Longview was platted by the Southern Pacific Railroad on rolling land north of the Sabine River, with the completion in 1869 of a twenty-five-mile extension from Marshall. The town was located on land purchased from Ossamus H. Methvin and was named by the railroad...
Marshall is located in the heavily forested East Texas timberlands. Anglo-American settlement began in 1835 with the arrival of families with land grants from the Mexican government. The area was settled so rapidly following the Texas Revolution...
Between 1850 and 1873, Jefferson was one of the most important commercial and immigration centers in Texas and the largest inland port, surpassed only by Galveston in commerce and industry. Jefferson is located beside Big Cypress Bayou, a navigation...
Straddling the Texas-Arkansas border, Texarkana is rare among American cities. It is two separate municipalities, physically indistinguishable, yet separated by a broad avenue that marks the boundary between two states, Texas and Arkansas. Its location south of...
Terrell, the largest city in Kaufman County, was founded in 1873 when C. C. Nash and John Moore purchased land along the route of the Texas and Pacific Railway between Longview and Dallas. Named for Robert Terrell, an early settler and landowner, the town thrived...
William Wills arrived in northern Van Zandt County in 1846 and built a double-pen log cabin. He purchased additional acreage at his homesite in 1856 to establish a rest stop for travelers on the Dallas–Shreveport road. A town was laid out in 1873 when the...
Mineola is a railroad town established in 1873 when the Texas and Pacific (T&P) Railway constructed its line through southern Wood County between Longview and Dallas. A junction was formed with the International and Great Northern (I&GN) Railroad at a small...
Anglo-American settlement in the area began in the late 1830s, and this community formed in the 1850s, named for William H. Pitts from Georgia. In 1874, Pittsburg became the county seat of the newly organized Camp County. The town received two vital rail...
Hopkins County was created by the first state legislature in 1846. Anglo-American settlement began in 1837, increasing after the Republic of Texas expelled the Cherokee Indians in 1839. The community, then named Bright Star, was a popular stopping point...
Greenville was established in 1846 as the newly created Hunt County seat. The town was located near the headwaters of the Sabine River on land described at the time as “a great prairie with tall waving grass.” McQuinney H. Wright, a surveyor, land speculator, and...
McKinney is located on a gently rolling prairie near the east fork of the Trinity River. It was established in 1848 as the second county seat of Collin County, which was carved from Fannin County two years earlier. Both the county and the new county seat were...
When Grayson County was created in 1846, the legislature named the county seat in honor of General Sidney Sherman, a hero of the Texas Revolution (credited with raising the San Jacinto battle cry, “Remember the Alamo, Remember Goliad!”) and an early railroad...
The history of Denison is linked to the Missouri, Kansas and Texas (MKT) Railway. Throughout the 1870s, the railway under the guidance of general manager Robert Stevens aggressively pursued a policy of town founding and development as it built south and west...
Settled in 1836, Bonham is one of the two oldest communities in the Red River Valley; the other is Clarksville. In 1837, Kentuckian Bailey Inglish constructed a log stockade and blockhouse (reconstructed in 1936) on the creek and soon thereafter donated land for...
Honey Grove displays a level of architectural affluence that reflects the area’s agricultural wealth during the late nineteenth century. The city is located on a rise of land that formed a transition between timber to the east and prairie to the west. Honey...
Paris, the county seat of Lamar County, is located fifteen miles south of the Red River on a vegetation boundary line separating the Piney Woods region of northeast Texas from the Blackland Prairie that extends southwest. The Red River Valley originally was home to...
Red River County was part of a large and vaguely defined area called the Red River district under the Republic of Texas, encompassing all or part of thirty-nine present-day counties. Anglo-American settlements in the area were established by 1818, and...
Dallas has its origins in a trading post that lawyer and Indian trader John Neely Bryan from Arkansas established at a narrows in the Trinity River flood plain south of the union of the river’s three branches in 1839. The site was a natural hard-bottomed crossing on an...
The town survey of 1844 by J. P. Dumas placed the one-half-square-mile plat (about 54 blocks) roughly parallel to the Trinity River, about 15 degrees off the cardinal points. Later expansion to the north and south increased that angle to about 45 degrees, creating numerous...
The Arts District developed following a 1977 study by Stephen Carr and Kevin Lynch of the city’s cultural facilities. The impetus for the study was the need to provide new facilities for the Dallas Museum of Art and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, both of which occupied aging...
The Near North describes an area north of Woodall Rodgers Freeway (TX 366 Spur) and east of I-45/U.S. 60. An agricultural fair (the Texas State Fair and Exposition) held in 1886 that competed with the official Dallas State Fair and Exposition (see DS91) brought attention to the...
The town of Highland Park, founded in 1907, and the city of University Park, begun in 1915, are independent municipalities several miles north of downtown and now surrounded by Dallas. Connected to the business center by trolleys, Preston Road, and the parkway of Turtle...
North Dallas is loosely defined as north of Northwest Highway Loop 12 (the northern boundary of University Park) and west of North Central Expressway U.S. 75. The one-mile grid of primary roads following the Public Land Survey System, evident north of Mockingbird Lane,...
The area east of I-45 and I-345 extending past White Rock Lake contains layers of Dallas’s growth. Immediately east of downtown, along Elm, Main, and Commerce streets, the Houston and Texas Central Railroad attracted industrial businesses and a freedmen’s town, known as Deep...
Settlements were founded on the west side of the Trinity River at approximately the same time as John Neely Bryan’s 1839 trading post on the east bank. Hord’s Ridge (later called Oak Cliff) in 1845 and La Réunion in 1854 were first connected to Dallas by a...
Irving was founded in 1903 in anticipation of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad building west out of Dallas. Irving’s main claim to fame was the Texas Stadium (1971–2010, A. Warren Morey), the original gridiron of the Dallas Cowboys football team, until...
Settled by the Peters Colony (Texas Land and Emigration Company) in the mid-1840s, as was Farmers Branch, the community was linked to the St. Louis, Arkansas and Texas Railway in 1888, extending a spur into Dallas in 1903 for commuter service. Addison was...
First settled in the 1840s in the area around present Richland College, the town relocated to the new Houston and Texas Central Railroad line in the early 1870s. The Texas Electric Railway, connecting with Waco, Corsicana, Dallas, and Denison in 1908, made...
The early community of Embree, a station on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, and Duck Creek, a stop on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway, consolidated around the Santa Fe depot (GF14) in 1887 to form Garland. According to the WPA Guide to Texas, by...
Settlers of the Peters Colony moved into this area in the mid-1840s, naming it Plano (Spanish for “flat,” which bluntly describes the terrain), when the post office was established in 1852. The route of the Shawnee Trail brought cattle drives through the county in...
