Fire and Lynchings of 1860

Dallas's fire was one of several that July. About half of Denton's square burned, and at first leaders blamed the heat and new phosphorus matches. Then Charles Pryor of the Dallas Herald wrote to other editors that interrogated enslaved people had revealed an abolitionist plot, and his letters spread across Texas. Vigilance committees formed. No evidence was ever shown, yet at least thirty Black and white people were killed, perhaps many more. The plaque names the Dallas victims: Sam Smith, Patrick Jennings and a man called Old Cato. Secessionists used the panic to rally Texans to leave the Union.

What the plaque says

Fire and Lynchings of 1860 On July 8, 1860, the temperature in Dallas reached 115 degrees. A combustible fire beginning outside of W.W. Peak and Brothers drugstore destroyed most of downtown. At the time, national tensions ran high over the right to enslave human beings. Many were driven by suspicion of Northern abolitionists and a rush to judgment. A local committee of vigilance conducted a swift investigation, without trials for the accused, a committee of 100 white men ordered all Dallas slaves to be whipped. On July 24, 1860, three slaves, Sam Smith, Patrick Jennings and "Old Cato," were hanged on newly-built gallows. In 1991, the site was named Martyrs Park, a memorial to the men and to the inhumane legacy of slavery in Dallas. (2018)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — steps away
  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 — 1.4 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 — 2.7 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

• Jane Elkins — steps away
• Site of First Ferry and Bridge — steps away
• Alexander Cockrell_Sarah Horton Cockrell — steps away
• John Neely Bryan, 1810-1877 and Margaret Beeman Bryan, 1825-1919 — steps away