Patrick

Patrick is on Farm Road 1798 midway between Minden and Pine Hill twelve miles from Henderson in the southeastern corner of Rusk County. The settlement originated in 1854 when three brothers-James Moore, John Thomas Campbell, and Marion Leander Patrick-led a wagon train of Scotch-Irish Cumberland Presbyterians to Texas from Bethel, York County, South Carolina. These Patricks and several allied families traveling with them stopped to rest at Pine Grove Presbyterian Church in Rusk County. The church community and piney woods so appealed to the Carolinians that they remained there instead of settling further west as originally planned. In December 1854 Archibald Watkins, minister at the church and first chief justice of Rusk County, sold John T. C. Patrick 335 acres on the Shreveport-Douglass road. For five years the three brothers purchased land bordering on Trammel's Trace in the headwaters of Murvaul Bayou. The settlement's modest corn plantations prospered.

After the Civil War more families moved into the area. A new economy supported by both cotton and corn developed as a gin and gristmill were built on the property of Leah Froneberger Patrick, widow of James M. Patrick. In 1880 Mrs. Patrick donated a three-acre tract for a church and school, originally called Pleasant Springs. These buildings formed the hub of a community eventually known as Patrick that also included a store and post office. Several deaths in the late 1880s left the cotton gin and gristmill abandoned. Although economic structures shifted as farmers drove their cotton to gins elsewhere, the community's population remained stable. In 1913 a new school was built. For the next thirty-five years it served between ninety and 125 pupils annually. In the late 1940s, however, young families left, and school enrollment dropped from over 100 students in 1945 to none in 1955. The Patrick school was officially consolidated with the Henderson Independent School District in 1957.