Historical Marker
Site of Old Communities of Mazeland and Wilmeth
Wilmeth, Runnels County · Texas
Erected 1968
The Handbook of Texas says Mr. and Mrs. Joel Smith kept Wilmeth's first store, and Mrs. Smith became postmistress in 1907. A gin had been running since 1904. Wilmeth had a Church of Christ from 1916 to 1962 and a Methodist church until 1949, and a Baptist church organized at Mazeland in 1906 moved to Wilmeth in 1909. The community had eighty people and three businesses in 1940, the same population in 1960, and twenty-five people in 2000.
What the plaque says
Mazeland (2 1/2 miles southwest) was founded in 1903 when a post office and store opened on A. B. Hutchinson's Ranch. Community was probably named for the corn or "maize" which grows in the area. A one-room school, built 1 mile west (1904), later served both places. By 1906 the settlement had enlarged, so this section was named in honor of Joe Wilmeth, a popular Ballinger banker. Before Wilmeth Post Office was established (1907) citizens would take turns bringing mail from Mazeland in horse-drawn wagons. In 1909, however, both post offices were discontinued. (1968)
Where it stands
31.97741, -100.12012 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Fort Chadbourne — 8.5 miAn 1852 infantry post and Butterfield stage station on a Coke County ranch, its fallen stone buildings rebuilt since 1999 by the descendant of the family that has ranched the land since 1877.
- Z. I. Hale Museum and Rock Hotel — 9.4 miA free museum in a Winters optometrist's office, a 1909 railroad hotel and a 1927 implement dealership, with Rogers Hornsby's hometown memorabilia and a 1912 horse-drawn cotton picker.
- Carnegie Library of Ballinger — 19 miA 1909 limestone library with an Ionic portico in a railroad town the Santa Fe created in 1886, one of the few Texas Carnegie libraries still working in its original building.
- Abilene State Park — 22 miA pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.