Bucks Bayou

Bucks (Buck) Bayou was on Bucks Bayou Creek and an unpaved road three miles southeast of Bay City in east central Matagorda County. By 1898, with the aid of local resident Henry Tobeck, this German settlement had completed a new schoolhouse, and the next year plans were being made to organize a Sunday school in the new school. In 1904 the Bucks Bayou school enrolled twenty-one students, and around 1909 it became part of the Sexton common school district. During the 1920s Lutheran services were conducted monthly in Louis and Karolina Arnold's house. Possibly also during the 1920s a church for black residents of the area was built on the banks of a nearby creek. By the mid-1930s the community comprised two schoolhouses and a cluster of farms by the road. A schoolhouse had been torn down by the late 1930s, and the community was no longer shown on a 1952 map. In the 1980s the area where Bucks Bayou once stood remained rich farmland, where cattle grazed and rice, grass, milo, and cotton were grown. At that time the townsite was marked by the old cemetery.