Regency, Texas, Mills County. (original) (raw)

History in a Pecan Shell

Hanna Valley was named for the Hanna family. Jesse P. Hanna and his five sons and their wives settled in the area in the mid 1850s. The Hannas built the first house in the area despite the threat (and at least one attack) of Comanche Indians.

After the Civil War, county vigilante committees that had formed to fight cattle rustling became banditti themselves, causing the Texas Rangers to enter the area and set things right.

Hanna Valley's first store appeared in 1871 with the post office opening five years later. It was closed in 1882, but reopened two years later. The population was fifty then and the town was notified by postal authorities they needed to rename their post office since another community was receiving mail under the name Hanna Valley.

Regency was chosen and by 1895 the town had a population of 200.

Regency had only forty residents from the 20s to the 40s and the post office closed for good sometime in the 30s. The last store closed in 1971.

Regency Bridge

By Mike Cox

When you�re standing on a suspension bridge and the span begins to bounce as a car starts across, it may be necessary to suspend an instinctive urge to run.

This is especially true with the Regency Bridge, which crosses the Colorado River 23 miles from Goldwaithe to link Mills and San Saba counties. Looking down at the river below, a normally robust appears to be considerably smaller.

Suppressing hard-wired flight impulses can be even more difficult if you�ve pulled off Mills County Road 127 to read the 1976-vintage historical marker summarizing the bridge�s history. The first bridge on this site was built in 1903. That structure, a traditional truss bridge, lasted only 23 years � practically a blink of an eye when it comes to public infrastructure typically designed to last a half-century or more.

Unfortunately, what the first bridge�s builder surely considered impossible happened on May 9, 1924 when a rancher and his two sons pushed a herd of cattle across the bridge... more ›

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