Portland

Portland's social life lived in a churchyard and a quilting circle. A history in the Commission's files quotes an 1888 account of a store, post office, blacksmith and wood shop, and a schoolhouse used as church. During the Depression a quilting club made quilts from leftover cloth, ginned cotton carded at home and flour sacks, and gave many to needy neighbors. Revivals once ran two weeks under a tabernacle built about 1914, with buggies and wagons filling the yard and babies on pallets. Mothers sewed dresses from cloth bought off the chicken peddler with butter and eggs.

What the plaque says

Portland The earliest known settler in the Portland community was Jesse Green London (1843-1875). A native of Missouri and a Confederate veteran who brought his family here in 1873. Other early settlers included members of the Tefteller, Cline, Bell, Henderson, Goin, and Biggerstaff families. The small farming community boasted several business establishments, including a blacksmith shop and a wood shop by the late 1880s.The six-grade Portland School opened in 1879 and met in a one-room log building until the school district was consolidated with two other area schools in 1898. The grocery store served as a residence and post office as well. Founded at the end of the 19th century, the Portland Congregational Methodist Church worshiped in the old log schoolhouse until 1909 when a sanctuary was built at this site. The opportunity for Portland to grow and prosper was denied when the rail line was laid south of the settlement. Although a few homes and this church building are all that remain of the community, the settlers left a rich heritage for their descendants, many of whom still live in the area. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 9.4 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 22 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.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 31 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.

More markers nearby

• Ashley Lodge No. 681, A. F. & A. M. — 1.4 mi
• First Baptist Church of Bailey — 1.4 mi
• James Fowler Biggers — 3.3 mi
• Gober Baptist Church — 3.5 mi