Buckeye

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Buckeye, Matagorda County. Now, if you were living somewhere up north in the early nineteen hundreds, and a slick piece of advertisement landed in your mailbox, promising warm Texas climate and fertile Texas soil, well, you might have packed your bags. Land promoters were doing exactly that, establishing hundreds of towns across Texas by luring folks down from the northern United States.

It was a whole operation. And somewhere in all that, two men from Ohio decided they were going to do it right. Dr.

Ambrose A. Plotner and John W. Stoddard purchased a piece of land in Matagorda County in 1902.

The locals knew it as the Kuykendall pasture, and they bought it from Wylie and Susan Kuykendall, and R. G. and Maggie Kuykendall. Grazing land.

Flat, open, waiting. These two men looked at it and saw something else entirely. They named the place Buckeye, after their home state of Ohio, the Buckeye State.

That was the first declaration of intent. The second was the plan itself, and it was ambitious. Irrigated farmland.

Railroad service. A canal designed to water approximately thirty thousand acres. They platted that Plotner-Stoddard irrigation canal in 1902, right alongside the purchase.

They set up a headquarters at the site and hired Charles F. Chillson as general manager. Things were moving.

The St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway was granted right-of-way through Buckeye in 1903. A community school was organized in 1905, and Plotner and Stoddard donated the one-room school building themselves.

A post office arrived in 1907. By 1909, the Buckeye irrigation farm was being subdivided for resale into tracts running anywhere from ten to three hundred acres. And then, finally, in 1912, the town itself was platted.

Streets got names like Citrus, Fig, Orange, and Peach. You can hear it, can't you. The optimism built right into the street signs.

This was going to be a place of orchards and abundance. But Plotner and Stoddard dissolved their partnership in 1916 and divided up the remaining unsold property between them. That word, unsold, does a lot of quiet work in this story.

The dream had not filled in the way they had drawn it. The nineteen thirties brought hope of an oil discovery at Buckeye. It did not come.

The town gradually declined. By the mid-nineteen forties, the Plotner and Stoddard heirs were selling off most of what remained. The post office, the one that had opened in 1907, closed in 1971.

Today, only a few houses remain at the Buckeye site. Streets named Citrus and Peach, laid out with such deliberate hope, and a canal that was supposed to change thirty thousand acres. Sometimes the biggest plans leave the quietest places behind.

What the marker says

During the early 1900s land promoters established hundreds of towns across Texas by luring residents of the northern United States with advertisements of Texas’ warm climate and fertile soil. The founders of the town of Buckeye sought to establish a town upon existing grazing land and planned irrigated farm land and railroad service that would increase the town and surrounding area’s population. Dr. Ambrose A. Plotner and John W. Stoddard purchased the land known as “Kuykendall pasture” from Wylie and Susan Kuykendall and R. G. and Maggie Kuykendall in 1902. The two men named the planned town after their native Ohio, known as the Buckeye state. A headquarters was established at the site and Charles F. Chillson was hired as the general manager. The plotner-stoddard irrigation canal was platted in 1902 and was designed to irrigate approximately thirty thousand acres. The St. Louis, Brownsville & Mexico Railway was granted right-of-way through Buckeye in 1903. A community school was organized in 1905 with Plotner and Stoddard donating the one-room school building, and a post office was established in 1907. The Buckeye irrigation farm was subdivided for resale in 1909 into tracts from ten to three hundred acres. The town was finally platted in 1912, and streets were given names such as Citrus, Fig, Orange and Peach. Plotner and Stoddard dissolved their partnership in 1916 and divided the remaining unsold property. Despite the hope of an oil discovery at Buckeye during the 1930s, the town gradually declined, and the Plotner and Stoddard heirs sold most of their property during the mid-1940s. The post office closed in 1971, and only a few houses remain today at the Buckeye site.