Community of Concho

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna pass it along to you. Out here along the Concho River, sometime in the late eighteen hundreds, settlers started arriving. They came looking for land, looking for a future, and what they found was good river bottom country.

They put down roots, and a small farming community grew up right along that water. Nothing flashy. Just people doing what people do when they decide a place is worth staying in.

They farmed it. They built on it. They called it home.

Now, a community like that needs certain things to hold together. And Concho, it got them, one by one. In nineteen oh five, a post office opened.

Not in some grand civic building, mind you. It opened in the home of W. D.

Cape. That's how it was done out here. You used what you had.

Then in nineteen oh six, a man named J. W. Barr opened a general store right at this very site.

Barr would live until nineteen sixty-four, long enough to see the world change in ways those first settlers couldn't have imagined. But in nineteen oh six, he was just a man opening a store, and that store became the business center for all the rural country surrounding it. And around that center, Concho kept building itself up.

There was a school, so children could learn. Two churches, so folks could gather and wrestle with something bigger than the harvest. A cotton gin, which tells you everything about what this land was producing.

A blacksmith shop, because the work of the place was real and iron-handed. And a cemetery, because communities aren't just about the living. They're about everyone who came before and made the thing possible.

For a while, Concho had it all. But by the nineteen forties the population had started to thin out, the way it does in small rural places when the wider world starts pulling people toward it. And then in nineteen fifty-four, the post office closed.

The one that had started in W. D. Cape's home, half a century before, went quiet.

The marker standing here doesn't pretend that's not a loss. But it does say this: the site of this pioneer community serves as a reminder of the area's early settlers. And that's no small thing.

Because somebody farmed this ground, and ginned cotton on it, and shod horses on it, and prayed and learned and buried their dead on it. The Concho River kept flowing. The land remembers.

What the marker says

As settlers came to the area in the late 1800's, a small farming community developed here along the Concho River. In 1905 a post office opened in the home of W. D. Cape. In 1906 J. W. Barr (d. 1964) opened a general store at this site. As the business center for the surrounding rural area, the settlement was also the site of a school, two churches, a cotton gin, a blacksmith shop, and a cemetery. Although the population had declined by the 1940's and the post office was closed in 1954, the site of the pioneer community serves as a reminder of the area's early settlers. (1983)