DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, somewhere out in Montague County, there's a place with a name that'll stop you mid-sentence if you're not ready for it. Uz.
Just two letters and a whole lot of history. Early settlers pulled that name straight out of the Biblical Book of Job — a town mentioned in scripture — and planted it right here in Texas soil. Fitting, maybe, that a place named from the story of Job would one day have trials of its own.
But we'll get to that. The community of Uz was up and running by the 1870s, and its whole world turned on cotton. That was the crop, the economy, the heartbeat of the place.
And for a while, it beat strong. By the early 1900s, Uz had reached its peak — and we're talking homes, stores, churches, a cotton gin, a school, a post office, and even a telephone exchange. Out in Montague County.
A telephone exchange. Don't let anyone tell you frontier Texas wasn't ambitious. Now, the unraveling started quiet, the way it usually does.
The post office was discontinued in 1907. Then in 1931, the school was merged with the Forestburg schools. Each one of those is a small goodbye, a community handing a piece of itself over.
But the blow that truly signaled the decline? That came in the 1930s, when a boll weevil infestation destroyed the cotton crop. Not trimmed it.
Not hurt it. Destroyed it. And when the cotton went, the reason for Uz — all those homes and stores and churches and that cotton gin humming away — well, it went quiet.
A place named for a town in the Book of Job, brought low by something you could barely see. There's a sermon in there somewhere, though I'll leave the preachin' to the marker.
What the marker says
Named by early settlers for a town mentioned in the Biblical Book of Job, Uz was a farming community whose economy was based on the cotton crop. In existence by the 1870s, the town reached its peak in the early 1900s. At its height the community included homes, stores, churches, a cotton gin, school, post office, and telephone exchange. The post office was discontinued in 1907, and the school was merged with the Forestburg schools in 1931. A boll weevil infestation in the 1930s destroyed the cotton crop and signalled the decline of the Uz community. (1990)