Site of a Confederate Powder Mill

Lancaster, TX

In 1862, with the Confederacy scrambling to arm itself, a partnership of Dallas-area men set up a small factory here to manufacture pistols for the State of Texas. Frontier Texas had little heavy industry, so improvised arms works like this one were vital to supplying troops far from the Southern manufacturing centers of the East.

Mansfield, TX

Partners Julian Feild and Ralph Mann, who had met in Harrison County around 1850, came south of Fort Worth and in the winter of 1859–60 raised a three-story steam-powered grist mill on the ruins of an earlier one. The mill drew business from San Antonio to the Oklahoma Territory, and the town that grew up around it — first "Mansfeild," then Mansfield — took its founders' names. During the Civil War the Confederacy claimed a share of its output, and afterward federal contracts kept its flour moving to army forts.

Mansfield, TX

Ralph Sandiford Mann came to Texas from South Carolina in the 1850s and, with his brother-in-law Julian Field, founded the town of Mansfield — its name a blend of their own. Their steam-powered grist mill supplied grain to the Confederacy during the Civil War and later fed U.S. troops at frontier forts Belknap and Griffin. About 1866 Mann built the log core of this home, later expanded in brick, and gave land for the town cemetery where he rests.

Waxahachie, TX

Completed in 1888 to relieve overcrowding, the Old Ellis County Jail was built by the Pauly Jail Building and Manufacturing Company of St. Louis, its round conical-roofed turret and corbeled brick giving it the look of a small castle. The sheriff's family lived on the first floor above twenty cramped cells, with solitary and death cells in the basement. Its rare rotary system — a rotating cylinder of ten cells with a single door, one of few in the United States — was engineered to make escape nearly impossible.