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Welcome to Texas Genealogy Trails!
*Volunteers dedicated to putting free data online.*
McMullen County Website is available for adoption.
If interested in joining our group, view our Volunteer Information Page and
contact Kim.
[Basic webpage design knowledge and a desire to transcribe data is
required]
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We regret that we cannot perform personal research for anybody
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McMullen County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. In 2000, its population was
851. Its seat is Tilden. McMullen is named for John McMullen, founder of a colony in Texas.The McMullen County
Courthouse was designed by the architect William Charles Stephenson, originally from Buffalo, New York. Stephenson
also designed some fifty buildings in Beeville, including the Bee County Courthouse.
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Tilden was one of the first two settlements in McMullen County when it was founded in 1858 at the mouth of Leoncita
Creek on the Frio River. The settlement, then known as Rio Frio, had eight to ten crude dwellings that housed about
thirty people by the fall of that year. Soon afterward the townspeople built a road connecting their settlement
to the old San Antonio-Laredo road, which lay to the west. In the early 1860s the town grew slowly. In 1862 Levi
J. Edwards built its first general store, and shortly after he added a saloon. About that time, too, the town built
its first school. The settlement acted as a home-guard post for the Twenty-ninth Brigade of the Texas Confederate
Militia during the Civil War. During the early 1860s Rio Frio became known as Dog Town. One explanation of this
name holds that drunken cowboys on a shooting spree left about fifteen dead dogs on the street. The other popular
explanation is that many ranchers used dogs to work their cattle. By 1870 Dog Town had a population of 190, and
in 1871 the community was granted a post office.
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