| |
| Dillon's
entry in the Handbook of Texas contains only the most basic facts. Less than 40
words. "Settled around 1900" a post office was "secured" in 1903 and discontinued
three years later. By the 30s it was gone from maps. That's it. Hardly worth a
mention. We were fortunate to receive an email from Robert Cowser, a former Texan
living in Tennessee who saw firsthand the evidence of Mr. Dillon's unfulfilled
dreams. No one can remember a place like someone who grew up there so it's altogether
fitting that Mr. Cowser's remembrance provides our page for Dillon, Texas. |
Dillon,
Texasby
Robert Cowser
A few years ago I drove from my home in Tennessee to
visit the farm in Hopkins County where I spent the first eighteen years of my
life. The farm is the site of what once was community called Dillon. In the 1890s
Frank Dillon, an emigrant from Indiana, worked hard to found a town on his property.
He built a blacksmith shop, a store, and a kiln. A grassy mound still exists where
the kiln once stood. With his neighbor, O. P. Wardrup, as a partner, Dillon operated
a cotton gin.
For five or six years at the beginning of the twentieth
century Dillon operated a post office out of his store. A courier in a horse-drawn
buggy brought the mail from the Saltillo
depot five miles to the north. As one might expect, the post office was named
Dillon. As automobiles became more and more common, Dillon talked of converting
his blacksmith shop to a garage. He sent one of his sons to a school in Dallas
for training in auto mechanics.
Primarily because neither the St. Louis
Southwestern nor the Louisiana and Arkansas railroads came near the site of the
store and shop, Dillon's efforts to build a town failed. That morning, as I looked
at the peaceful site, I felt strangely pleased that the town never developed.
Even if he had been able to convince a builder to put up a row of buildings, the
town probably would not have survived the Great Depression. Locust trees and Bermuda
grass now grow over the site where Dillon's house, store, blacksmith shop, cotton
gin, and kiln once stood.
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