Weimar: Named for a City Someone Once Liked

The railroad named it first for the man who donated the land: D. W. Jackson, a Georgia-born rancher who gave the right-of-way to the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway in eighteen seventy-three.

But Jackson was too modest a name, apparently, and the residents replaced it with Weimar, after the German city that railroad president Thomas Peirce had once visited and admired. The post office opened in eighteen seventy-three. The town incorporated in eighteen seventy-five.

Within a decade Weimar had topped one thousand residents, which was remarkable growth for a South Texas rail stop, and it established itself as a trading center for pecans, poultry, and dairy. The town's German name fit the demographic character of the surrounding countryside, which had been settled heavily by German immigrants, and it still carries a faint European echo on an otherwise thoroughly Texan stretch of Interstate Ten.