Samuel Augustus Erwin

Dates for the same man vary by source. The plaque gives Samuel Augustus Erwin's birth as 1786 and his arrival at Honey Grove as 1837; the Handbook of Texas says he was born in 1789 and moved with his wife Sallie and three children in the late 1830s. The Handbook credits him with helping found the town in 1842, and says he was named its first postmaster when the townsite was surveyed about 1850. The plaque says he platted it in 1848 for B. S. Walcott. Both agree he was a surveyor and justice of the peace.

What the plaque says

Samuel Augustus Erwin (March 17, 1786 - July 13, 1854) Virginia-born Samuel Erwin was married in 1819 in Tennessee to Sally Rodgers Crisp (1795-1860), in a ceremony performed by local magistrate David Crockett. First settler in the Honey Grove area, Erwin arrived here in 1837 and surveyed land grants for other pioneers. A surveyor by profession, he platted the townsite for his friend B. S. Walcott in 1848. He was the town's first postmaster and one of Fannin County's earliest justices of the peace. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 18 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.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 21 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 21 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 22 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• James G. Gilmer — steps away
• Oakwood Cemetery — steps away
• James Thomas Holt — steps away
• Erwin Evans Smith — steps away