The Free Town and the Company Town RoadyGoat

Just a few miles south of here lies the ghost town of Thurber, and you can't tell Gordon's story without it. In the late 1800s, Thurber was a massive industrial city that claimed to be the largest town between Fort Worth and El Paso. But it was a company town, completely owned and operated by the Texas and Pacific Coal Company. The company owned your house, the store, the church, even the saloon. Your pay came partly as company scrip, discounted at the commissary. Only company men and a few teachers and preachers could even live inside the fence. Gordon was different. It was a 'free town.' Here, you could own your own land, build your own house, and open your own business. It was where the miners from Thurber's dozens of nationalities came to spend their real money, to drink in a saloon not owned by the boss, and to talk union, which the company suppressed in Thurber until the miners finally organized in 1903. This town, Gordon, was the independent, sometimes rowdy, American-dream-chasing neighbor to the tightly controlled corporate utopia next door.

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The Iron Horse Arrives RoadyGoat

The railroad tracks you see running through Gordon represent a monumental feat of 19th-century engineering that literally created this town. When the Texas and Pacific Railway pushed west in 1880, it wasn't as simple as laying track on the ground. Engineers and surveyors had to precisely calculate a route through the rolling hills of the Cross Timbers, finding the gentlest grade possible for their heavy, steam-powered locomotives. Every curve was calculated, every creek required a trestle or culvert, and the entire roadbed had to be graded and flattened by thousands of laborers using little more than mules, plows, and dynamite. The railroad was a complex technological system. Gordon was placed here not by chance, but by design: it was a logical spot for a water tower and depot, a flat area perfect for a rail yard to assemble long trains of coal cars. The town's location, its economy, and its very existence are a direct result of this massive infrastructure project.

RoadyGoat → · 9.5 mi away

The Free Town and the Company Town RoadyGoat

As you drive here, you're traveling between two worlds that once sat side by side. Just down the road is the ghost of Thurber, a company town where as many as ten thousand people lived on land owned outright by the Texas and Pacific Coal Company. The company owned your house, the store, the school, the church — and the saloons too, including the famous Snake Saloon, with the longest horseshoe bar between Fort Worth and El Paso. Pay came once a month, and in between you drew scrip, discounted about twenty percent at the company commissary. And then there was Mingus. Right here. Mingus was the free town — messy, independent, sometimes dangerous. Here you could buy your own land and open your own business, and Thurber men came over to spend real cash instead of scrip. The company noticed: it bought up two stores and a saloon at Thurber Junction just to shut out the competition. Mingus was the chaotic opposite of Thurber's order — a place you could own yourself, right next door to a town that owned you.

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Santo East Cemetery

1875

The town of Calgando was established in the 1870s near this site on Sunday Creek. Soon after, land was donated for this cemetery. The oldest marked grave bears the date 1875, though older unmarked graves exist, according to local tradition. By 1880 Calgando was a local trade center, but when the new Texas & Pacific Railroad line passed one mile west that year, the town of Santo was established and Calgando businesses moved there. The cemetery remained, later called "Santo East." Many gravestones document an influenza epidemic in 1918. (1986)

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First Baptist Church of Santo

1872

The oldest continually active Baptist Church in Palo Pinto County, this congregation was chartered on November 3, 1872, under an oak tree near the Santo East Cemetery. Originally known as the Missionary Baptist Church of Christ at Cottonwood Grove on Palo Pinto Creek, it began with eight charter members. The present congregational name was adopted by the 1930s. For well over a century, the First Baptist Church of Santo has been active in community service, mission endeavors, associational work and the licensing and ordination of ministers. (1982)

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Brazos Santiago, TX

1846

The port of Brazos Santiago was located on Brazos Island in what is now Cameron County. According to a United States Coast Survey map in 1867 it was across Brazos Santiago Pass from the south end of Padre Island (at 26°02' N, 97°09' W). Before 1848 the port was wharves on the lagoon side of Brazos Island. Goods destined for ports up the Rio Grande had to be offloaded at Brazos Santiago because the bars at the mouth of the Rio Grande were too shallow for ships capable of plying the Gulf. Trade for Matamoros and interior Mexico was landed at the harbor on Brazos Island and then transported to Matamoros by oxcart. During the Mexican War Gen. Zachary Taylor established a supply depot on Brazos Island, which handled all American and north Mexico supplies, and several thousand American troops debarked from the port. After 1848 Richard King developed shallow-draft steamboats that could negotiate the shallow bars at the mouth of the Rio Grande. His boats could then offload in the lee of Brazos Island, go around to the Gulf side, and cross the bars and travel up the Rio Grande to their destination. By 1867 the north end of Brazos Island was a well-developed military port with three wharves on Brazos Santiago Pass, a railroad south to Boca Chica and on to Whites Ranch on the Rio Grande, four barracks, a hospital with four outbuildings, two gun emplacements, numerous warehouse buildings, and a lighthouse. After the Civil War the troops left Brazos Island, and the small town of Brazos faded away; most of the buildings were destroyed by the storm of 1867.

