Springtown, Texas

Everything Springtown is known for

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Music in Springtown

Songs About Springtown

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Artists From Springtown

A
Alf Evans
country Pop: 15

Rivers & Roads in Song near Springtown

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

Texas State Highway 199 8 songs Interstate 20 10 songs Brazos River 16 songs Interstate 35 27 songs

Musical Heritage

The Songwriter at Dido RoadyGoat

John Townes Van Zandt (1944–1997) — the Fort Worth-born songwriter behind 'Pancho and Lefty' and 'To Live Is to Fly' — is buried in the Van Zandt family plot at Dido Cemetery, northwest of Fort Worth. The Van Zandts were a founding Fort Worth family: K.M. Van Zandt donated land here in the 1890s for the school, church, and cemetery. Townes' headstone is inscribed 'To Live's To Fly,' a line from his own song.

11.5 mi away

History of Springtown

College Hill: A Higher School on the Frontier RoadyGoat

1884

In 1884, the same year Springtown incorporated as a town, it opened a college-level school. The Springtown Male and Female Institute, also known as College Hill Institute, served the educational needs of northern Parker County for about ten years. Frontier Texas had few options for secondary or higher-level schooling, and private institutes like this one filled the gap before public higher education reached the region. The fact that Springtown could sustain a school at that level for a decade, in a community without a railroad connection, says something about both the local ambition and the agricultural wealth that was flowing through those three cotton gins.

A Full Trade Center by 1877 RoadyGoat

1877

Springtown had no railroad in 1877. No rail connection, no shipping depot, none of the infrastructure that usually built Texas towns in this era. And yet by that year it had a hotel, a school, two general stores, two blacksmith shops and three cotton gins. Three cotton gins in a town that size means the surrounding farms were producing enough cotton to justify serious processing capacity. The hotel meant transient traffic. The blacksmith shops meant working equipment. The community was sustaining genuine commercial life on local agricultural output and the groundwater that had drawn people here, without a single mile of rail connection.

Its Own Newspaper Since 1881 RoadyGoat

1881

The Springtown Sentinel began publication in 1881, just a few years after the community had established itself as a trade center. On the Texas frontier, a local newspaper was more than a convenience. It was a signal that a community had enough economic and social life to sustain ongoing coverage, enough advertisers, enough readers and enough events worth reporting. A newspaper also created a shared record: legal notices, market prices, local controversies and community announcements that existed nowhere else. Springtown was small, remote and had no railroad, and it still supported its own press by 1881.

William and Elisabeth Woody Homestead

1846

William (Bill) Woody (1824-1915), one of the first Anglo settlers in Parker County, was born in Roane County, Tennessee. While living in the eastern Tennessee hills bordering North Carolina, he married Elisabeth Lydia Farmer (1822-1879) in 1846. In December 1846, six weeks after the birth of their son, the Woody family set out to Texas on foot with few possessions. Six months later, they arrived in Honey Grove in Fannin County where they met up with other family members and established a working farm. In 1851, the family traveled to White Settlement in Tarrant County where they stayed until their home was built here by 1855. Located in the Veal’s Station Community, the Woody family built a story-and-a-half, four-room dogtrot home using hand-sawn yellow pine lumber transported by ox from New Orleans. Once their house was complete, it served several distinct and important purposes for the Veal’s Station Community. The property was used as a refuge and stagecoach stop for pioneer travelers, a boarding house for college students attending Parsons College, and a community meeting place for all religious denominations in the area, as well as a cobbler’s workshop for hand-cobbled boots and shoes. In 1858, Bill Woody and community members built a two-story frame meeting house on the property which provided a church, masonic hall, town hall, common school, and later Parsons College, chartered in 1874, for the town of Veal’s Station. Elisabeth and Bill Woody are buried in the Veal’s Station Cemetery, both examples of rugged individualism that expanded the state and country in the nineteenth century.

Historical Marker → · 3.0 mi away

Eureka Lodge No. 371, A.F. & A.M.

1897

Eureka Lodge No. 371, A. F. & A. M. The Eureka Masonic Lodge entered into an agreement with W. L. Hutcheson to build this two-story structure in 1897. Over the years, while the first floor housed a variety of businesses, including Hutcheson's hardware store, the lodge continued to occupy the second floor. Exhibiting influences of the Romanesque Revival style, the building features round-arch windows, a detailed keystone on the upper central window, and a red sandstone cornerstone. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1987

Historical Marker →

Veal's Station

1858

Settled in 1852. Here was established in 1858 by William G. Veal (1831-1891), a leading spirit in all public improvements of the region, an outstanding school of Parker County which functioned more than a half-century. (1936)

Historical Marker → · 4.0 mi away

Springtown, TX

1856

Springtown is on State Highway 199 twenty-seven miles northwest of Fort Worth near the northern border of Parker County. In 1856 Joseph Ward of New Jersey settled on the site, on a creek fed by numerous springs seventeen miles northeast of Weatherford. Three years later Ward designed the town square and named the place Littleton's Springs after a pioneer family. In the mid-1870s the name was changed to Springtown following a petition by a majority of the 200 residents. The town's post office has operated continuously since its establishment in June 1875. In 1884 Springtown was incorporated, and the community elected J. A. Graves its first mayor. Springtown Male and Female Institute opened that year and served the northern part of the county for a decade. Public schools eventually developed, and in 1936 Springtown High School was incorporated in the Parker County school system. The first town newspaper, established in 1881, was the Springtown Sentinel . Newspapers that followed included the Pilot, Local , and Journal . By 1890 the community had four churches, two cotton gins, one steam corn mill, a daily stage to Weatherford costing one dollar, and a triweekly stage to Decatur. Springtown grew from a population of 500 in 1890 to nearly 800 in 1940. From the Great Depression through 1960 the population growth slowed. Afterward, primarily because of an increase in the Springtown-Fort Worth commuter population, the number of residents nearly doubled. Springtown had a population of 1,658 in 1986. In 1990 the population was 1,740. The population reached 2,062 in 2000.

