This is from the Handbook of Texas. I am researching McCarters in the Rural Shade area . RURAL SHADE, TEXAS. Rural Shade, a farming community on Farm Road 635 twenty miles southeast of Corsicana in southeastern Navarro County, was first settled in 1850 by Hugh and Washington Ingram. A post office was established there in 1858. Around 1870 James Ingram, one of Hugh's sons, built the first steam-powered gristmill in the area. By 1885 Rural Shade consisted of a blacksmith shop, a sawmill, three gristmills, three general stores, four cotton gins, and an estimated population of seventy-five. Two schools were in operation by 1906, with a total enrollment of 145. During the 1930s Rural Shade included a school, two churches, and five or six stores. After World War IIqv its school was consolidated with the Kerens school, and the stores closed. By the mid-1960s only a church and a number of scattered houses remained. In 1990 Rural Shade was a dispersed rural community. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Annie Carpenter Love, History of Navarro County (Dallas: Southwestern, 1933). Wyvonne Putman, comp., Navarro County History (5 vols., Quanah, Texas: Nortex, 1975-84). Alva Taylor, History and Photographs of Corsicana and Navarro County (Corsicana, Texas, 1959; rev. ed., Navarro County History and Photographs, Corsicana, 1962). Christopher Long