DUANE
Duane's take
The marker's got the story, and here's how I tell it — this is Dime Box, straight from the official record. Now there are towns in Texas with names that make you scratch your head, and then there are towns with names that make you reach into your pocket just to check. Old Dime Box, Lee County — that's the second oldest community in the whole county, sittin' right in the heart of land that Stephen F.
Austin himself laid out as part of his Old Three Hundred colony. You don't get a more Texas pedigree than that. The place started out with a perfectly sensible name: Browne's Mills.
Named for a man named Joseph S. Browne, who ran the mill there. And a mill in those days was the center of everything — the hub, the heartbeat of a community tryin' to get itself established on the Texas frontier.
But here's where the story takes a turn toward something you couldn't make up if you tried. The folks out around Browne's Mills needed things from Giddings — supplies, goods, whatever a person needs when they're livin' far enough out that a trip to town is a production. So they worked out an arrangement with their postman, a fellow by the name of John W.
Ratliff. They'd leave their dimes — actual dimes, coin of the realm — in a box at Joseph S. Browne's mill, and Ratliff would pick them up, make his way to Giddings, and bring back whatever those items were.
A box. Full of dimes. At the mill.
And somewhere along the way, the name Browne's Mills just couldn't compete with that image. The dime box won. The community kept the name, and the name kept the story alive.
So next time you drive through Old Dime Box, Lee County, think about old John W. Ratliff makin' his rounds, pocketful of dimes, runnin' errands for a whole community on the honor system. That right there is Texas frontier ingenuity — and it earned a town its name.
What the marker says
County's second oldest community. Located in Texas founder Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colony. First known as Browne's Mills. Present name derived from practice of leaving dimes in box at Joseph S. Browne's mill so that postman John W. Ratliff would bring items from Giddings to community members. (1968)