CRANES MILL, TEXAS. Cranes Mill, a stock-raising community seventeen miles northwest of New Braunfels in central Comal County, was named for J. B. Crain, who built a mill at the Gum Spring crossing on the Guadalupe River in the early 1850s. The spelling became Crane when a post office was established there before the Civil War. Postal service to Cranes Mill may have been interrupted just after the war, but by 1872 August Engel, a minister, teacher, and storeowner, ran the community's post office in his store. His son succeeded him and was postmaster there until the rural mail route from Fischer's Store was established. The Cranes Mill community recorded a population of twenty-five until the 1940s. The Cranes Mill school was eventually consolidated with a nearby school district. The remains of the town disappeared under Canyon Lake when it began filling in the 1960s, but in the 1980s a lakeside park still carried the name Cranes Mill.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Oscar Haas, History of New Braunfels and Comal County, Texas, 1844-1946 (Austin: Steck, 1968).
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