Site of Old Town and Post Office of Weldon

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Back in 1850, a man named William Morrow built a cotton gin about a mile north of where you're standing right now. Just one cotton gin.

But that's all it takes sometimes, and a settlement began to open up around it. Now, the post office serving those early folks went through a name or two before it finally got called Weldon, in 1869. That name came from a local pioneer merchant by the name of Weldon Jones Murchison, born in 1838, gone by 1899.

A man with enough standing in the community that they hung his name on the place he called home. The local economy ran on two things: cotton and timber. Both of them heavy, both of them demanding, and both of them shaping every road and rail line in the county.

By 1900, trains were hauling logs over a tram road all the way to mills in Trinity, fifteen miles to the east. Then came 1911, and the Beaumont and Great Northern Railway reached this point, and the town did something towns almost never do. It picked itself up and moved south to meet it.

The East Texas Development Company platted out a brand new townsite right there, and Weldon prospered. It prospered through the hard years and the lean years, right up until fire came calling. Disastrous fires, the marker says, and it doesn't soften that word.

One in 1926. Another in 1927. Back to back.

And still the town held on. Weldon kept its post office all the way until September 3rd, 1976, when it finally closed. A settlement born from a single cotton gin outlasted more than a century of flood and fire and shifting rail lines.

That's not nothing. That's Weldon.

What the marker says

In 1850 William Morrow built a cotton gin about a mile north of here, opening a settlement. An early post office in the vicinity was renamed Weldon in 1869, for Weldon Jones Murchison (1838-99), a local pioneer merchant. Local economy was based on cotton and timber. Trains hauled logs over a tram road to mills in Trinity (15 miles east) by 1900. Town moved south in 1911, when Beaumont & Great Northern Railway reached this point. The East Texas Development Company platted the new townsite, which prospered in spite of disastrous fires in 1926 and 1927. Weldon post office closed Sept. 3, 1976.