Allamoore

Allamoore (Allamore, Carrizo), is a ranching community on the Missouri Pacific Railroad just north of Interstate 10 and U.S. Highway 80, twenty-two miles southeast of Sierra Blanca in southeastern Hudspeth County. A post office under the name Acme was established there in 1884 with Robert B. McGrew as postmaster. It closed in 1886, but a new one opened two years later under the name Allamoore, after the postmistress, Mrs. Alla R. Moore. At that time the community consisted of "mining and stock camps." In 1890 the town had 200 inhabitants. Among them were Plato Clifford, a geologist and assayer, and H. C. Clifford, manager of the Hazel Mining Company. The Hazel Mine in nearby Culberson County was for several decades among the most productive silver and copper mines in Texas. The post office closed in 1895, but two years later a third post office, also called Allamoore, was established. By 1914 the population of the settlement had fallen to ten, and two cattle breeders were operating in the town. In the mid-1920s the population was estimated at twenty-five; by the late 1920s it was seventy-five. In the mid-1930s, when seventy pupils from the surrounding ranches attended the Allamoore school, the population was again estimated at twenty-five. A rock-crushing plant owned by Gifford-Hill and Company was operating five miles east of town in 1938. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s the population was estimated at seventy-five; it subsequently dropped to fifty. At that time Allamoore comprised scattered dwellings and a church. During the 1960s a local rancher reportedly paid a teacher to sit in the empty one-room schoolhouse, just in case a student happened to walk in. The Pioneer Talc Company opened at Allamoore in 1960 and the Westex Talc Company in 1971, but the latter was gone by the mid-1970s, and the Gifford-Hill rock crusher apparently ceased operation in the early 1980s. By 1988 the Allamoore school had the smallest enrollment of all Texas schools: only eight children from the ten families scattered throughout the district's 2,100 square miles attended.