HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

Sewell Park

Jacksboro, Jack County, Texas

Marker Inscription

This site became Jacksboro's first park after tract here on Lost Creek was donated to city on June 25, 1921, by pioneer teacher-lumberman-rancher-public benefactor Dan Roland Sewell (1872-1957). City's first waterworks were installed during Sewell's service as mayor, February 17, 1913, to April 11, 1921. (1972)

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Dan Roland Sewell wore many hats in early Jacksboro — teacher, lumberman, rancher, and mayor — and it was during his term that the town got its first waterworks. In 1921 he gave the city a tract on Lost Creek that became Jacksboro's first public park. The gift capped a life of civic service to a young North Texas frontier town.

Why it matters

The story shows how the public amenities we take for granted — clean water, parks — often depended on a single local benefactor in the frontier towns of the early West.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • · Dan Roland Sewell

Themes & tags

Westward ExpansionFrontier HistoryLandmark

Nearby & related markers

Hicks Cemetery

Jacksboro, TX

Settlers in the 1880s founded a community here called Hicks, named for a pioneer family, served by the Cooper School beginning in 1885. In 1889 George Washington and Levicia Jamison bought land at this site and buried their infant daughter Anna here in 1893, and the surrounding ground grew into a burial place for the area's founding families. Shaded by cedar and live oak, the cemetery today holds more than forty marked graves and several unmarked ones.

Roberts Branch Cemetery

Jacksboro, TX

As settlers pushed into North Texas in the early 1870s, a small ranching and sharecropping community took root along Roberts Branch, a Trinity River tributary named for a visiting Texas jurist who would soon be governor. The oldest graves here cluster around an unknown cowboy who died on a cattle drive, marked at first only by rough sandstone; the earliest dated stone belongs to an infant from 1881. Tended each spring since the 1890s, the ground also holds more than twenty veterans spanning the Civil War through Vietnam.

Gibtown Cemetery

Perrin, TX

Settled as New Hope City and later renamed Gibtown for merchant Burdett Levi Gibbins, this North Texas farming community grew up in the decades after the Civil War. Its cemetery, whose first marked grave belongs to Mary C. Stults (d. 1876), gathered the pioneer families, ministers, doctors, and county officials who built the town. Tombstones bearing Woodmen of the World and Masonic emblems record the fraternal life that bound the settlement together.

The Methodist Church in Chico

Chico, TX

This Methodist congregation was founded in May 1872, when pioneer Robert Calvin Mount, his wife, and three others gathered to worship in a log schoolhouse under the Reverend S.S. Cobb. Mount donated the land for its first church site. Over its first hundred years the congregation grew through five successive buildings on five different sites.