The History of Emory, Texas

Emory began life as Springville, reportedly named for the many springs in the area. A town plat was prepared by the late 1840s, and by 1857 the settlement had grown to include a store, a tannery, a gin, and a scattering of houses — a small but functioning trade point in the wooded country of what was then Wood County.

That early community sat in good farming and timber country, the kind of land that drew settlers steadily westward in the years of the Republic and early statehood. Springville's spring-fed setting and its location made it a natural gathering place, and it was poised to take on a larger role when a new county was carved from the region.

When Rains County was organized in 1870, Springville became its county seat — and with that, its name changed. The town was renamed Emory to honor Emory Rains, the legislator who had played an important role in authorizing the new county, which itself bears his surname. A post office opened the same year and has operated ever since.

The young county seat built the institutions of government in short order. A log courthouse gave way to a frame structure in 1872, which burned in 1879, and a brick courthouse rose in 1884. Around 1880 the Denison and Southeastern Railway was built across the county, turning Emory into a shipping point for the surrounding lumber-producing area and tying its fortunes to the rails.

By 1885 Emory had two churches, sawmills, cotton gins, saloons, hotels, and a weekly newspaper, the Rains County Record, with a population around 600. The town kept growing into the 1920s — three banks by 1914, an independent school district established in 1920, and roughly a thousand residents by 1929.

Then the Great Depression and the agricultural crisis of the 1930s hit hard, and the population fell to 447 by 1936. Recovery came in the late 1950s when nearby Lake Tawakoni was built and Rains County began attracting retirees. The later construction of Lake Fork to the east gave the area two of Texas's most famous fishing lakes. Today Emory is a steady county seat of roughly 1,400 people, home of the Rains 'Wildcats,' anchored by tourism, agriculture, and the draw of the surrounding water.