Neinda Community

The Handbook of Texas names Joe Cox among the 1880s settlers of the place first called Banner. Neinda's first postmaster, John O'Brien, was also its last. In 1940 the community still had a gin, several businesses and seventy-five residents, and in 1978 a store, a gin and the Baptist church survived. Thirty-one people lived there in 1980 and 1990, and twenty-one in 2000. The old cemetery is kept up by the Cemetery Association and by a Pioneers Reunion that meets every year.

What the plaque says

Soon after Jones County organized in 1881, ranchers settled west of Skinout Mountain and established a community called Banner. In 1890, a post office named Neinda opened, with John O'Brien as postmaster. A cemetery began the following year. The Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway bypassed the town in 1902 (creating Hamlin 6 mi. NW), and the post office closed in 1907. At its peak in the 1920s, the community had a school, Methodist and Baptist churches, a cotton gin, a doctor's office, pharmacies, stores and a filling station. By the early 21st century, only the cemetery (1891), Neinda Baptist Church building (1905) and Brown's Cash Store Building (1927) remained in the once viable town. (2007)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Phantom Hill — 26 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Pioneer Museum — 29 mi
  Nolan County's settlement story in a dozen rooms of Judge R. A. Ragland's 1906 house in Sweetwater, a town that started as a dugout store for buffalo hunters and a post office called Blue Goose.
• Frontier Texas! — 32 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 32 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.

More markers nearby

• Hamlin — 6.3 mi
• Adair-Steadman Site — 8.9 mi
• Jones County — 11 mi
• Fort Phantom Hill, C.S.A. — 11 mi