Route of Old Colony Line Road
Greenville, Hunt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Early travel artery. Followed the north boundary line of the Chas. F. Mercer colony, a 6,500-square-mile tract granted to Mercer in 1844 by Sam Houston (President of the Republic of Texas) for purpose of bringing colonists into Texas. Southern half of Hunt County once lay in this pioneer colony. Over the road came ox-wagons from Jefferson to supply stores in Greenville, McKinney, Dallas, Fort Worth and the frontier. Settlers from the Old South traveled it in a steady stream of covered wagons. Highway 24 today traces part of the road.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This early travel artery followed the northern boundary of the Charles F. Mercer colony, a vast 6,500-square-mile tract granted in 1844 by Republic of Texas President Sam Houston to draw settlers into the region. Ox-wagons hauled goods from Jefferson over the road to supply stores in Greenville, McKinney, Dallas, and Fort Worth. Down its ruts came a steady stream of covered wagons carrying settlers from the Old South.
Why it matters
The Old Colony Line Road traces one of the wagon routes that carried Anglo settlement across North Texas, a corridor of migration now shadowed by a modern highway.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1840s the Republic of Texas faced a basic problem: it had enormous amounts of land and not nearly enough people. An independent nation with a small population, an empty treasury and threats on its borders needed settlers. One solution was to revive the empresario system, granting large tracts to contractors who promised to bring in colonists.
North Texas was one of the regions the Republic most wanted to fill. Much of it was still wild country, and the prairies and river bottoms of what would become Hunt County and its neighbors were attractive to farmers. The colony grant made by President Sam Houston to Charles F. Mercer in 1844 was part of that effort. According to the marker it covered some 6,500 square miles, and the southern half of Hunt County lay inside it.
Roads were the other half of settlement. In this part of Texas, before railroads, goods traveled by ox-wagon, and river ports to the east connected the interior with the wider world. The Old Colony Line Road grew out of both needs.
People & events
Charles F. Mercer, the man whose name is on the colony, was a Virginian and a longtime U.S. congressman who had become interested in Texas colonization. He received his grant from Sam Houston, then president of the Republic, with the aim of bringing colonists into the country. Empresario colonies like his were controversial at the time. Settlers, land speculators and officials argued over the grants, their terms and who held title to which land, and the Mercer colony was part of those disputes.
The road that followed the colony's northern boundary line took on a life of its own. The marker describes ox-wagons coming from Jefferson, a busy river port in northeast Texas, carrying supplies to stores in Greenville, McKinney, Dallas, Fort Worth and the frontier beyond. Those slow, heavy wagons were the freight trains of their day.
The road also carried people. The marker describes a steady stream of covered wagons bringing settlers from the Old South. They were families loaded with everything they owned, headed for new farms on the Texas prairies. Many of the towns along this corridor trace their earliest settlers to those migrants.
Its place in the American story
The Old Colony Line Road is one thread in the great nineteenth-century movement west. Across the country, families followed roads, trails and rivers toward new land, and Texas was one of the main destinations. For many Southerners, Texas was the next frontier, and roads like this one were how they reached it.
The road also shows how the Republic of Texas worked as a nation. The Mercer grant was a deliberate policy to attract settlers, and the arguments it caused reflect a question every frontier society faced: who controls the land, and on what terms?
The road's commercial role connects it to the growth of cities that are now among the largest in America. Dallas and Fort Worth were once small frontier towns supplied by ox-wagons like the ones that rolled along this road. The marker notes that Highway 24 traces part of the route today, a reminder that many modern roads follow paths first worn by hooves and wagon wheels.
If you visit
Stop at the marker in Greenville and picture the scene: a slow ox-team hauling freight toward the western towns, or a covered wagon carrying a family and everything it owned toward a new life. The land here is rolling blackland prairie, the rich soil that drew so many of those settlers.
If you drive along Highway 24 nearby, you are following part of the old road's course. It is a simple way to turn history into experience: the pace is faster and the road smoother, but the direction is much the same as the one travelers followed in the 1840s and 1850s.
This stop pairs well with a trip through the small towns of North and Northeast Texas. For the other end of the old freight route, consider a drive east to Jefferson, whose historic district preserves the feel of the river port that once supplied this part of Texas.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Charles F. Mercer
- · Sam Houston
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Greenville
Greenville, TX
Created in 1846, Hunt County set its seat at a spot donated by surveyor McQuinney Howell Wright and named it Greenville for Texas independence veteran Thomas J. Green. Unusually for north central Texas, the county voted for secession, and Greenville endured hardship, violence, and federal occupation through the Civil War and Reconstruction. The arrival of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroad in 1880 transformed the town into a cotton-shipping powerhouse, complete with banks, streetcars, and Texas's first municipally owned electric utility.
Clinton Cemetery
Caddo Mills, TX
Local legend holds that this graveyard began when an unknown cowboy was buried here with landowner James Massay's blessing, on ground he set aside for the community. Massay also gave a railroad right-of-way, and the town that rose along it — first Massayville, then Clinton — was named for a Cotton Belt Railway official. The earliest marked grave dates to 1859, and by 1998 more than 500 graves and a few scattered homes were all that remained of Clinton.
Merit Cemetery
Merit, TX
Merit began as an Upland South farming settlement on the rolling Blackland Prairie of Hunt County, its Methodist congregation organized in 1871 and its name drawn from a visiting judge, William W. Merritt. The railroad's arrival in 1886 spurred cotton, stores, lodges, and a newspaper — and in 1912 robbers famously blew the bank vault open with nitroglycerin for $4,500. The community cemetery, deeded by Dr. Alexander Murchison in 1907, still holds veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam and is one of the county's few surviving swept-grave burial grounds.
White Rock Community
Hunt County, TX
First known as Tidwell Creek, this Hunt County settlement grew up along the Sherman-Jefferson Trail, one of the wagon roads that knit together the young towns of northeast Texas. The Havens family is remembered as among its first settlers, and a post office opened in 1857 to serve the crossroads community. Like many trail-stop hamlets, White Rock lived and died by the routes of travel and commerce passing through it.