The Oldest Rocks in Dallas County

Farmers Branch likes to call itself the City in a Park, and the park in question is a living museum of the county's beginnings. This compact walk circles the Farmers Branch Historical Park and the founding blocks around it — the very ground the Peters Colony opened to settlement in the 1840s, when this was the frontier edge of North Texas. You'll see a limestone doctor's house from the 1850s, an early Methodist congregation that met in a log cabin built in 1846, the site of the colony's first land agency, and a pioneer cemetery begun when a two-month-old baby died in 1843. Together they preserve some of the oldest structures and oldest stories in all of Dallas County. Read the marker text, then look at the rock walls and hand-cut limestone — these are the materials the first families had to work with.