Cranfills Gap

Cranfills Gap is at the intersection of State Highway 22 and Farm Road 219, forty-two miles northwest of Waco and fourteen miles southwest of Meridian in western Bosque County. The town is near a gap in a mountain on the border between Bosque and Hamilton counties. It is named for George Eaton Cranfill, who had settled near the site by 1851. Although the immediate area was a focus of settlement by 1858, the first sign of organized community development occurred in May 1879, when Sam Cranfill succeeded in moving a nearby Hamilton County post office, opened one month earlier by Samuel B. Crawford, across the county line into Cranfills Gap. The area may have had a horse-powered cotton gin at this time; Riley and Bud Ford opened the first store in 1882. By 1890 the town had two more stores, a blacksmith shop, a saloon, and two physicians. St. Olaf Kirche, a Lutheran church constructed of rock, was built in a rural Norwegian community in 1886 a few miles from Cranfills Gap. As the membership grew and more people lived in the gap, the parishioners grew tired of driving to the country for services and built a new brick church in Cranfills Gap in 1917. The old rock church, marked by a state historical marker, was still standing in 1989 and was used on special occasions.

Adapted from the official Handbook of Texas, a state encyclopedia developed by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA). It is an authoritative source of trusted historical records.