GUSSETTEVILLE - FOX NATION Traditional Cache
Buckanear: No longer in area
GUSSETTEVILLE - FOX NATION
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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Gussetteville - Fox Nation
South Texas Brush Country is where this cache is located just off a main highway and a farm road. Cache is small cammo container and is not on the ground. Be sure to have water or something to drink along with you if caching in the summer heat.
A relative who knew that we liked to locate places that had some history of early Texas recently asked if we knew about Gussettville, Tx? We answered that we did not. Being the curious types, we decided to see if we could locate it and see what was there. A lot of Texas history is located there as we learned from research and driving along the backroads. We were intrigued when we saw the names McMullen and McGloin in the article about the area. We found a cache located near the gravesite of Empressero McGloin located in San Patricio county when we first began caching in 2005. We could only imagine how remote it must have seemed in the days it was first settled.
After the Mexican War of Independence, the Mexican government used colonization contracts and land grants in what is now Live Oak County to promote the settlement of Texas. In 1825, the state of Coahuila and Texas granted a colonization contract to Benjamin Drake Lovell and John G. Purnell for a tract of land that included most of what is now Live Oak County.
In 1828, at Lovell's request, the same land was assigned to John McMullen and James McGloin, who agreed to settle the area with 200 Irish Catholic immigrants. Between 1828 and 1834 shiploads of Irish immigrants were brought to Texas by McGloin and McMullen, and in 1835 the Coahuilan government issued at least thirty-five land grants along the banks of the Frio, Nueces, and Atascosa Rivers in what is now Live Oak County. Most of the newcomers preferred to remain in the Corpus Christi and San Patricio settlements rather than risk the hardships and dangers of the inland frontier. Nevertheless, some settlers began to move into the southeastern section of the future Live Oak County. Irish immigrants Thomas and Margaret Pugh, for example, established a home near the Nueces about 1835.
In 1829, Patricio "Patrick" McGloin and Juan McMullen petitioned for land in the State of Coahuila and Texas, and in 1831 received a grant for 5,240 acres and founded the town of San Patricio, in San Patricio County near the Commanche Crossing of the Nueces River. Their town was also called "Fox Nation" after the Fox family who were the first settlers in the area, when Patrick McGloin's sister, Mary and her husband, Michael Fox inherited much of the land after Patrick's death. The Fox Nation area (or San Patricio County) was later known as Live Oak County, Texas.
The town, San Patricio was later called "Gusssettville" in honor of N. Gussett, an owner of the General Store. The original founders and their fellow colonists were primarily Irish Catholics from Ireland, especially Leitrim County. The community was one of the first settlements in what is now Live Oak County and as early as 1846 served as a stagecoach stop on the road between Corpus Christi and San Antonio. By the mid-1850s it had been renamed Gussettville. In 1856 the state legislature separated Live Oak County from San Patricio County. N. Gussett pushed to have Gussettville designated the county seat and offered to give land for a townsite, but Oakville, a new town, was chosen instead. In 1858 Gussettville became the third town in the county to be granted a post office. The community in 1884 comprised a church, a school, a general store, and thirty residents. The town lost its post office in 1886 and, after being bypassed by the San Antonio, Uvalde and Gulf Railroad in the second decade of the twentieth century, began to fade away.
Other immigrant settlers came from Alsace-Loraine (France), Prussia, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia. They built the first Catholic Church in Live Oak County, and named it St. Joseph Church. Land for the Church and part of the cemetery was donated by Thomas and Anne Shannon. Their town thrived as long as the San Antonio-Brownsville Stagecoach Line ran through it, but after the Nueces Valley Railway diverted traffic past Gussetteville, it dwindled.
Parking will not be a problem and there is some shade to protect from the hot summer sun.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
ABG BA TEBHAQ