Stonewall Saloon Museum

Saint Jo grew up as Head of Elm, a settlement near the head of the Elm Fork of the Trinity that Ithane and Prince Singletary started in 1849, left, and came back to about 1851. Cattle drives on the Chisholm Trail likely spurred its growth, and by 1871 Head of Elm had seven businesses, five of them groceries.

In 1872 a group of promoters led by Irb H. Boggess and Joseph A. Howell bought the 640 acres around the settlement, and the next year they laid out a townsite. The name was a joke. Boggess, the story goes, suggested Saint Jo as a dig at his partner Howell, who did not drink, and the post office opened under that name in 1873, when the town had a general store and two saloons. One of those was the Stonewall, built of native stone in 1873 as the first permanent building in town, with rooms upstairs where trail drivers could sleep.

The town grew quickly after that, reaching 500 people by 1886, when it incorporated and the Gainesville, Henrietta and Western Railway laid track through, along with two steam cotton gins, gristmills and a weekly newspaper. The old saloon outlived the cattle trade and county prohibition and now holds a museum of Montague County history, the place to start a look at the trail country of the upper Red River.