The History of Midlothian, Texas

Colonization of this part of Ellis County was slow until peace treaties opened the area in the 1840s. Among the earliest settlers were the families of William Alden Hawkins and Larkin Newton, who arrived in 1848 — Hawkins racing to build a house on his Peters Colony land near Waxahachie Creek before a 1848 deadline to claim his 640 acres. The name came later, in 1883, and by way of legend: when the Chicago, Texas and Mexican Central railroad connected Dallas and Cleburne through the area, a homesick Scottish engineer supposedly remarked that the local countryside reminded him of Midlothian in Scotland — and the spot happened to sit at the midpoint between Dallas and Cleburne. The name was accepted, and Hawkins went on to serve as Ellis County's first chief justice.

Midlothian's defining feature is geological. The Austin Chalk Escarpment runs north to south right through the city — a formation rich in exactly the limestone that cement manufacturing requires. That rock turned a farm town into an industrial powerhouse. Three of the ten largest cement plants in the United States operate in Midlothian, run today by companies including Martin Marietta (the former TXI), Holcim, and Ash Grove. The plants and their quarries have anchored the local economy for generations, and 'Cement Capital of Texas' is no exaggeration.

For a long time Midlothian was a cement-and-farming town well south of the metro. But as Dallas and Fort Worth sprawled outward along US-287, Midlothian's growth accelerated, and it became a fast-growing southern suburb — subdivisions and schools filling in around the quarries and plants. It's an unusual mix: a bedroom community for the metro and one of the biggest cement-producing cities in the country, all at once, sitting on that same chalk ridge that made it what it is.