Search Markers

Comanche, TX

Surveyed by Army engineers in 1850, the Corn Trail was the first wagon road to reach this part of central Texas, running fort to fort from San Antonio's district headquarters into the frontier. Its most common cargo was corn for Army horses and mules, which gave the road its name. The traffic drew settlers, and by Christmas 1855 there were enough of them to petition for the creation of Comanche County.

Bastrop, TX

This building began in 1850 as a humble frame cabin raised by John Cornelson in the young town of Bastrop, only a few years after Texas joined the Union. Joe Fehr enlarged it after 1854 using brick fired at the nearby Lottmans' kiln, giving the modest home its more substantial form. Recognized by the Texas Legislature as a historic shrine in 1954, it now houses the Bastrop County Museum.

Winters, TX

Winters got its first industrial plant when Bird, Hall and Mertz of San Angelo built this cottonseed oil mill in 1909-10, its millhouse walls quarried from stone at the Posey farm on Gap Creek. The mill crushed cottonseed into cake, meal, hulls, and oil, and gave the town a payroll, a work whistle that marked the day, and a distinctive aroma. It passed through the hands of Ballinger and Houston owners before closing in 1939 as cotton farming declined.

Callahan County, TX

Old Cottonwood Cemetery grew alongside a Callahan County community founded on land granted to George Washington Glasscock, Sr. for his service to the Republic of Texas. Homesteaders arrived in the 1870s to good farming country, and the town of Cottonwood soon boasted businesses, churches, an academy, and two newspapers. The graveyard — its earliest known burials infants from 1877 — holds veterans dating to the Texas War for Independence and even two friends who killed each other in a frontier gunfight and share a common grave.

Panhandle, TX

From 1938 to 1957, a bright red "Library Bus" rolled out of the Carson County library—Texas's first bookmobile and its first to offer "inside service," letting readers browse the shelves aboard. Visible for miles across the flat Panhandle, it stopped at ranches, schools, and oil camps, circulating some 2,000 books a month through years of sparse settlement, wartime growth, and industrial boom. Most Texas county libraries began, as this one did, from local citizens' initiative.

Palo Pinto, TX

Raised in 1880 from locally quarried sandstone, this jail replaced a crude log lockup and reflected the ambitions of a young frontier county. Its lower floor first held county offices and later a jailer's family, while the upper story confined killers, cattle rustlers, and rowdy cowboys—a snapshot of a still-lawless West. A hanging trap door installed in 1907 was never used, and after the building was vacated it was rescued as a county museum.

San Elizario, TX

Built around 1850 of adobe brick and cottonwood logs wrapped around steel cell blocks, this structure served as county jail while San Elizario was first, and later third, seat of El Paso County. Under one roof it held both the carcel and the juzgado—jail and courtroom together. Legend has it that Billy the Kid engineered the only successful escape from its cells, freeing his companion Melquiades Seguro.

Shippensburg, PA · est. 1947

Before Carlisle was chosen as the county seat, justice in the Cumberland frontier was dispensed at 'Widow Piper's Tavern' in Shippensburg, which hosted the county's court sessions in 1750 and 1751. Taverns often doubled as the civic centers of early settlements, serving as courtroom, meeting hall, and lodging all at once. The building endures today as the home of the Shippensburg Civic Club.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 1954

From 1804 to 1859, the first courthouse of Adams County stood in Gettysburg's old Center Square, on land given by town founder James Gettys. A county's first courthouse was the heart of its civic life — where justice was administered, records kept, and the young community governed itself in the decades of the early republic. The building is long gone, but the square it anchored remains the center of the town Gettys laid out.

Dallas, TX

One of the first brick schools in the Dallas system, this Victorian building rose in 1888 on the site of a pre–Civil War school begun by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. In its early years some pupils arrived by carriage, but as the city grew it drew children of so many backgrounds that it earned the nickname the 'Melting Pot School.' From 1963 to 1969 it housed a vocational center teaching the building trades.

