First National Bank of Mineola
Mineola, Wood County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Chartered on May 31, 1898, the First National Bank of Mineola incorporated for $50,000 at $500 per share. The majority shareholder, lawyer and former Wood County Judge H. M. Cates, became first president. Local photographer J. O. Teagarden served as first cashier. Throughout the course of its history, First National Bank has retained a strong financial footing in the community, surviving the banking crisis of the 1930s and adjusting to Mineola's shift from an agrarian economy to a retail service center after World War II. After operating for almost 60 years from its building at the corner of Johnson and Broad streets, the bank moved to this site in 1965. (2001)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Chartered in 1898 with fifty thousand dollars in capital, the First National Bank of Mineola opened under the leadership of a former county judge and a local photographer-turned-cashier. It weathered the bank failures of the Great Depression and adapted as Mineola shifted after World War II from a farming economy to a retail hub. After nearly sixty years at its original downtown corner, the bank moved to this location in 1965.
Why it matters
A community bank that survived the 1930s crisis shows the resilience of local finance that anchored small-town economies through booms, busts, and postwar transformation.
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Related people
- · H. M. Cates
- · J. O. Teagarden
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Harry W. Meredith
Mineola, TX
Harry Meredith arrived in Mineola around 1907 from Kentucky by way of a Kentucky brick plant, and spent the next half-century shaping the town from behind a banker's desk, serving as bank president, board chairman, and briefly as mayor. Late in life he turned his fortune toward the public good, and the Meredith Foundation he organized still funds the town's library, civic center, and youth and church programs. His home once stood on this site, a fixture of the community he reshaped.
Site of Barney B. Hart House
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Built in 1906 by builder J. J. McLeod for the attorney Barney B. Hart, this Queen Anne home stood in Mineola nearly unchanged for a century, with its asymmetrical façade, complex roofline, and classically inspired columns. Hart family members lived there until 1982, and the house was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. Soon after that honor, in 2009, the home was destroyed by fire, leaving only the site.
First National Bank Building
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Chartered in 1898, the First National Bank of Mineola moved through several downtown storefronts before rising in this 1912 building, erected on the ashes of the Mineola Mercantile that burned in 1903. In a booming East Texas railroad town, a permanent brick bank building signaled stability and ambition, its architecture meant to project the permanence that fire and frequent relocation had denied earlier commerce. The site layers a generation of local business history into a single downtown corner.
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Mineola's earliest settlers were drawn to this well-watered spot they called "the Forks of the River," and by the 1880s a public well stood here at the town's center. Crews drilling for salt in 1889–90 struck mineral water instead, and a 60-foot windmill tower and cypress tank soon made this the town's main water supply; a 1913 analysis touted more than a dozen minerals with reputed healing powers. The well was capped in 1924 when the street was bricked over the old intersection.