Wallace Mill

Stockman, on Farm Road 415 nine miles south of Timpson in eastern Shelby County, was founded in the 1890s and named for H. J. Stockman. It received a post office in 1899 with William T. Wallace as postmaster. The post office was closed in the early 1950s. The community was on a spur of the Santa Fe Railroad and became a shipping point for local farmers and lumber-mill operators. In 1914 Stockman had two stores, a gin, a cotton buyer, a cattle breeder, and a population of 150. The community had apparently grown to an estimated population of 200 by the late 1920s but then declined in the early 1930s, when population fell to twenty. After 1933 the population of the community grew slowly, reaching a postdepression high of eighty in 1964. In 1988 Stockman had a business, a church, and a population of fifty-two. The population remained fifty-two through 2000.