A land grant establishing the Peters Colony in the 1840s attracted the first Anglo-American settlers to the area. Gainesville was founded in 1850 on the route used by the California ’49ers and by 1858 was a stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail Route. Merchants providing supplies to cattle drives after the Civil War initiated the first period of growth. Two railroads came through in the later 1870s. Gainesville weathered the decline of the cattle business in the 1890s through high cotton prices, then by oil in the 1920s, and by the U.S. Army’s Camp Howze during World War II.
The spread of the use of barbed wire in the late 1870s affected the Plains landscape as much as did the railroad. The first reels of barbed wire sold in Texas were brought to Gainesville in 1875 by Henry B. Sanborn, a regional sales agent for Joseph Glidden’s Bar Fence Company of DeKalb, Illinois, which had patented two-stranded barbed wire the previous year. Starting with ten reels at the Cleaves and Fletcher Hardware store, Gainesville was one of his initial distribution points.
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