Birome

Birome is on Farm Road 308 fifteen miles south of Hillsboro in south central Hill County. The town was established in 1910 as a shipping point on the International-Great Northern Railroad, which had recently extended its tracks across the county, and given a portmanteau name derived from the given names of Bickham and Jerome Cartwright. The two brothers owned the 4,800-acre Cartwright Ranch, on which Birome was located. The settlement reached its height during the first decade of the twentieth century. By 1910 Birome had a school, a general store, a cotton gin, a blacksmith shop, a doctor, a barbershop, and an ice cream parlor. A Birome post office began operating in 1912. Fifty persons lived in Birome by the mid-1920s. Though its reported population remained unchanged between that time and the mid-1960s, the community experienced considerable decline, no doubt affected by the Great Depression and the dislocations resulting from World War II. The school closed in 1952, and the railroad tracks were abandoned. By the mid-1970s the population had fallen to thirty-one, a number still reported in 2000. In the early 1980s the community had a number of residences, a church, a community center, a grocery store, a cotton gin, and a post office.