Rising Star

When the first post office opened here in 1878, with Hendrick H. Osburn as postmaster, the settlement was called Copperas Creek. Tom Anderson bought land from one of the first settlers in 1879 and, after the old office closed, opened a new post office and store in his home in 1880. By 1889 Rising Star had five businesses and three doctors, and by 1904 a bank, a hotel, a school, five churches and two newspapers. Corn, cotton, oats and fruit carried the economy, and the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad arrived in 1911.

What the plaque says

First settlers--families of Andrew Agnew, Isaac Agnew, Fletcher Fields, David McKinley, Allis Smith and W. W. Smith--arrived in a wagon train from Gregg County, Jan. 6, 1876. Area was known for hardships: Indian raids, vigilante activities, gunfights. But a stable community developed around log school-church building erected in 1876. First store was founded about 1879 by Thomas W. Anderson and son William. Post office established 1880. The most creditable story as to how the town got its name is that the settlers suggested the name Star for the post office but it was rejected by the U.S. Postal authorities as another Texas town had that name. The settlers argued all night over the name selection, looked up and saw the morning star as they started home from their meeting and agreed to call it Rising Star. The city was first incorporated in 1891. In a 1905 election, there was a vote to dissolve the corporation but the charter was restored later the same year. Rising Star is the home of Texas (1939-1941) poet laureate Lexie Dean Robertson. Unique local structure is city hall built of stone from buried petrified forest. Economy is based on ranching, farming (a chief crop is Spanish peanuts), commercial pecans, industry, oil. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Brownwood State Park — 17 mi
  A CCC park on a reservoir that filled in a single flood before its dam was done, with stone cabins, a hilltop dance pavilion and a grand staircase climbed by dancers arriving by boat.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 20 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 23 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.

More markers nearby

• First United Methodist Church of Rising Star — 0.3 mi
• The May Community — 8.4 mi
• Cross Cut Cemetery — 11 mi
• Cross Plains Review — 11 mi