Harris Chapel

Harris Chapel is north of Duck Creek, just west of U.S. Highway 69, and four miles north of Lindale in northern Smith County. The area was occupied as early as 1903, when county records showed two one-teacher Harris Chapel schools, one with thirty-three Black students and the other with sixteen White students. Between 1910 and 1920 local children attended a large white frame schoolhouse, and average enrollment was fifty. The community was not designated on the 1936 county highway map, but a cemetery, a church, and a school were in the vicinity. At that time the one-teacher elementary school served twenty-eight Black students; the twenty-five White children of school age were not enrolled. By 1952 the Harris Chapel school, along with other local rural schools, had been consolidated into the Lindale Independent School District. A 1960 map identified Harris Chapel as a cemetery, a church, and a few farms scattered along the highway and several local roads. A 1973 map showed the church, the cemetery, and a small collection of dwellings at the site. The community was still shown on the 1981 county highway map.