Keystone

Keystone was a farm and ranch community several miles southeast of the intersection of Buckhorn Creek and Farm Road 140 and seven miles southeast of Pearsall in east central Frio County. A rural school was established in the community around 1900; the schoolhouse was also used for a community center and for religious gatherings. School records for 1906 show twenty-seven students attending the one-teacher Keystone school. A large reservoir supported irrigation farming in the area in the 1920s; farm laborers from Mexico worked the fields surrounding Keystone and were housed in small colonias in what local sources described as a plantation-like arrangement. The Keystone school was consolidated with those of Pearsall in the mid-1920s. Although the school remained active in 1929, the community appears to have been largely abandoned. By 1936 the Keystone School was inactive, though several farms still remained in the area.