Reflections: Sharing Sherman and Grayson County's Past Vol. I by Sherman Democrat

96 pages. This compilation was supported by the Sherman Democrat which gave the citizens of Grayson County the opportunity to preserve old photographs and share their stories with their neighbors. Contains approximately 250 photographs. Grayson County is a county in the U.S. state of Texas. The county seat is Sherman. The county was founded in 1846 and is named after Peter Wagener Grayson, an attorney general of the Republic of Texas. John Wright III worked for 45 years in the newspaper industry with more than 41 combined years in the Texoma market. Wright began his career in the newsroom of the Denison Herald in 1970. He worked his way up in the company, eventually becoming general manger of the Las Vegas Review-Journal before returning to Texoma in 1993. He retired from the Herald Democrat (formerly the Sherman Democrat) in 2016. In 1996, Wright led the merger of the Denison Herald and Sherman Democrat and was named publisher of the newly formed Herald Democrat. The move to merge the two community newspapers improved the efficiency of the papers, and the Herald Democrat continues to serve its two primary markets as well as Grayson County and the surrounding areas of Fannin and Cooke counties and Bryan County in Oklahoma. The merger wasn't the only change Wright saw through his nearly half-century career. There were technology changes, from a presses that used hot lead to create the plates that carried ink to paper to computer pagination used in today's newsrooms. He said it was the ever-changing world of media that drew him to the business. The earliest known inhabitants of what is now Grayson County were Caddo Amerindian groups, including Tonkawa, Ionis, and Kichai. These groups engaged in agriculture and traded with Spanish and French colonists at trading posts along the Red River. Trading posts were established at Preston Bend on the Red River, Warren, and Pilot Grove during 1836 and 1837. After the establishment of the Peters Colony in the early 1840s, settlement near the Red River increased. Grayson County was created from Fannin County by the Texas State Legislature on March 17, 1846. The county seat, Sherman, was also designated by the Texas State Legislature. In the 1850s, trading and marketing at Preston Bend became more important, as agriculture expanded in the county. This was helped by Preston Road, the first trail in the state. It went from Preston Bend to Austin, Texas. More growth occurred after the establishment of Sherman as a station of the Butterfield Overland Mail route in 1856. Opinions in the county about secession were divided. County residents voted by more than two to one in 1861 against secession, desiring to remain in the Union. The Great Hanging at Gainesville in nearby Cooke County in October 1862 was an attack on dissenters, men who were suspected of resisting conscription and having been Unionists. After 150-200 men were arrested by state troops, the military organized a so-called "Citizens Court", which had no basis in state law. Its jury made up its own rules and convicted and sentenced more than 25 men to death by hanging. Another 14 were lynched outright by a mob without even the cover of a trial. A total of 42 men were killed in the proceedings that month, considered the largest vigilante murders in US history. Men from Grayson County served the Confederacy at locations in the South. The Eleventh Texas Cavalry captured federal forts in the Indian Territory north of the Red River. Grayson County and much of Texas suffered economic depression in the postwar years during the Reconstruction era, based in part on difficulties in reliance on agriculture in the South, adjustments to free labor, and other problems. The driving of cattle herds north along Preston Road provided needed income for the county during this period. After the Houston and Texas Central Railroad and the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad began operating in the county in 1872, settlement in Grayson County picked up and flou.…