Excerpt from The History and Geography of Texas: As Told in County Names Several county names stand out on the map of Texas that were hoary with age a century and a half before the word Texas began to develop into geographical significance. These names were probably here before Columbus discovered Amer ica. At any rate Coronado and the followers of De Soto found them here with a well established local identity within less than fifty years after that event. The history of the State begins with the year 1528, during that epoch-making period when Henry VIII was laying his plans for a divorce from Catherine; when Luther was trans lating the Bible into German; several years before Calvin wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and before Michael An gelo painted his masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. Queen Elizabeth had not been born, and a quarter of a cen tury had to come and go before Shakespeare first saw the light. Comparing it with some of the older dates in American his tory it was seventy-nine years before the first settlement at Jamestown, ninety-two years before the May ower landed at Plymouth Rock, and more than two hundred years before George Washington was born. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

First published in book form in 1915 under the title 'The history and geography of Texas as told in county names. New material copyrighted 2012.

Several county names stand out on the map of Texas that were hoary with age a century and a half before the word "Texas" began to develop into geographical significance. These names were probably here before Columbus discovered America. At any rate Coronado and the followers of De Soto found them here with a well established local identity within less than fifty years after that event.

From Notrees to Pine Island, from Scotland to Moscow, from Dickens to Tennyson, from Spur to Lariat, from Buck Naked to Bald Prairie—Texans are unsurpassed for the imaginative names they give their towns and cities. Fred Tarpley has chosen 1001 of the most unusual and interesting of the 75,000 place names that dot the Texas map. The names of Texas communities and places can be traced to a number of basic sources, including people; landscapes; the Bible; literature and mythology; misunderstandings and errors; backward spellings and blends; and anecdotes and events. Each entry in 1001 Texas Place Names gives the official spelling of the name, phonetic pronunciation where necessary, dates of post office operation, and a short narrative about the origin of the name and the history of the place. Each of Texas's 254 counties is represented by at least two entries.

Includes Part 1, Number 2: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals