Preston Road

The fort in this road's name may never have existed. The Handbook of Texas says it was long thought that Capt. William Gilwater Preston accompanied the 1840 to 1841 Military Road expedition and founded a Fort Preston, but that now seems in doubt and the name's origin is obscure. The town is documented: Silas Colville and Holland Coffee set up a trading post about 1837 on the Red River's Washita Bend, and an estimated 1,000 wagons crossed there in one year. Lake Texoma later covered the site.

What the plaque says

Preston Road Named for Ft. Preston; built 1841 at best ford on upper Red River (N. of here). Followed pre-Columbian Indian trail. Republic of Texas staked out road to fort from Austin. "Preston Road" later served as cattle trail from ford of Trinity River at Dallas to Oklahoma border. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 3.4 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 3.9 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.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 4.4 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.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 4.6 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Flippen Homestead and the Founding of Highland Park — 0.4 mi
• Highland Park Methodist Church — 1.1 mi
• Cedar Springs — 1.5 mi
• Oaklawn United Methodist Church — 1.9 mi