McGregor

McGregor drew people from Banks, Comanche Springs and Eagle Springs, and the Banks post office moved to town in October 1882 with Thomas H. Baker still postmaster. By 1884 the town had a weekly newspaper, a school and several hundred residents, and it took a city charter in November 1886. The next years added two hotels, a national bank, a washing-machine factory, a tannery, a cottonseed oil mill and an artesian waterworks. The 1890 census counted 774 people, though other estimates ran as high as 1,500, and the 1910 count was 1,864.

What the plaque says

McGregor On September 7, 1882, lots in the town of McGregor Springs were sold at public auction. The event had been advertised statewide by the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad and the Texas and St. Louis Railway. The community was named for Dr. Gregor Carmichael McGregor (1824-1902), a pioneer Texas physician who later became a prominent Waco businessman. As the settlement grew away from the springs on Harris Creek, it became known as McGregor. Residents of such nearby pioneer settlements as Banks and Eagle Springs were among the first to move their families and businesses here. The post office was even listed as Banks for a short time in 1882. The first school,the McGregor Academy, was opened by J.S. Greenlee in 1883, four years before the McGregor Independent School District was created. The town ws incorporated in 1886 and A. H. Crain was elected to serve as the first mayor. Because of its location on major railroad lines, McGregor first developed as an agricultural shipping center. During World War II it experienced a period of intense growth due to the opening of an ordnance plant. Continued development has resulted from the town's diversified economy and rich heritage. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mother Neff State Park — 8.1 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 18 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 18 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 18 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.

More markers nearby

• McGregor Mirror — steps away
• First Christian Church of McGregor (Disciples of Christ) — steps away
• First Baptist Church of McGregor — 0.3 mi
• The Grange in Texas — 1.9 mi