INDEPENDENCE, TEXAS (Smith County). Independence was a church community on a light-duty road off Farm Road 2607 just northeast of Lake Tyler East and four miles west of Overton in eastern Smith County. It was originally part of the John Long survey. Little is known about early settlement, but records for 1903 show two schools in the community. A one-teacher white school was attended by thirty-seven students, and a one-teacher black school had thirty-six students. By 1936 the schools had merged with the Arp Independent School District. The 1936 county highway map shows only a small unlabeled cluster of farms at the intersection of two dirt roads. By 1973 Independence Church had been built, but only four or five farms remained in the area. Independence was no longer identified on maps in 1981.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Edward Clayton Curry, An Administrative Survey of the Schools of Smith County, Texas (M.Ed. thesis, University of Texas, 1938). "School Sights," Chronicles of Smith County, Fall 1969.
