The History of Lancaster, Texas

The first settlement was made in 1844–45 by Roderick Rawlins, whose party left Illinois in September 1844, putting Lancaster among the oldest communities in Dallas County. In 1847 Abram Bledsoe bought half of Rawlins's survey, and a few years later he laid out a town near the community of Pleasant Run, naming it Lancaster after his birthplace — Lancaster, Kentucky. The Rawlins homestead, built about 1855, still stands. Lancaster incorporated in 1887 as a farming and trade town on the black-dirt prairie south of Dallas.

Lancaster has an unusual Civil War footnote: a pistol factory in town manufactured the Tucker-Sherrod revolver, a close copy of the .44 Colt Dragoon, for Confederate troops from Texas. When the war ended, the town went back to what the prairie did best — cotton and farming — and it grew slowly as a self-contained county town with a courthouse-style square at its heart, well outside the reach of the city to the north.

Lancaster's hardest night came on April 25, 1994, when a violent F4 tornado ripped through the city, killing three people, injuring dozens, and destroying much of the historic downtown square. The town rebuilt, and its modern growth has come from a different direction: its location on the interstates south of Dallas turned Lancaster into a logistics and distribution center, its inland-port warehouses now a major part of the economy. The historic square has been restored, a reminder of just how deep this town's roots in Dallas County go.