J. D. Cooper House
Arlington, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built 1878 by J.D. Cooper, early landowner. Colonial design with square nails, wide board floors. Moved here by City. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1965.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1878 by early landowner J.D. Cooper, this house shows the plain craftsmanship of its era—colonial-style lines, square nails, and wide board floors. Later moved by the City to preserve it, it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965. Structures like it mark the settlement of North Texas in the decades after the Civil War.
Why it matters
Modest surviving homes of early landowners anchor a community's memory of its founding generation and the vernacular building traditions of the frontier era.
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Related people
- · J.D. Cooper
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Arlington Cemetery
Arlington, TX
Spanning more than ten acres, Arlington Cemetery gathers within its bounds several older graveyards — the original town cemetery, the W.W. McNatt addition, the Masonic Cemetery, and the Old City Cemetery. McNatt, an Arkansas transplant of 1872 and prominent merchant-farmer, sold the ground to the Arlington Cemetery Society in 1899. The oldest documented grave is that of one-year-old Mattie Luna Cooper (1874–75); around her rest pioneer settlers, veterans from the Civil War to World War II, and a long roster of the town's postmasters and mayors.
Carver Dixon King
Arlington, TX
Born in Tennessee in 1843, Carver Dixon "Uncle Dutch" King came to Texas in 1873 and helped launch the new town of Arlington, serving as its first mayor after its 1876 founding. A grocer, icehouse owner, notary, and justice of the peace across thirteen terms, King wove himself into nearly every civic institution of the growing town. He died in 1930, remembered as one of Arlington's founding leaders.
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.