Preston Road/Shawnee Trail

What closed the trail was a tick. In June 1853 farmers in western Missouri turned back a herd of 3,000 longhorns, since the cattle carried ticks that spread what they called Texas fever; the longhorns were immune, local cattle were not. Vigilance committees, a Missouri law in 1855 and a Kansas law in 1859 followed. After the war, an estimated 200,000 to 260,000 longhorns started north in 1866, and in 1867 Joseph McCoy opened Abilene, which pulled most herds to a route farther west. Early drovers called it the cattle trail or the Sedalia Trail.

What the plaque says

Preston Road/Shawnee Trail In 1840, authorized by an 1838 act of the Congress of the Republic of Texas, Col. W. G. Cooke and the Texas First Infantry Regiment laid out a military road from Austin north through what became Dallas to the Holland Coffee Trading Post on Red River (later covered by Lake Texoma). Coffee developed the town of Preston near the trading post, and Cooke's military route became known as Preston Road between the Red River and Dallas. Immigrants came from Missouri and Arkansas through Indian Territory (Oklahoma) into Texas along Preston Road. In one six-week period in 1845, roughly 1,000 wagons crossed the river into Texas. From the mid-1850s the road marked the route for Texas' first cattle drive. Later known as the Shawnee Trail, it probably was named for a Native American village called Shawneetown north of what became Denison. Cattle swam the Red River at Rock Bluff Crossing, a natural rock formation that served as a chute into the water, later the site of the city of Sherman's water intake station on Lake Texoma. This remained the principal route to the north for Texas cattle until the Civil War. The last large herds moved through Grayson County in 1871. The old route remains visible at Rocky Point on Lake Texoma, and along Hanna Drive. The overall passage is followed by parts of Preston Road in Grayson County, a farm-to-market road and State Highway Route 289, and Preston Road in Dallas. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eisenhower State Park — 4.7 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 5.6 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 7.2 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Choctaw Cultural Center — 20 mi
  The Choctaw Nation's history told from the Chahta side at Calera, with galleries from Nanih Waiya to the Trail of Tears and the reservation today, a living village and daily stickball.

More markers nearby

• Fink — 2.8 mi
• Perrin Air Force Base — 3.7 mi
• Site of Fort Johnson — 3.8 mi
• Sand Springs — 5.5 mi