John Wesley Love Home
Jacksonville, Cherokee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Known as "The Peach King" for his large peach orchards, John Wesley Love was born near Jacksonville in 1858. He and his wife, Texanna (Pickens), had this home built in 1902-03 to accommodate their family of twelve children. The turn-of-the-century Victorian-style house features a two-tiered, wraparound porch with hand-finished millwork ornamentation. The Love home is a stately reminder of Jacksonville's rich heritage and traditions.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Known as "The Peach King" for his sprawling orchards, John Wesley Love was born near Jacksonville in 1858 and, with his wife Texanna, had this home built in 1902โ03 for their twelve children. The turn-of-the-century Victorian house is distinguished by a two-tiered wraparound porch and hand-finished millwork. It survives as a stately emblem of Jacksonville's agricultural prosperity and heritage.
Why it matters
The Love home reflects the fruit-growing economy that made East Texas towns like Jacksonville flourish, and the confident Victorian architecture such success afforded.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- ยท John Wesley Love
- ยท Texanna Pickens Love
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Town of Craft
Craft, TX
First called Independence, the town of Craft sprang up along the railroad in the 1890s and took its name from Thomas J. Craft, its first postmaster and leading citizen. In 1896 local growers launched commercial tomato production here, and within two decades this corner of East Texas shipped an astonishing ninety percent of the state's tomatoes. Though the town faded in the 1930s, its brief boom made it a linchpin of a regional farm economy.
Old Rusk Tramway
Jacksonville, TX
After a rival railroad bypassed the area in 1873, local citizens rejoiced when the Rusk tram began running in 1875 with pine rails that warped and a top speed sometimes beaten by mule wagons. Its motley rolling stock included a used streetcar, three flatcars, and a steam engine called the "Cherokee," and passengers often had to help lift the train back onto its tracks along the 16-mile line to Jacksonville. Sold in 1879, the ramshackle tram had nonetheless done its job, drawing industry and growth to the region.
Dialville
Dialville, TX
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.
Texas Civil War Iron Works
Jacksonville, TX
In 1863 the Chapel Hill Manufacturing Co. built an ironworks on this site to make farm and kitchen tools the Confederacy badly needed, smelting native East Texas iron ore with Cherokee limestone and charcoal from nearby hardwoods. A crew that included 100 enslaved workers from Louisiana fed ore down the hillside into the furnaces, where molten iron was cast into molds. By the 1880s at least sixteen ironworks operated across East Texas.