Cottondale

Cottondale is a town the railroads skipped. The Handbook of Texas calls it one of the oldest communities in Wise County, settled in the early 1850s, and says landowner B. F. Banks offered ground to anyone who would build a house or business. The settlers wanted Cotton Valley, but another town already held the name, so postal authorities substituted Cottondale for the post office of 1875. Growth stalled as cotton declined. The post office closed in 1912 and the only school in 1933. Population was eighty-seven through the 1930s and 1940s, then twenty, then seventy-five by the mid-1960s.

What the plaque says

Cottondale Area's oldest settlement. Platted by landowner B. F. Banks, who also gave lots for public use named, 1875, for lush growth of cotton planted by John Bridges, blacksmith, to finance a trip to Alabama to bring back his bride. Paradise took over town's post office, (1912); school (1933). (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wise County Courthouse — 14 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's granite Romanesque courthouse of 1895-96 in Decatur, built after fire destroyed the Second Empire courthouse and set off a fight over the county seat.
• Chandor Gardens — 22 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 26 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 28 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.

More markers nearby

• "Machine Gun" Kelley — steps away
• Site of Old Town Paradise — 5.3 mi
• Keeter Cemetery — 5.8 mi
• Dr. M. W. Matthews — 6.1 mi