Name: Clarksville, Texas
Address: Clarksville, TX

Clarksville, TX RoadyGoat

Clarksville, nestled a bit higher than the surrounding Red River bottomlands, has always been a place where things take root. Like the hay that springs from these fields, or the football players who launch from Clarksville High onto college fields, folks here tend to make their mark. It was one of the first towns in Texas, you know, incorporated way back in the 1830s, when the Red River was a highway of trade. Even before that, the Caddo people knew this land. And while Clarksville might be a quiet spot these days, home to around the same number of people as it was a century ago, it’s nurtured some well-known names.

The Queen of Clarksville RoadyGoat

As you look at the historic buildings around the Clarksville square, know that you're standing in a town older than the State of Texas itself. James Clark laid out this townsite back in eighteen thirty-three, and when Red River County was organized in eighteen thirty-five, Clarksville was chosen as the county seat. For a stretch of years running from the late eighteen thirties up to the Civil War, this was the most important trading center in all of Northwest Texas. Steamboats would push up the Red River from as far as New Orleans and unload their goods at Rowland's Landing, about fifteen miles north of where you're sitting. But the thing your eye keeps coming back to is that courthouse in the middle of the square. The three-story limestone building you see was finished in eighteen eighty-four, and up in its tower sits a clock the whole town simply calls Old Red. Its faces are eight and a half feet across, and the bell behind them weighs close to two thousand pounds, all of it built by a clock company up in Boston. That clock started ticking in eighteen eighty-five and kept perfect time by hand until it was finally electrified in nineteen sixty-one. So as you drive on, picture the wagons, the steamboats, and generations of folks who set their day by the sound of Old Red ringing out over this square.

The Engineering of the Iron Horse RoadyGoat

The Texas and Pacific Railway finished its line through eastern Red River County in 1876, and this town grew up on it fast. But it wasn't called Annona yet. From 1874 the stop here was Walker Station, named for G. W. Walker, the man who founded it and served as its first postmaster. By 1881 a newspaper correspondent was calling it the most important trading point in the county outside Clarksville, eight miles up the road. Then in 1884, at Walker's own suggestion, the town gave up his name. He proposed Annona instead — said to be the name of an American Indian girl — and it stuck. The town he renamed kept climbing: three churches, a school, two cotton gins, two mills and a machine shop by the 1890s; two banks, a newspaper and about 600 people by 1914; a peak near 800 in 1929. A founder who put somebody else's name over his own is not the usual railroad-town story.

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David G. Burnet

1836

[center front] David Gouverneur Burnet - [left front] Born April 14 - 1788 - in Newark - New Jersey - Died in Galveston - Texas - December - 5 - 1870 - Delegate to the Second Convention of Texas - 1833 - Judge of the Department of the Brazos - 1834 - Delegate to the Consultation 1835 - [right front] President - Ad Interim - Of the Republic of Texas - March 16 to October 22 - 1836 - Vice President - November 10 - 1838 to December 13 - 1841 - Participated in the battle with the Cherokees May 29 - 1839 - Secretary of State - 1846

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Stevenson, William

1815

(October 4, 1768 - March 5, 1857) Frontier minister; friend of Stephen F. Austin, father of Texas. A circuit rider in Missouri Conference, Methodist Church, Mr. Stevenson in 1815 made a pastoral trip to Pecan Point, home of Claiborne Wright, member of newly-arrived Anglo-American colony on Texas side of the Red River. Records indicate that his preaching to Wright and friends in 1815 constituted the first Protestant sermons ever given in Texas, then part of Catholic "New Spain." He thus established a beachhead for religious freedom in Texas at this point of entry.

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Clarksville Cemetery

1830

This burial site was first used in the 1830s for the family of James Clark, the founder of Clarksville, who is interred here. The earliest grave is that of his father Benjamin Clark, a veteran of the American Revolution. Other graves include those of Albert Hamilton Latimer, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, the noted Texas journalist Col. Charles DeMorse and the Rev. John Anderson, a pioneer area preacher and educator. Known for many years as the Baptist Cemetery, the Clarksville Cemetery serves as a reminder of the town's early settlers and civic leaders.

