Search Markers

Hampden Township, PA · est. 2018

A Scots-Irish immigrant, Oliver Pollock built a merchant fortune — in part through the slave trade — and poured the modern equivalent of millions into the American Revolution. Convinced that the young nation's future lay in the West, he worked to open trade along the Mississippi River, channeling arms and supplies to the frontier and financing George Rogers Clark's Illinois Campaign. The crushing debts he took on for the cause led to imprisonment and the loss of much of his wealth; he spent his later years, from 1792 to 1806, living here in Cumberland County.

Boston, MA

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894) was one of 19th-century Boston's most celebrated men of letters — a Harvard physician, poet, and essayist whose witty 'Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table' pieces made him a household name. He also advanced medicine, arguing that unwashed physicians' hands spread childbed fever, and his youthful poem 'Old Ironsides' rallied the public to preserve the frigate USS Constitution. He moved in the same circles as Longfellow and Emerson during New England's great flowering of American letters.

Mirando City, TX

A Missouri-born lawyer and former Oklahoma legislator, Oliver Winfield Killam came to Texas in 1920 chasing oil. After two dry holes, his Mirando Oil Co. brought in the first commercial well south of San Antonio in 1921, and a gusher that December opened the South Texas oil boom. The instant town of Mirando City he founded swelled to a reported 13,000, sprouting stores, churches, schools, and a post office almost overnight.

Farwell, TX

The English-financed Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company — the syndicate behind the immense XIT Ranch — deeded ground for Olivet Cemetery in 1908, making it Farwell's first burial place. Among its earliest graves is XIT manager John Armstrong, shot by cattle thieves while loading stock at Bovina, and the cemetery holds the plot of the Hassell family, a mother and eight children murdered in 1926. Roughly a hundred interments include veterans reaching back to the Civil War.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1875 when the Olivewood Cemetery Association bought 5.5 acres from Elizabeth Morin Slocomb, this was one of Houston's first platted cemeteries and served the city's African-American community for roughly a century. Laid out along an elliptical drive with over 5,000 burial spaces, it became the resting place of post-emancipation Black leaders — pastors, an alderman, an attorney, a physician, a dentist — alongside laborers, veterans, and formerly enslaved people. Its grounds preserve West African-rooted burial customs such as upright pipes marking the passage between worlds and ocean-shell grave ornaments.

Olivia, TX

Olivia was founded in 1892 by a Swedish Lutheran minister who bought land on the Calhoun County coast and advertised a new colony to fellow Swedish immigrants in the Midwest, naming the town for his wife. Twelve families answered the first call, and the settlement grew with a schoolhouse where parents studied English at night, a church, and a scatter of stores and trades. Though newcomers of other backgrounds soon arrived, Olivia held onto its proud Swedish heritage.

Olivia, TX

In 1892 the Rev. Carl J. E. Haterius of Galesburg, Illinois, bought land on the Texas coast hoping to build a home for Swedish settlers, naming the town Olivia for his wife. As the townsite was laid out in 1893, ground was set aside for this cemetery tied to the Swedish Lutheran Eden Church. Swedes and non-Swedes alike helped raise the community, and their graves remain here.

Iberia Parish, LA

In the sugar country of Iberia Parish, along Bayou Teche in south Louisiana, the plantation store was the commercial heart of an agricultural estate. Bearing the Olivier name—a family long tied to the Attakapas region's French and Creole planter society—this store would have supplied field workers, tenants, and neighbors with goods, often on credit against the coming harvest. Such stores outlasted slavery, carrying the sharecropping and tenant economy of the sugar belt deep into the modern era.

Austin, TX

Ollie Norwood, a Texas native who served in France during World War I, became an Austin investor and municipal bonds broker known for building the sixteen-story Norwood Tower downtown. Beginning in 1922 he assembled lots along the Colorado River in the new Travis Heights neighborhood and, with architect Hugo Kuehne, developed the Arts and Crafts estate "Norcliff" with formal gardens, a spring-fed pool, teahouse, and pecan orchard. The Great Depression halted his additions, the state took part of the land for I-35 in 1953, and the City of Austin bought the property in 1985 to make it a park.

