Whitton

Whitton (Whiton, Whitten), a rural community eight miles southwest of Canton in southwest Van Zandt County on Farm Road 1651, was named for Elijah Whitton, an early settler from Alabama who built a log house that was still standing at the site in the 1990s. Whitton deeded land for a school in 1886, and the Whiton, or Greenwood School as it came to be known, was consolidated with the Canton school in 1949. The town had a sawmill, a grocery, a blacksmith shop, a cotton gin, and two churches at its height near the turn of the century, but mail was delivered from Canton. Early Whitten residents farmed, then raised cattle. When farms were later broken into smaller tracts for more homes, the town's population increased. The population was estimated at twenty from 1939 to 1964. In 1978 the old school building was converted into a community center. State highway maps showed a single business, a school, and scattered dwellings at the townsite in 1936, but in 1987 only a church and several dwellings remained to mark the townsite.