MERLE, TEXAS. Merle was on the south bank of Bethel Creek three miles south of Snook in southeastern Burleson County. Anglo-American settlement in the vicinity began in the early 1830s, but the town itself, located in a zone of blackland prairie in the fertile Brazos bottoms, was not founded until the late 1800s. A post office was established there in 1883. An influx of Czech immigrants began in the early 1880s, and a number of Italian farmers settled in this region in the early 1890s. Merle appears to have declined in the first years of the 1900s; the local post office was discontinued in 1919. One business was reported in the community in 1931. In 1934 the Merle School was merged with those in the nearby townships of Moravia, Lone Oak, and Snook to form the Snook Independent School District. The population was an estimated twenty-five in 1933. In 1948, the last year for which population statistics were available, the population remained an estimated twenty-five. By the 1990s there was no organized community, only a handful of farm dwellings scattered about the former townsite.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burleson County Historical Society, Astride the Old San Antonio Road: A History of Burleson County, Texas (Dallas: Taylor, 1980).
