Bronte

Runnels County, TX

In the rolling divide between Oak and Valley creeks, Runnels County ranch land gave way to a small farming town after George W. Norton bought the surrounding country around 1882. A post office opened in 1894 in the postmaster's home before the community pulled its stores, cotton gins, and blacksmith shops into a townsite platted in 1903, adding a high school by 1906. Churches and a Masonic lodge soon rounded out a typical West Texas farm town.

Robert Lee, TX

When drought scorched West Texas in the 1880s, a bitter struggle erupted between landless cattlemen who relied on free grass and ranchers stringing the new barbed wire across the open range. Masked "Nippers" cut fences by night—some ranchers lost thousands of dollars in burned posts and wire—as fencing off waterholes and public land pushed cowmen toward ruin. Only new laws under Governor John Ireland finally quelled the violence.

Winters, TX

Winters began in the 1880s when the Curry and Bell families staked claims on the west-central Texas prairie, and it took its name in 1889 by a vote in a new schoolhouse built on land from agent J.N. Winters. Cattle, feed, and cotton gave it an early economy, and the arrival of a rail line from Abilene in 1909 — with blacktop roads and the automobile close behind — brought a wave of prosperity. Oil strikes in 1949 and local milling and manufacturing kept the town growing, though it never followed a planned grid.

Runnels County, TX

Raised in 1903 at the turn of a booming West Texas cattle-and-farming frontier, this was reportedly the oldest stone building in its town. Its two-foot-thick walls, bound with a homemade sand-and-lime mortar, were built to last in an era when settlers relied on nearby stone rather than shipped-in brick. It first served the practical heart of an agricultural community as a grain and feed store.