Quinlan

Quinlan's Handbook of Texas entry counts the town's growth in small steps: 362 people in 1900 and 463 in 1904, 537 by 1910 and 600 by 1914, when it had twenty businesses, a bank and a weekly newspaper. By 1925 it was a retail center for southern Hunt, northern Kaufman and Van Zandt counties, with 35 businesses and about 5,000 bales. The count of 512 in 1933 hardly moved until Lake Tawakoni, four miles away, lifted it to 1,002 in 1988. The namesake, the Handbook says, was railway manager George Austin Quinlan.

What the plaque says

Quinlan The city of Quinlan began about 1892 as a stop on the Texas Midland Railroad. Owned by famed bond investor Hettie Green, called by the contemporary press "the witch of Wall Street," the railroad was operated by her son, Edward H. R. Green. Texas Midland became a subsidiary of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad, and the city which built up around a depot constructed here between the towns of Roberts and Greenville was named Quinlan in honor of George A. Quinlan, the general manager of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad. A post office opened in Quinlan in 1894, and by 1896 the city was incorporated. Harry Ford served as first mayor. Quinlan soon became the center of a large agricultural area, providing a railroad shipping point for growers of cotton and other crops. By the early 20th century the town boasted three cotton gins, numerous businesses and fraternal organizations, banks, schools, churches, and homes. Oil exploration and production overtook cotton farming as the area's economic base in the 1930s and 1940s, and the construction of Lake Tawakoni in the 1950s brought another economic boost to the community. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 15 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.
• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 15 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 18 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.

More markers nearby

• Captain Henry W. Wade — 0.7 mi
• Ables Springs — 6.7 mi
• Lake Tawakoni — 7.4 mi
• Poetry Baptist Church — 8.4 mi