Just a note to everyone. I'm stillhaving some things dissappear online and scared to add to the Fannin Co. Facts and folks as some dissappeared the other day. Apparently the backup computer was online when I uploaded ( why they didn't block the loading sockets? go figure) I'll try again tomorrow. As for Orangeville. I have a lot of notes ( of course somewhere in these stacks of stuff) . If you were to go out there today you will find a cluster of houses , none of them very old and nothing else. A little sign tells you that you are in orangeville and then out of orangeville. No buisinesses. There are some new houses in the area and I say that with sadness. I hate the land being changed and all these new developments. We are losing agricultural lands fast in some parts of north Texas. 10 yrs ago it was quiet there as far as the area. I hope it doesn't get overrun. But still only 20 houses or so nearby the area that was Orangeville. It never was a town as some are thinking . Places like Orangville had a cotton gin , a couple of churches, a school building and a general store. smaller than Walnut grove on those old Little house on the prairie shows. buildings were not placed close together here in north Texas like on tv shows. Most 'communities' (as opposed to towns outright) had a 'main street' . It would be strung over 20 acres or so the schools and churches as well as a store and the gins would be somewhere nearby on a creek or something. Towns on the other hand had a plat submitted to the courthouse and then usually were located at a crossroads of roads going to a large town or bridge crossing or something. The railroads usually get built along those and so the towns grew up in size while the communities which were usually located somewhere along a rural road or crossroads on a set of winding country roads. The Orangeville area was not called that until late. If you had early folks in the area they didn't use the word until the 1880's. It was named by some Yankees who came there. The area before that was considered the Bonham Post office area. That is why books refer to John Wesley Hardin being born in Bonham. He was born several miles west of where Orangeville is today, just to the East of Whitewright. It was called Bois d'arc because it is near the Bois d'arc 'bottoms'. According to an article Blair springs was there but I haven't gone to locate the springs if they are still there. There is supposed to be a proposed town plat for Blair Springs "the town' in the courthouse but I haven't dug for it yet. I hope to find all the plats sometime. I think that writer made a big mistake and are referring to the Lindsey Srings that are East of Whitewright. There area lot of bits and pieces I know about the area but I need to fit them to a timeline to get the story right. I used to know Katherine Summers , she has passed now. We used to be volunteers together over at Frontier Village in Grayson co. She told me tons of stuff about Orangeville that I wrote down. Her family was from there and she grew up most of the time there. The original use of the land by settlers was as a big camp for settlers to stay in awaiting their land grants. This was in the 1830's and early 40's. With 1852 being when most families actually settled and made farms there. Grayson county and Fannin received a large portion of its original land owners from these camps. They did build a little school to use. If you look at a map usually it will show orangeville on it. Then look to where Porters Chapel Cemetery is. that area is all "Orangeville" as is down to Chinquapin creek where that area later is called 'Medlintown" due to the school and store that was built there. There was a hotel at one time 'in orangeville' but that was at someones home nearby, not on a street as such. It was a busy place and probably would have become a full town but the railroad passed the area by and went to Whitewright and Trenton (both became towns all of a sudden when this happened) . Orangville had been an area to go to from these two later towns. so the population moved over to the railroad and they put any buildings they wanted to move on rollers and moved them there too. It had some interesting folks. The Yankees I mentioned were from a train (locomotive not wagon) load of them who came to the Orangville area to build a Presbyterian community. They bought up most of the available lands, created the stores and so on. Their burials are over in Valley Creek north of Leonard as they bought from where Orangville to Valley Creek and built their churches in both places. I will be buying a film soon that covers the Orangeville Presbterian Church Records and plan to abstract the records from it. That is a period if I recall just about the turn of 1900. No churches are there today. The Yankees were from new york. Their is an historical marker at the Presbyterian Church in Leonard that tells some of it but in doing research I found that marker is full of mistakes, including the fact it memorializes the wrong building! They tore down the building they think they have. The Neice of Samuel F.B. Morse of New York settled the Valley Creek and Orangeville area ,some families stayed but later many went back to New York. Her husband died in 1905 and a year later she dug him up and went back to New York city. Some of the names you would recognize like Colgate and Rockwell. But many returned to New York. The story goes they had visitors who came out from New York to visit and seeing the bois d'arc trees with their fruit on them thought they were orange trees so the people went along with the joke. Porters chapel is the main cemetery for that area so you can see how spread out it is . All the family names in that are the early area settlers with Valley Creek being the location of the "Orangeville" town name settlers. I have heard tales of bitterness toward these New Yorkers and their money buying up the land so the other families were land locked and could not expand to accomodate their children's farm needs. Times were hard and the main NY ers were people with money. They made a mint in money exporting those 'oranges' that is where all the hedges in the north and in europe come from. The bois d'arc tree is an ancient tree , scientist have proven it is from Fannin county area originally . All the bois d 'arc trees in the world came from here. I think about that every time i see pictures of WWI where those field hedges were so hard to get through. They were our trees! Thousands of railroad cars were full of those'oranges. Around here they are called 'bo dark apples' and 'bo dark oranges' , other places they are called Osage oranges , hedge apples, and other names. each one carries a half million seeds! I love them . The word is french meaning wood of the bow, Native americans used the wood for making bows. Leonard and Trenton both were heavily influenced by all of that area's settlers. Not so much to the north of the Orangeville because the boid d'arc bottoms were it flooded and was considered unhealthy. Whitewright of course also had plenty of families involved but I dont' see any of the New York group in that town that I know of, thy mostly resettled into Trenton and Leonard. Most lived around Leonard, Orangeville was the westernmost area of the lands they bought. The area has some Indian attack stories very early and was a hunting ground. It has various springs in it and plenty of woods. Woods were not all over the place. In the early days the woods were in low places and along creeks and rivers. The rest was a grassland. That is why names like Pilot Grove creep into use, it was unusual and you could see the 'grove' from far off so it was a Piloting landmark. Only with mankind with their fences and their buildings and utility lines have all the large tree growths replaced the mostly grasslands in the higher land areas of the county. These piloting tree's and groves were caused by a dead bird or an animal that had a seed in them. Orangeville is a pretty area of slighly rolling hills and large fields of agriculture. Creek bottoms and woods , winding roads. I knew the man who used to grade the road with a team of mules in the 1920's . He spent every dry day with a team of mules and a blade grading the road from Trenton to Whitewright , thru Orangeville and back to Trenton. It took most of the day , that was the orignal highway 69! Susan in Texas Betty Welch wrote: > > Nell : > > This is one reason that I would like to know more of Orangeville. Dr. > William Franklin Welch was Mrs. George W. Bush's wife's grgrandfather. She > is a cousin to my husband. It was very interesting to find this out. > > Betty Welch >