The History of Greenville, Texas

Greenville was founded in 1846, right after Texas joined the Union, and named for Thomas J. Green, a soldier and statesman of the Texas Revolution. It became the seat of Hunt County, and then it became cotton: after the MKT railroad arrived in 1880, the Blackland soil went to cotton and by the mid-1880s Greenville was a leading cotton market. Compresses and warehouses lined the tracks, and the town claimed the world's largest inland cotton compress, setting records in 1911 and 1912. For a while, this was a genuinely booming place.

In 1925 a boy named Audie Murphy was born into a sharecropper family in Hunt County, one of many children in hard circumstances. He lied about his age to enlist after Pearl Harbor and came home the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II, holder of the Medal of Honor and just about every other decoration the country gave — then went to Hollywood and played himself in the movies. Greenville honors him with the Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum, which pairs the county's cotton story with the memory of its most famous son.

When cotton declined, defense saved Greenville. A major electronics operation — the plant known over the years as E-Systems and later part of L3 and then L3Harris — became the dominant employer, doing sophisticated aircraft-modification and intelligence work that quietly made Greenville a serious defense town. The city runs its own municipal electric utility, and it's grown as the eastern edge of the metro reaches out along I-30. The cotton compresses are gone; the circuit boards, and Audie Murphy's memory, carried the town forward.