First timer? In this formerly once-a-day blog (and now pretty much a once-a-week blog), I have my computer select a random latitude and longitude that puts me somewhere in the continental United States (the lower 48). I call this “landing.” I keep track of the watersheds I land in, as well as the town I land near. I do some internet research to hopefully find something of interest about my landing location. To find out more about A Landing A Day (like who “Dan” is and what the various numbers and abbreviations mean in the first paragraph), please see “About Landing,” (and “Abbreviations” and “Cryptic Numbers”) above.
Note to casual readers: You probably want to skip the first part of this post and start with the landing map . . .
Dan – Are you sitting down? You better be (and hanging on to something for extra support as well). For the first time since landing 765 (that would be one thousand, two hundred and six landings ago, which occurred one week before Christmas, 2005), I have landed on a USer 9 times out of my last 10 landings. And why not a landing in . . . TX; 143/173; 9/10; 7; 154.0.
And, just for the heck of it, get this: the December 18, 2005 landing mentioned above was the first 9/10 since landing 27 (May 13, 1999). Of course, my earliest landings were a bunch of 10/10s and 9/10s when I had a wide open map full of nothing but USers. But anyway, only twice in 1,944 landings have I seen a 9/10.
And while I’m at it, here’s what my early landing spreadsheet looked like:
As a review, the numbers in column B are the Score. Red means the score is the lowest ever. States highlighted in red were hit for the first time. Column C has a “1” for USers and a “0” for OSers. Column D records USers/10 landings – there you’ll see the 9 for landing 27. It’s interesting that landing 27 marked the beginning of an 0/5 run, and I said goodbye to 9/10 until landing 765 . . .
OK, OK, enough of the esoteric minutiae of landing statistics. Here’s my landing map, showing my proximity to Sylvester:
FYI, Roby is the next little town just to the west of Sylvester; I had a 2009 landing in Roby where my post was all about the “Roby 43” lottery winners.
Here’s a broader view:
I landed in the Clear Fork of the Brazos River watershed (3rd hit); on to the Brazos (25th hit); on to the G of M.
Here’s my GE shot that shows an agricultural area, interspersed with some scrub and maybe some oil wells:
Here’s a little Sylvester history, from Wiki (most of which is borrowed from the Handbook of Texas website):
The Compere brothers of Abilene are credited with the founding of the community in 1903. They bought part of the AJ Ranch in anticipation of the arrival of the Kansas, Mexico and Orient Railroad. They named the new town in honor of W.W. Sylvester, the railroad’s promotion manager. [Pretty blatant tactics to make sure the railroad went through the town, eh?] The rails reached Sylvester in 1905 [no surprise] and businesses followed.
By 1909, the community had an estimated population of 600. Sylvester incorporated in 1927 although in 1930 the population had fallen to 382 residents. It had reverted to unincorporated status by 1950 and by the 1980s, fewer than 100 people remained in the community.
Although Sylvester is unincorporated, it continues to have a post office in operation with the zip code of 79560.
Moving right along. I stumbled on a cool blog by Steven Maier (stevenmaier.com), and he had a post entitled “Ghost Town – Sylvester, TX. Here’s a screen shot of his post title:
Here’s another screen shot (a little scrolled down from the above), showing a couple of pictures of an abandoned school along with Steven’s commentary:
Check out the entire post (and the rest of his blog) here.
I’ll close with this Panaramio wheat field shot by Kevin McCollum:
That’ll do it. . .
KS
Greg
© 2011 A Landing A Day