Novohrad

Novohrad is a decentralized farming and ranching community ten miles northeast of Moulton on Farm Road 1295 in northern Lavaca County. In the early days of the Republic of Texas, Norman Woods, son of Zadock Woods and a survivor of the Dawson Massacre, received a grant to land on the old La Bahía Road and Big Rocky Creek. There in 1880 Frank Migl built a store and cotton gin, and J. R. Jasek, formerly a botanist for the government of Bohemia, operated a nursery. The community that grew around these businesses took its name from a town in Bohemia. A post office operated in the store from 1894 to 1905, and as early as 1882 separate schools existed for the children of Bohemian and German residents. The Greive school for German students was later consolidated with the school at Praha in Fayette County. By 1950 Novohrad had two stores, a gin, a lodge hall, and a population of about twenty-five. The school was consolidated during the 1950s with the Moulton Independent School District; the demise of cotton as a cash crop and improvement of roads closed the businesses and directed commercial activities to Moulton. The ruins of the gin remained in 1987.