Ovilla

Ovilla went without a name for years. The Handbook of Texas says it was a thriving farming community by the 1850s yet stayed unnamed until Mrs. M. M. Molloy, wife of the Rev. D. G. Molloy, formed the name from the Spanish word villa. Its post office closed in 1906. Much later, in 1963, the town incorporated to escape annexation by DeSoto or any other neighbor, and its first census count afterward was 339 people. The Handbook calls Ovilla the oldest town in the county and notes that by 1990 the community had spread into Dallas County.

What the plaque says

Ovilla One of the oldest communities in Ellis County, Ovilla began as a fortified settlement built in 1844 on upper Red Oak Creek. Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian Church was founded in 1847 and the town's first schoolhouse was erected in 1849. By the turn of the century, Ovilla had a post office, banks, several stores, and a cotton gin. A marketing center for area farmers, Ovilla was bypassed by railroads and major highways. The town suffered destructive fires in 1918 and in 1926. Proximity to urban areas has stimulated new growth in recent years. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 8.7 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 10.0 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 18 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.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 18 mi
  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.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Ovilla — steps away
• Shiloh Cemetery — 0.8 mi
• Parsons' Cavalry C.S.A. — 4.5 mi
• Ellis County — 4.5 mi