Big Spring

Bill Pemberton, who looked after the spring for years, told historian Darwin Payne that the water running from it to White Rock Creek is called Bryan's Slough. Payne wrote that Edward Case Pemberton bought 320 acres from John Neely Bryan's widow in 1880, ran a dairy called Bryan Springs Dairy and kept a store for neighbors. A bur oak on the property is listed in the Texas historical tree registry, and a black walnut carries a railroad spike a Pemberton drove in 1908 to mark the flood's height. Payne found the spring's name in the 1880 deed.

What the plaque says

Big Spring Big Spring, a natural water feature located in the White Rock Creek Valley near its mouth on the Trinity River in Dallas County, was claimed in 1842 by John Beeman, the patriarch of the first family to settle permanently in the county. Prior to Beeman's claim, the site was occupied by Native Americans for centuries. In the fall of 1843, Republic of Texas President Sam Houston and his Indian treaty delegation and entourage camped at the site enroute to Bird's Fort. Houston engaged James Jackson Beeman to be his guide to replace the ailing John H. Reagan. When John Beeman died in 1856, the north half of the Big Spring tract was inherited by his daughter, Margaret, who married Dallas founder john Neely Bryan in 1843. The entire Bryan family made their homes here in the 1860s and 1870s. After John Bryan's death, Margaret sold the property to Edward Case Pemberton, who had recently emigrated from Illinois. Edward Pemberton reared seven sons, farmed and operated a dairy here and a store on the Kaufman Road nearby. He acquired additional acreage in the area which was inherited by his widow and sons when he died in 1914. Pemberton descendants continued to live and farm on most of these properties through several generations. Big Spring's private ownership spanned more than 160 years by three prominent pioneer Dallas families: Beeman, Bryan and Pemberton. The spring and bottom lands were purchased by the City of Dallas in 2003 as part of the Great Trinity Forest Project. (2014)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 4.5 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 — 4.5 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.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 5.2 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 6.3 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.

More markers nearby

• Joppee Community — 1.7 mi
• Pleasant Grove Christian Church — 2.4 mi
• Tueria Dell Marshall — 2.7 mi
• Lincoln High School — 2.7 mi