Cyrus Campbell

Comyn, TX

After settlers poured into this part of Comanche County around 1875, a rural community grew up around W. F. Matheney's trading post, whose shortened name—"Theney"—stuck to the town. The Texas Central Railroad arrived in 1881, a depot took the name of railroad official M. T. Comyn, and the settlement blossomed with stores, a gin, and lodge halls. A 1918 oil pipeline tank farm briefly conjured a tent city of hundreds before construction ended and residents drifted away.

Desdemona, TX

Serving the frontier community of Desdemona since J. S. and Rosa Jones deeded an acre for a public graveyard in 1880, this cemetery holds pioneer settlers, Civil War and world-war veterans, a physician who served the area for fifty years, and children lost young. When oil gushers surrounded the grounds in 1918, the boom brought sudden wealth—and new residents—to the very families buried among its oaks.

Desdemona, TX

Nine charter members organized this Baptist congregation in 1872, beginning with brush-arbor meetings under the Spanish oaks along Hog Creek where the Rev. Johnnie Northcutt preached to settlers who came by wagon, horseback, and foot. First called Rockdale Baptist Church, it built a sanctuary in the village of Desdemona and took the town's name around 1877. When oil was discovered and Desdemona boomed by 1919, the congregation fled the crowded conditions to build a new home at this site in 1921–22.

Sidney, TX

Bibb sprang up when Anglo cotton farmers settled western Comanche County in the 1870s, and by 1891 seven men platted a proper town of 44 lots. At its height in the 1890s it bustled with cotton gins, general stores, a school, four churches, a broom factory, and Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges. As roads improved and rail bypassed it, the population drained away; today no trace of Bibb remains on the ground.