Round Rock, TX

Swedish immigrant Johanna Olson bought this Round Rock property in 1907, having returned to the area after her husband's death in 1894. Local contractor A.S. Robertson built her a Queen Anne house in 1908, complete with the style's hallmark asymmetry, wrap-around porch, and fishscale shingles. Johanna and her daughters took in boarders from nearby Trinity College, which operated from 1906 to 1929, and the house stayed in the family until 1944.

Olton, TX

When the Soash Land Company laid out Olton in 1908, it set aside lots for a school, church and bank, and townspeople soon raised a Union church open to all denominations. About 1909 they hung this 950-pound steel bell, whose tones carried across the plains to call worshipers from miles around. After a 1928 tornado toppled the bell tower, the Methodist congregation bought the bell and moved it, and in 1958 it passed to the Church of the Nazarene.

Saint Louis County, MO

These interlocking rings mark St. Louis's turn as host of the Games of the III Olympiad in 1904, only the third modern Olympics and the first held in the United States. The competition unfolded alongside the sprawling Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the great World's Fair that put St. Louis on the global stage that year. The 1904 Games were long, loosely organized, and dominated by American athletes, a snapshot of a young Olympic movement still finding its footing.

San Jose, CA

This statue on the San José State campus honors alumni Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists during the national anthem after winning medals in the 200 meters. Their silent salute, protesting racial injustice, became one of the most iconic images of the civil rights era — and cost them dearly in the backlash that followed. The sculpture places their courage permanently at the school that shaped them.

Omaha, TX

Omaha grew up along the Seidicum Line, the old Bowie–Red River county boundary surveyed in 1840. When Thompson Morris laid out a townsite here in 1880, its post office bore the name "Gravett," and the dispute over what to call the place was famously settled by a drawing from a hat—yielding "Omaha," after a settler's old Alabama home. The town became a shipping point for plants and farm products.

Omaha, NE

In 1854 a band of pioneers crossed the Missouri River to found the town of Omaha on the Nebraska side, staking a claim that would grow into a major gateway city. A century later, in 1954, hundreds of committee members and thousands of Omaha's residents mounted a year-long centennial celebrating those founders. This monument commemorates both the crossing and the city it created.

Temple, TX

Omar L. Fletcher, a Bell County native born in 1887, joined his father in carrying on a family business begun in 1881 that grew into Fletcher Enterprises, a leading banking and industrial firm. In 1924 San Antonio builder Ernest Scrivener designed this Mediterranean-influenced house for him, with white brick, a tiled roof, and an arched entrance. It stood as the home of a prominent local industrialist and civic leader.

Omen, TX

Platted as Canton in 1850 near a crossroads on the way to the Smith County seat, this East Texas village cycled through several names before settling on Omen in 1880. It grew into a full frontier community—stores, a tanyard, blacksmith, hotel, churches, and a Masonic lodge—but the arrival and then the bypass of the railroad in the 1870s began a long decline. For three decades its Summer Hill Select School drew boarding students from across Texas, and even a 1930s oil flurry couldn't reverse the town's slide into a quiet rural crossroads.

Springfield, MA

This towering wooden figure is one of the "Whispering Giant" sculptures carved by artist Peter Wolf Toth, who created monumental tributes to Native Americans across all fifty states. Named Omiskanoagwiak, it is dedicated to the Indigenous peoples of the Pioneer Valley — the Native nations who lived along the Connecticut River long before European settlement. The carving honors their enduring presence and heritage in the region.

Lindale, TX

In the summer of 1839 the young Republic of Texas waged war on the Cherokee and allied tribes living in its eastern reaches, culminating in the Battle of the Neches in mid-July. Nearby, on Burleson Lake, stood the last camp of the Republic's army under generals Douglass, Rusk, and Burleson before Secretary of War Albert Sidney Johnston ordered it mustered out. From here the soldiers departed for home on July 25, leaving behind a campaign that drove the Cherokees from Texas.

Milwaukee, WI

In May 1921, the Milwaukee County chapter of the American War Mothers dedicated a stand of trees to the local men who had died on land and at sea in the World War. Living memorials of trees were a common and tender form of remembrance after 1918, chosen by grieving mothers and communities as a growing tribute to a generation lost. The dedication speaks to the raw, recent grief of a nation still counting its war dead.

