Park of Old Settlers Association of Grayson County

🏛️The era

By the late 1870s, the people who had settled Texas in its earliest days were growing old. Many had lived through the Republic of Texas era, the rough years of the frontier, statehood, and the Civil War. They had seen the country change beyond recognition, and they wanted to remember it together before those memories slipped away.

All across the United States in the late nineteenth century, communities formed old settlers' associations and held reunions. These gatherings mixed nostalgia, storytelling, speeches, and picnics. Grayson County, on the Red River at Texas's northern border, had a particularly rich past to celebrate. It had been frontier country where trading posts, settlers, and Native peoples met.

The association's first meetings were humble. In 1879, oldtimers traveled by wagon and camped near Sherman to share their memories of the Republic, the frontier, and the Confederacy. Out of those campfire reunions grew an institution that would last for generations.

👥People & events

Two women spoke at the very first meeting, a telling detail. One was Mrs. Julia Shannon King, daughter of the man who donated part of the land on which Sherman was laid out. The other was Mrs. Sophia Porter, one of the most colorful figures in North Texas history. She had come to Grayson County in 1838 as the bride of Holland Coffee, who ran an Indian trading post at Preston Bend on the Red River. Her life spanned the whole arc of Texas history the association was founded to remember.

The group formalized itself over time. It was incorporated in October 1898, and after years of meeting in various groves it bought this accessible site in 1899 as its permanent home. Paying for it wasn't easy. Bad weather, a smallpox outbreak, and even a power failure on the streetcar line that brought visitors out all hurt the association's finances. Still, the members finished paying off the purchase by 1909.

In 1923 they built an auditorium and named it for Jesse Loving, the association's longtime secretary. It was an honor for the kind of steady volunteer work that keeps an organization going.

The annual conventions drew some of the most powerful voices in Texas politics. Speakers included Governor James S. Hogg; John H. Reagan, a towering figure in Texas public life; Senators Joseph Weldon Bailey and Morris Sheppard; Congressman Roger Q. Mills; and Sam Rayburn, who went on to become one of the longest-serving Speakers of the U.S. House. For the crowds who gathered here, hearing such figures in person was a major event.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

This park reflects a very American impulse: ordinary people deciding that their own memories were history worth keeping. Long before professional historians turned to local and social history, old settlers' associations were collecting stories and honoring pioneers, and they helped shape how communities understood their past.

The list of speakers shows how closely these reunions tied into public life. In an era before radio and television, a politician reached voters by standing in front of them, and summer gatherings like this one were ideal places to do it. Several of the men who spoke here became figures of national importance, Sam Rayburn most of all.

The memories celebrated here also show how Americans of that era chose to remember the past. The association honored the Republic, the frontier, and the Confederacy, a combination typical of white Southern reunions in those decades. Today historians look at such gatherings both as valuable records of pioneer experience and as examples of how memory can emphasize some parts of the past while leaving out others, including the Native peoples and enslaved people who were also part of the frontier story.

🧭If you visit

Walk the grounds and picture them on convention day: families arriving by wagon or streetcar, old pioneers trading stories, and crowds gathering to hear a governor or a future Speaker of the House. Few city parks can claim to have heard so many famous Texas voices.

Look for the auditorium named for Jesse Loving. It stands as a reminder that institutions like this one depend on dedicated volunteers as much as on famous speakers.

Over the years the park has also hosted the Red River Valley Fair and, more recently, civic and youth groups, so it's still a living community space and not just a relic. Sherman sits in North Texas near the Red River, and this park fits well into a drive exploring the region's frontier history, including the story of Preston Bend and its trading-post days.