Elisha Adam Euless

The best-known chapter of Euless history after the cotton-gin days concerns Mosier Valley, a community founded in the 1870s by emancipated families. In August 1949 the Euless school superintendent tried to bus forty-six Black children to Fort Worth instead of repairing their run-down school. Parents, backed by the NAACP, got the order blocked. On September 4, 1950, they tried to enroll their children in the Euless school and faced a jeering crowd of about 150 White people. The superintendent cited state segregation law. The district was fully integrated only in 1968.

What the plaque says

Elisha Adam Euless Elisha Adam Euless (1848-1911) migrated to Texas in 1867 from Bedford county, Tennessee and settled in Tarrant county. In July 1870 Euless married Judy Ann Trigg, also a Tennessee native. He began farming and bought land in 1871. Euless was elected a Tarrant county constable in 1876. In March 1879 Euless purchased 170 acres in the area known as Woodlawn from his mother-in-law, Mary Ann Trigg. The land included a two-story grange hall built in 1877. The first floor was used as a community school and by the local Methodist and Presbyterian churches. The grange used the top floor. Euless prospered as a farmer and produced considerable amounts of cotton and corn. In 1881 he bought 80 acres where a cotton gin stood. The community that grew around the cotton gin and the grange hall came to be called Euless. A post office, mistakenly named Euless, opened there in 1886. Euless was elected Tarrant county sheriff for two terms, serving from 1892 to 1896. He was the first sheriff to occupy the courthouse completed in 1895. He later returned to the town of Euless, then moved back to Fort Worth where he died in 1911 and was buried in the Oakwood Cemetery. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tarrant County Courthouse — 15 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.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 15 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.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 16 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Bear Creek Cemetery — 2.1 mi
• Bedford Cemetery — 2.3 mi
• Saint John Missionary Baptist Church — 2.8 mi
• Site of Mosier Valley School — 2.9 mi