Poe Prairie

The school district that absorbed Poe Prairie belonged to a railroad town. The Handbook of Texas says Millsap began as a stagecoach relay station on the Weatherford to Palo Pinto road, got a post office in 1877, and in 1880 drew three small communities, Mineral City, Peck City and the relay station itself, to the Texas and Pacific line. By the 1890s it had a bank, a dozen other businesses, three churches, a ten-grade school called Millsap College and a weekly paper. Population rose from about 100 in 1890 to 800 in 1920 and fell to 261 by 1968.

What the plaque says

Poe Prairie The Poe Prairie community, made up largely of farm families, was named for early settler James William Poe (1853-1934), a Baptist minister who had moved here with his family in the mid-1870s. A cemetery was begun in 1879 with the death of one-year-old Johnie McCasland. Land for a cemetery, school, and church was later given to the community by the McCasland family. The school, begun in the mid-1880s, was merged with the Millsap School District in 1928. The cemetery stands as a physical reminder of the Poe Prairie Community. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 7.5 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Chandor Gardens — 12 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 22 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Acton State Historic Site — 26 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

More markers nearby

• Original Plant of Acme Brick Company — 0.9 mi
• Brock Methodist Church — 4.4 mi
• Weatherford, Mineral Wells and Northwestern Railway — 6.5 mi
• Jack Llewellyn Knight — 6.6 mi