Crockett, John McClannahan

Crockett's Dallas career began with a colony's quarrels. In 1850 he was appointed a commissioner of the Mercer colony, and in 1852 he joined John H. Reagan and another man in investigating Peters colony troubles. He served as first master of Tannehill Masonic Lodge, chartered at Dallas on June 24, 1850, and as mayor for three terms from 1857. Years earlier, as a bookkeeper in Paris, Texas, he had played the violin at village parties. The Handbook of Texas says he and his wife, Catherine, had no children.

What the plaque says

Crockett, John McClannahan (December 26, 1816 - August 4, 1887) South Carolina native John M. Crockett married Katherine (Kate) Polk in 1837. In 1848 they moved to Dallas where Crockett opened one of the pioneer settlement's first law offices. Crockett served as a state legislator, mayor of Dallas, and meteorological observer for the Smithsonian Institution in the 1850s, and as lt. governor of Texas during its first two years in the Confederacy. A prominent Mason, Crockett also helped establish The Grange in North Texas. Recorded - 1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 0.5 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 0.8 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 0.8 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.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 2.1 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.

More markers nearby

• Nicholas Henry Darnell — steps away
• City of Dallas — 0.2 mi
• A. H. Belo Corporation — 0.3 mi
• Dallas Morning News — 0.4 mi