Dacosta

DaCosta, on U.S. Highway 87 ten miles from Victoria in southeastern Victoria County, was established in 1860 when the San Antonio and Mexican Gulf Railway completed its route from Victoria to Port Lavaca. The railroad station was named for Alfred DaCosta, a Morgan Lines agent and ship captain at Indianola. The railroad was destroyed during the Civil War but was rebuilt, and DaCosta became a center of rural activity. A post office was established there in 1903, and a local social center and dance hall, which also housed the Guadalupe Sons of Herman Lodge, was built. Around 1900 the town was the site of a rice-farming enterprise in which 3,000 acres were put under cultivation. The venture, undertaken by a group of New Yorkers, was unsuccessful. The next year a Japanese group assumed sponsorship but was similarly unfortunate. Both projects failed because the rice fields did not have sufficient drainage in wet years. The community did, however, develop into an important center for cotton ginning, a business dating locally to the early 1900s. In 1963 DaCosta was the only community in Victoria County with two gins, which averaged about one-fifth of the county's annual ginning enterprise. Both gins were still operating in the mid-1980s. Though the community's post office was discontinued in the early 1950s, in 1986 the DaCosta Hall remained one of the most popular social and dance halls in the county. The DaCosta common school joined the Bloomington Independent School District in 1961. DaCosta's population, which was reported as about 100 from the 1920s to 1960, fell to 85 over the next decade and in 1990 and 2000 was 89.