Site of Griffin
New Summerfield, Cherokee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Founded by settlers who came from Griffin, Georgia. In the early 1850s became a flourishing town. Birthplace of John Benjamin Kendrick (1857-1933), Texas cowboy who settled in Wyoming in 1879 after going up the trail for years with herds of cattle. He served in Wyoming State Senate, 1910-1914, Governor, 1914-1916, then as U.S. Senator, 1916-1933. Town of Griffin gradually lost people and businesses to railroad towns after 1872. Last store here was closed 1930.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settlers from Griffin, Georgia, founded this East Texas town, which flourished in the early 1850s before the railroad's arrival elsewhere after 1872 slowly drained away its people and trade. Its most famous son was John Benjamin Kendrick, born here in 1857, who went up the cattle trail to Wyoming and rose to become that state's governor and a U.S. senator. By 1930 Griffin's last store had closed, leaving a ghost town behind.
Why it matters
Griffin's rise and fall is a classic tale of how the railroad picked winners and losers among frontier towns, and it produced a trail-driving cowboy who helped shape the politics of the American West.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1850s, East Texas was filling up with families from the older Southern states, and Cherokee County drew its share. The town of Griffin was founded by settlers who came from Griffin, Georgia — people who carried their old home's name west with them, as migrants so often did, planting a piece of the familiar in unfamiliar country.
For a while it worked beautifully. Griffin flourished in the early 1850s, a busy little town in a region that was still very much frontier. In those years, before the railroads, a town's fortunes rode on the roads, the trails, and the trade that passed through. Location was everything, and Griffin, for a time, had it.
Then the ground shifted beneath every small town in America. The railroad decided who would thrive and who would fade, and it did so with brutal indifference. A town the tracks reached could boom; a town they bypassed could wither. Griffin's story — a bright beginning followed by a long, quiet decline — is one that played out thousands of times across the settling West.
People & events
Griffin's most famous son was John Benjamin Kendrick, born here in 1857. His life reads like the American West itself compressed into a single biography. He grew up to be a Texas cowboy, and in 1879 — after years of going up the trail with herds of cattle — he settled far to the north, in Wyoming.
Those cattle drives were the making of him. Moving herds hundreds of miles across open country was hard, dangerous, formative work, and it carried Kendrick from the piney woods of East Texas onto the northern grasslands, where a young man with grit and judgment could build something lasting. He did exactly that, trading the saddle for the responsibilities of a rising citizen of his adopted state.
From there he climbed steadily into public life. He served in the Wyoming State Senate from 1910 to 1914, became governor in 1914, and then went on to the United States Senate, where he served from 1916 until his death in 1933. Meanwhile the town that produced him was going the other way. After 1872, Griffin steadily lost its people and its businesses to the new railroad towns, and its last store finally closed in 1930 — a ghost town left where a flourishing settlement had been.
Its place in the American story
Griffin is a textbook example of how the railroad remade the map of America. In the span of a single lifetime, the iron road could turn a thriving town into an empty crossroads simply by running somewhere else. The winners and losers of westward expansion were often chosen not by soil or spirit but by the surveyors who plotted the next line — and Griffin lost that lottery.
But the same soil that produced a ghost town also produced a genuine shaper of the American West. Kendrick's arc — from a boy in a fading Texas town, to a cowboy on the long cattle trails, to a governor and United States senator — traces the very migrations that built the interior of the country. The great trail drives moved Texas cattle and Texas people north, and in doing so they knit the frontier together and populated new states.
That two such different fates could spring from one small place is the quiet lesson here. The story of the West is not only the story of towns that boomed, but of the countless ones that didn't — and of the restless people who left them to make their mark somewhere the tracks happened to run.
If you visit
Don't come to the site of Griffin, near New Summerfield in Cherokee County, expecting a town. That's the point of it. What flourished in the 1850s has long since returned to the East Texas countryside, and the marker stands as one of the few reminders that a community once thrived on this ground.
The experience here is imaginative rather than visual. Stand where the town stood and picture the store that stayed open until 1930, the families who arrived from Georgia full of hope, and the boy who grew up here before riding north with the cattle and never really coming back. A ghost town asks you to supply the life it has lost.
It makes a thoughtful stop for a traveler drawn to the vanished places of the American landscape. Pair it with the region's other historic sites and let it set the mood: a reminder that not every frontier dream lasted, and that the map we drive today was drawn as much by the towns that disappeared as by the ones that survived.
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
- · John Benjamin Kendrick
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Robert Graves Stadler
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Born in North Carolina, Robert Graves Stadler had already served in the War of 1812 and fought for Texas independence before buying land here in 1845 near the community of Griffin. By 1853 he had drawn relatives from North Carolina to settle around him, laying the groundwork for the farming community that became Blackjack. He died just as the Civil War began.
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