Commerce & Texas A&M–Commerce

Commerce is the East Texas college town that William Leonidas Mayo built. A gifted teacher from Kentucky, Mayo moved his struggling private school here in 1894, and from that seed grew East Texas State, today Texas A&M University–Commerce. The school shaped the whole town, and its most famous student, Sam Rayburn, went on to become the long-serving Speaker of the U.S. House. This walk ties the university to the town that grew up with it: Mayo's school and grave, the President's House, the downtown that began as a crossroads trading center, the schools and churches that filled it in, and a marker to native son Claire Chennault, organizer of World War II's legendary Flying Tigers. It's a tour about how one determined educator's classroom turned a small Hunt County crossroads into a university town, and about the outsized people that town sent out into the world.