Weatherford

Rails and trade day made Weatherford a shipping town. The Handbook of Texas says the county seat was incorporated in 1858, got a post office in 1859 and sat midway on the Fort Worth to Fort Belknap stage run. The Texas and Pacific arrived in 1880, the Santa Fe in 1887 and a local line in 1891. By the mid-1890s the town had an estimated 5,000 people, 100 businesses and three banks. Watermelon has been the main crop since 1900, and the First Monday Fair grew out of the old trade day when court met.

What the plaque says

Weatherford Founded 1856. Named for Jefferson Weatherford, state senator and a confederate soldier. Frontier people found protection here from constant Indian threat during Civil War. Long the only town between Fort Worth and El Paso. Home of Chandor Gardens and Texas Railroad Museum. Nearby is Double Log Cabin Museum. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 0.7 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 15 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 22 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Acton State Historic Site — 23 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

More markers nearby

• Parker County, C.S.A. — steps away
• Prince Memorial CME Church — 0.3 mi
• Samuel Joseph Redgate — 0.4 mi
• Bose Ikard — 0.4 mi