Community of Valley Spring
Valley Spring, Llano County, Texas
Marker Inscription
O. C. J. Phillips, first settler, arrived in 1853. Whistleville combined with Bugscuffle to form Valley Spring, with post office established 1878. This was birthplace of James Field Smathers (1888-1967), inventor of electric typewriter. (1970)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
O.C.J. Phillips arrived as the first settler in 1853, and the crossroads communities of Whistleville and Bugscuffle eventually merged into Valley Spring, which gained a post office in 1878. The little Hill Country settlement's proudest native son was James Field Smathers (1888–1967), credited as an inventor of the electric typewriter. It is a place where frontier origins and modern invention meet.
Why it matters
Valley Spring shows how even the smallest rural communities produced Americans whose innovations reshaped everyday life across the country and the world.
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Related people
- · O.C.J. Phillips
- · James Field Smathers
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Valley Springs Primitive Baptist Church
Valley Spring, TX
Constituted in August 1882, this Primitive Baptist congregation chose one of its eleven charter members, Elder S. R. Woods, as its first pastor. The members met monthly in the Valley Springs schoolhouse until 1886, when they moved to the Shiloh Community School building on donated land. The church has continued to serve a wide rural stretch of Llano County ever since.
Huffman Cemetery
Valley Spring, TX
When James Jackson Larremore led his family to the Texas Hill Country in 1853, Llano County was raw frontier along the Llano River. His daughter Martha married Civil War veteran James S. Huffman, who acquired 300 acres running from Smoothin' Iron Mountain past Cold Creek, and as settlers put down roots they needed a place to bury their dead. The first recorded grave dates to 1884, and by 1917 the family formally dedicated the ground as Huffman Cemetery, tending it across the century until forming an association in 1980.
Chew Cemetery
Llano, TX
George Oliver Chew, born in West Virginia in 1832, came to Texas as a boy and settled in western Llano County in 1883, buying 320 acres where a family cemetery soon took shape around the graves of two young grandchildren. The Chews built a life on the land, running a school and later a cotton gin, and though they sold the property in 1927, the one-acre cemetery was later donated back. More than forty graves lie here, including both a Confederate and a Union soldier.
Baby Head Cemetery
Llano, TX
Local tradition holds that Baby Head Mountain took its grim name in the 1850s, after a child killed in an Indian raid was left on its slopes. A pioneer community grew up nearby in the 1870s, taking the same name, with homes, farms, and businesses. Today the cemetery — whose oldest documented grave is that of a child who died on New Year's Day 1884 — is the community's last physical trace.