Love Bug-Emma White Acrylic

Please drop this item 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 heart-shaped items obtained from different places and converted into travel bugs. They are named either for the places of their origin or for Texas Panhandle-South Plains towns with interesting names or histories. Much of the text is from the online Handbook of Texas or texasescapes.com.

A Texas historical marker on State Highway 207 twenty-five miles east of Lubbock is all that remains to mark the site of Emma, the once thriving county seat of Crosby County. In the fall of 1890 R. L. Stringfellow and H. E. Hume, owners of a general store in Estacado, purchased a section of land in the central part of the county. In 1890 a post office opened, and in 1891 Stringfellow and Hume laid out a town on this site and named it Emma, after the woman that one of them later married.

As settlers from Estacado and East Texas started moving into the area, residents of Emma called for a county-seat election, hoping to lure businesses to the new community. On October 14, 1891, the election was held, and Emma defeated Estacado by a vote of 109 to 103. Sometime after this the courthouse that had been built at Estacado in 1887 or 1888 was brought to Emma, where it was the most impressive building in town. Several businesses were also moved to Emma from Estacado, including the Crosby County News, edited by J. W. Murray, and the general store of Stringfellow and Hume, which was the largest business to be established in Emma. With new businesses moving in, Emma prospered, and by 1910 the town had several churches, a post office, a school, a bank, and an estimated population of 800.

Unfortunately, in 1910 the railroad came through the county and bypassed the town by five miles. On September, 17, 1910, Crosbyton defeated Emma in a new county seat election by a vote of 198 to 120. By October 1910 the majority of residents had moved from Emma to Crosbyton. Many of the business buildings and several residences were moved across the prairie to Crosbyton in a caravan consisting of four engines, thirty men, and twenty-two mules. The old courthouse was torn down and hauled to Cedric. In 1911 the post office was moved to Ralls, and Emma became a ghost town.