Boyd Chapel Community
Anson, Jones County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Settlements began to develop in Jones County by the mid-1800s, first around the abandoned Fort Phantom Hill site and then around ranches founded in the 1880s and farms established shortly thereafter. At this site in 1895, Reese Davis, Joe Swent and Alex Boyd built the Boyd School. The community that developed nearby came to be known as Boyd Chapel. Over the next decades, Boyd Chapel was shaped by early area landowners. These included Guy Arthur Hillier, a New York native who herded sheep from south Texas to this area, where he met and married Minnie Estes. Alexander Brown Young and his wife came to this area in 1897 from east Texas. They settled in the Boyd Chapel community with five sons, including their oldest, Thomas O. Young, who had a wife and family of his own. The Young family deeded land for Methodist and Baptist churches, and a tabernacle, school and teacherage. Judge L. Crow and his wife Dora built a unique house on a rise, using concrete, as well as stone gathered from around the U.S.; they cultivated an orchard and berry fields. In 1916, Raymond Young built a general store and gas station, the only one in Boyd Chapel. As the farming community grew, cotton became its primary crop. As in much of rural Texas, World War II greatly impacted the community's population, with young adults serving in the Armed Forces or finding work in urban centers in support of the war. In 1947, the school consolidated into the Anson school district. Today, only burials in the nearby Neinda Cemetery link the present agricultural fields to the community known as Boyd Chapel. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settlement came to Jones County in the late 1800s, first near the abandoned Fort Phantom Hill and then around ranches and farms, and in 1895 Reese Davis, Joe Swent, and Alex Boyd built the school that gave Boyd Chapel its name. Shaped by landowning families like the Youngs, who deeded ground for churches, a school, and a tabernacle, the cotton-farming community thrived until World War II drew its young people into the armed forces and city jobs. After its school consolidated with Anson in 1947, Boyd Chapel faded, and today only graves in the Neinda Cemetery mark where it stood.
Why it matters
Boyd Chapel is a quintessential Texas ghost community, its rise and disappearance tracing how frontier farm settlements bloomed and then dissolved into open fields in the 20th century.
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Related people
- · Alex Boyd
- · Alexander Brown Young
- · Raymond Young
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Neinda Community
Hamlin, TX
After Jones County organized in 1881, ranchers settled west of Skinout Mountain and built a community first called Banner, renamed Neinda when its post office opened in 1890. A cemetery followed in 1891, but the town's fate was sealed in 1902 when the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway bypassed it to create nearby Hamlin. Though Neinda peaked in the 1920s with a school, churches, a cotton gin, and stores, little survived into the twenty-first century beyond its cemetery, a 1905 church, and a 1927 store building.
Neinda Baptist Church
Hamlin vicinity, TX
Organized in July 1889 as the Baptist Church of Christ at Plum Creek, this West Texas congregation began with just thirteen charter members who first shared a community building with the Methodists and the Masonic Lodge. They raised their own sanctuary in 1894, built a second in 1904, and took the name First Baptist Church of Neinda. A twenty-year pastorate begun in 1916 helped root the church at the center of its farming community.
Woods Chapel Cemetery
Roby vicinity, TX
As settlers pushed into this corner of Fisher County in the early 1880s, a single frame building served as both school and church, and by 1884 a graveyard had begun — named for its first pastor, J. B. Woods. Among those resting here is the family of Henry Clay Lyon, a Tennessee-born veteran of the Republic of Texas army; of twenty-six marked graves, thirteen belong to infants and small children.
The Old Rock House
Sylvester vicinity, TX
In the 1880s cattleman Andy Long assembled the 10,300-acre "OB" Ranch that surrounded the future town of Sylvester. This one-room rock house, built in 1883, served as ranch headquarters and sometimes as the foreman's quarters, while Long kept his family home 25 miles away in Sweetwater. He sold the ranch in 1901 to the Compere brothers for colonization.