HEALD, TEXAS. Heald, on Farm Road 1443 in southwestern Wheeler County, was established in 1904 as a station on the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf Railway. It was at this station that Sam Pakan and his Slovak immigrants first set foot in their new Panhandle homeland. Heald, which was on a mail route from McLean, in November 1907 received a post office, which also served the Pakan community to the east. This post office was discontinued in 1909, reestablished in 1913, and closed for the final time in 1917. Thereafter, local mail was sent to Shamrock. Heald, a farming community with a store, a church, and a school, reported a population of twenty-five in 1930 and in 1940. The 1982 county highway map shows a church at Heald.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sallie B. Harris, comp., Hide Town in the Texas Panhandle: 100 Years in Wheeler County and Panhandle of Texas (Hereford, Texas: Pioneer, 1968). Arthur Hecht, comp., Postal History in the Texas Panhandle (Canyon, Texas: Panhandle-Plains Historical Society, 1960). William Coy Perkins, A History of Wheeler County (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1938).
