The name lasted twelve months. In 1898, the post office serving a scattering of farms and a railroad switch in Smith County was registered as Strawberry. By 1899 it was Arp, renamed after a newspaper editor because Strawberry Junction did not fit cleanly on the side of a shipping crate. That is the whole story of why a town of just over a thousand people carries the name of a man most residents today have never heard of, stamped over a fruit that most residents today have definitely eaten.
What the name change could not do was erase what the town actually was: a shipping point for produce, built around soil good enough that people bet a rail line on it. That identity did not disappear when the sign changed. It shows up twice now, in two places a longtime Arp resident might drive past without connecting to each other. One is a festival at the city park. The other is a restaurant six miles down a county road most people only take if they already know where they are going.
The Year Arp Was Named After Fruit
Before it was Arp or Strawberry, the settlement went by Jarvis Switch, a stop the International-Great Northern Railroad built through in 1872. Commercial farming took off in 1897 when a grower named J.W. Melton arrived from Troup and became the first local citizen to ship tomatoes north by rail. The post office followed the crop the next year, registering as Strawberry in 1898.
The rename to Arp came fast, and for a practical reason rather than a sentimental one. Strawberry Junction ran too long for the crate stamps shippers used to mark produce headed north, so the town took the shorter name of William Arp, a well-known newspaper editor of the era. The 2024 festival marked 125 years since that switch, which puts the math simply: Arp has carried its current name more than a century longer than it carried the one the soil actually earned.
A Festival That Took a Decade Off
The town kept a Strawberry Festival running for roughly 40 years before it quietly stopped in the 2010s. Erin Holcomb Gerometta, who grew up attending it and now serves as president of Arp Community Events, brought it back in 2021. She has said the point was giving local kids a version of the memories she had as a child, not recreating a museum piece.
The 2026 festival ran May 9 at Arp City Park with more than 100 vendor booths, live music, train rides, bounce houses, and the kind of berry-themed food you would expect from a town that used to stamp its name on strawberry crates. It is not a static tradition. By 2023, two years into the restart, the festival had already generated close to $6,500 in scholarship money for graduating seniors, funded by the same local vendors and businesses the event exists to showcase. That is a small town turning a nostalgia event into an actual funding mechanism for its kids, which is a different thing than just throwing a party.
Six Miles Down County Road 217, The Fields Just Look Different Now
In 2012, Jason and Sharon Romano bought a stretch of overgrown forest near Arp with no clear plan beyond building something they themselves would want to visit. What exists now on that same ground is High Hill Farm, a 70-plus acre resort property built around a working vineyard, and it has grown considerably since the early bungalow-and-tasting-room days.
A few things worth knowing if you have never turned down that driveway:
- The bungalows carry individual names like Bluebonnet, Julep, and Great Southern, each with a private courtyard
- The grounds include an infinity pool overlooking the vineyard, a bocce court, a skeet-shooting range at the top of the property's namesake hill, and a chicken coop guests seem to genuinely enjoy visiting
- D Magazine's 2024 profile on the property described plans already underway for a 3,000-person amphitheater, a Topgolf-style driving venue, and up to 110 privately owned home sites built around a spring-fed lake
That last part matters if you have driven past the entrance and assumed it was just a bed and breakfast. High Hill Farm is scaling into something closer to a destination community, and it is doing it from the same acreage that, a hundred years earlier, would have been platted for tomatoes and strawberries bound for a northern market.
The Restaurant Nobody Driving Past Would Guess Is There
The property's restaurant, Côte, is where the connection to Arp's original identity gets most literal. The kitchen sources from local farms and food artisans, and the current executive chef, Erin Willis, builds a seasonal menu around whatever that sourcing turns up rather than a fixed rotation. As of this year, dinner runs Thursday through Saturday evenings by reservation, with brunch service added on select weekends per the restaurant's own site.
The menu leans French and Southern at once. Regional food writers have described dishes like shrimp and grits alongside classics like coq au vin and beef Wellington, plus a candied pecan Belgian waffle that shows up in more than one review as the thing people order twice. None of this reads like the kind of restaurant you expect to find at the end of a farm-to-market road outside a town of a thousand people, which is precisely why Texas Highways and D Magazine both wrote it up as the kind of place East Texans keep discovering by accident rather than by search.
Same Soil, Different Century
Here is what actually connects the festival at Arp City Park to the dinner service at Côte. Both are responses to the same fact about this ground: it grows things worth building a gathering around. In 1897, that meant loading tomatoes onto a northbound train and hoping the soil's reputation would follow the shipment. In 2026, it means Arp Community Events turning a revived local tradition into scholarship money for graduating seniors, and it means a vineyard six miles away turning its own harvest into a seasonal menu that pulls diners in from Tyler and beyond.
The name Strawberry did not survive past 1899. The instinct behind it, that this particular stretch of East Texas is worth farming and worth gathering around, clearly did. If you have lived in Arp for years and only ever thought of the name change as a piece of local trivia, or never made the connection between the Strawberry Festival and the vineyard down the road, that is the thread worth knowing. The town's original identity did not fade. It just split into two different events on two different calendars, both still running on the same land.
If you are weighing what a home near this kind of local texture is actually worth, or thinking about what your next move in Arp or the surrounding East Texas towns might look like, Brittany Sartain is happy to walk through it with you. Schedule a free consultation whenever you are ready.
