There was a large migration from Fannin and Grayson Counties in the 1870s to escape the post-civil war poverty and unrest in that area. My great grandparents,Zack Blanton (5th Texas Cavalry) and his family, and Capt. John H. and Nancy (Blanton) Damron (1st Texas Cavalry-Arizona Brigade) also moved to Brown County. Rev.Ben Blanton (1st Texas Cavalry-Arizona Brigade) remained in Fannin County and established the Blanton Chapel near Leonard, Texas in 1876.

Rev. J.G. and Elizabeth (Dixon) Hardin, father of the notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, moved to Comanche, in Comanche County Texas about 1870.

The great migration to west Texas was a result of the 1979 passage of the Texas "pay-as-you-go" tax reform policy and opening of Texas school lands to homesteaders, which began in 1879 and brought about the elimiation of open-range cattle operations and the invention of barbed-wire. Many families in eastern Texas lost their farms or were pushed off their leases because of excessive federal war repriation taxes during the ten year reconstruction period.