Gober Garage

The Gober Garage ran on trust. A box of ticket books sat by the cash register, and customers who bought gas, parts or repairs said to put it on my ticket, with accounts settled monthly. Credit for farm-equipment repairs was sometimes extended free of interest until harvest, and one farmer said a tractor overhaul on credit saved his crop. The Glovers signed a contract on August 8, 1956 with E. F. Anderson for a 50-by-52-foot building of tile walls and steel trusses for $6,182.70. A porch offered water at one end and air at the other.

What the plaque says

Gober Garage Vernon C. Shive and John N. Glover operated a garage in Gober as early as 1933. After Shive died in 1944, John and Ruth Glover acquired a full share in the Gober Garage. In 1956, E. F. Anderson built a new facility with clay tile walls and steel trusses and windows. This vital community business offered maintenance and repair services for automobiles and farm equipment. It also became a community meeting place for farmers taking a break from their fields. Glover's family continued to operate the Gober Garage after his death in 1994, but the business closed a few years later. Its story reflects the dependency of many rural Texas towns on transportation in the 20th century. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 10 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 24 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 26 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 32 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.

More markers nearby

• Gober Public Schools — 0.2 mi
• Gober Baptist Church — 0.3 mi
• Site of Bartley-Woods School — 3.6 mi
• Portland — 3.8 mi