Amy Settlement

Amy's school mattered more than its post office. The Handbook dates the school to about 1890, with Jim Smith among its first teachers, and records seventy-six pupils and one teacher in 1904. The settlement sat on the East Fork of Big Creek, three miles north of Cooper, on the A. Askey survey. In 1929 the school merged with Mulberry to form Clark School, and by 1936 maps no longer named Amy. A count in 1939 found one business and twenty-five residents, and in 1964 a few scattered houses marked the old site.

What the plaque says

Amy Settlement In 1875 brothers David, Harrison, Madison, and Addison Hobbs left Mississippi and settled here in what was then known as the Big Creek Thicket. A settlement named Hobbs Thicket emerged and in the early 1880s the 2-room Hobbs Thicket Schoolhouse was built. Although travel over the area's muddy roads was difficult, Hobbs Thicket grew and in 1894 local store owner Robert A. Nickolson applied for a post office. The U.S. Postal Service turned down the initial name request of "Hobbs" and substituted "Amy." Nicholson was selected Amy's first postmaster. By 1920 Amy consisted of a post office, doctor's office, telephone switchboard, general store, two churches, barber shop, blacksmith shop, and cotton gin with two large boilers fired by wood and coal. The gin burned down in 1924 and was never rebuilt. The cotton gin's closing precipitated a steady decline in the town. In 1928 the school merged with the nearby Mulberry School System, and in the 1950s Amy's last remaining church and general store closed. For many years after the town of Amy no longer existed a number of its former residents and their relatives continued a tradition established about 1920 of gathering together for homecoming activities. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cooper Lake State Park — 5.4 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 17 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Eiffel Tower — 18 mi
  A 65-foot Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat, built by the local welders' union in 1993 beside Paris's Love Civic Center.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 18 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.

More markers nearby

• Enloe United Methodist Church — 1.8 mi
• Texas Livery Stable — 3.4 mi
• Delta County — 3.8 mi
• Leroy Nelson DeWitt, Pioneer Citizen — 5.3 mi