City of Arlington
Arlington, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The city of Arlington developed along the juncture of two distinct ecological regions, the Blackland Prairie and the Eastern Cross Timbers. The West Fork of the Trinity River and its area tributaries flow through the city, and one such stream, Village (Caddo) Creek, was the site of a series of Native American communities. The 1841 Battle of Village Creek and the 1843 Bird's Fort Treaty between the Republic of Texas and the Delaware, Chickasaw, Waco, Tawakoni, Keechi, Caddo, Nadako, Ionie, Biloxi and Cherokee tribes opened the region to pioneer settlement, led by Col. Middleton Tate Johnson and Patrick Watson. In 1876, the Rev. A. S. Hayter helped survey the area for a new townsite and rail stop for the Texas and Pacific Railroad. Named Arlington for the Virginia home of Gen. Robert E. Lee, the town became a regional cotton distribution center. Incorporation occurred in 1884, the year after its first newspaper, The World, was first published. At the turn of the 20th century, the city's more than 1,000 residents supported several churches and schools, including Arlington College, an institution that became the University of Texas at Arlington in 1967. Arlington residents adopted a city manager form of government in 1949. The municipality, situated between Fort Worth and Dallas, served as an interurban rail hub and as a stop along the Bankhead Highway. It became a statewide destination for amusements beginning in the 1920s with gambling at Top O' Hill Terrace and horseracing at W.T. Waggoner's Arlington Downs. Later attractions included Six Flags Over Texas amusement park, established in 1961, and the Texas Rangers baseball team. Today, Arlington remains a viable part of one of the nation's largest metropolitan areas. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Arlington grew up where the Blackland Prairie meets the Eastern Cross Timbers, on land once dotted with Native American villages along Village Creek. The 1841 Battle of Village Creek and the 1843 Bird's Fort Treaty — signed by the Republic of Texas with the Delaware, Caddo, Waco, Cherokee, and many other tribes — opened the area to settlement, and in 1876 a townsite and Texas and Pacific rail stop was surveyed and named for Robert E. Lee's Virginia home. From a cotton-shipping town it grew into an amusement destination and, wedged between Fort Worth and Dallas, into one of the anchors of a vast modern metroplex, home to UT Arlington, Six Flags, and the Texas Rangers.
Why it matters
Arlington's story compresses the whole arc of Texas history — Indigenous homeland, treaty and removal, railroad town, and booming Sun Belt metropolis — into a single city.
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Related people
- · Middleton Tate Johnson
- · Robert E. Lee
Related events
- · Battle of Village Creek
- · Bird's Fort Treaty
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Jesse Chisholm
Arlington, TX
Jesse Chisholm, born of a Scottish father and Cherokee mother, was a scout, trader, and interpreter fluent in dozens of Indian languages who negotiated for the Republic of Texas and Sam Houston, including a peace conference near here at Bird's Fort in 1843. He is remembered for the wagon route he marked across Oklahoma and Kansas, which cowboys adopted to drive Texas longhorns north to railheads. After the Civil War wrecked the state's economy, those drives sent five-dollar cattle to thirty-dollar markets, and the Chisholm Trail became the most famous of the great cattle roads.
Andrew Hayter
Arlington, TX
A Tennessee-born Cumberland Presbyterian preacher, Andrew Shannon Hayter came to Texas around 1850 and eventually settled in Tarrant County, where he founded churches, a school and a Masonic lodge and earned his living as a surveyor. His frontier knowledge made him the natural choice in 1876 to help route the railroad and lay out a small town between Dallas and Fort Worth. Offered the honor of naming it for himself, he instead chose 'Arlington,' after Robert E. Lee's Virginia estate.
First Baptist Church of Arlington
Arlington, TX
This congregation first organized in the 1870s at Johnson Station, an early Tarrant County settlement and stagecoach stop. When the Texas and Pacific Railroad drove a line through the area in 1876 and founded the town of Arlington, the church—like the community's other institutions—picked up and moved to the new rail town. After decades in temporary quarters and successive sanctuaries, including one lost to fire in 1944, the congregation settled at its present site.
Marrow Bone Spring
Arlington, TX
Long an Indian habitation, Marrow Bone Spring became a crossroads of the young Republic of Texas: Sam Houston's peace envoys visited in 1843, a licensed trading post opened nearby in 1845, and settlers of the Peters Colony put down roots. Soldier-statesman Middleton Tate Johnson posted troops here in the late 1840s, and in 1851 Tarrant County's first post office opened at Johnson's Station, which flourished for years around the reliable water.