Consider this map of Denton County:

There are similarly mysterious town names indicated on the map of Collin County, and to a lesser degree the maps of Dallas County and Tarrant County.

Intrigued by this discovery, I began to research a little further. I started my search for more information at The Handbook of Texas Online, A site created and maintained by the Texas State Historical Association in partnership with the University of Texas, and designed to be a "Digital Gateway" to Texas History.  Here I found that many of these mystery cities are not really cities anymore.  These days they would be more accurately described as simply "named places".

But, at one time these places were small towns.  Frontier towns to be more exact, most of which began to lose their municipality momentum just around the turn of the century (1900 not 2000!).

Check out what the Handbook of Texas Online has to say about Stony, Texas in far west Denton County for instance:

Stony is on Farm Road 2622 two miles east of the Wise county line and ten miles west of Denton in far west Denton County. It was settled in the late 1850s and was named for the stony area in which it was located. Its population never exceeded fifty, probably due to the emergence of Justin, eight miles southwest, as a shipping point for area farmers. Stony had a post office from 1879 to 1918. In 1884 it had a mill, a gin, four churches, two schools, and a population estimated at 130. By 1890 the population had dropped to fifty. In 1914 the town had 100 residents, a doctor, a blacksmith, and at least two stores. From 1933 to 2000 its population was estimated at twenty-five. In 2004 a school building dating back to 1884 still stood in the community, and a restored 1839 log cabin, located nearby, was open to the public as local museum.

I decided to make a trip out to nearby Stony and Drop, Texas to get some idea of what these places are like today.  I found that while these locales are not the ghost towns of western lore, there were several old and/or abandoned buildings where the towns once were.

I shot a few pictures of the more interesting buildings, and then rushed home to do a little more research.

Ghost Towns within minutes of Dallas and Fort Worth?  Who would have guessed?