The Grove (Coryell County) - August 2010 photos

Some of you may be wondering if I'll ever post photos of a Texas ghost town that actually looks like a ghost town. I'd usually respond that no two ghost towns are exactly alike, that each one has its own history and sometimes a little charm, but I digress. Let me welcome you to The Grove, some 16 miles southeast of Gatesville in Coryell County. Don't just call it "Grove," folks; this is The Grove. And it has a fascinating history of its own - and a happy ending that some of you won't believe.

The day that I was laid off from UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas after working there for almost 12 years, I decided to celebrate my emancipation from my passive-aggressive supervisor by rewarding myself with a road trip down Interstate 35 into the Hill Country. I was on a mission to discover a town that my wife, Ginny, had discovered decades ago while working as a park ranger over in Meridian. The town is Norse, which has now been absorbed into nearby Clifton and has virtually disappeared except for its church and cemetery. As long as I was looking for Norse, however, I wanted to spend a little time in Coryell County visiting the town that graced the cover of T. Lindsay Baker's Ghost Towns of Texas that rested in the passenger seat. And so I made my way down to The Grove, also known once upon a time as Morrison Grove, and this is what I've discovered.


Jim Whitmore's well at the center of The Grove, sitting in front of the building that housed the bank, post office, and the W.J. Dube General Merchandise store

The downtown area of The Grove has been carefully and lovingly preserved by the few people who still live in the vicinity. The buildings in downtown are arranged around the central well, which Jim Whitmore dug with a pick and crowbar in 1872 (some folks say in 1853). Twenty-eight feet deep, the well is reportedly still wet to this very day. And it's a good thing the well was productive, because the settlement was quickly becoming a favorite of Wendish colonists who had left eastern Europe for Texas in search of religious freedom. By 1874, The Grove had amassed enough townfolk, Wendish or otherwise, to obtain its own post office, with J.B. Coleman serving as postmaster. The Wends established a Lutheran church at The Grove in 1883.

In the mid-1880s, The Grove boasted three general stores, two grocery stores, a candy shop, a blacksmith, a cotton gin, and two barbershops, among other establishments, all laid out around Whitmore's hand-dug well that sated the town's thirst even during the driest of seasons. The Grove had also amassed a population of 150. The town was small, but prosperous due to the cotton, grain, and hides produced and shipped by Grove farmers.


A barber shop (or perhaps two?)


The diminutive Sheriff's Office at The Grove, next to the barber shop

1917 proved to be a busy year for The Grove, for this was the year that businessman W.J. Dube constructed a two-story red brick building that covered a whole city block. The middle of the building served as Dube's general store, with Planters State Bank opening next door within the building on September 14 with a capital stock of $10,000. The other side of the building housed the post office, with a doctor's office located just above the post office. Dube also served as postmaster and bank president.


Another look at the Dube general store as well as the bank and post office


Teller's window inside Planters State Bank at The Grove


W.J. Graham's General Merchandise, one of Dube's competitors

Planters State Bank operated until 1932, when it was driven out of business by both robbery and embezzlement. But the one event that probably changed the fortunes of The Grove more than anything else was the construction of Texas State Highway 36 in 1936. The original plans by the Texas Department of Transportation called for the highway to run right through The Grove - requiring Whitmore's old well to be paved over and lost forever. The townfolk of The Grove demanded that their beloved well be spared, but the only solution was to reroute Highway 36 two-tenths of a mile north of The Grove. When that happened, much of the traffic simply bypassed The Grove without taking the short detour to visit the various establishments. The cotton gin soon went out of business. During the 1940s, the camp that later evolved into Fort Hood confiscated 250,000 acres of farmland from The Grove's farmers, forcing them to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The Grove lost its public school in 1948, and Dube's general store changed hands twice before being closed down for good in the 1960s. By this time, the only establishments still operating in The Grove were a Lutheran church and the old post office, which lasted until 1996.

In 1972, however, an Austin antiques collector named Moody Anderson purchased the entire downtown area of The Grove with a view to preserve it. He purchased the Cocklebur Saloon building from Round Rock and had it shipped up to The Grove, where it now sits next to the blacksmith's shop.


