Mexia, TX History Finds

The Mexia Oil Boom and its influx of capital brought a myriad of improvements to the town, very quickly. It brought a lot of other stuff that wasn't so pleasant, to be sure, but that's not the subject of this post. One of the primary issues of the day was the condition of the roads.  The roads even in dry conditions were rough going for those tiny little tires on the 1920s automobiles.  But when it would rain heavily, everything was bogged down with mud, to the point of paralysis. A few photos shared on  Old Time Mexia Photographs  of the problem illustrates it far better than words: The prior six months, the Mexia papers carried progress of the City's bond issue to begin paving the streets of Mexia. They still hadn't started when Pershing Way was dedicated January 5, 1922 but it was in the works. Pershing Way was the concrete road from Mexia to the clubhouse, which Col. Humphreys paid for and then donated to the city....

Dad mentioned a photo he'd discussed with other long-time Mexia residents which shows a fountain in the center of an intersection of the town, probably turn of the century.  This is at the intersection of Commerce and Sherman, facing west toward the railroad a closer view of the fountain appears in another photograph, looking the opposite direction with the railroad behind us this 1885 map shows the Opera House in its position on Commerce Street, so it had been there for decades before the explosion in 1916 which didn't really narrow down the date of the fountain at all. I was intrigued enough to go digging around to find out its history and, it turns out, its link with another turn of the century photograph in the same Facebook group, Old Time Mexia Photographs The photo below is captioned incorrectly. The year is not 1905, it's 1906. It was taken by the visiting photographer from the Dallas News . It is this 1906 celebra...