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CELESTE, TEXAS
Celeste is on U.S. Highway 69 two miles
southeast of the headwaters of the Sabine River and ten miles
northwest of Greenville in northwest Hunt County. Like many towns
in Hunt County, it was a product of railroad development. The
townsite was platted in 1886 by the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe
Railway three miles north of Kingston, on open prairie already
crossed by the Missouri, Kansas and Texas line. This location was
chosen in order to ensure that Kingston, whose elected officials had
refused to offer incentives to attract the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe
to build through their community, would be bypassed by the line as it
put down tracks from Paris through Farmersville to Dallas. Celeste
was named for the wife of a Santa Fe official. The two rail lines
stimulated rapid growth. A Celeste post office opened in 1886, and
a number of merchants moved their businesses from Kingston to
Celeste. By 1888 three churches were holding services in the
settlement. The population by the mid-1890s stood at 600, and the
community maintained three gristmills and cotton gins, a bank, a
weekly newspaper, and a graded public school. Celeste was
incorporated in 1900, and its population increased from 671 that
year to 850 on the eve of World War I.qv By 1914 the community
had two banks, three cotton gins, a water works, an ice factory, and
a weekly newspaper, as well as some thirty-five other businesses. It
reported a population of 1,022 by 1926. Its high school and two
elementary schools registered 500 students. Some fifty business
establishments, including two banks and a newspaper, were in
operation. After the 1920s, however, the population of Celeste fell
from 803 in 1933 to 518 in the mid-1960s; businesses
correspondingly declined, from thirty to sixteen. After the 1960s the
town revived; in 1976 its population was 745. In 1982 the
community, where World War IIqv hero Audie Murphyqv once lived,
had a bank, four churches, ten stores, and a school that enrolled 300
students. The population in 1990 was 733.
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