The Cocklebur Saloon and the blacksmith shop

Anderson also transformed Dube's general store into a museum that held all sorts of antiques that Anderson had collected over the years. Anderson's efforts breathed new life into The Grove and brought tourists from far and wide to get a look at how life used to be like in a small Texas town so many years ago. The museum contained various artifacts - antique covered wagons, bathtubs, weapons, hanging lamps, quack medicine bottles, farm implements, signs, and so on - that have been rented by movie producers and have shown up in movies and television series ranging from Lonesome Dove to the film version of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and even the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit. Anderson even hosted jamborees in the Cocklebur Saloon.

But in 2010, the aging Anderson, who was recovering from a stroke, decided to auction off The Grove and all of the antiques within. Musician Chuck Allen performed at the last jamboree at the saloon:



1,800 lots of antiques and memorabilia were sold off at The Grove in April 2010 over a three-day period. As for the town itself, it was sold for $200,000 to Fran Moyer, whose grandfather was none other than W.J. Dube, beloved town elder of The Grove. Moyer had spent many childhood summers in The Grove, and she tearfully told the other auction attendees, "I just bought back my childhood."

Today, The Grove is home to 65 inhabitants. Some of the older houses near downtown have crumbled into ruins, while a few hang on for dear life. A few of the old buildings, including an old service station, have been converted into private homes. But the downtown area still stands, and Fran Moyer intends to keep it standing. She may eventually use the site to host family reunions and other events such as weddings. So if you get a chance, take Highway 36 to The Grove sometime soon. You'll be glad you did.

Update on town of Robert Lee

You may remember that the Coke County town of Robert Lee has been facing severe drought conditions and a critically low water supply. The town of Bronte, which is 12 miles away from Robert Lee and gets its water from Oak Creek Reservoir, has agreed to sell some of its extra water to Robert Lee, which will be able to pump it into town via a 10-inch pipe at a rate of 200,000 gallons of water a day.

This isn't really a story about a ghost town, but it does illustrate the latest chapter in Robert Lee's fight to avoid joining the roster of Texas ghost towns. Our best wishes go out to the townspeople of Bronte and Robert Lee in these trying times.

HOAX GHOST TOWN: Nix (Kaufman County) - January 2012 photos

UPDATED DECEMBER 22, 2013 - Unless hard evidence for the alleged Kaufman County town of Nix is discovered, I am forced to concede that the story behind Nix appears to be a hoax. I am otherwise keeping this blog post intact, but the reader is asked to please treat the information contained herein as spurious. It's a shame that misinformation can drive people to waste time and energy chasing down something that never existed, and it looks like it was my turn to get snookered. My apologies for any inconvenience that has resulted from all this.

If you've been following this blog for a while, or if you've done a lot of research into Texas ghost towns, you've probably realized how frightfully easy it is for a town to vanish not only from the map, but also from recorded history. That's one of the reasons why I have wasted little time in posting photographs I have taken at the site of what used to be a Kaufman County town called Nix.

So far, I have found precious little information about this forgotten community; what little I did learn about Nix was unearthed by Michael Depolo of the Ghosttowns.com site. Nix does not appear in either Rand McNally's 1895 US Atlas or their 1900 map of Texas railroads despite being incorporated in 1878, possibly because of the town's close proximity to Forney. The Texas State Historical Association doesn't even mention Nix on their normally helpful website, although they do discuss another ghost town called Nix in Lampasas County (which I have yet to visit). But if you head down US Highway 80/Interstate 20 into Kaufman County and exit at FM 460 (aka Clements Road) between Forney and the East Fork of the Trinity River, you should find a street sign that still carries the name of the old townsite to this day.


N.P. Nix Street, aka Kaufman County 225, aka FM 460, aka Clements Road

What used to be the town of Nix is now a set of barren fields north and south of Highway 80, bisected by FM 460. There's a Knox Truck Stop with an adjacent Subway at the northwest corner of the intersection, but the folks I talked to at the truck stop (now considered to sit on the outskirts of Forney) had no memory of any community called Nix.


