Ellison Springs, Texas

01A Cabin by the Springs

James Madison Ellison was twenty-one years old when he staked a homestead against the stone ledge in 1858 and watched water run year-round from a seam in the rock. He married Eliza Jane McGough, ran stock across the open range of southeastern Eastland County, and lived in the same country for more than half a century, dying in 1923. The springs took his name, and so did the community that grew around them.

The 1850s frontier in this part of Texas was a thin line of stock farms hemmed in by hostile country. Eastland County was not formally organized until 1873, and for Ellison's first decade on the land the nearest real authority was whatever company of minutemen the settlers could muster themselves. Reliable water — the kind that did not fail in a drought — was valuable enough that raiders and settlers alike knew exactly where it flowed.

02What Happened at the Ellison Springs Ghost Town in August 1864?

The fight that gave the springs their historical weight came during the Civil War, when most Texas men were away and the frontier was held by locally organized companies under Maj. George Bernard Erath's Second Frontier District. Lt. Singleton Gilbert commanded a company of citizens from Eastland, Callahan, and Shackelford counties, stationed at Nash Springs about three miles northwest of present-day Gorman.

On August 8, 1864, Gilbert sent out an eight-man scouting squad under Cpl. James L. Head. The next morning the squad cut fresh sign between the future sites of Cisco and Eastland. They tracked a raiding party — estimated at thirty to fifty Kiowa and Comanche warriors — south for more than twenty miles before overtaking them near a ranch several miles west of Gorman, close to Ellison Springs. Gilbert rode up with reinforcements, bringing the Texan force to roughly twelve to sixteen men.

According to the Texas State Historical Association, Gilbert ordered a frontal assault. Some of the raiders were on foot, carrying blankets and bridles meant for horses they intended to steal. The charge broke against a "withering fire" that killed Gilbert and two other Texans, wounded three more, and left no reported casualties on the other side. The raiders held the field. It was, the Handbook of Texas notes, "the only unsuccessful Indian engagement of the summer" under Erath's command. A follow-up pursuit by Sgt. A. D. Miller's squad recovered seventy-three horses and killed two raiders, but the Ellison Springs fight itself remained a defeat — the kind of local catastrophe that embeds a place name permanently in county memory.

03Brush Arbors, a Baptist Church, and a Cemetery

After the war the country around the springs slowly filled in. In the 1870s settlers held brush-arbor camp meetings at the water — open-air revivals under a rough framework of cut limbs — and about 1876 a Baptist church was built at the site. A cemetery was begun in the same period, and burials there continued as the surrounding farms persisted into the twentieth century.

Ellison Springs never became a town in the formal sense. According to the Handbook of Texas, the settlement was never incorporated and never held a post office; mail moved through Gorman, which grew into the commercial center for this corner of the county. The springs community remained what it had started as — a loose constellation of stock farms and family homesteads drawing on the same reliable water.

By 1940 the community still held a number of scattered dwellings. By 1968 only the cemetery remained.

04Can You Visit Ellison Springs Today?

The site sits off Farm to Market Road 8, roughly four miles northeast of Gorman, in country that has stayed rural. The Ellison Springs Cemetery is still maintained and is the principal surviving feature. Historical markers in Eastland County, catalogued by Fort Tours and the Texas Historical Commission, commemorate both the settlement and the 1864 fight. Visitors should treat the cemetery as the active burial ground it remains and respect adjacent private property; the springs themselves lie on land that is not open to the public.

Gorman, four miles to the southwest on U.S. 377, is the practical base for a visit — it has gas, food, and access to the regional road network that threads through Eastland County's other fading communities.

05What Remains of Ellison Springs Today

The cemetery remains, and the water still comes out of the stone ledge as it did when James Madison Ellison found it in 1858. The Baptist church is gone. The scattered farmhouses of the 1940s are gone. What survives is a name attached to a burial ground, a set of historical markers, and the documentary record of a single bad morning in August 1864 when a Texas lieutenant ordered a charge he could not carry. For a settlement that never had a post office and never drew a town plat, that is a heavier legacy than most places in Eastland County can claim.