KEYSTONE, TEXAS. Keystone was a farm and ranch community several miles southeast of the intersection of Buckhorn Creek and Farm Road 140 and seven miles southeast of Pearsall in east central Frio County. A rural school was established in the community around 1900; the schoolhouse was also used for a community center and for religious gatherings. School records for 1906 show twenty-seven students attending the one-teacher Keystone school. A large reservoir supported irrigation farming in the area in the 1920s; farm laborers from Mexico worked the fields surrounding Keystone and were housed in small colonias in what local sources described as a plantation-like arrangement. The Keystone school was consolidated with those of Pearsall in the mid-1920s. Although the school remained active in 1929, the community appears to have been largely abandoned. By 1936 the Keystone School was inactive, though several farms still remained in the area.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Frio County, Texas: A History (Pearsall, Texas: Frio Pioneer Jail Museum Association, 1979).

Ruben E. Ochoa