Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park, Dallas

The Cedars area near downtown Dallas is a home to the vast outdoor history landscape, known as the Dallas Heritage Village. Sprawled on 20 acres, this open-air museum features tree-shaded sidewalks lined with the largest ensemble of historic buildings in the city. There are in total over 25 structures presented, including a wide variety of authentic 19th-century pioneer and Victorian homes and commercial buildings – the finest collection of its kind in Texas.

In particular, the Village showcases properties dated from 1840 to 1910, such as a Victorian Main Street, a railroad complex, a log cabin, a pre-Civil war home, an 1860s farmstead with livestock, a 19th-century church, schoolhouse and more. All these buildings have been brought from throughout North Central Texas to the City Park – the first public park in Dallas, plotted in the 1870s. The first ever historic building moved here, back in the late 1960s, was the Millermore plantation house.

Each site in the Village is decorated with period-specific furniture, tools and ephemera, and is attended to by a team of role-playing interpreters that bring it to life, creating an immersive setting illustrative of the way ordinary Texans used to live over a century ago. In fact, strolling the grounds one can easily forget about the present day and age altogether, and the only hint of the passage of time would come from the Downtown Dallas skyline over the trees. Somewhat mind-boggling...