1899 Automobile Trip

Texas Escapes calls the car a St. Louis Gas Car surrey, and says a farm wagon ran Green and the car's builder off the road. The trip's afterlife outlasted the repair. Lawsuits followed, claiming the machine frightened horses, wrecked buggies and threw riders. As late as 1910 a Dallas newspaper noted the car, nicknamed Old Hurricane, still serving as a pace car at the State Fair. Texas Escapes adds that a Montgomery Ward electric car reached Dallas by rail in 1897, two years earlier, though most historians still give Green the credit.

What the plaque says

1899 Automobile Trip On October 5, 1899, Edward H. R. Green drove his newly-acquired "St. Louis" automobile from Terrell to Dallas. Accompanied by the car's manufacturer, George B. Dorris, Green passed through Forney on his historic journey. The five-and-one-half-hour, thirty-mile trip was marked by an accident in Forney, necessitating repairs to the automobile by a local blacksmith. Upon their arrival in Dallas, Green and Dorris were met by a cheering crowd. Hailed as a first in Texas, the automobile trip caused a sensation in area newspapers and among local citizens. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 12 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 13 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Fair Park — 17 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 17 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Dixie Overland Highway (U. S. Highway 80) — steps away
• Forney — steps away
• William Madison McDonald — steps away
• The Forney Messenger — steps away