St. John's Community Map

The people that comprised the St. John's community mainly came from Alabama and Missouri. Their destination was a portion of North Texas located between the towns of Pilot Point and Denton. An effort has been made to locate the homesteads of as many members of the St. John's community as possible. Below is the fruit of our labor. The map was created using deed records, tax rolls, and census records. Most of those in the St. John's community who owned property obtained a land deed which identified the original grantee of the tract of land on which the community member was purchasing. These were the easiest to locate as the General Land Grant Office has copies of land grant maps by county which layout the tracts of land each original grantee purchased. If a deed was not able to be located, County Tax Assessment Rolls were researched. Each assessment lists the landowner, the acreage he owned, and in what survey of land his acreage could be found (i.e. the original grantee). For those that did not own land, the census was used to identify who the community member lived near. Since the census is recorded door-to-door, it can be determined with relative confidence where community members who rented property were located by tracing their closest landowning neighbors. An arduous but rewarding task, the map below illustrates the geography of the St. John's community.