Clark's Store

Hail (Hale) is on Farm Road 1550 twelve miles southeast of Bonham in Fannin County. It was founded between 1845 and 1850 by Kentuckians Elijah Jackson and Nancy Triplett Clark, who came to Texas in a wagon train of twenty wagons. The site was known as Clark's Chapel because of a school building that was also used for a church there. The Clarks gave the land for the Methodist church. The wood was hauled from Jefferson by the Clark family for this building early in the town's history. A local grocery store was also built during this time. In 1894 the town acquired a post office that served residents until 1904, when the rural route out of Windom was begun. The name Clarksville, in honor of the founding family, was submitted to the postal service but rejected because there was already a Clarksville in Texas. New suggestions for the town's name were collected, and Elijah Clark drew from a hat the name Hail, submitted in recognition of the area's damaging hail storms. The first cotton gin at Hail was built in 1902 by Pat Clutter. At that time the town also had another grocery store, a drugstore, a doctor's office, a barbershop, a blacksmith's shop, and a Woodman of the World hall. The First Methodist Church was built about 1900, the Congregational Methodist Church in 1903, and the First Christian Church in 1915. In 1915 a car-repair garage was built by Luther and Arthor Reynolds. Soon after World War I jobs became unavailable in Hail because of business failures in the area. The churches were all abandoned during the 1930s except for the Methodist church, which was still active in 1988. A population of fifty and three businesses were recorded in 1949, and the last business in Hail closed in 1959. In 1988 the town was known as the Hail-Bartley Woods community. In 2000 the population was thirty.