Kahn Saloon

The Handbook of Texas places a killing behind Kahn's Saloon in 1893. Vernon Dalhart's father, Bob Slaughter, died in the alley after a feud with his brother-in-law, Bob Castleberry. The Handbook says the shooting seems to have been self-defense and that Castleberry was never tried. The plaque dates the saloon's opening to about 1900. Dalhart left Jefferson before he turned seventeen and moved with his mother to Dallas around 1898, where he studied at the Dallas Conservatory of Music. He moved to New York around 1908 and took the stage name Vernon Dalhart about 1911.

What the plaque says

Kahn Saloon Built during the early 1860s, this structure served as a boarding house and as a mercantile before opening as the Kahn Saloon about 1900. Temperance movement leader Carrie Nation was denied entrance here during one of her campaigns through Texas. Jefferson native Marion Try Slaughter launched his career as country music singer Vernon Dalhart at the Kahn Saloon. The popular gathering place was closed after local prohibitionists won a 1907 election. Since that time, the building has been used for a variety of purposes, including a newspaper office, lodge building, furniture store, and funeral home. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Excelsior House Hotel — steps away
  A brick-and-timber hotel at 211 West Austin that began as a river captain's boarding house in 1858 and was revived by a garden club in 1959, and still takes guests with rosewood furniture.
• Jefferson Historical Museum — steps away
  A four-floor museum in Jefferson's 1888-90 federal post office and courthouse, with rooms for African-American history, Jewish heritage, the Caddo and Diamond Bessie, bought by the historical society in 1965 for $8,100.
• Caddo Lake State Park — 11 mi
  A Civilian Conservation Corps park on the Texas shore of Caddo Lake, where the Caddo told of a lake made by wind-driven water and visitors now paddle Big Cypress Bayou past moss-hung bald cypress.
• Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 12 mi
  Wetlands and woods on part of a former ammunition plant, now a refuge for wood ducks, prothonotary warblers and alligator snapping turtles, with four easy trails and a free visitor center on a Ramsar lake.

More markers nearby

• Vernon Dalhart — steps away
• Jefferson C. S. A. — steps away
• Captain William Perry — steps away
• Texas Statesman Charles Allen Culberson — steps away