Dallas has no natural harbour, no mountain and no gold — it exists because one man built a cabin at a Trinity River ford in 1841. Three days trace that improbable city: pioneer log cabins, a Confederate-era plantation, freedmen's settlements, and 1963.
Texas's largest collection of 19th-century pioneer structures: 20+ buildings moved onto 8 acres, including the 1861 Millermore plantation house, an 1847 log cabin, a working blacksmith and Miller's log house. Open Thu–Sat 10:00–16:00; costumed interpreters on site.
The reconstructed cedar-log cabin of the Tennessee lawyer who staked a claim at the Trinity's best natural ford in November 1841 and named the settlement Dallas. Two rooms, a dogtrot, and the origin point of a 7.8-million metro. Free, exterior viewing.
Four galleries inside the 1892 Richardsonian Romanesque courthouse covering Caddo settlement, the Peters Colony land grants, cattle drives, the 1908 Trinity flood that nearly drowned downtown, and the oil boom. Open daily 10:00–17:00.
When it opened in 1912 this was the longest concrete structure in the world — 15 arches, 1,352 metres, built to cross a river that flooded catastrophically in 1908 and cut Oak Cliff off from Dallas. The levees below were completed in 1932.
Philip Johnson's 1970 open-air cenotaph: a 9-metre roofless concrete box on eight slender supports, seeming to float, enclosing a single black granite slab bearing the president's name. Johnson intended it as a tomb for the spirit, deliberately empty.
Completed 1902 in Gothic Revival brick with the second-largest Catholic congregation in the United States. Its 26 stained-glass windows were made in Munich; the parish grew out of the Sacred Heart church serving Dallas's early Mexican and Irish immigrant labourers.
The masterpiece of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition: Art Deco limestone, a 28-metre Hall of Heroes with a gold medallion of the Lone Star, and murals tracing four centuries of Texas history. Fair Park holds the largest collection of 1930s Art Deco exposition architecture on earth.
Opened 2019 in a purpose-built 5,000 m² West End building. Its centrepiece is an original Belgian WWII railcar of the type used for deportations; upper floors connect the Shoah to American civil-rights history, including Dallas's own segregation record.
The burial ground of Freedman's Town, settled by emancipated people after 1865 and paved over for Central Expressway in the 1940s. Excavation recovered 1,157 graves; David Newton's 1999 bronze memorial marks the largest freedmen's cemetery excavated in the US.
Founded 1873 as Deep Elm, a Black and Jewish commercial district beside the Houston & Texas Central tracks. Robert Johnson recorded here in 1937 in the Brunswick building at 508 Park Avenue — a Depression-era Art Deco tower now being restored.
The only museum in the American Southwest devoted solely to African American art and history, in a 1993 barrel-vaulted marble building. Holds one of the largest folk-art collections in the country plus archives on Dallas's segregated Hall Street and State-Thomas districts.
Dallas's first designated historic district (1973): 200 mansions along a 1.6 km boulevard laid out in 1905, in Prairie, Georgian and Mediterranean styles. The Wilson Block on Swiss holds the city's largest intact group of Victorian houses, moved and restored in the 1980s.