Williams Ranch in Mills County; Tales from the Grave

submitted by Patsy Johson

Written by Mike Cox and published in the Brownwood Bulletin.
Note: Williams Ranch was in Brown Co. at the time of its settlement.

The Mills County town of Williams Ranch is dead and so is anyone whoever lived there.

Once a thriving Central Texas community near a well-traveled old military road, all that remains is its cemetery.

Prominent among the graves is the resting place of the man who gave the place its name, John Williams, born, February 6, 1804 in North Carolina and settled in what is now Mills County in 1855. His cattle ranch, the genesis of the community, was D.K. Conner, who died on November 6, 1864. All that was mortal of Williams came to the cemetery in 1871, but the community's namesake had fathered five sons.

Within a decade, Williams Ranch had stores, a hotel, a mill, a blacksmith shop and several saloons. Henry Ford and J.M. Parks bought property including the village in 1875 and platted a town site they proposed to call "Parksford" in their honor. But the name that stuck was Williams Ranch.

The community got a post office in 1877 when the area was still part of Brown County. The northwest-bound stagecoach of Austin stopped there, and it was a roundup point for cattle drives. The town had the county's first public school, newspaper, telegraph connection, and hotel.

The tombstones in this cemetery four miles southeast of Mullin tell the history of the area as well as any book. At least two persons buried there were killed by Indians, including John Morris, who also served in the 27th Brigade, Texas Militia during the Civil War. He survived that bloody conflict, but died at the hands of Indians in 1868. In fighting for the South, Morris also fought to preserve slavery. One of those slaves was a man named Albert. Before freedom for blacks came to Texas in 1863, he had belonged to Welcome Chandler. No one ever knew when Albert was born, but he died in 1886, killed by a horse. Death being the ultimate equalizer, he was buried in the Williams Ranch Cemetery, not far from Morris' grave.

After the Civil War, it took a while for Texas blood to cool. That cooling came too late for N.A. Anthony, another Williams Ranch Cemetery resident. Beneath his worn limestone tombstone is a small piece of gray granite noting curtly: "Killed by Mob".

What claimed Allie E. Jackson noted on her tombstone, where her husband's name is chiseled in far larger type. Though she died in an age when gender equality was not an issue open for discussion, her survivors took care to have carved onto her gravestone that she had been "a kind and affectionate wife, fond mother and a friend to all."

She and the other residents of Williams Ranch and their descendants died of varying causes, from Indian arrows to illness and old age. The town itself succumbed to poor circulation of dollars to its once-flourishing business, a malady that began when the railroad bypassed it in 1885.

By February 8, 1892 things had slowed in Williams Ranch to the point that the post office closed. The Williams Ranch school, however, survived until consolidation with two other schools in 1920.

What happened to Williams Ranch was not all that different from the truism noted on the tombstone of another of its former residents: "Gone like a flower in the blooming June/Fading in a day."