memory of someone. Moving to the next screen I found a
place for my credit card information and decided I’d gone
far enough down that particular rabbit hole.
The site seems quite excited about their adoption
program, proclaiming its adoptions “great for holidays,
birthdays, graduations, and anniversaries. Choose from
thousands of Texas towns!”
Now I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to adopt
something, before I sign on the dotted line I’ll want to
know where it is. Surely if I dug deeper, Googled more, I
could find out. The Parker County Historical Commission
(PCHC) agrees that info on the town is pretty slim:
“Nothing much is known of this community other than
a Post Office was established here in February of 1878.
It was later discontinued in December of 1879. Allen R.
Chitwood was the postmaster.”
While I can’t tell you how to get there, I can tell
you that “Agricola,” is Latin for “farmer”; and surely the
mysterious community was home to plenty of those.
(Agrícola is also used in Spanish and means “agricul-
tural.”)
Alma is another Parker County town lost to the
past. The first community established in the southeast-
ern portion of the county, Alma was named for little
Alma McConnell, a settler’s daughter who died young.
The community sprang up in the 1870s; apparently the
chosen site of a group of God-fearing Methodists who
bought a structure named Alma Hall and held church.
Like most all early-day Parker County communities,
Alma was essentially a tiny hub where farmers and ranch-
ers could meet for worship and other social interactions.
With the Indians corralled north of the Red River, Alma’s
population turned its focus to coaxing crops from broken-
up fields. But the town’s time on the map (if indeed it
ever was on a map) was short. When in 1879 the Texas
& Pacific Rail Road built through the area north of Alma,
the townspeople pulled up stakes and moved to a new
town established on the nearby rail line — Aledo.
Only a couple of whispers of Alma remain. According
to the PCHC: “The Alma Cemetery, probably associated
with the church and community, was located somewhere
near the intersection of Kelly Road and Hwy 1187 SE of
Aledo. Information on the only known burial in 1893
came from an obituary in the Weekly Republic newspa-
per.”
Settled by southerners who’d wagoned in from
Georgia circa 1850, the Aledo area lay on the edge of
the Grand Prairie west of Fort Worth and 15 miles east of
Weatherford, where undulating swells of native grassland
gave way to the oak-forested hills of the Western Cross
Timbers. Comanches, in particular, enjoyed the lovely
hills and were quite the mounted menace before the U.S
Army starved and beat them, and other Plains tribes into
submission, and Anglo settlement proceeded unhindered.
The resulting community became a coal and water station
for westbound trains and served as a collection point for
buffalo hides. (As part of the Army’s concerted effort to
crush the Plains Indians’ resistance to westward expan-
Continued on page 104
Serving Parker County
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