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 1990
the population was 1,360.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: W. Walworth Harrison, History of Greenville
and Hunt County, Texas (Waco: Texian, 1976).
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