KERRDALE, TEXAS. Kerrdale was a post office at Spears Chapel, which is on Farm Road 2991 five miles southeast of Burkeville in eastern central Newton County. In 1909 J. J. Kerr established a small general store in the Spears Chapel community. The following year he secured a post office. Kerr was, according to that year's census, a thirty-year-old, white, native Texan with a wife and one child. The office served Spears Chapel, which had about thirty families, and the settlement at New Columbia, which was rapidly growing with the help of the newly established McMahon Handle Company. Inhabitants of New Columbia complained that the Kerrdale post office, three miles distant across rough terrain, was inconvenient. A. A. (Jack) McMahon and J. Polk McMahon, founders of the McMahon Handle Company, persuaded Kerr to liquidate his stock and become general manager of their own store. The post office, named Jack's, moved with Kerr; it closed in 1916. Although most of the residents left when the handle company closed in 1915, a few houses remain at Spears Chapel.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Madeleine Martin, "Ghost Towns of the Lower Sabine River," Texas Gulf Historical and Biographical Record 2 (1966). Newton County Historical Commission, Glimpses of Newton County History (Burnet, Texas: Nortex, 1982).
