Winona

Winona is at the intersection of Farm Road 16 and State Highway 155, three miles north of Owentown in northeastern Smith County. The area, part of the Martin Lagront survey, was inhabited by Delaware Indians as early as 1818. By the 1840s the commercial activities of migrants from the South had established the Dallas-Shreveport Road, a trade route that later became Farm Road 16. Though this made the vicinity more accessible to pioneers, a community was not established until 1870, when the Winona Liberty Baptist Church was organized. In 1877 Winona became a station on the Tyler Tap Railway. In 1878 a Winona post office was opened with John R. Nolan as postmaster; the office closed the next year but reopened in 1880 with Mary Jane Sewell as postmistress. In 1892 the postmaster, James A. Parrish, reported 150 inhabitants, including a dentist, a physician, a railroad agent, a grocer, a wagonmaker and blacksmith, and a justice of the peace. The settlement had a telegraph office, a drugstore, four general stores, and a mill and cotton gin. The Harris Creek Baptist Church moved there in 1900. By 1902 Winona had a school conducted by Professor McKnight. Local farmers, unlike most in Smith County, concentrated on corn and cotton, with little or no truck or fruit production. In 1903 the school system comprised three schools, one for white students and two for blacks. The Mount Carmel post office was transferred to Winona the following year, and in 1907 Starr Masonic Lodge Number 118 also moved there. In 1912, during services at the Winona Liberty Baptist Church, lightening hit the structure. One person was killed by the lightening, and another was trampled to death. Two years later postmaster William Y. Rice reported a population of 600. The town had grown to include a bank, two hotels, several groceries, additional cotton gins, a telephone exchange, and the offices of the local paper, the Winona News