About five miles northeast of Lago Vista, and three north of Jonestown, you’ll find remnants of an interesting Hill Country ghost town. Nameless, Texas, never reached even 100 residents, and its overall history was fairly ordinary, but at the heart of its history is one of the most frustrating examples of governmental bureaucracy you’ll find anywhere.
To get started, we need to time-travel back to 1869. At that time, traveling in north Travis County was a challenge; the terrain was hilly, rough and bumpy on a good day, and made travel between towns something the average person would put off until absolutely necessary. Nonetheless, a handful of settlers put down roots here, and with a burst of civic pride named their new community Fairview.
All was well in Fairview until its citizens decided to establish a post office. Mail was of critical importance to Americans of that time, when there was no other means of getting information, whether it be news of national events or the arrival of your sister’s baby in Tennessee. The mail was a critical life link to the rest of the world, and the folks of Fairview wanted a post office close by so they didn’t have to make a teeth-rattling trip in a wagon over jagged limestone to get their mail.
No big deal, they thought; we’ll petition the US Postal Service for our own post office, as countless towns had successfully done over the previous years. When you had a post office, you were “official” in the eyes of the federal government; you were somebody! At some point in the mid-1870s, they sent their request to Washington for their own post office: Fairview, Texas.
No can do, they were told. In order to get a post office with a place name, said name could not be already taken in that state or territory. There was already a Fairview, Texas with a post office (and still is; it’s a northwestern suburb of Dallas). Well, shoot, the Fairview citizens thought; we’ll try again.
How about Cross Creek? Nope, came the reply; there’s already one in Texas (gone now, but it was near modern-day Fulshear, west of Houston). So the folks of Fairview and/or Cross Creek had to try yet again.
Over the next couple of years, they would petition the Postal Service again and again; a total of six town names were rejected. In frustration, the town shot off an angry missive to the folks in Washington: “Let the post office be Nameless and be damned!”
THAT name was accepted. The US Postal Service officially registered the town of Nameless, Texas, in 1880.Whatever success the locals could draw from this was short-lived, as the Nameless post office shut its doors in 1890, and mail service moved to Leander, a couple miles to the east.
All that’s left of little Nameless is a graveyard and the fully-renovated Nameless Schoolhouse, which served until 1945. It sits proudly on Nameless Road west of Leander, and its steps used to serve the patrons of the infamous post office. The structure is maintained by the Friends of Nameless School, who can be found on Facebook at the ID FriendsofNamelessSchool.
The majority of Hill Country towns had less trouble getting their names and post offices squared away. We invite you to peruse a recap of the histories of over 30 towns in the region, and a full listing of businesses, events, and attractions, in the Texas Hill Country Travel App!
Have any of you folks been to Nameless, or do you have stories of other ghost towns in the Hill Country? We’d love to have you share them here!