Era, The Town of

Era's best-known son left in 1912. The Handbook of Texas says Robert Ewing Thomason was born in Tennessee and came to Era at age one; his mother died when he was six. He graduated from Southwestern University in 1898, finished law at the University of Texas in 1900 and was a Gainesville prosecutor by 1902. Malaria sent him west to El Paso in 1912, where he served as speaker of the Texas house, as mayor, and from 1930 in Congress, where he was reelected thirteen times. He obtained bills for Red Bluff Dam and Big Bend National Park.

What the plaque says

Era, The Town of Located in a fertile farming region, Era was settled in the 1870s. Merchant J. N. Gist (1827-1893) platted the townsite. The post office was opened in 1881 and named for Era Hargroves (1875-1880), daughter of an early resident; the village soon had a blacksmith shop, cotton gin, hotel, several stores, and three churches. Era Institute was chartered in 1897 with primary through college level classes. Among the town's prominent citizens was Robert E. Thomason (1879-1973), U.S. Congressman and Federal Judge. Era won first place in the Texas Community Improvement Program in 1973. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Great Hanging Memorial — 12 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 — 19 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.
• Denton County Courthouse-on-the-Square — 21 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.
• Wise County Courthouse — 25 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.

More markers nearby

• Bolivar, Townsite of — 9.8 mi
• First Cooke County Surveyor Daniel Montague (1798-1876) — 10 mi
• Gainesville Junior College — 11 mi
• Hubert H. Moss — 11 mi