Search Markers

Tyler, TX

Antioch Baptist Church was established in 1851 in the rural Sand Flat community, when members first gathered in homes and the local schoolhouse before raising their own sanctuary in 1857. Served only by part-time pastors, the faithful kept Sunday School and youth meetings going even when no preacher could come. New buildings in 1939 and 1953 marked the congregation's endurance across a century of rural life.

Bells, TX

Organized in 1861 as Antioch Baptist Church of Christ, this Grayson County congregation first met in a log cabin before relocating in 1872 to the Pink Hill community, where it shared a building with the local school and baptized converts in Choctaw Creek. A charter member of the Grayson County Baptist Association, it grew through the 1890s and became active in mission work into the 21st century. New sanctuaries in 1919 and 1974 marked its steady expansion.

Fairfield, TX

Antioch Cemetery grew up alongside the Turlington community and its Baptist and Methodist congregations, in a well-watered stretch of Freestone County that drew settlers arriving by steamboat up the Trinity River from Galveston. Established in 1877 beside a church founded in 1870, it holds pioneers like Samuel G. Wells — a veteran of the Texas Revolution and a founder of Anderson County — alongside Civil War veterans and Conrad Henry, a German-born immigrant whose headstone towers over the rest. With its oldest graves at the center and 'deer tongue' flowers said to have been carried in by the first settlers, the ground reads like a map of the community's growth.

Ratcliff, TX

This graveyard grew up with the Antioch Primitive Baptist Church, organized in 1859, its first marked grave dated the following year. Many of its unmarked burials belong to transient sawmill workers who lived nearby during the years the great 4C Mill operated at Ratcliff. Several neighboring communities still use the cemetery for the descendants of the church's original members.

Malakoff, TX

On a two-acre tract bought in 1883 by the trustees of the New Hope Methodist Episcopal Church, this cemetery has long served the Black farming community of Antioch. Its earliest marked grave, that of Allen Delorah, dates to 1894, and the ground holds numerous unmarked graves of early settlers and ministers. It stands as one of the oldest graveyards in this part of Henderson County.

Blanket, TX

Antioch Cemetery grew out of a late-19th-century farming community in Brown County, on land the Grazier family deeded to the county in 1880 for schooling and burials. A combined church-and-school building nearby made the site a hub of frontier community life before the district eventually folded into the Blanket schools. Its earliest marked graves date to 1881, and among those interred are Civil War veterans and other pioneers who built the settlement.

Lovelady, TX

Begun in the era of a vanished village first known as Neville's Prairie, this East Texas burial ground took the name Antioch in 1890 when a new post office rechristened the settlement. Its more than a thousand graves hold both enslaved people and pioneer settlers, a record in stone of a community that had faded away by the 1930s. The oldest documented burial dates to 1870.

Carthage, TX

Though its oldest tombstone dates to 1849, the land here was not formally set aside as a cemetery until 1875, when Thomas Jefferson Miller deeded it soon after his son Theo's death. Miller and his second wife are buried here, alongside members of the Holmes, Williamson, Donald, Poss, Capps, Hudson, and McDaniel families. For many years the graveyard was tended by the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.

Teague, TX

Shortly after the Civil War, Edward Ezell, Sr. and his wife Frankie gave about two acres for this burial ground, later expanded by the Antioch Cemetery Association. It served the Luna community—a village of 250 with a church, grist mill, school, blacksmith, and store—until the railroad bypassed Luna in 1906 and the settlement declined. Today the cemetery is all that remains.

Bastrop, TX

This burial ground is the last trace of a farming community that thrived in Bastrop County before the Civil War. In 1882 the cemetery and its church-school building were relocated to this spot along the historic Gotier Trace, and the earliest marked grave here—an infant's—dates to that year. Among its roughly one hundred graves lie pioneer families, Confederate veterans, and many children lost to disease.

San Augustine, TX

In use since at least the 1860s, this East Texas burial ground served the Antioch Church of Christ, a congregation dating to 1836. Stephen Passmore deeded the property to church elders in 1880, though graves marking pioneers and Confederate veterans predate the transfer. Names like Dwire, Baggett, Ware, and Bland record the ordinary settlers who built San Augustine County.

