Lone Oak Baptist Church

Lone Oak took its name from a single large oak on the grass-covered prairie, the Handbook of Texas says. The first settlers arrived in the late 1850s, and a post office followed in 1869. The Katy reached the community in 1881, and it incorporated in 1890, with a steam gristmill, a gin, 800 residents, three churches, a school, the weekly Lone Oak Call and more than forty businesses. The population reached 1,200 by 1914, then fell to 735 by 1945. Lake Tawakoni, built two miles southwest in the early 1960s, slowed the decline.

What the plaque says

Lone Oak Baptist Church Organized 1858 by W. M. Pickett and Benj. Watson. The charter members were Thos. Hooker, first pastor; Mr. and Mrs. Jas. Simpson; N. T. Featherston; Jane Pitts; Harriet Lively; and Mr. and Mrs. Wm. McBride, who gave site for first church. After it burned, present one was built, 1899. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1970

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 12 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 — 27 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.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 29 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• Caddo Indians in Hunt County — 4.2 mi
• Isaac Newton Gresham — 5.1 mi
• Judge James Hooker — 5.5 mi
• Lake Tawakoni — 7.3 mi