Lavon
Lavon, Collin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Located in southeastern Collin County, the rich soils of the Blackland Prairie and the water provided by Bear Creek attracted settlers to the Lavon area in the 1850s. Elbert C. Thompson came to the area in 1854 and others soon followed. Lavon began when the St. Louis and Southwestern Railroad came through the county in 1886. The first post office started in 1888 with Elbert Thompson serving as the first postmaster. Originally, the town was known as Thompson or Thompson Switch, after Mr. Thompson, who also owned a general store. To avoid confusion with another town named Thompson, the name was changed to Lavon in honor of Mr. Thompson's son, Bud O. Lavon Thompson. Early on there was a depot, meat market, general store, restaurant and barber shop. A bank building was built in 1907. James L. Rees, a Civil War veteran, and Miranda Rees' home was moved down the street to make room for the bank building. The Rees' home stands today as the oldest home in Lavon. Before a church was built, a two-story brick schoolhouse served as a place for people to worship. The Lavon Presbyterians organized in 1897 and erected a church in Lavon which served as a community church. Each denomination would alternate Sundays to provide a place of worship for the community until the late 1940s. From 1938 to 1940, a school building was built under the Works Progress Administration. In the 1950s, the creation of Lavon Dam attracted fishermen and boating enthusiasts to the area as a popular resort spot. Over the years, a number of businesses have been in Lavon, including a restaurant that filmed scenes for the 1967 movie, Bonnie and Clyde. The town incorporated in 1972. (2013)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Drawn by the rich Blackland Prairie soil and Bear Creek's water, settlers reached the Lavon area in the 1850s, and the town proper took root when the railroad arrived in 1886. Originally called Thompson or Thompson Switch after early postmaster and merchant Elbert Thompson, it was renamed Lavon for his son to avoid confusion with another town. WPA crews built a school here in the late 1930s, and in the 1950s Lavon Dam turned the area into a fishing and boating retreat—one restaurant even appeared in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.
Why it matters
It captures the layered life of a north Texas farm town shaped by soil, railroad, New Deal labor, and mid-century recreation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Lavon sits in the southeastern corner of Collin County, on the kind of ground that decided where north Texas towns would rise: the rich, dark Blackland Prairie soil, watered here by Bear Creek. Those two gifts — fertile earth and reliable water — drew the first settlers to the area in the 1850s, well before there was any town to speak of, when the promise was simply land a family could farm.
For a generation these were scattered homesteads rather than a community. The thing that turned settlement into a town was steel rail. When the St. Louis and Southwestern Railroad — the line long known as the Cotton Belt — pushed through the county in 1886, it created the reason for a town to gather at this spot, as railroads did across the whole prairie in those years.
That sequence — soil, then water, then the railroad — is the backbone of Lavon's early history. It explains why people came, why they stayed, and why the town proper dates its real beginning not to the first cabin but to the coming of the tracks.
People & events
The human story here begins with Elbert C. Thompson, who reached the area in 1854 and became, in effect, the town's founding figure. When the first post office opened in 1888 he served as its first postmaster, and he kept the general store besides — the two institutions, mail and merchandise, around which a young farm town organized itself. Fittingly, the place was first called Thompson, or Thompson Switch, after him.
But there was already another Texas town named Thompson, and confusion in the mails was a real problem in an age when the post office was a community's lifeline. The solution was a graceful one: the name was changed to Lavon, in honor of Thompson's son, Bud O. Lavon Thompson. So the town carries a family name twice over — the father's settlement renamed for the son.
Around that core the ordinary machinery of town life assembled: a depot, a meat market, a general store, a restaurant, a barber shop, and by 1907 a bank. Building that bank meant moving the home of James L. Rees, a Civil War veteran, and his wife Miranda down the street — and that relocated house still stands as the oldest home in Lavon. Faith came early too: with no church at first, worshippers met in the two-story brick schoolhouse, and after the Lavon Presbyterians organized in 1897, denominations shared a single church building by taking turns on alternating Sundays, a neighborly arrangement that held into the late 1940s.
Its place in the American story
Lavon's story is a compact version of how thousands of American small towns were born and remade. The railroad that created it in 1886 was doing the same work all across the country — deciding which settlements would become towns and which would fade — and the little cluster of depot, store, and bank that followed is the standard signature of a rail-born prairie community.
The town also carries the fingerprints of the New Deal. From 1938 to 1940 a school building rose here under the Works Progress Administration, the federal program that put millions of Americans to work during the Great Depression and left schools, roads, and public buildings in countless towns too small to have built them alone. Lavon's WPA school ties this quiet corner of Texas directly to one of the defining national efforts of the twentieth century.
And then the water returned to the story. In the 1950s the creation of Lavon Dam turned the surrounding country into a draw for fishermen and boaters — part of a mid-century national wave of dam-building that reshaped rural economies, trading some farmland for reservoirs and recreation. Even a brush with Hollywood found its way here, when a local restaurant provided scenes for a 1967 film. Few small towns capture so many chapters of the American century in one place.
If you visit
Come to Lavon with an eye for layers, because its history is stacked rather than displayed. This is a town you read by looking closely: the oldest home, the sites where a depot and a bank once anchored Main Street, the lingering sense of a farm community that grew up along a railroad line.
Seek out the Rees home, remembered here as the oldest house in Lavon — a structure that was literally moved to make way for the town's 1907 bank, and so carries two stories at once. Standing before it, you can feel the compression of the town's early decades, when a growing place rearranged itself building by building.
The water is the other half of a visit. The reservoir that formed in the 1950s made this country a place people come to fish and boat, and that recreational calm still colors the area. A good way to take Lavon in is to pair the historical marker with time near the water — the two together tell the whole arc, from prairie farm town to lakeside retreat, in a single unhurried afternoon.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Elbert C. Thompson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Nevada
Nevada, TX
Nevada grew from an 1830s land grant into a settlement founded by Missouri emigrant Granville Stinebaugh in 1852, incorporating in 1891 as the rich Blackland Prairie drew farmers. The arrival of the St. Louis and Southwestern (later Cotton Belt) Railroad in 1888 pulled the town toward the depot and filled its downtown with shops, hotels, and fraternal lodges. Then, before dawn on May 9, 1927, a half-mile-wide tornado tore through the west side of town, killing 27 and wounding 75, ending Nevada's rise.
Copeville
Copeville, TX
Kentucky-born John Miles Cope settled in Collin County in 1848 and helped organize this farming community—first called Black Spot—in the 1850s, becoming its first postmaster in 1878. When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad arrived in 1886, the town shifted a mile northeast to trackside, becoming a shipping point for farm produce and prized bois d'arc timber. Copeville grew to about 300 residents and in 1921 gained one of the nation's early female postmasters, Elizabeth Pearce.
Central National Road of the Republic of Texas
Josephine, TX
In the mid-1840s the fledgling Republic of Texas, hungry to draw settlers into its northeastern reaches, chartered the Central National Road to link the Red River with the military roads along the Trinity. A five-man commission set the project in motion in 1844, and surveyor George Stell laid out a route from present-day Dallas northeast through seven counties, hugging open prairie and natural stream crossings. Though the road may never have been fully built and was soon eclipsed by the Preston Road and the railroads, it helped pry open a swath of frontier Texas to farms and towns.
Rockwall County
Rockwall, TX
First settled in the 1840s, this region remained part of Kaufman County until Rockwall County was created in 1873. At just 147 square miles, it is the smallest of Texas' 254 counties, and both county and town take their name from a curious underground rock formation discovered in the early 1850s. Crossed by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, it long thrived as fertile farmland.