Site of Bethany

According to the Handbook of Texas, the place was first settled around 1840 and called Vernon, and it became Bethany around 1849 when a post office opened. The 1840s brought a log store, a tavern, a water-powered grain mill and a tannery. The post office moved to Caddo Parish, Louisiana, in 1860. In 1889 a barkeeper built a store split by the state line, because drinking was legal on one side and gambling on the other. The Bethany gas field opened in the 1920s and brought a resurgence; by the late 1890s, though, the school had only nine students.

What the plaque says

Site of Bethany A thriving town of the fifties - through it passed the Shreveport Road over which many emigrants entered Texas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 21 mi
  Wetlands and woods on part of a former ammunition plant, now a refuge for wood ducks, prothonotary warblers and alligator snapping turtles, with four easy trails and a free visitor center on a Ramsar lake.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 22 mi
  Galleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.
• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 22 mi
  Maplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 22 mi
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.

More markers nearby

• Mt. Zion Cemetery — 4.7 mi
• Bailey Anderson — 8.0 mi
• DeBerry — 8.5 mi
• Swanson's Landing — 11 mi