The Good Old Days: 1880 to 1900

During the 1880s and 1890s, greater Longview developed around two focal points, each based on a separate depot on the Texas & Pacific track.

Until the 1940s, T&P trains stopped at both places. The Longview City station was on the west side of Fredonia Street, north of the track. The Longview Junction station was near the site of the original International (later International & Great Northern) depot, where Sixth Street crossed the multiple tracks and became Mobberly Avenue.

The large and elegant Mobberly House hotel, located at what became the southeast corner of Mobberly and Pacific Streets, was built in 1884. Development at Longview Junction included division offices and shops for all three railroads, a sawmill, a cotton compress, a cottonseed mill, and a plant supplying ice for rail cars and (beginning in the late 1890s) electric power for the town.

The Junction neighborhood was an unbroken eastward extension of Longview city streets north of the T&P track, but the city limits stopped just west of Fourth Street. Longview citizens considered the Junction to be a rough, undesirable area. They were happy to do business there but reluctant to annex the portion lying outside the city limits. Therefore, the city kept its original boundaries of one mile square, centered at the intersection of Tyler and Center Streets. Longview's population grew from 2,034 in 1890 to 3,591 in 1900, but that part of the Junction neighborhood which lay outside the city remained unincorporated. Beginning in 1883, what was called the shortest streetcar line in the country ran along Fredonia and Methvin Streets between the two depots. The single car-open in summer and closed in winter-was pulled by two mules.

Public schools of that era in Gregg County were administered by the county through "common" school districts consisting at first of the four county precincts. One was called the Longview school district. Each district had its own board of trustees and levied its own taxes. A three-story wooden high-school building known as the Longview College was erected in 1883 for white pupils of the Longview district. Accordingly, the street on which it lay, between Green and Avondale Streets, was named College Street. A similar school, also known as a college, was built for black pupils in 1888 on East Marshall Avenue. White schoolchildren in the Junction area were served by a two-room private school taught by Mollie and Sarah Teague, built in 1883 on the corner of Magrill and Seventh Street. It later became a county school. In 1893, the four common school districts of Gregg County were divided into 11 smaller districts, including one named the Longview Common School District.

Fittingly enough, the only institutions apart from government, schools, and railroads that survive from the horse-and-buggy days of Longview are several churches. Those within the original city limits and their dates of initial meeting are as follows: First Methodist Church (late 1840s immediately east of what became the intersection of College and Boring Streets, later moving to the Marshall-Tyler Road as the Earpville church, then into Longview in 1873); St. Mark CME Church (an offshoot from the Earpville church in 1867, meeting in a brush arbor at what became Magrill Plaza-donated by John Magrill-at the intersection of First and Padon Streets); First Baptist Church (1871); First Presbyterian Church (October, 1872); Bethel Baptist Church (1874); First Christian Church (1875); St. Anthony Catholic Church (1880); and Trinity Episcopal Church (mission established in 1893). Other early churches in locations that were later incorporated within the Longview city limits include Pine Tree Cumberland Presbyterian Church (1847), Winterfield Methodist Church (camp meetings in the 1870s), Willow Springs Baptist Church (1891), and Jerusalem Baptist Church (1893).

Among other notable events of this period, a volunteer fire department was organized in 1885, based in an octagonal brick building on Tyler Street near the rear of the depot. Like other volunteer fire departments of that era in the United States, it was a hobby and social club for young civic leaders. In 1894, Bill Dalton and his outlaw gang robbed the First National Bank, located across Tyler Street from the fire station. The robbers shot their way out of town on horseback in a gunbattle with irate citizens, leaving a trace of the Wild West in the history of solidly Southern Longview. In 1897, a new courthouse was erected, and the local Lacy Telephone Company inaugurated a telephone system.