Kyle, TX

David Alexander Young came to Texas from Tennessee in 1857 and was among 179 Hays County men who fought in the Civil War, wounded while serving in Woods' 32nd Cavalry. When the International & Great Northern Railway reached Kyle, Young moved from Mountain City and in 1881 raised the town's first permanent store. The surviving building was given to the city of Kyle in 1936 by rancher M. G. Michaelis, Sr.

Colorado City, TX

This ornate Victorian house, with spool-trimmed porch columns and decorative wooden window "awnings," was built in 1899 by rancher F.E. McKenzie in the West Texas ranching town of Colorado City. It passed among cattlemen before D.N. Arnett, retired manager of the great Spade-Renderbrook Ranch, bought it in 1912, and four generations of his family have since called it home.

Concan, TX

On the Dry Frio in Uvalde County, a one-room log cabin rose in an era of Lipan-Apache raids and roving outlaws, when a house doubled as a refuge. About 1884 cattleman L. C. "Clabe" Davenport enlarged it for his family of twelve, adding a second log room, a hall, and stone rooms at the rear. When he later prospered and built a frame home, the old cabin lived on as kitchen, dining room, and guest quarters.

Lexington, NC

Completed in 1858, this Classical Revival courthouse anchored Lexington through the Civil War. Its interior burned in 1865 as the conflict reached the Carolina Piedmont, and it was rebuilt about 1867 during the early years of Reconstruction. The restored building remains a fine example of the antebellum public architecture that once dominated Southern county seats.

Del Rio, TX

In the desert town of Del Rio, near the Rio Grande, schooling began in the 1870s in an adobe room used whenever a teacher could be found. As the community organized a school district in 1884 and became the seat of new Val Verde County, it built a proper school at this site, adding grades over the decades until a twelfth grade came with the 1930 building. Constructed by Phil Garoni, that structure served as the high school until 1968 and remains in use for district programs.

Crosbyton, TX

Old Dewey Lake served as a key landmark for early surveyors of the South Plains, reportedly named for a land-office employee, Miss Dewey, after crews realized they had forgotten to name the site. Its shores hosted Texas Ranger Camp Roberts from 1879 to 1882 and the "Stag House" bunkhouse for cowboys of the Two Buckle Ranch. The lake itself vanished in the 1880s when eroding creeks cut a new channel and drained the basin.

Diboll, TX

Around 1908, lumber magnate T. L. L. Temple built this hall for the workers of his Southern Pine Lumber Company, pairing a downstairs reading room and recreation space with upstairs living quarters for family, single men, and schoolteachers. Over the decades it doubled as a Red Cross sewing room during World War I and a food distribution point for struggling families during the Depression. It is a rare survivor of the company-town institutions that once organized life in East Texas.

Dime Box, TX

The county's second-oldest community, Dime Box lay within Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colony and began as Browne's Mills. Its curious name came from the practice of leaving dimes in a box at Joseph S. Browne's mill so the postman could fetch goods from Giddings for local families.

Georgetown, TX

Erected in 1901 as a hotel, the Dimmitt Building rose just as Georgetown settled into a prosperous county-seat town. Over the decades it reinvented itself again and again, serving as mercantile stores, the town's first movie house, an auto dealership, a drugstore, a dental office, and a bus depot. A 1960 remodeling preserved its native-stone Spanish arches, columns, and turrets.

Georgetown, TX

John Jones Dimmitt built this limestone house in 1866, hauling the stone by ox-drawn wagon in the hard years just after the Civil War. A surveyor, lawyer, and railroad partner, Dimmitt was a civic force who helped bring Southwestern University to Georgetown. The home sheltered prominent citizens for more than a century and was preserved beginning in 1948.

