STONEBURG, TEXAS. Stoneburg is at the intersection of U.S. Highway 81 and Farm Road 1806, two miles northwest of Bowie Lake Dam and fifteen miles west of Montague in west central Montague County. A settlement began in the early 1870s. In 1883 school was conducted by W. T. Small on a ranch between Stoneburg and Bowie, twelve miles to the south. In 1893 the tracks of the Chicago, Rock Island and Texas Railway reached the area. That year a post office was established named Riley, but after five months the name was changed to Stoneburg, in honor of J. M. Stone, an area rancher who donated land for the townsite when the railroad arrived. By the early 1900s the town's population surpassed 150. Until the Great Depression the number of residents remained above 100. The post office closed on March 31, 1954. Since World War II the population has steadily declined, dropping to fifty-one by the late 1980s. In 1989 the town had only a service station and two churches. Through 2000 the reported population was still fifty-one.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Guy Renfro Donnell, The History of Montague County, Texas (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1940). Montague County Historical Commission, Story of Montague County (Dallas: Curtis, 1989).
