Name: Merkel, Texas
Address: Merkel, TX

Tye, TX RoadyGoat

Tye is not a town known for famous names or celebrity residents. You won't find the birthplace of a movie star or a president here. Instead, it’s a place defined by the everyday people who have called it home. It was built by railroad workers, ranchers, and small business owners. During the war, it was shaped by the tens of thousands of ordinary soldiers who passed through Camp Barkeley on their way to extraordinary circumstances. Today, it’s a community of families, commuters, and racing fans. Tye’s story isn't about any single famous individual; it's about the collective effort of generations of hardworking people who built a life on the West Texas plains, first along the railroad and now along the interstate.

8.6 mi away

The Town Named For Nothing RoadyGoat

Here is a name worth savoring: Noodle, Texas. And no, it has nothing to do with dinner. The community took its name from nearby Noodle Creek, and by old folk tradition the word Noodle here meant, of all things, nothing. The creek ran dry most of the year, an empty bed of sand and gravel, out in southwest Jones County. Now, how it got that meaning is where the storytellers disagree. By one account, the sheep herders working this stretch back in the eighteen hundreds reached for an old bit of Scotch slang. A noodle, in that sense, was an unimportant thing, a trifle, a whole lot of not much. The word noodle has long meant a fool, an empty-headed sort. By another version, though, former residents say they were taught the word was simply a local or old Indian term for nothing. Both versions land in the same place: folks looked at this dry, unremarkable creek in the West Texas scrub and basically named it Nothing Creek, and the town that grew up nearby inherited the joke. This is folk tradition, mind you, not a signed document, so take it in the spirit it was given. But there is something wonderfully honest about a frontier community shrugging at an empty creek and saying, well, that is about noodle. It stuck for well over a hundred years.

RoadyGoat → · 9.4 mi away

When Nothing Struck Oil RoadyGoat

Here is a delicious twist on a town named for nothing. Just south of Noodle, in the mid nineteen twenties, geologists and wildcatters got very interested in a buried geological structure they called the Noodle Dome. In eighteen ninety-eight, this was a place with a store and not much else. But in nineteen twenty-six, drillers brought in the Noodle Dome oil field, and suddenly the ground under all that nothing was worth a fortune. A dome, in oil-country terms, is exactly what it sounds like, an upward bulge in the rock layers deep underground. Oil and gas are lighter than the salty water in the rock, so over millions of years they float upward and get trapped right at the top of that dome, like air caught under an overturned bowl. Find the high point of the dome, drill into it, and you tap the reservoir. There is still a Noodle Dome Road out that way, running near the old field. So the next time someone tells you Noodle means nothing, you can smile and mention that this particular nothing was sitting on top of an honest-to-goodness oil boom.

RoadyGoat → · 9.4 mi away

Mims, Charles D.

1860

Charles D. Mims, Texas secretary of state, lawyer, and politician, son of William D. and Sarah B. (Hudspeth) Mims, was born in Monticello, Arkansas, on January 15, 1860. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Tyler, Texas, where Mims's father was the editor of the Tyler Reporter . Mims had a meager education, yet at age fourteen he began to read law with Thomas Jefferson Jennings . In 1881 Mims was chairman of the Jim Hogg Club in Tyler. After his admission to the bar in 1887 he began his law practice in Tyler. He was elected city attorney by 1889 and served in this position for two years before returning to private practice. In 1893 he moved to Beeville, where he took an active interest in politics. Seven years later his wife's health problems necessitated a move to Nacogdoches, where he was active in the Good Roads Movement. He became county judge in 1907 and served for two years. In October 1909 he moved west to Merkel, where he became the town's first mayor in April 1910. In 1907 he was elected chairman of the Democratic executive committee. He was appointed by Governor William P. Hobby as secretary of state, a post he held from November 1920 to January 1921. Mims reflected the shifting attitudes of Texas Democrats in the early 1920s in pleading for greater restraint in regulating corporations. In 1921 he moved to Houston to practice law. He died there on March 11, 1923, in an elevator accident. Both the Texas House of Representatives and Senate passed resolutions honoring his leadership and contributions to Texas. Mims, a Methodist, was survived by four children and his wife, Vallie C. (Price).

