Industry & Invention

Rockport, TX

Civic leader and politician John H. Traylor built the sprawling Aransas Hotel across a full city block in 1889, giving the coastal town of Rockport a grand tourist draw. Its three stories held roughly 100 rooms and a dining hall seating 200, and guests enjoyed orchestras, plays, a mounted-bird display, beach facilities, yacht cruises, and surrey tours. Renamed the Del Mar in the 1890s and sold in 1910, it had fallen idle by World War I and burned in 1919.

Arlington, TX

Wealthy rancher and oilman W. T. Waggoner assembled a stable of fine Thoroughbreds and quarter horses in the 1920s and built Arlington Downs, a mile-and-a-quarter track with a 6,000-seat grandstand that drew thousands, celebrities among them. Waggoner and his sons campaigned to legalize pari-mutuel wagering, which Texas permitted only briefly, from 1934 to 1937. After the betting ban returned, the grounds hosted rodeos and other events until the buildings were razed in 1958.

Ely Township, MI

On November 3, 1926, the Barnes-Hecker Mine on Michigan's Marquette Iron Range collapsed and flooded in minutes, killing 51 men digging the red iron ore deep underground — the worst mining disaster in Michigan history. Only a handful of bodies were recovered; 41 of the dead remain entombed in the earth where they worked.

Mineola, TX

Built in 1906 by builder J. J. McLeod for the attorney Barney B. Hart, this Queen Anne home stood in Mineola nearly unchanged for a century, with its asymmetrical façade, complex roofline, and classically inspired columns. Hart family members lived there until 1982, and the house was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. Soon after that honor, in 2009, the home was destroyed by fire, leaving only the site.

Sherman, TX

In the 1870s a stock company built a hotel in Sherman named for major shareholder Judge C. C. Binkley, who also led the Merchants and Planters Bank. Two successive hotels burned—one fire reportedly set to mask a robbery—before a grand three-story house rose, tied closely to the bank and the nearby Sherman Opera House. Former President William Howard Taft spoke from its balcony in 1919, and after a name change to the Texas Hotel, the last building burned in 1967.

Tom Green County, TX

Broken in 1868 as the first cultivated land in Tom Green County, this tract was promoted by real-estate man J. C. "Jake" Marshall as a German colony and named for Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor" then rising to power in Europe. Its thick-walled stone farmhouse doubled as a shelter for Ben Ficklin stage-line horses and sold its entire crop to the soldiers of nearby Fort Concho; its sturdy roof even saved lives in the 1882 flood that leveled the town of Ben Ficklin.

Gorman, TX

When brothers George and Edward Blackwell returned to Eastland County with medical degrees from Baylor and Northwestern, they built the kind of institution a booming Texas frontier needed. Their 1919 Blackwell Sanitarium grew alongside the oilfields that were pulling thousands of new residents into the region, and the hospital raised its own livestock while wives Frankie and Bessie ran the kitchen and nurses doubled as housekeepers. It served Gorman for half a century before a larger facility replaced it in 1971.

Huntsville, TX

German immigrant Baldwin Boettcher opened a sawmill at Westfield in 1898, running a vertically integrated operation—timberland, tram lines, mill, kiln, and lumberyards—that turned out 15,000 board feet of pine, gum, and cypress a day. Workers, largely from the Martinez and Zamora families of Mexico, lived in a company mill town. After Boettcher died in 1912 his family carried on, relocating the mill to this Huntsville site in 1929 just as the stock market crashed; through the Depression and a late-1930s boom the family kept it running until closing in 1969.

Edom, TX

For decades the cotton gin was the beating heart of small-town Texas economies, and Edom's was no exception. Opened at this site in 1918 and run from 1924 by merchant C. W. Morris, the gin drew 700 to 800 farmers who depended on it during the frantic late-summer ginning season, sometimes running around the clock. After a fire destroyed the original machinery in 1929, diesel-powered equipment kept it going until it closed around 1946.

Belton, TX

Robert Childers, a pioneer settler and veteran of the 1836 Army of Texas, built the first water-powered mill in Bell County here in 1847. Sold in 1856 to G. W. Shanklin, who was said to have built the best water race in Texas, the site also served as a stage stand on the Old Military Road and a crossing point for cattle bound up the trail. It was a hub where settlement, commerce, and travel converged on the early Texas frontier.

