Fry's Gap

The Handbook of Texas ties the name to Sarah Fry, who lived in the area for many years. She sold the land for the Jacksonville townsite to the railroad on the condition that it build a depot near her home on Fry's Summit before January 1873. The Fry's Gap post office ran only from 1903 to 1905, and the Handbook says a town never grew up. Maps still showed a depot here in the mid-1930s. By the early 1990s a few scattered houses were all that remained along the Texas and New Orleans line.

What the plaque says

Fry's Gap Fry's Gap A gap in a ridge near Gum Creek headwaters made a natural trail for early travelers, including Kickapoo Indians. The Fry family settled along the creek in the 1840s. Early industry in the Fry's Gap Community included Joseph Fry's grist mill and blacksmith shop, as well as Rhome Ragsdale's brickyard, kiln, paint factory, cotton gin and corn mill. When the Texas & New Orleans Railway came through in 1902, it used the old trail for the line. The depot at Fry's Gap soon became a shipping point for produce, lumber and oilfield supplies. Fry's Gap was also winter home to the J. Doug Morgan traveling tent show in the 1920s. Fry's Gap faded, but descendants of its early settlers remain. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Railroad Excursion Train — 21 mi
  A round trip of about 25 miles of track between the Palestine and Rusk depots through the Piney Woods, on a line built by prison labor and reopened as a tourist railroad in 1976.
• Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center — 29 mi
  A Texas Parks and Wildlife hatchery and visitor center in Athens where visitors can borrow tackle and fish a stocked pond, watch native species in gallery tanks and ride a tram around the hatchery.
• New London Museum and Cenotaph — 30 mi
  A volunteer-run museum beside the pink granite cenotaph for the March 1937 school gas explosion, holding a model of the school, a blackboard from that day and an odorizer device.

More markers nearby

• Old Neches Saline Road — 1.9 mi
• Jackson Smith — 3.2 mi
• Jacksonville College — 4.0 mi
• Lon Morris College — 4.4 mi