Knoxville

Tennessee immigrants settled the site in the late 1840s, and in 1854 William A. Pope opened a general store and a post office was established. By the Civil War Knoxville had four general stores, a gristmill, a sawmill, a distillery and a tanyard, and one church served Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians. When the International-Great Northern bypassed it in the early 1870s, most merchants and residents moved to the new railroad town of Troup. The post office closed in 1875, and within a few years Knoxville was a ghost town. By the early 1990s only a cemetery marked the site.

What the plaque says

Knoxville In 1854 Thomas Norman (1812-1859), a native of Tennessee, sold 2/3 interest in a 30-acre tract to William A. Pope and Archibald Carmichael. They sold town lots for Knoxville and in 1856, they gave 3/4 acre for a community church. Soon mercantile stores, a mill, distillery, blacksmith shop and a new school opened. Knoxville never had a saloon although all the stores sold whiskey. In 1872 the International Railroad Company opened the Palestine-Troup line. Businesses moved to Troup and Knoxville declined. The Knoxville cemetery is all that remains. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• New London Museum and Cenotaph — 13 mi
  A volunteer-run museum beside the pink granite cenotaph for the March 1937 school gas explosion, holding a model of the school, a blackboard from that day and an odorizer device.
• Goodman-LeGrand House and Museum — 22 mi
  A Tyler house begun in 1859 as four rooms, enlarged by the Goodman family over 73 years, and left to the city in 1939 with its furnishings, in a garden that fills a city block.
• Tyler Rose Garden and Rose Museum — 22 mi
  More than 38,000 rose bushes of about 600 cultivars in a free city garden, beside a museum of the Texas Rose Festival, which began in 1933, and of the rose industry.
• East Texas Oil Museum — 23 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

• Henry's Chapel United Methodist Church — 2.5 mi
• First Presbyterian Church, U. S. of Troup — 3.7 mi
• Robert Graves Stadler — 3.7 mi
• Site of Griffin — 4.1 mi