Hotel Dallas, 1912

The hotel on this corner, as one local history puts it, "went from Good to best." Will and Phoebe Good ran the plain wooden first hotel. Phoebe kept it after Will died in 1878 and was remembered for helping needy travelers, families and children among them, until her own death in 1906. W. A. Dallas, a San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway official in town since 1891, bought it from her estate, tore it down and built in brick. He married a granddaughter of Dilue Rose Harris. Restored by Helyn and Bill Farris, it carries the name Farris 1912.

What the plaque says

Hotel Dallas, 1912 Hotel Dallas, 1912 After Eagle Lake was laid out inthe 1850s, Gamaliel Good built a hotel on this corner. The Good Hotel served as a stagecoach and railroad stop. Three railroads crossed town, and commerce was heavy. By 1912 the economy had become dependent on rice farming and this structure was built. The Dallas Hotel was the social and business center for the town. Several hotels competed for the travelers' and drummers' business. With the decline of the railroad and the upsurge in automobiles, business decreased. This is the only one left of the historic hotels. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 6.0 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• Stafford Opera House — 15 mi
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site — 21 mi
  Stephen F. Austin's colonial capital on a Brazos bluff, the town of the Consultation and the first Texas newspapers, burned by its own garrison in the Runaway Scrape of 1836.

More markers nearby

• Town of Eagle Lake — steps away
• Rice Culture in Colorado County — steps away
• Methodism in Eagle Lake — steps away
• E. H. Henry Rosenwald School — 0.6 mi