Thurber: Ten Thousand People, Then Nobody

In eighteen eighty-six, brothers William and Harvey Johnson opened a coal mine in the Cross Timbers of Erath County. After Harvey died and William sold out, a Scottish cattleman named Robert D. Hunter saw the potential to sell coal to steam-powered railroads and organized the Texas and Pacific Coal Company. Thurber became a fully enclosed company town where the corporation owned every house, saloon, church, school, and store.

At its peak Thurber claimed ten thousand residents, making it the largest town between Fort Worth and El Paso. The end came swiftly when railroads converted from coal to oil after nineteen seventeen. The last load of coal was pulled from the Thurber mines in nineteen twenty-six, and by the late nineteen thirties the company had dismantled or sold off every building. Today a single smokestack and a small museum are all that mark the spot where ten thousand lives once hummed. Thurber is one of the most complete ghost towns in Texas.