Nix

By the Handbook of Texas account, David Coterell opened a blacksmith shop at Nix in 1883, and a post office in the Wallace store began that same year. By 1892 the community had two mills and gins, and Baptist and Christian churches by 1896. The post office closed in 1906. During the 1920s and 1930s, when there was much drilling for oil and gas in the area, Nix had the only dry test well in the county. Its population was put at about twenty-five through the 1940s and at six in 2000.

What the plaque says

Nix Settlers came to this site along the Fort Phantom Hill Road in the 1860s and established the village of Nix. Harvey Wallace opened a general store in 1875, and his wife Elizabeth became the first postmaster. Several springs ran nearby, including Dripping Springs near the Nix Cemetery founded in 1878. By 1885, citizens started a school on the Levi Ringer place. The town boasted a cotton gin, blacksmiths and stores, and citizens built a new schoolhouse in 1920. Rock quarries and cedar yards begun in the 1940s supported the local economy. Nix schools absorbed Bend, Lynch Creek and Ogles before consolidating with Lampasas in 1952. The historic Nix schoolhouse later became a community center. (2007)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Colorado Bend State Park — 8.5 mi
  Old ranch country on the Colorado above Lake Buchanan, where a spring-fed creek drops 70 feet over fern-covered travertine at Gorman Falls.
• Hancock Springs Park — 11 mi
  Lampasas's city park on Sulphur Creek, with a spring-fed swimming pool that holds about 69 degrees all year, the walls of the old bathhouse and a golf course.
• Llano County Courthouse Square — 31 mi
  The 1893 Romanesque courthouse on Llano's square, built after a fire at the height of a boom that was meant to make the granite town an iron city.

More markers nearby

• Pleasant Valley Farmers' Alliance No. 1 — 4.5 mi
• Operation Long Horn — 6.8 mi
• Scholten Railroad — 7.3 mi
• Site of Old Town of Senterfitt — 7.8 mi