History of Hale County, Texas

By: Mary L. Cox, Pub. 1937, reprinted 2025, 244 pages, soft cover, ISBN #978-0-63914-635-2. Hale County was created in 1876 from Bexar County. This book was written by the author to preserve a permanent history of the first 50 years of the county. He used a wide variety of sources from county records, newspapers and even firsthand accounts from some of the pioneers who settled here. All aspects of the early history of the county are discussed such as: organization of the county, first settlers, land & land problems, early landowners, industrial & agriculture development, transportation, Education, Newspapers, legal & judicial history, Banks, Medicine, religion and military history. The last third of the book is devoted to firsthand accounts given verbal to the author. These stories cover early life in the county from grasshopper plagues to Indian encounters to frontier hardships and Buffalo hunting in the 1870's.