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LEIGH,
TEXAS
AKA Antioch, TexasHarrison
County, East Texas
FM 134 and FM 1999
14 Miles NE of Marshall
Population: 100 (estimated in 2000)
Leigh
Area Hotels - Book Here:
Marshall
Hotels |
FM
134 near downtown Leigh
Photo courtesy Gerald
Massey, January 2009 |
History
in a Pecan Shell
Habitation of this area is said to date to pre-Columbian
times. Early settler J. J. Webster built “Mimosa Hall” a mile southwest of the
community in the 1840s. Antioch, a predominantly Black community sprang
up around the Antioch Baptist Church sometime prior to 1900.
With
the arrival of the railroad in 1900, residents from nearby Blocker, Texas moved
to Antioch and a general store was opened by the Reverend James Patterson. In
1901, the name of the community was changed and a post office opened.
The
population was given as 50 for 1914 and the town peaked in the mid 1920s with
126 residents.
It declined to 100 for the 1930 census and has remained there through the 2000
census. In the 1950s the railroad moved north of the town. Leigh still has two
churches, Antioch Baptist and St. Paul's Episcopal as well as the cemetery and
scattered residences.
Photographer's
Note:
Leigh,
Texas It is
on the map. It is somewhere between a ghost town and a village. It is located
in the Pine Woods area of northeast Texas, about 13-miles northeast of Marshall,
Texas - as the “Crow Flies.” Now if the Crow had to walk and push a flat tire’
it would be best he start at Waskom on I-20 on FM134 and proceed north for about
11-miles. I have passed through here many times going to Uncertain to ride my
Je Ski on Big Cypress Bayou and also going to the fabulous Jefferson.
There
are two neat churches, a cemetery, an old falling down large brick store...
Lady
Bird Johnson's early childhood home is only a short distance away. It is about
5-miles at the intersection of highways TX-43 & FM-2582 - about only 3-miles south
of Karnack. |
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St.
Paul's Episcopal Church
Photo courtesy Gerald
Massey, January 2009 |
Antioch
Missionary Baptist Church
Photo courtesy Gerald
Massey, January 2009 |
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Leigh
Area Hotels:
Marshall
Hotels
Oonie
Andrews, the ghost who lives in Lady Bird Johnson's family home at Karnack
She is as much a part of the old mansion that Jett Jones, who grew up with
Oonie, simply considers her "a lady who lives in the house that nobody else can
see."
In 1843, Milt Andrews built a splendid plantation-style mansion
near Karnack. Sometime in the l880s, Andrews' 19-year-old daughter, Eunice, sat
alone in an upstairs bedroom when bolt of lightning from a stormstruck the chimney,
raced down a fireplace, and hit Oonie. She was burned to death.
Over
the years, stories arose that the ghost of Miss Andrews never left the bedroom.
Eerie noises, odd happenings, and ghostly apparitions soon became common. When
the Andrews family sold the house to T.J. Taylor -- Lady Bird Johnson's father
-- in 1902, the ghost went along with the sale. While Lady Bird said she never
saw or heard the ghost, she admitted feeling a sense of apprehension and unease
in the house as a child. - From Ghosts
in East Texas by Bob Bowman
Uncertain,
Texas, Caddo Lake and Cypress Trees by N. Ray Maxie
Just a
mile or more east of Jefferson in far northeast Texas and only a stones throw
north of Karnack, is the great mysterious Caddo Lake... more |
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