Biardstown, TX

Founded in the first years of Texas statehood between 1846 and 1848, this was the first Church of Christ in Lamar County, organized by Elder Thomas Barrett with the pioneer family of Rebecca Stone Biard, who had come from Alabama to start the Biardstown community. William W. Biard donated his 20-foot log cabin—outfitted with split-log seats and a stick-and-dirt chimney—for the first sanctuary, and at his mother's death in 1848 he gave the land for the cemetery, where her grave was the first. Both the log church and its successor doubled as community schools, and though the congregation disbanded around 1920, burials continue to this day.

Midway, TX

Antioch Church of Christ traces its roots to a congregation formed on the Hayes Plantation and named for the biblical city of Antioch, making it among the oldest independent Black churches in Texas. After emancipation the church moved to Midway in 1865, where its building doubled as a school until a dedicated schoolhouse—later a Rosenwald School—was built. Through mergers and rebuildings across the twentieth century, the congregation has remained an active center of worship and outreach.

San Augustine, TX

Dr. William P. Defee arrived in Texas in 1833 and began preaching in settlers' homes, founding this congregation in 1836 in a dirt-floored log building on Rhoddy Anthony's land. Anthony, chosen elder, served fifty years. A new sanctuary rose about 1870 on Stephen Passmore's property and doubled as a schoolhouse and community meeting place before the present structure was completed in 1938.

Yellow Springs, OH

In 1852, when higher education for women was still a radical idea, Antioch College opened its doors in Yellow Springs to both women and men — and installed the famed education reformer Horace Mann as its first president. Mann, already renowned for building the common-school movement, poured his humanistic ideals into the young college, championing character and useful work alongside book learning. That spirit endured: Antioch later became a pioneer of the cooperative work-study model, sending students out to earn and learn in the real world, and in 1978 it grew into the broader Antioch University.

Buda, TX

Antioch Colony was a farming community formed after the Civil War by formerly enslaved African Americans who found it hard to buy land in freedom. Beginning in 1870, Anglo businessman Joseph Rowley sold parcels along Onion Creek to former slaves, sometimes writing restrictions into the deeds that may have been meant to protect the new owners from losing their property. Residents Elias and Clarisa Bunton donated land for a school and church in 1874, and the colony sustained Baptist and Methodist churches, a Masonic lodge, and an Eastern Star chapter until families drifted away by the 1950s; descendants have since returned to reclaim ancestral land.

Tolar, TX

Now a quiet rural locale, Antioch began as a ranching and farming community in western Hood County in the 1870s, near where the county's last Indian fight—the Battle of Lookout Point—occurred in 1869. Settlers established a church, school, and cemetery, and the graves here include Confederate veterans George Washington Brown and Austin Musick. As church and school closed through the mid-20th century, the cemetery remained as the community's historic heart.

Stewart County, GA

Built in the 1850s and run by the Antioch Primitive Baptist Church, this schoolhouse passed to Stewart County in 1895 and served the Louvale community for decades—first as a high school until 1928, then as an elementary school until 1942. It survives today as the Louvale Community House and home of a Sacred Harp singing school. The building marks the long arc of rural Southern education from church academy to public school.

Grand Prairie, TX

Mose Jordan Sr. arrived in the Grand Prairie area as an enslaved man in 1852, and by the late 1850s part of the Jordan plantation was already a burial ground for the enslaved. After the Civil War the Jordans freed their remaining slaves and divided fifty acres among them, and Mose helped found Freetown—also called 'The Line'—a Black community later displaced by Mountain Creek Lake. The plantation and Antioch cemeteries merged over time into this resting place for the earliest members of the Freetown and Dalworth communities.

Houston, TX

When federal troops proclaimed emancipation at Galveston on June 19, 1865, freedom came at last to enslaved Texans — and within a year, nine formerly enslaved people organized what became Houston's first African American Baptist church. Under the Rev. John Henry Yates, elected first full-time pastor in 1868, the congregation championed Black education and helped found the Houston Baptist Academy in 1885. The Gothic Revival sanctuary rising here in 1875–79 grew over decades into a landmark of stained glass, cross gables, and a glowing neon sign proclaiming that Jesus saves.

