Site of Randol Mill
Fort Worth, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1856 Archibald F. Leonard (1816-1876) built a dam and grain mill at this site. Hiram Crowley became a partner. The mill became a community center and county voting place. During widespread abolition violence in 1860, Leonard's Mill was burned. It reopened by 1862 and operated during the Civil War. Owners after 1867 were H.B. Alverson and J.H. Wheeler. In 1876 R.A. (Bob) Randol (1850-1922) acquired Wheeler's Mill. A water-driven turbine powered the mill, a circular saw,and a cotton gin. Randol Mill played an important role in the area economy and closed after Randol's death. (1979)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Archibald F. Leonard built a dam and grain mill here in 1856, and it soon became a community hub and county voting place. Amid the abolition-related violence of 1860 the mill was burned, but it reopened and ran through the Civil War, later passing to Bob Randol, who added a turbine-driven saw and cotton gin. Randol Mill was a mainstay of the local economy until it closed after his death.
Why it matters
Water-powered mills like this were the engines of early Texas communities, grinding grain, sawing timber, and drawing settlers together as the region's first industrial centers.
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Related people
- · Archibald F. Leonard
- · Hiram Crowley
- · R.A. (Bob) Randol
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Harrison Cemetery
Fort Worth, TX
This one-acre burial ground began on the land of Tarrant County pioneer D.C. Harrison, its earliest known grave that of young Mary E. Harrison in 1871. In 1895 R.A. Randol, operator of the nearby Randol Mill, bought the tract and deeded it forever as a cemetery. Its roughly sixty graves gather early settler families, including Randol's brother John, killed in an 1894 mill accident.
Site of Fort Worth-Dallas Interurban
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In 1901 the Texas Legislature cleared the way for an electric interurban line linking Fort Worth and Dallas, and within a year the overhead wires were humming. The thirty-five-mile trip took just over an hour, cars carried up to forty passengers, and riders could flag the train down anywhere along the route. Paved highways eventually stole its traffic, and the last car rolled on Christmas Eve, 1934.
The Handley Power Plant and Lake Erie
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At the dawn of the twentieth century, electricity and streetcars remade the space between cities, and this plant was built to power the Fort Worth–Dallas Interurban that whisked riders between the two rivals. Its cooling reservoir, Lake Erie, blossomed into a lakeside park with a two-story auditorium jutting over the water, where locals gathered for outings and social events. As automobiles killed the interurban, the park closed, the plant grew to feed a hungry electrical grid, and in 1956 the little lake was drained.
Archibald Franklin Leonard
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Born in Pennsylvania and married in Missouri, Archibald Franklin Leonard joined a wave of neighbors migrating to Texas in 1845 and took up land in the Peters Colony near present-day Grapevine. A church leader and enterprising merchant, he opened—with Henry Clay Daggett—the first civilian store in Fort Worth, served as Tarrant County's first county clerk, and sat in the Twelfth Texas Legislature. He helped lay out Grapevine, ran a mercantile there, and in 1856 established Leonard's Mill on the Trinity River, around which the community later known as Randol Mill grew.