Teague, TX

Chartered as the Trinity & Brazos Valley Railway and built between 1902 and 1907, this line earned the affectionate nickname "Boll Weevil" from the special trains that carried men to conferences about the pest then devastating Texas cotton. Founded by Col. Edward M. House—later President Woodrow Wilson's famous confidant—it became a shortcut hauler linking Galveston to Fort Worth and Dallas and even introduced diesel streamliners to Texas. Teague served as its division point, and this office anchored the road's operations.

Lagarto, TX

On this brush-country ranch in 1888 was born J. Frank Dobie, the folklorist who became one of the great chroniclers of the Southwest. A fierce individualist, he gathered and published more than thirty volumes of folk tales and legends, preserving the voices of the rancher, the miner, and the cowboy. His work gave the everyday people of South Texas a place in American literature.

San Patricio, TX

Robert Dougherty, a refugee from the Irish famine of the 1840s, built this house on Round Lake in 1876 to open St. Paul's Academy for Boys. Educated in Kentucky and seasoned as a journalist, merchant, and seminary principal in Corpus Christi, he taught an unusually broad curriculum for the era—geography, history, mathematics, Latin, Greek, classical literature, and even Gaelic. His commitment to learning ran so deep that all seven of his children began their working lives as teachers.

Willis, TX

In the young timber town of Willis, a carpenter named Sid Inglet raised a thirteen-room house in 1872 for Dr. William P. Powell, a Confederate veteran who had married Mary Eugenia Thompson in Waverly nine years earlier. Powell was the country doctor of the old school, making his rounds by horse and buggy and turning his own home into an office and makeshift hospital until he died in 1915. Six of his twelve children were born beneath its roof, and later owners even hosted more than a hundred weddings there.

Dublin, TX

This burial ground began in 1864 with the death of Ellen, daughter of J. H. Keith, and was donated by William "Big Bill" Keith in his aunt's memory with the condition that it serve for free public burials. Known simply as the Old Dublin Cemetery until an endowment renamed it in 1961, it holds roughly 1,400 graves. Nearly 300 of them are unnamed, marked only by field stones or funeral-home plates.

Kermit, TX

Winkler County's first post office opened near here in 1908 on the John Howe ranch, serving 300 people with mail twice a week. The Pueblo Investment Company promoted the Duval townsite nationwide, opening it in March 1910 with free lots, a picnic, and a cowboy tournament—but when Kermit won the county seat, Duval withered. After oil was struck in 1928 its townsite rights were canceled, leaving the ownership of many 1910 lots tangled to this day.

Missouri City, TX

Builder J. T. Dyer raised this Victorian house of heart pine and cypress, fastened with square nails, in Richmond, Texas, around 1890. His work was interrupted when his crew deserted him amid the violence of the Jaybird-Woodpecker feud, a bitter and bloody struggle over political power in Fort Bend County. The house survived the turmoil and was moved to its present site in Missouri City in 1963.

Ambridge, PA · est. 1948

Old Economy was the third and final home of the Harmony Society, a communal religious sect of German immigrants led by George Rapp, who founded the group in 1805. Settling here in 1825, the Harmonists built a prosperous, tightly organized village whose farms, mills, and factories made the celibate community famous for its industry and wealth. The society endured until 1905, and its preserved village is now cared for by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

Ambridge, PA · est. 1947

In 1805 a band of German Pietist immigrants led by George Rapp organized the Harmony Society, a communal religious sect that held all property in common while awaiting the millennium. After earlier settlements in Pennsylvania and Indiana, they built their final home, Economy, along the Ohio River between 1824 and 1831. Their disciplined communal industry made them famously prosperous until the society dissolved a century later, in 1905.

San Antonio, TX

German immigrant Edward Steves, who rose to prominence in San Antonio's financial and social circles, built this lavish limestone residence in 1874. Its 13-inch stuccoed walls, ornate carpentry, Mansard roof, and rainwater cistern make it a showcase of late-Victorian craftsmanship. The San Antonio Conservation Society acquired the house in 1952, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1970.

