Dialville
Dialville, Cherokee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1866, Confederate John J. Dial (d.1928) joined a group of 60 wagons headed for Texas. He arrived in this area the same year and soon began farming the land. With the 1882 arrival of the Kansas and Gulf Short Line Railroad, Dial opened a general store near the rail line. The following year, Dial and his wife, Ida Mae (Jones), deeded eight acres of land to the railroad for a flag stop station. The town site he platted at the site of the station was named Dialville when the post office was established in 1885. There was little growth in Dialville until 1897, when the flourishing tomato and peach production and shipping business revitalized the area. In that year, John T. Bailey opened a store and reactivated the post office. Dialville's first school was established in 1899. C. D. Jarratt, a leading East Texas fruit and vegetable sales agent, arrived about 1900 and helped develop the town into a leading shipping point for tomatoes and peaches. Dialville was the scene of much commercial activity during the early years of the 20th century, but by the mid 1920s had begun to decline. It remains an important part of the regional and agricultural history of Cherokee County.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
After coming to Texas in an 1866 wagon train, John J. Dial settled here and took up farming. When the Kansas and Gulf Short Line Railroad arrived in 1882 he opened a store by the tracks and deeded land for a flag-stop station, and the town platted around it was named Dialville when its post office opened in 1885. The community boomed after 1897 as a shipping point for the region's tomatoes and peaches, thriving through the early twentieth century before declining by the mid-1920s.
Why it matters
Dialville's rise and fall trace the classic arc of a railroad-and-agriculture boomtown, whose fortunes lived and died with the rails and the crops they carried to market.
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Related people
- · John J. Dial
- · Ida Mae Jones Dial
Themes & tags
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