Birome

Birome's name is a blend. The Handbook of Texas says the railroad's shipping point was laid out in 1910 on the 4,800-acre Cartwright Ranch, owned by brothers Bickham and Jerome Cartwright, and that their given names were run together. By 1910 the town had a school, a general store, a cotton gin, a blacksmith shop, a doctor, a barbershop and an ice cream parlor; the post office opened in 1912. About fifty people lived here in the mid-1920s, and thirty-one by the mid-1970s. The school closed in 1952 and the railroad tracks were abandoned.

What the plaque says

Birome Founded 1910. One of five International and Great Northern Railway stations in southern Hill County. Important agricultural market. Named for Bickham and Jerome Cartwright, descendants of settler Matthew Cartwright, whose 1856 land patent included this townsite. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hill County Courthouse — 17 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 19 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.
• Waco Suspension Bridge — 20 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 20 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.

More markers nearby

• Town of Penelope — 3.8 mi
• First Baptist Church of Mt. Calm — 6.1 mi
• Mt. Calm Methodist Church — 6.2 mi
• Col. Leonard Williams — 6.2 mi