Donahoe Community

Duane's take

Here's how the marker at Donahoe tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, Bell County has its share of communities that rose up out of the blackland prairie and quietly slipped back into it, and Donahoe is one of those stories worth sitting with for a minute. It started the way a lot of Central Texas communities did — colonists following the water.

In the late 1840s, settlers found their way to Donahoe Creek, and that fertile ground along its banks was enough to make people decide this was a place worth putting down roots. Then, in 1854, a man named Samuel Gibbs Leatherman arrived. Born in 1799, Leatherman was the kind of figure a young community needed badly and was lucky to get.

He opened the first mercantile store — which, if you've ever been far from town and needed something, you understand just what that meant. But Leatherman wasn't done. He gave land for the cemetery.

He brought in the first doctor. And then, come 1880, he donated land for a schoolhouse. Now that schoolhouse did double duty, serving as a church as well — right up until 1911, when Thomas Jefferson Jones and his wife stepped forward and gave the site for a proper Baptist church.

The community had grown up enough to have a town square, a post office, a telephone system, and a voting precinct. Donahoe, friend, was a real place. But here's the thing about good roads.

When they finally came — roads connecting folks to other towns — Donahoe didn't gain from them. It lost. People could go elsewhere, and eventually, they did.

The town square, the post office, the telephone system — all of it faded. What's left today is the cemetery. The very land Samuel Gibbs Leatherman gave back in those early years — that's what remains.

He gave it first, and it outlasted everything else he helped build. There's something in that worth thinking about down the road.

What the marker says

Colonists settled in the late 1840s along the fertile Donahoe Creek. Samuel Gibbs Leatherman (1799-1888) arrived in 1854 and opened the first mercantile store. He gave land for the cemetery and brought in the first doctor. In 1880 Leatherman donated land for the schoolhouse. It also served as a church until 1911 when Thomas Jefferson Jones and his wife gave this site for the Baptist church. Donahoe boasted a town square, post office, telephone system and voting precinct. With the coming of good roads to other towns, Donahoe declined, leaving only the cemetery. (1978)