Carthage, TX

Five charter members founded Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in 1871, with J. F. McLendon and W. H. H. Hayes as its first pastors. An 1876 sanctuary rose on land donated for what is now Antioch Cemetery, and after fires in the 1880s and 1939 the congregation rebuilt each time, adding a parsonage on the site of the old Antioch School in 1950. For more than 150 years the church has served rural Panola County.

Palestine, TX

This congregation grew from informal home services held in Palestine as early as 1856 and was formally organized as Antioch Baptist Church in 1873, once known as "Antioch Under the Hill." It built its first sanctuary that year on land deeded by John H. Reagan and steadily expanded through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, weathering a devastating 1962 fire before rebuilding. For generations Antioch has anchored Palestine's African American community with worship, education, and family programs.

Buna, TX

In 1841, while Texas was still an independent republic, a handful of frontier families gathered in John and Mary Richardson's home to organize this Primitive Baptist congregation. A log meetinghouse rose on the spot the next year, and worship has continued here ever since, with a cemetery added in 1850. The long roll of charter members — Aliens, Richardsons, Lairds, Durdins — reads like a census of the pioneers who settled this corner of the Piney Woods.

Kingsland, TX

Where the Llano and Colorado rivers meet, the Austin and Northwestern Railroad built a bridge and depot in 1892 and, soon after, the Antlers Hotel — a two-story wooden resort that opened in 1901 to greet railroad passengers stepping off the train. Guests strolled to a cottonwood park with a pavilion, fished the adjoining lake, and took in river views from the porches. As automobiles eclipsed rail travel the hotel quieted, passing through several owners before being refurbished and reopened in 1996.

San Antonio, TX

Anton Wulff left his native Germany for Texas in 1848 and rose to become a prosperous San Antonio merchant, serving as a city alderman and the town's first park commissioner. In 1869–1870 he built this handsome Italianate residence for his wife Maria and their eleven children. Later home to the family of flour-mill owner Arthur Guenther until 1950, it was restored by the San Antonio Conservation Society in 1974.

Corpus Christi, TX

Born in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1901, Antonio E. Garcia was sent with his sisters to South Texas in 1914 amid the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution. He trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before settling in Corpus Christi in 1935, where he drew on his Mexican heritage to create award-winning frescoes, murals, and wood carvings. Over six decades he painted monumental church frescoes, exhibited at the Texas Centennial, helped found the South Texas Art League, and taught at Del Mar College.

Benavides, TX

After emigrating from northern Mexico in 1866, José Antonio López and his family settled on these South Texas acres, first trapping wild horses and raising sheep, then ranching cattle and farming cotton at Rancho San José. Following his death in 1903, his heirs each gave a portion of their inherited land to fulfill his wish for a family burial ground, in continuous use ever since.

Canadian, TX

Blacksmith J. C. Studer arrived from Kansas in 1886 and in 1891 began the Anvil Park Ranch, named for the tool of his trade and its distinctive brand. The spread grew from two sections to 5,000 acres of purebred cattle that drew top buyers, but it won its fame from the professional rodeo it hosted each year from 1918 to 1941. Drawing rising stars and as many as 8,000 spectators, the ranch became a Panhandle institution before its sale in 1951 for wildlife breeding.

Presidio County, TX

On June 12, 1880, in the rugged Big Bend country of Presidio County, four Pueblo Indian scouts serving under General Benjamin H. Grierson fought and turned back a band of twenty Apache warriors. The marker records it as the last Apache stand in the county — a small but telling episode in the long, grinding conclusion of the Indian Wars in far West Texas. It reflects the era when the U.S. Army relied heavily on Native scouts to fight other Native peoples.

Rockdale, TX

This ford across the San Xavier (San Gabriel) River has carried travelers for centuries, in a valley people have inhabited for some ten thousand years. In the 1700s it was home to Native peoples including the Apaches, and despite their objections Spanish missionaries chose the area for three missions and a presidio, used between 1746 and 1757. Settlers followed the fertile ground and reliable water; a 1913 bridge finally rerouted traffic, and in 2004 the crossing joined the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail.

Spartanburg County, SC

Apalache Mill was one of the textile mills that transformed the South Carolina Piedmont in the decades after the Civil War, as cotton manufacturing shifted from New England toward the Southern cotton fields. Around such mills grew whole villages of workers' housing, churches, and company stores. The site is now recognized as a historic district for the part these mills played in the region's industrial past.

