Mount Vernon, Texas: Franklin County's Long Road to a Name

Mount Vernon has been the county seat of Franklin County since eighteen seventy-five, but it took the town nearly three decades to settle on that name. Joshua Foster Johnson arrived here in eighteen forty-five and established the first permanent settlement. A post office opened in eighteen forty-eight under the name Keith. The town was renamed Lone Star in eighteen fifty, then finally Mount Vernon in September eighteen seventy-five, just months after Franklin County was carved from Titus County and named for Judge Benjamin C. Franklin.

Mount Vernon won the county seat election that April, defeating two railroad milepost settlements. The commercial district grew as the supply and shipping hub for farm families across the Piney Woods edge of East Texas. Today it is a town of about twenty-five hundred people in one of the smaller counties in Texas, and the gateway to the lakes and timberland of the northeastern corner of the state.