Jabez and Harriet Haning

🏛️The era

When Jabez Haning's family arrived in Grayson County in 1846, North Texas was open frontier. Texas had joined the United States only the year before, and Grayson County, on the Red River, was brand new. Settlers were streaming in from the upper South and the Midwest, drawn by fertile blackland prairie and the promise of free or cheap land.

Much of that land came through the Peters colony, a large colonization grant the Republic of Texas made to a group of promoters in the early 1840s. Settler families who came to the colony could claim homesteads, commonly 320 acres for a married man, in exchange for living on and improving the land. Much of North Texas was first settled this way.

A generation later, the region changed again. After the Civil War, railroads pushed across Texas, and the Houston & Texas Central Railway built north from the Gulf Coast toward the Red River. Wherever the tracks went, new towns appeared, and places the railroad bypassed often faded.

👥People & events

Jabez Haning came to Grayson County as a young man of about nineteen, arriving with his family in 1846. In the 1850s he secured his own 320-acre grant through the Peters colony, on land about nine miles south of Sherman. It was a real stake in the prairie, the kind of homestead that turned a frontier family into a landowning one.

In 1854 he married Harriet Campbell, then about twenty. Together they built a farm. That meant breaking the tough prairie sod, putting up buildings, and raising a family through the uncertainty of the 1850s, the Civil War, and the difficult years of Reconstruction.

Then, in 1873, the Houston & Texas Central laid its line south of Sherman, and the route crossed the Hanings' land. In 1876 the couple donated land for a town site, a generous and farsighted decision. The new town was named Howe, most likely for a railroad official, though the marker notes the record isn't certain.

Harriet died in 1880 and Jabez in 1883, so neither lived long enough to see the town grow up. Still, the community that carries on here began with their gift.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Hanings' story is a small version of one of the biggest patterns in American history: frontier homesteading followed by the railroad. Across the West and the Great Plains, families claimed land first, and then the rails arrived and turned scattered farms into towns connected to national markets.

Railroads often chose town sites, named them, and sometimes decided which communities would thrive. Naming Howe for a railroad official shows how much influence the rail companies had in the young towns along their routes.

Donated town sites were also common. Landowners gave ground knowing a depot would raise the value of everything around it and bring neighbors, stores, churches, and schools. Many Texas towns trace their start to exactly this kind of bargain between a farm family and a railroad.

🧭If you visit

Howe is a small town along the route between Sherman and the Dallas area. The best way to appreciate the marker is to picture the landscape without the town: open blackland prairie, a single farm, and eventually a new rail line cutting across it.

Notice how the town is laid out in relation to the railroad. In many railroad towns, the older streets and commercial buildings still face the tracks, a reminder of why the town exists at all.

This is an easy stop on a North Texas road trip. Pair it with Sherman, the county seat that anchored the Hanings' world, and other Grayson County towns to see how the railroad era reshaped this part of the state.