Youngsport

The Handbook of Texas fills in the community's organized life. The Live Oak Baptist Church was organized in 1875. A Church of Christ congregation was meeting under a brush arbor by 1882, then in the school, and built in 1925 or 1926. The school, one of the larger rural schools in the county, had seventy-seven pupils and two teachers in 1905. In the early 1900s Youngsport had a Grange chapter and a Woodmen lodge. Students were moved to the Killeen district in 1938.

What the plaque says

Youngsport In January 1846, Francis L. Mudd received one-third of a league of land in this area along the Lampasas River. Four years later, the property became part of the newly created Bell County, carved out of Milam County. The next year, Michael Young purchased a parcel of Mudd's land and settled here with his family, reportedly because they had stopped while traveling to care for a sick daughter who did not survive. They buried her in what would become known as Live Oak Cemetery. A ship captain before moving to this area, Young allegedly named the community Young's Port, because he had finally found his port. Other early landowners and settlers included Anderson Young and P.C. Mitchell. In 1871, eleven years before the city of Killeen was established, Youngsport's post office opened. At the turn of the 20th century, the settlement supported several businesses, including a general store, barbership, drugstore, physician's office and blacksmith. The Live Oak Baptist and Church of Christ congregations served area residents, and local children attended a schoolhouse that was moved to the community around 1886. For many years, Youngsport residents received products and services from Killeen. By 1930, when the post office closed, three men and one woman served the community as postmaster. Eight years later, the school, which accommodated grades one through eight, closed, and students transferred into the Killeen district. By 2005, three cemeteries and the Church of Christ served as links to the early years of the dispersed agricultural settlement. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Williamson County Courthouse — 22 mi
  The fifth Williamson County courthouse, a Beaux Arts building by C. H. Page, rises over a Georgetown square of more than 50 Victorian-era buildings.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 24 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Inner Space Cavern — 24 mi
  A Georgetown cave found in 1963 when highway engineers drilled test holes, holding Pleistocene fossils and 72-degree rooms that visitors reach by an artificial tunnel.
• Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge: Doeskin Ranch — 31 mi
  A free federal refuge north of Lake Travis kept for two songbirds that need old juniper and oak, with trails at the Doeskin Ranch unit near Bertram.

More markers nearby

• Live Oak Cemetery — 1.8 mi
• Willingham Spring Baptist Church — 6.4 mi
• Maxdale Cemetery — 6.9 mi
• First Baptist Church of Killeen — 8.6 mi