Bill and Maude Dodson House
Farmers Branch, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This historic Farmers Branch residence was the home of the city's first mayor. William F. (Bill) Dodson (1895-1949), a native of Malakoff, married Maude Gilmore (1896-1998) in Fort Worth in July 1917. The following May, Bill became a private in the 36th Infantry Division, serving in France's Meuse-Argonne sector during the First World War The Dodsons'son Smith was born in November 1918. After the war, the Dodson family lived in Dallas and became active in real estate and oil. They moved to Farmers Branch in the 1930s and commissioned contractor Ross Faulkner to design a house to Maude's specifications. Completed by 1937, it was originally closer to Farmers Branch Creek but moved to its present site in 1942. In January 1946, Bill Dodson learned the city of Dallas, with city limits then 12 miles distant, planned to annex the Farmers Branch community. He and his neighbors circulated a petition for a local incorporation election. Citizens voted approval, and in April they elected Dodson the first mayor. H.O. Good, Lawson Lewis, Raymond Milloway, Thomas Reeder and Glenn Templin became the first aldermen. The new city council held three meetings in the Dodson House, with others conducted at Mason Lodge No. 395, where Dodson was a member. During his two-year term as mayor, Farmers Branch hired its first city employees, established a fire department and water system, and joined the League of Texas Municipalities. Maude stayed in the house until 1983, donating it to the city as the core of a heritage park. The Colonial Revival one-story frame house has telescoping wings, side gables, wood siding, six-over-one windows and a slender pedimented entry with square columns. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark – 2007
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Bill Dodson, a World War I veteran of the Meuse-Argonne, and his wife Maude built this Colonial Revival home in Farmers Branch around 1937, tailored to Maude's own specifications. When Dallas moved in 1946 to annex the community, Dodson and his neighbors organized an incorporation election—and voters made him Farmers Branch's first mayor. The new city council met in this very house while the young municipality hired its first employees and stood up a fire department and water system.
Why it matters
The house captures the moment a rural community chose self-government over absorption by a growing city, a small but vivid example of how suburban America took shape in the mid-20th century.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · William F. "Bill" Dodson
- · Maude Gilmore Dodson
Related events
- · Incorporation of Farmers Branch (1946)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Allen Cemetery
Allen, TX
Formally established by the Odd Fellows in 1884, Allen Cemetery has gathered a community's memory across three acres for well over a century. Its stones record early epidemics, pioneer settlers and physicians, and veterans of foreign wars — among them a soldier killed in the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I and another who served in the Spanish-American War — while oral tradition places an older slave burial ground in one corner. A cemetery association organized in 1899 still tends the grounds and keeps an annual Decoration Day.
First Baptist Church of Farmers Branch
Farmers Branch, TX
Thomas and Sarah Keenan settled at Farmers Branch in 1842, during the Republic of Texas era, and began a family cemetery here after burying their infant son the next year. With the Rev. David Myers they helped organize a Baptist congregation in 1846; when that group moved on, twelve members reestablished Baptist worship in 1870 as the Farmers Branch Missionary Baptist Church, first meeting in the local school. Growing steadily across the following century, it took the name First Baptist Church of Farmers Branch in 1951.
Webb Chapel Cemetery
Farmer's Branch, TX
Isaac and Mary Webb brought their family to the Peters Colony in 1844 and within a year helped form a Methodist society—the first church organized in Dallas County. Their log Webb Chapel, built in 1846, doubled as the settlement's first school, and the churchyard became a cemetery in 1847 when the Webbs' young daughter Alice died. Generations of north Texas pioneers now rest at the site, still tended by a cemetery association.
Carrollton Black Cemetery
Carrollton, TX
Carrollton's early African-American residents, many of them formerly enslaved, helped settle and build the town, and by 1871 a corner of farmer Scott Boswell Sr.'s land had become their community cemetery. Though it holds dozens of burials, only three names remain legible, and flooding from the Elm Fork of the Trinity River destroyed many grave markers over the years. Once threatened by development, the ground survives as one of the few tangible records of Black Carrollton's earliest generation.