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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
Bob Bowman's East Texas August
1, 2010 Column
A weekly column syndicated in 70 East Texas newspapers |
LONE STAR,
TEXAS
by David
Knape
Look
to the north
find the lone star
if you digress
you have gone too far,
A town we confess
that's not up to par
yet oh how we miss
the bliss of Lone Star.
© d.knape
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