Grapevine Pioneers: Cabins, Farms & Founders

Before Grapevine had a Main Street, it had a prairie — open grassland edged by the dense oak belt the surveyors called the Cross Timbers, threaded with springs and creeks. In 1843, Republic of Texas president Sam Houston met chiefs and captains of ten Native nations on this 'Grape Vine Prairie,' talks that led to the Treaty of Bird's Fort and helped open the land north of the Trinity to settlers. Two years later the first families came, most of them through the Peters Colony, an empresario land grant that covered all of Tarrant County. This driving loop visits where those people lived, farmed, and were buried: the colony that brought them, an 1859 farmstead that still works its land, the founder who named the town, and two pioneer cemeteries — one full of Grapevine's first leaders, one nearly erased, marked by a single sandstone cairn. Drive carefully; some stops sit on quiet roads, and the cemeteries ask for the same respect you'd give any resting place.