Mesa

Mesa was on the headwaters of Hog Creek four miles south of Iola in northwestern Grimes County. Anglo-American settlement in the area was underway by the late 1830s, when Alabaman Tandy Walker was granted a league of land on the east bank of Hog Creek. During the 1840s a community was founded among the local settlers on a low plateau overlooking the creek. In 1860 the town became a flag stop on the first railroad in the county, a Navasota-Iola tap line of the Texas and New Orleans Railroad. A post office operated at the community from 1898 until 1917. The township was bypassed to the east by the Iola-Shiro spur of the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway about 1907. Mesa had one business and a population estimated at 100 in 1933. In 1945 it had one business and thirty residents. This figure was unchanged in 1948, the last year for which population statistics were available. Farm Road 244 was constructed a mile to the west in 1949. By the late twentieth century only a handful of farm dwellings southeast of Frances Lake marked the former townsite.