Harmonson Rancho

Peter Harmonson was born on December 18, 1797, in Bourbon County, Kentucky, and farmed in Indiana, Missouri and Arkansas. He and his wife, Anna McGee, brought ten children to a 640-acre grant in Denton County, where he helped found Denton's first Methodist church, as he later did in Young County. In the October 1864 Elm Creek raid, the Handbook of Texas says, he and his son took refuge in a thicket on Rabbit Creek and shot one of the raiders' leaders. He died of arrow wounds on January 9, 1865, and lies at Johnson Station in Tarrant County.

What the plaque says

Kentucky native Peter Harmonson (1797-1865) came to Texas in 1845 as a settler in the Peters Colony. The following year he helped form Denton County, where he served as the first sheriff. In 1854 he brought his family here and established a ranch near this site known as Harmonson Rancho. An organizer of Young County, he served as its first chief justice. He died from a wound received in an Indian raid on the Elm Creek community. In 1869, after it was sold, his ranch site and his son Z. J. "Jack" Harmonson figured in a skirmish between Indians and local cattlemen. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Belknap — 3.1 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 10.0 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.

More markers nearby

• Two Miles Southwest to Fort Belknap — 1.4 mi
• Joseph Alfred Woolfolk — 2.6 mi
• Major Robert Simpson Neighbors — 2.9 mi
• Camp Belknap, C.S.A. — 3.0 mi