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Many west central Texas ghost towns relied on the railroad for their prosperity. When the rail lines moved or were laid several miles away, towns followed.
Man-made factors are the most prevalent reasons for a town’s death, but the uncontrollable forces of the natural world reap their own fruits.
About 14 miles southeast of Refugio lay Copano. Not being able to compete with Rockport, it was a ghost town by 1880. By all accounts, the ocean’s natural expansion claimed this town, and the Copano site now lies under the Gulf of Mexico. Copano Bay is its last vestige. It sits on the water’s edge and consists of new homesteads. Jim Wheat’s Ghost Towns of Texas maps show Copano on the eastern lip of Mission Bay. Comparing maps of today with his, one can see that the site no longer exists. The publishers of this page, by physical research, have qualified this. Future pages will expound on this premise.
Doubtless many write-ups have been done about the town the Army Corps of Engineers flooded to create Canyon Lake after designing and building Canyon Dam. Here, on the Texas Ghost Town page, the subject will be treated under the light of a ghost town. It may indeed be the only permanently abandoned town due to economic reasons! This is written tongue-in-cheek because it was not the town’s own economic situation that fell it. It was the economic situation of the persons behind the development of the dam and lake. (PHOTOS PENDING)
Just north of Llano in the heart of Llanite country, lie the remains of Babyhead—its cemetery.
The town of Babyhead was so named because of an incident involving the abduction and slaughter of a small boy by Indians. They conspicuously left the child’s head on a nearby mountain and it was found by the town’s posse.
There are no other structures in this ghost town.
Many of the towns featured on the Texas Ghost Town page will be mere cemeteries. Other cemeteries will be featured in Roadside Hobbies under Texas Necrogeography. Necrogeography is the study of burial customs: Texas Necrogeography is the study of Texas regional burial customs.
Stay tuned for such stories as "Adventures with Park Rangers," "The Great Bat Attack," and everybody’s favorite, "It Has A Door, Do You Think We Can Go In?", better known as "The Day James Bond Came To Town."
The first FULL Texas Ghost Towns page will be ready for viewing by the first week in December.
The publishers of the Texas Ghost Towns webpage are doing field research, taking photographs and tombstone rubbings, interviewing residents and officials, and gathering more reference materials. So, if you see a guy and a gal in a little white pick-up truck haunting small cemeteries or traveling some little known two-lane road to nowhere, wave at ‘em. They like it.
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