Coryell County (1,057 square mile area) was created by the Texas
state legislature in 1854 and is named for James Coryell (1796-1837
Texas Ranger), an early explorer of the region. Gatesville, the county
seat, grew up around Fort Gates, established in 1849 to protect settlers
from marauding Indians.
The habitation of Coryell County dates as far back as 4500 BC. The
Tonkawa, Lipan Apache, Kiowa and Comanche were among the tribes who
migrated through the area at various periods. When the General
Colonization Law went into effect in 1824, followed by the 1825 State
Colonization Law of Coahuila y Tejas, Robert Leftwich obtained a grant
to settle 800 families in Texas. The grant went through several legal
challenges, and later became Robertson’s Colony, named for Sterling C.
Robertson. The grant encompassed all or parts of thirty present-day
Texas counties. Settlers began moving into the area after Fort Gates
was established at Gatesville.
Land for a courthouse square was acquired and a one-story framed
structure was constructed in 1865 on a corner presently occupied by a
city filling station. In 1872, a two-story structure of native white
limestone was erected on this property and served as a focus of county
business for the next twenty five years.
On May 15, 1897, architect W.C. Dodson was commissioned to draw plans
and specifications for a third courthouse at a contract price of three
and half percent of the total building cost. The only stipulations
imposed on the architect were that the building have a cupola on top
with a Seth Thomas Clock and a bell of not less than 800 pounds, and
that the building be roofed in metal with the dome on the cupola in
clad copper. In addition, there were to be dual statues of Liberty and
Justice at the north and south entrances.”
The flag of Coryell County was designed by Donald K. Fisher, a member
of the Commissioners’ Court, and adopted on 24 February 1986 in
preparation for a number of anniversary events. In gold on white it
depicts the County Seal and the date of the County’s creation and
organization, 1854. The colors do not have any particular significance
but were selected to avoid the overused red-white-blue combination.
The County Seal is an adaptation of the Texas State Seal, and
consists of three unevenly spaced rings. Between the outer rings appear
the inscriptions “The State of Texas” and “County of Coryell.” Within
the inner ring appears a wreath of oak and pecan leaves around a Lone
Star, the points of which are shaded on their clockwise sides.
Coryell County, about 210 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, is
bordered by Hamilton, Bosque, McLennan, Bell, and Lampasas counties.
Gatesville, the county seat, is on U.S. Highway 84 and State Highway 36,
about eighty miles north of Austin and 110 miles southwest of Dallas.
The county’s center lies about four miles southwest of Gatesville at
approximately 31°23′ north latitude and 97°48′ west longitude. The
present county comprises 1,031 square miles of plateaus and grasslands
in the Grand Prairie region, with elevations ranging from 600 to 1,493
feet above sea level. Its two principal streams are the Leon River,
which drains the northern and eastern parts of the county, and Cowhouse
Creek, which drains the western and southern areas. Soils vary widely in
the county, but most are alkaline with limestone underneath. Indigenous
trees include red cedar, live oak, Spanish oak, burr oak, shin oak,
cedar elm, hackberry, pecan, redbud, Mexican plum, buckeye, ash, and
Eve’s necklace; native grasses include bluestems, gramas, and buffalo
grass. Approximately 25 percent of the county is considered prime
farmland. The fauna includes deer, armadillos, skunks, coyotes, bobcats,
opossums, ring-tailed cats, badgers, foxes, raccoons, and squirrels, as
well as assorted birds, fish, and reptiles. The climate is temperate;
the average minimum temperature is 33° F in January, and the average
maximum is 97° in July. The growing season averages 244 days annually,
and the rainfall averages about thirty-two inches.
Archeological evidence suggests that Central Texas, including Coryell
County, has supported human habitation for at least 12,000 years. The
hunting and gathering peoples who had established themselves along the
Leon River by 4500 B.C. were probably ancestors of the Tonkawa Indians,
who resided in the area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Another Central Texas tribe, the Lipan Apaches, became neighbors of the
Tonkawas sometime after 1300. In later years Kiowas sometimes resided in
the area, and the Comanches occasionally passed through.
