THURBER
Ghost Town — Thurber, Erath County County, Texas
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/thurber-thurber-texas/

Ghost town in Thurber; research record.

Thurber is a ghost town in Thurber, Texas. Ghost town in Thurber; research record. It sits in the archive under ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.

Seventy-five miles west of Fort Worth, in the northwest corner of Erath County, the Texas and Pacific Coal Company built and owned an entire city. Coal mining at Thurber began in December 1886 under brothers William and Harvey Johnson; after a payroll failure and a Knights of Labor strike, they sold in 1888 to investors who formed the Texas and Pacific Coal Company — president Robert Dickey Hunter naming the town for backer H. K. Thurber of New York.

DOCUMENTED HISTORY
Hunter fenced the whole townsite in barbed wire to keep out union organizers, then built a complete community inside it: schools, churches, saloons, stores, an opera house seating 650, a 200-room hotel, an ice and electric plant, and the county's only library — all company property, paid for in company scrip. Miners came from eighteen nations; at peak, around 1918–1920, Thurber held 8,000 to 10,000 people and was the principal bituminous-coal town in Texas. In a documented reversal, the United Mine Workers organized the town without violence in 1903, and Thurber became known as the nation's only fully closed-shop community.
The company opened a brick plant in 1897 on the local shale — 'Thurber brick' paved streets across the state — but the 1917 Ranger oilfield discovery turned locomotives from coal to oil. The last mine closed in 1921; the brick plant ran to 1930, the offices to 1933, the commissary stores to 1935. By the late 1930s Thurber was a ghost town, dismantled by the company that built it. The smokestack still stands, and the W. K. Gordon Center keeps the record.

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· Texas Pacific Coal Company organized in 1888; conversion of railways to oil undermined demand, and the final mine closed in 1921. A ghost town's file is unusual: the emptiness itself is documented, and this entry is part of that record. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. The record appears in 'Thurber — Historical Marker'. The date is part of the site's documented spine.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Thurber — Historical Marker — Texas Historical Commission
  https://atlas.thc.texas.gov/Details/5143005486

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