SELFS, TEXAS. Selfs is on Farm Road 100 sixteen miles northeast of Bonham in east central Fannin County. The first settlers in the area were John Western Jones and his family, who in the late 1830s or early 1840s built and operated a flour mill on a creek about a mile north of what is now the site of Selfs. The area remained sparsely settled until the 1880s, when two brothers, G. W. and G. T. Self, built a cotton gin and gristmill at what is now Selfs. Additional settlers were drawn to the settlement, which was named for the Self brothers. The Selfs community received a post office in 1887, and by the mid-1890s it reported 150 residents and several businesses, including a cooperative store. The town also had a school. Shortly after 1900 a Baptist minister, C. B. Hammett, established the North Texas Business College in Selfs, offering courses in office machines, telegraphy, and other business-related subjects. The school attracted students from Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma and operated in the community for some fifteen years. The Selfs post office closed in 1906, and by the mid-1930s only twenty-five persons lived there. The community population rose to fifty by the mid-1940s, but fell again to twenty by the mid-1950s. In the mid-1960s the population was again estimated at fifty, but thereafter and through 2000 was reported at thirty.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fannin County Folks and Facts (Dallas: Taylor, 1977).

Brian Hart