Welcome to Scranton

Update -- New information added Community Progress Tour, high school life, the Reese family and the Scranton Cemetery .

Scranton, Texas is a tiny community south of Interstate 20, 12 miles southeast of Cisco, in Callahan and Eastland Counties. The area is part of the Cross Timbers region of Texas, a stretch of land rich with post oak and mesquite trees and sandy soil. Scranton was once a small, yet thriving, center of agriculture, commerce and education.

All that is gone now. Most of the descendants of the original settlers moved away for better jobs, financial security and the promise of greater opportunities for their children.

Today, residents in the area include natives who left to work in the city and then returned after retirement to escape the stress of metropolitan life. There are people who remained -- despite drought, tornadoes, hailstorms, the decline of cotton, the elimination of the peanut allotment and numerous oil busts -- to hold on to a simpler life, the pleasures of seeing the stars at night and the independence of living off the land.

I am a native of Scranton and a graduate of Scranton High School. In these pages, I hope to tell you a little of what once was Scranton. I hope to preserve some of the facts and yes, maybe a tall tale or two, about the little community. My thanks to my cousin, Helen Ray Brashear, who shared a copy of her 1997 speech at the Scranton Homecoming, and to Evelyn Bailey, who has researched and written much about the history of our families and our community. I have relied heavily on their work and many other longtime residents who told stories about life in Scranton during its prime.

Other sources include Eastland County Cemeteries (Cawyer, 1974), Eastland County: Gateway to the West (1989), Eastland County Texas (Ghormley, 1969), the Handbook of Texas, I Remember Callahan (1986), History of Eastland County (Cox 1950), History of Eastland County, Texas (Langston, 1904), family records and my own recollections.

Photographs here are used with permission of family owners or are believed to be in the public domain. If you have photos of your family members who lived at Scranton you would like to see used on this site, please contact me. The logo at the top of the page incorporates graphic representations of the antelope, which was the Scranton High School mascot when I was in school. The green and gold used in the logo were the school colors.

Any opinions and errors here are my own. Please contact me with any correction. This was to be one of my "retirement" projects, but at present I find little time to work on the site. I continue to collect new documents and stories and hope to eventually add them to the site.

Robert E. (Bob) Shrader