Off The Beaten Path - Nickel, TX & Marysville, TX

[joe817]

NICKEL, TEXAS. Nickel (Nickle) is a rural community on Ranch Road 532 twelve miles northeast of the town of Gonzales in northeastern Gonzales County. It had acquired a post office by 1886, and in 1890 it had triweekly mail delivery, a gristmill, a gin, a general store, a winemaker, and a population of twenty-five. By 1896 mail was delivered daily. The community had been reduced to one business and ten citizens by 1933. By the mid-1940s its population had grown to twenty-five, but after 1948 no further population figures were available. Nickel was still identified on the 1988 county highway map.

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MARYSVILLE, TEXAS. Marysville is on South Fish Creek fifteen miles northwest of Gainesville in Cooke County. It had a post office from 1873 until the mid-1940s. It was named either in honor of Mary (Fitch) Corn, an early settler who moved to the area with her husband, Richard, in 1867, or after Marysville, California, hometown of Mrs. Corn's brother, R. A. Fitch, who moved to this area of Cooke County in 1869. To encourage the establishment of businesses, Richard Corn gave a building lot with each residence lot sold. By 1900 Marysville had 250 residents, a drugstore, a livery stable, a district school, and two each of mercantile stores, cotton gins, blacksmith shops, grocery stores, and churches. The town's population level held steady at 160 residents from 1925 to 1942, when Camp Howze(see below for more info) was built in northwestern Cooke County; the camp removed roughly three-fourths of the area to the north, east, and south of Marysville from the control of the community. With the loss of this many small family farms, Marysville declined. By the late 1980s it had seventy residents and a church and reported no businesses. The best-known resident of Marysville was Daniel Montague, for whom Montague County is named; he is buried in the Marysville Cemetery. By 2000 the population was listed as fifteen.

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CAMP HOWZE. Camp Howze, northwest of Gainesville in central Cooke County, was established by the United States War Department in 1942 as a United States Army infantry-training camp. It was located on a 59,000-acre tract purchased from local landowners beginning in December 1941 and named for Maj. Robert E. Lee Howzeqv, a Medal of Honor recipient who had seen action in the Indian campaigns of the late nineteenth century, the Philippine Insurrection, and World War I. Col. John P. Wheeler activated the base on August 17, 1942, and Maj. Gen. John H. Hilldring was its first commander. With a troop capacity of 39,963 men, the camp served as the training ground for several hundred thousand men between 1942 and 1946. Among the units prepared for action in World War II were the 84th, 86th, and 103d divisions. Camp Howze also held German prisoners of war. The camp provided employment for hundreds of area civilians. In addition, the $20 million spent by the national government on Camp Howze fueled the local economy. In 1946 the camp was declared surplus, disbanded, and leveled.