Lena

Lena was on Farm Road 154 and the Southern Pacific Railroad, four miles south of West Point in northwestern Fayette County. Prior to 1927 the name applied to a siding on a branch line of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway, where local farmers and ranchers loaded firewood cut from the surrounding oak-covered prairie. The wood, destined for markets in San Antonio and Houston, sold for fifty cents a cord and was brought to the siding by wagon. During the period 1919–28 a single store operated in a tent at the siding during the peak of wood-cutting season. Beginning in 1928 and continuing for the next thirty-five years the Earthen Products, Millwhite, and Texas companies excavated clay pits and shipped bentonite clay from extensive deposits described by J. C. Melcher in 1902. The Texas Company built an extensive processing plant on a spur line to the railroad and provided cottages for about twenty employees. There was no post office; residents received mail at West Point. Children attended school at Rock Ridge or nearby Muldoon. In 1965 the Texas Company ceased operations, and the Lena siding was discontinued. The eighty-foot masonry smokestack at the old processing plant collapsed in a wind storm in 1989, and many local residents, new to the area, know nothing about the old community.