White Rock Community

White Rock was Tidwell Creek first, probably for Esram Tidwell and his heirs, who held a large land grant, the Handbook of Texas says. The name changed when a post office opened in 1868, taken from outcrops of Austin chalk nearby; the plaque gives 1857 for the post office. A stop on the Sherman-Jefferson road, the village had 150 people in the mid-1880s, with three physicians, a lawyer, a gristmill and a gin. It lost ground as railroads served other parts of the county, fell to fifty people in the 1940s, and has held at seventy-three since the 1970s.

What the plaque says

White Rock Community Originally named Tidwell Creek, the settlement of White Rock began as a stop on the Sherman-Jefferson Trail. According to local tradition, the first settlers were members of the Jonas Havens family. A post office was established in 1857. Businesses in the town included stores, saloons, a blacksmith shop, a mill, and a gin. A school was in operation until the 1940s. Early traveling preachers served the religious needs of the community until two churches were organized. A decline in population occurred as a result of railroad expansion in other parts of the county. (1987)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 10.0 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.
• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 22 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.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 27 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.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 30 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.

More markers nearby

• Kingston Baptist Church — 3.5 mi
• Birthplace of Audie Murphy — 3.6 mi
• Audie Murphy — 4.5 mi
• First Baptist Church of Celeste — 4.8 mi