Canton, Texas

Everything Canton is known for

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Blayne Clower
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Rivers & Roads in Song near Canton

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Canton.

Interstate 20 10 songs Sabine River 10 songs Trinity River 8 songs Interstate 45 2 songs

History of Canton

How Salt Killed the Refrigerator Problem RoadyGoat

Before refrigerators, salt was how the world kept food from rotting, and the trick is pure physics. Pack meat in salt and you set up osmosis: water always flows toward the saltier side of a membrane. Bacteria and mold are mostly water, so when they land on salted food, the salt yanks the moisture right out of their cells and they shrivel and die. No water, no spoilage. Sugar does the exact same thing, which is why jam keeps, it's just sweet instead of salty. That single chemical trick is why salt was once worth its weight in trade: it meant you could eat through winter. The salt that did it for thousands of years, all over the world, is the same kind sitting in the dome beneath Grand Saline.

11.9 mi away

A Mile-Tall Column of an Ancient Vanished Sea RoadyGoat

The salt under Grand Saline isn't a flat layer. It's a column, a dome that rises like a frozen plume from deep underground. It started as the Louann Salt, the dried-out remnant of an entire sea that evaporated here during the Jurassic, roughly a hundred and seventy million years ago. Buried under heavier rock, salt behaves strangely. It actually flows, slower than honey but unstoppable, and over eons it squeezed upward into a towering plug of nearly pure rock salt more than a mile deep. The top is just a couple hundred feet down. There's so much of it that geologists estimate the deposit could supply salt for thousands of years at current rates. You are standing on the ghost of an ocean that dried up before the dinosaurs were done.

12.0 mi away

The Town Named for the Mountain of Salt Beneath It RoadyGoat

900

Here's a town that's exactly what it says on the label. Grand Saline means 'great salt marsh' in French, and it sits on top of one of the largest, purest salt deposits in North America. Caddo people were boiling salt from these brine springs as far back as nine hundred A.D., long before any town existed. Early settlers called the spot Jordan's Saline, but when the Texas and Pacific Railway laid track through in 1873, the new depot was christened Grand Saline, and the name stuck to the whole town. Morton Salt bought up the local salt works around 1920 and sank a deep mine into the dome by 1931. Nearly a century later, they're still digging the same salt. The name isn't a metaphor. It's a geology report.

12.0 mi away

Roberts, Oran Milo

1815

(July 9, 1815 - May 19, 1898) A South Carolina-born Alabama legislator, Oran M. Roberts came to San Augustine, Texas in 1841. He served in district and state judicial positions, including the first district court in Canon in 1850, and was president of the Secession Convention in 1861. After service as a colonel in the 11th Regiment, Texas Infantry, his postwar career included a second turn as a state Supreme Court judge; he made the 1877 ruling that ended the Van Zandt County Seat War. Roberts was elected governor of Texas in 1878. He was a law professor at the new University of Texas until 1893. Roberts helped form the Texas State Historical Association in 1895. (1998) Incise on base: Researched by Annette Herndon Plemmons

Historical Marker →

Canton, TX

1850

Canton, the county seat of Van Zandt County, is on State highways 19 and 64 on the Mill Creek tributary of the Sabine River, fourteen miles southeast of Wills Point in the central part of the county. The site, originally in Henderson County, was surveyed as early as 1840 by a company of men under Dr. W. P. King. The community stands on the original survey of Jesse Stockwell, who arrived in the area at that time. No settlement was made until 1850, when the town was laid out and named by settlers moving from Old Canton in Smith County. The first district courthouse at Canton opened in 1850, and a post office, the county's fourth, was established in that year. When the Texas and Pacific Railway built across the county in 1872, it missed Canton by ten miles, and citizens of Wills Point persuaded the county officials to move the county seat there. In the resulting dispute residents of Canton in 1877 went armed to Wills Point to get the records back, and the county judge wired Governor Richard B. Hubbard for aid. The Supreme Court of Texas finally decided in favor of Canton. Unwilling to use the railroad at Wills Point, Canton businessmen established Edgewood, ten miles to the northwest of town, and built an extension to the railroad at a siding formerly called Stevenson. Property for the town's first school, Canton Academy, was acquired in 1853. Sid S. Johnson began publication of the Canton Weekly Times , the county's first newspaper, in 1860. A Grange was founded in 1876. James S. Hogg , who once served as Canton district attorney, was elected governor in 1880. By 1890 Canton had a population of 421, flour mills, sawmills, cotton gins, and a bank. Brick buildings were under construction by 1892, and a new brick courthouse was completed in 1894. Iron ore and anthracite coal were discovered in 1887 and 1891. By 1896 the town reached a population high of 800 and had several churches, a steam gristmill and gin, two weekly newspapers, three general stores and two hotels. But residents had dropped to 421 by 1904. Notorious bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow once lived briefly at the Dixie Hotel, built in 1915. Canton was incorporated in 1919 and elected a mayor and aldermen. Despite the Great Depression , development of the Van oilfield after 1929 brought further expansion, and a Public Works Administration project in the 1930s completed a new courthouse in the community. In 1933 area schools registered 500 White and twenty-eight Black students. The population reached 715 in 1940, but residents dwindled again after 1949. In the 1950s, local business included a sweet-potato curing plant, an ice factory, a concrete-tile factory, lumberyards, and a cotton gin. Expansion of the Canton city limits doubled its territory in the 1960s. In 1970 the community had a municipal lake with recreational facilities, seven churches, a school, a bank, a library, a newspaper, and eighty-six businesses. The population doubled between 1960 and 1970 from roughly 1,000 to 2,000, and reached nearly 3,000 by 1990. The population was 3,292 in 2000. Canton is known for its First Monday or Hoss Monday trade day. According to various sources, the tradition began with district court meetings held on the first Monday of each month or with the monthly visit of neighbors in the Confederate times. The custom began with the swapping of surplus stock by barter and grew to include casual bargaining for or swapping of dogs, antiques, junk, and donkeys on a thirty-acre grounds. The Van Zandt County Fair and Rodeo and the Annual Bluegrass Festival take place in the community in August.

