Rocky Branch

Rocky Branch grew from a sawmill and gristmill set up in the late 1870s, and one local account says the community took its name from that mill site. In 1915 Nat Wright ran the sawmill and J. P. Forsyth a general store. A Primitive Baptist church nearby was organized in April 1854 and took over a building that served as meetinghouse and school; it was still used as a church in 1989. By the 1930s two businesses remained, and from 1974 to 1986 it had a community center but no businesses.

What the plaque says

Rocky Branch The abundance of creeks attracted travelers to this area, settled as early as the 1820s, and local tradition holds the community was named for the rocky beds of the creeks. The Rocky Branch Community grew throughout the 19th century; the earliest church, Spring Hill Primitive Baptist, was built in the 1850s. Over the years, the settlement boasted businesses, including lumber, grist and syrup mills, cotton gin, broom factory and general store. It also had a rodeo arena and baseball team, as well as a precinct courthouse, post office (1890-1904), community center and a Woodmen of the World band. Families made mattresses and canned foods at the community's school (1879-1943), which consolidated with the Paul H. Pewitt and Daingerfield districts in 1951. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Daingerfield State Park — 6.9 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.
• Lake Bob Sandlin State Park — 24 mi
  A 1987 state park on a 9,000-acre reservoir, where a Republic of Texas stockade called Fort Sherman stood in 1838 and the Caddo lived from A.D. 800 to 1860, now with fishing piers, trails and cabins.
• Atlanta State Park — 27 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.
• Jefferson Historical Museum — 32 mi
  A four-floor museum in Jefferson's 1888-90 federal post office and courthouse, with rooms for African-American history, Jewish heritage, the Caddo and Diamond Bessie, bought by the historical society in 1965 for $8,100.

More markers nearby

• Site of Chapel Hill College — 5.6 mi
• Daingerfield, C. S. A. — 5.7 mi
• Morris County — 5.7 mi
• Hometown of United States Senator Morris Sheppard — 6.1 mi