ECHO, TEXAS (Live Oak County). Echo (pronounced "Eeko"), also known as Mount Echo or the Point, was a stage depot and post office community a half mile north of Farm Road 888 and twenty-two miles southeast of the site of present Oakville in southeastern Live Oak County. The community was founded on land granted to Irish empresario^qv James McGloin.^qv McGloin himself never lived at the site, but a general store was established there by his daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, Patrick J. Murphy. During the 1850s a house was built on the site by John Bernard Murphy and his wife, Margaret Mary Healy-Murphy.^qv Perhaps as early as 1846, but certainly by the late 1850s, a one-room building near the Murphy's house became a stage stop on the road linking San Antonio with Corpus Christi and Mexico. In a building behind the stage stop, Patrick and Elizabeth Murphy ran an inn. A post office operated at the community from 1858 until 1879. In 1877 James G. Grover petitioned to establish a community school. Echo probably continued to serve as a stage stop until 1881. After Margaret Mary Murphy moved to San Antonio in the late 1880s and helped to found the Sisters of the Holy Spirit and Mary Immaculate,^qv the Murphy Ranch at Echo was used as a retreat for nuns from 1893 to about 1906. The stagecoach depot building remained standing until 1970, when it was leveled by Hurricane Celia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ervin L. Sparkman, The People's History of Live Oak County (Mesquite, Texas, 1981). Marker Files, Texas Historical Commission, Austin.

John Leffler