Coon Creek

Enslaved people were among the first to reach Smith Bend. The Handbook of Texas says John Jackson Smith's son Burton came to Bosque County ahead of his parents with horses, cattle and slaves, and that his was the first grave in the Smith Bend-Coon Creek Cemetery. His sister Ann and her husband, Silas McCabe, later joined the enslaved people who had accompanied Burton. The Handbook names none of them. By 1900 it says the numerous descendants of those enslaved at Smith Bend had virtually disappeared from the community.

What the plaque says

Coon Creek The Coon Creek Community evolved from the old Cyrus Community, the oldest settlement in southeastern Bosque County. The first settler was Temple Spivey who purchased land on the Brazos River in 1853. In January 1856, John Jackson Smith purchased 1,280 acres of land and sent his son, burton, to prepare the settlement. Burton Smith died in July 1856, and John Jackson Smith's son-in-law, Silas McCabe and his wife, Ann Smith, relocated from Dewitt County to the Smith Plantation. In august 1856, school district four was established and Silas McCabe opened a school in a one-room log cabin on the south side of Coon Creek opposite his home. In 1883, the Cyrus Community evolved into two separate communities. The area south of Coon Creek became known as Smith Bend and the area north of the creek as Coon Creek. The two communities share a cemetery established by John Jackson Smith in 1856: the Smith Bend-Coon Creek Cemetery. A new log school was constructed at Crystal Spring on Coon Creek, two miles west of McCabe's School. By 1900, a wooden frame schoolhouse was completed. In 1929, the existing schoolhouse was built. The Coon Creek Methodist Church Episcopal Church, south dates to 1874. In 1887, the Coon Creek Missionary Baptist Church of Christ was established. The existing church was constructed in 1916 and shared by the Methodist and Baptist congregations. The remaining remnants of the Coon Creek community include the 1909 home of William A. Vaughn, a two-story frame home known as the "pie" bonds house after Vaughn's son-in-law, Walter Pope "pie" Bonds. The school, church and historic home in Coon Creek continue to bond the community together. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bosque Museum — 13 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 19 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.
• Meridian State Park — 19 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Hill County Courthouse — 19 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.

More markers nearby

• Prairie Valley Community — 4.5 mi
• Towash — 6.8 mi
• Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church — 8.9 mi
• Whitney Memorial Park — 9.0 mi