City of Appleby
Nacogdoches, Nacogdoches County, Texas
Marker Inscription
CITY OF APPLEBY LOCATED NINE MILES NORTHEAST OF DOWNTOWN NACOGDOCHES, APPLEBY WAS A COMMON RURAL COMMUNITY IN EAST TEXAS. THE HISTORY OF APPLEBY PROVIDES A BACKGROUND FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AREA NORTHEAST OF NACOGDOCHES. IN 1840, PIONEERS BEGAN TO MOVE INTO THE AREA AND A MAN NAMED HERRAN BUILT A LOG HUT AND A TAR KILN THERE. SOON, MORE PIONEER FAMILIES BEGAN TO MOVE TO THE AREA AND A LOCAL SCHOOL WAS NEEDED. APPLEBY GREW WHEN THE HOUSTON EAST AND WEST TEXAS (HE&WT) RAILWAY CAME TO THE AREA. THIS BROUGHT A SHIFT IN POPULATION AS THE CENTER OF THE COMMUNITY MOVED FROM THE SOUTH TO AN AREA ADJACENT TO THE NORTH OF THE RAILROAD. THIS MOVE WAS COMMON IN SMALL COMMUNITIES AS LIFE STARTED TO CENTER AROUND THE RAILROADS. IN 1889, W.T. SKEETERS OPENED THE FIRST STORE IN THE COMMUNITY ON THE NORTHEAST SIDE OF THE TRAIN TRACKS. IN 1889, THE HE&WT RAILWAY ACQUIRED PROPERTY FROM JOHN H. RICHARDSON, W.A. HUNT AND D.M. HANEY, WHICH WAS TO BE LAID OFF INTO A TOWN WITH A DEPOT STATION. THE COMMUNITY WAS OFFICIALLY NAMED APPLEBY AFTER JAMES APPLEBY, AUDITOR OF THE HE&WT RAILWAY. AT ITS HEIGHT, APPLEBY HAD THREE CHURCHES, COTTON GINS, FIVE GENERAL STORES, A GRIST MILL, BOARDING SCHOOL, POST OFFICE, RAILWAY DEPOT, TELEPHONE EXCHANGE, BANK, BLACKSMITH SHOP, HARDWARE STORE, BARBER SHOP AND TWO DRUG STORES. APPLEBY DEVELOPED AS A DISTRIBUTION CENTER FOR THE AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY WITH COTTON AS THE CHIEF CROP. AS OTHER COMMUNITIES DEVELOPED, APPLEBY WAS UNABLE TO COMPETE WITH LARGER TOWNS. IT IS SIGNIFICANT FOR ITS EARLY GROWTH IN THE AREA AS A FOCAL POINT FOR LUMBER AND AGRICULTURAL ENTERPRISES. (2014)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Appleby began in 1840 when pioneers like a settler named Herran built a log hut and tar kiln in the piney woods northeast of Nacogdoches. The community's fortunes shifted when the Houston East and West Texas Railway arrived in 1889, pulling the town center north to the tracks and naming it for the railway's auditor, James Appleby. At its height it boasted churches, cotton gins, general stores, a bank, and a depot, thriving as a distribution point for lumber and cotton before larger towns eclipsed it.
Why it matters
Appleby's rise and decline around the railroad mirrors the fate of countless small American communities whose lives centered on the rails and the crops they carried.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Appleby's story unfolds in the piney woods northeast of Nacogdoches, and it spans two very different eras. It opens in 1840, in the frontier days of early Texas, when pioneer families were pushing into the region and carving farms out of the forest. It matures in the Gilded Age, when the railroad arrived and changed everything about how a rural community lived.
The earliest days were about the raw materials of survival and trade. A settler named Herran built a log hut and a tar kiln — that kiln a reminder that the pine forests themselves were an industry, cooked down into tar and pitch. As more families followed, the community grew enough to need a school, the classic sign that a scattering of homesteads was becoming a real place.
Then came the rails. When the Houston East and West Texas Railway reached this corner of the county, the whole center of gravity shifted. Life across small-town America was reorganizing itself around the tracks, and Appleby was a textbook case.
People & events
The people on this marker mark the two ends of Appleby's arc. At the beginning stands Herran, the pioneer whose log hut and tar kiln were among the first marks of settlement. At the turning point stands W. T. Skeeters, who in 1889 opened the community's first store on the northeast side of the train tracks — a small act that announced where the new town would grow.
That same year the railway acquired land from local owners to lay out a proper town with a depot. And the community took its name not from a founder or a pioneer but from James Appleby, an auditor of the railway. It is a telling choice: in the railroad age, the company that brought the trains often left its stamp on the very identity of the towns it created.
What followed was a burst of prosperity. At its height Appleby held three churches, cotton gins, five general stores, a grist mill, a boarding school, a post office, a depot, a telephone exchange, a bank, a blacksmith, a hardware store, a barber shop, and two drug stores. It thrived as a distribution center for a cotton-and-lumber economy — until larger towns grew up nearby and it could no longer compete.
Its place in the American story
Appleby is a perfect small-scale model of a story that played out thousands of times across America: the railroad town. In the late nineteenth century a set of tracks could conjure a town into existence or drain the life out of one that the rails bypassed. Communities literally picked themselves up and moved to be next to the depot, exactly as the center of Appleby migrated north to the line.
The crops and timber tell the other half of the national story. Rural towns like this one existed to gather the countryside's produce — here, cotton above all, and the lumber of the surrounding forests — and funnel it onto the trains that carried it to distant markets. The general store, the cotton gin, and the depot were the machinery of that exchange.
And its fading is just as representative. As transportation improved and larger towns pulled trade toward themselves, countless once-busy little places quietly shrank. Appleby's rise and decline is the life cycle of the American railroad community, compressed into one settlement.
If you visit
Come with a sense of before-and-after, because the landscape itself holds the story. The railroad is the key: notice which side of the tracks the community grew toward, and you are reading the town's history in its geography. That northward shift toward the depot is the single most important fact about how this place took shape.
Think about the long inventory of businesses the marker records — the gins, the stores, the bank, the drug stores — and let it repopulate the quiet in your mind's eye. Part of the pleasure of a place like this is measuring the busy town it once was against what remains today.
Appleby makes a rewarding stop on a slow drive through the back roads northeast of Nacogdoches, where the deep East Texas forest still presses close. It rewards the traveler who likes to stand in an unassuming spot and realize how much once happened there.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · James Appleby
- · W. T. Skeeters
Themes & tags
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