The McNab Grocery

Ahab Bowen, who owned this ground after the Civil War, was a Tennessean who came from Bolivar, Missouri, to open a grocery downtown. D Magazine says the 1870s census listed him as a huckster, though he prospered in groceries and feed and died in 1900 at ninety-three. He and his wife, Mary, bought sixteen acres here in 1873 and built a cedar house on Boll Street the next year, which still stands. The magazine dates the brick store to the late 1890s, while the plaque says 1891. The marker hangs inside a restaurant.

What the plaque says

The McNab Grocery After the Civil War Ahab Bowen acquired this land, then an area of grape vineyards and small farms. In 1891 he sold the lot to J. B. Franklin, who erected this brick structure. James McNab (d. 1924) operated a neighborhood grocery here in partnership with William A. Boren and Thomas M. Cullum, who later founded the Cullum and Boren Sporting Goods business. A livery stable in the rear housed a horse and delivery wagon. Civic leader Frederick Appell retained part ownership in the building until his death in 1943. Other grocers occupied the structure until the 1950s. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 0.7 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.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 1.3 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 1.8 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 — 2.5 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.

More markers nearby

• Maple Avenue — 0.2 mi
• Greenwood Cemetery — 0.2 mi
• Thomas L. Bradford — 0.3 mi
• Colonel C. C. Slaughter — 0.4 mi