Tsha Handbook → · 6.6 mi away

William Whipple Johnson

1860

William Whipple Johnson, the oldest of seven children, was born on October 11, 1843 in Ionia, Michigan to Ethan S. and Jane B. (Whipple) Johnson. He attended school in Ypsilanti, Michigan and in 1860 formed a business partnership with his father and his younger brother Harvey. The three men provided merchandise to the people of Ionia and within several years expanded their interests to include real estate and a hotel operation. During the Panic of 1873 and the collapse of the national economy the business suffered greatly, and the men moved from Michigan, leaving their debts behind them. By 1880, William and Harvey were in Strawn, Texas, where they opened a business in the name of Anna Fatzinger Campbell, who became William's second wife. The T&P Railroad reached Strawn that same year. William and Anna both served as postmasters, and the family established Campbell and Company, a mercantile that catered to local railroad workers. The Johnson brothers also secured a contract with the railroad to provide crossties for the line, and they created many jobs in the area for cutting cedar posts. In 1885, with the death of their three-year-old daughter Marion, William and Anna built a mausoleum on their property. There, they later interred Harvey (d. 1888) and a son, William Harvey (d. 1894). William Johnson expanded his business interests to include coal and other mining operations, and livestock trading. In 1905, he and Anna bought a 4,200-acre ranch outside of Gordon and erected a new mausoleum for their children's remains. Anna placed William's body there in 1914 and set aside money for a more permanent structure here on Salt Point. It was completed in 1923, a year after her death. The Johnsons are remembered for creating communities and business opportunities throughout Palo Pinto County. (2004)

Historical Marker → · 7.4 mi away

Gordon - 2025 Texas 1A Division I state football champion

2025

Gordon defeated Rankin 69-22 for the 2025 Texas 1A Division I state football championship.

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Goodnight, Charles

1857

Charles Goodnight, rancher, the fourth of five children of Charles and Charlotte (Collier) Goodnight, was born on March 5, 1836, on the family farm in Macoupin County, Illinois. His father died of pneumonia in 1841 when Charles was five, and shortly thereafter his mother married Hiram Daugherty, a neighboring farmer. In all, Charles had only six months of formal schooling. Late in 1845 he accompanied his family on the 800-mile trek south to a site in Milam County, Texas, near Nashville-on-the-Brazos, riding bareback on a white-faced mare named Blaze. He later took pride in the fact that he was born at the same time as the Republic of Texas and that he "joined" Texas the year it joined the Union. Growing up in the Brazos bottoms, the boy learned to hunt and track from an old Indian named Caddo Jake. At age eleven Charles began hiring out to neighboring farms, and at fifteen he rode as a jockey for a racing outfit at Port Sullivan. Not satisfied with that occupation, he returned to his widowed mother and younger siblings, continued at various farm and plantation jobs, including supervision of black slave crews, and for two years freighted with ox teams. In 1853 his mother married Rev. Adam Sheek, a Methodist preacher; that led to the formation of the partnership three years later between Charles and his step-brother, John Wesley Sheek. Although they considered going to California, they were dissuaded by Sheek's brother-in-law, Claiborne Varner, who induced them to run about 400 head of cattle on shares along the Brazos valley for a ten-year period. In 1857 the young partners trailed their herd up the Brazos to the Keechi valley in Palo Pinto County. At Black Springs they built a log cabin buttressed with stone chimneys, to which they brought their parents in 1858. Goodnight continued freighting cotton and provisions to Houston and back for a time until Wes Sheek married, then assumed the bulk of responsibility of looking after the growing herd of scrawny, wild Texas cattle. With his acquired hunting and trailing skills, he quickly mastered the modes of survival in the wilderness. During this time he became acquainted with Oliver Loving , who was also running cattle in the Western Cross Timbers. When the gold rush to Colorado began, Goodnight helped Loving send a herd through the Indian Territory and Kansas to the Rocky Mountain mining camps. As Indian troubles in Northwest Texas increased, concurrent with heated conflict over the reservations on the upper Brazos and Clear Fork, Goodnight and his neighbors joined forces with Capt. Jack (J. J.) Cureton 's rangers, with whom he served as a scout and guide. It was Goodnight who found the trail leading to Peta Nocona 's Comanche encampment on the Pease River in December 1860 and brought word of it back to Cureton and Capt. Lawrence Sullivan (Sul) Ross . He guided the rangers to the Indian camp and took part in the attack on December 18 in which Cynthia Ann Parker was recaptured. With the outbreak of the Civil War , Cureton's rangers, including Goodnight, were attached to the Frontier Regiment . Goodnight spent most of the war chasing marauding Indians and border toughs while ranging from the Canadian to the Colorado and Brazos headwaters with the likes of James E. McCord , James B. (Buck) Barry , and A. T. Obenchain . The intimate knowledge he gained of the vast rolling prairies and Llano Estacado later proved useful. At the expiration of his term of service in 1864, Goodnight returned to Palo Pinto County, where he and other cowmen spent the next year trying to recoup their cattle business from the chaos that characterized the frontier during that era. He sought out a new range along Elm Creek, in Throckmorton County, where Indians ran off nearly 2,000 head of his cattle in September 1865. Since cattle markets in Texas were poor at that time, Goodnight looked for a higher price at the Indian agencies and army posts in New Mexico, where beef was in demand. In the spring of 1866 he an

Tsha Handbook → · 11.9 mi away

Santo, Texas

Music in Santo

Songs About Santo

Artists From Santo

Rivers & Roads in Song near Santo

History of Santo

The Free Town and the Company Town RoadyGoat

The Iron Horse Arrives RoadyGoat

The Free Town and the Company Town RoadyGoat

Santo East Cemetery

First Baptist Church of Santo

Brazos Santiago, TX

William Whipple Johnson

Gordon - 2025 Texas 1A Division I state football champion

Goodnight, Charles

Things to Do in Santo

Everything Near Santo