considered to be Texas' premier ghost
town. Here's why: barely 100 years ago,
Thurber used to have 9,000 residents.
Today, it's merely a pit stop on Interstate 20.
Thurber began as a company-owned town.
The Texas and Pacific railroad owned the
mineral rights to the vast (and only)
bituminous coal deposits in Texas, and
lured thousands of skilled coal miners from
the north and from Europe to get it out.
Setting up a small settlement ringed by
tree-covered hilltops, Thurber, which was
named after one of the majority
shareholders in the company, quickly grew
as businesses set up shop. One of the
more prosperous secondary operations in
Thurber was its brick works. Today, crazy
people like me go all aflutter upon finding
Thurber bricks embedded in buildings and
sidewalks.
Italians, Polish, Germans, and Irish
immigrants soon called Thurber home.
Being a company-owned town, the workers
found that they did not have much say in the
way they were (mis)treated, and made their
discontent known through several strikes.
From 1900 to ca. 1925, America had
experienced many mining strikes, some
ending violently such as the one in Ludlow,
Colorado, in 1914. The miners in Thurber
became the first and only Texas miners to
unionize, and discovered Texas to be an
anti-union state.
As coal-burning locomotives gave way to
diesel engines, and workers remained
unsettled, the Texas and Pacific Railroad
Company closed shop. Though vast
amounts of coal still lay undisturbed around
Thurber, the discovery of oil not far away in
Ranger, Cisco, Mingus, and Gordon spelled
doom for the coal works. The coal miners
left, too, moving to more friendly
environments. The Thurber brick works
quickly succumbed as well, and Texas and
Pacific wasted no time in dismantling most
of the town and selling it for scraps.
Today, Thurber boasts some scenic ruins,
a very interesting, international graveyard,
two restaurants (one inside the old ice
house), and an Industrial Museum. And
that's about it. So the next time you find
yourself just east of Abilene, or west of Fort
Worth, on windy Interstate 20, stop by in
Thurber and visit with its ghosts.
