It was a beautiful day. My husband and I wandered around on a few roads east of Goldthwaite, just to see what we could see. We stopped at the old schoolhouse that was later used as a community center in what was once the town of Ridge, Texas. Nothing much is left of the town, but the place had a good feel to me, like it holds some stories. Sure enough, it does.

Just a few miles from the Ridge school lies Hanna Valley, one of the earliest and most interesting settlements in what was part of Brown County, now part of Mills County. “Hanna Valley, on the Colorado River, was first claimed for settlement by Jesse P. Hanna, in October, 1856. He moved his family, including five sons, into the attractive valley, built his home and established civilization in that part of what was then Brown County, only a few months after the first settlers built their homes near Pecan Bayou in the vicinity of what is now Brownwood.” James White tells in his book, The Promised Land.

The Hanna home was built in the fall of 1856 by Jesse P. Hanna and his sons. It was an 18-foot square structure, built of elm logs harvested along the river bottom. According to White, “Bullet holes and arrow marks on the old Hanna home showed the reality of the conflict in which early settlers were engaged in this section. In a log near the door there is a bullet said to have been fired by a Comanche Indian at one of the women of the family. The story is that in the daytime the Indian had slipped into the barnyard and stolen and mounted a horse which he was riding away when one of the women saw him and called to him to stop. Instead of stopping, the Indian fired at her, barely missing her as she reached for a shotgun.”

There is no marker to show where the Hanna house might have been. It’s likely, given the propensity for the occasional biblically proportioned flood along the Colorado, that nothing remains. The first church in Brown County was a Methodist church organized at Hanna Valley in 1863. There was a store at the town in 1871, reputedly run by a Jones and a Watkins. “Hanna Valley is in an attractive locality and is now the home of many old settlers. Its first post office was established in 1875, and Jim Hanna, a son of Jesse P. Hanna, was the first postmaster. The post office was discontinued after a few years and when reestablished was named Regency, because in the meantime another post office named Hanna Valley had been established,” White wrote.

The town of Ridge, a few miles northeast of Regency, was settled in the early 1890s. It’s named after W.D. Aldridge, who ran a store and the post office there. The schoolhouse pictured was built in 1931. Not much is written about Ridge, as the US Government purchased the surrounding land during World War II, and the town, along with Hanna Valley / Regency, basically died out as a result.

The country down that way is still very brushy, mostly ranch land with a few small clusters of homes here and there. Despite all the coming and going of early settlers, it’s still pretty rough and wild looking in places. No doubt, the river took back a great portion of what once was there, as its twists and turns have surely formed and reformed the surrounding land for thousands of years. The old clapboard schoolhouse, standing alone along the side of the road, seems emblematic of the whole process, a sort of outpost overseeing what is no more. I think we need to spend some more time out there and have a closer look around. Like I said, the area has that storied feel to it. I bet there are more out there.

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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com