BLACKLAND TX
Six Texas towns. One strip of black earth.
Navarro County, about 1920
Published by Blackland TX. Corrections and photographs are welcome.
The towns
The Blackland Prairie is a belt of deep black clay running southwest through three counties. It is older than the county lines, and it is why these places belong together.
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The places between them
Smaller than a town and older than most of them. No city hall to ring and no school calendar — what these have is a name, a location, and whatever the record kept.
Dresden
Called Melton first, then Richland, then Dresden in the 1860s. Navarro County's first post office ran out of Ethan Melton's house here, and he gave the ground for the church, the school and the burying place that still carries the family name. A graveyard reservation from Hannah Melton to C. C. Melton, dated 11 November 1909, is on record in the county deed books.
Navarro County deed records and family research in this archive
Gradyville
A community that grew up about 1865, a mile south of Blooming Grove, with a cotton gin and a store. It is a ghost town now.
T. Edgar Campbell, A Short History of Early Blooming Grove
Barry
Black clay, unlike Blooming Grove five miles west. The paper was dropped at the post office here.
Navarro Mills
Two drops for the paper — the general store and café, and the feed store.
Raleigh
Named in the newspaper's own masthead as one of the communities it served.
Mildred
Its own school district, and twenty-three pictures in this archive. Carried as a place until there is a reason to give it a page of its own.
Milford
Its own school district, on the Ellis County side. Nothing of it in this archive yet.
Emhouse
Spring Hill
The oldest settlement in Navarro County, begun in 1838 as a trading post by a Republic of Texas Indian agent. When the railroad reached Dawson four miles southwest in 1881 the merchants, the residents and the Masonic Lodge all moved to it, and Spring Hill emptied.
Texas Historical Commission marker, Town of Dawson, 1978
Crossroads
The businesses here picked up and moved to the new railroad town at Frost in 1881.
Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas
Wadeville
Emptied into Kerens the same way, and in the same year, when the track went through.
Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas
Porter's Bluff
Taken by the river in 1866. Some of the people who left it settled the ground that became Rice.
Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas
Purdon
Rural Shade
Bazette
Cheneyboro
Chatfield
Currie
What is kept
Blooming Grove has kept the record at its own address since the beginning.
The Community News, 2009–2012
Twenty-five issues and 734 pages as printed, produced in Blooming Grove and published by the Blooming Grove Community Library. Two more single-page issues appeared in 2015.
734 pages
The 2014 site
Standing pages and community posts — town government, organisations, local history, and the directory as it stood.
143 pages
The earlier site
Blooming Grove's first website, running from the mid-2000s until the 2014 rebuild. Kept whole rather than tidied, at its original addresses.
220 pages
Six towns with pages of their own. The rest are here as places, which is what they were before anybody built anything.