Industry & Businesses

Industry and Businesses. A Growing Community, also, People. While a county record-breaking 66,000 cotton bales were sold in 1950, by 1959 cotton farming had significantly decreased. The industrialization that occurred during the world war two years brought manufacturing jobs to the county, replacing many of the lost farm jobs. By 1953, about 2,000 people worked in manufacturing plants., Over the years, Hunt County managed to have 10 Fortune 500 companies at one time or another. They included Wing Doors, Papermate, Rubbermaid, Lance, Henson-Kickernick, Walker Manufacturing, L3 Harris (previously, Temco, LTV, E-Systems, Raytheon, and L3), Cytec, Fleishmann's Yeast, and Case., The story of the Puddin Hill Country Store began in 1839, when James and Mary Horton came to the Blackland Prairie of Northeast Texas. Mary Horton was said to have had difficulty walking up a hill through the mud, which she said was as thick as pudding. Accordingly, Mary Horton became the first Mary of Puddin Hill. It was her recipe for pecan fruit cake that was passed down through the family and later made the company famous., In 1948, Mary's great granddaughter, Mary Horton Lauderdale, and her husband Sam were students at the University of Texas. During the Christmas season of 1949, while still students, they began making and selling fruit cakes in their apartment, based on her grandmother's recipe. Sam and Mary decided to return to Mary's hometown of Greenville and give the business several years of all-out effort. They converted the laundry room at Mary's parents' home into a small bakery and went to work. The business grew and they were able to purchase a few acres of the original Puddin Hill farm, on which they built a facility in 1955. They added a retail store in 1975 and a candy kitchen in 1980. In 2014 Mary of Puddin Hill closed. The following year Elenberger's Bakery of Palestine bought the name, recipes, and equipment. In 2020, Luanne Dickens formed an agreement to bring a Mary of Puddin Hill store back to Greenville. It is located downtown and called Luanne's Mary of Puddin Hill., Innovation First International (IFI) was founded by Tony Norman and Bob Mimlitch in 1996 in Greenville. IFI began by producing electronics for autonomous mobile ground robots and is now a leader in educational and competitive robotics products and a growing developer of consumer robotics toys. They were founded on the belief that innovation is necessary very early in the design process to produce simple and elegant product designs. IFI's subsidiaries include VEX Robotics, Inc., RackSolutions, Inc., and Innovation First Labs, Inc. They design and supply control systems to the largest educational robotics competitions worldwide. They launched the HEXBUG line of consumer robotics toys in 2008., Reverse Side , Dewey Fitzpatrick, Jr. , Dewey Fitzpatrick, Jr. was originally from Palestine, Texas where he learned about the food business working at his father's restaurant as a young man. He spent time in the Army studying commercial dietetics and was in charge of the mess hall at Ft. McClellan, Alabama. He and Goldie Faye Manning married around 1941 and had seven children together. The family moved to Chicago before Fitzpatrick accepted a job at the Oakland Vocational School, a veteran trade school in Greenville., In 1951, Dewey and Goldie Faye Manning Fitzpatrick opened the Spare Rib Bar-B-Q Pit, in Greenville. In 1974, the restaurant moved to South Wesley St. The Spare Rib was one of the earliest restaurants in town to defy Jim Crow laws, as they had a mixed-race dining room. Fitzpatrick and his meat-smoking skills were featured in a National Geographic article on Texas BBQ in 1980. It was a world-famous restaurant that people from all over came to experience for themselves., The Spare Rib closed in 2004. Dewey Fitzpatrick died in 2013 at the age of 89 and Goldie Fitzpatrick died in 2020 at the age of 95., Ernie Carroll , Ernie Carroll was born in Quitman, Texas in 1926. He died in 1991. After he got out of the Navy, Carroll worked in Dallas for Shoemaker's Barbecue, a group of now-defunct barbecue joints founded in 1926 that once dotted downtown Dallas. When he opened his eponymous barbecue joint in 1948, Carroll borrowed their look, with only school desks for seating and a scant menu of barbecue sandwiches., After Carroll passed away, his daughter Shannon Routh eventually took over the business with her husband, Frank Routh Jr., and their business partner, Howard Barrow. Shannon remembers when sliced beef, ham, and sausage were the only meats in the old brick pit. The popular Ernie Burger was a brisket sandwich topped with barbecue sauce, yellow mustard, and sweet pickle relish. Still in business, Josh Thomas has been the owner of Ernie's Pit Barbeque since 2018.