Frame Switch

Frame Switch, a small stock-raising community with a railroad flag stop, is on U.S. Highway 79 and the Missouri Pacific line, three miles west of Taylor in east central Williamson County. The site in 1882 had a sheep ranch run by Solomon George Yakey. In 1884 Yakey married an Ohio woman, Mattie Frame, and persuaded her parents to join him at the settlement; the community was named for David Frame, Mattie's father. A number of Danish immigrants settled in the area in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1890 Yakey built a school on land donated by the Frames, and in 1903 the school had fifty-eight pupils. Frame Switch remained a small community throughout the twentieth century, with a population of twenty reported from 1933 to 2000. Two businesses were reported there in 1943. In 1988 there remained one business, a locally popular bar called the Frame Switch Tavern. The tavern, for some time a community center of sorts, had in the 1980s one of the few jukeboxes anywhere with a recording of Moon Mullican's classic country song "Pipe Liner Blues."