Hopewell

Hopewell is on Jimms Branch a mile south of Farm Road 1869 and 5½ miles west of Liberty Hill in southwestern Williamson County. The site, settled in the early 1850s, was also called Burleson Springs. A cemetery existed there by the mid-1850s, and church services for the local farmers were held in an adjacent field in 1855. The settlement was harassed by Comanches during the early decades of its existence; one of the last and most notorious incidents was the massacre of the Wofford Johnson family near Hopewell in 1863. As the Indian threat receded, the town flourished. A Masonic lodge was organized there in 1863, and Hopewell had a Presbyterian church by 1869, a school by 1878, a post office from 1876 to 1882, and, in the 1880s, a saloon and a general store. In 1900 Hopewell's Black school was the largest in the county, with two teachers and 140 pupils; its White school had one teacher and thirty-nine pupils. The community declined in the twentieth century, and its school was consolidated with the Liberty Hill school in 1945. By 1977 there was nothing left of Hopewell but a cemetery.