Belle Plain Street, which runs through a northwest section of Brownwood, out towards Grosvenor, is not the most well-traveled route to and from Brownwood, but it wasn’t always a road to nowhere. In fact, it might well have been one of the major arteries through the area when Brownwood was nothing but a collection of a few log cabins. The direction it takes is, for the first few miles, in line with an old military road, and later the stagecoach route.

Belle Plain Street turns into 279, which veers north before reaching Thrifty, but the beginning of it is the same route you’d start off on going to if you were actually going to Thrifty, Hunter’s stage and on to Camp Colorado, the route early settlers might well have traveled frequently as they congregated at Camp Colorado to purchase supplies such as flour, sugar, salt, and to seek military protection in the war against the Comanche tribes. 279 would have been an early way to reach Abilene as well, so why the name Belle Plain?

The now defunct town of Belle Plain, in Callahan County, for which the Brownwood street was apparently named, and which you will come close to if you follow it far enough, was once destined for greatness as a center of culture and commerce to rival the booming cities of east Texas. If you were to take Belle Plain Street heading northwest in the 1870s, you might well have been heading not to Abilene, Cross Cut or Cross Plains, but to the thriving town of Belle Plain– full of big plans, big money and big buildings. The big-dreaming prairie settlement, packed with ambitious members of the professional class ready to found a metropolis at the edge of the vast wilderness of West Texas, was, however, to meet a very different fate than its founders hoped to see.

The Daily Fort Worth Standard, in March 1878 described the growth of Belle Plain in glowing terms. “Even the latter county [Callahan], is settling up rapidly, Belle Plain, the county seat having grown within a year to be a place of nearly a thousand inhabitants. In any one of the dozen counties named there is an abundance of the best of land, and beyond them hundreds of miles of grazing lands, over which range great herds of cattle, and sheep, and horse, and from which the buffalo has not yet been driven.” “We do not know of a more pleasant or beautiful place or one with brighter prospects for a prosperous future than Belle Plain,’ proclaimed the Fort Griffin Echo in 1879.

Established in 1876, Belle Plain was the Callahan county seat by 1877. It grew rapidly to include a newspaper, hotel, several stores and the crown jewel of the town, Belle Plain College. The college was an ambitious project, showcasing classical education courses in everything from astronomy to music, with a special emphasis on the arts. The old story of the railroad bypassing the town, combined with a severe drought in 1887, spelled doom for Belle Plain, as the railroad planned town of Baird usurped the location. Belle Plain experienced a sharp decline, and is now virtually abandoned.

One of the striking features of Belle Plain today is its collection of looming, hollowed out structures, many of which still stand in a basically empty field. The old courthouse, some of the college buildings and various other buildings gape windowless along a bare skyline. It’s no wonder that there are rumors the old town is haunted, with frequent online reports of ghost sightings, flashing lights that seem to come from the cemetery, and strange events experienced by curious visitors.

The ruins of Belle Plain, and the old road to them from Brownwood, makes for an interesting drive if you have a free morning or afternoon. Belle Plain Street takes you along a historic path, up towards the headwaters of Pecan Bayou, and on to this empty place that dreams built, but misfortune destroyed. Dreams never do really die, they just get moved from one plan to another, yet something of those early dreams might still linger in this lovely, somewhat isolated and definitely ghostly site.

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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com. Comments regarding her columns can be emailed to [email protected].