Kerens

Kerens grew quickly and unevenly. The Handbook of Texas says two Corsicana attorneys, Samuel R. Frost and Bryan F. Barry, bought the plat and offered lots in 1881 and 1882, the post office opened in 1882, and the town incorporated in 1888. By the mid-1890s it had three cotton gin-mills, two hotels and a weekly paper, the Navarro Blade. In 1906 it ran two schools, one with 242 white students and one with 121 Black students. The population peaked at 1,800 in 1929.

What the plaque says

Kerens The Texas & St. Louis Railway built its narrow gauge line through Navarro County in 1881 and surveyed a 270-acre townsite here. The settlement was named for Richard C. Kerens (1842-1918), an official of the railroad in St. Louis, Missouri, who evidently never saw the town. Streets and blocks were laid out in relation to the railroad, and some streets were named for railroad officials: Senter, Humphreys, Goodman, and Sloss, renamed for Kerens' daughter Mrs. Hamilton Colket, who visited here in 1941. The railroad became standard gauge in 1887, and was renamed St. Louis Southwestern in 1891. Isolated cotton farmers moved from the prairie into the new town, and many residents of Wadeville (then two miles south) transferred their homes and businesses. In 1883 Theophilus Smith Daniel (1851-1933) moved his 1878 house from Wadeville to 200 S. Throckmorton Street in Kerens. Daniel was elected in 1888 to the first city council and was president of the first bank, established in 1900. The first cotton gin was built in 1883, and cotton seed oil was processed after 1899. City gins produced 23,000 bales of cotton in 1933. The building of a state highway in 1931 along Second Street, and decline of the cotton industry greatly altered Kerens' growth and economy. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — 14 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 27 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.

More markers nearby

• Josiah Martin Daniel — steps away
• Kerens Presbyterian Church — 0.2 mi
• Bazette Baptist Church and Cemetery — 4.0 mi
• Prairie Point Church and Cemetery — 5.0 mi