LEON JUNCTION, TEXAS. Leon Junction, sometimes called "the Junction," is on the Leon River and Farm Road 931 some ten miles southeast of Gatesville in eastern Coryell County. The site was settled in the early 1880s, and the community took its name from the river and from a proposed Lampasas railroad that was never built. Leon Junction did get rail service, however, when the Texas and St. Louis Railway completed the section of track between Waco and Gatesville in 1882. A post office opened at the community in 1883, with Jackson Thomason as postmaster. By the mid-1890s the town comprised three general stores and fifty residents; cotton was the principal shipment of area farmers. Leon Junction reached its peak in the early 1900s. The New Olive School, which served the community and its surrounding area, had two teachers and seventy-five students in 1904. The town reported a population of 100 in 1914, but by the 1930s only twenty-five residents remained. The community lost its rail service in 1972, when the St. Louis Southwestern Railway of Texas abandoned its track between Lime City and Gatesville. In the 1980s only the post office and one business marked Leon Junction on county highway maps. The community reported twenty-five residents in the early 1990s through 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Coryell County Genealogical Society, Coryell County, Texas, Families, 1854-1985 (Dallas: Taylor, 1986). John J. Germann and Myron Janzen, Texas Post Offices by County (1986).

Vivian Elizabeth Smyrl