COLTHARP-BEALL HOUSE. The Coltharp-Beall House, one of the earliest surviving structures in Van Zandt County, is on Farm Road 279 near the Henderson county line; it marks the original site of Edom on the north side of State Highway 64, five to six miles east of the present townsite. The house was built in 1849 by James Coltharp, who arrived from Georgia in 1846 with Capt. August Chandler Beall, who married Charlotte Elizabeth Coltharp on June 24, 1845. The Hamburg general store and post office was later built across the road. The site is located about halfway between Dallas and Shreveport, and the house served as an early stagecoach stop. Traveling preachers also stopped there in the 1850s and 1860s; the house was claimed to be the site of the area's first sermon. Coltharp family members established mills for processing lumber, flour, and cotton over the line in Henderson County before the Civil War.^qv After the war, members of the Beall family purchased the one-story wooden house with a stone chimney as a residence. In 1990 the structure served as a reunion center for the Beall and Coltharp families.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Van Zandt County History Book Committee, History of Van Zandt County (Dallas, 1984).

Diana J. Kleiner