Site of Earpville

TXGenWeb's Longview history dates Earpville to the Republic. It says James Earp and James Starkey bought 1,031 acres in 1841 and that the town was laid out soon after. From 1841 until annexation in 1845 the Rev. Job Taylor ran a relay horse-coach station there. The Point Pleasant history on the same site says the railroads that created Longview and Gladewater effectively erased Earpville, and that only the 1931 oil discovery changed the area as much.

What the plaque says

Site of Earpville This site was once within the boundary of the community of Earpville, settled in the late 1840s by James Earp (d. 1861) and many of his relatives from Alabama. Located on a stagecoach line, the settlement at its height boasted a post office, stage stop, Methodist church, and retail businesses and was the commercial and social center for farmers in the region. Part of James Earp's original homesite was sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1870. It became the site of the new town of Longview and signaled the decline of Earpville. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• East Texas Oil Museum — 12 mi
  A Kilgore College museum that rebuilds the 1930s oil boom in a full-scale Boomtown with a general store, drugstore and newspaper office, plus dioramas, films and antiques given by East Texans.
• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 21 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.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 21 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.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 21 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

• Johnny Cace's Seafood and Steak House — 0.4 mi
• John Tyson Smith — 0.5 mi
• The Grove — 0.7 mi
• Longview Junction — 0.7 mi