Emory
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City of Emory
Rains County
Texas
A Brief Town History EMORY, TEXAS. Emory, the county seat and largest town of Rains
County, is at the junction of U.S. Highway 69 and State Highway 19, at
the center of the county. It was named for Emory Rains,qv who settled
east of the townsite around 1848. The community was originally known as
Springville, reportedly for the many springs in the area. A town plat
was evidently prepared by the late 1840s, and by 1857 a store, a
tannery, a gin, and a number of houses occupied the site. When Rains
County was organized in 1870 Springville became the county seat, and the
name was changed to Emory in honor of Rains, who had played an important
role in the authorization of the county. A post office founded the same
year has continued to operate to the present. A log house initially
served as a temporary courthouse. In 1872 a two-room frame courthouse
was built; it burned in 1879, along with all of the county records, and
the county offices were again housed in the log house until 1884, when a
brick courthouse was constructed. About 1880 the Denison and
Southeastern Railway was built across the county, making Emory a
shipping point for the surrounding lumber-producing area. In 1885 the
town had two churches, two sawmills, two cotton gins, two saloons, two
hotels, a weekly newspaper named the Rains County Record, and a
population of 600. The town continued to prosper during the early years
of the twentieth century. By 1914 it had three banks and 700
inhabitants, and in 1920 its independent school district was
established. The 1920s witnessed a period of unprecedented prosperity
in Emory, and by 1929 the community, now incorporated, had a reported
population of 1,000. The Great Depressionqv and the agricultural crisis
of the early 1930s, however, began a decline that continued until the
1960s. By 1931 the population had fallen to 750, and by 1936 it had
dwindled further to 447, as many inhabitants sought their fortunes in
the larger cities. The early postwar period saw modest population
growth, but it was not until the late 1950s, when nearby Lake Tawakoniqv
was built and Rains County began attracting large numbers of retirees,
that Emory began to see sizable increases in the number of inhabitants.
After the mid-1960s the town grew steadily, from 578 in 1965 to 813 in
1985 and 1,012 in 1990. Over the same period the number of businesses
increased from twenty to thirty-seven. Tourism and agriculture form the
mainstays of the town's economy. BIBLIOGRAPHY: William Oscar Hebison
and Ambrose Fitzgerald, Early Days in Texas and Rains County (Emory,
Texas: Leader Print, 1917; rpt., Garland, Texas: Lost and Found, 1977).
100th Anniversary of Rains County (Emory, Texas: Hill, 1970). Claudia
Hazlewood -
Texas
State Historical Association
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