HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded Age

Battle Cemetery and Community

Mart, McLennan County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Established about 1880, the Battle community was named for local landowner Nicholas W. Battle (1820-1905). By the 1890s a town had developed, including a school, post office, business, homes, and churches. A cemetery was established on land acquired from Alexnder and Kenneth McLennan. The earliest documented grave dates to 1888. Following the building of the International and Great Northern Railroad line about 1901, the town began to decline. The Battle Cemetery stands as a memorial to the area's pioneers.

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

The Battle community grew up around 1880 on land tied to Nicholas W. Battle, and by the 1890s it had a school, post office, businesses, homes, and churches. A cemetery was laid out on ground acquired from the McLennan family, its earliest documented grave dating to 1888. After the International and Great Northern Railroad bypassed the town around 1901, Battle went into decline, leaving the cemetery as a memorial to the pioneers who settled here.

Why it matters

The rise and fading of Battle traces the familiar arc of countless small Texas towns whose fortunes were made or broken by where the railroad chose to run.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • · Nicholas W. Battle

Themes & tags

Westward ExpansionGhost TownsMemorial

Nearby & related markers

Lone Oak Cemetery

Mart, TX

This McLennan County burial ground began as land bought in 1880 by trustees of the Lone Oak School for a church and school. It was pressed into use as a cemetery by September 1881, when the infant son of the Goodman family was laid to rest here. Confederate veterans and a lone Union veteran of the Civil War also lie among the pioneer dead.

Site of Organization of the First Baptist Church of Mart

Mart, TX

In early 1878, Baptists in the tiny community of Willow Springs, Texas, first gathered in a private home to hear a visiting preacher, and that April eighteen of them met beneath a large elm tree to formally organize their congregation. They raised a frame church beside the tree and opened a burial ground that grew into Mart City Cemetery. The town itself was later renamed Mart, and the church moved on in 1893, but this spot marks where the community's spiritual life began.

Elk Community

Axtell, TX

Martin and Elizabeth Harper arrived from Tennessee with their five children in 1855, joined by other Scots-Irish families from the American South, and built a cabin, a schoolhouse, and a farm that gave the settlement its first name, Harper's School House. Czech and German immigrants began arriving around 1885, opening a cotton gin and reshaping the community, which took the name Elk when its post office was established in 1894. Over the years Elk boasted stores, a blacksmith, a gristmill, and fraternal lodges, and St. Joseph's Catholic Church, founded in 1925, still stands at the heart of this Czech and German farming community.

Torrey's Trading Post No. 2

Waco, TX

Established in 1844 during the days of the Republic of Texas, Torrey's Trading Post No. 2 sat on a bluff above Trading House Creek as a meeting ground between settlers and Native nations. Here President Sam Houston delivered his celebrated peace talks to assembled chiefs, and the post served as a "listening post" that helped keep an uneasy frontier calm. Run by George Barnard for the Torrey brothers, it was later moved to the growing town of Waco.