West-Wagner Homestead

George West is the name behind the house, and it belongs to a town on another river. At nineteen he was trail boss of 14,000 longhorns driven from Lavaca County to Montana in 1870, probably the longest drive on record. In 1880 he and Kittie bought a Live Oak County ranch, and in 1912 he gave his name, a townsite, $100,000 and a right-of-way for a railroad. The Handbook counts the ranch at 140,000 acres, not the plaque's 200,000. The Wagners, Czech-born hands who bought this homestead, kept it. It is private, with no public access.

What the plaque says

West-Wagner Homestead Washington West and his wife Mary Willauer West moved their family from Tennessee in 1854 and settled in Lavaca County, Texas. Their home became a stagecoach stop which developed into the community of Old Sweet Home. The Wests' sons George, Ike and Sol drove longhorn cattle to markets in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming from 1867-85. George married Catherine (Kittie) Searcy in 1874, and in 1875 built this Greek revival style home on family land. George West's ranching interests expanded to several south Texas counties. They moved to Live Oak County in 1880 and later established the town of George West on a portion of their 200,000 acre ranch. In 1883 George and Kittie West sold the Lavaca County homestead to Ike and Emma West, who sold it in 1891 to Frank and Anna Wagner. Natives of Czechoslovakia, the Wagners had lived at the West homestead doing ranch and farm work. Here they reared their six children, Frank Jr., Jim, John, Anton, Joe and Mary. In 1918 Frank and Anna Wagner deeded the homestead to their youngest son, Anton Wagner. His brother and sister, Joe and Mary, lived in the house until the 1950s. The West-Wagner homestead remains in the Wagner Family. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 6.6 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 8.6 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 19 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 24 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.

More markers nearby

• Old Sweet Home — 0.3 mi
• Vysehrad School — 4.4 mi
• Sarah Creath McSherry Hibbens Stinnett Howard — 5.7 mi
• St. Mary's Parish — 6.0 mi