Bead-Little Hope Orange Small 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, protects the number and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Photos of the travel bug 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.  Much of the text is from the online Handbook of Texas or texasescapes.com.

Little Hope is at the intersection of Farm roads 154 and 312, ten miles east of Quitman in eastern Wood County. The old Little Hope church and cemetery are about 1½ miles north of the community, which is sometimes referred to as the "new" Little Hope. The area was settled as early as the 1850s, and by 1857 a school, taught by fifteen-year-old Emily Smith, served both the Little Hope area and the Holly Springs community. In 1881 the Little Hope Missionary Baptist Church was organized; it was said to have taken its name from the fact that there was little hope that the church would survive more than a year. The first meeting of the church was held at a brush arbor near a place called the Murphy graveyard, but eventually a two-story building was constructed; the second story was used for meetings of the local Woodmen of the World lodge. Baptisms for the church were originally conducted at J. A. Stinson's millpond near the Speer community.  From 1933 to 1939 the community, which apparently never had a post office, reported a population of ten served by one business.  No further population figures are available, but by 1960 both the old Little Hope church area and the new Little Hope community had a few widely scattered dwellings, many abandoned.  By the early 1970s the membership of the Little Hope congregation had climbed to around 128, and around that time the church added a belfry incorporating the bell from a defunct school.  Little Hope church received a Texas Historical Commission marker in the early 1980s and was still active at that time.  The 1988 county highway map showed two businesses at the new Little Hope community.  In 2000 the population was still twenty-five.