MOUNT CARMEL, TEXAS (Wichita County). Mount Carmel was a farming community five miles north of the site of present Electra on State Highway 25 in northwestern Wichita County. The settlement was founded on October 15, 1906, by Emil Flusche, a German colonizer who previously had established two colonies in Kansas and the Texas colonies of Muenster, Lindsay, and Pilot Point. Flusche contracted with Reese S. Allen of Electra, a Wichita County landowner and investor, to sell some of Allen's property to settlers at prices ranging from twelve to twenty dollars an acre. Flusche attracted German farmers from Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois to the predominantly Catholic community, which developed around a forty-acre plot donated as a townsite by Allen. The Mount Carmel Church, which became the main focus of the community, was completed in 1907, and that same year a Catholic school opened. Two years later a rectory was completed. By 1920 the church congregation had thirty-five families. In 1922 Mount Carmel residents completed Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. The scarcity of water in the area kept Mount Carmel a very small community, and the oil boom in and around Electra further limited its growth by inflating land prices. Its population was never estimated at more than thirty residents, the number it reported from 1936 through the mid-1960s. Mass was said in Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church until 1965, when only eight families remained in the community. In December 1966 the church and its contents were sold. After that time the community ceased to exist as an organized entity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Louise Kelly, Wichita County Beginnings (Burnet, Texas: Eakin Press, 1982). Sketch of the German Catholic Colonies in North Texas Founded by the Flusche Brothers (MS, Willis Library, University of North Texas).
