Madisonville, Texas

Everything Madisonville is known for

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Cody Johnson
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Rivers & Roads in Song near Madisonville

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

Interstate 45 8 songs Kickapoo Creek 4 songs Trinity River 11 songs Brazos River 42 songs

History of Madisonville

The Spanish Town the Trinity Swallowed RoadyGoat

Long before Madisonville, the most important spot in this county was a river crossing in its northeast corner, where the Old San Antonio Road, also called El Camino Real de los Tejas, the King's Highway, forded the Trinity River near present-day Midway. There, in September 1774, Spanish colonists founded the town of Nuestra Senora del Pilar de Bucareli. Led by Antonio Gil Ibarvo and named for the Spanish viceroy, Bucareli grew into a real settlement: a plaza, a church, a guardhouse, twenty houses of hewn wood, and hundreds of residents, prospering partly on quiet trade with the French. It did not last. An epidemic struck in 1777, Comanche raids followed in 1778, and a Trinity River flood in early 1779 finished the job. Rather than wait for permission, Ibarvo led the settlers east, and before April 1779 they founded what is now Nacogdoches, one of the oldest towns in Texas. So a flood on the Madison County line did not just erase a town; it relocated it, planting the seed of a city that still thrives today. (Source: Handbook of Texas; Texas Historical Commission.)

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The Mushroom Capital of Texas RoadyGoat

This small county seat between Houston and Dallas wears an unlikely crown: the Mushroom Capital of Texas, a title the Texas Legislature made official. The reason sits on the edge of town, where Monterey Mushrooms runs one of the largest mushroom farms in the country. The operation traces back to the 1970s, when Ralston Purina built a mushroom-processing plant here; Monterey Mushrooms took it over in the early 1980s and turned Madisonville into a genuine fungal powerhouse. The numbers are hard to picture. The farm produces hundreds of thousands of pounds of white and brown mushrooms every single week, much of it grown in climate-controlled rooms stacked vertically so a single acre can yield more than a million mushrooms. Out of that industry grew the town's signature party, the Texas Mushroom Festival, launched in 2001 and now drawing thousands downtown each October for mushroom tacos, a Shiitake 5K, and live music. It is the kind of identity most towns would never claim and Madisonville leaned all the way into: a farm town that decided its strangest crop was worth celebrating. (Source: Monterey Mushrooms; Texas Mushroom Festival.)

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The Stagecoach Man Who Gave Away a Town RoadyGoat

The county seat you are rolling into exists because one man gave the land away. When the Texas Legislature carved Madison County out of Grimes, Walker, and Leon counties in 1853, the new county needed a courthouse town near its geographic center. Job Starks Collard, a Missouri-born pioneer who had come to this part of Texas back in the 1840s when it was still northern Montgomery County, donated a 200-acre tract on Town Creek for the purpose. Lots went on sale in the summer of 1853, and a fresh, stream-fed lake just northeast of the site settled the question of water. The name came at the suggestion of an early resident, Dr. Pleasant Williams Kittrell, who proposed honoring James Madison, the fourth president and the man often called the Father of the Constitution. Collard, for his part, was no idle benefactor: he ran a stagecoach inn on the very ground where the town's high school would later rise, and when he died here in 1867 he was buried among the people who settled the place he founded. (Source: Handbook of Texas; Find a Grave.)

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Kimbro, Truman

1918

(1918-1944) Madison County native Truman Kimbro was born in Cottonwood (6 mi. W), and attended school in nearby Center. Drafted into the army in December 1941, he arrived in Europe in October 1943 with the 2nd Engineer Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division. He was among the allied forces that landed on Omaha Beach during the Normandy Invasion on June 6, 1944. Killed in December 1944 while placing anti-tank mines before advancing German troops, Kimbro was post-humously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He is buried in the U. S. Military Cemetery near Henri-Chapelle, Belgium.

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TX-21 - Driving the Camino Real

1690

Texas Highway 21 follows the route of El Camino Real de los Tejas across central and east Texas, designated a National Historic Trail in October 2004 by Public Law 108-342.

