The Grove

A file of loose papers in the Longview library's genealogy department tells the Grove's origin differently. It says John R. Magrill, who came from Alabama in the 1840s, gave the roughly one-acre tract about 1850 to Black residents of the Arpville community, which became part of Longview, for a meeting house open to all denominations, according to his descendant C. A. Magrill. The deed was reportedly lost in a courthouse fire at Gilmer, and accounts differ on whether it named all people of African descent in Upshur County or only Arpville.

What the plaque says

The Grove The Grove The Grove was a natural timber stand within what became Longview in 1870. Tradition holds that the area's freedmen gathered in the Grove for worship services as early as the 1860s. In 1871, John R. Magrill sold the one-acre grove tract to the town's African American population. Acting on their behalf were O.J. Taylor, Silas Billup and Alick Berry. Over the years, the Grove was an important gathering place for the local African American community. Efforts in the 1930s to acquire the land for oil production failed due to confusion over the title, and the city later adopted the land for use as a park, now known as Magrill Plaza. (2003)

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.
• New London Museum and Cenotaph — 22 mi
  A volunteer-run museum beside the pink granite cenotaph for the March 1937 school gas explosion, holding a model of the school, a blackboard from that day and an odorizer device.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 22 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.

More markers nearby

• First Methodist Church of Longview — steps away
• Delta Drilling Company — steps away
• Gregg County — 0.3 mi
• General John Gregg — 0.3 mi