History

Caddo Mills, Texas

Caddo Mills is at the intersection of State Highway 66 and Farm Road 36, eight miles southwest of Greenville in southwestern Hunt County. Caddo Indians were early inhabitants and camped in the area near the banks of Caddo Creek. They first arrived in the late 1850s. Twenty years later I. T. Johnson and Henry King built a gristmill a mile west of the present townsite. Shortly thereafter, a store opened and a community developed. Residents in the area referred to the community as Caddo Mills, after Johnson and King’s gristmill. On June 16, 1879, a post office opened. By the early 1880s the settlement had 100 residents, three churches, a school, and at least a dozen businesses. In 1886 the tracks of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad reached the area. As a depot of the Katy, Caddo Mills grew rapidly over the next few decades. By 1892 the number of businesses doubled and the population increased to 500. In 1897 the Caddo Mills Banner began weekly publication. The State National Bank opened in 1905. The town’s population reached 700 on the eve of World War I, then fell to 600 in the 1920s. By the early 1940s Caddo Mills had incorporated; the population was reported as 390 and the number of businesses as twenty. The population reached 680 by 1964 and 1,302 by 1988. In 1990 it was 1,068, and in 2000 it was 1,149. The census in 2010 shows the population as 1338.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: W. Walworth Harrison, History of Greenville and Hunt County, Texas (Waco: Texian, 1976).