A little patch of vanished McLennan County history will live on in memory thanks to the installation of a state historical marker on the grounds of The Church at Tree Lake near China Spring.

More than three dozen local residents joined Annie C. Bessire, 88 — the local history buff who bankrolled the marker after several years of research into the largely defunct community of Erath — in dedicating the plaque near the intersection of Tree Lake Drive and China Spring Road last month.

Tree Lake Drive was known for many years as Erath Road.

What became the Erath community of McLennan County was originally part of an 1834 Mexican land grant issued to Miguel Rabajo (listed in some state texts as Rabago).

McLennan County, named for Scottish immigrant surveyor Neil McLennan (1777-1867), was established in January 1850. The Erath section, named for Austrian immigrant surveyor George Bernard Erath (1813-1891), was formed later that year. It included land northwest, west and southwest of the Brazos River, including the three Bosque rivers and what is now China Spring.

By 1880, the settlement six miles northwest of downtown Waco and two miles southeast of China Spring had a gristmill and a general store. At the peak of its population, it also boasted a Baptist church, a Methodist church, a school, two cotton gins and a blacksmith’s shop. Erath even operated its own post office from 1896 to 1907.

The Erath school, which operated from 1890 through the 1920s, was consolidated with several other rural schoolhouses around 1930 to form the China Spring district. The Great Depression also chased away most of the town’s businesses, leaving just a corner convenience store, one gristmill and the churches.

Erath’s population dipped and grew in spurts: It was reported at 15 in 1900, had grown to 47 by 1911, had dropped to 24 by 1931 and had grown again to 50 by 1949. County road maps showed only a smattering of homes along the highway in the ’40s and ’50s. Much of the area was annexed by the city of Waco by the late 1980s.

Bessire, whose family moved to the Waco area in 1937 for work, said she wanted to ensure that the old community was not left in obscurity for all time.

“It’s doubtful if any of the younger families in this area will ever know that there was an Erath section, an Erath settlement, an Erath Town or an Erath community,” Bessire said. “The only place that the name Erath is seen is on the Erath Building, the old Baptist church . . .”

After researching in the archives of The Texas Collection at Baylor University and interviewing old-timers, as well as reading oral histories collected by a Baylor history student in the 1970s, Bessire wrote a nine-page community history she dubbed “Erath: A Section, a Settlement, a Town, a Community.”

Additional sources: Handbook of Texas Online, The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County (1972), Drayton Kelley; McLennan County before 1980, (1981) William R. Poage.