POST

A short history of Post

Post is located on the edge of the caprock escarpment of the Llano Estacado, the southeastern edge of the Great Plains. It is at the crossroads of U.S. Routes 84 and 380.

The land had been on John Bunyan Slaughter's U Lazy S Ranch. In 1906 Slaughter sold it to C. W. Post, the breakfast cereal manufacturer, who founded "Post City" as a utopian colonizing venture in 1907. Post devised the community as a model town. He purchased 200,000 acres (810 km2) of ranchland and established the Double U Company to manage the town's construction. The company built trim houses and numerous structures including the Algerita Hotel, a gin, and a textile plant. They planted trees along every street and prohibited alcoholic beverages and brothels. The Double U Company rented and sold farms and houses to settlers. A post office began in a tent during the year of Post City's founding, being established (with the name Post) July 18, 1907, with Frank L. Curtis as the first postmaster. Two years later, the town had a school, a bank, and a newspaper, the Post City Post, the same name as the daily in St. Louis, Missouri. The Garza County paper today is called the Post Dispatch—by coincidence, also the same as the current daily in St. Louis. The Santa Fe Railway reached the town in 1910. The town changed its name to "Post" when it was incorporated in 1914, the year of C. W. Post's death. By then, Post had a population of 1000, 10 retail businesses, a dentist, a physician, a sanitarium, and Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches.

From 1910 to 1913, Post experimented with attempts at rainmaking. Explosives were detonated in the atmosphere at timed intervals. Precipitation records, however, showed that the efforts failed.

The C. W. Post estate pledged $75,000, and the town raised $35,000 in 1916 to bid unsuccessfully to become the site of the proposed West Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College.

Postex Cotton Mills began production in 1913 with 250 employees. When the Post interests sold the business in 1945 to Ely and Walker Dry Goods Company of St. Louis, the plant was producing six million yards of cloth a year and employed 375 workers, who manufactured Postex cotton sheets and Garza pillow cases. Ely and Walker sold Postex in 1955 to Burlington Industries, the world's largest textile manufacturer at that time. By 1973, the company employed 450 persons. The mill has since closed.

Oilfield service companies have been important to the economy, as have farming and ranching. In 1989, Post had two libraries, a hospital, a nursing home, an airport, the Post Dispatch (founded 1926), and 90 businesses. The population reached 3,400 in 1928, declined to 2,000 in 1940, but increased to 3,100 during the 1950s. With the development of the local oil industry, the town's population attained its highest level of 4,800 in 1964. The 1980 census showed a population of 3,864, but by 1988 the Texas Almanac reported 4,162. In 1990, the population was 3,768.

Many ranchers and civic boosters live in Garza County, among them Giles McCrary, a former mayor, who until his death in 2011 operated the OS Museum, a hybrid of exhibits from both the American West and Asia, which are changed three times per year. Two baseball fields in Post are named for former resident Norm Cash.

Adapted (trimmed) from the Wikipedia article Post, Texas, revision 1378146741 by its contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.