Thurber, Texas

01The Johnson Brothers and the Birth of a Coal Town

Mining began at Thurber in December 1886, when brothers William Whipple Johnson and Harvey Johnson opened the first commercial coal shafts in the area. Their operation was small and undercapitalized, and in the fall of 1888 the Johnsons sold out to a group of New York investors organized as the Texas and Pacific Coal Company. The new president, Colonel Robert Dickie Hunter, gave the town its name in honor of H. K. Thurber, one of the company's principal backers. Hunter moved quickly to build a fully enclosed company town around the mines: schools, churches, a 200-room hotel, a library, a 650-seat opera house, saloons, and a commissary that issued scrip redeemable only at company stores, discounted twenty percent if used between monthly paydays.

By the late 1890s the company was employing miners recruited from Italy, Poland, Britain, Ireland, Mexico, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Sweden, and Russia, along with African American workers brought in from Indiana. Many spoke little English. They lived in segregated neighborhoods on hills named for the nationality that dominated them — New York Hill, Polander Hill, Italian Hill — and worshipped at a Catholic parish, St. Barbara's, that still stands today.

02What Happened to Thurber's Famous Closed Shop?

For its first fifteen years Thurber was aggressively anti-union. That changed in September 1903, when organizers for the United Mine Workers of America slipped into the town and, in a matter of weeks, inducted more than 1,600 miners into a new local. William Knox Gordon, who had taken over as manager of the Texas and Pacific properties in 1899, recognized that the old policy of suppression was finished. On September 27, 1903, the company signed an agreement with the UMWA that made Thurber, according to labor historians, the only 100 percent closed-shop city in the nation. Every worker in town — miner, brickmaker, clerk — was required to hold a union card.

The arrangement held for nearly twenty years. A brick plant, opened in 1897 using clay from company property, diversified the economy; Thurber paving bricks went into the streets of Fort Worth, Dallas, Galveston, and even into Camp Bowie during the First World War. At its 1918–1920 peak the town claimed somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 residents, briefly making it the most populous settlement between Fort Worth and El Paso.

03Oil, Strikes, and a Company That Walked Away

Thurber's collapse was sudden and structural. Through the 1910s American railroads converted their locomotives from coal to fuel oil, and the Texas and Pacific Coal Company — ironically enriched by its own 1917 oil strike at nearby Ranger — had less and less reason to keep digging. Demand fell, prices fell, and in 1921 the UMWA called a national strike. The Thurber miners walked out. The company refused to reopen the mines under the old contract, and within a few years the shafts were permanently closed. Families packed up, boarded trains, and left. The brick plant hung on until 1930. The Thurber post office, which had served the town through its entire industrial life, closed for good on October 28, 1936. The Texas and Pacific Coal Company reorganized as the Texas Pacific Oil Company and moved on.

04Can You Visit Thurber Today?

Yes — and it rewards a detour off I-20. The most visible landmark is the tall brick smokestack from the generating plant, preserved as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark and visible for miles. A short walk away stands the restored fire station, a surviving miner's cottage, and St. Barbara's Catholic Church. The Thurber Cemetery, set back from the highway, holds more than a thousand graves, many marked in Italian and Polish. The W. K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas, operated by Tarleton State University, serves as the site's interpretive museum and archives, with exhibits on mining technology, immigrant labor, and the 1903 unionization. The New York Hill Restaurant, housed in a building evoking the old company hotel, sits just above the interstate.

05What Remains of Thurber Today

What remains of Thurber is a carefully curated fragment. The smokestack, the church, the cemetery, the fire station, and the Gordon Center together preserve perhaps two percent of what the town once was; the rest — the opera house, the 200-room Knox Hotel, the rows of miners' cottages, the saloons, the union hall — is gone, dismantled or burned after the company pulled out. Erath County has designated portions of the site as historically significant, and the smokestack is a listed landmark. For a town that once held ten thousand people speaking a dozen languages and working the deepest coal shafts in Texas, the surviving silhouette is small. But it is honest: a smokestack without a factory, a cemetery without a town, and a museum that still tells the story of the first union city in America.