City Wagon Yards

The yards served farmers who arrived by wagon, but the Handbook of Texas shows how fast rails crowded in. A line from Weatherford reached Cleburne in 1887, a spur to Egan in 1902, and the Trinity and Brazos Valley, nicknamed the Boll Weevil, ran out of Cleburne from 1904 to 1924. A local streetcar operated from 1911 to 1917, and the Interurban from Fort Worth served the town for eighteen years after 1912. The earliest road here was a wagon trail soldiers used between Fort Belknap and Fort Graham.

What the plaque says

City Wagon Yards Were meeting places for early rural folks coming to town to buy, sell, trade, catch up on latest news. Here on this lot farmers, travelers for "two bits" got feed, water for teams; crude overnight accommodations. Wagon yards, outdated by better roads, cars, trucks, were forerunner of motels. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cleburne State Park — 11 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.
• Acton State Historic Site — 18 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 24 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Dinosaur Valley State Park — 26 mi
  Theropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.

More markers nearby

• Site of the Old City Spring — steps away
• Johnson, Middleton T., Colonel; Cleburne, Patrick R., General — steps away
• Cleburne Town Square — steps away
• Site of Old Picnic Grounds — steps away