YARD, TEXAS. Yard is a rural community in northwest Anderson County, twenty miles northwest of Palestine on Farm Road 321 by the Trinity River. Originally part of the Tennessee Colony, Yard reportedly received its name when Bruce Gray, the owner of the first store in the community, sent in a list of potential names to the post office department and accidently included a customer's request for a yard of cloth on the paper. Yard post office functioned from 1903 through the mid-1950s. The community had some ten inhabitants in 1925, twenty inhabitants and one business establishment in 1949, and eighteen inhabitants in 1968. In 1982 Yard had a church and several scattered dwellings, and the population was still eighteen through 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fred I. Massengill, Texas Towns: Origin of Name and Location of Each of the 2,148 Post Offices in Texas (Terrell, Texas, 1936).

Mark Odintz