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Hawkins-Holly Lake Ranch, Texas - GAZETTE ARTICLE ONLINE

WOOD COUNTY HISTORY - AS TIME GOES BY

 

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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.

 

 

 

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