CROW, TEXAS. Crow is at the intersection of Farm Road 778, U.S. Highway 80, and the Missouri Pacific Railroad, fourteen miles southeast of Quitman in southeastern Wood County. The site was called Graham when a railroad station was built there in 1876. When the town received a post office in 1906, it was renamed Crow in honor of Wilson Crow, who worked at a local sawmill. Sometime before 1900 Burrell Cannon, an employee of the nearby Rucker sawmill, is said to have built an airplane that flew. Crow at one time had a number of stores and a saloon, reported to be the last saloon in Wood County. By 1910 the community had two churches and a district school. A few years later it had a population of seventy-five, a telephone connection, and four businesses, including a blacksmith shop and a cotton gin. Though lots were platted at Crow, the town never grew. After the local timber supply was exhausted, the sawmills closed down, and much of the population left. In the 1930s Crow had a population of 100, a number of dwellings, a church, three businesses, and a school, which in 1932 had an enrollment of eighty-eight students in nine grades. At that time Crow was still a station on the Texas and Pacific Railway. By 1956 post office had closed. The church and school closed by 1960. Over the next decade the population gradually declined and in 1970 was reported at twenty-five. By the early 1980s U.S. Highway 80, which borders the community, had been expanded to four lanes, and Crow had gained a few new dwellings. The 1988 highway map shows several businesses, and the community reported a population of twenty-five in 1990. The population remained the same in 2000.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wood County, 1850–1900 (Quitman, Texas: Wood County Historical Society, 1976).
