The History of Yantis, Texas

Harry M. Matthews is said to have settled the area as early as 1860, when this corner of Wood County was rolling farm and timber country far from any railroad. By 1870 a gristmill and cotton gin were being run nearby by J. Singleton, the kind of small industry that drew area farmers in to grind corn and gin their cotton.

For its first decades the community was served by the post office at Quitman, the county seat to the south. It remained a rural farming locale, its fortunes tied to the land, until it gained an identity and a name of its own in the mid-1880s.

Yantis got its own post office in 1885 and took the name of its first postmaster, George R. Yantis. By 1890 Yantis was also running a gristmill and gin at the little community of about thirty-five people — postmaster, miller, and town namesake all at once, a common arrangement in small Texas settlements of the era.

The town grew steadily through the 1890s. By 1896 around sixty people lived there, and the community had grown to at least fifteen businesses, including two gristmills and gins, along with two churches and schools serving a couple hundred students from the surrounding country — a real trade center for the rural northwest corner of the county.

Yantis reached its high point in the early twentieth century. By 1914 the town of about three hundred had a telephone connection and some twenty-one businesses, including the Yantis State Bank. The population peaked near five hundred in the early 1930s before the long decline that touched so many small farm towns, and a 1947 oil discovery in a nearby field proved too small to change its fortunes.

The town incorporated in the late 1960s, when only a few families and businesses remained. Then came the change that defined modern Yantis: the impoundment of Lake Fork Reservoir in the late 1970s, which wrapped the town on three sides with water and turned it into a destination for anglers chasing the lake's now world-famous trophy bass. Today Yantis is a small lakeside community in Wood County, home of the Yantis ISD Owls, defined far more by the lake than by the gristmills of its founding.