Isaac Newton Gresham

By 1902 Gresham had spent two decades organizing farmers. He joined the Southern Farmers' Alliance in 1881, spent four years starting suballiances in Alabama and Tennessee, and edited farm papers in Granbury and Greenville before taking over the Point Times. He had told the journalist Owen Pinkney Pyle of his plan for a new union as early as 1900. After founding it he started the union's paper, the Password, in Emory, and lost his leadership post in 1905 after an audit of his books. He died of appendicitis on April 10, 1906.

What the plaque says

Isaac Newton Gresham (Feb. 20, 1858 - April 10, 1906) In 1902 Alabama native Isaac Newton "Newt" Gresham was a Rains County farmer and newspaper editor. Wishing to help local farmers organize to take advantage of farm prices, he called a meeting in a nearby barn that summer. With an initial membership of ten neighbors, the Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union of America was founded. At first a secret organization, the idea soon spread throughout the south and west. The union eventually became a national organization. Gresham and his wife, Ida May, were the parents of four children. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 17 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.
• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 28 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.

More markers nearby

• Lone Oak Baptist Church — 5.1 mi
• Judge James Hooker — 5.6 mi
• Dougherty Community Cemetery — 6.2 mi
• Miller Grove School — 6.6 mi