Gunsight Community

Gunsight took its name from the nearby Gunsight Mountains, one of a handful of summits, with Double Mountain and Evans Peak, that rise above the county's hilly plateau. The Handbook of Texas dates its settlement to 1879 and its post office to 1880, opened in J. W. Shepard's store. The community counted fifty people in 1890. The oil boom and the Wichita Falls and Southern Railway nearby lifted it to 150 by 1920, but during that decade it lost both its railroad station and its post office. From 1980 through 2000 the population was reported as six.

What the plaque says

Records indicate that Gunsight existed on a wagon road from Fort Griffin to Stephenville in 1858. Settlement of the town, however, did not occur until the 1870s. The first recorded burial here was that of Lewis McCleskey is 1877. Gunsight developed as a stage stop and by 1880 contained a post office, school, two churches, gristmill, general store, and a cotton gin. The local economy, sustained by cotton farming and ranching, was boosted by an area oil boom in the 1920s. The town began a steady decline after World War II and today consists of a few houses, a few buildings, and this cemetery. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 10 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.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 12 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.
• Old Jail Art Center — 28 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.

More markers nearby

• Wayland School — 5.3 mi
• Parks Camp — 8.4 mi
• Camp Salmon, C.S.A. — 10 mi
• Eastland — 10 mi