The History of Winfield, Texas

Winfield began with the railroad. When the Texas and St. Louis Railway was built through western Titus County in 1880, the nearby community of Gray Rock was asked to donate land and money to route the line through town. When its merchants refused, W. C. Barrett deeded a portion of his land a mile northeast of Gray Rock to the railroad for a depot, and the tracks were laid there instead.

The village that grew up around the depot was first called Barrett, for the landowner. When a post office opened in 1887 with Patrick H. Carr as postmaster, the settlement took the name Carr. The young community shifted names as it found its footing along the new rail line, a common pattern in the railroad towns of East Texas.

In 1892 the town's name was changed a final time to Winfield, in honor of W. H. Winfield, the general passenger agent for the railroad. The name stuck, and the community settled into life as a trading point on the line.

By 1896 Winfield had three churches, several stores, a pottery operated by J. S. Hogue, and a population estimated at around 150. The rich farm country around it and the railroad at its center gave the town a steady role as a shipping and trade center for the surrounding cotton and timber lands of western Titus County.

Winfield reached its peak in the early twentieth century. By 1914 the town had a brick company, a newspaper, numerous stores and cotton gins, two banks, and a population estimated at about 700 — a busy little railroad town in its prime. The two banks merged in 1919 and closed in the early 1920s as the boom faded.

The population eased back over the following decades — to 629 by 1925 and around 350 by the 1940s, when the town incorporated. It has held steady at a few hundred residents ever since, recorded at 422 in the 2020 census. Today Winfield is a small, quiet town along the interstate, still the second-largest community in Titus County, with the lakes and woods of Northeast Texas all around it.