History of Dillon, Texas (ghost town)

Dillon’s entry in the Handbook of Texas contains only the most basic facts. Less than 40 words. “Settled around 1900” a post office was “secured” in 1903 and discontinued three years later. By the 1930s it was gone from maps. 

In the 1890s Frank Dillon, an emigrant from Indiana, worked hard to found a town on his property. He built a blacksmith shop, a store, and a kiln. A grassy mound still exists where the kiln once stood. With his neighbor, O. P. Wardrup, as a partner, Dillon operated a cotton gin.

For five or six years at the beginning of the twentieth century Dillon operated a post office out of his store. A courier in a horse-drawn buggy brought the mail from the Saltillo depot five miles to the north. As one might expect, the post office was named Dillon. As automobiles became more and more common, Dillon talked of converting his blacksmith shop to a garage. He sent one of his sons to a school in Dallas for training in auto mechanics.

Primarily because neither the St. Louis Southwestern nor the Louisiana and Arkansas railroads came near the site of the store and shop, Dillon’s efforts to build a town failed. Locust trees and Bermuda grass now grow over the site where Dillon’s house, store, blacksmith shop, cotton gin, and kiln once stood.

Dillon shares a name with the fictionalized town in the television program Friday Night Lights. 

By J.E. Jennings and Robert Towser of Texas Escapes