Bonham, TX

Around 1890, Bonham joined the wave of booming Texas trade towns that adopted street railways, running a 2.5-mile steam-powered streetcar line from Russell Heights to the railroad station every half hour for a nickel a ride. The route deliberately skirted the business district because the cars spooked horses and disrupted trading. Even saddle-sore cowboys climbed aboard for the novelty and convenience.

Megargel, TX

After the Comanche lived from 1854 to 1858 on a state reservation near Camp Cooper, the U.S. government removed them and their goods north to Oklahoma. On August 3, 1859, the exodus camped near this spot on a head branch of Kickapoo Creek, escorted by a company of the 1st U.S. Infantry under Capt. C. C. Gilbert and Indian agent Matthew Leeper, while to the east Maj. George H. Thomas escorted more than a thousand Lower Brazos Reserve Indians on the same forced journey. Megargel was later founded here in 1910.

San Saba, TX

On this ground in March 1847, twenty Comanche chiefs and German colonists led by John O. Meusebach agreed to a treaty of peace opening the Fisher-Miller land grant to settlement. Unusually for its time, the agreement was honored by both sides and, as the marker notes, was never broken. It stands as a rare, lasting accord between Native people and European immigrants on the Texas frontier.

Anahuac, TX

On this bluff first called Perry's Point, General Manuel Mier y Terán established a fort in 1830, naming it Anahuac after the Aztec name for Mexico City. The post was meant to halt Anglo-American colonization, but the imprisonment of settlers from Stephen F. Austin's colony provoked the first open rebellion against Mexican rule in 1832.

Nacogdoches, TX

For roughly a century a stone house stood on this Nacogdoches site, thought to have been built about 1779 by town founder Antonio Gil Ybarbo and sold by him in 1805. It later served as headquarters for Indian traders William Barr and Samuel Davenport and, over its long life, did duty as trading post, warehouse, town hall, fort, barracks, church, tavern, and saloon before being demolished in 1902. A reconstruction rose in 1936 on the college campus.

Banquete, TX

Fort Lipantitlán was a Mexican garrison thrown up in 1831 along the Nueces to choke off further Anglo-American colonization. When the Texas Revolution erupted, Texan volunteers under Ira Westover seized the earthwork in November 1835, and in 1842 a small garrison held it against a far larger force led by General Antonio Canales. The state acquired the ground in 1937 through a donation from the Bluntzer heirs.

San Felipe, TX

San Felipe de Austin was the unofficial capital of Anglo Texas, the seat of Stephen F. Austin's colony — and this was the only home Austin, the "Father of Texas," ever owned in the region. In March 1836, as Santa Anna's army advanced during the Texas Revolution, Texans deliberately burned San Felipe to deny it to the enemy, and Austin's house went up with the town. The scorched-earth retreat was part of the desperate "Runaway Scrape" that preceded the victory at San Jacinto.

Onalaska, TX

Onalaska grew up around the Carlisle-Pennel Lumber Company, and in 1908 the company's owner deeded land for this Methodist church, with a company superintendent overseeing construction and nurturing local congregations. The community thrived until the region's lumber industry faded after World War I, draining away much of its population. Fortunes turned again when nearby Lake Livingston was completed in 1968, and by the 1970s the church saw renewed growth.

Ozona, TX

Established by the U.S. Army in 1855 above the junction of Live Oak Creek and the Pecos River, Fort Lancaster guarded travelers and mail on the long overland road between San Antonio and the far West. Garrisoned by the Second Cavalry, it was abandoned in March 1861 after Texas seceded from the Union, then briefly reoccupied by federal troops in 1868. Nearby, the deep ruts of one of the most-used pioneer fords of the Pecos are still visible where wagon wheels dragged down the hillside.

Tehuacana, TX

In the years after the Civil War, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church founded Trinity University at Tehuacana, opening its doors in 1869 to both men and women—a notably progressive choice for the era. Chartered in 1870, the school offered instruction that reached even into law and theology. In 1902 the institution relocated to Waxahachie, continuing a life that endures elsewhere today.

Mount Pleasant, SC

Before bridges spanned the tidal rivers and creeks of the Carolina Lowcountry, ferries were the vital links that stitched the region's roads together, and stone guideposts like this one told travelers how far they still had to go. This marker counts down the distance to Prince's Ferry, one of the crossings that carried people, goods, and mail across the waterways around Mount Pleasant and Charleston. For a traveler on horseback or in a wagon, "three and a half miles" was a welcome, concrete promise on a long and unhurried journey.

