The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 47, July 1943 - April, 1944 Page: 210

                                
Southwestern Historical Quarterly

stream. Not far across the East Fork, Major Stell blazed the
surface of an ash tree" and marked it for his eighteenth mile
post. His road next curved southeast, then east, and then
northeast around a high hill, and along the north bank of a
small creek, which the United States Geological Survey topo-
graphical map'4 called Yankee Creek. After a short distance,
the road turned more toward the north and finally due north,
pointing directly at the future county seat town of Rockwall,
and following approximately the route of the present road from
Barnes Bridge to Rockwall for several miles. But short of the
townsite the old road turned thirty degrees east and crossed
the course of a present paved highway about one and one-half
miles east of the site of present Rockwall. A little north of
the present pavement a cedar post was planted in the ground
marking the twenty-seventh mile; the course of the road
changed just three degrees more toward the east, and continued
in a straight line for eleven miles. In this span of distance,
Major Stell passed over the future county line and progressed
some seven and a half miles into modern Collin County; a
mulberry post was set here to mark the thirty-eighth mile.
Cedar posts had marked almost every mile for the past twenty
because the route was following a prairie ridge on which there
were very few trees.
Observing the map of Collin County for a moment, one finds
that this thirty-eighth mile post was about a mile and a half
west of a small village called Josephine. Four miles further
north the old road survey bent eastward and crossed the line
into Hunt County (on land that was part of Fannin County in
1844) at a point two miles south of State Highway 24, between
Greenville and McKinney. A few miles to the northeast, Major
Stell and his men crossed the route of this present-day State
Highway eight and one-half miles west of Greenville, near the
village of Floyd.
The land of this area must have appealed to the surveying
crew as well as to the Commissioners of the National Road.
Each of these early road makers was to receive pay for his
work in land, and more than a dozen tracts of this Hunt County
aField Notes, 1, 9. Every mile of the survey, as required by the act
creating the National Road, was marked on either a tree or a substantial
post. Major Stell's plat and field notes gave the kind of timber or post
used at each mile of the road.
4"Map of Barnes Bridge Quadrangle.

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