HICKS, TEXAS (Lee County). Hicks is three miles northwest of Tanglewood in far northwestern Lee County. The area was first settled in the 1860s, and by the mid-1880s a small community had begun to develop. A school was built there in 1887, and two years later, when the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway came through, a townsite called Niles was laid out on land owned by the railroad. Around 1910 large lignite deposits were discovered near the townsite. The Rockdale Coal Company began operating a strip mine and opened a commissary to sell supplies to the miners. In 1911 the town received a post office called Hicks with R. L. Scarbrough as postmaster. The community's population was reported at 150 in 1914, but it began to decline soon thereafter. In 1926 the town had an estimated fifty residents, and during the mid-1930s it had a small station and a few scattered dwellings. In the 1980s it was a dispersed rural community.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lee County Historical Survey Committee, A History of Lee County (Quanah, Texas: Nortex, 1974).