The area that became Coryell County was part of the Milam Land
District, assigned by the Mexican government for settlement first to
Robert Leftwichqv in 1825, and later to Sterling C. Robertson.qv
Some of the land was surveyed as early as 1835, but few settlements
existed before the late 1840s, when the United States established Fort
Gates and other military posts along the frontier to protect incoming
residents from Indians. The line of frontier forts was moved farther
west in the early 1850s, and Fort Gates was abandoned in 1852. Settlers
in the Fort Gates area numbered about 250 at that time, and they began
to campaign for a county seat. In 1854 the legislature established
Coryell County and named it in honor of frontiersman James Coryell,qv an early landholder. Residents chose the site for Gatesville, the county seat, in an election held in May 1854.
Besides Fort Gates, settlements established in Coryell County in the
1850s included Mound, Coryell Church, Rainey’s Creek (Coryell City),
Langford Cove (Evant), Boyd’s Cove (Bee House), the Grove, Henson’s
Creek, Spring Hill, Station Creek, Turnover, and Lincolnville. The 1860
census showed the county’s free population to be 2,360; 81 of this
number were slaveholders, who owned a total of 306 slaves. The majority
of residents were from the Old South. Of the heads of households in
1860, the largest number (115) were from Tennessee, forty were from
Alabama, and thirty-seven each from Kentucky and North Carolina.
Unlike neighboring McLennan County, Coryell County had few large
plantations. Most of its resources were devoted to stock raising and
subsistence farming. The 1860 production included 25,000 cattle, 8,500
hogs, 3,800 sheep, 61,000 bushels of corn, 18,000 bushels of wheat, and
forty-nine bales of cotton.
Although Coryell County residents owned relatively few slaves, the prevailing sentiment was decidedly in favor of secession.qv
In the fall of 1860 residents held several mass meetings advocating
secession and the formation of militia companies. James M. Norrisqv represented the county at the Secession Conventionqv
in January 1861 and voted to leave the Union; Coryell County voters
approved the ordinance later that year by a margin of 293 to 55. Several
companies from Coryell County volunteered for duty in the Confederate
Army or to help protect frontier settlers from Indians. Gatesville
became headquarters of the Second Frontier District, under the command
of Maj. George B. Erath.qv Local sources give little record of Coryell County during Reconstruction.qv Election returns for 1869 showed the county choosing Andrew J. Hamilton over Edmund J. Davisqqv
for governor by a unanimous vote, 259 to 0; the vote indicated that the
Radical Republicans had been banished by that time and the Democrats
restored to power.
In national politics, Coryell County was staunchly Democratic from
the end of Reconstruction through the late 1960s. However, voters chose
Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and George Bush
in 1988 and 1992. Occasional third parties, such as the Greenbackers,
Populists, and Progressives, drew a sizable portion of the vote, but
never enough to swing the county’s overall election results. Residents
generally voted Democratic in state elections.
Before the Civil War,qv schools in Coryell County were
operated as private or subscription institutions, with state funds
supplementing the budgets. The legislature enacted a system of public
schools in 1870, and by 1872 Coryell County had twenty teachers and
nineteen schools for nearly 600 schoolchildren. Nearly every community
either had its own school or was near a community that did. As in many
Texas counties, however, extensive schooling was for many children a
luxury that took second place to helping on the family farm. As late as
1940 fewer than 9 percent of the population over the age of twenty-five
had completed high school. Large-scale consolidation of common schools
into independent school districts took place in the 1930s and 1940s,
making it possible to use available resources more efficiently. After
World War IIqv the percentage of residents who finished
school gradually rose. By 1960 nearly 18 percent were high school
graduates, and by 1980 the number represented 72 percent of the
population over twenty-five.
In the early years of Coryell County few communities had their own
preacher; itinerant ministers went from place to place, sometimes
staying two or three months in a town. Among the earliest churches
established in the county were a Baptist church at Coryell Church in
1854 and a Methodist church at Gatesville in 1854. The first
Presbyterian church was organized at Rainey’s Creek in 1858. A Christian
church was in operation by the mid-1860s, and Germans and Wendsqqv
brought the Lutheran church to the area, establishing St. John’s in
Coryell City in 1889. Coryell County had no Catholic church until 1940,
when an influx of military families diversified the area’s religion;
before that, Catholics had to travel to Lampasas or Waco in order to
attend services. In the early 1990s, the county had approximately 100
churches, representing fifteen different faiths; Southern Baptist,
United Methodist, and Church of Christ were the largest communions.
