INKUM, TEXAS. Inkum was between Farm Road 89 and U.S. Highway 277 ten miles south of Merkel in southwestern Taylor County. The Inkum post office was opened in 1903 to serve the farmers moving into what had been a ranching area. According to some imaginative sources, the first postmaster, H. M. Puckett, wanted to call the community Lail, after the original grantee, but the ink on the application got blotched, and the postal officials read it as Inkum. Punkett ran a general store-post office in the community until 1908. The Inkum school operated for several years about the same time. In 1908 the post office was moved to the Wilson ranch. In 1914 the community had a population of fifty, but soon thereafter most of the local farms were purchased and converted back to large-scale ranching, and the post office was closed in 1915. The community was no longer listed on maps by the 1930s.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Juanita Daniel Zachry, A History of Rural Taylor County (Burnet, Texas: Nortex, 1980).
