DANVILLE, TEXAS (Gregg County). Danville, also known as New Danville and as Rabbit Creek, is a rural community off Farm Road 349 six miles southwest of Longview in south central Gregg County. It was established around 1847 and was reportedly named by S. Slade Barnettqv and his relatives for their former hometown, Danville, Kentucky. In 1848 the Gum Springs Presbyterian Church was organized in the community, and the New Danville Masonic Lodge was chartered in 1852. A post office opened in 1850 under the name Rabbit Creek; its name was changed to New Danville in 1852, and it remained in operation until 1873. At its height around the time of the Civil Warqv New Danville had three or four stores, several saloons, a blacksmith shop, and a hand-fed gin powered by two mules. The community continued to prosper until the early 1870s, when the International-Great Northern Railroad bypassed it. Many of the town's residents and most of its businesses moved to Kilgore on the railroad. In the 1940s Danville, as it was later called, still had a church, a cemetery, and two stores. Later the stores closed, and in the early 1990s only a few scattered dwellings remained at the site.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Marker Files, Texas Historical Commission, Austin. Eugene W. McWhorter, Traditions of the Land: The History of Gregg County (Longview, Texas: Gregg County Historical Foundation, 1989).
Christopher Long
