Poletown and Rhodesburg
Grand Saline, Van Zandt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first documented mention of a settlement at this site, just west of Jordan's Saline, comes from an 1863 letter by Alice Merrifield. The community was mostly made up of people who fled west to escape the southern battle sites of the Civil War. The small community became known as Poletown, perhaps because of the poles used for home construction, and was one of many such communities formed on unattended land while property owners were away at war. After the war, Poletown residents who were not property owners made arrangements to purchase land or become tenant farmers. A voting precinct was formed in 1873, a school had been established for local children by 1889 and land was deeded to the community for the already existing cemetery in 1900. In 1895, Tom Alexander honored populist Jacob C. Rhodes by deisgnating a section of his land at Poletown as the new town of Rhodesburg (or Rhodesburgh). The city gained national prominence when Rhodes and his followers changed allegiance to the Socialist Party. Rhodes organized the Socialist Party of Texas, and the first Socialist state convention was held later that year. For over a decade, Socialist Party encampments were held just west of Grand Saline. The Socialist Party of Texas reached its peak of popularity by the time of the 1912 presidential election, and received thirty percent support in Van Zandt County. While the National Socialist Party shifted away from tenant farmers' issues and toward labor union issues, the Texas party, including Van Zandt County, began to fracture and weaken while the Democratic Party strengthened. Soon, most of Rhodesburg's political leaders left the area, while many descendants of the earlier settlers remain. (2010)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
During the Civil War, families fleeing the war's front lines settled unattended land here, forming a community that became Poletown, perhaps for the poles used in building homes. In 1895 Tom Alexander laid out the town of Rhodesburg to honor populist Jacob C. Rhodes, who organized the Socialist Party of Texas and hosted its first state convention. Socialist encampments met west of Grand Saline for over a decade, and the party drew thirty percent of Van Zandt County's vote in 1912 before fracturing.
Why it matters
This quiet crossroads was a stronghold of the early-twentieth-century Socialist movement among Texas tenant farmers, a largely forgotten strand of American political history.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1860s, the country was tearing itself apart, and the war reached into places far from any famous battlefield. The eastern edge of Van Zandt County, in the piney, salt-rich lands of Northeast Texas, was one of those places — not a front line, but a refuge from one.
What makes this spot unusual is that its history was written by people moving away from danger rather than toward opportunity. Families packed up from the southern reaches of the conflict and headed west, looking for land where the war's violence would not follow. They found unattended acreage here, ground whose owners had gone off to fight, and they simply settled on it.
That was the texture of the wartime and postwar frontier: fluid, improvised, and shaped as much by absence as by ambition. Ownership blurred when men left for the army, and communities like this one sprang up in the gap. When the fighting ended, the reckoning came quietly — through deeds, tenant agreements, and the slow business of turning a squatters' refuge into a lawful town.
People & events
The earliest written trace of the settlement comes from an 1863 letter by Alice Merrifield — a single document that anchors the community's beginning. The people around her had come west to escape the war, and they built modestly, likely with poles for their homes, which may be how the place earned the name Poletown.
After the war, the settlers who owned nothing set about earning a foothold: buying land where they could, working as tenant farmers where they could not. The community grew in the patient, institutional way that real towns do — a voting precinct in 1873, a school for the children by 1889, and land formally deeded for the cemetery that already existed by 1900.
The town's second act belongs to two men. In 1895, Tom Alexander set aside a portion of his land as a new town and named it Rhodesburg to honor the populist Jacob C. Rhodes. Rhodes and his followers then made a move that pulled this rural crossroads onto the national stage: they threw in with the Socialist Party. Rhodes organized the Socialist Party of Texas and hosted its first state convention that same year, and for more than a decade, party encampments gathered just west of Grand Saline.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to forget that in the years before the First World War, socialism was a genuine electoral force in parts of rural America — not an imported idea, but a homegrown response to the hard arithmetic of tenant farming. Nowhere was that truer than in Texas, where families who worked land they did not own listened closely to anyone promising them a fairer share.
This community was a stronghold of that movement. By the 1912 presidential election, when the Socialist Party reached its national high-water mark, it drew roughly thirty percent of the vote in Van Zandt County — an extraordinary figure that shows how deeply the message landed among people who farmed for a living but owned little.
The decline is as instructive as the rise. As the national party turned its attention from tenant farmers toward industrial labor unions, the Texas movement lost the very grievance that had powered it, and the Democratic Party moved back in. The leaders drifted away; the descendants of the original settlers stayed. In that arc — a burst of radical hope on the land, then its fading — you can read a whole chapter of American political history that rarely makes the textbooks.
If you visit
Come here expecting quiet. This is farm country west of Grand Saline, and the drama is entirely in what happened rather than what remains — a ghost town in the truest sense, where a place that once held conventions and drew national attention has settled back into fields and open sky.
Stand at the crossroads and let the layers register: a wartime refuge, then a chartered town, then the improbable capital of a political movement, all on the same unremarkable ground. The cemetery, deeded to the community around the turn of the century, is the kind of place where the family names of those persistent early settlers still show up on the stones.
If you're building a road trip through Northeast Texas, this makes a thoughtful stop between the better-known salt-mining sights of Grand Saline and the wider county. It rewards the traveler who likes history that hides in plain sight — bring your curiosity, read the marker slowly, and picture the encampments that once filled the ground just to the west.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Jacob C. Rhodes
- · Tom Alexander
Themes & tags
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