Historic Brick Streets of Stephenville

Paving was a debt, and Stephenville's way of paying shows how towns did it. The Tarleton State University Industrious Historian writes that cities such as Stephenville covered the cost with municipal paving certificates, obliging each property owner to pay a share for the street in front of their lot. Oil-rich Ranger and Eastland paved their dirt streets in the same years. Stephenville itself had grown from 3,891 people in 1920 to 4,768 in 1940, the Handbook says, and its oil boom of 1918 to 1920 faded because the main fields lay outside the county.

What the plaque says

Historic Brick Streets of Stephenville Seeking to improve the town's dirt streets, the Stephenville City Council in 1929 authorized paving by the Thurber Construction Co. High-quality bricks from Thurber (26 mi. NW), popular with builders around the state, were laid over a Macadam base and bonded with a tar-like substance. Individual property owners bore most of the cost, despite the economic hardships of the Depression, and viewed the brick thoroughfares with pride. Although some of the streets have since been covered with asphalt, the brick pavement remains handsome and durable. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dublin Bottling Works — 12 mi
  The Erath County plant that bottled Dr Pepper with cane sugar from 1891 until a 2012 settlement ended its Dr Pepper license, and that still makes its own sodas the same way.
• Dinosaur Valley State Park — 23 mi
  Theropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 29 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.

More markers nearby

• John Tarleton — 0.5 mi
• Stephenville Masonic Lodge #267 — 0.5 mi
• Cornelia Graves — 1.1 mi
• Kiker's Gin — 7.2 mi