COLONY SETTLEMENT, TEXAS. Colony Settlement, also known as Colony, is on Farm Road 3355 two miles east of U.S. Highway 181 and Normanna and eight miles northeast of Beeville in east central Bee County. In 1893 W. T. McCampbell sold 10,000 acres of his land to C. (or O.) M. Peterson, who journeyed to Chicago with hopes of returning with colonists to develop the area. The immigration of several Norwegian farmers from 1894 to 1898 led residents to call the community Norwegian Colony. Later, the area was called Mennonite Colony, then Colony Settlement. A Lutheran church was built there in 1912 but fell into disuse in the 1960s. A local school served one teacher and thirty-five pupils in 1898, and in 1926 the community constructed another school. The 1948 state highway maps indicate several scattered dwellings at the site. Although the school at Colony Settlement was no longer in operation in 1990, a number of families still lived at the site.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grace Bauer, Bee County Centennial, 1858-1958 (Bee County Centennial, 1958). Camp Ezell, Historical Story of Bee County, Texas (Beeville: Beeville Publishing, 1973).

Adrian D. Ramirez