Birch

Birch, on Farm Road 60 and Birch Creek eight miles northwest of Somerville in southern Burleson County, has been a farming community since the first half of the nineteenth century. Settlement in the vicinity began in the mid-1830s, but the first record of a community appears in the records of the newly organized Burleson County Commissioners Court in 1846. In the mid-1880s a number of Czechoslovakian immigrants reached Burleson County; they settled in Caldwell and also pushed several miles to the southwest. Some of them help to found Frenstat, and others proceeded to Birch. A post office operated in Birch from 1891 until 1908, and a school operated in the town for several years until it was consolidated with the Somerville Independent School District in 1948. In 1941 Birch had a population estimated at twenty-five and two accredited businesses. Population estimates remained at the same level until 1948, the last year for which figures are available. In 1961 a Birch congregation of the United Church of Christ was consolidated with a church in Lyons. By the early 1960s only a tiny cluster of houses remained at the site.