Wood County History

By LOU MALLORY — Chairperson, Wood County Historical Commission

More Snapshots of Early Communities   1-7-06

Forest Home, Texas: Forest Home is on a soil-surfaced road 1 ½ miles north if FM 515 and four miles west of Winnsboro in northern Wood County.

In 1859, John. R. Wright traveled from South Carolina and settled in the area. Records indicate he donated an acre of his land for a community project, likely a school.

Locals established a Forest Home school district in 1884 and by 1896, it served 47 students. By 1905, there were 62 students.

During the 1930s, the community had a number of farms, a church and a school, which in 1932 had 43 students in eight grades. By the late 1940s, the school was gone, and in 1960, the Forest Home church served only widely scattered farms in the area. Though Forest Home is not labeled on the 1988 county highway map, a church is still shown at the site.

Merrimac, Texas: Merrimac was nine miles southeast of Winnsboro and a few miles west of Perryville. The location is near what became FM 2869 on northeastern Wood County.

Families were reported living in the area before 1850 and Merrimac was said to be a thickly populated sawmill community before 1901, the year it received a post office.

In 1897 Winnsboro’s W.G. Ragley Lumber Company built a tramline through the area to carry logs; this later became part of the Texas Southern line, on which Merrimac was a stop.

By 1905, the one-teacher school at Merrimac served 50 students. In 1914, Merrimac had a population of forty-one people, a physician, a blacksmith, a general store, a cotton gin, and a telephone connection.

By 1917, the railway had stopped running in the area. Three years later Merrimac lost its post office. During the early 1930s, the Merrimac school district had an enrollment of 20 students in grades one-eleven. The community was not shown on county highway maps of the 1980s.

Perryville, Texas: Perryville, sometimes called Parryville, was at the intersection of Farm Roads 2088 and 852, eight miles southeast of Winnsboro. It was reportedly named after a local landowners and sawmill operator and is said to have absorbed an early sawmill community known as Wallingville or Wallington.

Perryville was near Wood County’s first public road, called Jefferson Road. It was built through the area in 1853 for use by local farmers who needed to haul their cotton to Jefferson. About 1856 a sawmill was built nearby and a store opened.

In 1860 a post office under the name Parryville was established at the site. It was discontinued briefly in 1866, then reopened from 1867 to 1869.

A second post office, called Perryville, operated from 1894 to 1906.

Perryville at one time had as many a five cotton gins. By 1900, it had a population of 98, two churches, a school and a store. In the late 1930s, the population was reported at 20. In the 1940s, the community had numerous scattered dwellings, two schools, two churches and three businesses, including a sawmill. The population in 1949 was 40 people. In 1960, two churches remained but the businesses had disappeared and many of the dwellings had been abandoned.

From the early 1970s to 1990, the population of Perryville was reported as 52. The Perryville Baptist Church, organized in 1884 as the County Line Missionary Baptist Church, received a Texas Historical Commission marker in the mid-1980s. At that time, the original church building, erected in 1908 just off what is now FM 852, was still being used for services.