Jane Elkins

Jane Elkins carries the surname of her last enslavers. Records name her through the people who enslaved or hired her: Edward Welborn, John Young, then Smith and America Elkins, who hired her out to the widower Andrew Wisdom to keep his two small children. The trial record is State of Texas vs. Jane, a Slave, with a jury of white men and a special pool of thirty-six summoned. Historian Daina Ramey Berry writes that several hundred people traveled to watch the 1853 hanging, and that a medical fraternity later dug up her body.

What the plaque says

Jane Elkins Jane Elkins is significant to Dallas County and statewide history. Born into slavery around 1800, she was the first documented enslaved person purchased in Dallas County, which was created by the Texas Legislature in 1846. On March 17, 1844, Edward Welborn transferred ownership of Jane to John Young for $400. Around 44 years old, she was described as being "sound in body and mind, and a slave for life." Young then sold Jane to Smith E. Elkins and his wife America. After her husband died, the widow Elkins leased Jane out to Andrew Wisdom, a widower with young children. Jane worked as their caretaker. Wisdom was found bludgeoned to death in 1853. Contemporary accounts are meager, but a Galveston Daily News article published on August 28, 1880, reported that Jane had accused a "prominent citizen of the county" of committing the crime. Despite Jane being the one to alert authorities, she quickly became the sole and primary suspect. In the case of State of Texas vs. Jane (a slave), case #188, Jane was indicted on May 10, 1853, convicted and tried by an all-white, male jury on May 16 and sentenced to murder in the first degree on May 17. Jane had no representation during her trial, no witnesses were called and no formal investigation took place. She was hanged just ten days later outside the Dallas courthouse, on May 27, 1853. Records indicate her body was buried in a shallow grave near the courthouse but later exhumed and used for medical research. Many details of Jane Elkins' life remain unknown. But her place in history is secured as the first recorded enslaved person purchased in Dallas County and as the first woman to be legally hanged in the State of Texas. (2021)

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

• Fire and Lynchings of 1860 — 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