Browder Springs

Dallas owes its life as a rail city to a sentence slipped into a Texas legislative bill in 1871. The Houston and Texas Central was building north and would reach the town the following year. The Texas and Pacific, building west from Marshall along the thirty second parallel, intended to cross it near Corsicana, some fifty miles to the south. A Dallas representative, John W. Lane, attached a rider to the T&P's right of way bill requiring the crossing to fall within one mile of Browder's Springs, a name almost nobody in the capital recognised. The bill passed before anyone discovered that Browder's Springs lay a mile southeast of the Dallas County Courthouse, and in 1873 the two lines met where the rider said they must, making a crossroads of a river town of three thousand people. The springs were the reason the town had water. Lucy Jane Browder and her sons Edward and Isham acquired the property in the late 1840s, and in 1881 the city bought eight acres of it, along with the private water system, and fed the town through a wooden main. The park around them was renamed Sullivan Park in 1936 for Dan L. Sullivan, the city's first water commissioner, and reverted five years later. The Dallas County Heritage Society formed in 1966 to save the Millermore mansion, moved it onto the grounds the next year, and from 1971 filled the park with nineteenth century buildings brought in from around North Central Texas. The City of Dallas has run the site as Old City Park since 2024. The springs themselves went when Mill Creek was made a sewer in the 1930s, and the spot was buried under the Thornton Freeway.