Site of Old Hawkins Springs
Midlothian, Ellis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
William Alden Hawkins (1800-67) and wife Anna Eddy (1800-95), from La Porte, IN., arrived with family at this site in May 1848, becoming first settlers in area. The family included Marcellus Tolbert (1824-96); Mary Melissa (1824-84), with her husband Harrison F. Hinkley and child Annie Lucretia; Benjamin Franklin (1828-91) and wife Mary; James Emerson (1829-1912); William Alden (1831-89); Elizabeth Ann (1838-1903); David Peter (1838-63); John Wesley (1841-76); and George Washington (1842-1931). As a member of Peters Colony, Wm. A Hawkins and adult children claimed about 2500 acres of land. In a critical period of 28 days prior to July 1, 1848, logs were cut and hauled from Dallas County cedar brakes to build five houses, to sustain the claims. Hawkins Spring, about 100 feet from the Wm. A Hawkins' home supplied water for all households and often for passers-by. Upon the organization of Ellis County in 1850, William A. Hawkins (1800-67) was appointed first Chief Justice (County Judge). Currently situated on Hawkins' family lands are part of Midlothian business district east of Santa Fe Railroad, on the Wm. A Hawkins' survey; Northridge Shopping Center, on Harrison Hinkley survey; First United Methodist Church, on B.F. Hawkins' survey.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In May 1848 William Alden Hawkins and his large family arrived here from Indiana as the first settlers in what became Ellis County, part of the Peters Colony land-grant scheme. In a frantic 28 days they cut and hauled cedar logs to raise five houses and secure claims to some 2,500 acres, drawing water from the spring beside the family home. When the county organized in 1850, Hawkins was appointed its first chief justice, and much of Midlothian later grew up on the family's surveys.
Why it matters
The site captures the land-grant colonization that peopled North Texas in the 1840s, when a single pioneering family could lay out the bones of a future town.
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Related people
- · William Alden Hawkins
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Midlothian Cemetery
Midlothian, TX
Midlothian grew out of the Peters Colony, an ambitious 1840s effort to draw settlers onto the north-central Texas prairie. The Hawkins family arrived in 1848 and set aside land for a church and, beside it, a cemetery whose earliest marked grave belongs to Mary Elizabeth Hawkins in 1873. As the town incorporated in 1888 and prospered, the burial ground grew alongside it, gathering mayors, pioneers, ranchers, farmers, and the anonymous poor into one shared record of the community's life.
Midlothian Presbyterian Church
Midlothian, TX
In the decades after the Civil War, American Presbyterianism was split between a northern branch (PCUSA) and a southern one (PCUS), and small Texas towns often supported a congregation of each. Midlothian brought its two together in 1911, and the united congregation raised a sanctuary just before the First World War. Generations of members have anchored the town through cooperative charities like Manna House and through national and global mission work.
First United Methodist Church of Midlothian
Midlothian, TX
Methodist worship reached this stretch of Ellis County in the late 1840s, when settlers met in homes and were served by circuit-riding preachers who rode out from Waxahachie. Congregations gathered in pioneer schoolhouses and in early settlements like Hawkins and Lebanon before the flock consolidated in the growing railroad town of Midlothian in 1883. A permanent sanctuary rose in 1902, replaced by a new house of worship in 1966, and many members still descend from those first pioneer families.
Newton Cemetery
Midlothian, TX
This family plot holds the Newtons, Peters Colony pioneers who reached the Ovilla area in the 1840s. Patriarch Larkin Newton, born in South Carolina in 1794, was a War of 1812 veteran who fought at the Battle of New Orleans and served as a county commissioner in three states before settling in Ellis County, where he built a schoolhouse for his family. The oldest grave is his own, from 1858, joined over time by his wife, children, and grandchildren.