Johnson County

Before it was a county, this land was split between two colonies. The Handbook of Texas puts the northern half in the Peters colony and the southern half in the Mercer colony, with the first permanent settlements coming in the mid-1840s. The county was marked off in 1854 with 700 residents, and the 1860 census was the first to count it. Its lines moved afterward: the western portion went to new Hood County in 1866, and in 1881 a section of Ellis County was added, completing the present boundaries.

What the plaque says

Johnson County Named for Middleton T. Johnson (1810-1866), native of South Carolina, for 7 terms an Alabama legislator, a leading Texan after 1840. Served in 9th Texas Legislature; in Texas Rangers, Mexican War, Civil War. County created and organized 1854, from land earlier in counties of Ellis, Hill and Navarro. First county seat, Wardville, 1854-1856. Second was Buchanan, 1856-1867. Camp Henderson, at famous springs 3.5 miles southeast of Buchanan, a recruiting place in county during Civil War, in 1867 was made county seat and renamed in honor of a Confederate General Patrick Cleburne.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cleburne State Park — 11 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.
• Acton State Historic Site — 19 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 24 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.
• Dinosaur Valley State Park — 26 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.

More markers nearby

• City Wagon Yards — 0.5 mi
• Johnson, Middleton T., Colonel; Cleburne, Patrick R., General — 0.5 mi
• Cleburne Town Square — 0.5 mi
• Site of the Old City Spring — 0.5 mi