San Pedro Community

The Handbook of Texas dates first settlement at San Pedro to the late 1840s and gives the post office two runs, 1848 to 1857 and 1858 to 1905. It says a school opened in 1889 and a Presbyterian church was organized about then. A family memoir on the Houston County TXGenWeb site recalls the frame school around 1919: parents cut and hauled the wood, pupils held a spelling match one Friday a month, and on the Friday before Easter parents hid eggs for a hunt. By the mid-1930s the Handbook lists a church, a cemetery and some houses.

What the plaque says

San Pedro Community In the 1830s immigrants from the southeastern U.S. settled here along San Pedro Creek and the stage route to nearby Rusk. A stage stop and general store established by Joel W. Stowe became site of the San Pedro post office in 1842. Settlers made molasses from native ribbon cane, grew cotton and corn, and milled lumber. The Presbyterian Church (1870s), cemetery (1872), San Pedro School (1888), and Baptist church (1904) were community centers. The population fell during World Wars I and II before rebounding in the 1960s. A new Baptist sanctuary was completed in 1979. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Caddo Mounds State Historic Site — 16 mi
  Three earthen mounds of an ancestral Caddo village and ceremonial center on the old El Camino Real, settled about A.D. 800 and still sacred to Caddo people, with a grass house and visitor center.
• Texas State Railroad Excursion Train — 21 mi
  A round trip of about 25 miles of track between the Palestine and Rusk depots through the Piney Woods, on a line built by prison labor and reopened as a tourist railroad in 1976.

More markers nearby

• Germany — 3.2 mi
• The Edens-Madden Massacre — 4.7 mi
• Daniel McLean and John Sheridan — 4.7 mi
• Site of Old Town of Augusta — 4.7 mi