La Marque: Buttermilk Station Gets a French Name
Texas
La Marque began as Highlands, a rural settlement along Highland Bayou anchored by an early Texas land grant. During the Civil War, soldiers moving between Houston and Galveston regularly stopped here to buy buttermilk from local farms, giving the community the nickname Buttermilk Station. The name Highlands had to change in the eighteen nineties when postal authorities discovered another Texas town with the same name.
The local postmistress, a French Catholic Ursuline Sister known as Madame Saint Ambrose, renamed it La Marque, a French phrase meaning the mark or my spot. An interurban electric railway from Galveston to Houston had arrived by nineteen fourteen and spurred growth. La Marque grew into a residential community of about fifteen hundred people by nineteen fifty-two.
