Carmine, Once Sylvan

The town was platted under the name Sylvan, and the name it carries now is not a colour. It was renamed for Newton Carmean, and on the fifteenth of June 1892 the spelling was deliberately changed from Carmean to Carmine, because the post office kept confusing it with Cameron, up in Milam County. A town changed its own name by one letter to stop its mail going astray. The townsite was established by Dr. B. J. Thigpen, who had been promised the station agent's job by the railroad if he would promote the place, and who moved onto it in the mid 1880s. Sources cannot agree on the year: the Handbook of Texas says Christmas Day 1885, the local chamber and the county historical commission both say 1883, and a county history of 1902 says he built in 1884. It worked either way. By 1900 Carmine had four general stores, four saloons, two blacksmith shops, several churches, ten other businesses and a newspaper called the New Century, a German American settlement grown into a railroad town on the Austin branch of the Houston and Texas Central. The peak came in 1950 at six hundred and fifty people and twenty four businesses. The cotton gins closed through the 1960s, and between 1980 and 1985 the railroad that had made the town was shut and the track was lifted out of the ground. That is the detail worth holding: the line that reached this corner of Fayette County in 1871, the first in the county, is not merely disused but physically gone. Two hundred and thirty nine people lived in Carmine in 1985 and two hundred and forty four in 2020, which by the standards of small Texas railroad towns counts as holding steady.