Site of Early Grayson County Settlement - Whitemound
Tom Bean, Grayson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Named for two large white mounds of rock nearby. Settled 1849 by Henry Lackey and his 9 children, from Missouri. Town grew up around A. S. Lackey grist mill. It had a post office, churches, businesses, several doctors, and Bosworth Academy. Most residents moved away after Cotton Belt Railroad bypassed this site in 1888.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Named for two great white outcrops of rock nearby, Whitemound was settled in 1849 when Henry Lackey brought his nine children south from Missouri. A town blossomed around A. S. Lackey's grist mill, complete with a post office, churches, doctors, and the Bosworth Academy. When the Cotton Belt Railroad bypassed the site in 1888, residents drifted away, and Whitemound faded into memory.
Why it matters
Whitemound is a classic Texas ghost town whose rise and fall tracked the railroad, showing how a rail line's route could make or unmake a whole community.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Henry Lackey
- · A. S. Lackey
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First United Methodist Church
Tom Bean, TX
This Methodist congregation grew out of open-air brush arbor meetings at a rural campground in the mid-1880s, then followed its people into the new railroad town of Tom Bean. Fire, a tornado, and shared quarters with the Presbyterians all shaped its story, and a later sanctuary even preserved the heritage of a chapel from the nearby Perrin Air Force Base. It is a congregation whose home moved and rebuilt again and again as the community around it changed.
City of Tom Bean
Tom Bean, TX
Wealthy Bonham landowner and surveyor Thomas Bean donated fifty acres for a branch railroad from Sherman to Commerce, and the town of Tom Bean sprang up in 1887, the year he died. Nearby Whitemound, bypassed by the rails, lost its post office and its settlers to the new town. By the early 1900s Tom Bean boomed with a grain company, drugstore, newspaper, saloon, dance hall, and movie theater—until cars and the decline of cotton drew business away to Denison and Sherman.
Old Cedar Community
Sherman, TX
Settled in 1848 by Grayson County pioneers who reclaimed land from wilderness amid Indian raids and frontier hardship, Old Cedar quickly needed a cemetery—still holding some 400 graves, including one Union and eighteen Confederate veterans. As the community took root it built Cedar Academy in 1871, where students learned to make ink and split goose-quills alongside their lessons, and organized the Cedar Methodist Church the same year. Camp-ground revivals under brush arbors drew families from miles around each summer.
Kentucky Town
Whitewright, TX
First settled in the 1830s as Annaliza, this Grayson County community was renamed by Kentucky emigrants in 1858 and laid out in an unusual pattern meant to guard against raids on the frontier. A stop on freight and stage routes, it became a cradle of "Sacred Harp" shape-note singing and, during the Civil War, a rendezvous for the notorious Quantrill guerrilla band. Its layered history packs settlement, culture, and wartime lawlessness into one small crossroads.