The Dallas skyline at dusk under a purple sky, with the lit green outline of a tall tower at center and Reunion Tower on the right.
Carol M. Highsmith / public domain via the Library of Congress
Texas · Region

Dallas & the Metroplex

Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, Fair Park, Cedar Ridge, McKinney's Heard, Denton, Waxahachie, Rockwall and Terrell.

11 places to explore

Caddo people lived in what is now Rockwall County before Anglo settlers arrived. John B. Denton, killed in the 1841 militia attack on the Native villages on Village Creek to the west, lies buried on the courthouse lawn in Denton. The region is the Blackland prairie and its edges, and the Heard sanctuary in McKinney and Cedar Ridge Preserve above Mountain Creek keep pieces of prairie and chalk hill.

Dallas grew around Browder's Spring, where the city made its first park in 1876 and where Dallas Heritage Village now holds the mansion of a slaveholding cotton planter. East of downtown, Fair Park has held the State Fair since 1886 and the Art Deco buildings of the 1936 Texas Centennial, and the African American Museum there keeps the story of the Hall of Negro Life. Downtown, the Sixth Floor Museum looks over Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy was killed in 1963, and the Dallas Museum of Art grew from a gallery that opened in 1909.

The county seats outside Dallas kept their courthouses: Waxahachie's 1897 Ellis County courthouse, with its carved stone faces, and Denton's of 1896. Rockwall's museum holds the argument over its famous rock wall. At Terrell the No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum recalls 2,200 RAF cadets who trained there from 1941 to 1945.

What to See in Dallas & the Metroplex

11 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Cedar Ridge Preserve

Dallas

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.

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A prairie meadow of red and yellow blanket flowers and purple thistles in bloom, with wooded creek bottom beyond under a blue sky.

Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary

McKinney

A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.

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Historic Sites

The white Greek Revival front of Millermore at Dallas Heritage Village, two stories with four tall columns, a balcony over the door and a flagstone path across the lawn.

Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park

Dallas

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.

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No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum

Terrell

A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.

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The red-brick Texas School Book Depository building seen from above across the lawn and curving white pergolas of Dealey Plaza, with Elm Street running past it.

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

Dallas

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.

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Towns & Gateways

Exterior of the African American Museum at Fair Park in Dallas, a long concrete building with a blue standing-seam dome and barrel-vaulted roofs.

African American Museum, Dallas

Dallas

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.

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The pale stone entrance tower of the Dallas Museum of Art hung with banners, a drive curving past it and a glass skyscraper rising behind.

Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas

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.

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Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum

Rockwall

A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.

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Architecture

The tan stone Denton County courthouse with its slate-roofed clock tower and domes, seen across the courthouse lawn between shade trees under a cloudy sky.

Denton County Courthouse-on-the-Square

Denton

An 1896 courthouse by W. C. Dodson in Denton limestone, pink granite and two sandstones, restored in 2004, now a free county museum on a lawn holding the grave of John B. Denton.

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The Ellis County Courthouse in Waxahachie, banded pink granite and red sandstone with arched porches, round turrets and a tall clock tower.

Ellis County Courthouse

Waxahachie

J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.

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The limestone front of the Hall of State at Fair Park, with its curved central entrance between two tall blocks, long colonnaded wings and a fountain pool in front.

Fair Park

Dallas

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.

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Dallas & the Metroplex rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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