Donahoe

DONAHOE, TEXAS . Donahoe was on Donahoe Creek sixteen miles southeast of Belton in the southeastern corner of Bell County. It was named for the creek, which in turn was named for a merchant who explored the area as part of the Texan Santa Fe expedition of 1841. Settlers acquired land along the creek in the late 1840s. Sometime after his arrival in 1854 Samuel Gibbs Leatherman opened the first general store there, and the 1860 census listed Howel Bass as the Donahoe blacksmith. Donahoe had a post office from 1888 to 1903. In 1896 it had a general store, the Science Hill School, a blacksmith shop, and a population of sixty. The Science Hill School had seventy-nine pupils and one teacher in 1903. A community called Dice, presumably named for John Dice, who owned a general store on the site in the mid-1800s, had a church, a school, and scattered dwellings on the same site in 1948. A Baptist church held services there into the 1950s, when it closed. On the 1963 topographical map the site is once again identified as Donahoe and shown to have two dwellings. By the late 1970s Donahoe had been abandoned, and only the cemetery remained. A Texas Historical Commission marker was dedicated at the site in 1979.