Beaukiss
I was reminded of the remote settlement of Beaukiss by a friend and fellow historian, Dr. Michael Collins (retired from Midwestern State), who has been searching for information on an ancestor (Jasper Collins) who lived there around the time of the Civil War. Beaukiss remains a dispersed agricultural community. The primary focus is the Post Oak Island Masonic lodge, which is still active. There are also two cemeteries, but neither, so far as I could discern, included members of the Collins clan.
November 22, 2020
From the Handbook of Texas Online:
“BEAUKISS, TX.Beaukiss is on Middle Yegua Creek about one mile from the Lee county line in southeastern Williamson County. The settlement was founded in 1880 by Samuel M. Slaughter who was also appointed its first postmaster that year. Beaukiss was a prosperous rural community by 1884, when it had a church, a school, a gristmill, a cotton gin, and seventy-five inhabitants. The population had climbed to 100 by 1890, and in the early years of the twentieth century the community had a variety of businesses, several doctors, three fraternal organizations, a school, and a string band. The town declined to a population of seventy-five in 1920 and only two businesses in 1931. The oil boom in eastern Williamson County revived Beaukiss briefly in the 1930s, when a well came in at the nearby Abbott oilfield, but the Beaukiss school closed in 1947, and the population of the town had declined to twenty by 1949. In 1977 Beaukiss was the site of a cemetery and a church. Its population in 1990 and 2000 was twenty, according to the United States census, though the local Masonic lodge had about 80 members in 2001.”
Mark Odintz, “Beaukiss, TX,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed February 08, 2021, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/beaukiss-tx. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
Beaukiss, Williamson County, Texas
Established in 1880
Population in 1884 was seventy-five; population in 2000 was twenty.