Center Point, TX

In the late 1890s German immigrant Charles Apelt turned a Texas oddity into an industry, founding the Armadillo Basket Factory on this site after discovering the decorative potential of the nine-banded armadillo's shell. His novelty baskets sold by the tens of thousands, reached the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and employed dozens of local hunters at the operation's height. The farm supplied shells for lamps and desk sets and even live armadillos to zoos and medical research before it finally closed in 1971.

Anderson, TX

First known as Pine Grove for the Baptist church at its heart, this Grimes County burial ground was in use by the 1860s, with a headstone dated 1869 and likely older unmarked graves. Land donors formalized it in 1886, and it holds Confederate veterans as well as Brosig T. Wasson, the county's first fatality of World War I. When the church disbanded in 1929, the cemetery took the name of the area's vanished post office, Apolonia.

Gilmer County, GA

Stretching roughly 2,000 miles from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Trail was one of the boldest ideas of early American conservation—a continuous footpath along the spine of the eastern mountains, first proposed in the 1920s and stitched together largely by volunteer hiking clubs. The Georgia Appalachian Trail Club, formed in 1930, cut and blazed the trail's southern reaches through these Blue Ridge highlands, and the full path was completed in 1937. A plaque like this one marks not a battle or a birthplace but a shared act of stewardship: ordinary walkers building a wilderness corridor by hand.

Pershing County, NV

In the summer of 1846, brothers Jesse and Lindsay Applegate led a party south from Oregon's Willamette Valley seeking a safer eastern route, reaching a broad Humboldt River meadow—now Rye Patch Reservoir—and blazing the Applegate Trail. Oregon-bound emigrants used it successfully over the next two years. But in 1848, Peter Lassen guided a small wagon train toward his California ranch along a barely passable extension, and the emigrants suffered such loss of life and livestock that it earned the grim name "Death Route." The two branches shared this desert junction.

La Vernia, TX

The Applewhite line reached Texas through Thomas Applewhite, a North Carolina–born War of 1812 sergeant who, with his wife Elizabeth and eight enslaved people, moved to Wilson County in 1853 and bought 214 acres here the next year. Local tradition holds the homestead served briefly as a stage stop on an alternate branch of the Chihuahua Road running from the coast to San Antonio. After emancipation, African American families who had taken the Applewhite name established their own homes nearby and remained in the area for generations, their story bound up with the land's original stone house, largely destroyed by 1950s highway work.

Chappell Hill, TX

Built in 1852 by Isaac Applewhite—a minister, lawyer, and teacher whose hobby was carpentry—this house was raised of hand-hewn native cedar in a style typical of its era. Applewhite was more than a homebuilder: he also operated a steam sawmill and gristmill in partnership with F. J. Cooke, helping supply the young community. The home was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Appomattox County, VA

On a quiet Sunday in April 1865, the long agony of the Civil War reached its close in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. There, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the remnants of his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending four years of war. This monument, raised in the Confederate memorial tradition, frames that surrender from the Southern perspective — a defeated army "still unconquered in spirit." Its language reflects the "Lost Cause" interpretation that shaped much of how the postwar South chose to remember the conflict.

San Marcos, TX

In the mid-1700s Spanish Franciscans pushed onto the central Texas frontier, founding a cluster of three missions—San Francisco Xavier de los Dolores, Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, and San Ildefonso—first on the San Gabriel River to draw the Coco, Mayeye, Orcoquiza and neighboring peoples into Catholic and Spanish colonial life. The killing of a priest and the departure of the Native converts collapsed the effort, and the missions were shifted to the San Marcos River in 1755 before later attempts among the Lipan Apaches farther west. The 1936 state marker recalls how fragile Spain's northern frontier of faith and empire truly was.

Austin, TX

This site marks the approximate spot where Franciscan missionaries relocated three East Texas missions to the Colorado River in 1730 before moving them permanently to the San Antonio River in 1731. First founded in 1716 to convert the region's Native peoples, the missions were abandoned during French incursions from Louisiana in 1719 and restored by the Marquis of Aguayo in 1721.

