P.A. Watson Log House

This is a textbook dog-run house. The Arlington Historical Society describes the form: two log cabins separated by a passage ten or fifteen feet wide, all under one gabled roof, with a porch across the front and shed rooms behind. The open passage gave shade, caught breezes and made room for farm and household gear, and the dogs liked to sleep there. Walls were hand-hewn logs chinked with sticks and clay, doors hung on rawhide or wooden hinges, and roofs were oak clapboards held down by weight poles. The form ran from Alabama to Ontario.

What the plaque says

P.A. Watson Log House After his wife Margaret Ann (Armstrong) died, Patrick Alfred Watson (1810-1894) built this dwelling in 1855 near present Arlington for their six children. In 1858 he married Margaret's niece Mary Jane Donaldson and they had six children. A surveyor, educator, and religious leader, Watson gave land for the P.A. Watson Community Cemetery and for the original site of a church an school building. The congregation is now West Fork United Presbyterian Church in Grand Prairie. The house was enlarged and Watson family descendants occupied it until 1961. It was moved here in 1976. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 11 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.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 14 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 15 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.

More markers nearby

• Jopling-Melear Log Cabin — steps away
• North Side School — steps away
• First United Methodist Church of Arlington — steps away
• First Baptist Church of Arlington — 0.3 mi