New York

New York is on Farm roads 804 and 607, eleven miles east of Athens in eastern Henderson County. It was first settled around 1856 by James C. Walker, Davis Reynolds, Jesse M. Forester, and A. M. Otts at a location south of the present site. The present site was settled in 1873. The community was reportedly named either by T. B. Herndon as a joke or by Reynolds because of his hopes for the town's future. By 1884 New York had two steam gristmills and cotton gins, two churches, a district school, and a population of sixty, which rose to 100 by 1892. A post office operated there from 1876 to the first decade of the 1900s. New York declined after it was bypassed by the railroad in 1901. Its school was consolidated with the Poynor system in 1936. In the 1980s nearby Dunsavage Farms, a restaurant, antique shop, and bed and breakfast, began to market New York, Texas, cheesecake, which became nationally known by 1992. In 1992 the town had the Reynolds store, a Baptist church, and a population of twenty. By 2000 the population was listed as fifteen.