What most of the townsite of Nix looks like today

According to Depolo's research, a local farmer named Nicholas P. Nix established a store just west of Forney in 1868, and for a while the story competed heavily for business with Haught's Store (now part of Mesquite) in neighboring Dallas County. Nix's Store was essentially a Reconstruction-era version of Carl's Corner - by 1872, 105 settlers had relocated to the area, and the Town of Nix was formally incorporated on December 20, 1878, with a population of 265, with Nicholas Nix serving as the town's first mayor. Nix reached its peak in 1885 with a population of 550 served by two general stores, a city hall, a bank, a hotel, a barber shop, a saloon, a school, a church, and a post office.


Neglected sidewalk and foundations for a building in Nix, adjacent to an abandoned well

Many up-and-coming towns met with a slow demise because they were bypassed by the railroad, and Nix was no exception - in 1890, the Texas and Pacific Railway Company chose to lay its tracks across Mesquite instead of Nix. By 1900, the population of Nix had dwindled to 248. And here is where the town's misfortunes really began.


Closeup view of the abandoned well in Nix - approach with extreme caution

In 1902, a fire raged through half of the town of Nix, destroying the school and many other buildings. A second fire in 1916 ravaged almost everything that was left over from the earlier blaze. By 1920, only 51 people resided at Nix. It was the last year that Nix was enumerated as a municipality.


Foundations of Nix almost completely obliterated by soil and foliage


Discarded and charred wood, quite possibly a castoff remnant of Nix

Supposedly, the Town of Nix had its own cemetery, but my understanding is that all of the graves were moved to as-yet-unidentified new location. Depolo claims to have found ruins of Nix to the south of Highway 80, but all of the ruins I have found so far have been to the north. A second expedition to Nix may be warranted for the near future. If you want to visit the townsite, you might want to go before too much time passes - real estate companies are offering much of the land for sale, so it could very well be that the last vestiges of Nix will vanish forever before you know it.

Kelsey (Upshur County) - November 2010 photos

Happy New Year, everybody!

If you're a Latter-day Saint living in Texas, it might interest you to know that the first Mormon colony in the Lone Star State has become a ghost town. The East Texas community of Kelsey can be found in Upshur County seven miles west of Gilmer on FM 1795 about a mile and a half south of State Highway 154. To someone just passing through, Kelsey might look like a sleepy little rural community, but upon closer inspection, the town once billed as the "Zion of the South" starts to look a little ghosty.

Kelsey got its start in 1898 thanks to John and Jim Edgar, brothers from Alabama who tried to make a home with their fellow Mormons at the colony in Mesa, Arizona, but just couldn't take the desert climate. Jim made it back to Alabama, but for financial reasons, John rented a farm in Upshur County and hoped to use the profits from his crops to fund the rest of the trip home. John's harvest was so bountiful that he wrote Jim in Alabama and convinced him to relocate to the Texas farm. The two brothers purchased 140 acres of land in 1898 and a similar amount of acreage in 1900. Salt Lake City began to take notice of the Edgar enterprise, envisioning the settlement as a haven for Latter-day Saints who were experiencing persecution in other parts of America. Missionaries were dispatched to the Upshur County site, a log chapel was built by Mormon settlers, and the site received its own post office in 1902, named after nearby Kelsey Creek.


Historical marker at Kelsey, with the last commercial store in town standing vacant in the background

Kelsey really started growing in 1904, when LDS authorities sent out a county surveyor to lay out an actual townsite on Jim Edgar's plot of land. By this time, even more Mormon settlers were migrating from all across America to the nascent Texas town - enough to attract a railroad line maintained by the Marshall and East Texas Railway in 1910. By 1911, Kelsey boasted five stores, three sawmills, two blacksmith shops, a gristmill, a shingle mill, and a cotton gin. These were joined in the following year by the Kelsey Academy, a two-story red brick schoolhouse operated by the missionaries and the first school in East Texas to feature a gymnasium.


Kelsey Academy today, a de facto repository for town memorabilia

Kelsey's population grew to around 750 residents in 1917, and the town had its own business district with 14 commercial enterprises. That same year, however, the Marshall and East Texas Railway was abandoned; originally constructed as a logging line, it operated until the timber areas it served were logged out. The only problem was that Kelsey's farmers depended on that railroad line to ship their crops to market. The population continued to grow to around 800 in 1923, but many residents in Kelsey realized there was an increasing tolerance for Latter-day Saints throughout America, which meant a safe haven like Kelsey was no longer necessary for Texas Mormons. And so the colony began to deteriorate, especially when the Great Depression hit the nation.


