BRITE, TEXAS. Brite is 3½ miles north of Capote Peak and three miles east of the Sierra Vieja Mountains in the highlands of northwestern Presidio County. It grew up around the store on the ranch of Lucas Charles Briteqv and was sometimes called Brite's Store. The settlement established a school before 1911, when Brite's Ranch Precinct No. 7 reported seventy-eight students and a population of 468 in the county scholastic census. By 1914 it was selected as a county voting precinct. The store housed a post office from 1916 until 1926. Mexican bandits robbed the store twice. The first attack, known as the Brite Ranch Raid, occurred on Christmas Day, 1917, when about forty-five raiders sacked the store and killed postman Mickey Welch and two passengers on his mail stage. On March 3, 1933, Mexican bandits looted the store. In 1933 Brite listed a population of ten, and as late as 1939 the Brite school was maintained as part of the Marfa district. After World War II the population in Brite grew to twenty-five. In 1966 it was twenty-one, and the store was closed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cecilia Thompson, History of Marfa and Presidio County, 1535–1946 (2 vols., Austin: Nortex, 1985). Ronnie C. Tyler, The Big Bend (Washington: National Park Service, 1975).
