It’s always great fun to have an adult ‘play day’,
so one morning early I took off for a friend’s house near Denton, Texas. We
were planning to do some beading, giggling, and dog wrangling, as well as
taking a break from all of this hard work to have lunch. Denton is an
interesting town, the seat of Denton
County and home to two major universities. This town, like many others, was
part of the land grant given to William S. Peters and named Peters Colony;
later Hiram Cisco, William Woodruff, and William Loving donated 100 acres as
the actual site for the town. However, both the town and the county were named
for John B. Denton, a preacher and lawyer killed by the Kichai people
in the Battle of Village Creek. In 1857, Otis G. Welch, county surveyor Charles
C. Lacy, and Joseph A. Carroll laid out the city and named the first streets,
but Denton was not incorporated until 1866.This area of the state was
agricultural and became a center for flour and cottonseed oil mills, along with
cottage industries when the Texas and Pacific Railway and Missouri, Kansas and
Texas Railway established stops here in 1881. Since these connections only went
north-south, the town did not develop as a manufacturing and wholesale center. This
first rail connection brought an influx of people to the area and set the stage
for the creation of North Texas Normal College (University of North Texas) in
1890, and the Girls Industrial College (Texas Woman's University) in 1901. As
the universities grew, so did their impact on Denton's economy and culture.
