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Ragtown
Ragtown was simply a line of shacks, tents and brush arbors that lined the road
from Joliet (FM 671) to Stairtown. The inhabitants were oil field workers and their families, hoping to make a better income in the booming
oil fields near Luling. Ragtown got its name by the way women hung their wash, on bushes, fence lines, and mesquite trees.
Barber's Store, built by John, Fritz and Red Barber, was across the road from
a cafe housed in the home of Mrs. Thompson and stocked canned goods, dried beans and some work clothes. It also had a one-armed
gasoline pump. The store was torn down between 1945 and 1949. There was neither school nor church in Ragtown. Children attended
school at Prairie Lea or at the three-room school house at Joliet. Mineral Springs Baptist Church just northwest of Joliet served
the people of Ragtown. The settlement had nearly disappeared by the mid-1940s. Ragtown's existence satisfied a need and, when that
need no longer existed, neither did Ragtown.
Sources –
1. Caldwell County Kin: The First 150 Years published by the Genealogical and Historical Society of
Caldwell County, November 2000, C-36
2. Plum Creek Almanac, Vol. 21 No. 2, Fall 2003
The Plum Creek Almanac is a project of
The Genealogical and Historical Society of Caldwell County.
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 The Genealogical and Historical Society
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© 1963-2015
Updated
05/15/2015
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