Slidell

Slidell is a town that shrank on schedule. The Handbook of Texas says it never exceeded 275 inhabitants and served nearby farmers and ranchers. By the early twentieth century it had a cotton gin, a local telephone exchange and a weekly newspaper, the Courier, and its school district grew to take in rural communities in three counties. After 1911, when a fire destroyed two businesses, and the arrival of the automobile, it declined as a trading center. By 1944 even the barber had left. A post office and 175 residents remained in 1985.

What the plaque says

Slidell Named for John Slidell, one of the Confederate diplomats in the "Trent Affair" (1861), this community was established to supply goods and services to nearby farmers. The post office was started in 1884. Garrett Fletcher, donor of land for a cemetery and church, gave lots to nearby businesses that moved here in 1885, including twenty-two-year-old Dr. Drury Young Stem's medical office and drugstore. George W. Durham gave land (1893) for the public square and the first school building, and Nathaniel Pruett began (1895) the telephone system. Today Slidell serves a farm and ranch area. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wise County Courthouse — 14 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's granite Romanesque courthouse of 1895-96 in Decatur, built after fire destroyed the Second Empire courthouse and set off a fight over the county seat.
• Denton County Courthouse-on-the-Square — 18 mi
  An 1896 courthouse by W. C. Dodson in Denton limestone, pink granite and two sandstones, restored in 2004, now a free county museum on a lawn holding the grave of John B. Denton.
• Great Hanging Memorial — 24 mi
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.
• Stonewall Saloon Museum — 24 mi
  Saint Jo's first permanent building, a stone saloon of 1873 with rooms upstairs for trail drovers, in a town named, the story goes, as a joke on a founder who did not drink.

More markers nearby

• Greenwood — 4.8 mi
• Cattle Trail Crossing — 7.7 mi
• Bolivar, Townsite of — 8.7 mi
• Era, The Town of — 11 mi