Virginia-born Samuel Erwin married Sally Rodgers Crisp in Tennessee in 1819 in a ceremony performed by local magistrate David Crockett. The first settler in the Honey Grove area, he arrived there in 1837 and surveyed land grants for other pioneers. A surveyor by profession, he platted the townsite for his friend B.S. Walcott in 1848. He was the town's first postmaster and one of Fannin County's earliest justices of the peace.