Daingerfield, TX

Daingerfield is the Morris County seat, and its name goes back to Captain London Daingerfield, who was killed in an 1830 battle near the spring at the center of the present town. A settlement grew there in the early 1840s, with a post office by 1846 and a girls’ academy and Chapel Hill College following in the next decade. The town shifted after an 1879 fire destroyed most of it; when the railroad arrived nearby, businesses moved toward the railhead, creating the townsite people recognize now. Later, Lone Star Steel and a Navy aerophysics laboratory drove a major postwar expansion. Even the bluegrass tune “Old Dangerfield” borrows the name.