HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded Age

Town of Gunter, on Old Gunter Ranch

Gunter, Grayson County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Established 1880s by Jot Gunter, developer of Texas real estate, prominent Grayson County businessman. In mid-1890s his ranch exceeded 20,000 acres. Gunter, born in North Carolina in 1845, came to Texas to practice law after he served in Confederate army. The town of Gunter, incorporated in 1914, was named for him.

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

The town of Gunter rose on the sprawling North Texas ranch of Jot Gunter, a North Carolina–born Confederate veteran who came to Texas to practice law and became one of Grayson County's leading businessmen and land developers. By the mid-1890s his ranch spread across more than 20,000 acres. The community that grew on his land took his name and was incorporated in 1914.

Why it matters

Gunter's story reflects the Gilded Age transformation of the Texas frontier, as vast cattle ranches gave way to the town-building and real-estate booms that settled the plains.

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Related people

  • · Jot Gunter

Themes & tags

Westward ExpansionFrontier HistoryLandmark

Nearby & related markers

Whitaker Cemetery

Gunter, TX

This Grayson County burial ground began in 1866 on J. W. Whitaker's farm with the interment of Joseph McLean, serving the Clayton schoolhouse community. Its settlers — farmers and ranchers who had come from Mississippi and other southern states — formally bought the cemetery in 1880 and kept burying their dead there. In 1967 their descendants founded an association that still tends the graves and holds a memorial service each May.

Elliott Cemetery

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David Elliott, born in Tennessee in 1817, went to sea young on the Mississippi and rose to riverboat captain before his ordination as a Baptist minister. In 1847 he settled in southern Grayson County, where he found unmarked pioneer graves in sandstone foreign to the area; when his daughter Virginia died in 1855 he buried her nearby, and the plot grew into a public cemetery. Maintained for decades by Pilgrim's Rest Baptist Church, which Elliott helped organize, it holds early teachers, longtime residents, and military veterans.

Hall Cemetery

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This burial ground sits on land patented under the Peters Colony, an immigration venture that received a huge Republic of Texas grant to draw settlers to North Texas. The cemetery began in January 1857 with the burial of Anderson White's daughter, and a week later her mother-in-law; White later reserved two acres and deeded them for a public cemetery. It takes its name from Benjamin F. Hall — minister, doctor, dentist, and lawyer — and holds the region's first settlers, Confederate veterans, and victims of the deadly 1896 Sherman tornado.

William Whitley Wheat

Howe, TX

William Whitley Wheat came to Texas from Alabama in 1842, joining the Peters Colony before settling in what became Grayson County, where he and his wife raised ten children. An early cattle drover who pushed herds to northern markets, he prospered as a farmer and served for years as county commissioner in the 1870s and 1880s. As the first president of the Old Settlers Association of North Texas, he worked to calm the frictions of the post-Civil War frontier.