Stranger Community, Cemetery and Churches

Stranger has two explanations for its name. The marker credits a visiting Frenchman about 1870. The Handbook of Texas calls the most likely story a post office representative asking the local blacksmith for a name and getting a refusal, since the blacksmith was a recent arrival and a stranger himself. The Handbook adds that the settlement was Upper or North Blue Ridge in its early years and got a post office in 1879. By 1884 it had 200 residents, four churches, a steam cotton gin and a hotel. The Union Church was still holding services in the 1980s.

What the plaque says

Stranger Community, Cemetery and Churches This community was originally settled as Blue Ridge prior to 1850. Thomas McKissick Garrett donated land (two miles northeast) for the establishment of a school, church, and Garrett Cemetery. With the estate settlement following his death in 1862, the property was removed from public use. This location was donated by David Barclay and two grandsons of Thomas Garrett, James Franklin Erskine and Thomas Jasper Erskine. The name Stranger was suggested by a visiting Frenchman about 1870. Buildings for a Methodist-Presbyterian Union Church and a Baptist church were conducted in July 1869. The first school classes were conducted in the new sanctuaries. By 1877 the Union Academy and Union School had become public free schools. A separate schoolhouse (1/4 mile northeast) was constructed in 1902. Stranger once had a cotton gin, stock dipping vat, doctors, general stores, blacksmith shop, stagecoach inn, and mills, but only the cemetery and church buildings remain. The sanctuaries, where services were conducted until 1960, are now used for the biannual homecoming activities. (1980)

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.
• Calvert — 24 mi
  A railroad cotton town of 1868 on State Highway 6 that claimed the largest cotton gin in the world and elected Black men to county and state office during Reconstruction.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 28 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.

More markers nearby

• Odds Community — 5.8 mi
• Eutaw — 7.1 mi
• Sarahville de Viesca, Site of Colonial Capital — 8.9 mi
• Falls County — 8.9 mi