MERRIMAC, TEXAS. Merrimac was nine miles southeast of Winnsboro and a few miles west of Perryville near what became Farm Road 2869 in northeastern Wood County. Families were reportedly living in the area before 1850, and Merrimac was said to be a thickly populated sawmill community before 1901, the year it received a post office. In 1897 Winnsboro's W. G. Ragley Lumber Company built a tramline through the area to carry logs; this later became part of the Texas Southern line, on which Merrimac was a stop. By 1905 the one-teacher school at Merrimac served fifty white students. In 1914 Merrimac had a population of forty-one, a physician, a blacksmith, a general store, a cotton gin, and a telephone connection. By 1917 the railway had stopped running in the area; three years later Merrimac lost its post office. During the early 1930s the Merrimac school district had an enrollment of twenty students in grades one to eleven. The community was not shown on county highway maps in the 1980s.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: W. Cleo Irons, The Reorganization of the Public Schools of Wood County, Texas (M.Ed. thesis, University of Texas, 1935). Timothy K. Perttula et al., `This Everlasting Sand Bed': Cultural Resources Investigations at the Texas Big Sandy Project (Austin: Prewitt and Associates, 1986). Wood County, 1850–1900 (Quitman, Texas: Wood County Historical Society, 1976).
