Bangs, Texas

Everything Bangs is known for

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Music in Bangs

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C
Coffey Anderson
country

Rivers & Roads in Song near Bangs

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Bangs.

Texas Colorado River 6 songs San Saba River 2 songs Texas State Highway 71 2 songs

History of Bangs

Texas's First Printing Press RoadyGoat

You're rolling through Bangs, Texas, and the name on that sign traces back to a single man, so here is his story. Samuel Bangs was born around seventeen ninety-eight, probably in Boston, and trained as a printer's apprentice. In September of eighteen sixteen he sailed from Baltimore as the printer for Francisco Xavier Mina, a Spanish revolutionary raising a filibuster expedition against Spanish rule in Mexico. On February twenty-second of eighteen seventeen, on Galveston Island, Bangs and a partner named John McLaren ran off a manifesto for Mina on a small portable press hauled all the way from England. Historians call that single sheet the first documented printing ever done on Texas soil. The expedition itself ended in disaster. Royalist forces captured Bangs, and the story goes that they spared his life for one plain reason: he knew how to work the press, and they needed a printer. He spent years afterward printing official documents for the Mexican government, then came back to Galveston and helped found the Galveston News. That is the man whose name got stamped on the survey out here in Bangs, hundreds of miles inland from any of it.

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A Town Named For A Survey RoadyGoat

Here in Bangs, Texas, the name comes not from a founder who built the place but from a line on a surveyor's map. The town sits inside a block of land recorded as the Samuel Bangs survey, and Samuel Bangs was one of the more remarkable men in early Texas, a printer granted land for his service around the era of the Texas Revolution. By most accounts he never once set foot on the acreage that would carry his name. There is a competing story, that the town honors a man named Bangs who sat on the board of the railroad that came through in the eighteen eighties, but the county land records come down on the side of the printer, because the survey wore his name long before any rail was laid. So pull on this one short name and you already get two men, one press, and one railroad. Let's start with the printer, because his story is the strangest of the three.

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Between Two Great Rivers RoadyGoat

Look at where you are actually standing. Bangs sits in Brown County in west central Texas, up around one thousand six hundred feet above sea level, in country drained by Pecan Bayou and by a stream with one of the best names in Texas, Jim Ned Creek. That creek rises near Tuscola and runs southeast about seventy miles before it reaches Pecan Bayou at Lake Brownwood, just east of here. Jim Ned was a real person, a Delaware Indian scout who rode for the Texas militia in the Republic and early statehood years, and his name got stamped on the water and stuck. This whole region rides a kind of hydrological fence line. The Brazos River system drains the country to the north, and the Colorado River system, which Pecan Bayou feeds, drains the south. Rain that falls just a few miles apart out here can end up in two different rivers and reach the Gulf coast in two different places. The name on the town is human history. The shape of the land underneath it is a great deal older.

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Bangs, TX

1886

Bangs is on U.S. highways 67 and 84 and the Santa Fe Railroad six miles west of Brownwood in west central Brown County. The town was named for its location in the Samuel Bangs survey. In 1886 a post office was established there, and in 1892 Bangs had eight businesses and a population of fifty. A school was begun that year. In 1900 the population was 136. By 1915, when the town incorporated, Bangs had 600 residents and twenty-one businesses, including four churches, a bank, and a weekly newspaper. The following year a water system was installed, and natural gas was piped into the community in 1920. The Bangs Independent School District, formed in 1927, eventually consolidated nine other school districts. Highway 67 was built through the town in 1932. After World War II several additions added new housing units to Bangs. Brownwood began supplying Bangs with filtered water in 1946. In 1963 a new high school was built, and passenger train service ended for the community in 1965. In 1973 Bangs became home to the controversial New Testament Holiness Church, led by David Heze Terrell, who also ran World Ministries, Incorporated, of Dallas. Bangs slowly grew to a population of 1,214 in 1970 and 1,716 in 1980, then declined to 1,555 inhabitants in 1990. In 2000 the population grew to 1,620.

Tsha Handbook →

Bangs Public Schools

1892

The town of Bangs was established on the route of the Santa Fe Railroad, which deeded land to the city for a school. The first school building, a two-room frame structure on the south side of the railroad tracks, was completed in 1892. Miss Clemie King was the first teacher; enrollment totaled 35 pupils. A new 2-story stone structure, built on the north side of the tracks in 1903, replaced the first building. Over the years the school system has grown and built additional facilities. Nine other area schools have consolidated with the Bangs school system since its founding. (1992)

Historical Marker →

First Baptist Church of Bangs

1883

This congregation traces its history to 1883, when the Rev. A R. Watson and a small group of worshipers formed a Baptist congregation in the community of Mukewater. The church moved to the new town of Bangs on the Santa Fe Railroad Line in 1890 and became known as First Baptist Church. By 1891 a sanctuary was built on land granted to the church by the railroad. It was replaced by a larger structure in 1923. Throughout its history, First Baptist Church has served the community with a variety of worship, educational, and outreach programs. (1991)

