GARNER, TEXAS. Garner is on Farm Road 113 fourteen miles northwest of Weatherford in west central Parker County. The first settlers arrived in the area in the mid-1850s and settled on the John C. Trappe survey. The twenty or so families who made up the town's population opened a school around 1877 and called the place Trapp Spring. Development of an established community began in the late 1880s a half mile west of the original site. By 1890 the community had a post office branch and a new name, Garner, chosen in honor of a local gin operator, Ab (or C. B.) Bumgarner. Trapp Spring School had moved to the new townsite in 1888. The arrival of the Weatherford, Mineral Wells and Northwestern Railway established Garner as a retail and shipping point for the area. For most of the twentieth century Garner was a church and school community for local farmers. In 1914 it had forty residents and five businesses. The population was seventy-five in 1947. The post office was discontinued about 1970. In 1980 and 1990 the population was reported at ninety-eight. By 2004 the population had increased to an estimated 196. Garner's early school community of Trapp Spring is credited as the birthplace of the popular domino game 42 (see FORTY-TWO [DOMINO GAME]).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dennis Roberson, Winning 42: Strategy & Lore of the National Game of Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1997, 4th rev. ed., 2009 Kathleen E. and Clifton R. St. Clair, eds., Little Towns of Texas (Jacksonville, Texas: Jayroe Graphic Arts, 1982).
