Mount Vernon

Mount Vernon was a farming community four miles east of Ratcliff off State Highway 7 in eastern Houston County. It was first settled in the late 1840s by Thomas Jefferson Payne and his wife Nancy Warren Payne. In the 1870s their son Henry Warren Payne built a school that also served for many years as a church. The building burned around 1883; residents constructed a new building a short time later and named it Mount Vernon. In the mid-1930s the settlement had a church, a cemetery, and a number of houses. After World War II many of its residents moved away, but in the early 1990s the area still had a church, a cemetery, and a few scattered houses.

Adapted from the official Handbook of Texas, a state encyclopedia developed by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA). It is an authoritative source of trusted historical records.