Wheatville

Wheatville is two miles northwest of Naples in northern Morris County. The village was settled sometime before 1852 and named by the family of William Wheat, original grantee of the land on which it was located. During the antebellum years Rev. Samuel Morris, who had moved to Morris County from Alabama, established a gin, a gristmill, tanning vats, and a brick kiln in the community. A post office was established in Wheatville in 1868. When the Texas and St. Louis Railway was constructed in the late 1870s it bypassed Wheatville, and most of the merchants moved their stores to a site along the railroad three miles to the south. As the new town, first called Belden and later Naples, began to grow, Wheatville began to decline. The post office was transferred to Belden in 1882. In 1984 a cemetery remained at the site of the once thriving community.