Orient

Orient, in northeastern Tom Green County, derived its name from its location on the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway. A post office was established there in 1909, and in 1914 a general store was operating. The local school had two teachers in 1930. The population of Orient was twenty in 1925 but only ten in 1934. The 1936 county highway map showed at Orient one business and scattered dwellings, with Skinner School, Wooland Station, and a mining site nearby. Nearby oil discoveries staved off Orient's demise, though its post office was discontinued in 1964, one of its two businesses was gone by 1965, and the other was gone by 1970. The population increased to forty in 1953 and remained at that level into the 1980s, when only a few houses and the abandoned Wooland railroad station marked the townsite. In 2000 the population was still listed at forty.