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Gainesville, Texas

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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A city and the county-seat of Cooke county, Texas, U.S.A., about 6 m. S. of the Red river, and about 60 m. N. of Fort Worth. Pop. (1890) 6 594; (1900) 7874, of whom 1201 were negroes and 269 foreign-born. The city is served by the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe, and the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas railways, and by an interurban electric railway. Gainesville is a trading centre and market for the surrounding country, in which cotton, grains, garden truck, fruit and alfalfa are grown and live-stock is raised; and a wholesale distributing point for the neighbouring region in Texas and Oklahoma. The city has cotton-compresses and cotton-gins, and among its manufactures are cotton-seed oil, flour, cement blocks, pressed bricks, canned goods, foundry products, waggon-beds and creamery products. Gainesville was settled about 1851, was incorporated in 1873, and was chartered as a city in 1879; it was named in honour of General Edmund Pendleton Gaines (1777-1849), who served with distinction in the War of 1812, becoming a brigadier-general in March 1814 and receiving the brevet of major-general and the thanks of Congress for his defence of Fort Erie in August 1814. Gaines took a prominent part in the operations against the Seminoles in Florida in 1817 (when he was in command of the Southern Military District) and in 1836 and during the Mexican War commanded the department of the South-West, with headquarters at New Orleans.