Gonzales, TX

On this site in late September 1835, eighteen Texans conferred with the alcalde of Gonzales and stalled some 150 Mexican dragoons sent to seize the town's cannon. Their delay bought precious days for colonists to gather recruits, setting the stage for the Battle of Gonzales — the opening clash of the Texas Revolution.

Waxahachie, TX

Completed in 1888 to relieve overcrowding, the Old Ellis County Jail was built by the Pauly Jail Building and Manufacturing Company of St. Louis, its round conical-roofed turret and corbeled brick giving it the look of a small castle. The sheriff's family lived on the first floor above twenty cramped cells, with solitary and death cells in the basement. Its rare rotary system — a rotating cylinder of ten cells with a single door, one of few in the United States — was engineered to make escape nearly impossible.

Pipe Creek, TX

J. W. English bought this land in 1878 and built the cabin around 1888 near a crossing of the Medina River; it was sold to T. S. Crist in 1906. Standing along a well-traveled route, the home offered food and shelter to a steady stream of passersby—wagon-train pioneers, charcoal haulers, and Texas Rangers among them. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Lincoln, TX

An old evergreen here is said to have sheltered the French explorer Louis de St. Denis in 1714 as he crossed the region that would become Texas, likely among the first Europeans to pass this way. More than a century and a half later, the same spot served as a site for pioneer court trials in the 1870s. The tree became a landmark linking two distant chapters of frontier history.

Memphis, TX

Memphis's oldest burial ground was carved from the corner of the town plat just months before the community was chosen as the seat of Hall County, out on the Texas Panhandle plains. J.C. Montgomery, remembered as the "Father of Memphis," rests in its oldest section, and the earliest marked grave belongs to Ben F. Taylor, who died in 1890. Among the notable dead is W.A. Johnson—newspaper editor, state senator, and lieutenant governor of Texas—whose grave reflects the town's early prominence.

Falcon, TX

In 1746 the Viceroy of New Spain commissioned Colonel José de Escandón to colonize this stretch of the Rio Grande, and the first settlers arrived three years later; an official 1767 survey converted their holdings into individual land grants, beginning private land ownership in the region. Around 1800 José Eugenio Ramírez founded the Ramireño ranch here, and the community that grew around it was renamed Falcon in 1915 for his wife, María Rita de la Garza Falcón. When Falcon Dam flooded the townsite in 1952, residents carried their history to higher ground at this relocated village.

Gruver, TX

Established in 1886, Old Farwell was meant to be the seat of Hansford County but lost the election to a rival town that has itself since vanished. It took its name from John V. Farwell and his family, Chicago department-store magnates who received three million acres, the vast XIT Ranch spread across ten Panhandle counties, as payment for building the Texas State Capitol. All that survives here are stones from the casing of a 200-foot well, dug by hand to bring water to a town now gone.

Victoria, TX

This Italian Renaissance Revival building went up in 1911–13 to serve as Victoria's United States Post Office and Federal Courthouse, built by San Antonio contractor Otto P. Kroeger and Company under supervising architect James Knox Taylor. Federal offices worked here until 1961, and four years later the building became headquarters for the regional Frels Theatres chain. Its dignified design reflects the Progressive-era era of monumental federal architecture in county seats.

Jefferson, TX

When this building rose in Jefferson in 1869, the town was a booming inland riverport on Big Cypress Bayou, its wharves linking Texas cotton to the wider world by steamboat. As the first federal court and custom house in the region, it processed the trade and legal business of a frontier port at the height of its prosperity, and it also sheltered the county court and its records.

Jefferson, TX

From 1890 to 1964 this Jefferson building housed the U.S. court for the Eastern District of Texas and the town's post office, long after the riverport's steamboat heyday had faded. Preserved rather than razed, it now serves as a museum recalling the era when federal justice and the mail passed through its doors.

Amarillo, TX

Organized in 1889 by sixteen charter members, this was among the first churches in the raw new Panhandle town of Amarillo. The 1890 meeting house was frontier improvisation at its most vivid: a belfry of cedar posts, a baptistry filled by hand with water buckets and warmed by hot rocks in winter, and a Ladies Aid member whose horse knew the route so well it earned the nickname "John the Baptist." The restored building was rededicated during a Diamond Jubilee in 1964.

