Eagle Ford Community

Eagle Ford briefly looked like the next big North Texas town. When the depression of 1873 halted construction of the Texas and Pacific Railway, the Handbook of Texas says, the community became its western terminus until 1876, built cattle-holding facilities and shipped cattle. It grew to several thousand people, with fifty new businesses and homes, a two-story hotel and a weekly paper, the Weekly Eaglet. Once the line reached Fort Worth in 1878 the town shrank, to about fifty people in the 1890s. Dallas annexed it in 1956.

What the plaque says

Eagle Ford Community The Eagle Ford Community developed just east of an important early crossing on the west fork of the Trinity River. Among the early settlers of the area was the family of Enoch Horton (1777 - 1851). Arriving in November 1844, they established several large farms. James Horton (1818 - 1876) built the Eagle Ford Grist Mill and donated land in 1857 for the nearby Horton Cemetery. He also gave land for the Texas and Pacific Railroad right-of-way and depot. The village saw immediate growth from the 1870s until the rail line was completed westward to Fort Worth, when the Eagle Ford Community began to decline. In 1907 William Foster Cowham and Associates came to the area from Michigan and began buying property, including some of James Horton's original holdings. They established the Southwestern States Portland Cement Company and built two villages to house their employees. Immigrants from Mexico found employment with the company, and their descendants have contributed to the diverse cultural heritage of the community. Eladio R. Martinez (1921 - 1945) was a distinguished soldier in World War II, earning the Combat Infantry Badge and a Purple Heart in action in the Phillipines. 1989

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 5.6 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 — 6.1 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 — 6.8 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 — 8.1 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

• La Reunion Cemetery — 2.6 mi
• La Reunion — 2.9 mi
• First Baptist Church of Irving — 3.4 mi
• Jordan-Hight Family Cemetery — 3.4 mi