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Jubal Richard Parten

1896

Born in Madisonville on February 16, 1896, Jubal Richard “J.R.” Parten secured his legacy as a pioneer in the American oil industry and a reputation in local, state and national politics. Studying government and law at the University of Texas, Parten graduated and married Opal Woodley in 1917. Shortly after, J.R. joined the army, rising to the rank of major. After WWI, Parten joined his father-in-law in organizing Woodley Petroleum Company in 1919, thus beginning his over-seventy-year career in the petroleum industry. Throughout his career in the oil industry, Parten stayed active in the affairs of his alma mater and national politics. He served on the University of Texas Board of Regents from 1935-1941 and received a distinguished alumnus award from his beloved university in 1987. During WWII, Parten served as director of the Transportation Division of the Petroleum Administration for War, responsible for delivering necessary oil for the war effort. J.R. also participated in the post-war negotiations at the Potsdam Conference. President Harry S. Truman called on Parten again in 1950, to organize the Petroleum Administration for Defense during the Korean War. He held many public service positions throughout his life representing his country, state, and county. J.R. Parten divorced Opal in 1947, and married Patsy Edwards Puterbaugh and the couple had two children. Parten always generously gave back to Madison County whenever donations were asked. He also gifted multiple tracts of land for an elementary school, hospital, and the Madison County Library. Parten died on November 9, 1992, and is buried in the Madisonville Cemetery. (2017)

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Parten, Jubal Richard

1917

Jubal Richard (Major, J. R.) Parten, businessman, political activist, philanthropist, and university regent, son of Wayne Lafayette and Ella May (Brooks) Parten, was born at Madisonville, Texas, on February 16, 1896, the sixth of eleven children of one of the pioneer families of Madison County. He spent his youth in Madisonville and graduated from Madisonville High School as valedictorian in 1913. From 1913 to 1917 he studied government and law at the University of Texas and participated in the intercollegiate debate program. After passing the state bar exam, Parten left school and entered the second United States Army Officers Training School at Leon Springs. After earning his initial commission as a captain and becoming an instructor in field artillery, he served tours of duty at Camp Stanley, Texas, and Camp Jackson, South Carolina. On December 15, 1917, Parten married Opal Woodley, a University of Texas student from Shamrock. He left the army in January 1919 with the rank of major. That same month he joined his father-in-law, Edward L. Woodley, to form the Woodley Company, an oil-well-drilling firm in Shreveport, Louisiana, that was reorganized and incorporated in 1922 as the Woodley Petroleum Company. As head of Woodley, Parten was a pioneer of the American oil industry. His company made the discovery wells at the Haynesville field in northern Louisiana and at the El Dorado field in southern Arkansas in 1922. Woodley moved its offices from Shreveport to Houston in 1935. It was active in Smackover, Arkansas, at the giant East Texas oilfield , and at fields in west central Texas, eastern New Mexico, and western Canada. In 1931 Parten and Sylvester Dayson of Longview formed the Centex Refining Company, which later became the Premier Refining Company. Premier operated refineries in Longview, Baird, and Fort Worth, Texas, as well as Cotton Valley, Louisiana. As president of the Independent Petroleum Association of Texas from 1931 until 1934, Parten was a leader in the fight against the attempt by the presidential administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to impose federal regulations on the production of crude oil. His efforts contributed to the establishment in Texas of the Railroad Commission as the primary regulator of the state's oil industry. Long active in the affairs of the University of Texas, Parten was appointed in 1935 by Governor James Allred to the board of regents, of which he was chairman for his last two years of tenure, 1939–41. Parten's accomplishments included the recruitment and hiring of Homer P. Rainey as UT president and Dana X. Bible as head football coach. His most significant contribution, however, may have been his work with UT lands and the Permanent University Fund . Major Parten was instrumental in changing the oil leasing of UT lands from a closed to an open bidding process, which brought an enormous increase in revenue for the PUF. During World War II Parten served as the director of the Transportation Division of the Petroleum Administration for War. He was responsible for seeing that crude oil and oil products were delivered from the Southwest to the East Coast. Working with an expert team from the oil industry, he coordinated a delivery system of railroad tank cars, river barges, and pipelines that provided fuel for the allied invasion of Europe in June 1944. His most important contribution was his management of the construction of the War Emergency Pipelines ( see BIG INCH AND LITTLE BIG INCH ) from East Texas to New York and Pennsylvania. At the time, these were the largest-capacity petroleum pipelines ever constructed. In 1945 President Harry S. Truman appointed Parten chief of staff of the United States delegation to the Allied War Reparations Commission. Serving under Ambassador Edwin Pauley, Parten organized the delegation and participated in the negotiations in Moscow and later at the Potsdam Conference in Berlin. He and fellow delegate Luther Gulick coauthored the final report of the Un

