Guion

Guion was on what is now U.S. Highway 83 twenty-five miles southwest of Abilene in south central Taylor County. Settlers were at the site in 1879, and as early as 1882 the settlement served as a stagecoach station and mail stop for a line that ran from Abilene to San Angelo. The Guion post office opened in 1884 with Champion T. Traylor as postmaster. It closed sometime after 1930, and mail was rerouted through nearby Ovalo. In the mid-1880s a small church and school building was used by all communions in the area. The local Baptist church, which was organized at nearby Lemon's Gap in 1883, moved to Guion and held its first service in the union church on September 12, 1886. Later the Guion and Lemon's Gap schools also merged. The building was enlarged through the years, and parts of it were used in constructing the Methodist church at Tuscola. Guion had no cemetery; its residents buried their dead at Lemon's Gap, McBee, Cedar Gap, and Bradshaw. In the early 1890s Guion reported a population of twenty-five and a general store, a flour mill and gin, and a blacksmith shop. The original settlement near the stagecoach station became known as Old Guion when the railroad came through the area in 1910, and the community was moved three miles to be near the railroad and a better public road. Though Guion reported a population of eighteen from 1925 through 2000, by the mid-1980s nothing remained of the community, and all that remained at old Guion was the ruins of the station keeper's house.