Jones' Mill Community

Shortly after 1900 the Selfs community, which grew up near where Jones' Mill once stood, had a business college. The Handbook of Texas says a Baptist minister, C. B. Hammett, founded North Texas Business College there, teaching office machines, telegraphy and other subjects. It drew students from Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma and ran about fifteen years. The Self brothers' gin and gristmill of the 1880s brought a post office in 1887 and a cooperative store by the mid-1890s; the post office closed in 1906. John Western Jones had built his flour mill about a mile north.

What the plaque says

Jones' Mill Community In the 1840s, New Jersey natives John W. and Tamson (Tamezine) Finley Jones settled in Fannin County. Joining them later, other family members included sons who had served as missionaries to the Choctaw and Chikasaw nations. The Jones' Mill Community arose around the family's flour mill and cotton gin. Four decades later, the Self brothers built a mill, and the population shifted and became known as the Selfs community. Eventually, Honey Grove became the predominant area settlement. Over the years, many from Jones' Mill contributed to development of churches and other institutions in Honey Grove. Today, the Jones' Mill community is represented by its historic cemetery (1/4 mi. E.), with grave markers dating to 1850. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 20 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 21 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 21 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Eiffel Tower — 23 mi
  A 65-foot Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat, built by the local welders' union in 1993 beside Paris's Love Civic Center.

More markers nearby

• Allen's Chapel Methodist Church and Cemetery — 4.7 mi
• Vineyard Grove Baptist Church — 5.0 mi
• The Historic Persimmon Grove and Capt. Hill's Military Camp — 5.7 mi
• Erwin Evans Smith — 7.9 mi