The History of Daingerfield, Texas

Europeans are said to have first camped by a spring near the center of present-day Daingerfield around 1740. The name itself comes from a frontier tragedy: in 1830, Capt. London Daingerfield led a band of about a hundred men in a bloody fight with Indians near that spring. Daingerfield was killed in the battle, and when a settlement began to grow up in the area in the early 1840s, it was named in his honor.

The young community took root quickly. John Wingate Truitt came to Texas and settled in what later became the Jenkins community, just outside present-day Daingerfield. The family built a dogtrot log cabin: two main rooms on either side of an open hallway, with deep porches along the full length of the house. The cabin still stands.

S. R. Shaddick started the first school in 1840, and a post office opened in 1846. For its first decades Daingerfield was a small frontier town in the rich, wooded country that would later become Morris County, awaiting the railroad and the courthouse that would define it.

Daingerfield's defining year was 1877. That year Titus County, which had originally included the area, was divided, and Daingerfield became the county seat of the brand-new Morris County. The same year, the railroad laid its track a half mile southeast of the existing town.

Then came disaster and reinvention. In 1879 a large fire destroyed most of the town, and rather than rebuild on the old site, the majority of the businesses moved down to the railhead — which is the present site of Daingerfield. By 1904 the town had grown to 699 people, with industries that included a chair factory, a tannery, a hat factory, a cotton gin, and a flour mill — a busy trade center for the surrounding farm-and-timber country.

Daingerfield's greatest growth came during and after World War II, with the opening of the Lone Star Steel Company and the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance Aerophysics Laboratory nearby. Between 1945 and 1961 the population tripled, from about 1,032 to 3,133, as steel jobs drew families to the area and Daingerfield became an industrial town as much as a courthouse town.

The steel mill anchored the local economy for decades, joined by a garment factory, a chemical plant, and a roofing-products factory by 1980. Today Daingerfield is a small county seat of around 2,500, known for its CCC-built state park, its powerhouse Tiger football tradition, and its long history of bouncing back — from a frontier fight to a fire to the rise and shifts of the steel era.