Leonard

Leonard's land passed through two hands before the town. The Handbook of Texas says President Anson Jones granted 3,520 acres to Martin Moore on February 8, 1845, and Solomon Langdon Leonard bought the tract in February 1859 for $10,560. H. L. Parmele negotiated the townsite with the Denison and Southeastern Railway. Leonard Collegiate Institute began in 1894 in a two-room frame building, took the name Dodson College in 1906, passed to a Presbyterian presbytery in 1908 as Manton College Institute, and closed in 1914. A school and post office had opened in 1881.

What the plaque says

Leonard Settlers began arriving in this area in the 1840s and 1850s. Solomon L. Leonard (1811-1861) planned to move here from Missouri because of his sympathy with the Confederate cause. Before his death, he accumulated holdings of 10,000 acres on the prairie around Wildcat Thicket, where fugitives and outlaws often hid. Bob Lee (1834-1869), a leader in the Lee-Peacock feud, and a Confederate Army captain, was ambushed in the thicket by Union sympathizers. In 1880 when the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad came through, the Leonard heirs had the 100-acre townsite of Leonard laid out. They donated land for a depot, streets, a small park, and this town square. On July 22, 1880, a public auction took place here to sell town lots. A picnic was held and continues as an annual event. Mark Daniels bought the first lot and erected a saloon. Soon there was a hotel, a post office, and "The Graphic" newspaper. By 1881 a schoolhouse was built and area churches moved into town. Leonard was incorporated in 1889 and the town boundaries were extended one-half mile in each direction from the city hall building on the town square. For years Leonard has been the marketing center of this agricultural area. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 20 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 26 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.

More markers nearby

• First Presbyterian Church of Leonard — 0.3 mi
• Dr. William Chamberlayne Jones — 0.4 mi
• East Shady Grove Baptist Church — 2.7 mi
• Valley Creek — 2.9 mi