New Hope

New Hope is on Farm Road 1801 four miles east of Mineola and a mile north of the Missouri Pacific line (formerly Texas and Pacific) in southern Wood County. The community apparently moved north to this site from an earlier location, as there is a New Hope cemetery just south of the railroad line and about a mile south of the present location of the New Hope Baptist Church. The area was settled as early as 1842, when Georgia native Nathan Warren homesteaded his land grant at the site of what would later become the New Hope community. About twenty years later the area saw an influx of planters from Louisiana, who were said to have named the area "New Hope" because they hoped to regain their fortunes there. Reportedly no established community developed at that time. By sometime in the 1880s an establishment called the Bluejack Academy was serving the New Hope area with a summer school, and in 1884 the New Hope public school district was established. By 1896 the local one-teacher public school was serving thirty-two White students; ten years later the number of students had risen to forty-seven. By 1917 a Baptist church, originally founded in 1864 in nearby Greer's Neighborhood (later known as Golden Rule), had, after several moves and name changes, established itself as the New Hope Baptist Church at the second, more northerly site of the community. In 1932 the New Hope school district had four teachers for 126 White students in ten grades and one teacher for thirty-three Black students in seven grades. In the 1940s New Hope had a church, five businesses, and a number of dwellings. By 1960 only a church and a number of widely scattered dwellings remained at the site, though by 1988 the community had gained a number of new dwellings and a school. New Hope apparently never had its own post office but was on the mail route from Mineola. The New Hope Baptist Church received a Texas Historical Commission marker in the early 1980s. In 2000 the population was fifteen.