Barry

Barry moved to meet the train. The Handbook of Texas says the 1886 town, with a gin and a post office in Taylor's General Store, stood a mile south of its later site, and residents shifted it to the tracks when the Corsicana-Hillsboro line was completed in 1888. Rural residents got mail service at the new site on May 16, 1904. By 1914 the town had about 400 people, two banks, a hotel and a weekly paper, the News. The school district merged into Blooming Grove's in 1958.

What the plaque says

Barry This agricultural community was named for Corsicana businessman Bryan T. Barry, who developed the land deeded for the townsite by early settlers Dave and Effie Wright. The Barry Post Office was established in 1886, the same year the St. Louis, Arkansas & Texas Railroad came through the town. The first post office was housed in the general store operated by Owen Taylor, who also was the town's first postmaster. Henry Allison later served as rural mail carrier for 40 years. Early businesses in Barry included the First State Bank, which operated from 1909 until 1931, grocery stores, gas stations, drugstores, blacksmith shops, a newspaper office, a meat market, a cafe, and a hotel. In 1910, W. T. Woodruff and R. W. Varnell formed Woodruff and Co., which sold dry goods, hardware, and farm implements. Settlers were attracted to the area by its rich farmland, and by 1920 most of the land had been cleared and planted in cotton. Barry's first cotton gin was established in 1899 by Dan McCammon, and E. Y.Jordan and Jack Hodge also operated early gins. Methodist and Baptist churches were organized by the end of the 19th century, and the Barry School, which opened in 1895, served the area until 1958. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — 10 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 23 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 23 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.

More markers nearby

• Barry Baptist Church — steps away
• Grange Hall Cemetery — 3.6 mi
• Blooming Grove United Methodist Church — 4.6 mi
• City of Blooming Grove — 4.7 mi