Dillon, Texas, Hopkins County ghost town. (original) (raw)
Dillon's entry in the Handbook of Texas contains only the most basic facts. Less than 40 words. "Settled around 1900" a post office was "secured" in 1903 and discontinued three years later. By the 30s it was gone from maps. That's it. Hardly worth a mention. We were fortunate to receive an email from Robert Cowser, a former Texan living in Tennessee who saw firsthand the evidence of Mr. Dillon's unfulfilled dreams. No one can remember a place like someone who grew up there so it's altogether fitting that Mr. Cowser's remembrance provides our page for Dillon, Texas.
Dillon, Texas
A few years ago I drove from my home in Tennessee to visit the farm in Hopkins County where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. The farm is the site of what once was community called Dillon. In the 1890s Frank Dillon, an emigrant from Indiana, worked hard to found a town on his property. He built a blacksmith shop, a store, and a kiln. A grassy mound still exists where the kiln once stood. With his neighbor, O. P. Wardrup, as a partner, Dillon operated a cotton gin.
For five or six years at the beginning of the twentieth century Dillon operated a post office out of his store. A courier in a horse-drawn buggy brought the mail from the Saltillo depot five miles to the north. As one might expect, the post office was named Dillon. As automobiles became more and more common, Dillon talked of converting his blacksmith shop to a garage. He sent one of his sons to a school in Dallas for training in auto mechanics.
Primarily because neither the St. Louis Southwestern nor the Louisiana and Arkansas railroads came near the site of the store and shop, Dillon's efforts to build a town failed. That morning, as I looked at the peaceful site, I felt strangely pleased that the town never developed. Even if he had been able to convince a builder to put up a row of buildings, the town probably would not have survived the Great Depression. Locust trees and Bermuda grass now grow over the site where Dillon's house, store, blacksmith shop, cotton gin, and kiln once stood.
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