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Nevertheless, today’s wayfarer might find the most fascinating exhibit on this rural county road to be the derelict country store flanked by an archaic Sinclair gas pump, where its immutable numbers tell the story of the closing transaction: $5.56 in petrol at 26 cents per gallon.
Worley Store entered this agrarian realm in the 1920s as a sideline to the Worley Cotton Gin, said Kit Worley, whose grandfather Frank Worley opened the tiny store chiefly to accommodate gin employees.
A museum piece in its own right, Worley Store looks the part of an early 20th century place of business with its false front and porch lined with wooden benches.
Limited shelf space was crammed with groceries ranging from Clabber Girl Baking Powder to motor oil. The store sold fresh beef from calves butchered on the Worley ranch, which were kept away from flies in a screened-in booth at the back of the store. Double wooden doors welcomed patrons into this small-scale country mercantile, which boasted a Dr Pepper cooler and domino table. In the 1960s, the wooden porch was replaced with poured concrete.
Lifelong resident of the San Gabriel area Frank Felton said he remembers hanging around the store and worked at the Worley Gin as a youth. Felton remembers the store stocked summer sausage, sardines and cheese to accommodate gin employees, as well as the days in the first half of the 20th century when gasoline sold for 17 cents per gallon. However, those were the days when money was not plentiful.
Benches relate their own stories, with names such as “El Johnny Reyes” carved in the seat planks. Worley’s father, Lefus Worley, took over the family store, which closed in the early 1970s following a cotton gin explosion, Worley said.
The Sinclair gasoline pump was a new appliance to Worley Store in the 1950s, replacing an antique model capped with a glass bowl and equipped with a siphon that transferred the motor fuel to the automobile tank, Worley said.
It was not the gasoline, but a new Coca-Cola vending machine offering ice-cold soft drinks that had customers lined up for a mile on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in the 1950s.
“This guy from Cameron came out and put a Coca-Cola machine right there in the corner,” Worley said, pointing out a small section of the porch. “I can still remember standing right here and looking down this road and seeing all these cars lined up on that Sunday afternoon to get a Coke.”
Today, the store is a combination museum piece and storage room. An antique cash register was looted from the counter, as was a framed picture of Judge Roy Bean.
Six generations of Worleys have occupied this section of Milam County since the 1880s, Worley said. Forebears worked in the coal mines east of Rockdale, saved money and invested the cash in farmland along the San Gabriel River.
Long before there were Worleys planting corn and cotton in the river bottomland, there were numerous Indian tribes, which in 1745 brought the Roman Catholic churches in San Antonio to establish missions in the area.
The mission Nuestra Señora de los Delores del Rio de San Xavier materialized with one missionary friar ensconced to minister to the tribes. Mission San Francisco Xavier de Horcasitas was built on the south bank of the San Gabriel River, and a year later, San Ildefonso was established.
All three clustered near a presidio called San Francisco Xavier de Gideo. Tribulations in the form of drought, sickness, Apache raids and conflicts between Spanish soldiers and priests, who protested the military’s treatment of friendly Indians at the mission, took their toll, prompting church officials to move the missions in 1755.
Archaeologists still are putting together pieces of history through research and on-site digs in the San Xavier Mission archaeological district in Milam County. Tourists from across the U.S. regularly visit the mission sites. Worley, from his vantage point across the road, has seen thousands of people visit and photograph the Candelaria memorial.
The San Francisco Xavier Mission is remembered with a marker eight miles west of Rockdale on FM 908, and six miles east of San Gabriel on FM 487, a marker commemorates the San Ildefonso. Mission sites are on private property.
Close to a mile from Worley Store is another museum piece for the motoring public, the Worley Bridge. Still in operation, the Pratt Through Truss design conveys vehicles via a rumbling metal deck across a deep chasm where the San Gabriel River flows. The bridge, now a rural Texas rarity, boasts seven span steel stringer approaches that are 272 feet long, plus 138 feet of main span. At 12 feet wide, it can narrowly accommodate one vehicle at a time. Vehicles weighing more than 5,000 pounds are prohibited.
Tourism in the Worley domain has picked up in recent years as more people visit Apache Pass resort. Worley and his wife, Linda, live in the Worley family home, built at a total cost of $2,500 by Frank Worley in the 1920s. At one time, the main road to San Gabriel passed by the Worley homestead, gin and store.
Today, the once bustling settlement gets its fair share of tourists along with residents, mail carriers and pickup trucks hauling farm products and tools, all of which fill their tanks with gasoline costing more than $3 per gallon.