Thurber

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.