Like most areas in the South, Coryell County suffered a severe
economic decline after the Civil War and throughout Reconstruction.
Between 1864 and 1866 the county lost 63 percent of its tax base. About a
third of the lost property was in slaves; the rest came from declines
in farm acreage, farm value, and livestock value, each of which had
fallen 30 to 50 percent by the time of the 1870 census. Recovery was
slow because transportation was poor and the economy was so dependent on
stock raising and farming.
The county economy began to recover in the late 1860s. The overall
population more than doubled between 1870 and 1880, rising from 4,124 to
10,924, and the market for agricultural products increased. The 1880
census reported 1,546 farms in the county, up from 279 ten years
earlier, and the amount of improved land rose from 11,831 acres in 1870
to 83,258 acres in 1880. Field crops such as corn, wheat, oats, and
cotton took up about 65 percent of the improved land, while livestock
dominated the rest. By 1880 the county had nearly 23,000 cattle, 10,300
hogs, and 4,300 sheep. A branch of the Chisholm Trailqv
passed through the county, and the area around Copperas Cove served as a
camping ground for traildrivers. When the arrival of the railroad made
long trail drives unnecessary, Copperas Cove continued to prosper as a
shipping point for cattle. Coryell County ranchers reported more than
46,000 cattle and 19,800 hogs in 1890, but by 1900, due to the influx of
new residents from the Old South, farming had become the dominant
occupation; cotton, corn, and oats were raised on more than 65 percent
of the county’s 200,000 improved acres.
Two railroads were completed through Coryell County in 1882: the
Texas and St. Louis Railway laid a narrow-gauge track from Waco to
Gatesville, and the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe crossed the southern tip
of the county near Copperas Cove, making its way from Belton to
Lampasas. The arrival of the railroads prompted the establishment of
Oglesby, Lime City, and Leon Junction, and provided new economic
opportunities for Mound, Gatesville, and Copperas Cove. A third railroad
company, the Stephenville North and South Texas, laid track from
Hamilton to Gatesville in 1911, providing the northwestern part of the
county with easier access to rail service and making the communities of
Ireland and Levita more important commercial centers.
Between 1880 and 1900 the population of Coryell County nearly doubled
again, rising to 21,308 by the turn of the century. Most of the
incoming residents were from other parts of Texas or from other southern
states; some, however, came from other countries. New immigrants
arrived from Germany in the 1880s and 1890s via Galveston, Lee, and
Fayette counties, and from Mexico soon after the turn of the century. In
1930, 145 residents of Coryell County were native Germans, and 352 were
native Mexicans. As for African Americans,qv some former slaves left
the county after the Civil War, but most stayed either to continue
working for their former owners or to start new lives on their own. One
group settled in Lincolnville, about four miles west of Gatesville.
Between 1880 and 1950, the number of black residents in the county
increased at roughly the same rate as the white population; blacks
represented from 2 to 3 percent of the county’s total population during
those years. The permanent establishment of Fort Hood in 1950 changed
the ethnic makeup of the county. By the early 1980s, 22 percent of the
county’s 56,767 residents were of British descent, 21 percent were
German, 19 percent were black, 8 percent were Hispanic, 2 percent were
Asian, and 0.6 percent were Indian; the remaining percentage was
unspecified.
For the first third of the twentieth century, roughly 30 to 50
percent of the county’s improved acreage was devoted to cotton culture,qv
with production generally ranging from 18,000 to 30,000 bales annually;
the county’s record crop of nearly 58,000 bales occurred in 1906.
Production totals fell in the 1930s, as low yields and the onset of the
Great Depressionqv persuaded farmers to devote more of their
resources to feed crops and livestock. In 1940 farmers planted 50,500
acres in cotton, compared to the 109,000 acres they had planted ten
years earlier; in the late 1950s, cotton was grown on fewer than 17,000
acres. No cotton production was reported in the early 1980s.
Farmers and ranchers kept more of their land as pasture for livestock. Sheep and goat ranching,qqv
which had been first introduced to the area in the 1850s and 1860s,
gradually increased in importance in the 1930s. Production of wool rose
from 32,800 pounds in 1920 to 665,700 in 1940, while mohair production
increased from about 16,000 to 121,300 pounds; these two industries
declined somewhat in the 1960s and 1970s as cattle production increased.
