DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. In 1854, a man named John Campbell Patrick loaded up his life and headed west. He brought his wife, Eleanor Stephenson, her maiden name being Currence, and their five children.
He brought his brothers. He brought other families. The whole caravan came out of South Carolina, and they set their sights on East Texas.
Now, Patrick was born in 1814, and he had a sense for land, or at least a sense for timing. In 1855, he bought 335 acres right here on Shreveport Road. He built a log house.
Seems modest enough, a log house on a stretch of road in Rusk County. But you know how some places just draw people in? That log house became the center of what folks would come to call the Patrick Community.
And it grew. A gin went up. A grist mill.
A schoolhouse. A church building. One man's 335 acres became something that looked an awful lot like a town.
Patrick himself died in 1868, but the story of that home was far from over. His daughter, Mary Bolding, a widow, took up residence and took up work. She ran a store out of that home.
She ran a post office. And she operated a telephone switchboard, right there in the same house her father had built from logs on the Shreveport Road. Mary Bolding kept all of that going until her death, which came just before World War I.
One log house, one family's arrival, and decades later the community was still answering the call, literally.
What the marker says
In 1854 John Campbell Patrick (1814-68), his wife, Eleanor Stephenson (Currence), and their five children came from South Carolina with Patrick's brothers and other families. Patrick bought 335 acres here on Shreveport Road in 1855 and built a log house that became the center of the Patrick Community. The settlement grew to include a gin, grist mill, schoolhouse, and church building. Mary Bolding, Patrick's widowed daughter, operated a store, post office, and telephone switchboard in the Patrick home until her death just prior to World War I.