Groesbeck, Texas

Everything Groesbeck is known for

4 songs mention this city 2 artists from here

Music in Groesbeck

Songs About Groesbeck

Blind Lemon's Penitentiary Blues
Blind Lemon Jefferson
55%
"If you wanna go to the state penitentiary, go to Groesbeck for your trial"
Grosebeck Blues
Lightnin' Hopkins
55%
Blind Lemon’s Penitentiary Blues
Blind Lemon Jefferson
50%
"Go to Groesbeck for your trial"
I’ve Been Everywhere...In Texas
Brian Burns
2%
"Groesbeck"

Artists From Groesbeck

K
Kenny Harrell
country
A
Allon
r-n-b

Rivers & Roads in Song near Groesbeck

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

Interstate 45 8 songs Brazos River 42 songs Interstate 35 43 songs Trinity River 11 songs

Musical Heritage

The Hitmaker of Mexia RoadyGoat

Not all of Mexia’s famous stories involve oil booms or scandal. For over 50 years, one of America’s greatest songwriters quietly worked from her home right here in town. Her name was Cindy Walker. You might not know her name, but you know her songs: 'You Don't Know Me,' made famous by Ray Charles and Elvis Presley; 'Dream Baby,' a hit for Roy Orbison; and dozens of Western Swing classics for Bob Wills. From her house, which had a pink-themed studio, she wrote over 500 major-label recorded songs. She’d often wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, write it down, and then mail it off to Nashville or Hollywood. A member of the Country Music and Texas Heritage Songwriters Halls of Fame, Cindy Walker proved that you don’t need to live in a big city to have a huge impact on the world. You just need a phone, a typewriter, and a quiet room in Mexia, Texas.

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History of Groesbeck

Fort Parker and the Two Lives of Cynthia Ann Parker RoadyGoat

Near here, in 1833, the Parker family built a fortified settlement on the Texas frontier. On May 19, 1836, a large force of Comanche warriors, joined in some accounts by Kiowa and Caddo allies, approached the stockade. Negotiations under a flag of truce broke down, the warriors attacked, five settlers were killed, and five people were taken captive while eighteen survivors hid for nearly a week in the Navasota River bottoms. Among the captives was a girl of about nine named Cynthia Ann Parker. She was adopted into Comanche society, married the warrior Peta Nocona, and became the mother of Quanah Parker, the last great Comanche war chief. In 1860, Texas Rangers and soldiers recaptured her at the Battle of Pease River and forced her back to Anglo relatives, but she never adjusted and repeatedly tried to return to her Comanche family. The familiar phrase Fort Parker Massacre carries only the settlers' side; the fuller story belongs to a long cycle of displacement, expansion, raiding, and frontier violence. The fort you can visit is a reconstruction, rebuilt in 1967. (Source: Handbook of Texas.)

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The Railroad That Built One Town and Erased Another RoadyGoat

North of Groesbeck, a single decision by a railroad turned one county seat into a ghost. Before Groesbeck existed, the important town here was Springfield, founded in 1838 near the Navasota River. It became Limestone County's first county seat and grew into a real frontier community of a couple hundred people. Then the Houston and Texas Central Railroad came through, but it bypassed Springfield entirely and laid out a brand-new town several miles away: Groesbeck. After Springfield's courthouse burned in 1873, voters moved the county seat to the railroad town. Springfield's post office closed in 1878, its businesses and residents drifted away, and within a single generation the old seat simply disappeared. Today almost nothing of Springfield survives except Springfield Cemetery, now tucked inside Fort Parker State Park, where the graves include a veteran of the American Revolution and men who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto. Drive these miles and you're crossing the exact stretch of country where a rail line could create one town and reduce another to a cemetery under the trees. (Source: Handbook of Texas; Texas State Historical Association.)

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The Hand-Built Dam and the Men Who Made It RoadyGoat

Approach the lake at Fort Parker State Park and you're looking at one of Groesbeck's best engineering stories, built almost entirely by hand by men history nearly forgot. During the Great Depression, about 200 young African American men were assigned to Civilian Conservation Corps Company 3807, known as Camp Mexia, one of the segregated CCC camps run under the federal program. Many were sons of local sharecropping families. They earned $30 a month, of which $25 was normally sent straight home to their families. With a camp sawmill, a limestone quarry, concrete, earth, hand tools, and small carts called Georgia buggies, they raised a 423-foot dam across the Navasota River, creating the roughly 750-acre Fort Parker Lake, along with roads, trails, a bathhouse, and stone park buildings. The dam holds back the water using sheer mass and carefully placed earth, stone, and concrete, and the crews had to manage river flow, anchor a stable foundation, and keep water from eroding or slipping beneath the structure, all without modern excavators or computer modeling. The dam was finished in 1939, and the park opened in 1941. The lake and shoreline you see are not natural; they are a 1930s engineering project built largely by hand. (Source: Texas Parks and Wildlife; Handbook of Texas.)

