Pleasant Grove

Pleasant Grove is a farming community in northwestern Lee County two miles southeast of Tanglewood. The town was originally named Brown's Gin after J. J. Brown, who operated a cotton gin and grocery store there in the mid-1870s. In 1883 residents built a Baptist church in a grove of oak trees and adopted the present name. The church building also served as a school; it had an enrollment of fifty in 1898. After the turn of the century a small business center developed a mile west of the church and school. Around 1920 a new two-room schoolhouse was constructed, and it continued to operate until the school was annexed by the Lexington Independent School District after World War II. In 1930 the town had a population of 170, the school, several businesses, and a number of scattered dwellings. By the late 1960s the population had dropped to around fifty. In the early 1980s Pleasant Grove was a dispersed rural community.