Argyle, Texas

Texas

An outlaw is rumored to have hidden sixty thousand dollars in stolen gold coins in a cave near here, and he died before he could dig it up.

Around the time the railroad came through, Sam Bass was working this part of Texas. He had taken sixty thousand dollars in gold coins from the Union Pacific Railroad. The story goes that he stashed them in a cave. He died at twenty seven, and the rumor holds that he never came back for the gold. Argyle had barely a hundred and fifty people at the time. It got its name in eighteen eighty one, when the Texas and Pacific laid track through. Some say a railroad surveyor named it after a garden in France. Others point to the Scottish region of Argyll. The town's bank opened in 1906 in a little red brick building with a drugstore out front. Robbers hit it in 1912 and left with seventeen hundred dollars. Nobody ever caught them. The Depression pulled the population down to ninety people by 1950. Locals call the place The Small Apple. It now holds more than five thousand.

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
Also around this time was when Sam Bass, an infamous outlaw who stole $60,000 in gold coins from the Union Pacific Railroad, was rumored to have stashed the gold in a cave. Sam Bass died when he was 27, and it was rumored he never lived to retrieve the gold.

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

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