Hermleigh

Hermleigh nearly had a name the post office would not take. The Handbook of Texas says the new town was first called Hermlin for land donors R. C. Herm and Harry W. Harlin, but postal officials objected to its likeness to Hamlin. During World War I the town's name was changed for a time to Foch, honoring the French general. The Santa Fe reached it in 1911, a school stood by 1913, and the Hermleigh Herald served for a time. Population was 725 in 1980, 200 in 1990 and 393 in 2000.

What the plaque says

Hermleigh Townsite surveyed 1907 by H. W. Harlin and R. C. Herm, on Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific Railroad. Post office, store and church moved here from Wheat, community to the northeast. In 1907 new town--a trade center for livestock farmers--had 2 banks, a lumber yard, a newspaper; 2-story brick school was built 1909. Santa Fe Railroad came through in 1911. In 1918, a war hero was honored by town's name change to "Foch". Old name was reinstated 1921. Six miles east is Sand Stone Canyon, with Indian pictographs. Skeletons of extinct mammals have been excavated nearby. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Scurry County Museum — 9.4 mi
  Snyder's county museum on the Western Texas College campus, with the rifle used to shoot the white buffalo, an 1878 chuckwagon and the millionth barrel of the Canyon Reef oil boom.
• Heart of West Texas Museum — 18 mi
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 21 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.
• Lake Colorado City State Park — 24 mi
  A mesquite-plains park on a lake built in 1949 to cool a power plant, southwest of Colorado City, where controlled burns are bringing back the grassland and 300 bird species pass through.

More markers nearby

• St. John's Catholic Church — 0.7 mi
• Pyron, Texas — 4.1 mi
• Lone Wolf Community — 7.4 mi
• Dunn — 8.7 mi