Valley Creek

Valley Creek made its money from a hard wood. The Handbook of Texas says Howard L. Parmele ran a general store, a sawmill and a cotton gin there, and milled and shipped large quantities of wagon parts, house blocks and street paving blocks made from bois d'arc. All parties to the June 3, 1869 land purchase lived in New York City, and a post office opened in his store in 1875 with Parmele as postmaster. In 1880 the Denison and Southeastern Railway passed three miles south, and by 1882 most residents had moved to Leonard.

What the plaque says

Valley Creek The first permanent settlement in this area began in 1869 when eleven Presbyterian families migrated here from New York. Organized by Howard L. Parmele and others, including his brother-in-law Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, the colony was formed for the establishment of a Presbyterian U.S.A. mission. Land for the settlement was located near the site of Waller Wells, an early campground used by freight haulers operating between Sherman and the East Texas port of Jefferson. Named for a nearby stream, Valley Creek became a thriving community in the 1870s under the direction of Howard Parmele, who established a mercantile store, sawmill, and cotton gin here. The town also included a school, hotel, post office, drugstore, grist mill, barbershop, doctors, churches, and a blacksmith shop. With the assistance of dr. d. H. Dodson, an Iowa minister and educator, the local Presbyterian U.S.A. church was formally organized in 1875. Bypassed by rail lines in 1880, the town declined. Businesses were moved to Leonard (3 mi. S), where many former Valley Creek residents became prominent leaders. Only a church building and a cemetery remain at the site of the pioneer Valley Creek community. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 10 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 23 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 28 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 28 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.

More markers nearby

• Grove Hill — 1.9 mi
• Joseph F. Fenner — 2.0 mi
• First Presbyterian Church of Leonard — 2.6 mi
• Dr. William Chamberlayne Jones — 2.7 mi