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Texas’ Lone Starsby
Bob Bowman | |
A
reader from Gladewater called
a few weeks back with an interesting question: “How many towns named Lone Star
are located in Texas?”
At my last count, there
were ten, and six of them are in East
Texas. |
Lone
Star
Alice's Texas
State Bank Architectural Details
Photo
courtesy Terry
Jeanson, July 2010 |
The best known Lone
Star stood in Morris County and was the home of Lone Star Steel on U.S. Highway
269 north of Daingerfield.
The town had a population of 2,006 and 86 businesses in 1980, but it had fallen
to 1,615 in 1990.
Another Lone
Star stood in Cherokee County. It was founded in the early 1880s by storekeeper
Henry L. Reeves, who established a store 13 miles east of Rusk.
Reeves became known for his hard deals and local farmers dubbed the community
“Skin Tight.” The town had a population of 300 at one time, but today it has only
10 residents.
Delta County’s Lone Star was also known as Barton and Volney.
It was on the old Bonham and Jefferson road a mile west of Jot
‘Em Down. When a railroad bypassed Lone Star, the town declined and its school
was merged with Pecan
Gap.
Lamar County’s Lone Star stood on Farm Road 906 twelve miles
north of Blossom. It
also had a school, but it was merged with Powderly.
At its peak, the town had the school, one business and a cluster of homes. By
1983, the settlement had been dropped from a county map.
Another Lone
Star, located a mile south of Corrigan in Polk County, was the site of Tom Hackney’s
sawmill on the Houston, East and West Texas Railroad. Hackney later moved his
mill to Valva and Lone Star declined.
A sixth Lone Star in East
Texas was a rural community four miles east of Quitman
in Wood County. While the town never had a post office, it did have a school in
the 1800s. By the 1940s, the school had disappeared and only four homes remained.
The
other Lone Stars in Texas were near Bastrop
in central Bastrop County; two miles south of New
Braunfels in Comal County; on Farm Road 378 eleven miles north of Lockney
in Floyd County; and between Chico
and Decatur
in Wise County.
Most of the Lone Star names likely came from the Texas
slogan, “The Lone Star State.”
Bob
Bowman's East Texas August 1, 2010 Column
A weekly column syndicated
in 70 East Texas newspapers
Copyright Bob Bowman | |
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