Site of Scyene Meeting Place

Belle Starr was Myra Maybelle Shirley when her family reached Scyene. She was born near Carthage, Missouri, in 1848. Her father became a prosperous innkeeper and slaveholder, and the family sided with the Confederacy. Her older brother John, called Bud, joined bushwhackers in the border raids, Carthage was burned, and by 1864 the Shirleys had migrated to Scyene, the Handbook of Texas says. A Dallas Morning News article dates the move to 1863. She married Jim Reed on November 1, 1866, and her daughter Rosie Lee was born in 1868.

What the plaque says

Site of Scyene Meeting Place In the 1840s, settlers held public meetings under a tree at this site. Beginning in the 1850s, several successive 2-story frame buildings stood here and housed Masonic Lodge, church, elections, and social activities. Scyene Meeting Place housed one of the first public school sessions in Dallas County. In her girlhood, outlaw Belle Starr was a pupil in that school. In 1872, Texas & Pacific Railroad bypassed Scyene and the town dwindled. Yet the Woodmen of the World and other groups continued to meet in the community building, and school was held here until 1927. Bicentennial project donated by Mesquite Historical and Genealogical Society (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 6.1 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 — 6.3 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 — 7.5 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 — 8.4 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

• Pleasant Mound "Public" Cemetery — 1.4 mi
• Pleasant Mound Cemetery — 1.5 mi
• Pleasant Mound Methodist Church — 1.5 mi
• Pleasant Grove Christian Church — 2.3 mi