Birthplace of City of Kaufman; Site of King's Fort

The surveyor who built the fort left a bigger mark elsewhere. The companion plaque, THC 11991, says Warren A. Ferris led the 1840 party. The Handbook of Texas says Ferris led surveying expeditions from 1839 to 1841 into northeast Texas, which it calls Indian-occupied and which was Native homeland, and surveyed for King's Southern Land Company, for which he began a town called Warwick at the Three Forks of the Trinity. When King died in 1841, John Neely Bryan of Dallas took the townsite. The two plaques disagree on King's death, this one placing it soon after 1846.

What the plaque says

Birthplace of City of Kaufman; Site of King's Fort (Founded 1840) Established by Wm. P. King and 40 pioneers he led from Holly Springs, Miss.; this was then in Nacogdoches County, Republic of Texas. Caddo, Cherokee, Delaware and Kickapoo Indians roamed the area. Settlers built log cabins inside the fort. When the Indian menace lessened, Kingsboro (or early Kaufman) began to grow. Supplies came from San Antonio, in arduous yearly trips there. Hearing the Texas Republic was joining the United States, King in 1846 got patent to lands at the fort. Although he soon died, his widow carried on his plans for the colony. (1970) Incise on back: Kaufman County Historical Survey Committee

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 8.9 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 — 25 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 — 29 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 — 29 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

• Colonel Isham Chisum — 0.2 mi
• Mrs. William P. King — 0.2 mi
• Kaufman County — 0.3 mi
• First United Methodist Church — 0.4 mi