The History of Kaufman, Texas

The town began as a fort. In 1840, Dr. William P. King bought two and a half square miles of land on the frontier east of the future Dallas and established Kings Fort — a stockade in genuinely dangerous country, the edge of settlement. After about five years of growth the community was renamed Kingsboro. Then county government came calling: when Kaufman County was created in 1848 and needed a seat near its center, the town won out after several elections and, in 1851, became the county seat.

In 1852 the town took the name of its new county, Kaufman — honoring David Spangler Kaufman, a diplomat and legislator who had served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas, the state legislature, and then the U.S. House, where he was one of Texas's first two representatives. It's a weighty name for a small prairie county seat, but Kaufman carried it as it grew into a farming and trade center on the Blackland Prairie, cotton and crops moving through its square.

For most of its history Kaufman was a quiet, self-contained county seat well outside Dallas's orbit — small enough that its brushes with fame are the odd footnote, like being the first place the outlaw Bonnie Parker was ever jailed, or the hometown of the vaudeville comedian Ted Healy, who helped launch the Three Stooges. Now Dallas's relentless eastward and southeastern growth is finally reaching Kaufman County, and the old Kings Fort town sits at the far edge of the expanding metro, its courthouse square still marking the center of a place with genuinely deep Texas roots.