Rylie Prairie

The railroad that made Rylie Prairie was a troubled one. The Texas Trunk was chartered in 1879 to run from Dallas to the Gulf near Sabine Pass, but by August 1881 it had built only thirty-six miles, to Kaufman. It went into receivership that December and had seven receivers over its twenty years. The Handbook of Texas says the line reached Rylie in 1881 and made it a shipping point for cordwood and cotton. In 1930 the community moved a quarter mile northeast to State Highway 175.

What the plaque says

Rylie Prairie Named for the family of James and Mary Rylie, who came to Texas from Illinois about 1846, Rylie Prairie was a thriving community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A post office opened in 1883, and in 1884 streets were platted near the route of the Texas Trunk Railroad. At its height, the community included homes, churches, a school, and businesses including a cotton gin, grist mill, and general stores. The town began to decline in the 1930s and 1940s after the railroad discontinued service and people moved closer to Dallas and the new highway system. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 9.4 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 — 9.5 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.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 10 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.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 11 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.

More markers nearby

• Kleberg — 2.1 mi
• Pleasant Grove Christian Church — 3.8 mi
• Dawdy's Ferry — 4.0 mi
• Pleasant Mound Methodist Church — 4.6 mi