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Neches, Battle of the

1839

The battle of the Neches, fought on July 15 and 16, 1839, was the principal engagement of the Cherokee War , a conflict that began when President Mirabeau B. Lamar announced that the time had come for an "exterminating war" on Native Americans in Texas. Under Lamar's leadership, the Republic refused to recognize earlier treaties with the Cherokees who lived in East Texas and, after accusing them of planning to join Mexico in an insurrection, sent troops commanded by Gen. Thomas J. Rusk to occupy their lands. The Cherokee leader, Chief Bowl (Duwali) led an evacuation of their main town, but they were attacked a few miles west of present-day Tyler at dusk on July 15. The first day's battle proved indecisive, but on July 16, Texas troops led by Rusk and Edward Burleson overwhelmed the Cherokees and their allies, the Kickapoos , Delawares , and Shawnees , in a fight on the headwaters of the Neches River in present-day Van Zandt County. Chief Bowl entered the battle on horseback, but when his mount was wounded and he was shot through the thigh, he dismounted. After being wounded again, he sat on the battlefield where a Texan soldier shot him in the head. Approximately one hundred Native Americans died in the fight; Texan losses were reported as five dead and twenty-eight wounded. Most of the Cherokees and their allies who survived the battle fled to the Indian Territory. Only the Alabamas and Coushattas remained in significant numbers in East Texas. A Texas Historical Marker was erected on the site of the battle in Van Zandt County in 1968, and an annual Cherokee reunion took place in the county.

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Canton - First Monday Trade Days

1850

Canton's First Monday Trade Days is one of the oldest and largest flea markets in the United States, operating since the mid-1800s.

Raines, Cadwell Walton

1876

(September 18, 1839 - August 2, 1906) Born in Georgia, Raines came to Texas in 1858. After serving in Gen. R. M. Gano's Texas Cavalry Regiment in the Civil War, he was a teacher in New Braunfels and a lawyer in Canton. Van Zandt County Judge from 1876 to 1878, he played a major role in the infamous County Seat War of 1877. He published newspapers at Wills Point, Mineola, and Quitman. In Quitman he became Wood County Judge and was appointed State Librarian in 1891 by his friend, Governor James Stephen Hogg. Raines rebuilt the neglected state library and began its invaluable collection of Texana from 1895 to 1899 and again from 1899 until his death. (1998)

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Free State of Van Zandt

1861

Several explanations have been proposed for the origin of the name Free State of Van Zandt for Van Zandt County. The first is that when Van Zandt and Kaufman counties were formed from Henderson County, all debts for the area were retained by Henderson County, and consequently Van Zandt County became known as a debt-free territory. Resentful politicians of Henderson County thereafter referred to Van Zandt County as a free state. Another explanation states that in 1861 some 350 residents attended a meeting to protest secession . They reasoned that if Texas could leave the Union, then Van Zandt County could leave the state of Texas. These people tried to organize a government until they were threatened with military intervention. In another story, a slaveowner from out of the state came through Van Zandt County seeking a place to keep his slaves after Confederate setbacks. Asked if Van Zandt County would suffice, the man replied, "Hell no, I had as soon think of taking them to a free state. I came all the way from Quitman and never so much as saw a slave." In yet another tale, during Reconstruction residents declared Van Zandt County independent of state and national authority. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan sent troops, eventually captured the perpetrators, and imprisoned them near Canton. Although the rebels had temporarily routed the United States troops, in their eagerness to celebrate they drank too much and failed to post a guard. All eventually escaped.

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Everything Near Canton

130 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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