Rosser Depot of the Texas Midland Railroad

Rosser began as a river port and kept a segregated quarter. The Handbook of Texas says the riverboat town of Trinidad, platted in 1851, lost its post office in 1866 as railroads displaced river trade. When the Texas and Pacific came in 1872 a tent boomtown arose. Capt. Robert S. Rosser applied for a post office as Burton in 1886, but a Burton already existed, so it was named Rosser. The Handbook says Black residents, mostly farm laborers for White landowners, were segregated into an area called Red Row, after the red rental houses there.

What the plaque says

Rosser Depot of the Texas Midland Railroad Originally known as Trinidad, Rosser depended on the Trinity River for trade until 1882, when a line of the Houston and Texas Central Railroad was built here. The company was later renamed the Texas Midland Railroad by Mrs. Hetty Green of New York, who bought the line in 1892. Operated by her son Edward H. R. Green, it had a dramatic impact on the early growth of Kaufman County. Rosser supplied lumber for ties, gravel for roadbeds and water for the locomotives. The brick depot, built here in 1917, replaced an earlier frame depot which burned. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 21 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 24 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• Fair Park — 28 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 28 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

• Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church — 5.8 mi
• Bristol School — 6.7 mi
• Telico Cemetery — 7.3 mi
• Kaufman County Poor Farm — 11 mi