Garden Valley

Garden Valley's peak came in 1914, when the Handbook of Texas counts about 300 people, four cotton gins, six general stores and a telephone company. Dr. G. W. Matthews became the local physician in 1878, and by 1884 the settlement shipped fruit and cotton by rail from nearby Lindale. A 1903 survey lists a three-teacher school for 110 White students and a one-teacher school for 35 Black students, and in the mid-1930s the two schools still served about the same numbers. By the mid-1940s the population had fallen to about 150.

What the plaque says

Garden Valley On January 1, 1851, James L. Davidson purchased more than 1,000 acres in northwestern Smith County, the tract where he founded the town of Garden Valley. The next year, Garden Valley had a post office and its first public road, the approximate route of Farm Road 16 today. Two years later, the commissioners court of Smith County opened another public road, the Tyler to Garden Valley Road. Shortly after, Davidson built a store, which he named J.L. Davidson & Company, at the intersection of the two roads. In addition to his store, Davidson also installed a mill in Garden Valley by 1860. The town had a Methodist church by 1854, which also doubled as the site for the community school beginning in the 1860s. By 1870, Garden Valley saw an increase of residents, including two blacksmiths and several physicians. In 1871, the William Taylor Masonic Lodge, originally organized in nearby Flora, moved their meeting place to Garden Valley. Baptist worshippers also built a church here in 1877. During the early part of the twentieth century, the town experienced stability with several stores and cotton gins, but began to decline in the 1930s. The school eventually merged with Van Independent School District, the Methodist church dissolved and a new state highway bypassed the town, forcing the closing of the post office in 1952. The Garden Valley Resort and Golf Club, developed in the mid-1970s, preserves the name, and while the business district is gone and only the Baptist church and a few residents remain, Garden Valley remains one of the area's historic settlements. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tyler State Park — 15 mi
  A 985-acre park eight miles north of Tyler, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1935 to 1941 around a 64-acre spring-fed lake, with more than 13 miles of trails.
• Tyler Rose Garden and Rose Museum — 18 mi
  More than 38,000 rose bushes of about 600 cultivars in a free city garden, beside a museum of the Texas Rose Festival, which began in 1933, and of the rose industry.
• Camp Ford Historic Park — 18 mi
  A free county park north of Tyler on the site of the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi, with a kiosk, an interpretive trail and a historical society museum downtown.
• Goodman-LeGrand House and Museum — 18 mi
  A Tyler house begun in 1859 as four rooms, enlarged by the Goodman family over 73 years, and left to the city in 1939 with its furnishings, in a garden that fills a city block.

More markers nearby

• Union Chapel Cemetery and Church — 2.9 mi
• Duck Creek Soil Erosion Project — 5.2 mi
• In this vicinity extended the Vial-Fragoso Trail — 5.4 mi
• Jarman No. 1 Discovery Well — 5.8 mi