Salesville

Salesville, on Farm Road 2270 eight miles north of Mineral Wells in northeastern Palo Pinto County, was originally settled by the families of Victor Adolphus Dow and Theopalus Sale in the area known as Loving Valley. The place became a stage stop on the line owned by the Carson Lewis Stage Coach Company running west from Weatherford. The road, which passed just east of the settlement, carried soldiers, freighters, and travelers between Fort Worth and Fort Belknap. Sale erected a general store, and when a post office was established in the back of his building in 1880 the community became known as Salesville. Andrew Jackson Grantham donated land for the first school, as well as for a church and a cemetery. The agricultural community prospered, and by 1914 it was a station on both the Gulf, Texas and Western and the Weatherford, Mineral Wells and Northwestern railroads. With the decline of cotton in the 1920s, owing to drought and the boll weevil, business in the town began to stagnate. The post office was closed in 1954, and several years later the school became part of the Mineral Wells district. The population of Salesville was estimated at 113 in 1925 and 150 in 1941, but from 1949 to 1990 it was reported at forty. The population reached eighty-eight in 2000.