DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Somewhere out in Travis County, there's a community with a name that nobody planned on giving it — and the story of how that happened is about as Texas as it gets. The area was first surveyed in the eighteen-fifties, and by eighteen sixty-eight, settlers had taken a liking to it enough to put down roots and build something.
A real community grew up out here — a store, a meat market, a school that doubled as a church on Sundays. People were making a go of it. So in eighteen eighty, the townspeople decided it was time to make things official.
They applied for a post office. Now, a post office needs a name, and that's where things got interesting. Postal authorities rejected not one, not two, but six names.
Six. You have to imagine the patience wearing thinner with each rejection — the meetings, the debates, the hopeful submissions sent off and sent back. After the sixth time, the citizens had had enough.
Their reply to the postal authorities was, and I am quoting the marker here, 'Let the post office be nameless and be d——d.' The implied name was accepted. And just like that, Nameless, Texas had a name. The post office ran from eighteen eighty to eighteen ninety, and the community kept on — school, store, meat market, the whole works.
The present school building went up in nineteen oh nine, and classes ran there until nineteen forty-five. Today, if you find your way out to that spot in Travis County, what's left is the school, a cemetery, and some ruins. Once an active little community with six rejected names and one that stuck — the one nobody meant to give it.
What the marker says
First surveyed in the 1850s, this area attracted numerous settlers by 1868. A community grew up, and in 1880 townspeople applied for a post office. After postal authorities rejected six names, the citizens replied in disgust, "Let the post office be nameless and be d'd". The implied "name" was accepted. Besides the post office (1880-90), town had store, meat market, and school, which also served as a church. The present school was erected in 1909; classes were discontinued in 1945. Today only school, cemetery, and ruins mark site of once-active community. (1970)