Gregg County

The Handbook of Texas says Black residents outnumbered white residents in every census from 1880 to 1930 except 1920, making up 55 percent of the county in 1910 and 52 percent in 1930. It suggests that the county's Republican votes in 1880, 1884, 1896 and 1900 were probably tied to that Black population. Then the oil boom changed the count: between 1930 and 1940 the white population rose from 7,555 to 43,548, while the Black population rose from 8,198 to 14,423.

What the plaque says

Gregg County Formed from Rusk and Upshur counties. Created April 12, 1873; organized June 28, 1873. Named in honor of General John Gregg (1828-1864). Delegate to Secession Convention and to the Provisional Congress of the Southern Confederacy; a Confederate officer. Longview, the county seat.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• East Texas Oil Museum — 11 mi
  A Kilgore College museum that rebuilds the 1930s oil boom in a full-scale Boomtown with a general store, drugstore and newspaper office, plus dioramas, films and antiques given by East Texans.
• New London Museum and Cenotaph — 22 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.
• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 22 mi
  Maplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 22 mi
  Galleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.

More markers nearby

• The Grove — 0.3 mi
• First Methodist Church of Longview — 0.3 mi
• General John Gregg — 0.3 mi
• 1919 Longview Race Riot — 0.3 mi