Desdemona, Texas

Desdemona is a former oil boomtown and virtual ghost town located in Eastland County east of Abilene in West Texas. The community is located on Texas State Highway 16 at Farm-to-Market Roads 8 and 2214, approximately twenty miles southeast of the county seat of Eastland and twenty miles west of Stephenville, site of Tarleton State University.

Dating to 1857, Desdemona was one of the first Texas towns established west of the Brazos River. Settlers constructed a small fort on land owned by C.C. Blair for protection from Comanche Indian attacks. In 1873, Rockdale Baptist Church, the first organization of any kind in Eastland County, was constructed. Two years later, the brothers William and Ben Funderburg acquired the former Fort Blair land and proceeded to develop the community, then called Hogtown on Hog Creek. A post office was authorized in 1877 under the name "Desdemona", a reference not to the character from Shakespeare, but the daughter of an area justice of the peace. During the 1890s, agriculture was important in Desdemona, particularly peanuts. The population reached 340 in 1904.

In 1914, businessman J.W. "Shorty" Carruth drilled a shallow unproductive oil well and began selling stock in his Carruth Oil Company though he misrepresented the actual value of its worth. In 1923, a federal grand jury indicted Carruth for using the mail to defraud investors of some $7 million. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. The presiding judge likened Carruth to a "highwayman".

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