Crane, TX

A discovery well completed in November 1945 opened one of the great oil fields of the Permian Basin, on University of Texas land designated the Block 31 Unit. By 1969 it had produced a hundred million barrels, and by 1987 a second hundred million, drawn from wells reaching some 8,500 feet into the ancient Devonian rock. Engineers pushed recovery far beyond the ordinary by injecting high-pressure gas to wash oil from the reservoir.

Banquete, TX

This roadside marker points to the site of Fort Lipantitlán, a mile to the northeast, where Mexican soldiers garrisoned the Nueces frontier beginning in 1831. Texan volunteers under Captain Ira Westover captured the post in November 1835 during the Texas Revolution, and in 1842 it withstood an attack led by General Antonio Canales. The state raised the marker in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence.

La Porte, TX

Nathaniel Lynch, one of Austin's "Old Three Hundred," established a ferry in 1822 where Buffalo Bayou meets the San Jacinto River, charging a few cents to carry travelers and stock across. In the spring of 1836, as settlers fled the advancing Mexican army in the "Runaway Scrape," hundreds crossed here, the prairie thick with wagons and tents. Days later, at the nearby Battle of San Jacinto, Santa Anna — hoping to cut off the Texan retreat at this very ferry — was instead defeated, and a modern ferry still runs at the site today.

Camp Verde, TX

Established by the U.S. Army in 1855, this frontier post became the headquarters of one of the nineteenth century's most unusual experiments: a herd of camels imported at the urging of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to test overland transport across the arid Southwest. The scheme proved impractical, and the post changed hands with the times — surrendered to the Confederacy in 1861, reoccupied by the U.S. Army in 1865, and abandoned in 1869.

Fieldton, TX

In the summer of 1872, Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie of the U.S. Army marched 240 men and eight officers along the draw near this spot as part of the Army's campaign to force Native peoples off the Texas frontier. His swift, secret movement toward New Mexico aimed to break up a network of traders who paid Indians to raid settlers' cattle and horses. The track his soldiers beat across the plains served later scouts and settlers and is still remembered as Mackenzie's Trail.

Jackson Township, PA · est. 1930

In 1738 Philadelphia glassmaker Caspar Wistar gave one hundred acres to a congregation of German Reformed families among the Tulpehocken settlers, asking in return only one red rose paid each year. That symbolic rent is still honored by Trinity Reformed Church, a living link to the region's colonial German community. The congregation's roots reached back to 1727, when Reverend John Philip Boehm led its first communion service.

Jones Creek, TX

A short distance from here stood the home of Emily M. Perry (1795–1851), the only sister of Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas." After the town of San Felipe burned on March 29, 1836, during the turmoil of the Texas Revolution, Austin regarded Peach Point as his home. The plantation tied the family of Texas's chief colonizer to the coastal plains of Brazoria County.

Shippensburg Township, PA · est. 1970

The Mount Jackson, or Potato Point, School was first built in 1865 as one of the countless one-room schoolhouses where a single teacher taught children of every age. Faithfully reconstructed and moved to this site in 1969 by alumni and friends of Shippensburg State College, it preserves a vanishing form of American schooling. Such schools were the backbone of rural education for generations.

Brady vicinity, TX

One night in 1866, five men from Richland Springs tracked stolen horses to an Indian camp near this spot and recovered them in a sharp encounter. A metal arrow struck a Mr. Lafferty and slid halfway around his skull; it was cut out with a pocketknife, and remarkably he survived. The grave of an Indian killed in the fight lies about thirty yards to the north.

China, TX

Named for one of the Atakapan-speaking peoples it once linked, the Opelousas Trail ran from La Bahia — later Goliad — to the Mississippi in Louisiana, a route worn by Native trade for centuries before Spanish soldiers and French traders followed it. After 1820, settlers streamed in from Louisiana and the South, and cattlemen like Martin de Leon and James Taylor White drove great herds along it to market in New Orleans. In 1836 Texas families fled down the path in the "Runaway Scrape," and later the captured Santa Anna was led along it as a prisoner of war; the Confederate Army used the road, and parts of it became U.S. Highway 90.

