City of Crandall

The railroad made Crandall before any plat did. The Handbook of Texas says the Texas Trunk Line Railway chose a route across land of the Rev. C. F. Crandall in 1880, and the community that quickly formed along the right-of-way he gave became a shipping point for area farmers. A post office branch opened in 1881. By 1884 there were a gristmill, a cotton gin, a church and a school. By the mid-1920s the Handbook estimates 750 residents and fifty businesses, two of them banks, and notes that some residents left for city jobs during World War II.

What the plaque says

City of Crandall Named for The Rev. C. F. Crandall (1827-1906), Methodist minister who came here from Indiana, 1877, and bought 1800 acres of land. When Texas Trunk Line Railroad built east from Dallas in 1880, he gave bonus for rail service and was first postmaster when post office was created in 1881. Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and Methodists built churches. Townsite plat was recorded in 1889. The city school system was established in 1901. By the early 1900s, town had a lumber yard, several stores, 3 physicians, 3 banks. It remains a center for agriculture and recreation. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 12 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.
• Fair Park — 21 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 — 21 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.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Lee Cemetery — 6.2 mi
• Forney Independent School District — 8.1 mi
• William Madison McDonald — 8.3 mi
• 1899 Automobile Trip — 8.3 mi