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Fort Parker

1834

Built 1834 for protection from Indians. Named for leaders who bought first Predestinarian Baptist church body to Texas: Elder Daniel Parker; his father, Elder John; brothers Jas. W., Benjamin, Silas, John. Also here were Kellogg, Frost, Nixon, Duty and Plummer families on May 18, 1836, raiding Comanches killed Benjamin, John and Silas Parker, Samuel and Robert Frost and others; captured Elizabeth Kellogg, Rachel Plummer and son James, and Sila's children, John and Cynthia Ann in captivity, Cynthia Ann married Chief Peta Nacona; her son, Quanah, was last Comanche Chief. With her baby, Prairie Flower, in 1860 she was captured by Texas Rangers. She, the baby and Quanah are buried at Fort Sill.

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Limestone County

1836

Limestone County is in Central Texas about thirty miles due east of Waco. Mexia, its largest community, is approximately eighty miles south of Dallas. Groesbeck, the county seat, is near the county's center, at approximately 31°31' north latitude and 96°35' west longitude. The county comprises 931 square miles principally in the Blackland Prairies region. In the southeastern section loamy soils overlie mottled gray and red or yellow, cracking, clayey subsoils; in the central section the soils are slightly acidic and loamy at the surface, with cracking clayey subsoils; and surfaces in the northwestern section are dark, calcareous, mostly cracking, clayey soils. The nearly level to undulating terrain and light-colored, medium to slightly acid soils of the Claypan area and Cross Timbers are also found in the county. The vegetation includes mesquite, blackjack oak, pecan, bois d'arc, and elm trees as well as Indian grass and Texas winter grass in the northern area; the Post Oak Savannah vegetation of the southern area has tall grasses, Post oak, and blackjack oak. The natural resources of the county are clays, including kaolin and ceramic clays, limestone, industrial sand, glauconite, lignite coal, oil, and gas. The level to rolling prairie ranges from 375 to 665 feet above sea level. The land, on the divide between the Brazos and Trinity rivers, is drained by the Navasota River and its tributaries, which split the county in two. Bodies of water include Lake Mexia , Springfield Lake , and Lake Limestone. The average annual precipitation is almost thirty-eight inches, and the temperatures range from an average low of 37° F in January to an average high of 96° in July. The average growing season lasts 255 days. The area that became Limestone County was home to the Tawakoni, or Tehuacana, and Waco Indians. These were primarily agrarian people friendly to the whites who settled there. Tehuacana, in northeastern Limestone County, is on an old Indian village site. The Tawakonis were expert hunters and noted traders as well. Their enemies were the Apaches and Comanches, who often raided the Tawakoni settlements. Limestone County was part of the Haden Edwards and Robert Leftwich empresario grants made by the Coahuila and Texas legislature in 1825. This legislation began settlement of the area and the struggle between the government of Mexico and the American settlers for dominance. The government tried to restrict colonization through legislation, but settlers continued to come to Texas. Numerous individuals, both Mexican and Anglo, claimed land grants in the area before 1836. Among these were Silas M. Parker, Moses Herrin, Elisha Anglin, Luther T. M. Plummer, David Faulkenberry, Joshua Hadley , and Samuel Frost, who came together as a group from Illinois in 1833 to establish a permanent settlement for their families. Fort Parker, near the Navasota River in what is now central Limestone County, was the earliest actual settlement in the vicinity. While most of the men were out in the fields early on May 19, 1836, a large band of Comanches and their Kiowa allies approached the fort. After a short conversation under a flag of truce, the Indians attacked and killed most of the inhabitants. Several prisoners were taken, including Mrs. Rachel Plummer , who later wrote an account of her captivity, and nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker , who spent the next twenty-four years with the Comanches and married Peta Nocona . Their son, Quanah Parker , was a chief of the tribe. The other eighteen survivors wandered for six days, hiding in the riverbottoms, until they reached Fort Houston, from where a rescue party was sent back to survey the scene. After this raid further settlement was delayed until a treaty with the Indians was signed in 1844 at the instigation of Sam Houston . In the mid-1840s new settlements were established at Springfield and Tehuacana Hills. On April 11, 1846, Limestone County was formed from Robertson County, and a