Clifton, TX

R.G. Grant built a water-powered wooden mill on the Bosque River here in 1857, and during the Civil War the building served as a commissary and storehouse for the Confederate Army. Under later owner William Kemp, a new stone mill supplied flour and cornmeal hauled by ox cart to frontier settlements and forts across West Texas, and former governor and U.S. senator Richard Coke once held an interest in it. Rebuilt with a distinctive mansard roof and cupola, the mill later became an electric power plant before it was demolished in 1915.

Bacliff, TX

Established in 1910 by landowners G. C. Perkins and W. Y. Fuqua, Clifton-by-the-Sea was a bayside resort that rose as prosperity returned to Galveston County after the catastrophic 1900 storm. Reached by the rail line along Galveston Bay's western shore, it offered a hotel, summer homes, and a pier-mounted bathhouse and pavilion that hosted dances with Houston and Galveston orchestras. Hurricanes repeatedly wrecked the resort until a 1943 storm ended it for good; after World War II the area became home to petrochemical workers and, in 1948, took the name Bacliff.

Mineola, TX

After moving to the railroad town of Mineola in 1897, Dr. Walter Jackson Coleman was persuaded to open a pharmacy, launching the Coleman Family Drug Store in 1902. He earned his patients' trust with house calls and by accepting food as payment, while his son Charlie mastered patent formulas and won a pharmacist's license. Two more sons ran an adjoining clinic in the 1930s, and the family business served Mineola until 1964.

Lancaster, TX

In 1862, with the Confederacy scrambling to arm itself, a partnership of Dallas-area men set up a small factory here to manufacture pistols for the State of Texas. Frontier Texas had little heavy industry, so improvised arms works like this one were vital to supplying troops far from the Southern manufacturing centers of the East.

Laredo, TX

Coal mining along this stretch of the Rio Grande above Laredo reached back to Spanish times, but it boomed after Welsh engineer David Darwin Davis found coal veins in Webb County and became superintendent of the Cannel Coal Company in 1888. The company town—renamed Darwin around 1900—swelled with miners, many from Mexico, and gained stores, restaurants, and boardinghouses during the 1900–1910 boom. As petroleum replaced coal, Darwin declined, and by 1930 it was all but abandoned, leaving a mine dump and cemetery behind.

San Antonio, TX

Built in 1734 for prominent Bexar citizens Geronimo and Javiera Cantu de la Garza, this block-long Spanish colonial compound had limestone walls three feet thick and lush gardens. Generations later, José Antonio de la Garza used its vault to safeguard merchants' valuables and, granted royal permission in 1818, minted the small coins called 'jolas'—making the home likely the first mint in Texas. During the 1835 Siege of Bexar, Ben Milam's troops battled two days to seize the fortress-like compound as their headquarters, and Milam died taking the city.

South Bend, TX

After repeated failures, the Donnell family completed a dam and mill on the Clear Fork in 1876, and for nearly half a century it ground meal and flour for a vast frontier region. The mill yard became a community gathering place beside a river crossing once traveled by the 2nd U.S. Cavalry under Albert Sidney Johnston and Robert E. Lee. From this hard-won settlement grew Eliasville and a lineage that produced two University of Texas presidents.

Belton vicinity, TX

John Thornton Dulaney left Virginia in 1849 to chase the California gold rush, then settled in Bell County, Texas, where after the Civil War he built a bustling farm complex around a grist mill, cotton gin, store, and blacksmith shop. A tinkerer by nature, he machined his own mill parts and often fed 35 people a day, including his millhands. His enterprise anchored the neighborhood—complete with a church and school he built—until it wound down around 1912.

Hemphill, TX

East Mayfield sprang up here in 1912 around a large sawmill built by Hiram Knox of the Knox Lumber Company, and was named for Texas Railroad Commissioner Earle B. Mayfield. Incorporated in 1914, the company town swelled to roughly 1,200 people with homes, businesses, churches, a school, a movie theater, and a hospital. But once the surrounding timber was cut out and the mill burned in 1937, there was nothing to rebuild for, and the town emptied out.

Austin, TX

Edward Mandell House came to Austin in 1885 drawn by the pull of state politics, and he became one of the most influential operators of his era, managing the campaigns of four Texas governors. In 1912 he steered Woodrow Wilson to the Democratic presidential nomination, moving onto the national and world stage. The rambling shingle-style home built for him on this site in 1890 hosted many political meetings before it was sold in 1914 and finally razed in 1967.

