WARREN, TEXAS (Fannin County). Warren, also called Fort Warren and Old Warren, was on the Red River just south of its confluence with Choctaw Slough in the area of present Fannin County on the Fannin-Grayson county line. Fort Warren was built by Abel Warren, an Indian trader from Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1836 in what was then Red River County. The bois d'arc wood structure was surrounded by walls with two-story towers on each corner to watch for Indian raids. Warren traded with Kiowa, Caddo, Tonkawa, and Wichita Indians there. He soon returned to Arkansas, but other settlers continued to operate the fort. When Fannin County was established from Red River County in 1837, Warren became the county seat of an area that also included that of present Grayson County. The court house, a two-story cabin, was built in Warren, and in 1838 a new stockade was built around the fort. The first school in Fannin County was established by John Trimble in a stable. By 1838 there were eighty-eight first class land warrants issued in Warren. The Republic of Texas began mail delivery in Warren in 1839, and in 1847 the community received a United States Post Office, after Texas's annexation. On January 16, 1843, an act of the Congress of the Republic of Texas changed the county seat from Warren to Bonham, because of its more central location. During the Civil War Warren served as a transport and food supply area for soldiers in Louisiana and Arkansas. Warren was bypassed by the stage and the railroad, and the community slowly disappeared. The post office was closed in 1876. The old courthouse remained in Warren until the 1920s, when it was dismantled and moved to Bonham to be erected as a historical landmark, but it was never rebuilt.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fannin County Folks and Facts (Dallas: Taylor, 1977). Grayson County Frontier Village, History of Grayson County, Texas (2 vols., Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Hunter, 1979, 1981). Floyd Crandall Hodge, A History of Fannin County (Hereford, Texas: Pioneer, 1966). Graham Landrum and Allen Smith, Grayson County (Fort Worth, 1960; 2d ed., Fort Worth: Historical Publishers, 1967). Mattie D. Lucas and Mita H. Hall, A History of Grayson County (Sherman, Texas, 1936).
