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.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Benjamin Franklin Galloway
- · Bedford Forest Galloway
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
La Prada Drive Church of Christ
Dallas, TX
This Church of Christ congregation began meeting in members' homes at the close of the 19th century and in 1907 bought property near what became Fair Park, worshipping in a white frame building for decades as street names—and its own name—changed around it. It helped found a sister congregation in Oak Cliff in 1949, relocated to Bruton Road in 1954, and followed its members to northeast Dallas, dedicating a new building on La Prada Drive in 1979. It preserves the Restoration Movement traditions of elder-led governance and a cappella singing.
Lawrence Farmstead
Mesquite, TX
Stephen Decatur Lawrence, son of an original Mercer colony settler, received about 640 acres on his twenty-first birthday and began building here in 1874, adding a T-plan clapboard house in 1882 that grew into a striking Victorian home with a central tower and steeply pitched roof. Barns, a smokehouse, a root cellar, and a wash house rounded out a working blackland-prairie farmstead where Lawrence raised eleven children across two marriages. The family held the land until 1995, when part of it became a city historical park.
Mesquite Cemetery
Mesquite, TX
This ground was already a burial place before the Texas and Pacific Railroad founded the city of Mesquite in 1873, its earliest marked grave dating to 1859. In 1890 local builder and civic leader Louis C. Ebrite laid out the cemetery in the grid of driveways still used today, and it was formally deeded for cemetery use two years later. It continues to honor area veterans and the generations of families who built Mesquite.
Cox Cemetery
Dallas, TX
Cox Cemetery holds more than 400 marked graves and perhaps 100 unmarked burials, its oldest stone from 1848 marking a two-month-old child. Absalom Humbard, who came to Texas after being wounded and imprisoned during the Civil War, permanently set the ground aside for burials near White Rock Lake, where it served pioneer families—Glovers, Lavenders, Coxes, Donagheys and others who had arrived from across the United States and from Germany. It also served the vanished railroad communities of Fisher (later Calhoun) and Reinhardt before they were absorbed into Dallas.