SPRING CREEK, TEXAS (Bosque County). Spring Creek is a community on a creek of the same name, two miles north of Farm Road 1473 and twelve miles northwest of Meridian in Bosque County. The community was on the Tim R. Hawkins survey. Settlers began to arrive after the Civil War, and by 1880 the community had a school and a church, which probably met in the same building. John A. Lomax, whose family lived near the Spring Creek community, describes his experiences at a Methodist camp meeting in Spring Creek about 1880 in his book The Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (1947). A post office named Help operated in a nearby house from 1894 to 1908. Its name supposedly derived from a conversation held when the subject of having a post office came up. Reportedly someone said having a post office "would be a help to the community"; hence the name. Elizabeth A. Smith was the first postmaster. The mail arrived on the train to Iredell, and a carrier brought it the eight miles to the community. A store was near the post office. In 1907 a church was built by the Southern Baptists; it was still in use in the 1980s, but had been enlarged and modernized. The early school was a wooden box structure; in 1899 a newspaper reported that the school had seventy-five or eighty pupils. A concrete schoolhouse was constructed in 1915; it still stood in the 1980s, though by that time it was used as a place to spread lunch. In 1936 Spring Creek included the school, a cemetery, and a number of scattered dwellings, but in 1937 its school was consolidated with that of Iredell. Spring Creek had a church and a cemetery in 1970. In the 1980s the Spring Creek Cemetery was maintained by a local organization; the cemetery received a Texas Historical Commission marker in 1986.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Meridian Tribune, February 17, 1899.
