Historical Marker
Pleasant Thorp
Thorp Spring, Hood County · Texas
Erected 2018
The town outlived its college, but not for long. Sam Milliken bought part of the old Thorp homestead in 1871, built a cotton gin and opened a resort hotel that advertised the medical benefits of the springs. After Add-Ran left, a post office opened in 1893 and the population passed 400 that decade, peaking at 485 by 1904. Railroads bypassed the town. Thorp Spring Christian College replaced Add-Ran in 1910, and a steady decline began in the mid-1960s, to 184 residents by 1990.
What the plaque says
Pleasant Thorp IN 1840, A BLACKSMITH NAMED PLEASANT THORP (1809-1890) IMMIGRATED TO TEXAS. HE PLANNED TO SETTLE IN THIS AREA AFTER TRAVELING THROUGH WHILE ON THE MOREHOUSE EXPEDITION. AS PART OF HIS HOLDINGS TOTALING NEARLY 18,000 ACRES, THORP ENCOUNTERED SULPHUR SPRINGS, WHICH LED TO HIS SETTING ASIDE LAND FOR THE TOWN OF THORP SPRING. HE AND SAM MILLIKEN ESTABLISHED THORP COLLEGE IN 1871. THIS EARLY SCHOOL GAVE WAY IN 1873 TO ADD-RAN COLLEGE, WHICH MOVED TO WACO IN 1896 AND FORT WORTH IN 1910, BECOMING TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY (TCU). IN 1888, THORP DEEDED TO HOOD COUNTY THE PORTION OF HIS LAND CONTAINING THE SPRING TO FORM A PUBLIC PARK. A TRUE TEXAN PIONEER, PLEASANT THORP LEFT A GREAT LEGACY FOR RESIDENTS AND POSTERITY TO CHERISH. (2018)
Where it stands
32.47477, -97.81731 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Granbury Courthouse Square — 2.8 miA National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
- Acton State Historic Site — 8.1 miThe 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.
- Dinosaur Valley State Park — 16 miTheropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.
- Chandor Gardens — 19 miA 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.