All that's left of the Crockett County town of Emerald, the first town founded in Crockett County, is this historic marker at a truck stop and motel along the I-10 and a house in the Fairgrounds park in Ozona Texas.
The marker reads as follows:
EMERALD TOWNSITE
1 Mile North
The first platted town in Crockett County, Emerald was founded in 1889 by Fort Worth & Rio Grande Railway Immigration Agent T. W. Wilkinson. It was to be an agricultural shipping point on a planned extension of the F.W. & R.G. Publicized from Maine to Minnesota for mild climate and fertile land, it acquired a post office on April 8, 1890. Mail came from San Angelo via Knickerbocker (50 miles northeast). Charles Hatch and E. C. Moore were successive postmasters.
In August 1890 the town was in the path of a prairie fire. Although valiant work turned the fire, it was visible for two nights before and two nights after it circled the town. Also in 1890, the county's first school session was held in a tent in Emerald by Mrs. John Noyes. After a frame schoolhouse was built, Mrs. John Ketchpaw taught there. Miss Ada Williams taught the last school term in the spring of 1893.
Confident it would be the county seat, Emerald nevertheless lost in the election of 1891 to the E. M. Powell water well site (now Ozona). Wilkinson protested, to no avail. After the residents began to move to the Powell Well, Emerald Post Office closed on December 7, 1891. The townsite thus became one of the many colonization failures in West Texas. (1978)"
More on Emerald from the Handbook of Texas online: (
visit link)
"EMERALD, TEXAS. Emerald was seven miles east of Ozona and eighty-five miles southeast of San Angelo in eastern Crockett County. The townsite was in a level divide at an elevation of 2,425 feet stretched between the hills of the Edwards Plateau. In 1888 a well-driller successfully tapped the aquifer 540 feet below the surface. T. A. Wilkinson of Tarrant County, an immigration commissioner for the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railway Company, persuaded the company to equip the well with a windmill, a pump, a tank, a two-room schoolhouse, and a store. A townsite one mile square was established with 300 lots, one-fourth to be for business, and named Emerald Grove. Prospective clients came by railroad to San Angelo and were brought by buggy to view the townsite and the level land, available at a dollar an acre.
Settlers came from Tarrant County, Texas, as well as Ohio, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Iowa. Houses and buildings were constructed of lumber brought from San Angelo. The post office opened in 1890. A buckboard provided mail service and transportation from San Angelo.
But in 1890, when Crockett County was organized, Ozona became the county seat. Emerald was bypassed by the railroad, so the whole town moved to Ozona. The post office closed in 1891, and the school closed in 1893. In the fall of 1897 the school building, the last of the Emerald structures, was hauled to Ozona on four wagons. In Crockett County Memorial Park, Ozona, is preserved a home from Emerald.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Crockett County Historical Society, History of Crockett County (San Angelo: Anchor, 1976). Ozona Stockman, July 31, 1941. San Angelo Standard Times, August 29, 1954. Marker Files, Texas Historical Commission, Austin."