Austin, TX

This commercial building went up in 1894 for Louis Openheimer, a Texas military, business, and civic figure, and was designed and built by John McDonald, who served as Austin's mayor from 1889 to 1895. In 1899 it was sold into the estate of 12-year-old Fannie Montgomery. Its Queen Anne styling—projecting second-story bay windows carried on jigsawn Victorian brackets—marks it as a fine example of late-19th-century commercial architecture.

Del Rio, TX

From Laughlin Air Force Base near Del Rio, Strategic Air Command and CIA crews flew high-altitude U-2 and RB-57 aircraft on secret Cold War reconnaissance. In October 1962 their cameras captured the Soviet missile sites in Cuba that touched off the Cuban Missile Crisis, and under 'Operation Brass Knob' U-2s photographed nearly all of the island. The crisis peaked on October 27 when a surface-to-air missile downed Maj. Rudolf Anderson Jr., the confrontation's only combat death.

Nash County, NC

In 1946 Black "leaf house" workers who graded and processed tobacco in eastern North Carolina organized to demand better pay and conditions, casting the region's first pro-union vote at a factory just west of here. The drive was part of Operation Dixie, the postwar labor campaign to unionize the South. Historians see these worker mobilizations as an early seedbed for the civil rights movement that followed.

Malden, MA

This memorial honors Lance Corporal Garvin, remembered here as 'Eddy' and as the community's first service member to fall in Operation Enduring Freedom, the American campaign in Afghanistan launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Dedicating everyday public spaces — a ballfield, a playground, a set of tennis courts — to fallen hometown heroes is a long American way of keeping a name alive in the places where neighbors gather. Here, a young Marine's sacrifice is woven into the daily life of Malden.

Lometa, TX

In the spring of 1952, at the height of early Cold War anxiety over communism and nuclear attack, the U.S. Army and Air Force staged Operation Long Horn across the Texas Hill Country—one of the largest war games ever held on American soil. More than 115,000 troops swarmed ranches whose owners had signed easements, simulating an invasion, an atomic strike, and a massive airborne drop pitting infantry and armor against the 82nd Airborne. Aggressor forces even "captured" nearby Lampasas before the mock war ended, swelling little Lometa from 900 people to 22,000.

Nye County, NV

High in the canyon above stand the massive stone foundations of Ophir, once a thriving silver camp. Ore discovered in 1863 led to the Murphy Mine and, in 1865, a $200,000 twenty-stamp mill that housed the first experimental Stetefeldt furnace ever built, anchoring the town of Toiyabe City and its 400 residents. After a decline in 1869 and a revival in the 1880s, the mines yielded more than three million dollars in gold and silver before the town was deserted by the 1890s—yet in its heyday it boasted schools, a church, lodges, and plenty of saloons.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

In 1964, in the unlikely setting of an abandoned Philadelphia jailhouse, Rev. Leon H. Sullivan opened the first Opportunities Industrialization Center to train Black workers for skilled jobs that discrimination had long kept beyond their reach. Born of the same organizing energy as Sullivan's earlier 'selective patronage' boycotts, O.I.C. paired vocational instruction with dignity and self-reliance, and the model spread from this city to hundreds of centers across the nation and eventually overseas.

New Haven, CT

The stern motto carved here — 'Opposition to tyrants is obedience to God' — echoes a Revolutionary-era American ideal, a version of a sentiment famously proposed for the national seal in 1776 and embraced by generations who held that resistance to unjust power was a sacred duty. Set on a monument dated 1896, the words carried that founding conviction into the Gilded Age, when Americans often looked back to the founders' language of liberty.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

For nearly a decade Ora Washington reigned over Black women's tennis, claiming eight national singles titles from the American Tennis Association between 1929 and 1937. When she wasn't dominating the court she starred for the Philadelphia Tribunes, one of the era's great women's basketball teams, and she coached and competed here at the YWCA. Barred by segregation from the mainstream circuits, she built her legend within the parallel world of Black athletics.

Canton, TX

Oran M. Roberts came to Texas from Alabama in 1841 and became one of its most consequential public men — a judge who presided over the secession convention in 1861, a Confederate colonel, a state Supreme Court justice, and, from 1878, governor. In retirement he taught law at the new University of Texas and helped found the Texas State Historical Association in 1895. His career bridges the Old South, the Confederacy, and the making of modern Texas institutions.

