Redwater

The village was Ingersoll for its first years. It grew up around a sawmill run by Daniels and Spence in the mid-1870s, and they named it for Robert Ingersoll, the agnostic. The Handbook of Texas says residents wanted a new name after a revival in 1886, and a new well that yielded red water supplied one. The post office, opened in 1881, kept the old name until 1894. The community had about 50 people in 1884 and roughly 300 in 1892; the Handbook's figure for 1900 is 128, and by 1950 it was 457.

What the plaque says

Redwater The first community in this area was Mooresville (2 mi. E), settled in 1840 by the Charles Moores (1776-1852) family. It had disappeared before this town grew up near the Daniels and Spence sawmill in 1875. Because of mill workers' disregard for religion, the village was first named Ingersoll for the famous agnostic of that day, Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-99). A branch of the St. Louis Southwestern (Cotton Belt) Railway arrived here in the late 1870s, attracting more upstanding citizens. William Thomas Fagan built two more sawmills in the early 1880s. English-born Earnest Thomas Page (1860-1937) opened a general store, which also housed the town's first post office (1881) Church-going townspeople objected to the name Ingersoll and suggested changing it to Redwater, for the color of spring and well water in the area. A town vote in 1894 made Redwater the official name. In 1914 a tornado destroyed many businesses here, but Redwater quickly rebuilt. The economy was based on farming and lumbering until 1941, when the Red River Army Ammunition Depot and Lone Star Ordnance plant were built just north of town. The opening of the International Paper Mill in the 1970s has created new interest in lumbering and tree farming. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Atlanta State Park — 9.1 mi
  A shoreline park on Wright Patman Lake, leased from the Army in 1954, where Caddo ancestors farmed the Sulphur River and wagon traces such as the Bobo Ferry trace still cross the woods.
• Museum of Regional History — 13 mi
  Texarkana's oldest museum, in an 1879 brick building on State Line Avenue, with Caddo pottery, one of Scott Joplin's pianos and a research library of city directories and photographs.
• Daingerfield State Park — 35 mi
  A pine-and-hardwood park built in 1935-39 by a white and a Black Civilian Conservation Corps company, with a dammed lake, Bass Lodge and a 2.4-mile loop trail around the water.

More markers nearby

• Arkadelphia Rosenwald School — 7.0 mi
• Hooks — 7.6 mi
• Pecan Point Signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence — 8.1 mi
• Old Boston — 9.8 mi