Yet Mentone has no church, grocery store, cemetery, or school. What it does have is a legacy of enmity stretching back decades. In the twentieth century, several families—the Hoppers, the Creagers, the Joneses—competed for control of the town. When Pamela Colloff surveyed the county’s “spiteful, tribal politics” for Texas Monthly, in the mid-nineties, she found elections that were “knock-down-drag-out fights” animated by “the tangled web of family rivalries, personal vendettas, and enduring grudges among locals.” Some of those clans have since dwindled or decamped for more populated areas. But the habit of feuding remains, though these days it’s largely confined to infighting between factions of the Jones family. “If we had a movie theatre, or a mall, or five thousand people, or even one thousand people, things would be radically different,” Steve Simonsen, the county attorney, told me. “There’s not anything else to occupy people.”journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter