Prairie Valley Community

Prairie Valley wore three names. The Handbook of Texas says it began as Valley Springs and was also called Tittle and Calera, and names John Gaines as its first settler in 1854, a name the marker leaves out. The first church, a Church of Christ, formed in 1857. A saloon stood by 1865 and a post office ran from 1872 to 1880. In 1905 the school had two teachers and 109 students. By the 1950s only a church and its cemetery remained, and the Handbook says a historical marker for the community stands in nearby Whitney.

What the plaque says

Prairie Valley Community In former Waco Indian region. First land grants were to Elisha Dennis, Manuel Madrigal, and Dr. Levi Jones, physician to Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas. First settlers (1850s) included Jesse Hayes, P. P. Whitehead, E. P. Wade. In 1857 Hill County's First Church of Christ congregation was organized here. Settlers by 1870 were families named Burks, Collins, Cranfil, Darden, Edwards, Harris, McIntosh, Page, Walling, and Wilson. Post office, Masonic lodge, school (Hill County Common District 1), and cemetery opened in 1870s. In 1872 the Missionary Baptist Church was organized. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hill County Courthouse — 15 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Bosque Museum — 16 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 21 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.
• Meridian State Park — 22 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.

More markers nearby

• Towash — 4.0 mi
• Coon Creek — 4.5 mi
• Whitney Memorial Park — 4.6 mi
• Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church — 4.8 mi