First Post Office

Junction became the county's shipping and marketing center for livestock, wool, mohair, pecans and grain, and a hunting center for one of the state's leading deer counties, with pecan processing, tourism and a cedar-oil plant besides. The Texas Tech University Center offered graduate and undergraduate courses to as many as 250 students. Buses brought pupils from the whole county to the Junction school, which absorbed the rural schools, and the town held the county library, a hospital and a nursing home. Its people numbered 2,654 in 1990 and 2,618 in 2000.

What the plaque says

First Post Office Across the street, south, was the first building erected to house the Junction post office. Junction's first postmaster, Mrs. Harriet Kountz, appointed 1876, at first kept the mail in her home. In 1879, her husband, Dr. Ezekiel Kountz, built a post office, drugstore, and general mercantile house on the square. Lumber was hauled from Austin. Mrs. Kountz moved the office here and served until 1881. Dr. Kountz, first county clerk of Kimble County, used store as county office until courthouse was built nearby. Old store was dismantled 1911. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kimble County Historical Museum — 1.0 mi
  A free county museum in Junction, the town at the meeting of the North and South Llano, with the papers, photographs and tools of a ranching county.
• Eckert James River Bat Cave Preserve — 26 mi
  A limestone cave on the James River where about four million Mexican free-tailed bats raise their young each summer, kept open to visitors by a family's gift.
• Fort McKavett State Historic Site — 31 mi
  The post Sherman called the prettiest in Texas, home to soldiers of all four Buffalo Soldier regiments and then to a town that lived in its buildings until 1973.

More markers nearby

• City of Junction — steps away
• O.C. Fisher — steps away
• Kimble County — steps away
• Early History of Kimble County — steps away