Wolfe City, TX

Type: General Entry

Published: 1952

Updated: January 25, 2018

Wolfe City is at the intersection of State highways 34 and 11, seventeen miles north of Greenville in north central Hunt County. It was settled in the late 1860s or early 1870s, when Lemuel Pinckney Wolfe built a mill near the banks of Oyster Creek. For a brief time area farmers called the community Wolfe's Mill. By 1882, the year it received a post office, the name had become Wolfe City. In 1887 Wolfe City incorporated, and the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad reached the community, establishing it as an important shipping point for area farmers. In the early 1880s Wolfe City had just over 200 residents and a dozen businesses. By 1892 it had 1,800 people and sixty businesses, including a bank, a planning mill, a foundry, the Sentinel Chronicle, two gristmills, and two cotton gins. On the eve of World War I fifteen businesses served the nearly 1,400 residents. Over the next decade the population of Wolfe City reached its peak, 1,859. In 1945 the town had just over 1,300 residents, and in 1990 the population was 1,505. The population was 1,566 in 2000, and declined to 1,436 in 2015.

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W. Walworth Harrison, History of Greenville and Hunt County, Texas (Waco: Texian, 1976).

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The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.

David Minor, “Wolfe City, TX,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed September 19, 2023, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/wolfe-city-tx.

Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

TID: HJW13

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