Coho and Nancy Jane Smith Farmstead Site

The farmstead belongs to Azle's earliest decade. The Handbook of Texas says Dr. James Azle Steward moved into a cabin built by a Dutchman named Rumsfeldt in 1846, and settlers soon spread along Ash, Silver and Walnut creeks. The first post office, in 1881, honored a man named O'Bar until Steward, who gave the townsite land, had the town named Azle. Farmers grew wheat, corn, peanuts, sorghum and cotton, plus melons and orchard fruit, and early twentieth-century dairies sold milk to Fort Worth creameries. State Highway 34 reached Azle by 1933.

What the plaque says

Coho and Nancy Jane Smith Farmstead Site Early settlers to this area, who began arriving about 1849, included James and Sarah Hoggard. Their daughter, Nancy Jane, married John J. "Coho" Smith, a cabinet maker and teacher. The Smiths bought property at this site soon after their marriage in 1861. Their original one-room cabin was enlarged as the family grew, and according to local history it also served as a school. Archeological investigations at the site have revealed many aspects of a 19th-century farmstead, including a hand-dug well, root cellar, spring house, and rock walls which may have been part of a fortified structure. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Worth Stockyards — 14 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 15 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 15 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 16 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.

More markers nearby

• Ash Creek Cemetery — 1.1 mi
• Ash Creek Baptist Church — 1.1 mi
• First Methodist Church of Azle — 1.5 mi
• Kiowa Raid on Walnut Creek — 3.4 mi