[2] Thought to be the first white man to explore pre-Mills County, Pedro Vial visited in 1786 and 1789 while traveling between San Antonio and Santa Fe.

[12][1][14] One source identifies the David Morris, Sr., and Dick Jenkins families as the first pioneers in the area, who settled south of present-day Center City in 1852.

[1] This isolated part of Texas, popularly referred to as a "no man's land," also attracted a variety of criminals, and minimal and often corrupt law enforcement allowed crime to surge.

[1] Other sustained problems roiled the area, including native incursions, conflicts related to the cattle business, community feuds, agrarian discontent, and political unrest.

[16] Originally organized to protect settlers, vigilante "committees" formed with the tacit approval of law officials that degenerated into thieving, vindictive, and murderous groups that terrorized the area, killing an estimated one hundred people during their reign in Central Texas.

[2][1] The first legal actions at the Mills County clerk's office was to issue a marriage license and to file a divorce suit, and both transactions were instigated by Black couples.

[19] The Cowhouse Mountains, which are part of an extensive range of hills located in the Lampasas Cut Plain, cross the county from the southeast to the northwest.

[8] San Saba Peak, at a height of 1,712 feet, is a prominent mountain in the county and was named in 1732 by Don Juan Antonio Bustillo y Cevallos, Spanish Governor of Texas.

[22] The county has a variety of soils, including gray loams, sandy dark and stone clay, and alluvia in the bottom lands, and black wax on the prairies.

[1] The county has historically sustained its economy with farming and ranching operations of varying sizes, with small businesses and recreational hunting providing additional income.

[1] Game was the only substantive food for early settlers; deer, however, served various needs: in many households, they were the main meat and they sold antler and skins.

[2][13] Land owners often fenced in areas they did not own that sometimes included public water sources for livestock, which led to a fence-cutting epidemic in the mid-1880s, leading to legislation forbidding it.

[2] Early cattle trade in Mills County relied on the Fort Worth Stockyards for selling, but the local auction ring effected higher prices through bidding, rather than waiting to receive an offer from a buyer who came to visit a rancher's stock.

[2] Robert Briley started the first local auction that changed hands many times to become the Mills County Livestock Commission of Goldthwaite.

[2] Early trucking, which only required a license and a railroad permit, was pioneered by Everett Holland and Lindsay Kettle from Mullin and Slim Hurst from Star.

[53] The first reported rail movement of mohair occurred on April 11, 1903, when a shipment of hair produced on the Elberta Ranch, located on South Bennett Creek, was sent to a processing mill in Lowell, Massachusetts.

[8][50] In 1912, the Santa Fe Railroad published a pamphlet, Practical Information for the Farmers of Central West Texas, which provided crop and livestock recommendations that the company claimed would thrive in the county.

[2] It brought a general decline in Mills County farming (and overall population) and effected further agricultural diversification, leading not only to an upswing in sheep, goat, and chicken production but also to developing additional sources such as pecans, fruit, and dairy.

[9] The Soil Bank Program under the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s paid farmers to transform under-producing farmland to pastureland, and most of the land never returned to production.

[90] Early settlers taught their children the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic at home when time allowed and within the limited boundaries of what they knew.

[8] School buildings started appearing in the 1860s and early 1870s, which were constructed by local men of logs with dirt floors, appointed with split-log benches and fireplaces, which a few years later were replaced by wood stoves.

[2][91] State support of pre-Mills County schools was minimal in the early days: for instance, Williams Ranch received ninety-nine dollars in 1878.

[2] The early county residents enjoyed a number of diversions, including dancing, attending movies, running horse races, going to town on Saturdays, and drinking at the saloons.

[2][1] The first Mills County fairgrounds, located on the south side of Goldthwaite to the east of Livestock Commission Company, had a number of features, including a race track, baseball and football fields, an exhibition building, a band and dance platform, and sometimes a skating rink.

[41] In 2010, The Goldthwaite Eagle reported the county's dramatic shift to the Republican party following a long history of landslide Democratic voting in local elections.

[100] A special buffalo bar-b-que organized by a number of local businessman in 1948 welcomed Lyndon B. Johnson, who arrived by helicopter and delivered a speech to a crowd of 2,500 at the baseball field near Lampasas Commission Company.

[2] A broadside appeared in Goldthwaite, printed on a portable press by Lampasas resident "Calamity" Bonner, and is credited as the first paper distributed in the town.

[2][108] Pioneers traveled through pre-Mills County by wagon pulled by ox, mule, or horse teams on primitive clearings through wooded areas or via crude trails that were often nearly impassable in wet conditions due to mud holes.

[1] In 1885, the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad laid tracks through Goldthwaite, Pegtown, and Mullin, then onto Brownwood, bypassing Williams Ranch and Center City, both of which had anticipated being stops.

[119] The limestone jail that still stands was built by Green and Nichols of Lampasas at a cost of $8,850; it was completed in April 1888, six months and nine days following ground breaking.