SHANNON, TEXAS. Shannon is on Farm Road 175 twenty miles southwest of Henrietta in extreme south central Clay County. It was established around a general store built by Rachel D. Ivie in 1878 and was known as Stampede Springs. This name was changed, apparently soon after the settlement's founding, to Shannon, in honor of a pioneer family that had come to the area from the Shannon Valley in Ireland. A post office opened in 1893. By 1910 the local school enrolled eighty-two students and employed two teachers. By the mid-1920s 112 persons lived in Shannon. The population remained constant throughout the succeeding three decades, while the reported number of businesses fell from three in 1936 to two by the mid-1950s. The population decreased to eighty in 1966-67 and to twenty-three by the late 1970s. In 1990 the population was listed as twenty-three. The population remained the same in 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: William Charles Taylor, A History of Clay County (Austin: Jenkins, 1972).

Brian Hart