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Carson, Christopher Houston [Kit]

1843

Christopher Houston (Kit) Carson, frontiersman, son of Lindsey and Rebecca (Robinson) Carson, was born on December 24, 1809, in Madison County, Kentucky. The family moved in 1811 to Howard County, Missouri, where Kit grew up illiterate. He ran away to Santa Fe in 1826, learned Spanish, and trapped from Taos to California and back in 1829–31. He became a veteran mountain man before he was twenty-one. As a free trapper for many different companies during the next ten years, he led an arduous life and became familiar with a vast area only partly within the United States. In 1842, after eight months as hunter for Bent's Fort in what is now Colorado, he visited relatives in Missouri. Carson was guide and hunter for John C. Frémont's first three explorations between 1842 and 1846 and became a national hero through Frémont's published reports. Carson's exploits in the Mexican War and subsequent overland transcontinental journeys with Edward F. Beale and George D. Brewerton caused him to be lionized in Washington, D.C. In 1854 he was appointed Indian agent at Taos, New Mexico, and learned to sign his name, C. Carson. In 1856 he dictated his concise and factual memoirs to his secretary, John Mostin. Though Carson's knowledge of Indian languages and customs made him an effective agent, he resigned his agency in 1861 and became colonel of the First New Mexico Volunteers. He fought the Confederates at the battle of Valverde in 1862. In 1863–64, under orders from Gen. James H. Carleton, Carson conducted a successful campaign against the Navajos but was not in charge of the "Long Walk," which transferred them to a reservation at the Bosque Redondo. Carson was brevetted brigadier general of volunteers and was in command at Fort Garland, Colorado, in 1866–67. He resigned his commission, moved his family to Boggsville, Colorado, and became Indian agent for Colorado Territory in November 1867. Although seriously ill, he conducted a Ute delegation to Washington, D.C., early in 1868. He died at Fort Lyons, Colorado, from an aneurysm of the aorta on May 23, 1868. From about 1836 to 1840 Carson was married to an Arapaho, Waanibe, by whom he had two daughters. In 1841 he married a Cheyenne, who soon divorced him. In February 1843, after conversion to Catholicism, Carson married Josefa Jaramillo in Taos, and by her he had seven children, of whom four left descendants. The couple also adopted a Navajo orphan. Josefa died after childbirth in April of 1868. Kit and Josefa were first buried in Boggsville in the Colorado Territory. Their remains were moved to Taos in 1869, as Carson's will stipulated. In Texas history Carson was connected with an international border incident in 1843 ( see SNIVELY EXPEDITION ). He made a hazardous ride from what is now Kansas to Taos and back in an effort to secure aid for a wagon train, which was ultimately saved by the intervention of United States Dragoons. A second Texas adventure was Carson's fight at the first battle of Adobe Walls on November 25, 1864, against a large number of Kiowas and Comanches. Aided by two howitzers, Carson made a demonstration of force that may have helped to produce a peace treaty in 1865. As trapper, explorer, Indian agent, and soldier, Carson fought hostile Indians innumerable times. He also had a variety of peaceable relations with friendly Indians and treated Indians as equals. Myth-makers in his own time made Carson a superhero by exaggerating his Indian fighting. Later myth-makers have tried to make him a supervillain by the same process. Carson was of short stature and unimpressive demeanor and was extraordinary in his willingness to volunteer for what he believed to be the common good. Although fearless, he had enough caution to survive. He was not a natural leader but acted as difficult circumstances demanded, though he remained modest and unspoiled by adulation. Kit Carson is one of the most deservedly durable of American heroes.

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Shapira Hotel

1903

Russian-born Jewish immigrants Jake Shapira (d. 1903) and his wife Sarah owned a boarding house at this site which burned in 1903. The following year Sarah had this Victorian hotel built. The structure reflects Eastlake styling and features fishscale and diamond shingling. One of the most lavish buildings in the region, the Shapira Hotel was an early center of business and social activity. It was later operated by Clara Wills as the Wills Hotel. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1982

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Everything Near Madisonville

231 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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