Westhoff

Westhoff was surveyed in 1906 when the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway extended its line from Cuero to Stockdale, and some residents kept using the name Bello until the summer of 1909. The Handbook of Texas says three gins once handled as many as 4,800 bales of cotton a year. A fire in 1913 destroyed thirteen businesses, and the town never fully recovered. By 1915 it had about 475 people, four churches, a bank and a weekly newspaper, the Westhoff Advertiser, edited by Walter W. Eatman.

What the plaque says

Westhoff Founded 1906 as Bello ("Beautiful View"), tent city of workers building Texas and New Orleans Railroad. Renamed 1909 for Wm. Westhoff (August 8, 1831 - March 19, 1911), local merchant and political leader. For a time town had 3 cotton gins, 13 stores. It remains a farming - ranching - uranium leasing center, inhabited by many ethnic groups. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 13 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 21 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.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 25 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.
• Panna Maria — 31 mi
  The Silesian village on a plateau above the San Antonio River that claims the oldest permanent Polish settlement in America, with a church of 1878 and a ceiling found again in 2000.

More markers nearby

• Bellevue-Cheapside — 5.5 mi
• Pilgrim Presbyterian Church — 6.7 mi
• Community of Pilgrim — 7.6 mi
• Lindenau — 8.1 mi