Gabriel Mills, TX

Gabriel Mills was on the North San Gabriel River eight miles southwest of Florence in northwestern Williamson County. An Englishman, Samuel E. Mather, built a water-powered gristmill at the site about 1849. The community was known at different times as Mather Mills, Brizendine Mills, and Gabriel Mills. The settlement was augmented by a number of families in the early 1850s and had a Masonic lodge and a two-story combination lodge-church-schoolhouse by 1856. Farmers came from a wide radius to use the mill and the stores that were established in the later 1850s. A post office was opened in the town in 1858. By 1884 Gabriel Mills had seventy-five inhabitants, a mill, a gin, a school, and two churches. The community reached a peak population of eighty in 1890 and thereafter declined rapidly. By 1892 its population had dropped to thirty, in 1905 its post office was discontinued, sometime before 1915 the lodge was destroyed in a fire, and by 1920 the community was deserted. In 1988 all that survived of Gabriel Mills was a cemetery.