Greenwood

Greenwood kept being rebuilt and kept burning. The Handbook of Texas says Wag Wilson built Rock Ranch, a stone house used as a fort during the settlers' conflicts with Native raiders, and that the Greenwood Male and Female Normal College opened in 1892 and ended when its building burned in 1908. The Campbell Hotel ran from 1895 to 1920. A series of fires hurt the town through the early twentieth century. The WPA built a stone school during the Depression, and in 1953 another fire took out half of Main Street, which was not rebuilt.

What the plaque says

Greenwood Pioneer settlers came to this area as early as the 1850s. Local tradition states that the Greenwood and Hart families were among the first settlers in the area, and that the community was named for the Greenwood family and the creek was named for the Hart family. As the town of Greenwood began to grow, businesses, churches, a cemetery, school, and Masonic Lodge were established. A post office was opened in 1877, and a town well was dug by John Karr Berry in the early 1890s. At its peak, the town boasted two saloons, four grocery stores, two drug stores, a hotel, bank, hardware store, barber shop, blacksmith shop, cotton gin, and the Greenwood Gazette newspaper. The Greenwood Male and Female College, although in operation for less than twenty years, provided quality education for young people of the community. This small settlement has served as a supply center for surrounding farming communities for over one hundred years. It has also been a center of social and religious activities. Three churches serve the Greenwood area: Greenwood Baptist Church, founded as Hart's Creek Missionary Baptist Church about 1872; Greenwood Methodist Church, founded about 1880; and Greenwood Church of Christ, founded in 1896. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wise County Courthouse — 12 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.
• Stonewall Saloon Museum — 22 mi
  Saint Jo's first permanent building, a stone saloon of 1873 with rooms upstairs for trail drovers, in a town named, the story goes, as a joke on a founder who did not drink.
• Denton County Courthouse-on-the-Square — 23 mi
  An 1896 courthouse by W. C. Dodson in Denton limestone, pink granite and two sandstones, restored in 2004, now a free county museum on a lawn holding the grave of John B. Denton.
• Great Hanging Memorial — 26 mi
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.

More markers nearby

• Slidell — 4.8 mi
• Cattle Trail Crossing — 10 mi
• Battle of the Knobs — 11 mi
• Forestburg — 11 mi