Historical Marker
Longview
Longview, Gregg County · Texas
Erected 1963
TXGenWeb's history of Longview dates the town's first great shock to January 1929, when the Texas and Pacific moved its terminal to Mineola. Longview lost about 700 families and more than a million dollars in payroll. The Depression and a drought followed, and then oil was found in 1930. The same account puts the population at about 5,000 in 1930 and about 25,000 in 1935. The Handbook of Texas adds that Longview's post office receipts reached $100,000 by 1935 and its bank deposits rose from $500,000 to over $10 million.
What the plaque says
Longview Named for "long view" from Rock Hill when surveyors laid off townsite in 1870. Incorporated June 24, 1871. Became county seat of Gregg County; also railroad, agricultural and lumber center. Its history includes an 1894 bank robbery-- the last raid of the notorious "Dalton Gang". Early home of Governors Thomas M. Campbell and James S. Hogg. Since nearby 1931 Lathrop Well extended East Texas oil field into world's largest, it has been a petroleum, financial, industrial, medical, cultural, religious hub. Home of LeTourneau College. Historic sites marked. (1963)
Where it stands
32.51018, -94.81791 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- East Texas Oil Museum — 9.7 miA 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.
- New London Museum and Cenotaph — 20 miA 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.
- Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 26 miMaplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
- Harrison County Historical Museum — 26 miGalleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.