Streetman

Streetman, a small town on the line between Freestone and Navarro counties, was established as a station on the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway in 1905, and settlement began the following year. Most of the town lies in Freestone County and about a third of it in Navarro County. It was named for Judge Sam Streetman of Houston, a surveyor for the railroad, who also surveyed the townsite. The new station drew the surrounding country to it. In 1907 the post office of Cade, a farming settlement of the 1870s just west of the town, was moved to Streetman, and Cade declined once the rail line passed it by. The County Line Baptist Church, organized near Streetman in 1882, moved into the town in 1908 and became its First Baptist Church. A school began classes in 1907 in a blacksmith shop.

The railroad, which called itself the Valley Road and was more commonly known as the Boll Weevil, ran its tracks across Freestone County in 1906–07. Streetman was incorporated in 1914, by which time it had about 600 people, two cotton gins, two blacksmith shops, three churches and a lumberyard, and its own newspaper, the Streetman Enterprise, founded in 1912. The town's best years were 1920–40, and in 1931 it had 509 residents and thirty-five businesses. After the Second World War crop failures and the general movement from the country to the cities thinned it out. By 1948 its school district had been annexed by Fairfield's, the Black school was consolidated with Fairfield's in 1960, and by the late 1970s the town had five businesses and 239 people. The 2000 census counted 203.