Orange, TX

Chartered in 1856, the rail line reaching Orange was meant to knit Texas to a trade route pushing west from the Mississippi. Because the tracks halted at the Sabine River, the first depot here earned the name End of the Line Station, where trains unloaded cargo for transfer to riverboats and ocean freighters. Service continued in part through the Civil War—when some nearby rails were torn up to fortify Sabine Pass—before the interstate route was finally completed in 1881.

Alvarado, TX

As cotton spread across Johnson County in the 1890s, John Ezell built a gin on his land midway between Alvarado and Cahill in 1896, and it quickly became a major rural enterprise. Fire destroyed it in 1899, but Ezell rebuilt with new equipment before the next season. J. Otto McLeroy took over in 1917, and the gin—served by two rail lines carrying cotton to Dallas, Fort Worth, and Waco—operated until 1948 before its building burned in 1953.

Alto, TX

Fastrill was a company town built by the Southern Pine Lumber Company in 1922, its name stitched together from three men tied to area logging. At its peak it held 600 residents—Anglo, African American, and Mexican American in separate sections—served by a general store that began in a boxcar, a school, and worship structures, while 200 loggers cut 50 million feet of timber a year. When the surrounding pine was exhausted, the company closed the town in 1941 and moved the workers' families to Diboll, leaving only two graves behind.

Rusk, TX

In 1847 land speculator James Ferguson bought 1,600 acres in Cherokee County and built a mill, running it for several years before losing it to a court judgment. In 1869 Charles E. Ford, a New England Quaker, bought the mill and modernized it to grind corn, saw lumber, and repair machinery, building a small empire of 14 gins and mills across the county. His son kept the mill turning until 1917; today only the mill pond and traces of the race remain.

La Feria, TX

La Feria's first bank opened in this building soon after its 1912 founding, just as the Rio Grande Valley's railroad-fed farm boom was drawing settlers and capital south. Founded by Illinois-born Bailey H. Dunlap — who became the town's first mayor in 1915 — it won a state charter, was rechartered as a national bank in 1925, and moved to new quarters by 1927.

Pittsburg, TX

In 1898, at the request of a local coal-mining firm, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie put up $5,000 to match community pledges and build the first of 31 Carnegie libraries in Texas here in Pittsburg. The masonry building did triple duty as library, opera house, and city hall, holding 3,000 books and hosting professional drama, lectures, graduations, and clubs — including women stitching supplies for World War I hospitals. It anchored the town's cultural life until a modern school opened in 1926, and the library itself burned in 1939.

Whitley County, IN

In 1836, as northern Indiana was being carved into farms and townships barely a decade after statehood, Richard Baughan claimed 240 acres of this land directly from the federal government. By 1841 he had raised a combined flour and saw mill on the site, the kind of water-powered enterprise that anchored a frontier settlement — grinding the settlers' grain and cutting the lumber for their first real houses. The same ground served as the seat of Whitley County's earliest court, making it both the commercial and civic heart of a county just finding its feet.

Jefferson, TX

This site marks the first ice factory in Texas, an innovation that transformed daily life in the state's punishing climate. Before mechanical refrigeration, ice had to be shipped south at great cost; the arrival of local ice manufacturing in the late nineteenth century revolutionized food preservation, brewing, and everyday comfort. The works here are associated with the Blackburn Syrup operation in the river town of Jefferson.

Evadale, TX

Benjamin Richardson, a de Zavala colony settler who arrived around 1830, made his home on a bluff over the Neches and, with his sons, ran a ferry that proved a lifeline during the 1836 Runaway Scrape, when panicked civilians fled Santa Anna's advance toward the U.S. border. The place was later renamed Ford's Bluff for a milling family, and in 1904 the Kirby Lumber Company built a sawmill here, giving the site its final name, Evadale, in honor of a local schoolteacher.

Fort Worth, TX

In 1901 the Texas Legislature cleared the way for an electric interurban line linking Fort Worth and Dallas, and within a year the overhead wires were humming. The thirty-five-mile trip took just over an hour, cars carried up to forty passengers, and riders could flag the train down anywhere along the route. Paved highways eventually stole its traffic, and the last car rolled on Christmas Eve, 1934.

