Earlier posts discussed the area history of Hugo Road, Purgatory Springs, and surrounding land ownership. Some of the information related the work of others in this field and so invited some questions, such as the origin of the name Hugo. More recent readings suggest that there were two schools in the area, one being Purgatory Springs and the other Hugo and since these two names seem to be interchangeable, it raises the question of whether there were two schools or one school with different names.
Digging further into the matter, always striving to find original source documents, one can find no evidence of two schools in the area. However, the one school building, still standing there on one acre of land, was probably not the original school building. That does not mean that there weren't two schools, it just means that the original documentation discovered has not supported this theory. Secondly, there has been no discovery of the basis for choosing a name for a post office. The criterion for the name selected by the local postmaster was that it be "one word, preferably short". Obviously, there were other criteria, probably in the judgement of the US Postal Service, to prevent naming post offices with, shall we say, nasty words.
A search of the National Archives shows that the first post office to be located at the settlement of Purgatory Springs was to be named Hugo. This official document dated June 1896 makes it clear that this was to be the first post office here and not a renaming of an existing post office. The document also shows that the name first proposed was Grover, but that is lined out and Hugo inserted. A search of\ newspapers and the census of the area did not reveal anything or anybody that would suggest a connection to the name Grover. The wording of the document also states that this is the first post office for the area, thus disputing the earlier viewpoints that there was a first post office named Purgatory Springs and then later renamed Hugo. Apparently there was no earlier post office named Purgatory Springs. The Hugo post office was established in 1896 with Samantha Fox as the proposed Postmaster. The document also indicates that the site of the post office was 1/4 mile to the west of Purgatory Creek, the creek which flowed from Purgatory Springs. The Post Office served 120 people. The site was reportedly in a store, as is so often done, but the location of the store has not been determined.
Once the area received its post office, the settlement became known as Hugo, with the origin of the name still unknown. As was typical, the settlement adopted the name of Hugo from the name of the Post Office. Thus everything in the area was renamed including the school, the site which is known, and the cemetery, that site being known. On maps there is even a mountain named Hugo Mountain, to the north of the Highway 32 near its junction with Purgatory Road.
The origin of the name of Hugo remains speculative at this time. Oral family history would indicate that the name was chosen in honor of an ancestral person dating back many centuries in Ireland. A search of the newspapers of the area for the years immediately around 1896 shows many news articles in the newspapers of San Marcos and San Antonio of the death and memorials to Victor Hugo who died exactly ten years earlier in 1885. The many news articles were in memory of the tenth anniversary of his death. Wiki has an extensive article on the bio of Victor Hugo.
There you have it, some new facts, and a suggestion for the origin of the name of Hugo to add to the story of Hugo, Texas. But, who was Samantha Fox?
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