Roughly 50 people call the unincorporated community of McAdoo, Texas, home—and every one of them felt the wrath of 90-mile-and-hour winds and softball-sized hail the night of April 25, 2023. Even those whose cars, homes and livestock dodged direct damage were affected by the loss of two key institutions in this agricultural hamlet: their temporary post office, and the Crosby County Fuels Co-op, the heart of the community.
Both are well under way toward rebuilding, reported volunteer fire chief Mack Gardner to the Dickens County commissioners court August 14. New foundations have been dug and concrete has been poured on newly graded sites, said Gardner. They’ve even found a use for the rubble that used to be Gardner’s old store, by donating it to the county for use in road and ditch repairs.
The morning after the storm, said Co-op manager Luis Guzman, volunteers began salvaging what merchandise they could from the building. Though they couldn’t recover the communal coffeepot that kept morning conversations going, they did manage to rescue thousands of usable items of hardware and equipment, meticulously cleaning and sorting right down to the nuts and bolts. Those items are now readily accessible in the co-op’s temporary headquarters, the earlier co-op building across the street.
There, the coffee is poured up like always, and folks stop in before heading out to work or to the fields. Across the way, the old site has been leveled out and the new one smoothed. A block farther south will rise the permanent post office, a long-awaited improvement. Although a precious tree had to be sacrificed for access, said Garnder, it’ll be worth it. McAdoo will build back better than ever.
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