Rural Communities of Western Mills County
Ridge, Mills County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Pioneers migrated to western Mills county to take advantage of the area’s rich soil and ample water supply. The community of Regency, (originally Hannah Valley) received a post office in 1889. Today, few vestiges of Regency remain. Other area residents organized the Ebony community (originally Buffalo) in 1879. Regency and Ebony had churches, schools and other institutions. The Ridge community (originally Cold Springs) formed in 1888. The Ridge school building, built in 1931, was later used as a community center. During World War II, the U.S. Government purchased land in the region to form Camp Bowie. The towns declined when many residents did not return following the war.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Drawn by rich soil and reliable water, pioneers settled western Mills County in the 1870s and 1880s, founding the communities of Regency, Ebony, and Ridge, each with churches, schools, and a post office. During World War II the U.S. government bought regional land to create Camp Bowie, and many residents who left never returned. Today only faint traces of these once-thriving towns remain.
Why it matters
The story shows how frontier settlement built a web of small Texas communities — and how wartime land acquisition and out-migration could quietly erase them.
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Related events
- · Establishment of Camp Bowie
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Jackson Massacre
Goldthwaite, TX
On an October morning in 1858, settlers Moses and Lydia Jackson set out with four of their children and met a small party of Indians, possibly Comanches. The parents and two sons were killed at once; the middle children, Joshua and Rebecca, were carried off, abandoned after nearly two weeks, and walked two days before a party of settlers and Texas Rangers found them near Sweetwater. The family was buried where they fell, close to this spot.
Ratler, Texas and the Renfro Dam
Goldthwaite, TX
In the late 1870s Mary and J. W. Jones threw a dam of live-oak logs and sandstone across the Colorado River to power a grist mill and cotton gin, and a settlement called Jones Valley grew up around the trade it drew. When the mail arrived after Mills County's formation, the town was rechristened Ratler, and its dam became a favorite swimming and fishing spot for area settlers. Successive owners rebuilt the dam in sturdier stone, and though the great flood of 1936 swept nearly everything away, the dam itself endured.
Site of Chesser Valley Community
Mullin, TX
Chesser Valley took its name from John Dan Chesser, a Missouri native who came to Texas in 1854 and, after serving in the Texas State Troops during the Civil War, homesteaded 160 acres here with his wife Elizabeth. Their expanding log home doubled as church, hospital, and travelers' hotel, and the valley became a gathering place for camp meetings where families came by wagon to worship under a brush tabernacle. A one-teacher school opened in 1868, but after the Chesser house burned in 1926 the little community all but vanished.
Buffalo-Ebony Cemetery
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Local tradition holds that this burial ground began when two sheep herders died while camping here, though its oldest marked grave dates to 1882. After Frank and Mary Crowder bought the land in 1889, Mary later gave part of it for a community cemetery serving the Buffalo and Ebony neighborhoods. Pioneers and veterans rest here, joined in the 1940s by three members of the Reynolds family reburied when their original graves fell within a new military camp.