Huron

Sources disagree on who Huron was. The marker says the post office took its name from Huron, youngest son of storekeeper Jehu Gist; the Handbook of Texas says residents named it for Huron Gist himself, the man who opened the general store. Either way the place was small. The Handbook adds a stone gristmill, a church and a three-room school, says the schoolhouse burned in 1918 and was replaced, and reports that the population apparently never exceeded fifty, though the plaque counts about 200 pupils in the school in the early twentieth century.

What the plaque says

Huron The U.S. Army established Fort Graham in this area in 1849. Although the fort closed in 1853, the presence of the troops stationed there had prompted the development of settlements throughout this part of Hill County. By 1860, James Monroe and Martha Louisa (George) Neal moved to this immediate area with their family, and the Elm Mott community developed around their property. Over the years, the Neal family donated land to local residents on which to build a school, teacher housing, a Methodist church, a tabernacle and a Woodmen of the World hall. The turn in the road known as Community Corner was the settlement's social center, and Elm Mott became the central stop between the communities of Whitney and Blum, established as railroad towns in 1876 and 1881, respectively. In the early 1880s, widower Jehu Gist moved to Elm Mott with his sisters and children and opened a general store that served the dispersed agricultural community. He later applied for a post office, which required that he find a unique name for the town. After several suggestions, the postal service approved the name Huron, the name of Gist's youngest son. The post office operated in the Gist store from 1897 to 1904. In the early part of the 20th century, the Huron School served about 200 students, and area residents supported three church congregations. Huron students consolidated into Blum and Whitney districts in 1949, but Cedar Creek Baptist Church, established in 1888, remains a spiritual and social center, as well as a gathering place for area residents and for descendants of early Huron families. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hill County Courthouse — 14 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Cleburne State Park — 18 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.
• Meridian State Park — 22 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Bosque Museum — 23 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.

More markers nearby

• Fort Graham — 3.1 mi
• Boesch House — 6.5 mi
• Whitney — 6.6 mi
• Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church — 6.8 mi