Alexander Harwood
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(1820-1885) Came to Dallas in 1844 from Tennessee. After the death of his first wife Isabella Daniel Harwood in 1851, he married Sarah Peak in 1855. Harwood was elected county clerk six times between 1850 and 1880. He was senior warden of the Tannehill Masonic Lodge and served the Confederacy as assistant to Postmaster General John H. Reagan. Harwood represented Dallas County at the 1866 State Constitutional Convention. (1996)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Alexander Harwood arrived in Dallas from Tennessee in 1844, when the settlement was little more than a river crossing, and spent the next four decades helping run it. Voters returned him as county clerk six times between 1850 and 1880, and he served the Confederacy as an assistant to Postmaster General John H. Reagan before representing Dallas County at the 1866 constitutional convention that followed the Civil War. His long public career threads through the town's rise from frontier outpost to established county seat.
Why it matters
Harwood's decades in local office trace how ordinary civic work — clerking, record-keeping, convention-going — knit a raw frontier county into a functioning part of the postwar American South.
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Related people
- · Alexander Harwood
- · John H. Reagan
Related events
- · 1866 Texas Constitutional Convention
Themes & tags
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