Bethel

Bethel is on Farm Road 963 eight miles northeast of Burnet in north central Burnet County. A school was established there in 1869. The settlement was closely linked with nearby Sage, which had a post office and a store but used the Bethel school. The school had one teacher and twenty-five students in the mid-1890s; it closed in 1941, when the area was consolidated with the Burnet Independent School District. Several houses, a gin, a store, and a cemetery marked the community on county highway maps in the late 1940s. Bethel had a community center and a few scattered houses in 1990. As of 2015, a brush arbor was converted to a barn while the schoolhouse became house.