Valley View: A Settler's Name for a Prairie Vista

Valley View takes its name from a simple observation. L. W.

Lee settled on Spring Creek in Cooke County in eighteen seventy, platted a town on his land in eighteen seventy-two, and called it Valley View for the broad view of the creek valley spread out below the site. Eighteen families moved in that year and a post office opened alongside them. Cooke County itself dated to eighteen forty-eight, carved out of frontier land that stood between the eastern Caddo and the Comanche ranges to the west.

By eighteen ninety Valley View had four churches, a hotel, and a school. A two-story brick schoolhouse and six brick business buildings went up in nineteen oh three, the same year telephone service arrived. The town still sits at the crossing of Interstate Thirty-Five and the Santa Fe Railway ten miles south of Gainesville, a small Cooke County community that has held its place on the map for a hundred and fifty years.