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Clarksville, TX (Travis County)

1871

Clarksville is just northeast of the intersection of the Missouri Pacific Railroad and West Tenth Street in west Austin, Travis County. The land, containing streams and steep hills, had previously been part of a plantation owned by Governor Elisha M. Pease . It is said that Pease gave the land to his emancipated slaves with the vain hope that they would remain near his mansion and be available for further service. Clarksville was founded in 1871 by Charles Clark, a freedman who changed his name from Charles Griffin after emancipation. Clark bought two acres of land from Confederate general Nathan G. Shelley and built a house on what is now West Tenth Street. He subdivided his land among other freedmen to start a community outside of Austin. Despite its isolation Clarksville came within the jurisdiction of Austin early in its history. Early Clarksville has been described by its older residents as a wilderness broken by an occasional dirt road and train tracks laid by the International-Great Northern Railroad in the 1870s. The Sweet Home Baptist Church served as the community meeting center. The church was organized in the home of Mary Smith on the Haskell homestead sometime before 1882, when the congregation purchased land on which to build a church. Rev. Jacob Fontaine served as the first minister. Elias Mayes , a black state legislator from Grimes and Brazos counties in the Sixteenth and Twenty-first legislatures, lived in Clarksville as early as 1875. He built a home on land purchased from Charles Clark in 1884. Many Clarksville residents worked in the cotton industry or farmed; others held jobs in surrounding communities. Leroy Robertson owned and operated a community store. In 1896 a school at Clarksville had an enrollment of forty-seven. In 1917 a new one-room schoolhouse was built and named Clarksville Colored School. It offered six grades. Early in the twentieth century developers began to realize the land value of Clarksville, which lay near growing downtown Austin. Austin city policy aimed to concentrate the local black population in the east, and pressured black communities in west Austin, such as Clarksville and Wheatsville, to move. In 1918 the Austin school board closed the Clarksville school. Clarksville residents were later forced to use city services in east Austin or none at all. The 1928 master plan of the city of Austin recommended "that all the facilities and conveniences be provided the Negroes in this district, as an incentive to draw the Negro population to this area." Most Clarksville residents endured the lack of services, however, and refused to move. The community did experience two small emigrations to California, the first during World War I and the second in 1943. Clarksville maintained its school, which enrolled sixty-nine students in 1924, sixty-six in 1934, and seventy in 1940. Sometime in the 1960s the school building was moved to O. Henry Junior High School. The Sweet Home Baptist Church was rebuilt for a third time in 1935. Until 1930 Clarksville residents used kerosene lamps, and the community remained surrounded by woods. In later years Clarksville began to feel the pressure of Austin's expanding White community, which filled the surrounding area with spacious, middle-class homes. In 1968 Clarksville residents unsuccessfully protested a state and local plan to build a highway along the Missouri Pacific Railroad, which extended along the western boundary of Clarksville. The completed MoPac Expressway cut through the community, causing twenty-six families to be relocated. Twenty-three families left of their own accord. The number of homes in Clarksville decreased from 162 in 1970 to less than 100 in 1976. Residents of Clarksville began requesting Austin city funds for the improvement and preservation of their community in 1964, but dirt streets crossed the area until 1975, and a creek carrying sewage periodically flooded homes. In 1975 the Texas Historical Commission designated a two-block-w