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Parker, Cynthia Ann

1836

Cynthia Ann Parker, a captive of the Comanches, was born to Lucy (Duty) and Silas M. Parker in Crawford County, Illinois. According to the 1870 census of Anderson County she would have been born between June 2, 1824, and May 31, 1825. When she was nine or ten her family moved to Central Texas and built Fort Parker on the headwaters of the Navasota River in what is now Limestone County. On May 19, 1836, a large force of Comanche warriors accompanied by Kiowa and Kichai allies attacked the fort and killed several of its inhabitants. During the raid the Comanches seized five captives, including Cynthia Ann. The other four were eventually released, but Cynthia remained with the Native Americans for almost twenty-five years, forgot Anglo ways, and became thoroughly Comanche. It is said that in the mid-1840s her brother, John Parker , who had been captured with her, asked her to return to their Anglo family, but she refused, explaining that she loved her husband and children too much to leave them. She is also said to have rejected Native American trader Victor Rose's invitation to accompany him back to Anglo settlements a few years later, though the story of the invitation may be apocryphal. A newspaper account of April 29, 1846, describes an encounter of Col. Leonard G. Williams 's trading party with Cynthia, who was camped with Comanches on the Canadian River. Despite Williams's ransom offers, tribal elders refused to release her. Later, federal officials P. M. Butler and M. G. Lewis encountered Cynthia Ann with the Yamparika Comanches on the Washita River; by then she was a full-fledged member of the tribe and married to a Comanche warrior. She never voluntarily returned to Anglo society. Indian agent Robert S. Neighbors learned, probably in 1848, that she was among the Tenawa Comanches. He was told by other Comanches that only force would induce her captors to release her. She had married Peta Nocona and eventually had two sons, Quanah Parker and Pecos, and a daughter, Topsannah. On December 18, 1860, Texas Rangers under Lawrence Sullivan Ross attacked a Comanche hunting camp at Mule Creek, a tributary of the Pease River. During this raid the rangers captured three of the supposed Native Americans. They were surprised to find that one of them had blue eyes; it was a non-English-speaking Anglo woman with her infant daughter. Col. Isaac Parker later identified her as his niece, Cynthia Ann. Cynthia accompanied her uncle to Birdville on the condition that military interpreter Horace P. Jones would send along her sons if they were found. While traveling through Fort Worth she was photographed with her daughter at her breast and her hair cut short-a Comanche sign of mourning. She thought that Peta Nocona was dead and feared that she would never see her sons again. On April 8, 1861, a sympathetic Texas legislature voted her a grant of $100 annually for five years and a league of land and appointed Isaac D. and Benjamin F. Parker her guardians. But she was never reconciled to living in Anglo society and made several unsuccessful attempts to flee to her Comanche family. After three months at Birdville, her brother Silas took her to his Van Zandt County home. She afterward moved to her sister's place near the boundary of Anderson and Henderson counties. Though she is said in some sources to have died in 1864, the 1870 census enrolled her and gave her age as forty-five. At her death she was buried in Fosterville Cemetery in Anderson County. In 1910 her son Quanah moved her body to the Post Oak Mission Cemetery near Cache, Oklahoma. In 1957 her body and that of Quanah's were reinterred in the Fort Sill Post Cemetery at Lawton, Oklahoma. In the last years of Cynthia Ann's life she never saw her Native American family, the only family she really knew. But she was a true pioneer of the American West, whose legacy was carried on by her son Quanah. Serving as a link between Anglos and Comanches, Quanah Parker became the most influential Comanc

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Parker, James W.