Riviera, TX

In 1845, with the annexation of the Republic of Texas approved, the United States sent Gen. Zachary Taylor to occupy the contested land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. After wintering and drilling near Corpus Christi, his army—whose rosters included two future presidents and many future generals—marched south in March 1846 along a road roughly traced by this spot. Skirmishes and the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma soon followed, prompting the U.S. declaration of war.

Hidalgo, TX

This site marks the approximate location of Mission San Joaquin del Monte, a visita established in 1749 as part of José de Escandón's sweeping project to colonize the lower Rio Grande and draw the region's Indigenous peoples into Spanish mission life. Escandón's settlements planted the first European towns along the river, laying the groundwork for the ranching society that followed. The State of Texas placed this marker in 1936.

San Antonio, TX

Built by Franciscan friars in 1731, this stone aqueduct carried water from the San Antonio River to irrigate the fields of Mission San Francisco de la Espada. Its round arches span Piedras Pintas Creek in a design that echoes the great aqueducts of Rome. Remarkably, the structure survives in fine condition and still moves water nearly three centuries later—often called the only Spanish colonial aqueduct still functioning in the United States.

Dundalk, MD

This monument honors Aquila Randall, a young Maryland militiaman who fell on September 12, 1814, at the Battle of North Point—the land engagement east of Baltimore during the War of 1812. As British forces marched toward the city, Randall and his fellow citizen-soldiers of the local militia met them on the road through the Patapsco Neck, buying time and blood for the defense that would hold at Fort McHenry the very next day. The elegant classical inscription, opening with a line drawn from Joseph Addison's tragedy Cato, frames his death in the language of Roman virtue that the young republic so admired.

Gholson, TX

Aquilla Creek's crossing was notoriously impassable in wet weather, so in 1887 the county judge contracted for an iron span with a hundred-foot approach on each bank. The first firm failed to finish, and the Missouri Valley Bridge & Iron Works of Leavenworth, Kansas, completed the truss bridge in 1892 for $3,000. Two sister iron bridges over the same creek fell in the 1950s, but strong local support saved this one even after a modern concrete bridge took over the traffic in 1998.

Goliad, TX

Founded in 1852 by the Western Presbytery of Texas, this men's college took its name from the Aranama Indians who had been converted at nearby Mission Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga. Housed in the old mission buildings and aided by funds from Goliad, it taught classical languages, mathematics, surveying, and bookkeeping. Like most of Texas's twenty-five colleges, it closed when the Civil War began in 1861 and its students marched off to the Confederate Army; the great storm of 1886 finished off its buildings.

Rockport, TX

Carved from the coastal edge of Refugio County in 1871, Aransas County is the second smallest in Texas, yet it embraces three Gulf bays—Copano, St. Charles, and Aransas. The area had known Indian habitation, Spanish exploration, and Anglo colonization long before the county formed, and it later drew its living from fishing, farming, offshore oil, and tourism. In 1937 it became home to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.

Rockport, TX

Aransas County was created from Refugio County on September 18, 1871, and organized the same year with the coastal town of Rockport as its seat. Its name descends from the Spanish river name Nuestra Señora de Aranzazú, a reminder of the region's colonial Spanish heritage along the Texas Gulf coast.

Rockport, TX

This airfield grew out of the U.S. Navy's urgent need for pilot-training sites during World War II. In 1942 Aransas County offered land to the Civil Aeronautics Administration, voters approved a bond issue, and the county bought 700 acres for an auxiliary military landing field. Leased to the Navy for the war, it hosted landing practice for pilots based at Beeville, Kingsville, and Corpus Christi, and has served both military and civilian aviation ever since.

Skidmore, TX

The Aransas Creek valley layered one Texas frontier era atop another: the Karankawa who named the creek, Martín de León's 1805 rancho, Irish empresario colonists arriving via Copano Bay in the 1830s, and Anglo stock-raisers who followed. Later Frank Skidmore introduced barbed wire, windmills, and registered Herefords, and gave right-of-way to the railroad in 1886. Ranching, freighting, and trucking sustained life on the rich prairie.

Port Aransas, TX

Begun in 1855 and first lit in 1856, this 67-foot tower with its imported French lens marked the natural Gulf pass to Aransas and Corpus Christi Bays. During the Civil War, Confederates buried the lens and damaged the tower in 1863 to keep its light from aiding Federal forces. Rebuilt after the 1919 hurricane, it was finally decommissioned in 1952 once the shifting pass moved south of it.