Junction, TX

Chartered in 1896, this dam and its network of irrigation and power ditches were meant to run mills, supply a young town's water, and green the surrounding ranch land. Built of native stone and cypress, the main ditch ran wide and deep, carrying water into the mid-1920s before proving unprofitable. The charter was finally forfeited in 1950.

Emory, TX

In 1905 Walter B. Fraser built a pioneering plant here that turned local clay into bricks and hollow building tile — the first industrial factory in Rains County, employing about forty men. When a post office opened nearby in 1909, it took the name "Ginger" from the distinctive burnt-clay color of the bricks. Operations wound down as the clay supply neared exhaustion in the 1940s, though the wider business prospered at other Texas sites until it was sold in 1961.

League City, TX

Beginning in 1887, Galveston County ran a 213-acre poor farm on the banks of Clear Creek, where the indigent, elderly, ill, and convicted lived and worked the fields — a common way local governments met public need before modern welfare. Chronically underfunded and dogged by complaints, it closed by 1913; the land lay idle until the late 1920s, when it was reborn as a public park, today's Walter G. Hall Park.

Houston, TX

An 1840 attempt by merchant Andrew Briscoe and the Harris family to build a railroad to the Brazos failed, but their Harrisburg holdings passed in 1847 to investors led by San Jacinto hero Gen. Sidney Sherman. Chartered in 1850, the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado carried the first train passengers in Texas history on April 21, 1853—fittingly, to a celebration saluted by the "Twin Sisters" cannon of San Jacinto. Its depot, roundhouse, and docks once stood a block north of here.

Abilene, TX

John and Laura Hudson Guitar came to Abilene from Missouri in 1898, already wealthy from a chain of cotton gins and oil mills strung along the Texas & Pacific Railroad, along with ranching and real-estate interests. In 1910 they completed a grand $75,000 mission-style mansion here — five bedrooms, marble and stained glass, and novelties like intercoms, security lights, and a bowling alley with an early pin setter — where they raised eight children as a showplace of Abilene society. Left vacant after Laura's death in 1948, the deteriorating house was razed by the family's heirs in 1964, its ornamental stone griffin preserved in local collections.

Athens, TX

When Charles H. Hawn stepped off the first train to reach Athens in 1881 with a load of lumber, he quickly became the town's leading builder, praised as "adept as an architect and master builder" and credited with its 1885 courthouse and many early homes and storefronts. In 1886 he and his wife Lillian founded the Hawn Lumber Company, which supplied and framed much of the growing county seat. Passed to his son William and kept in the family until 1997, the firm shaped Athens' built landscape for well over a century.

Rockport, TX

As World War I demanded ships, the Heldenfels Shipyard rose on nearly thirteen acres of Rockport waterfront in October 1917 to build four 281-foot wooden cargo vessels for the military. At its peak more than 900 men worked here, and the "Baychester" and "Zuniga" slid into the water in 1919. When the war ended and a hurricane battered the yard, the last two hulls were finished as barges in 1920, closing out the contract.

Sunray, TX

Before the mid-1880s the open Texas Panhandle had no range fences, so winter blizzards drove cattle from Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas south onto Texas ranches, overgrazing the Canadian River breaks and mixing herds. To stop the costly spring sorting, ranchers with brands like the Turkey Track, Bar C, and LIT joined to build a single drift fence along their northern lines — a four-strand, four-barb barrier some 200 miles long, running from the Panhandle's corner into New Mexico. Built from roughly 65 carloads of wire and posts hauled from Dodge City, most of it was torn down by 1890 to comply with a state law against fencing public land.

Dumas, TX

Before the mid-1880s the Texas Panhandle had no range fences, so winter blizzards drove cattle south from Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas onto Texas ranges, mixing the herds and overgrazing the Canadian River breaks. To stop the costly spring separations, ranches like the Turkey Track, LX, and LIT joined to build a 200-mile, four-strand barbed-wire drift fence — until an 1889 state law against fencing public land forced most of it down by 1890.

Rotan vicinity, TX

Ranchers John and William Hittson were among the first to settle here around 1870, and the community that grew near their homes took their name. A post office, school, store, and church followed, and oil discovered after World War I brought new income. Yet the labor drain of the Second World War left its small family farms unable to survive, and by the century's end only a few homes and a cemetery remained.

