Thomas Wilson Stegall

Lake Creek had a post office before it had a forge. The Odd's Creek office opened in 1848 and closed within six months. Stegall's blacksmith shop of 1873 gave the settlement a center, and the office reopened as Lake Creek in 1885. By 1888 the town had a corn mill and gin, a jeweler, two doctors and four churches, with Evergreen Academy for schooling. Farmers who had embraced the Populist movement formed a cooperative that opened the Lake Creek Cooperative Association General Store. The boll weevil later cut businesses to one.

What the plaque says

Thomas Wilson Stegall (July 28, 1832 - April 25, 1900) First promoter of Lake Creek community, Stegall was born in North Carolina. He served as a private in the Confederate Army, 1863 - 1865. He and wife Lucinda had eight children. They lived in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi, then moved to Delta County, Texas, in 1873. A Baptist preacher, Stegall was known for his kind deeds. He once cut an opening in his favorite rose hedge to give a neighbor an exit through his property. The blacksmith shop he built on his land became a community center, forming the nucleus of the town of Lake Creek. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cooper Lake State Park — 8.1 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 14 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Eiffel Tower — 14 mi
  A 65-foot Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat, built by the local welders' union in 1993 beside Paris's Love Civic Center.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 14 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.

More markers nearby

• Wilson, John William — 1.7 mi
• Leroy Nelson DeWitt, Pioneer Citizen — 2.7 mi
• Enloe United Methodist Church — 4.2 mi
• Amy Settlement — 6.0 mi