Carta Valley

Carta Valley is on U.S. Highway 377 thirty-two miles southwest of Rocksprings in southwestern Edwards County. The community is named for its location in a valley surrounded by bluffs and for Ed Carta, an early settler. Settlers arrived in the area in 1898, and land was allotted for a cemetery in 1904. W. A. Varga opened a store in the community in 1906 and served as postmaster the following year when the Carta Valley post office was opened. In the early years children from the settlement attended the nearby Double Tank School until a school and church building was erected in Carta Valley sometime before 1913. A separate structure for the Methodist church was built in 1913, and a Baptist church was built in 1923. Carta Valley had an estimated thirty-five inhabitants in 1914. The population of the community was estimated at twenty from the 1920s through the 1950s. In 1948 the community maintained a school, two churches, one business, and a number of scattered dwellings. The settlement had a small boom in the 1960s, when its population briefly shot up to an estimated 150 inhabitants with five businesses, but by the 1970s the population was once more estimated at twenty. In 1978 Carta Valley had a school, a church, and a few dwellings; it was still marked on highway maps in 1990. In 2000 the population was twelve.