Goforth

Goforth's first school, Prairie Hill, opened in 1881. Population estimates swung from 100 in 1892 to twenty in 1896, yet by 1900 the Goforth ginning company was one of the busiest in Central Texas, serving the prosperous farms and ranches of eastern Hays County. Then soil exhaustion and erosion cut the yields, a flood in 1913 hastened the decline, and farms and businesses failed. The community lived on as the site of a school for local Mexican American children until 1948. By 1981 the county highway map showed only a cemetery here.

What the plaque says

Goforth Once the center of cotton-producing activity in Hays County. Goforth became a ghost town during the 1920s. The community was established in the 1870s by James Taylor Goforth (1849-1915), who operated a general store at this site. Goforth's store served as a social center and as a banking facility for many of the farm families in the area. Business activity in Goforth was at its height between 1880 and 1906. The town boasted a drugstore, doctor's office, meat market, stable, and blacksmith shop. A U. S. Post Office opened in 1890, with J. T. Goforth as postmaster. In 1894, J. M. Butterworth purchased Goforth's store, but closed it three years later when the Goforth Supply Company was organized. The town's founder later formed a gin and milling company that operated one of the largest cotton gins in the area. Despite the fact that rail lines had bypassed Goforth, the community flourished until soil erosion and worn out farmland combined to bring extensive crop failure in 1925. A worm infestation in 1926 caused total abandonment of area farms. The supply company closed that year with stock still on the shelves. Although little evidence remains of the townsite, Goforth is an important part of Hays County history. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• McKinney Falls State Park — 12 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 12 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 12 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Barton Springs Pool — 17 mi
  A three-acre pool in the bed of Barton Creek, fed by the fourth-largest spring in Texas at 68 to 70 degrees, and shared with an endangered salamander found almost nowhere else.

More markers nearby

• Buda — 4.9 mi
• Barton Cemetery — 5.3 mi
• Kyle — 5.3 mi
• John Wheeler Bunton — 5.3 mi