Bead-Okra Gray Stone Donut TB

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 large beads obtained from different places and converted into travel bugs.  They are named for Texas towns with interesting names or histories.

Okra, in south central Eastland County, was named for the vegetable.  Settlement began in 1880 on lands made available by the Texas and Pacific Railway.  The post office was established in 1899, and a gin was built a year later.  The population was fifty in 1914, forty in 1940, and twenty in 1980 through 2000.  Tiny Okra has both "city limits" signs are on the same post.

By the 1920s the town had a cotton gin, a public school and teacherage, two churches, and a number of stores and businesses.  During Prohibition, the countryside along the Colorado River south of Whon was a popular hideout for bootleggers.   As small-scale cotton farming in the area decreased, the community began to decline.  In 1940 Whon had a store, a post office, and sixty people; by 1949 the population had dropped to thirty.  The post office, which had become a unique drive-in facility in 1961, was still operating in the 1980s.  At one time Whon was thought to be at the exact center of the state, until a surveyor's error of ten miles was discovered.  Through 2000 the population was still reported at fifteen.