Ely

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, picture this: a man who'd already lived through the Civil War, already seen enough of the world to last most folks a lifetime, looks over at his wife and says, let's start over. That man was Levi Wells Ely, born in 1829, and he did not go quietly into his later years.

In 1882, he and his wife Laura, a Page before she was an Ely, packed up and left Georgia behind. They came to Fannin County, Texas, and they put down roots. A farm.

Land worth working. And from that farm, something grew. A whole community took shape around them, and folks just started calling it Ely.

Now, you don't get a community named after you without a little momentum behind you, and this one had plenty. The soil was fertile, and the cotton came up strong. Rail lines ran nearby, and that combination, good dirt and a way to move what you grew, had a way of drawing settlers like a dinner bell at sundown.

Before long, Ely had itself a general store, a cotton gin, a blacksmith shop, a barber shop, and churches, more than one. The kind of place where you could get your horse shod, your hair cut, your soul tended to, and your crop ginned, all without riding too far from home. In 1895, a post office opened, which tells you the community had grown enough to need one.

But here's the thing about frontier towns: not all of them hold on. That post office closed in 1905. The school kept going longer, kept teaching Fannin County children, until 1949, when it was consolidated into the Whitewright District.

Levi Wells Ely himself passed in 1904, just a year before that post office shut its doors. He'd come a long way from Georgia, built something out of good Texas ground, and left his name on a place that outlasted him, at least for a while. Sometimes that's the whole of what a person can ask for.

What the marker says

A veteran of the Civil War, Levi Wells Ely (1829-1904) and his wife Laura (Page) migrated to this area from Georgia in 1882. The settlement that grew up around their farm became known as the Ely community. Settlers were attracted to this cotton-producing area by the fertile soil and nearby rail lines. Ely was the site of a general store, cotton gin, blacksmith shop, barber shop, and churches. A post office, opened in 1895, closed in 1905. A school was located here until 1949 when it was consolidated with the Whitewright District. (1980)