Cottonwood Bank and Post Office

Cottonwood was a fruit-growing town. Settlers from East Texas began farming around it in the mid-1880s, raising cotton, oats and several kinds of fruit, and a fruit and vegetable cannery opened here in 1903. The Handbook of Texas ties the town's fading to the automobile era and to a shift in local farming from fruit and vegetables to ranching. Cottonwood had 350 people in 1890, 300 by 1915 and 120 by 1940. From 1980 through 2000 its population stood at sixty-five.

What the plaque says

W. F. Griffin opened a bank about 1911 in this small frame building. With Griffin as a director, Paul Ramsey served as the first president. His duties included teller, cashier, loan officer and custodian. When the railroad bypassed Cottonwood, merchants and residents moved away. In January 1915, the bank closed. In 1918 Hazel Respess opened a post office in the building and ran it for the next 50 years. In 1975, postal service here was stopped. This spot has been a gathering place for the community. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 18 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Lake Brownwood State Park — 26 mi
  A CCC park on a reservoir that filled in a single flood before its dam was done, with stone cabins, a hilltop dance pavilion and a grand staircase climbed by dancers arriving by boat.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 26 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.

More markers nearby

• Site of Cottonwood Springs — steps away
• Cross Plains Review — 6.0 mi
• Fort Mason-Camp Cooper Military Road — 6.1 mi
• Home of Robert E. Howard — 6.1 mi