Whittaker

Whittaker was a small farming community on the west bank of the Brazos River five miles east of Snook in southeastern Burleson County. Anglo-American settlement in the vicinity began in the early 1820s. The town itself was founded in the late nineteenth century near the site of the Chance Plantation, one of the largest in the county. A post office was established in 1891 and named for a family of early settlers. A number of Italian immigrant farmers took up residence in this region of the Brazos bottoms during the early 1890s. In 1918 the Houston and Texas Central Railroad assisted local leaders in constructing an interurban line from Whittaker to Bryan, eleven miles to the east, across the Brazos River Bridge. Popularly known as the Peavine, the road facilitated the transport of cotton from the Brazos bottoms to interstate rail connections in Bryan and helped stimulate the growth of that community. Flooding along the river damaged the road at frequent intervals, making repairs increasingly costly, until it was finally abandoned in 1923. Although early population figures were unavailable, Whittaker apparently declined in the early twentieth century. By 1919 the post office had been discontinued. In 1933 the town had a population estimated at 250 and one rated business. By 1943 the population had dropped to an estimated thirty, where it remained until 1948, the last year for which statistics were available. There was no organized community in existence by the early 1960s.