Tsha Handbook →

Eagle Mountain Army Air Field — WWII Marine Glider Base

1942

In June 1942, the U.S. Marines established a glider training base on 2,500 acres east of Eagle Mountain Lake, 18 miles northwest of Fort Worth — the first inland glider base in the country. The base trained Marine pilots on Waco gliders inspired by Germany's capture of Crete, then shifted to dive bomber finishing school in 1944. Closed after WWII, the land was purchased by televangelist Kenneth Copeland in 1986. The runway, a cracked ramp, and a Quonset hut are all that remain.

Historical Account → · 9.7 mi away

Nix, William Hoyle

1918

Hoyle Nix, West Texas fiddler, bandleader, and exponent of the Bob Wills sound, was born William Hoyle Nix to Jonah Lafayette Nix and Myrtle May (Brooks) Nix on March 22, 1918, in Azle, Texas. The family moved to Big Spring when Hoyle was one year old. His father was a fiddler and his mother a guitarist, and the couple often performed together at community gatherings. Nix was six years old when he learned his first fiddle tune. In addition to his parents' influence, the music of Bob Wills was also very important to his style. According to Nix, Wills was the finest fiddler he ever heard. Nix and his brother Ben formed the West Texas Cowboys in 1946 and patterned the band after Wills's Texas Playboys. In 1954 the Nix brothers built a small dance hall on the Snyder highway just outside of Big Spring and named it the Stampede . Nix had already established a dance circuit in the area and was making regular appearances in other towns, including Abilene, Lubbock, Midland, Odessa, and San Angelo. The West Texas Cowboys cut their first recordings in 1949 for the Dallas-based Star Talent label. The initial Star Talent release, Nix's "A Big Ball's in Cowtown," a folk-derived rewrite, proved to be an enduring standard. He continued to record for small Texas record companies-Queen, Caprock , Bo-Kay, and Winston -in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1968 Nix started his own label, Stampede, named after the dance hall. During the late 1950s, the West Texas Cowboys grew to its largest size with nine members. The band at this time included former Texas Playboys Eldon Shamblin, Millard Kelso, and Louis Tierney. Nix had first shared a stage with Bob Wills in 1952 in Colorado City, Texas, and their two bands soon began touring together, splitting the playing time at each dance. After Wills disbanded the Texas Playboys in the early 1960s, he continued to appear with Nix on a fairly regular basis until his first stroke in 1969. The respect that Wills had for Nix was evidenced when he invited Nix and his son Jody to participate in what turned out to be Wills's final recording session, For the Last Time , in 1973. Nix's last recordings were made in 1977 and released on Oil Patch. He was inducted into the Nebraska Country Music Hall of Fame in 1984, the Colorado Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985, the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1991, the Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1991, and the Northwest Western Swing Music Society Hall of Fame in 2013. He died after a short illness on August 21, 1985, in Big Spring, Texas. Nix married five times and had four children, Larry (1940), Jody (1952), Hoylene (1957), and Robin (1959). Larry joined his father's band in 1957 and played bass. When Jody signed on in 1960 as drummer and fiddler, the two siblings became the rhythm section of the West Texas Cowboys, a position they held for the next twenty-five years. Jody Nix took over leadership of the band as his father wanted, and with the younger Nix carrying on the show, Texans were assured of dancing to the music of a Nix fiddle well into the twenty-first century.

Tsha Handbook → · 9.7 mi away

Things to Do in Springtown

quirky 7.7 mi away
Chewbacca's Grave — May the 4th

May the 4th be with you — and with the Wookiee. Peter Mayhew the seven-foot-three British actor who brought Chewbacca to life in every Star Wars film from 1977…
quirky 0.7 mi away
Springtown Dinosaur Tracks

A family went out hunting arrowheads along Walnut Creek in 2017 and found something about 110 million years older than they expected. Pressed into the creekbed…
quirky 7.6 mi away
Chewbacca's Grave

The seven-foot-three British actor who played Chewbacca in every Star Wars film from 1977 to The Force Awakens is buried right here at Azleland Memorial Park.…
quirky 9.3 mi away
The Azle Earthquake Swarm

Starting in November 2013 the ground beneath Azle started shaking and it did not stop for 84 days. Twenty-seven earthquakes rattled windows cracked foundations…
historical 9.3 mi away
WWII Marine Glider Base at Eagle Mountain

In 1942 the United States Marines bought 2931 acres of ranchland on Eagle Mountain Lake for a purpose that sounds almost unbelievable now — training pilots to…
historical 21.6 mi away
Where Every Vietnam Helicopter Pilot Learned to Fly

If you flew a helicopter in Vietnam you almost certainly learned how right here. Fort Wolters trained over 40000 rotary-wing pilots before shutting down in…
historical 23.1 mi away
Billy Bob's Texas

Billy Bob's opened in 1981 in an old cattle barn in the Fort Worth Stockyards and at one hundred twenty-seven thousand square feet it is the largest honky-tonk…
historical 23.2 mi away
Fort Worth Stockyards

Daily cattle drives down the street. Honky-tonks and rodeos in the old West.

Everything Near Springtown

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

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