VERAND, TEXAS. Verand, five miles north of Eldorado, was the first town to be established in Schleicher County. The area was settled in the mid-1880s, when a group from Vermont bought several thousand acres of land there and established the Vermont Ranch. The town associated with the ranch was called Verand. It had a stage stop, a school, a store, and a hotel. A Verand post office was established in June 1892 with Charles C. West as postmaster. About twenty families moved to the area, but they encountered difficulty in obtaining titles to the town lots. In 1895, when W. B. Silliman surveyed the site of Eldorado and offered free town lots to the residents of Verand, they accepted the offer and moved their homes and businesses to Eldorado. The Verand post office was officially transferred to Eldorado in April 1895. Though no evidence of the Verand community remained, a historical marker was place at the site in 1968.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Roy D. Holt, ed., Schleicher County, or Eighty Years of Development in Southwest Texas (Eldorado, Texas: Eldorado Success, 1930). Schleicher County Historical Society, A History of Schleicher County (San Angelo: Anchor, 1979). Marker Files, Texas Historical Commission, Austin.

Vivian Elizabeth Smyrl