Hallsville

Hallsville's Handbook of Texas entry starts earlier than the railroad. W. C. Crawford built Fort Crawford about a mile west in 1839 for protection, and by 1849 it had a post office and a two-story building serving as church, Masonic hall and school, the only school in western Harrison County until 1868. When the railroad passed a mile north in 1869, settlers moved to it. The new town boomed to as many as fifty businesses, lost its western trade after the line reached Longview, and counted about 600 people in 1884 and 300 in 1892.

What the plaque says

Hallsville Formerly Hallville. Successor to Fort Crawford and Ash Springs, pioneer settlements of 1840s. Hallsville was founded when Texas & Pacific Railway was built. First train arrived Aug. 17, 1869. Western terminus for a time, and site (1870-73) of T. & P. shops, town attracted ox-wagon freighting in wool, cotton and buffalo hides from the West. Hallsville, named for Kentuckians Elijah and Volney Hall, received charter Aug. 13, 1870. Volney Hall was a vice president of the old Southern Pacific Railway, which was rechartered as the T. & P. Acquired Sub-Courthouse, 1965. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 12 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 — 13 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.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 13 mi
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.
• East Texas Oil Museum — 19 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.

More markers nearby

• Noonday Holiness Camp Interdenominational — 3.6 mi
• Old Grover Cemetery — 7.8 mi
• Johnny Cace's Seafood and Steak House — 8.2 mi
• Winterfield Methodist Church — 8.4 mi