Community of Jermyn

The Handbook of Texas adds to the plaque's account of the town's namesake: J. J. Jermyn was the son of Joe Jermyn, a coal magnate of Scranton, Pennsylvania. It dates the settlement's founding to 1902, which makes Jermyn one of the last towns established in Jack County, and says the Gulf, Texas and Western tracks arrived on October 21, 1909. By the 1920s the town had about 213 people, several stores, a bank, a church and a school. Afterward it served as a community center and shipping point for cattlemen, and it counted seventy-five residents in 1990 and 2000.

What the plaque says

Located on the western edge of Lost Valley, a 20-square mile area of Jack County, Jermyn was founded in 1909 as site of the roundhouse, depot, and office building for the Gulf, Texas & Western Railroad. It was named for J. J. Jermyn (1852-1928), line's president. Land for the town was donated by Oliver Loving II (grandson of "Dean of Texas Trail Drivers") and W. P. Stewart. Many lots were sold and the town embarked on two decades of prosperity and progress. A school was built about 1912 and Jermyn came to have numerous businesses, including a hotel, garage, bank, two general stores, blacksmith shop, land office, cotton gin and warehouse, restaurant, drugstore, ice house, lumber yard, confectionary, U.S Post Office, and a newspaper --The "Enterprise" -- succeeded by the "News". With the sale of the G.T. & W. Railroad to the Frisco system in 1930, however, a gradual decline set in. By 1936 the line curtailed passenger service, then all service. Highway construction hastened the railroad's -- and the town's-- economic demise as citizens moved to the cities to find work, and businesses closed. Today the post office, two churches, and a general store still function and part of the school serves as a civic center. Current economic base is ranching. (1972) (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 14 mi
  The northernmost post of the Texas frontier line, outside Jacksboro, where a stone hospital and six other buildings stand from 1867 and a later Guard unit became the Lost Battalion.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 16 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.
• Fort Belknap — 22 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.
• Royal Theater — 27 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.

More markers nearby

• Site of Loving Ranch House — 1.7 mi
• Lost Valley — 4.5 mi
• Bryson — 7.1 mi
• Hawkins Chapel — 7.5 mi