Tsha Handbook →

Havins, Thomas Robert

1890

Thomas Robert Havins, historian and college professor, was born on October 6, 1890, to William E. and Frances (McCall) Havins at Merkel, Texas, where his mother died while he was an infant. Thereafter his father, a sheepherder, moved his young family often throughout Central Texas. During a stay in Callahan County he sent his son Tom to Scranton Academy and then, in 1907, to Howard Payne College (now Howard Payne University) in Brownwood. Havins taught in small public schools from 1909 to 1921. He began working as a librarian at Howard Payne College in 1923 and received a B.A. degree there in 1927. In 1931 he received his M.A. degree from the University of Texas and began teaching history and government at Howard Payne. He taught there until his retirement in 1961, except when he left to obtain a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas (awarded in 1941) and to serve in World War II as an officer in the United States Army Air Force (1942–45). Havins was chairman of the department of social sciences and was the first recipient of the Howard Payne Oscar, an award for faculty achievement. He was credited with teaching more students than any other teacher in the school's history and was named professor emeritus upon retirement. He served as a visiting professor of history at the University of Texas (1962–63). From 1947 to 1953 he was a member of the Texas Prison Board ( see PRISON SYSTEM ) and was recognized for his role in helping reform the state's prison system. Havins was made a fellow of the Texas State Historical Association in 1959. He wrote Something About Brown (1958), a history of Brown County; Camp Colorado: A Decade of Defense (1964); Beyond the Cimarron: Major Earl Van Dorn in Comanche Land (1968); and Belle Plain, Texas: Ghost Town in Callahan (1972). He published numerous articles in the 1952 Handbook of Texas , the Southern Baptist Encyclopedia , Texas Military History , Texana , and the West Texas Historical Association Yearbook . He was also the author of a column, "Evergreen," published in the Brownwood Bulletin in 1960 and 1961, for which he won a Texas Press Association award. Havins was married on June 14, 1915, to Mottie Frierson, who died on June 26, 1970. They had a son and a daughter. In 1972 Havins married Myrtle Kimberlin. He was a Baptist and Democrat. He died in Baptist Memorial Hospital in San Angelo on February 6, 1976, and was buried in Eastlawn Memorial Park in Early.

Tsha Handbook →

Merkel, TX

1881

Merkel, off Interstate Highway 20 seventeen miles west of Abilene in northwestern Taylor County, was founded in the early 1880s when the Texas and Pacific Railway arrived; it was first known as the "Windmill Town." The community, a shipping point like many other towns in the area, was renamed in 1881 for its first settler, S. M. Merkel. J. L. Vaughan, the railroad agent, became postmaster and telegraph operator in June 1883, when the post office opened. In 1882 the widow Rollins built the first general store. The population was twenty-five in 1885 and 400 in 1890, when the town had four churches and a school. The Methodist church was built in 1882 and organized by Rev. R. F. Dunn. The First Baptist Church was built in 1885, Grace Presbyterian in 1886, and the Church of Christ in 1903. The first school, conducted in the train depot, was taught by Mrs. A. M. Thornton; seven children enrolled. In 1887 a school building was built on county land donated to accommodate the growth. In the 1897–98 term there were 178 children in the Merkel school district. A college opened in 1887 and enrolled about 100 the next year. This institution lasted only four years. The 1897 population was 600. On June 26, 1906, Merkel incorporated. In the first election, on August 4, 1906, G. W. Johnson was elected mayor and S. F. Harris was elected city secretary. The town had only seventeen mayors in the seventy-five years following incorporation; Henry West held the office for eleven terms at four different times. In November 1904 the Farmers and Merchants National Bank was organized. In 1926 Dr. Robert I. Grimes opened the first hospital, which closed in the 1960s. Farming and ranching were the primary economic factors in Merkel's early development. Though agriculture continues to play a significant role in the town's economic health, residents also rely on oil-production jobs and military-support jobs at Dyess Air Force Base . The population was 1,848 in 1933, 2,005 in 1940, and 2,314 in 1950. The weekly Merkel Mail has been published since 1890. In 1992 Merkel had 2,469 residents. The population grew to 2,637 by 2000.

