Town of Lancaster
Lancaster, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Founded by A. Bledsoe (1801 - 1882), from Kentucky, joined by his son-in-law, Roderick A. Rawlins (1833 - 1910), and Mrs. Mildred Parks Rawlins (1789 - 1875). The elder Rawlins family came to this locality in 1844. Bledsoe, later to become Texas State Comptroller, settled here in 1846. With the Rawlins' cooperation, he established this town about 1852, patterning and naming it after the Kentucky town founded by his grandfather. Stores, a school, churches, a grist mill, tannery, cotton gin, and carding mill soon were built in or near the 1-square-mile townsite. During the Civil War (1860s), a Confederate pistol factory was operated here. After 1876, a town well on the Square provided water for citizens and visitors. The first railroad arrived in 1888, another in 1890. Randolph College, an enterprise of one of the Texas Christian University founders, Randolph Clark, operated here 1898 - 1900. Other schools used the college plant until it burned in 1912. Fires also destroyed some sections of this Square in 1877, 1889, and 1918. During its first century, Lancaster was a farmers' market town -- its fortunes fluctuating with yields and prices of cotton. Since 1950, a broader economy prevails, and the population has increased. Marker Donor: Lancaster Historical Society
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Kentucky-born A. Bledsoe settled here in 1846 and, with the Rawlins family, laid out this town around 1852, naming it Lancaster after the Kentucky town his grandfather had founded. Stores, churches, a school, and mills soon clustered on the one-square-mile townsite, and during the Civil War a Confederate pistol factory operated here. The town weathered repeated fires and the rise and fall of Randolph College, living for a century as a cotton-market town whose fortunes rose and fell with the crop.
Why it matters
Lancaster's century as a cotton town—complete with a wartime arms factory and a short-lived frontier college—illustrates how a single crop could dictate the boom, bust, and rebuilding of communities across North Texas.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · A. Bledsoe
- · Roderick A. Rawlins
- · Randolph Clark
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fry - Butcher House
Red Oak, TX
In 1882 Sam and Sarah Jane "Jennie" Fry bought 150 acres of Ellis County blackland prairie, and the next year raised a farmhouse with the help of local carpenter Lewis Butcher. Its turned-wood porch posts, jig-sawn brackets, and gabled roof made it a proud example of the Queen Anne style then fashionable even on Texas farms. The home stayed in the family for over a century, passing to Jennie's son George A. Butcher before finally leaving family hands in 1986.
City of Ferris
Ferris, TX
Ferris grew from an 1851 cluster of land-grant pioneers into a chartered town when the Andrews family deeded a 100-acre townsite to the Houston & Texas Central Railway in 1874, naming it for Judge J.W. Ferris. The railroad brought a post office, a cotton gin, and a newspaper, and by 1895 the community had found its lasting identity as a brick-making center. The short-lived Ferris Institute reflected the town's early reach for education.
Lisbon Cemetery
Dallas, TX
In 1870, two landowners gave five acres for a church and burial ground at Lisbon, then a small pioneer town south of Dallas. A combined church and school rose the next year, and after the school closed and the churches moved away, the site endured purely as a cemetery. Descendants of the founding families organized to preserve it in 1948.
Rylie Cemetery
Dallas, TX
In 1878 John Armstrong Rylie gave this land in southeast Dallas County for a settlers' school, and it began serving as a cemetery a decade later with a burial in 1889. Over the years more than 400 people were laid to rest here, among them the earliest families of the Rylie Prairie community and their descendants, including at least one Civil War veteran. A local association formed in 1962 to care for the grounds, keeping the pioneers' memory tended.