Allen Water Station

The stone dam was lost for decades. In 1912 the Southern Pacific built a larger concrete dam downstream, and its reservoir drowned the 1874 dam. Clarence Reynolds grew up a thousand feet away in the 1930s and 1940s and told the National Register preparers he never knew it existed. Floods left about five feet of silt over its west side. After the 1912 dam was breached in the 1960s, Cottonwood Creek cut back, and by the 1970s the old dam worked again. Twelve stone piers show the water tank was about twenty-five feet across.

What the plaque says

Allen Water Station On March 11, 1848, Ebenezer Allen, former Republic of Texas Attorney General, obtained a charter for the Galveston and Red River Railway. Track construction began in early 1856, and the company was renamed Houston & Texas Central (H&TC) Railway Company in September of that same year. Construction on the line began in Houston and reached Corsicana in 1871, Dallas in 1872 and Denison in 1873 where the connection was made with the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroad to form the first all-rail route from Texas to St. Louis and the east, allowing grain, cotton and cattle to reach its destination overnight. In 1874, the H&TC Railway acquired land from J.W. Franklin in Collin County to construct a stone dam across Cottonwood Creek and a water station to provide water for its steam locomotives. The water station included a pump house, an elevated water storage tank, a privy for the railroad workers who operated the water station and other facilities. The workers were Americans and immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Switzerland. H&TC Railway Company Surveyor Theodore Kosse created the town of Allen in 1876 by platting the James Reed survey. The station and town established a center for commerce for local farmers and provided better equipment and broader markets for agricultural production. The Allen Water Station remained in operation until diesel engines replaced steam engines in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The station is recorded as a State Antiquities Landmark and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The 1874 stone dam and foundations for the water tower and pump house, still visible today, highlight the important role that the H&TC Railroad played in late 19th century commerce, transportation and settlement. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 4.1 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 18 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 — 24 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 — 24 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

• Allen — 0.2 mi
• Allen Station of the Texas Electric Railway — 1.1 mi
• Allen Cemetery — 1.1 mi
• First Methodist Church of Allen — 1.7 mi