The cattle industry remained fairly stable between 1900 and 1940, with
the amount of stock on hand averaging about 35,000 head. The number of
cattle rose to nearly 48,000 in the late 1960s and to 93,000 in the
early 1980s.
Tenant farming and sharecropping, which had accounted for the
operation of a third of the county’s farms in 1880, increased steadily
in the early twentieth century, peaking at 58 percent in 1930. The
depression forced some people, many of them tenants, to give up farming
and look for work elsewhere. The establishment of Camp Hood in the early
1940s took approximately 225 square miles of land in southern Coryell
County, eliminating two dozen communities and nearly 1,200 farms.
Although some small farmers in other areas of the county managed to keep
their land, the trend was toward larger farming and ranching
operations; the number of farms in the county fell from 3,101 in 1930 to
1,841 in 1950 and 991 in 1982, while the average size of a farm rose
from 188 acres in 1930 to 268 acres in 1950, and to 627 acres in the
early 1980s. In 1950, 28 percent of the farms were run by tenants, and
by 1982 that figure had fallen to 12 percent.
By virtue of its rural environment and relatively small population
Coryell County escaped many of the hardships suffered by more urban
areas during the depression of the 1930s; nevertheless, relief programs
were necessary to see local residents through the difficulties that they
did experience. Among these programs were two camps established by the
Civilian Conservation Corpsqv-one at Mother Neff State Parkqv to construct park buildings and tourist facilities, and one at Gatesville as a soil-conservation and brush-control detail.
The United States involvement in World War II brought an end to the
depression; on a local level, new war industries paved the way for a
dramatic increase in the population of Coryell County. Among the
military facilities built in and near the county in the 1940s were Camp
Hood, the Bluebonnet Ordnance plant, and a camp for German prisoners of
war.qv Because of the large number of soldiers, construction
workers, and other government employees who came to the area during the
war years, there was a severe housing shortage, and many local families
offered rooms for rent in their homes. When the military decided in 1950
to make Fort Hood a permanent base, the population of Copperas Cove
mushroomed, from 1,052 in 1950 to 4,567 in 1960 and to 10,818 in 1970.
During the same period Gatesville’s population grew by only 800, from
3,838 to 4,683.
The St. Louis Southwestern of Texas abandoned its track to Gatesville
in 1972, leaving the town without rail service; the branch to the
northwest had been discontinued in the 1940s. However, in the 1970s and
1980s, Gatesville was chosen as the site for several new units of the
Texas Department of Corrections (see PRISON SYSTEM). The Gatesville
State School for Boys,qv established in 1887, closed in the
early 1970s, and the facility became the Gatesville Unit of TDC.
Mountain View School for Boys,qv established in 1962, was
also transferred to TDC in 1975 to provide relief for overcrowded
conditions at the Goree Unit Women’s Prison in Huntsville. The Hilltop
Unit, a minimum-security prison for men, opened in 1981. In all, more
than 1,000 people worked for the prison system at Gatesville, making TDC
one of the county’s largest employers.
In the early 1980s, 88 percent of the land in Coryell County
(exclusive of Fort Hood) was devoted to farms and ranches. About 20
percent of the farmland was under cultivation, with oats, wheat, and
sorghum accounting for 94 percent of the 101,000 acres harvested; other
crops were hay, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peaches, and pecans. Eighty
percent of the county’s agricultural receipts came from livestock and
livestock products, the most important ones being cattle, sheep, wool,
Angora goats, mohair, hogs, and turkeys. Although agriculture continued
to be an important part of the local economy, farm receipts represented
less than 8 percent of the county’s total income. Professional and
related services, manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, and public
administration employed 68 percent of the workforce in the 1980s; 10
percent of the workforce was self-employed, and 8 percent was employed
outside the county. Coryell County had 56,767 residents in 1980, a 60
percent increase over the 1970 population of 35, 311. The county’s
population in 1990 was 64,213, according to census records.
SOURCES: Coryell County Genealogical Society,
Coryell County, Texas, Families, 1854-1985 (Dallas: Taylor, 1986). Jerry
K. Smith and Patrick D. McLaughlin, Copperas Cove, City of Five Hills: A
Centennial History (Burnet, Texas: Eakin Press, 1980). Zelma Scott,
History of Coryell County (Austin: Texas State Historical Association,
1965).