A quiet lane in Titus County

A house rises on the old Neville survey

You're standing on Kathryn's Court, a small lane in the Country Club Estates subdivision outside Mount Pleasant. The lot at Kathryn Court holds four and a half acres of what county records call the "A. Neville Survey," a patch of land first laid out under an old Texas land grant. A house went up here in 2013, one of several built as the subdivision filled in. There is no older structure under it. The ground itself carries the name of the original surveyor, Neville, whose patent predates the town itself. Mount Pleasant, about two and a half miles away, was founded in 1848 to govern Titus County, created two years earlier when Texas was still carving its new counties out of open land.

Caddo families were pushed from this creek country

Before any survey carried the name Neville, this stretch of land belonged to the Caddo Nation. The Caddo Nation had lived across Titus County for generations, building burial mounds and villages along Ripley Creek, Harts Creek, Blundell Creek and Swannano Creek. Some Caddo families stayed in the area as late as 1845, among the last Native peoples left in Northeast Texas before Anglo settlers pushed them out. A trail called the Cherokee Trace ran north through this part of Texas too, blazed around 1821 and used by Cherokee families fleeing after their defeat at the Battle of the Neches in 1839.

In 1839, Captain W. B. Stout led 42 men against a village on White Oak Creek, a site he called a "rendezvous for Indian renegades." Stout's men destroyed it. Stout then had his company build Fort Sherman in southwestern Titus County, where the Cherokee Trace crossed Big Cypress Creek. The fort marked the edge of a hard, violent push to clear Native families from this ground in the years just before the county existed.

Kendall Lewis, remembered as the first recorded Anglo settler in Titus County, moved here in 1835 and built a home on Swauano Creek with his wife, believed to be a Creek Indian. By 1846, the same year Titus County was created, conflict with Native families forced the Lewis family to leave Texas altogether.

Mount Pleasant became the new county's seat

Mount Pleasant, about two and a half miles from this lot, was founded two years later, in 1848, to serve as its county seat. The town and the county took shape on ground that had so recently belonged to somebody else.

A soldier drowned, an editor was found with his throat cut

Two unsettled deaths followed soon after, both reported in regional papers. Around 1888, a Lieut Holt of the U.S. Army drowned in White Oak Creek, somewhere between Mount Pleasant and Paris in neighboring Lamar County, according to the Mount Pleasant Press at the time.

Then, on June 2, 1891, O. P. Boyd, editor of the Titus County Times, was found dead a short distance outside Mount Pleasant. Boyd's throat had been cut from ear to ear. Newspapers as far off as Los Angeles picked up the report. No account says who did it or why.

Mount Pleasant drew visitors chasing cures in red springs

For a handful of years, Mount Pleasant became something else entirely: a health resort. Red mineral springs nearby drew visitors chasing cures in the waters, and the town saw a burst of tourist money through 1915, before the springs' fame faded and the broader population growth of the 1920s took over as the town's main story.

A golf course took shape beside the subdivision

About a quarter mile from this lot, the Mount Pleasant Country Club laid out its first nine holes in 1939, designed by the golf architect Perry Maxwell. The club added nine more holes in 2000, rounding out the course that still borders the subdivision today.

Disaster declarations struck the county, not this lane

Titus County has taken its share of federal disaster declarations in recent years: wildfires in 2011, a severe winter storm with tornadoes and flooding in 2016, tropical storms Marco and Laura in 2020, and another round of severe storms, tornadoes and flooding in 2024. None of these singled out this lot or this lane.

A fisherman drowned at Lake Tankersley nearby

On April 4, 2019, James Paul Majors, 74, of Mount Pleasant, went fishing on Lake Tankersley near town. Majors's boat was later found drifting, unoccupied, on the far side of the dam. Texas Parks and Wildlife game wardens used side-scan sonar to find Majors's body in the water. The county ruled it an accidental drowning.

Drowning deaths at lakes around Mount Pleasant have been described in local reporting as part of a wider pattern of water danger at recreational lakes, though the heaviest toll by far has been recorded far from Texas: at Lake Pleasant near Tempe, Arizona, where multiple drownings have been reported over the years. That lake is not this one, and nothing ties its deaths to Ellis Kelley Lake or Lake Tankersley here in Titus County.

Families still play the course Maxwell laid out

The house at Kathryn Court sits on four and a half acres carved from the old Neville survey, inside the Country Club Estates subdivision that grew up around the golf course. About a quarter mile from here, families still play the same course Perry Maxwell laid out in 1939.