Belcherville, Texas

In eighteen eighty-seven, the Belcher family , John and Alex, ranchers who had run cattle on this stretch of Montague County since before the Civil War , heard that a railroad was coming and decided to turn their ranch headquarters into a town. They bought twenty-seven thousand acres, platted streets, and waited. The Gainesville, Henrietta and Western Railway arrived as promised, and Belcherville boomed: a post office, more than twenty businesses, a cotton and cattle shipping point for the surrounding range. It incorporated in eighteen ninety-three.

Then fires after the First World War and the pull of nearby Nocona took the businesses, and the people followed. Towns in North Texas lived and died by which way the rails ran. Belcherville today is all but a ghost town, home to a few dozen people, one of hundreds of Texas communities that rose and fell with the railroad era and never found a second act.