The U.S. Army established Fort Worth in 1849 atop a seventy-foot bluff at the confluence of the West Fork and Clear Fork of the Trinity River where they form a single channel that flows east to Dallas and then southeast to the Gulf of Mexico. Because there was...
The forks of the upper Trinity River supported the largest concentration of Indians in Texas in the early 1800s, a diverse mix of Caddo, Wichita, Shawnee, Delaware, and other bands. These communities, concentrated along Village Creek in present-day Arlington,...
After his reelection as president of the Republic of Texas in 1841, Sam Houston sought to end Indian hostilities in the region. He called councils with the tribes, meeting at Grape Vine Springs. Bird’s Fort Treaty in 1843 established a boundary line from current...
Denton was founded in 1857 near the geographical center of Denton County, which was formed in 1846. Growth was slow until the Texas and Pacific Railway and the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway arrived in 1881. Yet, despite these connections, Denton did not develop...
A land grant establishing the Peters Colony in the 1840s attracted the first Anglo-American settlers to the area. Gainesville was founded in 1850 on the route used by the California ’49ers and by 1858 was a stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail Route. Merchants...
Parker County was established by the Texas legislature in 1855, but Anglo-American settlers had lived in the area since the mid-1840s. Cattlemen Oliver Loving and Daniel Waggoner both established ranches in Parker County in 1855. Weatherford, incorporated in...
Settler J. A. Lynch laid out the town of Mineral Wells in 1881. When attempting to dig a water well, Lynch struck mineral water instead, which reputedly cured his rheumatism. By 1885, Mineral Wells was booming as a health resort, selling “Crazy Water” (so...
The first Anglo-American settlers crossing the Brazos River here into Indian lands in 1854 included Elizabeth Crockett, the widow of David Crockett, who brought her family from Tennessee to claim a league of land awarded to heirs of Texas Revolution veterans (she...
Charles and George Barnard opened a trading post in 1859 at the site of the future Glen Rose, where they built a flour and gristmill. Glen Rose grew with the popularity of its mineral springs, with sanitariums, hotels, and saloons promoting the town as a...
Cleburne has been a transportation hub since the U.S. Army wagon trail forded Buffalo Creek in the 1850s. Between the 1880s and 1904, four railroads were brought through Cleburne. The Santa Fe built machine shops in 1899, and the railroad construction and repair...
Gatesville was founded in 1854 when Coryell County was organized. It is named after Fort Gates, which was established nearby in 1849 to protect settlers. The lawlessness of the 1870s, with cattle and horse rustling, only lessened in the 1880s when barbed-wire...
Cliff Town was settled in 1852 on both banks of the Bosque River. A stone mill built in 1868 on the west bank attracted other businesses, and after the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway passenger station was built on the west bank in 1880, most...
Founded in 1854 in tandem with Bosque County, Meridian was platted by George B. Erath on the east bank of the North Bosque River. A log courthouse was built the same year, and until after the Civil War all structures were built of logs. The Gulf, Colorado and...
The county seat of Hill County, Hillsboro (originally spelled Hillsborough), was incorporated in 1881. The St. Louis, Arkansas and Texas Railway reached the town in 1888 and the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway in 1903. The railroads helped expand Hillsboro’s...
After the U.S. Army pushed Lipan Apache and, later, Comanche farther north in 1873, the region was open for settlement. The first settlers were Germans, brought by the Adelsverein from Fredericksburg in the early 1850s. Llano (Spanish for “plain”) was...
The U.S. Army established Fort Mason in 1851 near an Indian campsite at Gamel Spring. Mason was settled predominantly by German immigrants moving farther north from the earlier settlement at Fredericksburg. The town of Mason grew up around the fort (which was...
Located in bison rangelands beyond the reach of the 1847 treaty negotiated by John O. Meusebach with the Comanche to permit European settlement, the Brady area was not settled until the mid-1870s, after the Indians had been forcibly removed. Brady...
In 1847, German immigrant Ottfried Hans von Meusebach (he subsequently Anglicized his name to John O. Meusebach), commissioner general of the Adelsverein (Society for the Protection of German Immigrants) and founder of Fredericksburg, negotiated a treaty with...
In 1853, Moses Hughes built a mill, a log house, and a gin at Sulphur Creek, which was fed by seven mineral springs frequented by local Indians. In 1855 Elizabeth Burleson Scott and George W. Scott laid out the town of Burleson, named for her father, who...
The first Anglo-American settlers arrived in the area in the mid-1850s, often taking refuge from Indian attacks in fortified family dwellings before and during the Civil War. The frontier posts established by the U.S. Army in the late 1860s,...
Kentucky-born Henry C. Jacobs donated land, surveyed a town, and advocated for its selection as the Shackelford County seat in late 1874. Albany was a supply stop on the western cattle trail during the late 1860s and early 1870s. The Texas Central Railroad...
Comanche, Kiowa, and Tonkawa groups occupied the area before Anglo-American settlement began in the late 1850s, with the first cabin on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River built in 1857. Established by the Texas legislature in 1858, Stephens County was not...
When Brown County was organized in 1857, only a few farmers and ranchers lived around the hamlet of Brownwood, which was the new county seat. Development was hampered by persistent Comanche raids. Brownwood, platted on land donated by Greenleaf Fisk, lay on a...
Located on the Rolling Plains of North Central Texas, in the former hunting grounds of nomadic Kiowa and Comanche bands, Stamford was established in 1899. Texas-born, New York City bankers Eric P. and Swen A. Swenson donated 640 acres of land for a town site after...
A settlement grew up at Fort Phantom Hill in the late 1870s but moved to the current site (about fifteen miles northwest of the fort), known as Jones City, when the county was organized in 1881. John Merchant donated land for a town in the hope that the...
Taylor County was organized in 1878, with centrally located Buffalo Gap as the county seat. As the Texas and Pacific (T&P) Railway approached from the east, a group of ranchers and businessmen enticed it to pass through their land, where a town site named...
The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway established a stop here as it built west in 1886 and offered free lots to anyone who would move here from nearby Runnels City and to any religious congregation that would erect a church. Half of the town lots were claimed...
Archer County and a county seat to be named Archer City were created by the Texas legislature in 1858 in Kiowa and Comanche lands, but the first Anglo-American settlers did not arrive until 1874. Oil was discovered in Archer County in 1912 and has continued...
The Texas legislature created Wichita County in 1858, and the town of Wichita Falls was platted in 1876. Growth was slow until 1882, when residents offered land concessions to the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway to route its line through the town. By the...
Following the forced removal of Indians from North Central Texas in the mid-1870s, open-range grazing attracted the first Anglo-American settlers to Hardeman County. Herds were moved through this area along the Western Trail to Kansas railheads. Hardeman County...