Orange, TX

The Orange Chamber of Commerce grew from an 1887 citizens' committee formed to promote the young Sabine River city's business potential. Through a Board of Trade in 1899 and the Progressive League of Orange in 1902, civic and manufacturing leaders pursued better roads, a deep-water canal, and an opera house while courting outside investors. Consolidated into today's chamber around 1918–1922, the organization later helped draw the chemical plants that reshaped the local economy after 1947.

Orange, TX

After Texas voters approved secession in 1861, Orange County raised three companies for Confederate service and later added coast-guard and state-troop units for local defense. Lying just ten miles from Camp Pleasant across the Louisiana line, the county became a link in the Confederate supply route, gaining a post office, a supply depot, and a military hospital as fears of a Federal coastal attack mounted in 1863. Local readiness helped deter Union forces at the Battle of Sabine Pass, and after the 1865 surrender occupation troops of the 37th Illinois arrived and Reconstruction began.

Orlando, FL · est. 1924

Erected in 1924, just a few years after the guns fell silent in Europe, this memorial gathers the names of Orange County's sons who died in what its generation simply called "the World War" — the First World War. Communities across America raised such monuments in the 1920s, transforming private grief into public remembrance on courthouse lawns and town squares. The phrase "Lest we forget" was the era's watchword for a war meant to end all wars.

Orange, TX

Clyde Spears opened the Orange Dairy Company here in 1941, pasteurizing and bottling some 800 gallons of milk a day gathered from sixteen local dairies, among them the Moonglow Dairy said to milk by moonlight. The two-story brick plant still shows its cooling-system ceiling hooks and sanitary tile. But postwar economics—costly pasteurization, new milking machines, cheaper refrigerated shipping, and out-of-state competition as far as Wisconsin—doomed small dairies, and Borden bought out and closed the company in 1948.

Orange, TX

A shallow well drilled near Orange in 1903 struck no oil, but deeper drilling into the Gulf Coast salt domes changed everything: Rio Bravo Oil Company's 1913 "Wonder Well" was briefly the deepest in Texas, and Humble Oil's 1921 gusher opened the Orange oil field to a wave of wildcatting. A boomtown of stores, hotels, cafes, and theaters rose overnight—served by a six-mile plank road and eight buses—and even drew a Japanese agricultural colony and petroleum company that logged a record-deep rotary well in 1922. A 1923 fire, a tornado, and dwindling crews later thinned the town, which today centers on its school district, churches, and homes.

Amarillo, TX

Built in 1936–37 to a design by architect Guy Carlander, Ordway Hall served as the administration building for Amarillo College and was named for George Ordway, who helped win the legislative authority to found the school and became its first president. Its buff-brick, L-shaped form rises to a four-story tower and is dressed in crisp Art Deco ornament — chevrons, flutes, and terra-cotta panels of gnomes at their books. Inside, terrazzo floors and patterned brick carry the same careful craftsmanship.

Wasco County, OR

By the 1960s, Oregon's spectacular roadside vistas were increasingly cluttered by billboards and commercial signage competing for the traveler's eye. The Oregon Roadside Council, a citizen conservation group, championed the Oregon Scenic Areas Act of 1961, which surveyed some 3,585 miles of highway to protect their views. More than 7,000 signs and billboards were removed, preserving the sweeping landscapes along routes like the Columbia River Gorge for future generations.

Austin, TX

When Austin was founded as the Republic of Texas capital in 1839, no Protestant church yet existed in the raw new town. That autumn the Rev. William Youel Allen rode over from Houston and, on October 13, 1839, preached in Richard Bullock's hotel and organized a Presbyterian congregation of six members. Bullock and James Burke, both former church elders, served as its first ruling elders.

Roby, TX

The Texas Legislature created Fisher County in 1876, but with no permanent settlers it was attached to neighboring counties for the courts. By 1885 enough people had arrived to organize the county, touching off a fierce rivalry between the rival townsites of Fisher, promoted by Wisconsin businessman E. D. Strang, and Roby, laid out by former Mississippi planters D. C. and M. L. Roby. An 1886 election made Roby the county seat, and with a courthouse underway the county's organization was complete.