Crumbling remains of a small abandoned home or shed in Kelsey

The old log chapel had long given way to a more accommodating church, but today there is no operating church, LDS or otherwise, in the ghost town of Kelsey; the last church to serve the community has now become a private residence.


Former Mormon church at Kelsey

With the consolidation of Kelsey's school system with the Gilmer Independent School District, Kelsey became a quiet little rural community where the remaining denizens developed fond memories for the town, including, in the words of one resident, "Quiet walks in the woods, swinging on the porch, chores, loooong school bus rides into Gilmer and a weekend drive to the town square." Most of the town's original buildings are long gone, although BSA Troop 311 has made a valiant effort to map out where the buildings were once located. Today, Kelsey has perhaps 50 residents remaining.

There are also two cemeteries at Kelsey, one of them reserved for the Sanders family.


Family plots at Sanders Cemetery in Kelsey, next to Kelsey Academy


Front gate to Kelsey Cemetery


Budded on Earth to bloom in Heaven


A rough tombstone inscribed with a black permanent marker


Handsome tombstone of Fred C. Slater

I hope you've enjoyed this set of photos from Kelsey, and I apologize that I haven't been that active on the blog lately - between the holidays and a cold, I've been preoccupied. But I'm already staking out more ghost town expeditions for 2012 so be on the lookout for more exciting adventures! More forgotten towns! More brushes with certain death! (On second thought, scratch that last one.) And my best wishes to all of you throughout the New Year.

La Reunion update - some good news and bad news

First off, I hope everyone has enjoyed a lovely and peaceful holiday season. Best wishes to all of you for 2012.

Since I reported on my findings at the La Reunion site in Dallas County last month, I learned a little more about the scant remains of that old house on the original colony site. Turns out that the homestead appears to be that of La Reunion colonist Leon DeLord, who built the house with his son Alphonse. The only thing is, according to Emanuel Santerre, last survivor of the French colony, the DeLord house - remnants of which I photographed and posted on the blog - was built after the La Reunion colony officially dissolved.

The DeLord site can be found somewhere along Westmoreland Road on the old colony site. Thousands of commuters probably pass by it every day without realizing the historical significance of the old homestead. The Episcopal Diocese of Dallas apparently owned the plot for some time, but now it seems unclear as to whom, if anyone, is responsible for the site. And it may not be part of the actual La Reunion colony itself like the cemetery on nearby Fish Trap Road, but it may be as close as anyone gets.

Then again, I've heard rumors of other possible ruins at the La Reunion site, but I'll have to file that under "To Be Continued."

Museum at Thurber receives $5,000,000 grant

This news is admittedly a bit old by now, but definitely worth sharing in light of my previous coverage of the Erath County ghost town of Thurber. Last month, Tarleton State University announced a gift of $6 million from Mrs. W.K. Gordon, Jr. and the W.K. Gordon, Jr. Foundation. $5 million of the gift will be used to fund the W.K. Gordon Center for the Industrial History of Texas in Thurber, named for Mrs. Gordon's father-in-law - one of the most prominent men in Thurber's history.

The W.K. Gordon Center really is an interesting museum and a fitting tribute to the legacy of Thurber. Please include it on your itinerary whenever you're able to visit this ghost town.

18 months - a personal milestone

Yesterday, I paid a visit to the scant remains of the Burning Bush settlement on the border of Smith County and Cherokee County. Not much left - just a historical marker and the crumbling remains of an old Burning Bush barn, both now on private property and completely surrounded by the town of Bullard. This much, however, is just enough.

Since May 2010, I have paid a visit to at least one Texas ghost town every month. I've only shared a few of my exploits so far on this blog, but I hope you've enjoyed what I've presented so far. As I mentioned earlier, I see these trips as a form of personal therapy; besides, I've never really put together a formal "bucket list," but visiting ghost towns would clearly be on such a list. I'll keep doing this as long my car, my finances, and my health allow me.