Quinlan
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City of Quinlan
Hunt County
Texas
A Brief Town History
QUINLAN, TEXAS. Quinlan is on State Highway 34 four miles west of Lake Tawakoni and twelve
miles south of Greenville in south central Hunt County. The site was first
known as Roberts, after Texas governor O. M. Roberts,qv who on October 26,
1882, sold 100 acres of land in southern Hunt County to the Texas Central
Railroad. This land, "situated between the South and Caddo forks on the
Sabine River," served as the location of the new town of Roberts, to which
the Northeastern Branch of the Texas Central built. The line was reorganized
as the Texas Midland Railroad in 1886 by Hetty Green,qv a bondholder in
the defunct railroad, and the new road extended its track northward from
Roberts through Greenville to Paris by 1894. In 1892 Edward H. R. Green,qv
Hetty Green's son and president of the Texas Midland, abandoned Roberts
as a depot and established a new depot town, Quinlan, 1½ miles north of
the older community. The new community took its name from George Austin
Quinlan, vice president and general manager of the Houston and Texas Central
Railway.
Settlers moved quickly into Quinlan. Some of the earliest, including John
M. Cook and R. K. Epperson, moved their businesses from Roberts. The settlement
received a post office in 1894, and by 1900 its population had reached 362.
This growth, no doubt induced by the presence of the railroad, continued
through the first quarter of the twentieth century. In 1904 463 persons
lived in Quinlan. The number rose to 537 by 1910 and 600 by 1914, when Quinlan
had twenty businesses, including a bank and a weekly newspaper. In 1925
this "retail trade center for southern Hunt, northern Kaufman and Van Zandt
counties" had an elementary school, a high school, and thirty-five businesses
and managed a cotton harvest of some 5,000 bales. In 1933 Quinlan had 512
residents and thirty businesses; in 1952 the population of 599 supported
twenty-five businesses; in 1964 the community had 621 persons and twenty-two
businesses. After the mid-1960s Quinlan grew considerably, largely due to
its proximity to Lake Tawakoni. It had a population of 900 in 1976 and 1,002
in 1988, when it had fifty-one businesses, in 1,360 in 1990, 1370 in
2000 and 1400 in
2005.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: W. Walworth Harrison, History of Greenville and Hunt County,
Texas (Waco: Texian, 1976).
Brian Hart TSHA -
Texas
State Historical Association
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