Love Bug-Estacado Acrylic Pink Glitter

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Photos in the travel bug logs are appreciated.  I will be re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

This is one of a series of heart-shaped items obtained from different places and converted into travel bugs. They are named either for the places of their origin or for Texas Panhandle-South Plains towns with interesting names or histories.

Estacado, the first white agricultural settlement on the South Plains of Texas.  In 1878 Paris Cox, an Indiana Quaker, visited this area with a group of buffalo hunters.  Attracted by the abundance of cheap farm land, he returned to Indiana and began advertising his plans for a Quaker colony here.  Cox secured railroad land in western Crosby and eastern Lubbock counties in exchange for his sawmill business in Indiana.  In the fall of 1879 the first families arrived in the area in time to face a severe winter.  Cox built a sod house for his family, but the other settlers spent the ordeal in tents and quit the colony the following spring, leaving only the Cox family in residence.  After a successful crop was achieved, interest in the colony was renewed and by 1882 ten families had been recruited. The community was named Marietta for Cox's wife Mary, but was renamed Estacado, from the Spanish name for the region, Llano Estacado.

The community provided some of the first organized education on the South Plains when Emma Hunt began teaching in a dugout classroom in 1882; by 1884 classes were being held in the Quaker meetinghouse. The Central Plains Academy, the first college on the Llano Estacado, was established in the community in 1890 and operated for two years.  The town flourished for some years, and by 1890 the population was reported at 200.  In 1891 Estacado lost the county offices and began to decline.  The town lacked leadership after Cox's death in 1888.  A grasshopper invasion and drought in 1892–93 all but finished it.

Favorable growing conditions continued to attract settlers to the region after 1900 so Estacado continued to exist, although the original Quaker colony had dissolved.  The population increased from sixty-eight in 1930 to eighty-five in 1940; it remained stable at eighty from 1970 through 2000.  In the mid-1980s the town had a cotton gin and a few scattered residences.