Vasco

Vasco is on Farm Road 895 just below Dry Creek and three miles northeast of Charleston in eastern Delta County. The area was inhabited by 1903, when Mrs. O. C. Anderson opened a post office at the site. The community was named Vasco when the post office department altered Velasco, the requested name, because there was already a Velasco in Texas. In 1905 a school, called Long Branch, was established to serve local children; that year it had sixty-six students and one teacher. The town was bypassed by the railroads and never prospered. Its post office closed in 1907, but the school adopted the name Vasco in 1921. The Vasco Baptist Church had been organized by 1931, when the congregation sent a representative to a meeting of the Delta County Baptist Association. The 1936 county highway map showed the community as a business, a church, and a cluster of dwellings at the junction of several dirt roads between Dry Creek and Lake Creek; at that time Vasco reported a population of twenty-five. In 1939 the school merged with Charleston, Long Ridge, and Cleveland to form the East Delta school district. Forty people lived in Vasco in 1952. By 1963 the school had closed, leaving three businesses and a few scattered farms on Farm Road 895 and a dirt road. By 1970 local students attended classes within the Cooper Independent School District. Vasco reported a population of twenty in 1990. The population remained the same in 2000.