Site of Early Grayson County Settlement - Whitemound

Whitemound took its name from two whitish, cone-shaped hills, which Joseph D. Lackey chose as a homesite in 1848, a few months before his father Henry arrived with his family. The Lackeys brought enslaved people with them. Henry's mother, Mary Lackey, who made the trip from Missouri at 93 and lived to 105, was the first person buried in Whitemound Cemetery. Doctors, a cotton gin and a grist mill followed. When the Cotton Belt line passed three-quarters of a mile away in 1887, the people, the churches and the school moved toward Tom Bean.

What the plaque says

Site of Early Grayson County Settlement - Whitemound Named for two large white mounds of rock nearby. Settled 1849 by Henry Lackey and his 9 children, from Missouri. Town grew up around A. S. Lackey grist mill. It had a post office, churches, businesses, several doctors, and Bosworth Academy. Most residents moved away after Cotton Belt Railroad bypassed this site in 1888. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 17 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.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 21 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.
• Eisenhower State Park — 21 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.

More markers nearby

• City of Tom Bean — 1.4 mi
• Old Cedar Community — 3.2 mi
• Kentucky Town — 4.1 mi
• Vittitoe Cemetery — 4.2 mi