Munger Community

The Handbook of Texas gives the place a tangled start. It says the area post office was called Condor in 1899, the year George Johnson opened a store and became first postmaster. In 1902 the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway crossed Henry Martin Munger's farms and chose a station site on his land. By 1905 a Munger post office existed under William H. Ellington, with a blacksmith shop and a general store, though the Handbook notes a dispute over whether the two offices stood on one site. The school joined the Coolidge district in 1968.

What the plaque says

Munger Community In 1854, Ten Labors of Land (1770 acres) were surveyed in Limestone County for Jonathan Scott. In 1872, Henry Martin Munger moved his family from Rutersville (Fayette Co.) To Mexia. There he opened a lumberyard, planing mill, flour mill, grist mill and cotton gin. In 1876, Munger began to buy up and fence the entire Scott survey for a major cotton farm. Two of his sons, Robert and Stephen, expanded the family cotton operations. Robert, who patented several cotton processing machines and tools, moved to Dallas in 1885 to open his own manufacturing plant. The Munger Improved Cotton Machine & Manufacturing Co., later the Continental Gin Co., became the largest manufacturer of cotton-processing equipment in the U.S. Robert also developed the Munger place residential development in Dallas starting in 1905. Stephen joined Robert in Dallas in 1888. He became company president, director of City National Bank and trustee of Southern Methodist University. The Munger farm stayed in the family until 1920, and the family owned 22 gins in Limestone and Freestone counties. In 1903, the Munger family deeded right-of-way to the Trinity & Brazos Valley Railroad (T&BV, nicknamed the "Boll Weevil"), linking the community to other rail markets. By the late 1920s, the Munger community boasted a ten-grade school, Welcome Baptist Church, Munger Methodist Episcopal Church, and a cotton gin, depot, post office, general store, blacksmith, polling place and boy scout troop. The population declined in the 1930s as cotton prices dropped and improved roads opened. The school and rail line closed in 1942, and the two churches closed by 1948. Former residents held community reunions for several years, but today few historic reminders remain from this once-thriving rural settlement. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 14 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 14 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.
• Old Fort Parker — 19 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.
• Petroleum Industry Park — 25 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.

More markers nearby

• United Methodist Church of Coolidge — 4.5 mi
• Hubbard City News — 6.1 mi
• Hubbard — 6.1 mi
• Hometown of Tris Speaker — 6.1 mi