The Denton County towns that fell off the map

Two Denton County communities that once had post offices, schools and stores now survive mainly as names on a road sign and a handful of markers. Stony, in the far west of the county, and Waketon, twelve miles south of Denton, both appear in the Handbook of Texas, and neither appears on a modern highway map as a town. Their histories show the same slow sequence: a settlement gathers around a few families, a post office and a school arrive, a railroad town nearby pulls the traffic away, and the population drifts down until only the buildings are left.

What Stony looked like at its peak

Stony sits on Farm Road 2622, two miles east of the Wise county line and ten miles west of Denton, in far west Denton County. Settlers arrived in the late 1850s, and the name came from the stony ground they found there. The community never grew large: the Handbook of Texas records that its population never exceeded fifty, which it attributes to the rise of Justin, eight miles southwest, as a shipping point for area farmers. Stony had no such advantage, and the numbers reflect it.

Why did Stony's population numbers move so oddly?

The published figures for Stony do not describe a straight decline. In 1884 the community had a mill, a gin, four churches, two schools, and an estimated population of 130. By 1890 the population had dropped to fifty. In 1914 it was back up to 100 residents, with a doctor, a blacksmith, and at least two stores. From 1933 to 2000 the estimate settles at twenty-five. Read those dates together and you see a place that held on longer than the word "vanished" suggests. A gin and a mill meant local cotton was processed locally. Four churches and two schools meant families were staying, not passing through. The 1914 figure, with a doctor and a blacksmith, describes a working rural community, not a ruin. Then the twentieth century did to Stony what it did to hundreds of places across the Blackland Prairie: the automobile, the consolidated school and the improved farm-to-market road let people drive to Denton or to Justin for what they used to buy at home.

What survives at Stony today

The Handbook of Texas reports that in 2004 a school building dating back to 1884 still stood in the community, and that a restored 1839 log cabin nearby was open to the public as a local museum. Those two structures are worth pausing over. The school is the kind of building that once anchored a rural district, and the log cabin predates the settlement of Stony itself by roughly twenty years, which places it among the earliest surviving structures in that part of the county. A reader driving Farm Road 2622 today passes a community that the record describes as still holding these landmarks, even as the town around them has shrunk to a stable handful of residents.

The full published entry on Stony in the Handbook of Texas carries the same dates and a citation for anyone tracing the place further.

The settlement that Waketon came out of

Waketon stood twelve miles south of Denton and began as part of the Chinn's Chapel settlement. That settlement was established in 1853 by Elisha Chinn, in an area that had supported settlers since 1845. It was not one town but three small communities: Shiloh, Bartonville, and Waketon. The name Waketon honored Simpson Wakefield, a farmer from Tennessee. When you find a deed or a cemetery list that names Waketon, Bartonville or Shiloh, you are looking at branches of the same neighborhood.

How long did Waketon last?

The community existed for just under 100 years. By the late 1940s Waketon's twenty residents could no longer support the town, and by 1950 it had ceased to exist. That is a compressed account, and it is worth taking slowly. Twenty residents is not enough to keep a store, a school or a post office open, and once those go the remaining families have no reason to stay within walking distance of a center that no longer functions. The Handbook of Texas does not say what the last building standing was, or what became of the church and school grounds. It gives the founding, the names, the three settlements, and the end. For Waketon, that is the shape of the record.

What the two histories have in common

Set the two side by side and the mechanics line up. Both communities grew out of families who arrived before there was much of a county around them. Both got a name from the land or from a settler. Both built the institutions that made a rural neighborhood work: a school, a church or four, a store, a gin or a mill. Both depended on being the nearest place to buy and sell. And both lost that function to a larger town with better connections, Justin for Stony, and for Waketon the pull of Denton and the growing communities around it.

Where do you look for a town that is not there?

If your family came from Stony or Waketon, the paper trail usually runs through the same records that serve the rest of the county. Census returns place a household in a district, and district names change as populations shift. Cemetery lists show who stayed. Deeds and probate records show land changing hands, sometimes long after the post office closed. Local newspapers carried the school notices, the church meetings and the store advertisements that marked a community's life. What you will not find is a plat of a town that no longer exists, because in most cases there never was one. These were settlements, not incorporated places, which is part of why they could disappear without a courthouse record of the disappearance.

What the record leaves open

The Handbook of Texas entry for Waketon does not say when the school closed, when the last store shut, or where the buildings stood. The entry for Stony notes the 1884 school building and the restored 1839 cabin as of 2004, and anyone relying on that report should treat the date as the date it was written. Whether the cabin is still open, and what condition the school building is in now, is a question the published page cannot answer. For Stony and Waketon alike, the next step is the ground itself: the roads, the cemeteries, and the markers that local groups keep.

The section is anchored by the shape of the county, and the community removed inside the town itself is followed under Quakertown inside the Denton city limits.

About the Handbook of Texas entries

The Handbook of Texas Online is a publication of the Texas State Historical Association. Its community entries record the settlement, naming, institutions and population estimates of Texas towns, and each entry carries a citation and a publication date. The Stony entry is written by David Minor and the Waketon entry is written by David Minor. Both are accessible through the TSHA website.

The Blackland Chronology editorial team
contact@dentoncountyhistoricalmuseum.com