Site of Worthy Store

Donie was a town that moved. The Handbook of Texas says residents applied for a post office in 1898 as Douie, and Washington misread the name as Donie. The Dewey Prairie Baptist Church had organized in 1886. When the Trinity and Brazos Valley built a couple of miles east of town in 1907, the townspeople moved to the new location. The church took the name First Baptist Church of Donie in 1909 and its building was moved by 1913. The Donie Chair Company, in existence since 1902, shipped colonial-style chairs throughout the Southwest.

What the plaque says

Site of Worthy Store At this location in 1906, Alabama native Dillard Monroe Worthy opened a general merchandise store. He was later joined by his son, Roy, and the business became D.M. Worthy & Son. It provided residents with essential items and included farming materials, butcher and blacksmith shops, funeral supplies and lumber. D.M. Worthy had other interests as well, serving as first president of Guaranty State Bank (later Donie State Bank) and opening other businesses. He was also instrumental in bringing a spur track of the Trinity & Brazos Valley Railway near Donie. The store closed soon after he passed away in 1930, but Roy reopened it in 1939. Roy Worthy died in 1956, and the store remained in operation for several more years before it burned. (2007)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Fort Parker — 20 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 23 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Fort Boggy State Park — 24 mi
  A 1,847-acre park in Leon County named for a settlers' palisade of 1840, with a 15-acre lake, short trails and the story of Tennessee farmers, the Keechi and a Ranger captain.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 26 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.

More markers nearby

• Antioch Cemetery — 5.1 mi
• Personville — 7.1 mi
• Lost Prairie Cemetery and Church — 8.9 mi
• Jewett Methodist Church — 9.3 mi