Edgewood, TX

Built in 1909 by Virgil Henson and W.A. Covin, this building housed the bank founded by J.P. Downs that grew from the First State Bank into the First National Bank of Edgewood. A second floor added in 1918 gave the directors a meeting room and a Masonic Lodge a home, and in 1929 the Farmers and Merchants State Bank merged into it. The bank moved out in 1959, and the building later became a cafe.

Breckenridge, TX

The First National Bank of Breckenridge was founded in 1904 when Stephens County was still chiefly farm and ranch country. It moved into this Beaux Arts Classical Revival building in 1920 at the peak of the local oil boom, its Ionic columns and ornamented doorway announcing the sudden wealth pouring into the region. The structure served as the bank's home until 1972.

Navasota, TX

Local architect and stonemason James Davern and his brother-in-law C. C. Camp raised this commercial building of cement-covered stone rubble in the 1880s. During the First National Bank of Navasota's ownership in the 1890s it gained handsome Renaissance Revival detailing. The bank occupied it until 1952, and over the years the building also held a hotel, offices, a telephone company, and assorted stores.

Romney, WV

Romney is among the oldest towns in West Virginia and the seat of Hampshire County, and by the late 19th and early 20th centuries a chartered national bank was a mark of a community's commercial coming-of-age. "First National Bank" institutions took their name from the federal charters created under the National Banking Act of 1863, which knit local savings into a stabilized national currency system. A bank building like this one would have anchored Romney's main street, holding the deposits of farmers, merchants, and families across the surrounding Potomac highlands. Its survival as a recognized landmark preserves the everyday architecture of small-town American finance.

Orange, TX

Organized in 1857, this congregation is the earliest known religious body in Orange County, gathered first in a small schoolhouse near the Louisiana line. An 1865 hurricane destroyed that early meeting place, and the church rebuilt among sweet-gum groves before relocating to its present site around 1892 on land deeded by Joshua Cole. Longtime member F.A. Burton served the church for sixty-eight years until his death in 1925—and when Hurricane Rita took its sanctuary again in 2005, the congregation rebuilt once more.

San Marcos, TX

Erected in 1894-95, this bracketed building served as the office for the San Marcos National Fish Hatchery, established in 1893 near the head of the spring-fed San Marcos River. When the hatchery closed in 1965 the site passed to Southwest Texas State University, and the old office found new life housing the school's Aquatic Biological Center before being moved to the River Walkway.

Old Forge, PA · est. 1947

In 1789, in the years just after the Revolution when the new republic was pushing industry into its river valleys, Dr. William Smith and James Sutton built an iron forge on the south bank of the Lackawanna River. It was the earliest forge in this corner of northeastern Pennsylvania, tapping the region's water power and abundant ore long before anthracite coal made the Lackawanna Valley a national industrial powerhouse. The little settlement that grew up around the works took its name from the forge itself, and the name Old Forge stuck long after the hammer fell silent.

Old Forge, PA

In the old anthracite-coal country of Lackawanna County, the borough of Old Forge raised this Wall of Honor in 2005 to gather the names of its own — the sons and daughters who left these hills to wear the nation's uniform. Communities like this one, built by immigrant miners and their families, sent generation after generation into the country's wars, and a wall of names is how a small town keeps faith with them. The borrowed phrase "Lest We Forget," older than any single conflict, turns the monument into a standing promise rather than a record of one battle.

Newcastle, TX

This powder magazine is the best-preserved original building of Fort Belknap, one in a chain of federal posts strung from the Red River to the Rio Grande to shield settlers after Texas joined the Union. Named for its builder, Brig. Gen. W. G. Belknap, the fort held sixteen stone and picket houses by 1853 on the edge of contested frontier country. The State of Texas restored the magazine in 1936.