Pecan Gap, TX

Virginia-born educator Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday bought hundreds of acres in Fannin County in 1870, farming the land and running a cotton gin whose timbers later became the surviving barn. His youngest daughter Ela grew up in his footsteps and in 1913 founded the Hockaday School in Dallas, which won national standing as a college-preparatory school for girls. From this rural homestead ran a thread connecting frontier farming to one of Texas's most respected educational institutions.

Village of Floral Park, NY

In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, this spot on Long Island was the heart of one of America's great mail-order seed and bulb empires. John Lewis Childs built his home and seedhouse here, and the flower fields and catalog business he grew were so central that the surrounding community took its name — Floral Park — from them. Childs was more than a nurseryman: he served as the village's founder and first president, sat in the New York State Senate, and published horticultural writing that carried the gospel of gardening across the country.

Thurber, TX

Around 1895 the Texas and Pacific Coal Company built the first-class Hotel Knox in its company coal town of Thurber, where it housed and entertained the mine's white-collar staff beside the mining office run by general manager William Knox Gordon. After the hotel burned in 1907, the Plummer Hotel replaced it. Thurber itself was dismantled in the 1930s, though the ruins of the mining office lingered for decades.

Daingerfield, TX

This factory built the machinery that kept Texas agriculture running: gin saws to strip seed from cotton and grist mills to grind corn into meal. When the Civil War cut off imports, such local works became vital, letting Texas process the cotton that served as the "money of the Confederacy"—traded across the Mexican border for ammunition, medicine, and other goods. The war spurred a whole network of Texas plants making wagons, guns, powder, shoes, and cloth.

Portland, TX

Before dawn on September 14, 1919, a hurricane that had gathered strength in the Gulf for two weeks drove a wall of water—carrying oil, timber and cotton bales—across North Beach, sweeping vacationers into Nueces Bay despite frantic evacuation warnings. Though the official toll was 284, estimates including those lost at sea reach a thousand. Survivors buried the dead in mass graves using farm tools, and about a hundred yards east of this spot lay one of those burial grounds until the bodies were reinterred a month later.

Ranger, TX

By 1917 area farmers and ranchers were reeling from drought and boll weevils when Texas and Pacific Coal Company manager William Knox Gordon bet that oil lay far deeper than earlier dry holes had reached. Contractor Warren Wagner drilled here on J. H. McCleskey's farm, and on October 17, 1917, at 3,432 feet the well roared in at an estimated 1,600 barrels a day. It ignited the wild, prolific Ranger boom, whose oil helped relieve wartime shortages and let the Allies, as the saying went, 'float to victory on a wave of oil.'

Longview, TX

Here in 1871, at just twenty years old, James Stephen Hogg founded his first newspaper, the Longview News. In its pages he pressed for better schools and government while campaigning against radical Reconstruction policies, railroad subsidies, and frontier lawlessness. The three-year venture sharpened the leadership that carried him to become, in 1891, the first native-born governor of Texas.

Austin, TX

New York native John Bremond opened a dry goods store here as early as 1847, and by the 1860s he and his sons had built John Bremond & Company into a cornerstone of Austin commerce. The family helped launch the city's first hook-and-ladder company and championed the railroad that reached Austin in 1871; a back room even birthed what became the State National Bank. The firm later roasted and shipped its own coffee statewide before closing in 1967, its old limestone building reputedly Austin's oldest commercial structure at its 1979 demolition.

Berkeley, CA

By 1900 downtown Berkeley had grown up around Shattuck Avenue, and on this site stood a brick livery stable run by John Fitzpatrick, an early operator of the Ocean View Trolley, offering hacks and carriages at all hours. In 1910 the Berkeley Farm Creamery took over the site, selling dairy from nearby farms including Strawberry Canyon's Such Ranch. In 1936 the West Coast's first Red Cross chapter — organized in 1898 during the Spanish-American War — bought the property for its headquarters.

Poteet, TX

This land along the Atascosa River was first set aside in the 1700s for a San Antonio mission, then lay unsettled until José Antonio Navarro secured it as a Mexican land grant in 1831. Navarro was no ordinary rancher—in 1836 he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence—but by the 1850s he had made this his working ranch, running hundreds of cattle and summering in a log house above the river. He passed the ranch to his sons after the Civil War, and it stayed in the family until 1894.

