Kaufman County

The plaque gives the county's dates and namesake; the Handbook of Texas gives its people. Kaufman County voted for secession in 1861 by a three-fourths majority, and the 1860 census counted 533 enslaved people, 15 percent of the population. The Handbook suggests slavery never spread widely because cotton stayed a minor crop until after the war. The county's Black share more than doubled from 13 percent in 1880 to 29 percent in 1930. Rockwall County was cut from its northern edge in 1873, and the county's limits have not changed since.

What the plaque says

Kaufman County Created February 26, 1848; organized August 7, 1848; named in honor of David Spangler Kaufman 1812-1851; came to Texas in 1837 and located at Nacogdoches; member of the Texas Congress 1839-1845; Member of the United States Congress. Kaufman, the County Seat

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 9.2 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 25 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Fair Park — 29 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 30 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

• Mrs. William P. King — steps away
• Colonel Isham Chisum — steps away
• First United Methodist Church — 0.2 mi
• Birthplace of City of Kaufman; Site of King's Fort — 0.3 mi