Cedar Springs

Cedar Springs ran a close third for county seat. The Handbook of Texas gives the 1850 election results: Dallas 191 votes, Hord's Ridge 178 and Cedar Springs 101. A runoff then sent Dallas past Hord's Ridge, 244 to 216. The 1936 plaque places a county seat election in 1848, so the dates differ by source. Cedar Springs and Hord's Ridge, now Oak Cliff, both ended up inside Dallas. The Handbook adds that Colonel William Cooke's troops in 1840 built Cedar Springs Post on the Trinity, the first structures raised by White men at the site of Dallas.

What the plaque says

Cedar Springs Although settlement of the town of Cedar Springs did not begin until after 1843, the area had been surveyed during the late 1830s by Colonel G. W. Cooke in preparation for construction of a military road from Austin to the Red River. In 1843, Dr. John Cole and his wife, Mary, along with their eight children, arrived in this area. Cole received a Peters colony land grant about two miles east of the Cedar Springs branch of the Trinity River. Preferring to settle closer to the springs, he purchased additional acreage in this area, built a home, and opened a general store. The name of the community possibly was taken from the abundance of cedar trees near the springs. Cedar Springs gradually attracted additional settlers, and several other businesses, including a distillery, steam-powered flour mill, and grist mill, were begun. Development of the Cedar Springs community declined following Dallas' selection as the Dallas County Seat in 1850. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the area began to experience suburban growth and was renamed Oak Lawn. The site of the early town of Cedar Springs was annexed by the City of Dallas in a series of municipal actions between 1920 and 1940. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 2.5 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.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 2.8 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 Heritage Village at Old City Park — 3.7 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 — 4.3 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

• Oaklawn United Methodist Church — 1.0 mi
• Flippen Homestead and the Founding of Highland Park — 1.2 mi
• Robert E. Lee Park — 1.2 mi
• Preston Road — 1.5 mi