The Governor Horton Place

Austin, TX

Tradition holds that in 1912 a traveling family buried a child, María de la Luz, on this ground, and later that year three men purchased the land for use as a Mexican cemetery. A grass fire in the 1940s destroyed many of its wooden crosses and markers, and further graves were lost to development in the 1970s as Austin grew out to surround the once-rural site. What remains is a quiet link to the area's Hispanic community.

Austin, TX

Local tradition holds that this graveyard began in 1859 with the burial of young John Davis, accidentally shot after a skunk's spray sent him running through camp and he was mistaken for a Comanche intruder. His father later donated the land to the Onion Creek Masonic Lodge, and it grew into a community graveyard of more than 1,200 burials on some 6.6 acres. Among those interred are pioneer settlers, fraternal-order members, and veterans from the Civil War through the Korean Conflict.

Austin, TX

In 1874, two Brothers of the Congregation of Holy Cross arrived at the Doyle Farm on the rolling land south of Austin — the seed of what would grow into St. Edward's University. The farm had belonged to James Doyle, an Irish immigrant who reached Texas in 1835, on the eve of its war for independence, and built a life on this frontier ground. When the Catholic teaching order took up the land, a working Texas homestead began its transformation into one of the state's enduring centers of learning.

Austin, TX

The land beneath McKinney Falls State Park was once part of a ten-league Mexican land grant made in 1832 to Santiago del Valle, a Coahuila y Tejas official, on ground originally tied to empresario Ben Milam's colonization contract. Over the following decades it passed to Galveston founder Michel Menard and then to Thomas F. McKinney, whose family settled it in the late 1840s. Farming communities such as Del Valle and Creedmoor grew up across the grant, and its rural southern reaches survive today as parkland.