Small Community and Cemetery
Edgewood, Van Zandt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Small community was settled by the 1870s; the first school was opened one-half mile east of this site about 1889. A Baptist church was organized in 1895. Three years later Willis R. Henson donated land for a cemetery on this site; its first recorded burial was that of Mrs. Mary Allen. A post office was established in the mercantile store of William Henry Luster in January 1900. Despite closure of the post office in 1907, the town continued to thrive, boasting a Church of Christ and a Methodist church, a drug store, doctor's office, barber shop, photographer, gin, grist mill, blacksmith and woodworking shop. Two churches merged with congregations in nearby Edgewood in the 1930s and 1940s and the school merged with the Edgewood school in 1949. The cemetery and Baptist church were all that remained of Small in 1999. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
By the 1870s farming families had put down roots in this corner of Van Zandt County, and within a generation the settlement called Small had a school, a Baptist church, a cemetery, and even a post office tucked inside William Henry Luster's mercantile store. For a few decades it hummed with the ordinary machinery of a rural East Texas town — a drugstore, a doctor, a barber, a photographer, a gin, a grist mill, a blacksmith, and a woodworking shop. As nearby Edgewood drew off its churches and its schoolchildren in the 1930s and 40s, the town quietly emptied, until by 1999 only the cemetery and the Baptist church remained.
Why it matters
Small's rise and fade mirrors the life cycle of thousands of self-sufficient farm hamlets that briefly dotted the post-Reconstruction South before consolidation and out-migration erased them from the map.
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Related people
- · Willis R. Henson
- · Mary Allen
- · William Henry Luster
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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