Haden House

Pecan Gap, TX

Virginia-born educator Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday bought hundreds of acres in Fannin County in 1870, farming the land and running a cotton gin whose timbers later became the surviving barn. His youngest daughter Ela grew up in his footsteps and in 1913 founded the Hockaday School in Dallas, which won national standing as a college-preparatory school for girls. From this rural homestead ran a thread connecting frontier farming to one of Texas's most respected educational institutions.

Wolfe City, TX

Around 1873, pioneers Lemuel P. Wolfe and Abbey Wilson built a grist mill here, grinding corn with a wheel turned by oxen treading an incline. The millhouse held the area's first post office and became the heart of a settlement called Wolfe's Mill, which incorporated in 1886 as Wolfe City.

Windom vicinity, TX

This site marks the boyhood homesite of Sam Rayburn, who moved with his family from Tennessee to Fannin County, Texas, in 1887 and lived here until 1912. Educated in Texas law, he entered the legislature in 1906 and went on to a half-century in the U.S. Congress, becoming the longest-serving Speaker of the House in the nation's history. The modest rural homestead grounded a career that spanned the presidencies of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy.

Cooper, TX

The Smith brothers—Benjamin, Charles, Gilford, and Mira J.—came from Arkansas in the 1840s and helped hew Delta County out of the raw Texas frontier. Famously large men, they raised log cabins with puncheon floors and wooden pegs instead of nails, hunted bear for meat in the dangerous Jernigan Thicket, and supplied the settlement with essential trades like blacksmithing and tanning while the women spun, wove, and clothed their families. Theirs is a vivid portrait of self-reliant frontier life before towns and stores took hold.