Bead-Paint Rock Green Porcelain Oval TB

This travel bug has the modest goal to circulate more than five years and to be moved by at least 25 cachers.  That is a rate of five drops per year for five years.  As of 23-Dec-19 it had survived for 2.6 years and had been moved by 14 cachers.

Please drop it in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event where there is no security.  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.

Travel bug photos are appreciated and will be re-posted here.

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.

Paint Rock is the county seat of Concho County.  When driving through the town, one is struck by the almost frontier look of the place.  There should be horses tied to a hitching post.  The attractive courthouse bears the date 1882. 

The town was established and became the county seat 1879.  Paint Rock grew steadily and by 1884 it had become a shipping center for wool, hides, pecans, and mutton.

A Presbyterian church was organized at the community in 1881 and a Baptist church in 1886. In 1892 the Methodists erected the first church building, which was used by all the denominations until they each acquired their own. The population rose from 100 in 1884 to 800 by 1914, when Paint Rock had a waterworks system, a newspaper, and a bank.  The town acquired a railroad connection in 1910, with the completion of the Concho, San Saba and Llano Valley Railroad from Miles to Paint Rock.  The railroad was discontinued after a flood washed away the bridge over the Concho River in late 1936.  The development of Paint Rock was punctuated by two serious fires, in 1909 and 1922, on the town square.

In 1931 the population reached a peak of 1,000, then fell to 500 by 1933. It rose to 800 by 1941 and remained at about that level for the next two decades, when it began to decline again.   After hitting a low of 193 in 1972, the population stood at 290 in 1988.  The population grew to 320 in 2000.

The town is named for one of the major rock art sites in Texas and is certainly the premier site in Central Texas.   The site is composed of hundreds of pictographs painted onto the limestone that forms a cliff seventy feet high, 150 to 200 yards north of the river. There are an estimated 1,500 paintings spread out over a distance of one-half mile. The site is on private land.