Gainesville: Stagecoach Stop on the Southern Overland
Texas
Gainesville sits just south of the Red River at a crossing that drew traffic long before there was a town. Settlers arrived in the eighteen forties under the Peters Colony land grants, which offered six hundred forty acres to each head of family. The town was established in eighteen fifty on forty acres donated by Mary E.
Clark, and named for General Edmund Pendleton Gaines. By eighteen fifty-eight it was a station on the Butterfield Overland Mail route, the semi-weekly stagecoach line linking Saint Louis to San Francisco in less than twenty-five days. Passengers changed horses at the station on the corner of Rusk and California streets.
Indian raids slowed early growth, but after the Civil War, merchants supplying cattle drives built the first real commercial district, and railroads began arriving in the late eighteen seventies and eighties. Gainesville is today the seat of Cooke County, a working agricultural and small manufacturing city of about seventeen thousand.
