King's Fort: Birth of Kaufman

Kaufman began behind a stockade wall. In 1840, while this was still the Republic of Texas and Caddo, Cherokee, Delaware, and Kickapoo people moved through the country, William P. King led some forty pioneers from Mississippi to build King's Fort here, raising log cabins inside its walls for safety. As the danger eased, the little settlement of Kingsborough grew up around the fort, and when Kaufman County was organized in 1848, King's widow helped win the county seat for the town. This walk traces that founding: the fort site, the King family who started it, the courthouse the county built, the early churches, and the historic homes and storefronts that filled in the square. (Out of respect for the families involved, this tour deliberately does not visit sites tied to the county's 2013 tragedy.) Bring good shoes and an eye for the layers of a frontier town that became a county seat.