Forest, TX

Miller Bill Spinks rebuilt his sawmill here in 1891 beside a rail spur known as Spinks' Switch, and a company town of workers' houses grew up around it. New owners renamed it Kilraven in 1909 by fusing the surnames Kiley and Craven, and at its peak the mill supported some 250 people. When the surrounding timber ran out, the mill was dismantled in 1921 and the town simply vanished, leaving only a mill pond behind.

Palestine, TX

In 1941 the Pennsylvania-based Knox Glass Bottle Company chose Palestine for a new plant, drawn by rail access, cheap natural gas, and an eager chamber of commerce that assembled the deal. Its 90-ton furnace began turning out clear glass jars that July, and at its peak the plant employed more than 450 people making containers for the food and home-canning trades. It anchored the local economy for over four decades before closing in 1984, its final dated jars kept as keepsakes.

Plainview, TX

On the arid High Plains, water was everything, and Plainview's civic leaders staked the town's future on finding it underground. In 1911 they bored the region's first deep wells, and the next year the Texas Land & Development Co. sank a demonstration well that filled Lake Plainview—billed as the largest body of water in Texas fed by a well. Popular but costly, the lake reverted to nature after a 1917 fire destroyed its pump house.

Lometa, TX

Lometa began as a railroad town in the mid-1880s, and when a second line arrived in 1909 the railroads needed water for their thirsty steam locomotives. A dam completed in 1911–12 backed up Emory and Salt Creeks into a lake—known as Santa Fe Lake—that watered the trains and doubled as a recreation spot. As diesel engines replaced steam, the need faded, and the reservoir was retired in the 1970s.

Jermyn vicinity, TX

J. C. Loving, son of the legendary trail driver Oliver Loving, built his ranch house here in 1872 at the height of the open-range cattle era. He became a founder and the first secretary of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, which held its first office at this very ranch. The operation later passed to his son, Oliver II.

Fort Worth, TX

Before 1905, Fort Worth's live entertainment meant saloons, dance halls, and church socials — until Karl Hoblitzelle founded the Interstate Amusement Company and made the city a stop on his vaudeville circuit. Built in 1910–11, the lavish "Atmospheric" Majestic Theatre dazzled with Turkish rugs, gold-leaf ceilings, marble floors, and reportedly the nation's first indirect stage lighting. Will Rogers, Tallulah Bankhead, and Fred Allen all performed here before the theater turned to movies and was finally razed in 1970.

Fulton, TX

The ruined rendering vat here marks the Marion Packing Co., one of a dozen or more meat-packing plants that sprang up around Rockport and Fulton in the 1860s and 1870s to process the vast herds of range cattle roaming Texas after the Civil War. Beef was dried, salted, or pickled for shipment, while tallow, hides, horns, and bones went east to factories. Like most coastal plants, it thrived until about 1880, when driving cattle to northern markets proved more profitable.

Lufkin, TX

In 1908 Daniel Webster Martin and his two sons opened a small wagon shop in Lufkin, where Martin, an inventor and designer, developed specialized wagons for the booming lumber industry. Incorporated as the Martin Wagon Company in 1910 with partner B. L. Zeagler, the business thrived until the Depression cut demand for timber products. It was later absorbed by the Lufkin Foundry and Machine Co.—renamed Lufkin Industries—and became the seed of that company's trailer division.

McAllen, TX

McAllen's first doctor arrived in 1906, and over the following decades a series of physicians built the town's medical infrastructure—among them Dr. Carlos Balli, the first Hispanic to practice here, known for making house calls on horseback. Private clinics gave way to the first municipal hospital in 1925 and a larger facility on Main Street in 1928, expanded repeatedly through the mid-twentieth century as the population grew. The long-serving hospital building on this site was demolished in 1993.

Palestine, TX

After James B. McKnight ran a saddlery and farrier shop on this Palestine block in the late 1800s, the property passed in 1910 to the Farmers and Citizens Bank, founded by African American businessmen in 1906. For the next 35 years the block—known as McKnight Plaza and fondly called "on the square"—thrived as the commercial heart of Palestine's Black community, packed with the offices of doctors, dentists, druggists, cafés, barbers, and a funeral home. Its social life centered on the Missouri Pacific Colored Booster Club, which sponsored dances and events until the building was razed in 1945.