DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, so let me pass it along to you straight. Now picture this — a flat stretch of Grayson County, nothing but wheat swaying in the breeze, ten acres of it, and a man named James Patillo Smith standing there in 1904 with a surveyor's eye and some ambitious ideas. J.
P. Smith, as folks knew him, platted streets right there in that wheat field and called what he laid out the town of Hagerman. Named for a railroad attorney — James P.
Hagerman — this place didn't stay a wheat field for long. By 1910, Hagerman had two hundred and fifty residents, a cotton gin, a school, a church, a post office, a railroad depot, and several businesses humming along. That's not bad for a former grain crop.
The town kept right on growin'. Three churches took root. The school expanded to a three-teacher operation.
Hagerman was doing what small Texas towns do best — persisting, building, becoming something. And then the news came. Sometime in the 1920s, word got out.
Not a drought, not a fire, not hard times in the usual sense — something slower and more certain. The creation of Lake Texoma would completely inundate the town. Inundate.
That's the kind of word that settles over a place like a shadow. Residents started leaving. Businesses followed.
One by one, Hagerman began to empty out, not from failure, but from fate. Lake Texoma was created in 1943, and it did exactly what people feared — it swallowed the town whole. Streets J.
P. Smith once platted in a wheat field now lie somewhere beneath that water. Hagerman is still out there, in a manner of speakin'.
You just can't get to it dry.
What the marker says
In 1904 James Patillo (J. P.) Smith platted streets here in a 10-acre wheat field and established the town of Hagerman. Named for railroad attorney James P. Hagerman, the town consisted of 250 residents, a cotton gin, school, church, post office, railroad depot, and several businesses by 1910. The town prospered and grew to contain three churches and a three-teacher school. However, in the 1920s residents and businesses began to abandon the area when it became known that the creation of Lake Texoma would completely inundate the town. Lake Texoma was created in 1943. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845 - 1995