Whitewright

Whitewright did well in the twentieth century. The Handbook says its population was 1,804 in 1900, and by the mid-1920s both the Katy and the Cotton Belt served the town, which had sixty-eight businesses, two banks and makers of cottonseed oil and flour. It remained a market for cotton, wheat and corn growers. In the 1970s and 1980s seven factories made goods from sausage to clothing to fertilizer. The Handbook dates the post office to 1888, ten years after the plaque's date for the town's founding.

What the plaque says

Whitewright Early settlers in this part of Grayson County established communities at Orangeville (4 mi. E), Pilot Grove ( 4 mi. S), and Kentucky Town (3 mi. W). In 1878, after the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas (MKT) railroad built a line southeast from Denison to this site, a new town was created and named for William Whitewright (1825-1898), a railroad official and vice president of the Union Trust Company of New York, the railroad's financial backer. Immediately upon the new town's founding, former citizens of Orangeville, Pilot Grove, and Kentucky Town moved to Whitewright. A post office was established in 1878, along with numerous homes and businesses. By 1894 the town boasted schools, churches, a newspaper, a college, and community organizations, as well as railroad depots, cotton gins, restaurants, drugstores, grocery stores, wagon yards and livery stables, lumberyards, hardware stores, blacksmith shops, and numerous other businesses. Serious fires in 1904 and 1911 almost destroyed the central business district, but the citizens soon rebuilt. The city of Whitewright no longer has passenger rail service, but it continues its role as an important marketing center for this area of Grayson County. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 11 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.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 18 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.
• Eisenhower State Park — 24 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 26 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.

More markers nearby

• First Methodist Church of Whitewright — 0.3 mi
• Whitewright Masonic Lodge No. 167 — 0.5 mi
• Vittitoe Cemetery — 2.1 mi
• Kentucky Town — 2.2 mi