Site of Galloway Farmstead
Mesquite, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Confederate veteran Benjamin Franklin Galloway (1833-1912) And his wife Eliza (Fletcher) (1852-1883) came to Texas from Tennessee in 1872. Their son Bedford Forest is said to have been born in a covered wagon at Duck Creek (Garland) in 1873. They purchased 101 acres in 1874 and Benjamin Galloway erected a cabin where they lived while a two-room house was built. A farmer, he also raised horses, mules and cattle. A second son, Nathan Lemmon, was born in 1876. Twin sons were born in 1883, but they lived only a day, and Eliza Galloway died soon after. Her niece, Clara Gentry, came to live with the family that year. At that time Benjamin had a Blackland Prairie hay company. Dallas clients included Tennessee Dairy, Caruth Farm and Ringling Brothers Circus. Benjamin Galloway married Amanda Jane Miller (1848-1938) of Tennessee in 1887 and built a 1½ story addition onto the home place. The structure eventually featured an entrance hall, bedroom, parlor, and a kitchen on the first level, with children's rooms upstairs. A son was born in 1888, but died at birth. Bedford returned home after attending college in Waco and New Orleans and made his living farming, baling hay and ginning cotton. He and his first wife, Nannie Lawrence, had four children. After her death in 1915, he married Bertha Dakan in 1917 and they had two daughters. Bedford was a city alderman, a member of the school board, and served as mayor of Mesquite from 1927 to 1940. A Galloway descendant restored the house between 1949 and 1950 and built another addition in 1955. Designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1973, the Galloway Home Place was moved from this site to a more rural location in Sunnyvale in an effort to protect it from encroaching urban development. (2000)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Confederate veteran Benjamin Franklin Galloway brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1872 and bought 101 acres near Duck Creek, raising crops, horses, mules, and cattle. He built up a home place and a Blackland Prairie hay business whose Dallas customers included the Ringling Brothers Circus, while his son Bedford Forest later served as mayor of Mesquite for over a decade. Designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1973, the house was eventually moved to rural Sunnyvale to save it from encroaching development.
Why it matters
The Galloway home place traces the settlement of the Blackland Prairie by post-Civil War Southern migrants and the farming economy that shaped Dallas County before the suburbs arrived.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When Benjamin Franklin Galloway brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1872, he was joining one of the great population movements of the age. In the years after the Civil War, worn-out Southern farmland and hard times pushed thousands of families westward, and the rich, dark soil of the Texas Blackland Prairie — some of the most fertile ground in the country — pulled them in.
This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age frontier of North Texas: still open enough that a family might arrive by covered wagon, buy a hundred acres, and build a cabin to live in while a proper house went up. Galloway did exactly that in 1874, and the story that his son Bedford Forest was born in a covered wagon at Duck Creek in 1873 captures how raw the country still was.
Around this settlement, the future city of Garland and the town of Mesquite were only beginning to take shape. What looks today like Dallas suburb was then working prairie, waiting for the plow.
People & events
Benjamin Galloway was a Confederate veteran who came to Texas as a young man with his first wife, Eliza. Theirs is a story marked by both striving and heartbreak. He farmed and raised horses, mules, and cattle, and he built a business baling the wild hay of the Blackland Prairie — an operation successful enough to count Dallas clients like a dairy, a prominent farm, and even the Ringling Brothers Circus among its customers.
Grief threaded through the prosperity. Eliza bore several children, but twin sons born in 1883 lived only a day, and Eliza herself died soon after; her niece Clara Gentry came to live with the family that year. Benjamin remarried in 1887, to Amanda Jane Miller, and expanded the home place into a proper house with an entrance hall, parlor, and children's rooms upstairs.
The family's second generation carried the name forward. Bedford Forest Galloway — that wagon-born son — went off to college in Waco and New Orleans, returned to farm, bale hay, and gin cotton, and then turned to public life. He sat on the school board, served as a city alderman, and was mayor of Mesquite from 1927 to 1940, guiding the town through the Depression years.
Its place in the American story
The Galloway home place is a window onto how the American West of the cotton belt was actually settled — not by lone pioneers in an empty land, but by families migrating out of the exhausted post-war South to start again on better soil. Multiply the Galloways by the thousands and you have the peopling of North Texas.
Their arc also traces a familiar American pattern: the first generation clears the land and builds the farm; the second, born into it, becomes the town's civic backbone. A boy said to have entered the world in a covered wagon grew up to serve as mayor of the very community that grew around his father's fields.
And the home's final chapter is the American story in miniature. Designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1973, the house was later lifted off this spot and moved to rural Sunnyvale to save it from the advancing suburbs — the same growth the Galloways helped set in motion now pressing against the farmstead that started it.
If you visit
Stand at this site and do a bit of mental time-travel. The house itself is no longer here — it was moved to more rural ground in Sunnyvale to protect it — so what you are visiting is the original ground, the spot where a Tennessee family staked their claim on the Blackland Prairie in the 1870s.
Let the marker do its work as you read the dates: the arrival, the cabin, the births and the losses, the growing house, the hay company, the son who became mayor. It compresses nearly seventy years of one family's life into a few square feet of the prairie they chose.
This makes a rewarding stop on a Dallas-area history drive precisely because it is so ordinary and so complete — a single family's whole climb from covered wagon to city hall. Look around at what surrounds the site now, and you'll understand exactly why the old home had to be carried out to the country to survive.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Benjamin Franklin Galloway
- · Bedford Forest Galloway
Themes & tags
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