OCKER, TEXAS. Ocker is a farming and church community at the intersection of Farm roads 320 and 53, eleven miles east of Temple in eastern Bell County. It was founded by Czech settlers in the 1880s and was granted a post office in 1888. The office and the community were named for B. Ocker, a shopkeeper in the community and the first postmaster. In 1890 Ocker had a general store, a mill and gin, a sorghum manufactory, a doctor, and a barber. Some seventy-eight Czech families were living in the vicinity of Ocker by 1893. In 1896 it was a flourishing town of some fifty-five inhabitants; at that time it had a second gin and Baptist and Christian churches. The Rolnicky Vzajemni Orchranni Spolek Statu Texas, a farmers' mutual aid and insurance society, was founded in 1901 in Ocker by a group of Czech farmers. Ocker slowly declined thereafter; it lost its post office in 1904 and declined to a population of twenty by 1933. The reported population was ten in 1964. The town had disappeared by 1968, though in 1988 the Ocker Brethren Church still stood some two miles south of the former townsite.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clinton Machann and James W. Mendl, Krásná Amerika: A Study of the Texas Czechs, 1851-1939 (Austin: Eakin Press, 1983). Temple Daily Telegram, April 17, 1936.

Mark Odintz