Parsons Station

The train that crossed Parsons was part of a railroad bargain. The Handbook of Texas says that in March 1886 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe agreed to be bought by the Santa Fe, and had one year to build forty-two miles between Cleburne and Weatherford, among other lines. The county entry makes Weatherford the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe's northern terminus in 1887. The plaque names that company's line as the one Old Nancy, the cattle train, ran. The Cresson to Weatherford segment was among 111 miles abandoned in 1959.

What the plaque says

Parsons Station For more than 100 years, this was the site of the Parsons community, which developed around the homestead and ranch of Amsley Parsons, who came to the area with his family in 1854. Another early settler was Sam B. Kutch; the Kutch and Parsons families intermarried, and it was on Kutch's property that the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe rail line crossed on its way from Weatherford to Cresson and Cleburne. The rail line was built through the area in the 1880s. In addition to being a rail stop, Parsons community had a rail switching station and offices for telegraph, Western Union and Wells Fargo services. A post office opened in 1888 under the name Parsons after the originally requested name, Woodstock, was denied by Postal Service officials. The rail stop featured cattle pens for loading livestock of area ranchers onto rail cars that shipped them to Cleburne, from which they could be taken to other markets. Prominent ranch families in the vicinity were McFarland, Eddleman, Woodhouse and Buck, as well as Kutch, Parsons and others. Longtime area residents also remember a school named Paradise and a grocery store. The train that made the trip from Weatherford to Cleburne was known as Old Nancy Hanks, or Old Nancy, reportedly for a famous horse belonging to Abraham Lincoln's mother. Old Nancy was a cattle train, although passengers often hopped aboard for rides. In 1931, the county began construction on what became State Highway 171. The road's completion led to a decline in rail use and the ultimate end to Old Nancy's route, and few relics of the once vital area shipping point and community around Parsons Station remain. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 11 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Acton State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 14 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 21 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Annetta Cemetery — 5.8 mi
• Dennis Methodist Church — 6.9 mi
• City of Aledo — 7.1 mi
• Bankhead Highway in Aledo — 8.1 mi