Towash

Towash changed hands more than once. The Handbook of Texas says a band of Ioni, a name it also lists for the Hainai of the Hasinai Caddo confederacy, settled this Brazos bank in 1835, and traders called the village for its leader. Settlers pushed them upriver in 1850. The Dyer brothers got state permission in 1854 for a stone dam and gristmill and added wool carding in 1860, drawing women from up to 100 miles for Confederate cloth. Floods broke the dam in 1863 and 1908. In 1905 the Black school had fifty pupils, the white school sixty-five.

What the plaque says

Towash Named for Hainai Indian chief. One of first Hill County settlements. Grist mill and carding machine built, 1850, by S. C. Dyer established Towash as a trade center. By 1879 had 15 business enterprises. Declined after railroad bypass. Ruins inundated by Lake Whitney. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hill County Courthouse — 15 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Bosque Museum — 16 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Meridian State Park — 19 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 25 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.

More markers nearby

• Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church — 3.0 mi
• Whitney — 3.6 mi
• Whitney Memorial Park — 3.6 mi
• Boesch House — 3.7 mi