Goldthwaite Gold

Before we venture out on road trips I try to do at least a bit of research

Abandoned house and well

about where we’re going beyond looking for places to eat and to stay. My task was made difficult because I didn’t pay attention to how the name of the town is spelled. That middle ‘th’ gave me all sorts of problems, but I was sure that there had to be something written about Goldthwaite, so I persevered. Eventually I got the spelling right and found a goodly amount of history concerning the seat of Mills County.





Before Anglos came to this part of Texas, the region was a hunting ground for Apaches and Comanches; they fought over it until the middle 1800s when they were rounded up and sent to reservations. The originals settlers, like the Indians before them, lived off what they could hunt.

Mills County Courthouse

Farming didn’t really start until the settlers of German ancestry arrived. Mills County, named for John T. Mills, a justice of the Supreme Court of the former Republic of Texas, is situated partly in the Grand Prairie region and partly in the western Cross Timbers region of Texas, so the land supports both hunting and farming/ranching. The town of Goldthwaite began as a part of Brown County which lies to the northwest. Not surprisingly, Goldthwaite was named after a railroad official, Joe C. Goldthwaite, who worked for the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway; he was the person who auctioned off the town lots. After Mills County was organized, several landowners donated property with the assurance that Goldthwaite would become the county seat. The first post office opened in 1886, and depending on who you read either this was followed two years later by the first county jail, and two years after that the courthouse was completed, or the courthouse was built in 1887, followed by the jail the next year. In any case, in 1889, Goldthwaite was chosen county seat. Oscar Ruffini designed the first courthouse which was wood. It was in use from from 1890 through 1912, when it was destroyed by fire. For construction of the next courthouse, the county hired architect Henry T. Phelps. He chose the Classical Revival style for the structure, using a rectangular form, a central, ornamental pediment and fluted, engaged columns. The courthouse is shaded by several large trees and, as we saw in Comanche, around the courthouse are historic markers. One has to do with the Old Town Well: three men were digging the well when one was overcome and died from most likely a build-up of carbon dioxide gas; another was overcome by the gas, but was rescued by Deed H. Mayer who also reclaimed the dead man’s body.

Goldthwaite was scheduled to be the division point of the Santa Fe Railroad which had built shops and a roundhouse switch on the line. However, labor problems caused the shops to be relocated, shutting

County jail

down the railroad business in this little town. However, Goldthwaite continued to progress, probably because of the farming and ranching that were successful in the county. By 1898, the town had three churches, a bank, several hotels and boardinghouses, two cotton gins, two gristmills, both public and private schools, businesses, and two weekly newspapers. In 1915 the first school library was established and in that same year work began on a new water source, Lake Merritt. Goldthwaite churned right along until 1931 when it was hit with not only a drought but the Great Depression. After these, Goldthwaite recovered only modestly, until agricultural diversification brought renewed success. Since one of the things I like to do in my spare time is knit, I was interested to learn that one of the agricultural products of Goldthwaite is mohair; other products include wool, fruits, cattle, turkeys, and pecans. We had noticed several herds of goats, but they’d been sheared so we didn’t identify them as producing mohair.

One of my bits of research said that there was an interesting bridge that crossed the Colorado River in downtown Goldthwaite. This is not true.

Regency Suspension Bridge

The very nice lady at the Chamber of Commerce gave us a county map and showed us how to get to the Regency Suspension Bridge. It’s actually a few miles out of town and Dave declared that it was a shortcut to San Saba. Although you can get to San Saba by using the bridge, it is not a short cut! The bridge is reached by a gravel road that comes from the now extinct town of Regency. The ranchers and farmers used this bridge, built in 1903, to get their produce to market, but in 1924 it collapsed, killing a person, a horse and some cattle. The replacement bridge was washed away in the 1936 flood; however in 1939 the current bridge was constructed using hand labor. I would be surprised if anything short of a tornado or earthquake could demolish this iteration; we drove across it and it hardly moved. This is one of the last suspension bridges in Texas and it is in a very pretty setting. It’s worth a trip just to see the bridge.

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