Ft. Stockton, TX

This ground served as the burial place for soldiers of Fort Stockton and the civilians of the town that grew beside it after the post's founding in 1859. Troops here guarded the San Antonio–San Diego mail line and countered raids along the Comanche Trail, and the graves testify to a brutal frontier where few lived past forty. When the fort closed for good, the remains of 56 soldiers were reinterred at Fort Sam Houston in 1888.

Fort Davis, TX

For a brief, dramatic span in 1861–62, this frontier outpost on the San Antonio–El Paso military road served as a Confederate supply point, held by Texas Mounted Rifles after the U.S. Army withdrew. Troops passed through en route to the ill-fated campaign to seize New Mexico and Arizona — and the Pacific gold routes — while Apache warriors ambushed a patrol under Lt. Mays in the Big Bend that August.

Mason vicinity, TX

Built of stone quarried from the post hill beside a spring long used by Native peoples, Fort Mason helped guard the Texas frontier against raids. Colonel Robert E. Lee commanded the post from February 1860 until February 1861 — and it was here, as the Union began to fracture, that he wrestled with the choice that would define his life. Vowing he would draw his sword only in defense of his native Virginia, Lee left Fort Mason on February 13, 1861, and rode toward the coming war.

Clyde, TX

Established in 1851 to move supplies between Austin and the remote outpost of Fort Phantom Hill, this road cut diagonally across the county from northwest to southeast. Though regular troops abandoned the fort in 1854 and the supply line closed with them, the route lived on, traveled by emigrants, soldiers, surveyors, and others pushing into the West Texas frontier.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1975

Built in 1818 in restrained Georgian style, the Franklin County Jail served Chambersburg for 152 years—among the borough's oldest surviving buildings. Its stone walls stood through one of the Civil War's boldest raids: in July 1864 Confederate cavalry, demanding a ransom the town could not pay, put much of Chambersburg to the torch. The jail endured while blocks around it burned.

Longview, TX

Fredonia was founded by empresario Haden Edwards, who in 1825 contracted with the Mexican government to settle 800 families in East Texas. A dispute soon led him into the ill-fated Fredonian Rebellion and flight to the United States in 1827, but the town lived on as a busy ferry crossing and cotton river port. Its warehouses, brick kiln, and homes prospered until the Civil War's aftermath and a railroad's bypass around 1870 emptied the townsite.

Millcreek Township, PA · est. 1946

Long before highways, travelers crossed this high ground on the Presque Isle Portage, the carrying-path that linked Lake Erie to the headwaters flowing toward the Ohio. It formed part of the older Venango Trail worn by Native people through the forests of northwestern Pennsylvania. In 1753 the French widened an Indian path into their military French Road, and the modern highway still shadows and departs from that ancient route here.

Pearsall, TX

Built in 1884 for $11,000, the old Frio County Jail is the oldest building in Pearsall, combining cells with a jailer's residence in a style typical of its era. A second story and added cells housed different classes of prisoners, and a well on the grounds supplied its water. It served the county until 1967 and even doubled as a storehouse for confiscated bootleg liquor during Prohibition.

Hillsboro, TX

Built in 1895 by noted attorney Greene Duke Tarlton, a Louisiana native, this Victorian home was among the finest in Hillsboro. Its refinements included hand-carved mantels, stained-glass windows, a speaking tube linking the kitchen to a third-floor bedroom, and a dumbwaiter, while the grounds held a stable, coach house, orchard and grape arbor. It was later restored and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1972.

Galveston, TX

What began as an open-air market in the 1830s became, in 1846, a 260-foot frame building that housed both Galveston's produce stalls and its city hall, police, and public meeting space — its opening celebrated with a grand ball. Goods arrived by catboat from the bay, and before the Civil War the demand for stalls forced a 100-foot addition. It was here, in October 1862, that Galvestonians voted to peacefully accept Union occupation; the building survived the war and later fires before a stone structure replaced it in 1888.