AS TIME GOES BY
Wood County History
By LOU MALLORY —
Chairperson, Wood County Historical Commission
Another early Wood
County community - Smith, Texas 10-15-05
This early Wood
County community was also known as Terrapin
Neck. It was located just north of the
intersection of FM 2659 and 2911, three miles
northeast of Hawkins in southeastern Wood County
near the Upshur County line.
Settlers from
Alabama, including Dr. O.S. Fitts, J.R. Mooney
and a Mr. Smith arrived in the area as early as
1845 or 1856 and a cemetery called Smith was
established sometime before 1864. In the 1870s,
another wave of settlers from Alabama moved to
the community. Among were Alfred Snider, Richard
Webb Faulk and Philip Marion Faulk.
P.M. Faulk, who
arrived with his wife Mary Jane Routen Faulk and
their nine children in late 1875, gave Smith its
alternate name of Terrapin Neck due to the large
number of terrapins that were attracted to a
low-lying stretch of his land near Big Sandy
Creek.
Faulk served as
county commissioner between 1884 and 1890. He
was also among the charter members of the Paron
Primitive Baptist Church, which was organized in
November of 1888 in the Cox schoolhouse near
Smith.
The Smith farming
community was widely dispersed along a stretch
of the Snider Bridge Road south of its
intersection with Big Sandy Creek. Many
farmsteads in the area had sharecroppers.
Before 1910, John
C. Faulk ran a gin and a livestock dipping vat
in the community. Sawmills, including an early
mill called the Smith Sawmill, were also
important to the local economy until the 1920s.
Smith reportedly
only ever had one store, which opened sometime
after 1870. The Smith school district was
established and a school was built near the
Smith Cemetery after a 1903 petition which
requested a school closer to the main community.
Around 1905, the
Paron Church was moved closer to the Smith
school and cemetery. In the 1930s, Smith had two
churches and a school. The 1932, the school
served 54 white students and 23 black students
in nine grades and seven grades respectively.
At this time, the
community, still extensively populated with
descendents of the original Faulk settlers,
remained predominantly Primitive Baptist. By
1960, only a few widely scattered buildings, the
Paron Church, and a cemetery across the Upshur
County line, remained in the immediate vicinity.
The 1988 county
highway map shows a church and a cemetery at the
site of Smith. Additionally, about three miles
north is the Paron Church and cemetery, which
may mark the site of the Paron Baptist Church
before it was moved closer to the Smith school
and cemetery.
Settlements come,
settlements go — under the sands of time.