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Cornelia Clark Fort

1943

(February 5, 1919 - March 21, 1943) Born into an affluent Tennessee family, Cornelia Fort attended the Ward-Belmont School in Nashville and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 1939. She returned to a society life in Tennessee but was soon introduced to flying by a friend. In her first week in the air, Fort logged over 2,000 miles. She became an instructor in 1941, a year after her first flying lesson. She worked with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's civilian pilot training program at Fort Collins, Colorado, before taking a similar position in Hawaii. She was airborne with a trainee when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor; Fort landed safely while under enemy fire. By 1942 she was part of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) commanded by Nancy Harkness Love. Fort and 26 other women pilots ferried war planes across the United States. Fort was transferred to a new squadron in Long Beach, California. On March 21, 1943, she ferried a BT-13A airplane toward Dallas' Love Field. While flying in formation, her plane struck another aircraft. Available records indicate that Fort was the first American woman pilot to die on active military duty when she plunged into the rugged terrain of Mulberry Canyon, three miles southeast of this site. Shortly before her death at age 24, Cornelia wrote, "I am grateful that my one talent, flying, was useful to my country." On August 4, 1943, WAFS personnel merged with and helped create the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), led by noted aviator Jacqueline Cochran. The WASP's most famous training ground was Avenger Field at Sweetwater in nearby Nolan County. (2000)

Historical Marker → · 5.6 mi away

Butterfield Mail & Stage Line

1857

One of major horse-drawn transportation projects of history. Was authorized by Act of Congress on March 3, 1857. Contract for semi-weekly service overland to San Francisco, California, was awarded to company headed by John Butterfield; another stockholder in the $2,000,000 venture was express pioneer William G. Fargo. The line employed some 2,000 people and used hundreds of stagecoaches and thousands of animals. In addition to receipts from freight and passengers, it had a $600,000 annual subsidy for carrying U.S. Mail. Company operated from September 1858 to February 1861 with a 25-day schedule for the 2,795 mile trip (8 to 9 days were allowed for crossing Texas). Route began in Tipton, Mo., and Memphis,Tn., uniting at Fort Smith, Ak., entering Texas near Sherman, thence westward through the Comanche-held frontier, leaving the state at El Paso. Stage stations were located about every 20 miles and the best known in this vicinity were Fort Belknap, Fort Phantom Hill, Mountain Pass and Fort Chadbourne. Between Fort Belknap and Tucson, Az., mules were used to pull the coaches as they were less appealing to Indians. Each coach accommodated four to ten passengers at an average fare of $200 each; mail and freight charges were ten cents per one-half ounce. (1969)

Historical Marker → · 7.7 mi away

Castle Peak

1858

The Butterfield Overland Mail, the first public transportation facility spanning the area from the Mississippi to the Pacific with passenger and mail service, 1858-61, used the 2400-foot peak to the northeast as a beacon. The drivers and passengers viewed it for 30 to 40 miles. In that era it was called Abercrombie Peak, for Colonel J. J. Abercrombie of the U.S. Army, active in defense of this frontier. Waterman Ormsby, a newspaper reporter riding the first Butterfield Stage to pass this way, noted that the peak resembled a fortress. Later the height was renamed Castle Peak. (1968)

Historical Marker → · 5.5 mi away

Merkel, Texas

Music in Merkel

Songs About Merkel

Artists From Merkel

Rivers & Roads in Song near Merkel

History of Merkel

Tye, TX RoadyGoat

The Town Named For Nothing RoadyGoat

When Nothing Struck Oil RoadyGoat

Mims, Charles D.

Havins, Thomas Robert

Merkel, TX

Cornelia Clark Fort

Butterfield Mail & Stage Line

Castle Peak

Things to Do in Merkel

Everything Near Merkel