Yoakum

Yoakum was named for Benjamin Franklin Yoakum, born in Limestone County in 1859, who began as a rodman on a railroad survey and became traffic manager of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass in 1886. Railroad shops came in 1888, and the roundhouse drew hundreds of workers. By 1896 the town had a cotton mill, three gins, a compress and about 3,000 people. Tex-Tan began in 1919, when Carl Welhausen took over a small tannery. By the 1940s fifteen packing sheds shipped tomatoes north, and the May Tom-Tom Festival, begun in 1928, advertised them.

What the plaque says

Yoakum Located on DeWitt-Lavaca county line on land granted by Mexico in 1835 to settler John May. Cattle gathering area for Chisholm Trail. With coming of San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad in 1887, became transportation center. Named for rail official B. F. Yoakum; incorporated in 1889. Industries: beef, leather, canning plant. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 9.3 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 — 16 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.
• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 16 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 — 22 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

• The Trail Drivers of Southwest Texas — steps away
• Yoakum National Bank — 0.7 mi
• Katolika Jednota Zen Texaskych (K.J.Z.T.)_Catholic Women's Union of Texas — 1.1 mi
• Hochheim Cemetery — 8.1 mi