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Jones, Frank Albert

1900

Frank Albert Jones, black artist, son of Edward Jones and Sarah Clark, was born at Clarksville, Texas, around 1900. He never attended school or learned to read or write, and was completely self-taught. He spent his early years in the Red River County area, where he supported himself working at odd jobs. When he was a small child his mother told him that he had been born with a veil over his left eye, and that this veil would enable him to see spirits. According to a widespread African-American folk belief, people born with the veil or caul (part of the fetal membrane) over their eyes have the power to see spirits and communicate with them. Those who have this power are sometimes referred to as "double-sighted." When Jones was about nine years old, he began to see spirits. He compared his double-sightedness to looking through a hole into the spirit world. Throughout his life he continued to see spirits, which he called "haints" or devils, in many disguises, including dogs, birds, clocks, and men and women of all nationalities. Though Jones's only generally known art is drawings done in prison during the last eight years of his life, he said he made his first "devil" drawing at the age of ten. Early drawings (circa 1930) have been found. Jones spent some twenty years of his life in Texas prisons, beginning in 1941, when he was imprisoned on a rape charge that resulted from his having taken in an abandoned baby girl seven years earlier. Apparently, when the child's mother returned to claim her, Jones refused to surrender the child and was arrested for rape. After his release from the Red River County Jail, he married Audrey Culberson, a woman with two grown sons, and the couple lived in Clarksville. In 1949 an elderly Clarksville woman was found murdered, with robbery as the apparent motive. One of Frank Jones's stepsons was arrested, and he implicated Jones in the crime. Jones was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. He served nine years of the sentence before being paroled. After two years of freedom he was accused of another rape, and in 1960 he was sent back to prison to complete his life sentence. He steadfastly maintained his innocence of the crimes for which he had been convicted. In prison in Huntsville, sometime between 1960 and 1964, Jones began to salvage discarded paper and pencils and to draw pictures of the haints he saw as a result of his veil. He called his drawings "devil houses." Using the stubs of red and blue lead pencils thrown away by inmate bookkeepers, he sketched horizontal and vertical lines that formed architectural structures viewed in cross-section. The houses were divided into cell-like rooms surrounded by barbed-wire shapes that Jones called "devil's horns." The jagged horn shapes, in alternating red and blue colors, set up the internal rhythm of each drawing. The haint figures were confined and received protection inside the rooms of the houses. Jones depicted the grinning haints frontally and in profile, with fluttering wings. Fire spewed out of the mouths of some. Others had lightning bolts emanating from their bodies. Additional elements of Jones's drawings included dice, pinwheels, and starbursts. Often large clocks appear in the houses. As a young man in Clarksville Jones had feared the supposedly haunted clock tower. Years later, while he was in jail in Clarksville, his work duty required him to wind the four large clocks in that tower. During his last prison term (1961-69) a large clock faced the courtyard where he drew most of the work that he is known for today; more than half of these 500 drawings prominently feature clocks. After Jones was "discovered" in the Prison Art Show in 1964, the first thing he bought with his new wealth was a fine gold watch. Ironically, he could not tell time. Jones's work belongs to a category of self-taught art known as visionary art, which represents the expression of a vision seen only by the artist. Jones named his drawings after the haints they c

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Munchus, George Murray

1921

George Murry (Murray, Murrey) Munchus, physician, the son of Murry and Lou (Beatty or Betay) Munchus was born on August 6, 1887, on a farm in Ellis County, Texas. His parents were former slaves who traveled from a plantation near Greenville, Alabama, to Texas by horse and wagon soon after the Emancipation Proclamation. Murry Munchus was one of the first black men to own farmland in Ellis and Hill counties. To be near public schools, the family moved to Waxahachie, where George and his two brothers graduated from Oaklawn High School. Munchus received a bachelor's degree from Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson College) in Austin and earned a medical degree in 1909 from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. After completing his internship at Hubbard Hospital in Nashville, Munchus opened a medical practice in 1911 in Clarksville, Texas, and served black patients throughout Red River County. He married Jesselle Sims, a teacher and member of a prominent black Fort Worth family; they had four children, one of whom died in infancy. Munchus attracted countywide attention when he had George Powell, a black contractor, build the county's first black hospital, a two-story brick structure with space on the lower floor for a drugstore, cleaning and pressing shop, barbershop, meeting hall, and business offices. The hospital and family living quarters were located on the second floor. In 1921 a fire that Munchus believed was started by the Ku Klux Klan destroyed his hospital and home. Munchus moved his practice and his family to Fort Worth, where in 1922 Powell built a home for him on Terrell Avenue. Munchus established and administered the Negro Community Hospital (1928-45). He was active with the Masonic Lodge, the Knights of Pythias, the American Woodmen, the board of trustees of Samuel Houston College, and the National Medical Association. He served a term as president of the Lone Star State Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association and was medical examiner for the local Atlanta Life and Universal Life insurance companies. Munchus was the first black physician on the staff of the now defunct Pennsylvania Avenue Hospital. He died on May 30, 1952, at his Terrell Avenue home, which was designated a Texas historic landmark in 1985.

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Clarksville, Texas

Music in Clarksville

Songs About Clarksville

Artists From Clarksville

Rivers & Roads in Song near Clarksville

History of Clarksville

Clarksville, TX RoadyGoat

The Queen of Clarksville RoadyGoat

The Engineering of the Iron Horse RoadyGoat

David G. Burnet

Stevenson, William

Clarksville Cemetery

Clarksville, TX (Travis County)

Jones, Frank Albert

Munchus, George Murray

Things to Do in Clarksville

Everything Near Clarksville