Site of Dulaney's Mill

Dulaney told his own story to the Dallas Morning News in 1895. After the war, he wrote, he paid $500 in Mexican gold dollars for eight acres on Salado Creek with a dam site, then hauled logs by ox team all day and sawed at night. He built the mill into a small cliff, burned limestone for mortar, cut the race from solid rock and set the dam in cedar posts. Among his papers was a cotton press patent. Now and then he simply walked off, returning with tales of Canada, Singapore or the West Indies.

What the plaque says

Site of Dulaney's Mill Farm complex noted for grist mill, cotton gin, general store, blacksmith shop. Owned by John Thornton Dulaney (1825-1916), who in 1849 left his native Virginia, going to California gold rush. He married Mary Jane Gates (1836-1925), whose parents settled in Texas in 1821. Dulaney's home at this site was built in 1868, after his return from Civil War. Nearby were church and school built by Dulaney for neighborhood. He had five children. With millhands, he often fed 35 people daily. Dulaney, an inventor, made mill parts as needed. His business continued until about 1912. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 11 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Williamson County Courthouse — 26 mi
  The fifth Williamson County courthouse, a Beaux Arts building by C. H. Page, rises over a Georgetown square of more than 50 Victorian-era buildings.
• Inner Space Cavern — 28 mi
  A Georgetown cave found in 1963 when highway engineers drilled test holes, holding Pleistocene fossils and 72-degree rooms that visitors reach by an artificial tunnel.

More markers nearby

• Bell County — 3.4 mi
• Fort Griffin — 4.2 mi
• Major Archibald Johnson Rose — 4.8 mi
• Alice Gray Hamblen — 4.9 mi