Flat Top

Flat Top was on Elm Creek and Farm Road 2134 four miles southwest of Voss and twenty miles southwest of Coleman in southwestern Coleman County. It was founded about 1862 when Richard Coffey, one of the earliest White settlers in southwestern Coleman County, started ranching at the site. Coffey built a number of cabins to house his cowboys and enclosed the settlement with a picket fence as a defence against Indian raids. The community was known as Flat Top because of a flat-roofed building that stood on the site in its early years. As a result of their exposed frontier location, Coffey's ranch and the neighboring ranches suffered Indian raids several times in the early 1870s, and the last victim of such raids in the county was killed near Flat Top in 1875. At the same time, the community profited from its location on the road that paralleled the telegraph line between forts Concho and Belknap. Local ranchers supplied the army posts with cattle, and Flat Top became a change station on the Fort Concho-Brownwood stage line. In the 1870s a series of rock corrals, still standing in the mid-twentieth century, were built to hold the stage horses. The community had a post office from 1879 to 1881. Flat Top declined thereafter and was no longer listed on county maps by the 1930s.