David Myers

🏛️The era

When David Myers crossed the Red River into Texas on Christmas Eve, 1845, Texas was at a turning point. It had been an independent republic for nearly ten years, and in the last weeks of 1845 the United States was completing its annexation. A family arriving at that moment was stepping into a land about to change from a republic into an American state.

To attract settlers to its northern frontier, the Republic of Texas had granted large areas of North Texas to colonization ventures. The best known was Peters Colony, which offered free land to settlers who came and lived on it. For families in the Midwest and Upper South, the promise of land at no cost was a powerful pull, and it drew many of the first Anglo-American settlers to the area around what would become Dallas.

At the time, the land northwest of present-day Dallas was thinly settled prairie and woodland. There were no established towns of any size, few roads, and no institutions beyond what settlers built themselves. In such places, the church was often the first organization a community created and the center of its social life.

👥People & events

The Myers family's story is one of steady westward movement. William Myers, born in 1753, and his wife Flora left Virginia for Kentucky, where David, the last of their ten children, was born in 1797. In 1820 David married Letitia Reddish, a fellow Kentuckian. The couple then kept moving west, to Indiana in 1829 and to Illinois in 1831. In each generation the family followed the edge of American settlement.

In Illinois, David Myers became a well-established Baptist preacher, and in 1843 he was ordained at Taylor's Creek Church in Jersey County. Then, in his late forties, an age when many people settle down, he and Letitia set out again. Drawn by the prospect of free land in Texas, they travelled south with their children and grandchildren, three generations on the move together, and crossed the Red River on Christmas Eve, 1845.

They settled on a Peters Colony land grant about twelve miles northwest of present-day Dallas. Myers quickly became a religious leader for the scattered pioneer settlements. On May 10, 1846, he organized the Union Baptist Church, which the marker describes as the earliest continuing Baptist congregation in Dallas County. He served it for the rest of his life and helped start several other churches in the area, including Bethel, Rowlett Creek, Liberty and Lonesome Dove.

His death fit the demands of a frontier preacher's life. After delivering a sermon in Collin County, he was caught in a cold rain on the way home, and the exposure led to pneumonia. He died on March 9, 1853. Letitia lived until 1885 and saw the frontier settlement grow into a lasting community.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Myers family's moves, from Virginia to Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois to Texas, follow the westward expansion of the young United States. Each generation pushed a little farther, and families like theirs carried American institutions with them, especially churches, onto new frontiers.

On the frontier, the church was often more than a place of worship. It was where neighbors met, where disputes were settled, where children learned and where a community first defined itself. Preachers like Myers, who organized congregations and rode long distances to serve them, did much of the work of turning scattered homesteads into communities.

The Peters Colony also shows how land policy shaped settlement. The promise of free land drew families into North Texas at the moment Texas joined the Union, helping to settle a region that would grow into one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country.

🧭If you visit

Today the area where the Myers family settled is part of the busy Dallas metro, and it can be hard to picture the prairie and timber the family found in 1845. Standing at the marker is a good time to try: imagine the quiet, the distances between cabins, and a preacher on horseback heading out to distant congregations in all kinds of weather.

Farmers Branch is one of the oldest settled communities in Dallas County, and it takes pride in that history. Look for other markers and preserved historic sites nearby that tell the story of the area's earliest settlers.

This stop fits easily into a day of exploring North Texas history. If the theme interests you, you could follow the trail of the other congregations Myers helped found, to see how one preacher's work spread across the region in a few short years.