California Crossing

The Trinity had seven or eight crossings in Dallas County before the Civil War, and the Handbook of Texas names this one beside Dawdy's Ferry, Record Crossing and Eagle Ford. The river's easy fordability, it says, increased trade traffic, while attempts to make the Trinity navigable failed. Later, even the fords could not keep the river from becoming a barrier to growth. The county's first bridge, built by Alexander Cockrell in 1855, lasted only a few years before one of the Trinity's frequent floods took it. A toll bridge opened in 1872.

What the plaque says

California Crossing CALIFORNIA CROSSING (Some Five Hundred Feet North) Here thousands of 49'ers crossed Trinity River in heroic trek west--following California Gold discovery. Crossing was in shallow part of stream on Southern Transcontinental route to Pacific. Later used by stage lines, railroad; route passed through Dallas and Cedar Springs on to El Paso. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 9.2 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 9.2 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.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 10 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.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 11 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

• City of Irving — 4.0 mi
• First Baptist Church of Irving — 4.0 mi
• Sowers Cemetery — 4.4 mi
• Daniel Webster Gilbert, M. D. — 4.4 mi