Pyron, Texas
Hermleigh, Scurry County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(Former Townsite .5 miles South) Once a thriving community. Named for Bob Pyron, a rancher who settled on nearby Buffalo Creek before 1890. School was first held in his cellar. In 1900 town was founded and in 1910 citizens moved 4 miles southeast to be on Santa Fe Railroad. Pyron grew to include 2-story hotel, Odd Fellows Hall, stores, and a cotton gin. But it declined after a major highway bypassed this site. Post office closed 1952 and today only the railroad crossing sign and a few houses remain. Old settlers gather yearly at cemetery to exchange reminiscences. (1968)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Pyron sprang up on the West Texas plains around a rancher named Bob Pyron, whose cellar hosted the community's first school before the town was formally founded in 1900. A decade later its citizens picked up and moved four miles to reach the Santa Fe Railroad, where Pyron flourished with a two-story hotel, an Odd Fellows hall, stores, and a cotton gin. When a highway bypassed the site the town faded, its post office closing in 1952, until only a railroad crossing sign and a handful of houses remained.
Why it matters
Pyron's slow disappearance is a classic tale of the rural West, where the railroad made a town and the highway later unmade it, leaving a ghost town behind.
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Related people
- · Bob Pyron
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Hermleigh
Hermleigh, TX
Surveyed in 1907 along a new rail line, Hermleigh sprang up almost overnight as a trade center for West Texas livestock farmers, boasting two banks, a lumber yard, and a newspaper within its first year. When the Santa Fe arrived in 1911 the town's future seemed set; during World War I patriotic fervor briefly renamed it "Foch" for the French marshal before the original name returned in 1921.
Former Townsite of Wheat
Hermleigh, TX
A small farming settlement grew here in the late 1880s and took the name Wheat after a bumper wheat crop the year its post office opened in 1890. Served by postmasters Minerva Thomas and G. W. McCall, it had a school that doubled as a church. When the Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific Railroad bypassed the community in 1907, residents relocated two stores and a cotton gin to the new railside townsite of Hermleigh, and Wheat faded away.
Dunn
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Dunn began about 1881 as a change station where freighters resting their teams hauled goods north after the Texas & Pacific Railway reached Colorado City. A blacksmith shop and store sprang up to serve the wagon traffic, mail was dropped at the Dunn family home, and a post office named for them opened in 1890 with the first school built the same year. A community well, windmill, and trough once stood in the middle of the road—covered over only when the highway was paved in 1938.
Site of O.K. Wagon Yard
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