REGENCY, TEXAS. Regency, also known as Hanna Valley and as Hannaville, is on the Colorado River twenty miles southwest of Goldthwaite in southwestern Mills County. Hanna Valley, one of three rich farming communities dividing the Colorado River valley in Mills County, was named for the Hanna family. David Hanna and two slaves settled in the area in 1854, and the next year David's father, Jesse P. Hanna, and Jesse's four other sons arrived in the valley, driving horses and cattle. According to local tradition, the Hanna women influenced their men to remain in the area because of its songbirds. By 1856 the Hannas had built the first house there. In 1862 a band of Comanche Indians attacked the residents of Hanna Valley, but by the early 1870s the threat of Indian raids had subsided. Around 1870, however, vigilante committees formed in the area to fight cattle rustling and other crimes, since there were no nearby courts of law. These groups eventually became criminal mobs that controlled and terrorized San Saba County and surrounding areas until the intervention of the Texas Rangersqv in 1896 and Capt. William J. McDonaldqv in May 1897.
The first store in Hanna Valley was built in 1871, and the first post office opened in 1876, with Jim Hanna, one of Jesse's sons, as postmaster. The post office closed in 1882, but was reestablished in 1884, when the town population had grown to fifty. At that time the name Hanna Valley was rejected by the postal authorities because another Texas town had the same name; the community became known as Regency instead. By 1890 Regency had a gristmill, a cotton gin, and a population of fifty, and by 1895 it had more than 200 residents and a church, a general store, a flour mill and gin, a physician, and a constable. From 1920 to 1940 the town had about forty residents. By 1936 Regency consisted of fewer than a dozen scattered dwellings. Its post office had been discontinued by the early 1930s, and mail was routed through Mullin. The town's remaining store closed in 1971. In 1990 and again in 2000 Regency reported twenty-five residents.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hartal Langford Blackwell, Mills County-The Way it Was (Goldthwaite, Texas: Eagle Press, 1976). Flora Gatlin Bowles, A No Man's Land Becomes a County (Austin: Steck, 1958).
