Barnesville

BARNESVILLE, TEXAS . Barnesville was twelve miles east of Cleburne in eastern Johnson County. The site was settled in 1853 by Moses, Ben, and Andrew Barnes and Jaud and John Dee, and it grew through the 1880s. Moses Barnes built a cotton gin there in 1868; by 1873 a local post office opened. Three years later a townsite was laid out. By 1879 a school had opened, and the community was a stop on the Waxahachie-Cleburne stagecoach road. The Methodist church served as the focal point of the community. In the mid-1880s Barnesville had a population of 150, a cotton gin, two gristmills, a school, and two churches. In 1897 the local school had seventy-nine pupils and two teachers. The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe and the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas railroads bypassed Barnesville in 1881. A single teacher and forty-nine pupils were registered in the local school in 1903, but the community was apparently abandoned thereafter.