Field's Store Community

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Field's Store Community, out in Waller County. Settlers had already started showing up in this corner of Texas before the Civil War even got started. So by the time the early eighteen seventies rolled around, the land wasn't exactly empty.

It had history in its soil. That's when Druey Holland Field, born in eighteen oh nine, and his wife Caroline, born in eighteen thirty-seven, decided to open a general store out here. Now, a general store in a place like this wasn't just a place to buy flour and nails.

It was the thing that said, quietly but clearly: a community is here. And sure enough, a small agricultural settlement began to grow up around that store, and folks started calling it Field's Store community. It had a school.

It had a post office. A brick kiln, which tells you people were building things meant to last. A blacksmith shop.

A cotton gin. Other businesses besides. The kind of place where the rural countryside for miles around had somewhere to come, somewhere to do business, somewhere to belong.

Druey Field died in eighteen seventy-two, and Caroline in eighteen seventy-six, but what they'd started kept on going. The community also carried another name, New Hope, and there's something in that second name worth sitting with. New Hope.

That's not just a mailing address. That's a declaration. Today, the place still retains a sense of identity that reflects its early role as the nucleus of pioneer settlement.

Some communities fade when the people who founded them are gone. This one held on, and it held on to both its names.

What the marker says

Settlers began arriving in this vicinity prior to the Civil War. In the early 1870s Druey Holland Field (1809-72) and his wife Caroline (Perry) (1837-76) opened a general store in the area, and the small agricultural settlement that soon developed became known as Field's Store community. A center of business for the surrounding rural area, the settlement was the site of a school, post office, brick kiln, blacksmith shop, cotton gin and other businesses. Also known as New Hope community, it retains a sense of identity that reflects its early role as the nucleus of pioneer settlement.