Port Aransas, TX

Aransas Pass, the natural inlet separating San Jose and Mustang Islands, became a strategically vital point along the Texas coast during the Civil War. Early on, Confederate vessels moved cotton and supplies freely through the pass, but a Union blockade soon tightened, and Federal forces under Captain J. W. Kittredge seized control until his capture in 1862. Control seesawed through 1863 and 1864, and after Union forces withdrew, Confederate ships again slipped supplies through the pass to sustain the wartime South.

Houston County, TX

Rooted in 1820s-30s Mexican land grants from empresario Joseph Vehlein, the Arbor community truly took shape after the Civil War as Southern families arrived for the cattle and cotton boom. A brush arbor served as its first church and school; a store, gin, grist mill, and post office followed, and the Four C Lumber Mill drove a boom from 1910 to 1925. Depression, then the pull of wartime cities, drained the community until only scattered farms and ranches remained.

Chester, PA

This granite monument marks a point on one of America's strangest borders: the Twelve-Mile Circle, the great arc swung twelve miles out from the old courthouse cupola in New Castle to define Delaware's northern edge — the only truly curved state boundary in the nation. The line traces back to the 1680s, when overlapping royal grants to William Penn and the Calverts set off more than a century of boundary quarrels that even Mason and Dixon could not fully resolve. In 1892 the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey carried out precise field work to re-establish where the arc met the Pennsylvania–Delaware line, and commissioners from both states set this stone to fix the spot. Each face speaks for a different party to the agreement — Delaware to the south, Pennsylvania to the north, the surveyors to the west, and the year 1892 to the east.

Santa Fe, TX

The town of Arcadia sprang up along the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad in 1890, and its oldest surviving congregation, Arcadia Christian Church, organized in 1894. Early worshipers shared a building with the local Methodists until a tornado around 1909 spurred them to raise their own sanctuary in 1910. A steam-locomotive bell given by the Santa Fe Railway in 1961 hung in the belfry — a fitting nod to the railroad that created the town.

Village of Newark, NY

In the village of Newark, in the Town of Arcadia along the path of the Erie Canal, this memorial was raised in 1928 to honor local residents who served in the nation's wars on land and sea. Erected in the years between the World Wars, it reflects a wave of community war memorials that followed the heavy losses of World War I, when towns across America sought lasting ways to commemorate their veterans. Its broad dedication to soldiers, sailors, and marines "of all wars" ties together generations of service from a single upstate New York community.

Castroville, TX

In the 1840s, Castroville rose on the Medina River as one of empresario Henri Castro's Alsatian-German colonies, drawing skilled European tradesmen to the young Texas frontier. Arcadius Steinle, a Prussian-born mason, arrived in 1845 and within two years was raising this stucco-over-rubble-stone house for his growing family. Built in phases over decades and held by the Steinles until 1946, it reflects the durable vernacular craftsmanship these immigrant artisans brought with them.

Hamshire, TX

Built about 1856, this is a rare Texas survival of a "daubed" house, its lower walls plastered with a mixture of moss, mud, and sassafras. Moise Broussard raised it for his bride, Mary Gadrac Arceneaux, whose family the marker ties to Louis Arceneaux — said to be the model for Gabriel in Longfellow's poem "Evangeline." The house later passed to Athenas Arceneaux, an early figure in the region's rice-planting, and the oaks around it were reportedly grown from acorns of the tree shading the fabled Evangeline grave.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1954

This brick meetinghouse rose in 1804 on ground William Penn had set aside as a Quaker burial place in 1701, at the very heart of the colony he founded as a haven for the Religious Society of Friends. For more than two centuries it has served without interruption as a place of worship and a gathering point for Philadelphia's Quaker community.

Alice, TX

Archelaus Bynum Dodson came to Texas from North Carolina in 1827 and threw himself into the independence movement, serving as a convention delegate in 1832 and as a lieutenant in 1835. His young wife, Sarah, sewed a red, white, and blue banner for his company — a flag remembered as an early Lone Star of Texas, said to have flown over Washington-on-the-Brazos when the Declaration of Independence was signed in March 1836. Dodson fought on through victory at San Jacinto, then spent his long life moving ever westward with the Texas frontier.