By Haley Shapley
Grapevine’s Main Street is teeming with history big and small, but one piece of it you’re sure not to miss is the Torian Cabin, created sometime around 1845. Main Street wasn’t its first home, but there it stands, exactly the same way it was constructed more than 160 years ago.
This historic cabin was cobbled together by Francis Throop, a colonist from Missouri, along a creek at the edge of Cross Timbers, near the pioneer community of Lonesome Dove. Its double-pen style consists of two connecting rooms side by side, each with a door to the porch. Today, you can step onto the porch and take a peek in each of those doors, seeing the interior as it may have looked with its first inhabitants.
Kentucky farmer John R. Torian bought the property in 1886, and members of his family lived in the cabin until the 1940s. When it was donated to the city in 1976, Grapevine’s oldest structure was moved about four miles to its current location. But since they couldn’t just pick up the pre–Civil War era cabin and move it, each log was numbered and painstakingly put back in its exact location, giving locals and visitors a chance to see a little piece of history in its authentic sta