Butterfield Overland Stage Line

Gainesville was the middle of a long run of stations across north Texas. Coaches came from Davidson's station, 17 miles west, then went 15 miles on to Diamond's station near present Whitesboro and 15 more to Sherman, which became a mail distribution point in 1859. The Handbook of Texas gives the fare as about $200 one way, and the contract paid $600,000 a year. It also credits the route with bringing settlers from the upper South and Midwest into Cooke County, among the tensions it lists behind the Great Hanging of 1862.

What the plaque says

Butterfield Overland Stage Line Gainesville was a station on the Southern Overland Mail Line (Butterfield Route), which provided semi-weekly mail and stage service between St. Louis and San Francisco, 1858-1861. The line was 2795 miles long--one of the longest stage transportation routes ever established. 1964

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Great Hanging Memorial — 1.0 mi
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.
• Stonewall Saloon Museum — 23 mi
  Saint Jo's first permanent building, a stone saloon of 1873 with rooms upstairs for trail drovers, in a town named, the story goes, as a joke on a founder who did not drink.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 23 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.

More markers nearby

• James Menees Lindsay — 0.6 mi
• Fairview Cemetery — 0.6 mi
• Dougherty, F. M. — 0.6 mi
• G. H. Ragsdale — 0.6 mi