Census years and a county that moved its lines

Why the same family appears under three different county names

You have the names and you have the dates, and the census still will not give up the household. That is normal in Denton County, because the county you are searching did not always have the shape or the seat it has now. The returns follow the county as it stood on the day the enumerator knocked, and both the line and the government that kept it moved more than most family historians expect.

Federal population censuses run from 1790 and have been taken every ten years since. A 72 year restriction governs access, which makes 1950 the most recent year available, and that census was released on April 1, 2022. The schedules from 1790 to 1950 sit with the National Archives, and most have been digitized by its digitization partners. The working method the National Archives recommends is simple and slightly counterintuitive: start with the most current census available and work backwards toward the earlier generations. A family that is easy to identify in 1950 is often a tangle of same-name households in 1860.

What drew the first lines on the map

Nothing was enumerated in what became Denton County until there was a county to enumerate. Anglo settlement began after William S. Peters of Louisville, Kentucky, and several others obtained a land grant from the Texas Congress in 1841. The land settled by their company, the Texian Land and Immigration Company, became known as the Peters colony, and the grant covered all of the future Denton County along with parts or all of several other future counties. The earliest settlement inside those lines lay in the southeastern section, near the site of present Hebron, and most early residents took up land in the Cross Timbers.

Why did the county seat keep moving?

In 1846 the Texas legislature formed Denton County out of what had been a much larger Fannin County, naming it for John Bunyan Denton, an eastern Fannin County Methodist preacher and lawyer killed in a raid against Indians in northern Tarrant County on May 22, 1841. County officials were elected that year, but no courthouse was built, and the seat did not stay put.

A county seat named Pinckneyville was located near the center of the county, about a mile southeast of the present center of Denton. Less than two years later a site named Alton, three or four miles to the southeast, was made county seat. Because water was not readily available there, the legislature allowed Alton in 1850 to be moved about two miles south to Alexander Cannon's homestead near Hickory Creek, and a log courthouse, the first in the county, went up at that spot. Alton soon had stores, residences and a hotel, and it was a regular stage stop. In the summer of 1856 residents voted to establish a new county seat near the center of the county on a 100 acre tract donated by Hiram Cisco, William Loving and William Woodruff. The new town, named Denton, was established the next year and incorporated as a city only in 1866. Deeds, probate and tax rolls from the 1840s and 1850s therefore attach to a seat that changed name and place twice before the town you know today existed.

Where do the census lines fall between 1850 and 1900?

Denton County grew slowly until after the Civil War. It counted 4,780 residents in 1860, slightly more than 10,000 acres of improved land, and a few more than 20,000 cattle, of which 6,000 belonged to John S. Chisum, who began ranching in the northwestern part of the county in 1854. Almost every resident was still engaged in subsistence agriculture, and the cotton ginned that year totaled two bales.

The 1870s changed the arithmetic. Population rose from 7,251 to 18,143 across the decade, many new residents began farms, and by 1880 almost 50 percent of the county was in cultivation. Railroads entered the county in the 1880s and had a great economic and demographic effect. Subsistence crops such as corn and vegetables declined, cotton and wheat acreage rose quickly, and cattle numbers on the prairies shrank. Cotton acreage stood at 29,785 acres in 1880 and peaked at 115,078 in 1920. Wheat acreage grew by more than 80,000 acres between 1880 and 1900, and from 1890 to 1920 the county ranked first or second in wheat production among Texas counties, behind Collin County. Krum, a village near Denton, was reputed in 1900 to be the largest inland wheat market in the United States.

The effect on the returns is direct. A family that farmed the same ground through the 1870s may be listed in one district in 1870 and a newly drawn one in 1880, in a household that has added boarders, hired hands or relatives. Railroads also determined town location up to the 1970s, when only one town of any size was not on one of the railroad lines built in the 1880s. If you are hunting a family that seems to vanish between two decades, look first for a town that the rails created, then for the district that grew around it.

Reading a return without the whole story

The federal schedules give you the building blocks, as the National Archives census pages put it, but they do not hand you the county's internal history. The Handbook of Texas entry on Denton County, written by E. Dale Odom, supplies the sequence: organization in 1846, the moving seat, the range era, the rail and cotton decades, the population shift that followed. Keep the two side by side and the household in the return sits inside a place that is changing around it.

Where to start before you search the name

Pull the county's own timeline first and match it against the decade you are searching, because the district, the seat and the household structure all follow from it. Then take the most recent census you are entitled to see and work backwards, one decade at a time, asking at each step what the county looked like that year rather than what it looks like now. A name that appears to move is often a boundary that moved, a seat that moved, or a railroad that arrived and redrew the neighborhood.

The county's lines on the ground are drawn under county boundaries and towns, and the rest of the paper is surveyed in reading Denton County records.

About the National Archives census records

The National Archives holds the federal population census schedules from 1790 to 1950 and most have been digitized by its partners. The collection is searched by year, by ancestor's name and by topic, including agriculture, mortality and manufacturing schedules. A 72 year restriction applies, so 1950 became the most recent available year when that census was released on April 1, 2022.

The Blackland Chronology editorial team
contact@dentoncountyhistoricalmuseum.com