City of Ferris

Two sources disagree about who gave Ferris its ground. The plaque says the Andrews family deeded a 100-acre townsite in 1874 to the Houston and Texas Central. The Handbook of Texas says railroad employees laid out the settlement on land donated by the McKnight family, pioneers of the early 1850s, and names the namesake Justus W. Ferris, a county business and civic leader. A general store and post office opened in 1874, and the town incorporated in 1892 with about 350 residents and some twenty businesses, plus gins and hotels.

What the plaque says

City of Ferris Sire was occupied in 1851 by the Ephriam Andrews family and their in-laws, the McKnights, settling a purchased land grant. The Duffs, Greens, McDaniels, and Orrs also pioneered here. The Cumberland Presbyterian Church was founded in 1858. The Andrews family (1874) deeded 100-acre townsite, named for Judge J.W. Ferris (1823-99), to the Houston & Texas Central Railway. Post office opened June 22, 1874, in store of the first Postmaster, Jackson J. Straw. First cotton gin opened in 1880; first newspaper in 1889. The Ferris Institute was operated 1892-1907. City has been a brick-making center since 1895. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 15 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 18 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.
• Fair Park — 18 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.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 18 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.

More markers nearby

• First United Methodist Church of Ferris — 0.5 mi
• Edgewood Cemetery — 5.8 mi
• Town of Lancaster — 6.6 mi
• Former Site of Head House — 6.7 mi