Town of Teague

The Handbook of Texas says Yoakum named the town for his mother, Narcissus Teague, and her parents, James and Jane Fowler Teague, early Freestone pioneers. Fairfield, which the railroad bypassed, beat Teague in the 1918 county-seat election. By 1914 Teague had churches of seven denominations, waterworks, an electric plant, an ice plant, three banks, two gins, a cottonseed mill, a compress and 3,300 people. Businesses fell from 140 in 1931 to 100 in 1936, and the population reached a low of about 2,800 in 1975.

What the plaque says

Town of Teague In 1905 this town was a drowsy country village called Brewer-- named for 1835 land grantee Green Berry Brewer. It had been settled in the 1870s. Prosperity rolled into Brewer in 1906, however, when the Trinity & Brazos Valley Railroad selected it as site for the railroad shops and as the main division point between Houston and Fort Worth. The town was speedily renamed for the Teague family, relatives of noted railroad builder B. F. Yoakum. In August, 1906, promoters held a town lot sale. Customers arriving on a special train were met by a band playing "Dixie" and before the day was over, they had consumed 5,000 pounds of barbecue. By 1907 Teague was transformed. Dozens of brick buildings were under construction, population soared, and the Ten Thousand Club advertised "10,000 by 1910". Teague's first opera house was soon projected, and citizens once watched 2 merchants struggle happily to the bank carrying large baskets of "greenbacks". During the first decade of the 1900s, population hovered at 5,000 but then momentum decreased. With the decline of passenger train service, Teague began to dwindle. Today it is again a quiet town and the railroad depot-office building houses a museum. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 16 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Old Fort Parker — 16 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 — 16 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.

More markers nearby

• Old Division Point Office for the "Boll Weevil" Railway — steps away
• William Rufus Boyd, Jr. — 0.8 mi
• Furney Richardson High School — 3.2 mi
• Ghost Town of Cotton Gin — 5.8 mi