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Rocky Creek Baptist Church

1877

Eighteen people gathered under a brush arbor near Rocky Creek in Brown County on August 18, 1877, to organize a Baptist congregation. They called the Rev. R. L. Baker as their first pastor, and by November began construction of a one-room church building. It was replaced by a larger structure in 1889, and in 1919 that building was destroyed in a storm. The congregation ceased meeting for two years, but in 1921 came together to once again build a new house of worship. The church grew in the ensuing decades, offering a variety of worship, educational and outreach programs. New structures were completed at this site in 1952 and 1983. The congregation continues to serve the community. 	(2001)

Historical Marker → · 4.4 mi away

Chandler, Welcome Williams

1854

Welcome Chandler, the first settler, farmer, county judge, postmaster, and store owner in Brown County, was born in North Carolina to William Hugh and Tebitha Elizabeth (Hodges) Chandler in January 1813. The family moved to Copiah County, Mississippi, where Chandler married Sarah Brown in 1834; they moved to Texas in 1854. That summer, Chandler, Samuel R. Coggin, and J. H. Fowler visited the Brown County area and resolved to settle there permanently. In July 1856 Chandler arrived with his wife, their eight children, J. H. Fowler (who became the first bridegroom in Brown County by marrying Chandler's daughter Mary Ann the following year, and who also brought the first herd of cattle to Brown County in December 1856), and seven slaves. On Pecan Bayou, just east of the site of Brownwood, they built the first dwelling in Brown County, a large log cabin. Chandler also operated the county's first store, a settlers' supply house, in his home. Although local mail service may have existed earlier, the first official post office in Brownwood was apparently established on February 20, 1860, and located in Chandler's house. Chandler was named postmaster, a position he held till January 23, 1867, when the post office was temporarily discontinued by the United States government. On March 21, 1857, the first election in the county took place in the Chandler home, and Chandler was elected county commissioner; however, because of a mistake about county boundaries made by the state legislature, none of the officers elected in 1857 ever served. Instead they asked the legislature to correct its mistake, and it did so on February 8, 1858. The second election, on August 2, 1858, was also held in the Chandler home, and Chandler was elected chief justice (county judge). The first courthouse in the county, a log structure, was built on Chandler's farm in October 1858. Chandler was elected county treasurer on August 4, 1862. After the defeat of the Confederacy and the invalidation of county elections of the Civil War years, a new election of county officers was held on August 25, 1865, and Welcome Chandler rode with the results in less than a day to have them validated in Austin (140 miles from Brownwood), so that the county would not be without the rule of law. He was elected judge of the county board of appeals in 1869. The Chandlers had five more children after arriving in Brown County. Their daughters Melissa and Laura Caldora were the first twins born in the county, and their daughter Ella was the second White child born there. The first Confederate flag in the county was made by Mrs. Chandler, her daughter Jane, and Mrs. Brooks W. Lee. It was first flown on February 23, 1861, when the residents of Brown County met in the Chandler home and voted to ratify the ordinance of secession . Chandler died in Williamson County, Texas, in May 1870 and was buried in Florence, Texas.

Tsha Handbook → · 8.5 mi away

Sand Creek (Brown County)

1873

Sand Creek rises two miles northwest of Bangs and just north of U.S. highways 67 and 84 in western Brown County (at 31°45' N, 99°10' W) and runs northeast for five miles to its juncture with the East Fork of Sand Creek, then another two miles to its mouth on Jim Ned Creek, just north of Thrifty (at 31°49' N, 99°08' W). It crosses an area of rolling hills to flat terrain surfaced by clay and sandy loams that support scrub brush, mesquite, cacti, live oak, juniper, grasses, water-tolerant hardwoods, and conifers. Sand Creek was the site where the last victims of Indian torture in Brown County were murdered and where a company of Texas Rangers subsequently set up camp to watch over some eight counties. On a December morning in 1873, Bill Williams and his son left their home on Sand Creek to cut rails along Jim Ned Creek; after Williams left, his wife took her infant to their cow lot to do the milking. While building a fire to keep the baby warm, Mrs. Williams was attacked by the Kiowa renegade Big Foot and his band. The band dragged the baby through the fire, plundered the Williams house, and kidnapped a twelve-year-old daughter hiding inside. Riddled with arrows, Mrs. Williams regained consciousness, took her baby to the house, and treated its burns. The Williams boy returned to the house on an errand to find his mother dead and the baby dying. After a quickly formed posse trailed the band northwestward, they discovered the twelve-year-old girl hanging from a cottonwood tree. This and other such incidents prompted the formation of Company E of the Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers. The company's commander, Capt. William Jeff Maltby , recruited Mr. Williams and during the following summer camped several weeks along the banks of Sand Creek, from where he and his company patrolled neighboring counties. Eventually, Maltby, Williams and others trailed Big Foot and destroyed him and his band.

Tsha Handbook → · 8.5 mi away

Things to Do in Bangs

quirky 22.6 mi away
Geographic Center of Texas Marker

A 1963 highway-department roadside marker on US Highway 377 northeast of Brady noting the geographic center of Texas which actually lies about five miles away…

Everything Near Bangs

167 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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