Texas is #1--in Ghost Towns

If you want to see a real ghost town this Halloween, you're in luck.

News Radio 1200 WOAI reports that Texas leads the nation in the number of ghost towns.

A web site called Ghost Towns of America has tallied 511 ghost towns in Texas, and, in San Antonio, we're in ghost town central.

The site lists 31 ghost towns in Wilson County alone.  There are 25 ghost towns within 25 miles of New Braunfels.

Like the classic movie 'The Last Picture Show,' many Texas ghost towns were small farming communities which didn't survive either the Dust Bowl of the thirties, or the moving of the railroads in the sixties and seventies, leaving them isolated.

Other Texas ghost towns died because the railroad never came, or the Interstate highways bypassed them.

Some were build around oil fields that eventually played out.  That is the most common in east Texas, where oil was first discovered at Spindletop in 1900.

Many more ghost towns are in the process of being formed.  The departure of young people from rural communities, and a lack of interest by millennials in taking over the family farm and ranch is leading more rural decay.  

So next year, Texas may have even more ghost towns for the list.

IMAGE: GETTY


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