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There
are four faces of old Lobanillo, which straddles East
Texas’ oldest highway less than 20 miles from the Texas-Louisiana border.
But
overriding the name is the fact that the site is considered to be one the oldest
places continuously occupied in East Texas.
First, of course, was La Lobanillo, the pueblo of Gil
Ybarbo, where his mother and other refugees remained when Spain evacuated
colonists from western Louisiana and East
Texas in 1773.
When Lobanillo exchanged hands, it was known as Shawnee
Village and later as Jimtown, a name shaped after the first names of
Jim Halbert and Jim Willis.
And, finally, along came Geneva,
today’s name for the town at the intersection of El
Camino Real (Texas Highway 21) and Farm Road 330 in northwestern Sabine County.
To
tell the town’s story, you have to reach back to when Ybarbo
was born at Los Adaes, Louisiana, then the provincial capital of Spanish Texas,
in 1729. His parents were colonists sent to Texas
the same year from Andalusia, Spain.
At Los Adaes, Ybarbo
married Maria Padilla and they settled on Lobanillo Creek in what is now Sabine
County. They called their place Rancho Lobanillo.
When Spain recommended
the abandonment of its missions and forts in East
Texas, Ybarbo became the leader of the displaced persons of the area, who
were given the choice of settling at San
Antonio or the Rio Grande River.
When Ybarbo
petitioned Spanish authorities to let the settlers return to their homes in East
Texas in 1774, they were allowed to travel as far east as the Trinity River,
where they founded the town of Bucareli in present-day Madison County.
But Ybarbo
and his fellow settlers soon abandoned Bucareli and went to what is now Nacogdoches,
where he is credited with laying out the town. He died at his home on the Attoyac
River near Nacogdoches. |
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Lobanillo apparently
did not have a post office during the Republic of Texas years, but on July 23,
1884, a U.S. post office was established with the name Geneva
and William W. Johnson as the first postmaster.
In the latter part of the
1800s, Geneva began to grow and
soon had a population of 150. It acquired several cotton gins, a gristmill, a
hotel, two churches, a livery stable and at least five stores.
Sabine
County’s first independent school district was organized at Geneva
in 1904. During the 1934-1935 school year, the community had 351 students.
The
town lost its post office and the last cotton gin in Sabine County was operated
by Joe Harris at Geneva until
it went out of business in 1959.
Today’s Geneva
has only one store, a cluster of homes at the intersection of its two highways,
and a number of collapsed buildings. | |
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