The City of Newark is a type "A" General Law Municipality. The City Council consists of a Mayor and five councilmembers. The Council appoints a City Attorney, an Internal Auditor and a Municipal Judge. Council members also appoint citizens to serve on various Boards and Commissions.[citation needed]
According to the Handbook of Texas, settlement began in the mid-1850s, referring to the community as Caddo Village because of numerous remnants of the Caddo Indian culture found along the banks of the West Fork of the Trinity River. After the Rock Island Railroad reached the town in 1893, officials surveyed town lots; the community was named after Newark, New Jersey, perhaps the hometown of G. K. Foster, the civil engineer who helped survey the town. Newark was a prosperous farming community until the 1920s. It regained its status as a retail market for area farmers by the end of the 1940s. In 1951 Newark incorporated.[5]
^Note: the US Census treats Hispanic/Latino as an ethnic category. This table excludes Latinos from the racial categories and assigns them to a separate category. Hispanics/Latinos can be of any race.[9][10]
