Cedar Springs
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
CEDAR SPRINGS Earliest known historic site in Dallas County Visited in 1840 by Colonel Wm. G. Cooke's preliminary exploration for a route between Austin and Red River. A community also called Cedar Springs, established in this vicinity in 1843 by Dr. John Cole, rivalled Dallas in an election in 1848 for county seat. In 1929, the land was annexed to Dallas.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Cedar Springs is remembered as the earliest known historic site in Dallas County, visited in 1840 by Colonel William G. Cooke while scouting a route between Austin and the Red River. A community by the same name, founded in 1843 by Dr. John Cole, grew so quickly that it challenged Dallas for the county seat in the 1848 election. The land was finally annexed to Dallas in 1929.
Why it matters
Cedar Springs recalls the earliest days of Anglo settlement in North Texas, when the location of a county seat could decide whether a town became a city or vanished into a neighbor.
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Related people
- · William G. Cooke
- · John Cole
Related events
- · 1848 Dallas County seat election
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cedar Springs
Dallas, TX
Surveyed in the late 1830s during preparations for a military road, the Cedar Springs area drew Dr. John Cole and his family in 1843 under a Peters colony land grant. Cole built a home and store near the springs, and a small community with a distillery, flour mill, and grist mill grew up around them. After Dallas was chosen county seat in 1850 the town faded, later revived as the suburb of Oak Lawn and absorbed into Dallas between 1920 and 1940.
Preston Road
Highland Park, TX
Long before wagons rolled, this route ran as a pre-Columbian Indian trail. In 1841 the Republic of Texas staked it out as a road from Austin to Fort Preston at the best ford on the upper Red River, giving it the name it still carries. In the decades after, drovers pushed longhorns up Preston Road from the Trinity crossing at Dallas toward the Oklahoma line.
Colonel C. C. Slaughter
Dallas, TX
Christopher Columbus Slaughter, the first native-born cattle king of Texas, ranged the west Texas frontier as a ranger, Confederate beef supplier, and trail driver before building a ranching empire of more than a million acres. In the early 1870s he moved to Dallas, where he founded and led three early banks and helped launch the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. Renowned for his philanthropy to Baptist schools, churches, and hospitals, he left a mark on both the open range and the growing city.
Ahab Bowen Home
Dallas, TX
Ahab Bowen came to Dallas in 1861 from Tennessee and made his living as a farmer and feed dealer, buying this land in 1867 when it still lay beyond the young city's limits. Around 1874 he built this modest wood-frame farmhouse for his family, a plain vernacular home of a kind once common across rural Dallas County. As the city swelled around it, the house survived as one of the few reminders of the county's 19th-century agricultural roots.