Wilderville

Wilderville is on Farm Road 413 six miles northeast of Rosebud in southern Falls County. It was established in the early 1870s and was named for the E. M. Wilder family, who became landowners in the area shortly after the Civil War. A post office operated from 1874 until 1906. Within ten years the community had grown to include two churches, a school, steam gristmills and cotton gins, a weekly newspaper, and 300 residents. Cotton and grain were the principal shipments made by area farmers. The community faded around 1900. By the early 1930s the number of residents had fallen to ten. A school, a church, and a few scattered houses marked the community on county highway maps in the late 1940s, and the population was reported at twenty. Wilderville had forty-five residents and a store in the 1980s. Through 2000 the population was still reported as forty-five.