Bead-Blue Green Red Stone Donut TB

This travel bug has two modest goals, to survive more than five years and to be moved by at least 25 cachers. As of 31-May-19 it had been moved by 12 cachers and had survived for 3.9 years.

Please drop it in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean, protects the number and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Travel bug photos are appreciated and will be re-posted here.

This is one of a series of large beads obtained from different places and converted into travel bugs.  They are named for Texas towns with interesting names or histories.  Much of the text is from the online Handbook of Texas or texasescapes.com.

The site of Blue, on Farm Road 696 eight miles west of Lexington in northwestern Lee County, was first settled around 1846 by three brothers, Joseph, William, and Isaac Jackson, who received a one-third league grant for service in the Mexican War.  The settlement was originally named Blue Branch after a nearby stream.  There was no surface water in the community so the brothers went to Wooly Branch and dug a canal to power a mill - the first west of the Brazos.  They are also credited with building a horse-powered cotton gin just north of the settlement.  For a period  the town harbored a band of six local outlaws.  Five citizens were shot in a short span of time.  The honorable citizens knew who the assassins were; four were caught and hung from the same tree.  The other two of the gang escaped and were never seen again.  A local post office was established in 1879. The same year, a Methodist church was organized there, and a cotton gin was operating at about the same time.  William Jackson operated a small chair factory. The community's post office closed in 1895 but was reopened in 1897, and the name of the settlement was shortened to Blue.  In 1906 a one-room school at Blue had thirty-three students. The settlement began to decline after 1910.  Its post office closed in 1913, and its school was consolidated with the Lexington Independent School District in 1941.  In the mid-1930s the town had a school, a business, and several scattered dwellings. In 1945 its reported population was twenty-five. In the early 1980s the town was a dispersed rural community with a church and one business. The population was fifty in 2000.