Coho and Nancy Jane Smith Farmstead Site

🏛️The era

When the first settlers began drifting into this corner of North Texas around 1849, Texas had been a state for only a few years. The land west of the young town of Fort Worth was still frontier in every sense: open prairie and timbered creek bottoms, few roads, and families who had to raise, build, or make almost everything they needed.

Those early decades were anything but calm. The 1850s brought a steady stream of newcomers pushing west across Texas, and the 1860s brought the Civil War, which pulled men away from farms and left frontier counties feeling exposed. Across the western edge of settlement in those years, conflict between settlers and Native nations defending their homelands was a real and recurring part of life.

That is the backdrop to this quiet hillside. A family starting out here in 1861 was building a home at the very moment the nation was coming apart, on ground that was still being settled rather than simply lived on.

👥People & events

The story starts with James and Sarah Hoggard, part of that first wave of settlers to reach the area around 1849. Their daughter, Nancy Jane, grew up on this frontier, and in 1861 she married John J. Smith, a man everyone seems to have known as "Coho."

Coho Smith brought two useful trades to a young community: he was a cabinet maker and a teacher. Soon after their wedding, the couple bought land at this spot and raised a one-room cabin. As children arrived, the cabin grew with them, a room at a time, the way so many frontier homes did.

Local tradition holds that the Smith home also served as a school. That fits neatly with Coho's work as a teacher, though the marker is careful to frame it as local history rather than documented fact. It is easy to picture it anyway: neighborhood children gathered in a family's front room, learning their letters in a house built by hand.

Much later, archeologists came to read the ground itself. They found a hand-dug well, a root cellar, a spring house for keeping food cool, and rock walls that may have belonged to a fortified structure. Whether those walls were truly defensive remains an open question, but together these features sketch the daily work of keeping a family fed, watered, and safe.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Most of America's westward story was not written by famous explorers or generals. It was written by couples like Nancy Jane and Coho Smith, who bought a piece of land, built a cabin, and slowly turned wilderness into a community. Sites like this one are where that larger story becomes tangible.

The Smith farmstead also captures something important about frontier education. Before counties had the money or population for formal schoolhouses, learning often happened in homes, taught by whoever in the neighborhood had the skill. A cabinet maker who could also teach was a real asset to a settlement.

Finally, this is a reminder of what archeology adds to written history. Few frontier families left diaries or letters, but they left wells, cellars, and stone walls. By studying them, researchers can recover the ordinary routines that paperwork never captured. The marker itself was placed as part of the 150th anniversary of Texas statehood, a fitting tribute to the families who built the state from the ground up.

🧭If you visit

Come here with your imagination switched on. The point of this place is not a grand building but what lies in and under the ground: the traces of a family farm where a well was dug by hand and food was kept cool in a cellar and spring house.

As you look around, try to picture the cabin growing room by room, and neighborhood children arriving for lessons. Think about the water, too: a reliable spring or well decided where families could settle, and a spring house was the frontier's refrigerator.

Azle sits just northwest of Fort Worth, so this stop pairs easily with a day exploring the city's frontier and cattle-town history. It works especially well for families. Kids who have never considered where water or refrigeration come from often find a root cellar and a hand-dug well surprisingly fascinating. Please respect any private property and leave archeological features undisturbed.