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The first wave of settlers arrived in the rolling Cross Timber country of north central Texas in the 1840s. Primarily of Scotch-Irish origins, these pioneer farmers came for the most part, from southern states, following the frontier as it shifted west of the Mississippi. They entered an area where Indians had been living for thousands of years. The roving bands of Comanche posed a serious threat to the settlers, and in 1849, the U.S. Army established Fort Worth to protect the farms along the sparsely populated frontier.
The area southeast of the fort (and of the Trinity River) was well protected and presumably fairly well settled by the early 1850s. In one well-documented case, eight related families migrated to the area in 1853 from Illinois. Three of the four Gibson brothers in this group established homesteads about four miles northwest of present-day Mansfield. This settlement, which became known as the Gibson Community, included a school and a church building by 1860.
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