Colbert's Ferry

Two Chickasaw men ran ferries here before the stagecoaches came. The Handbook of Texas says Joseph Mitchell operated one near this crossing in 1842 and died in 1847, and that around 1849 Benjamin Franklin Colbert turned to Joseph B. Earhart to establish the ferry that took his name, earlier than the marker's 1853. The road bent south toward Sherman once that town was founded. In 1860 M. A. McBride challenged Colbert's exclusive hold from the Texas bank, and the dispute ended when Colbert obtained McBride's riverfront land.

What the plaque says

Colbert's Ferry Established about 1853 by Benjamin F. Colbert. Across it came thousands of immigrants into Texas in the fifties. The stages of the Southern Overland Mail Line, which provided mail and passenger service between St. Louis and San Francisco, crossed there, 1858 to 1861. Abandoned in 1931 when a highway bridge spanned the Red River.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eisenhower State Park — 3.7 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 4.9 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Choctaw Cultural Center — 12 mi
  The Choctaw Nation's history told from the Chahta side at Calera, with galleries from Nanih Waiya to the Trail of Tears and the reservation today, a living village and daily stickball.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 14 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.

More markers nearby

• 1931 Free Bridge Controversy — steps away
• Colbert's Ferry (Butterfield Overland Mail) — 1.1 mi
• Red River Bridge — 3.0 mi
• Colbert's Ferry — 3.1 mi