Site of Confederate Arms Factory

The plaque's partners were a business as well as a list of names. The Dallas Herald announced a Lancaster gunmaking partnership in February 1862, and on April 11 the state Military Board agreed to buy up to 3,000 Colt-pattern pistols from Tucker, Sherrard and Company. John M. Crockett signed with the others and later reported delays for want of steel, tools and workers. Collectors credit about 400 pistols to the shop, though firearms historian William Edwards argues that surviving serial numbers do not fit that count. The Handbook's Lancaster entry spells the name Sherrod.

What the plaque says

Site of Confederate Arms Factory Site of Confederate Arms Factory Established by Joseph H. Sherrard, William L. Killem, Pleasant Taylor and John M. Crockett in 1862 to manufacture pistols for the State of Texas.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 12 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 13 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 — 13 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.
• Fair Park — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Town of Lancaster — steps away
• Former Site of Head House — steps away
• First Christian Church of Lancaster — 0.6 mi
• Edgewood Cemetery — 1.0 mi