LONG TAW, TEXAS. Long Taw, also known as Good's Chapel, was just southwest of Cooper on the Old Bonham and Jefferson Road in central Delta County. The settlement developed in the 1850s when freighters hauling cotton, vegetables, and livestock to market began to stop there for water. The name was supposedly given by these drivers because the distance from water at the South Sulphur River crossing to the supply there was a long tow ("long taw"). In 1883 local residents established a school that enrolled thirty-seven students and employed one teacher in 1905. When the Texas Midland Railroad built a line through the area in 1895, many people moved to nearby Cooper, which had become an important railroad town. By 1936 Long Taw no longer appeared on maps. The school remained in the vicinity, but it was consolidated into the Cooper district in 1949. Maps for 1964 showed a few scattered dwellings on the site of Long Taw.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Paul Garland Hervey, A History of Education in Delta County, Texas (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1951). Wilma Ross and Billie Phillips, Photos and Tales of Delta County (1976).

Vista K. McCroskey