Starrville Community Center
Winona, Smith County, Texas
Marker Inscription
STARRVILLE COMMUNITY CENTER STARRVILLE WAS ORIGINALLY PART OF THE I.W. HALL SURVEY AND, BY 1849, THE TOWN HAD BECOME A STOP ON THE DALLAS-SHREVEPORT ROAD. IN 1852, REVEREND JOSHUA STARR BOUGHT THE LAND AND BEGAN SELLING TOWN LOTS. DURING THE SUMMER OF 1862, STARRVILLE WAS THE SITE OF GEN. HENRY McCULLOCH’S C.S.A. ARMY ENCAMPMENT IN PREPARATION FOR THE MARCH TO LITTLE ROCK. DURING THE LATE 1870s, LOCAL LEADERS REFUSED TO ALLOW THE RAILROAD TO RUN A LINE THROUGH TOWN AND RESIDENTS BEGAN MOVING TO WINONA. THE POST OFFICE MOVED TO WINONA IN 1907. A NEW SCHOOL WAS BUILT IN 1927 BECAUSE BAKER SPRINGS SCHOOLS CONSOLIDATED INTO THE STARRVILLE SCHOOLS. BY 1952, THE SCHOOL WAS ABSORBED INTO THE GLADEWATER SYSTEM AND LATER WINONA SCHOOL DISTRICT. THE SCHOOL, BUILT IN 1927, IS DESIGNED IN VERNACULAR STYLE WITH DOUBLE DROPPED SIDING. THE INTERIOR WAS BUILT WITH A SLOPING FLOOR AND SLIDING WOODEN DOORS THAT SEPARATE THE AREA INTO CLASSROOMS. AN AUDITORIUM WAS ADDED IN 1930 WHERE PLAYS AND MUSICALS WERE PERFORMED. LOCAL CARPENTERS FINIS WALTERS, LANCE LOWRY AND FRANK ALBA CONSTRUCTED THE SCHOOL. THROUGH THE YEARS, THE SCHOOL HAS ALSO SERVED AS A POLLING CENTER, THE SITE OF SMITH COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY PROGRAMS, EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS, OLD TIMERS REUNION, WEDDINGS, AND RECEPTIONS. IN THE 1940s, TWO ADDITIONAL BUILDINGS ASSOCIATED WITH THE SCHOOL WERE DONATED TO THE WATERS BLUFF AREA TO PROVIDE SCHOOLS FOR LOCAL CHILDREN. THE CENTER IS OPERATED AND MAINTAINED BY THE STARRVILLE COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENT COMMITTEE. THE COMMUNITY CENTER REMAINS A TESTAMENT TO THE PEOPLE’S COMMITMENT TO EDUCATION AND THEIR STRONG COMMUNITY SPIRIT. RECORDED TEXAS HISTORIC LANDMARK – 2012
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Starrville grew up along the Dallas–Shreveport road, becoming a stop by 1849 and taking its name from Reverend Joshua Starr, who bought the land and sold town lots in 1852. During the summer of 1862 it served as the encampment of Confederate General Henry McCulloch's army before its march toward Little Rock. When townspeople blocked the railroad in the 1870s, the community drifted toward Winona, but its 1927 schoolhouse endured—hosting classes, plays, reunions, and elections—and survives today as a community center kept up by local volunteers.
Why it matters
The center preserves the memory of a bypassed frontier town and stands as a testament to a rural community's lasting commitment to education and shared civic life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Starrville began as so many East Texas communities did, as a point on a road. The land was originally part of the I. W. Hall survey, and by 1849 the settlement had become a stop on the Dallas–Shreveport road, one of the arteries that carried travelers and trade across the region before railroads.
A road stop was a promising place to build a town. In 1852, Reverend Joshua Starr bought the land and began selling town lots, giving the community both its name and its ambitions. For a time it grew as a real center of local life, tied to the traffic moving between two important points.
That dependence on the road, and later on the railroad, would shape everything that followed. The story of Starrville is finally the story of a town that lived by its connections to the wider world, and then watched those connections move elsewhere.
People & events
Two chapters give Starrville its character. The first came in the summer of 1862, when the town served as the encampment of Confederate General Henry McCulloch's army as it prepared to march toward Little Rock. For a season a quiet crossroads was a mustering ground for men and matériel bound for the war.
The second chapter was the town's undoing. In the late 1870s, local leaders refused to let a railroad run its line through Starrville. Whatever their reasons, the decision was fatal to the town's future, and residents began drifting to nearby Winona, which the rails did reach. The post office followed them in 1907.
Yet the community's spirit outlasted the town itself. A new school was built in 1927 when the Baker Springs schools consolidated into Starrville's, its walls of double dropped siding raised by local carpenters, its interior fitted with a sloping floor and sliding wooden doors that could divide the space into classrooms. An auditorium was added in 1930 for plays and musicals, and in the 1940s two associated buildings were donated to serve children in the Waters Bluff area.
Its place in the American story
Starrville belongs to one of the most common and least celebrated stories in American history, the story of the town the railroad passed by. Across the country, the arrival or absence of a rail line decided which settlements grew into cities and which faded into memory, and Starrville chose, remarkably, to send the tracks away.
What makes this site more than a footnote is what the community did with what remained. The school absorbed its neighbors' schools, then was itself absorbed into larger districts, first Gladewater and later Winona. The town emptied, but the schoolhouse endured as the place where people still gathered.
That building has served as a polling place, a home for historical society programs, a site of old-timers' reunions, weddings, and receptions, all kept up by the local improvement committee. In an age when so many rural communities simply disappeared, Starrville's survival as a gathering point is a small national lesson in how memory and civic life can outlast the economy that first created them.
If you visit
Come here as a ghost-town traveler, ready to read absence as much as presence. The town that once bustled along the Dallas–Shreveport road is mostly gone, and part of what you are visiting is the quiet where a community used to be.
The schoolhouse is the thing to study. Look at the vernacular construction, the double dropped siding, and imagine the sloping floor and the sliding wooden doors that let one room become several. The 1930 auditorium is where the plays and musicals filled the building with sound; picture it in use.
Because the center is still tended by the community and hosts gatherings through the year, it is a living stop rather than a ruin, and it fits a road trip built around the vanished and half-vanished towns of Smith County. Read the marker with an eye for the three separate places it names, and let it remind you how a single decision about a railroad could redraw the map of a whole neighborhood.
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
- · Joshua Starr
- · Henry McCulloch
Themes & tags
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