1834

James W. Parker, the first of the Parker family to come to Texas, son of John and Sarah (White) Parker, was born in northeast Georgia, probably in Franklin or Elbert County, on July 4, 1797. He moved with his family to Dickson County, Tennessee, in the summer of 1803, and to the Territory of Illinois in 1815, where he married Martha (Patsy) Duty on July 14, 1816. In 1830 he and his family moved to Conway County, Arkansas, from whence he made several exploratory trips into Texas. In 1832 he proposed to Stephen F. Austin that he be permitted to settle fifty families "in the new colony above the mouth of the Little Brazos River." Austin did not reply to his offer. In 1833 James, along with his brother, Silas M. Parker , and their families, returned to Texas. James registered at Tenoxtitlán on January 29, 1834, for admission to Robertson's colony and registered on May 22, 1834, for admission to the Austin and Williams colony. He was granted a league of land north of site of present Groesbeck on April 1, 1835. Parker claims to have been one of the party that found Josiah P. Wilbarger in 1833, after he had been scalped and left for dead. James and Silas founded Fort Parker in the spring of 1835 and were joined in the fall by their father, John Parker, and brother, Benjamin. In February 1835 James Parker and Sterling C. Robertson met with hostile Indian chiefs to sign a treaty of friendship. Parker was one of six representatives from Viesca elected to the Consultation to meet in San Felipe, and his name appears on November 7, 1835, on the Declaration of the People of Texas in General Convention Assembled . Parker left the Consultation early, as he was concerned about the Indian activity around Fort Parker, and enrolled as a ranger on November 17, 1835. He was working in his field, a mile from Fort Parker on May 19, 1836, when the fort was attacked by Indians. He arrived in the midst of the attack and hid seventeen of the fort's inhabitants; he later led them for six days through the underbrush, south to Tinnin's settlement, near the crossing of the Navasota River and the Old San Antonio Road . His father and his brothers Silas and Benjamin were killed; five family members were captured. After insuring the safety of his family, he began efforts for the return of captives taken at Fort Parker: his daughter, Rachel Parker Plummer ; his grandson, James Pratt Plummer; his niece, Cynthia Ann Parker ; his nephew, John Parker ; and his sister-in-law, Elizabeth (Duty) Kellogg. James's initial efforts at raising a company of men for pursuit was foiled by the threat of the return of the Mexican army. He returned to Fort Parker in June to bury the dead; in July he met with Sam Houston in San Augustine to secure his help in the return of the prisoners. Parker disagreed with Houston's remedy-a treaty with the Indians. In August 1836 James again approached Houston, now in Nacogdoches, to persuade him to order an expedition against the Comanches. Houston again refused. While in Nacogdoches James was reunited with Mrs. Kellogg, who had been returned by Delaware Indians, who had purchased her. James returned her to his family in Walker County. In June 1837 Parker wrote to President Houston for permission to raise 2,000 men to "act against the Indians." Houston commissioned Parker to raise 120 men to "flog those Indians." The force was disbanded by Houston in late July before it had departed. James's daughter Rachel was returned in February 1838 and died in February 1839 in Houston. On November 21, 1840, James petitioned the Texas House to raise a force against the prairie Indians. The petition was denied. Two boys, thought to be John Parker and James Pratt Plummer, were recovered from Fort Gibson in January 16, 1843, by James Parker. There is some doubt as to the identity of the child, John Parker. The Texas Congress, in 1845, passed a joint resolution for payment by Isaac Parker for redemption of John Parker from the Keechi Indians. In 1844 James pub

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Faulkenberry Cemetery

1814

David Faulkenberry, believed to have been born in South Carolina circa 1795, wed Nancy Douthit in 1814 in Tennessee. The couple had seven children. The family was part of Daniel Parker's Pilgrim Church, an Illinois congregation that came to Texas in 1833. The Faulkenberrys and others from the church, including Elisha Anglin, moved to present-day Limestone County in 1835. They built cabins and Fort Parker for protection against Native Americans. David and his oldest son, Evan, were killed in an attack in 1837 near Fort Houston. Nancy later wed Elisha Anglin and established this cemetery. Her descendants formally deeded it as a graveyard in 1874, and the city annexed the cemetery and its additions in 1979. The first marked burial, dating to 1854, is that of a child. Among the gravesites are those of two state representatives, five sheriffs, an early Texas Ranger, many veterans from military action dating back to the Texas Revolution, and John C. Clariman, a longtime caretaker of the cemetery. Today, the cemetery is a link to Limestone County's 19th-century settlers and their descendants. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2003

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Civilian Conservation Corps at Fort Parker State Park

1935

In August 1935, construction of a state park began here on the former town site of Springfield under the direction of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The group assigned to build Fort Parker State Park was Company 3807(C), an African American CCC Camp. From 1935 to 1942, the park company constructed park buildings, roads and facilities, erected a dam across the Navasota River, and reconstructed old Fort Parker. Located nearby, old Fort Parker was rebuilt in preparation for a Texas Centennial observance in 1936, and was the first of the CCC projects completed. The dam that created Lake Fort Parker was concluded by 1938 and required breaking and hauling rock for cement, digging out the dam footings, spillway, and wing walks, and pouring cement for the dam. Creating the park facilities included clearing and building five miles of roads, constructing an activity center / bath house, drinking fountains, and cement picnic tables. Former Texas Governor Pat Neff dedicated Fort Parker State Park in May 1941, and declared it open to the public. Company 3807(C) was transferred out of the area in 1942 after completing several complex tasks over a span of almost seven years. (1997)

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Everything Near Groesbeck

279 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the nearest 200 are listed here — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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