OLD WARREN, TEXAS. Old Warren (Fort Warren or Fort Kitchen), on the Fannin-Grayson county line, was named for Abel Warren,^qv a trader from Fort Smith, Arkansas, who established a trading post on the Red River one mile below the mouth of Choctaw Bayou in 1836. In the summer of 1837 Daniel Montague^qv and William Henderson built a trading house at the site. A fifteen-foot log stockade with two-story towers at the corners surrounded the post; gates admitted stock and wagon trains. Settlers built cabins near the post for protection from the Indians, and J. A. Caldwell carried the mail from Preston to Warren. Roswell W. Lee was the first postmaster. The post furnished a military escort for the wedding party of Holland Coffee^qv and his bride (later Sophia Porterqv) from Washington to Coffee's Trading Post in 1837.

When Fannin County was organized in 1838, Warren became the county seat; a school was opened in 1839; and the commissioners' court met in the new courthouse in January 1840 to order the platting of the town. Joseph Sowell and John F. Scott built a tavern. The thirteenth Masonic lodge in Texas was organized at Warren on November 3, 1840, and included E. H. Tarrant and William G. Cooke^qv among its charter members. Another member was John B. Denton,^qv who preached the county's first sermon in the summer of 1840. Joseph Sowell was killed by Indians before he could be initiated at the next meeting of the lodge. The fort was abandoned in 1840, and the town's decline began when Bonham became the county seat in 1845. In 1930 not one structure remained to indicate the location of the old town.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: W. A. Carter, History of Fannin County, Texas (Bonham, Texas: Bonham News, 1885; rpt., Honey Grove, Texas: Fannin County Historical Society, 1975). Fannin County Folks and Facts (Dallas: Taylor, 1977). Floy 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).