Dawson TX

Dawson started somewhere else. Four miles northeast was Spring Hill, the oldest settlement in Navarro County, begun in 1838 as a trading post by a Republic of Texas Indian agent. A cattleman named Britton Dawson took land near there in the 1840s as bounty for service at San Jacinto, and later kept a house big enough to serve as a stagecoach stop.

In 1881 the railroad came through — the Texas & St. Louis, the line people called the Cotton Belt, though the state's own history calls it the St. Louis Southwestern and has it running Corsicana to Waco rather than Tyler to Waco. Two of Britton Dawson's sons and their wives gave a hundred acres for a townsite on it. The railroad set up a box car for a depot. Spring Hill emptied into the new town — merchants, residents, the Masonic Lodge and all — and Dawson took the name and the trade.

Cotton made it. By 1926 there were four gins, two banks, a bottling works, a telephone exchange, a cottonseed oil mill and three miles of pavement. By 1988 seven businesses were left.

On the third of May, 1968, a Braniff Electra came out of Houston for Dallas and flew into a thunderstorm north of here. The right wing failed, then the tail. Fort Worth lost it off radar at 4.51 in the afternoon. Eighty-five people were aboard and none survived — the worst air disaster in the state's history. The state's own marker, put up in 2019 out on Farm Road 709, records what happened next in one sentence: the citizens of Dawson were first on the scene to offer assistance.

What came out of it went well past the county. The accident report took thirteen months, and the findings changed how pilots are trained to read radar and steer around a storm.