MOUNT VERNON, TEXAS (Houston County).

Mount Vernon was a farming community four miles east of Ratcliff off State Highway 7 in eastern Houston County. It was first settled in the late 1840s by Thomas Jefferson Payne and his wife Nancy Warren Payne.

In the 1870s their son Henry Warren Payne built a school that also served for many years as a church. The building burned around 1883; residents constructed a new building a short time later and named it Mount Vernon. In the mid-1930s the settlement had a church, a cemetery, and a number of houses.

After World War II many of its residents moved away, but in the early 1990s the area still had a church, a cemetery, and a few scattered houses.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Houston County Cemeteries (Crockett, Texas: Houston County Historical Commission, 1977; 3d ed. 1987). Houston County Historical Commission, History of Houston County, Texas, 1687-1979 (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Heritage, 1979). Marker Files, Texas Historical Commission, Austin.

Eliza H. Bishop

http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/MM/hvmbj.html