Gladewater
Gladewater, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Founded 1827 as St. Clair, 3 mi. east. Moved to present site on Glade Creek and T & P Railway in 1872. Population increased from 500 to 7000 after discovery of oil in 1931, when it became production and refining hub. Manufacturing, clothing, medical, farming and dairy center. Home of annual East Texas Quarter Horse Show and the richest self-supporting cemetery in the world. Round-up association sponsors June rodeo, nationally known, in unique arena in abandoned salt water disposal pit. Historic sites marked.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded in 1827 as St. Clair a few miles east, the settlement moved to Glade Creek and the Texas & Pacific Railway in 1872 and took the name Gladewater. Its population exploded from 500 to 7,000 after oil was discovered in 1931, turning the farming and dairy town into a production and refining hub. The town became known for its East Texas Quarter Horse Show and a nationally known rodeo held in a converted salt-water disposal pit.
Why it matters
Gladewater's leap from sleepy railroad town to oil-refining center epitomizes how the East Texas field remade the region's towns within a single decade.
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Related events
- · East Texas oil discovery (1931)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First United Methodist Church of Gladewater
Gladewater, TX
Gladewater grew slowly as a railroad town from the 1870s until, in 1922, fourteen people led by the Rev. H.T. Perritte gathered in a family home to organize a Methodist congregation and soon built a one-room sanctuary. Everything changed in the 1930s, when the East Texas oil boom flooded the town with new residents and swelled the church alongside it. Its members went on to form the men's and women's groups that carried the congregation's many programs forward.
First Franchised Motor Bus Line in Texas
Gladewater, TX
When W. E. Nunnelee began carrying passengers from Tyler to Gladewater and Mt. Pleasant in March 1925, the automobile age was reshaping how ordinary Texans traveled. His fleet of stretched autos and small buses ran 205 miles of newly paved road, and when the Railroad Commission began regulating such lines in 1927, Nunnelee's held franchise No. 1. These rattling, breakdown-prone vehicles — uncomfortable and hard to drive — nonetheless pointed the way toward the modern intercity bus.
Bumpus House
Gladewater, TX
Built around the turn of the twentieth century, this Gladewater house blends Colonial Revival dormers and gable ends with Craftsman touches like tapered box supports on brick piers. Sawmill owner and road builder William E. Bumpus and his wife Catherine bought the property in 1927, and it stayed in the family until 1987. It survives as a well-preserved local landmark of early East Texas domestic architecture.
Foshee Family Homestead
Gladewater, TX
William Emmett and Mary Foshee bought this Upshur-country land in 1884 and raised their large family in a house built in 1890 from lumber sawn at John O'Byrne's mill, distinguished by a chimney of hand-hewn 'ironrock' from the creek that crossed the property. William wore many hats on the frontier — postmaster, farmer, lumber contractor, and justice of the peace. In the early 1930s one of the first wells of the great East Texas oil field came in on this ground, and the family's Ironrock Oil Company, named for that curious stone, was still operating when the marker was placed.