County Magazine

There’s no shortage of change in Texas. Or ghost towns to prove it.

Scattered across the state, from Terlingua to Texon, Indianola to Sherwood, you’ll find towns that tell some of the most dramatic stories of boom and bust. Usually, there’s a railroad that gets built in the next town over, an industry that falls out of favor, a mine that taps out, or some environmental or economic change that leaves once-thriving towns to fade.

Today, some of these ghost towns are truly empty, marked only by deteriorating structures that act as a kind of carbon-dating system that gives clues as to when the last residents left. But many ghost towns are still home to the living.

Helena, not quite gone

Helena, founded in 1852, was once the county seat of Karnes County and has long been a stopping place between San Antonio and the Texas coast. In its heyday, it had a courthouse, jail, newspaper, drugstore, blacksmith shop, two hotels, and several saloons and general stores.

According to local lore, when people in the town fought, they called it the “Helena duel.” Fighters would tie their right hands together and use a 4-inch knife to try to end their dispute.

But a different kind of feud led to Helena’s decline. After a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a local businessman’s son, the angry, grieving father vowed to “dry up Helena,” said Mallorie Deason, a former volunteer firefighter and medic who now runs the Karnes County Historical Society Museum. The museum oversees the preservation of the courthouse and several historic buildings on the site of the old square.

Legend says that in revenge, the man paid to have the railroad, originally planned to pass through Helena, rerouted through neighboring Karnes City. The decision created “The Big Curve,” a railroad bend that bypassed Helena — still traced today by Highway 181.

About 200 people still call Helena home today, which puts it on the list of ghost towns that are still very much alive, though not in the way their founders might have imagined.

“They wear the ghost town label with pride,” Deason said. “We were considered the toughest little town in Texas.”

Preserving the past

For more than 50 years, locals have been keeping the spirit of Helena alive, despite its reputation as a ghost town. The Karnes County Historical Society Museum is partly funded by Karnes and Wilson counties, with most of its budget coming from community events like the April Victorian Tea Party and October’s Indian Heritage Summer Festival.

While Texas leads the nation in population growth, second only to Florida, most of that is concentrated in the Dallas-Austin-Houston triangle. Meanwhile, 75 counties lost population in 2022–2023, the Texas Demographic Center found, putting parts of the state at risk of becoming the next generation of ghost towns.

In places like Edwards County, longtime ranching families are getting older, and their heirs are selling their land and moving east to areas like San Antonio. Sutton County in West Texas has struggled since the natural gas industry there all but disappeared, a challenge facing many counties in the Panhandle that have industries with periods of growth and recession.

County historical commissions, created by the Texas Legislature, help preserve the state’s history by surveying sites, maintaining markers and promoting heritage tourism. There are more than 200 such commissions in Texas. The Texas Historical Commission, which oversees them, said their goal is to “save the real places that tell the real stories of Texas.”

“People don’t realize that ghost towns can still happen,” Deason said.

A bump in tourism In Helena, the two-story courthouse still stands, along with the original post office, the county’s first Masonic lodge and an old farmhouse that belonged to the Sickenius family, where local quilters met for many years. In 1962, residents formed a group to preserve the town’s history and the abandoned courthouse. In a town without a mayor, police department or school district, both the cemetery and the museum have their own boards that help make decisions about building maintenance and renovation.
Deason is pushing for air conditioning and heat in the courthouse, modern conveniences that will help her bring this history into the present.

Ghost town museums such as the one in Helena don’t get a ton of visitors, but after a recent appearance on the Texas travel show “The Daytripper,” Deason said they’ve had more people dropping by than ever before. It’s nowhere near the number of people who visit Terlingua, where hundreds of thousands of visitors pass annually en route to Big Bend National Park, but it’s a start.

Deason hopes to bring school groups to the ghost town to teach students about how the area’s history shaped today’s community. “They need to know their history of where they live,” she said. “They need to know their ancestors.”