Acme, Texas

Texas

Miners digging gypsum here turned up mastodon fossils.

historicalnaturalroadside

The first thing this town gave up was not gypsum. It was mastodons. A businessman named James Sickler found a large deposit of gypsum out here in 1890. He moved his Kansas operation down, renamed it the Lone Star Cement Plaster Company, and started digging. In the early mining, the crews kept turning up mastodon fossils. The town that grew around the pit was called Acme. Within ten years it had a store, a school, a hotel, and a railroad depot. By the middle of the nineteen forties, about four hundred people lived here, and the plant had become the largest of its kind in the United States. Then it closed in the nineteen sixties. By 1975 fourteen permanent residents were left. Gypsum board is still made here, but nobody lives in Acme anymore. A few of the original buildings are still standing, the railroad depot among them. Most of the rest were bulldozed.

Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.

What this was written from
During the initial mining of gypsum, a number of mastodon fossils were found.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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