Black Springs

Oran's second life began in 1908, when wells there began producing mineral water and a crystal plant was built to ship it nationwide. The Weatherford, Mineral Wells and Northwestern Railway ran in, and the town filled up: a gin working around the clock in cotton season, a skating rink, a weekly paper, three churches, four general stores and a twenty-room hotel at a dollar a day. By 1912 the school had 112 pupils. Then the boll weevil arrived. The gins were dismantled, the wells abandoned, and the tracks and depot taken up.

What the plaque says

Black Springs Settled before the Civil War and named for the area's early water source, located nearby, the Black Springs community played a significant role in the growth of Palo Pinto County. Prominent individuals associated with the town included early cattlemen and trail drivers Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight and J. J. "Jack" Cureton, a noted military veteran and pioneer. In 1886 the community was renamed Oran in honor of Texas Governor Oran M. Roberts. Once the county's leading town and the site of stores, churches, a school and railroad, it declined in the 1930s and 1940s. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 12 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 18 mi
  The northernmost post of the Texas frontier line, outside Jacksboro, where a stone hospital and six other buildings stand from 1867 and a later Guard unit became the Lost Battalion.
• Chandor Gardens — 25 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 27 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.

More markers nearby

• Charles Goodnight — steps away
• Site of the Home of Oliver Loving in 1855 — 5.3 mi
• Whitt Seminary — 8.2 mi
• Whitt Cemetery — 8.3 mi