Search Markers

Wills Point, TX

Neal Martin's long life spanned the making of Texas: born in 1777, he came from Kentucky in 1816, hunted buffalo in Van Zandt County, and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in the war for Texas independence. He later rode as a Texas Ranger, campaigned in Indian conflicts, and served in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War. He was buried here at the age of 102, his grave later marked by a great-granddaughter.

Edom, TX

For decades the cotton gin was the beating heart of small-town Texas economies, and Edom's was no exception. Opened at this site in 1918 and run from 1924 by merchant C. W. Morris, the gin drew 700 to 800 farmers who depended on it during the frantic late-summer ginning season, sometimes running around the clock. After a fire destroyed the original machinery in 1929, diesel-powered equipment kept it going until it closed around 1946.

Cuero, TX

Chosen in 1846 as DeWitt County's first seat of justice, the town of Cameron honored Captain Ewen Cameron, a prisoner of the ill-fated Mier Expedition who was executed on Santa Anna's order. Though platted on a hundred donated acres, it never grew beyond a log courthouse and clerk's office, and after four elections and four court fights it lost the county seat to Clinton in 1850.

Caldwell, TX

The Camino Real, or Old San Antonio Road, was the great artery of early Texas, tracing ancient Indian and buffalo trails and echoing the 1691 route of Spanish padres. Stretching roughly a thousand miles from Saltillo in Mexico into Louisiana, it carried explorers, traders, soldiers, and settlers for generations before it was surveyed around 1800 as the "King's Highway." Here it also marked the boundary between the early colonies of Stephen F. Austin and Sterling C. Robertson.

Des Moines, IA

This marker records the site of Camp Burnside, a Civil War rendezvous where Iowa volunteers mustered before joining the Union Army between 1861 and 1865, including men of the 23rd and 39th Infantry regiments. Training camps like this ringed the North, gathering farm boys and townsmen into regiments bound for the front. From this Des Moines ground, Iowa sent its soldiers into the war.

El Paso, TX

After the Civil War, the U.S. Army found its old El Paso post at Magoffinsville unsuitable and in 1868 moved the garrison to the Concordia Ranch, establishing Camp Concordia. Built of adobe barracks and outbuildings, the post was renamed Fort Bliss in 1869 and, despite hard living conditions, guarded the frontier until troops withdrew in 1876—only to return within a year. It was the third of six sites the Army's El Paso post would occupy over the decades.

Throckmorton, TX

Established in January 1856 by Major W. J. Hardee's 2nd U.S. Cavalry, Camp Cooper guarded the Texas frontier against the Comanche and oversaw a nearby Indian reservation. Robert E. Lee commanded here for nineteen months before the Civil War, and the post launched the 1859 Cimarron Expedition. Texas troops seized it in February 1861 as the state left the Union.

Del Rio, TX

Established as Camp San Felipe in 1876 as an outpost of Fort Clark, this U.S. Army post was one of a chain of forts defending the isolated settlements of the Southwest Texas frontier. General E. O. C. Ord created it to guard against raiding parties crossing the Pecos and Devil's Rivers. After the town of Del Rio grew up around it, the camp took the town's name; with the end of Indian raids by 1890, troops moved on and the post was abandoned in 1891.

Gainesville, TX

In the anxious months after Pearl Harbor, the little North Texas town of Gainesville transformed almost overnight into a training ground for war. Activated in August 1942 and named for Texas-born General Robert Lee Howze, Camp Howze drilled infantry for the fight in Europe while also holding German prisoners of war and supporting air operations. Camp exchanges, libraries, chapels, theaters, and a base newspaper — the Camp Howze Howitzer — sustained the soldiers, and the installation reshaped Gainesville's economy and growth.

Juno, TX

Established by the U.S. Army in 1857, Camp Hudson guarded the vital San Antonio–to–El Paso road against Indian raids and was named for a lieutenant who died of wounds from an earlier fight in Texas. Federal troops evacuated it at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, reoccupied it afterward, and abandoned it for good in 1868.

Palacios, TX

Begun in 1925 as a summer training ground for the Texas National Guard on land donated by Palacios citizens, this bayside camp grew into one of the U.S. military's largest field-training sites after it was renamed for Major John A. Hulen in 1930. During World War II the War Department expanded it for anti-aircraft training and quarters for 12,000 personnel, and from 1943 to 1945 it held German prisoners of war. Returned to the Guard in 1946, it was gradually dismantled and the land sold off by the mid-1960s.

Edna, TX

In the anxious months after San Jacinto, part of the fledgling Republic of Texas army camped here from December 1836 until President Sam Houston furloughed the restless troops in May 1837. Commanded first by Felix Huston and then by Albert Sidney Johnston, the encampment reflected the young republic's uneasy standoff with Mexico. Its darkest moment came when Captain Henry Teal was assassinated in his tent one night in May 1837, a killing that still shadows the site's memory.

Village of Garden City, NY

As the Great War ended, the flat plains of Garden City hosted Camp Mills, a major mobilization and embarkation post for troops bound to and from Europe. From February to September 1919 a sprawling thirty-building complex here served as a base hospital, caring for roughly two thousand soldiers at a time as they returned from the front. Doughboys recovering from wounds, gas exposure, and the era's devastating influenza passed through these wards on their way home.

Imperial County, CA

This marks the site of Camp Pilot Knob, one of the sprawling camps of the Desert Training Center that General George S. Patton Jr. established across the Southwest in 1942. Covering thousands of square miles of Mojave and Sonoran desert, it was the largest military training ground ever created, hardening American troops for combat in North Africa and beyond during World War II. Soldiers endured brutal heat here to prepare for the realities of desert warfare.

Sabinal, TX

Camp Sabinal was established on July 12, 1856 by Captain Albert G. Brackett of the Second U.S. Cavalry to guard the San Antonio–El Paso Road and the frontier settlers strung along it. Federal troops held the post only until November of that year, and it later served as a Texas Ranger camp. Little remains but the ground where it stood.

Brady vicinity, TX

From 1862 to 1864, Captain W. G. O'Brien's company of mounted volunteers was stationed here as part of the Frontier Regiment, a Texas force raised to guard the settlement line against raids while the Civil War drew men and resources east. In 1864 the regiment was folded into the Confederate Army as the Forty-sixth Texas Cavalry. The camp reflects the double burden Texans carried during the war — fighting for the Confederacy while defending an exposed frontier.

Kerrville, TX

The U.S. Army opened Camp Verde in 1855 to guard the Texas frontier, and the next year it became headquarters for one of the country's strangest military experiments: some forty camels imported at Secretary of War Jefferson Davis's urging, tested as pack animals for crossing the arid Southwest before the idea was judged impractical. Confederate forces took the post in 1861; the U.S. Army returned in 1865 and abandoned it in 1869. The camel corps remains one of the most memorable curiosities of the antebellum army.

Camp Wood, TX

Camp Wood was established in May 1857 to guard the San Antonio–El Paso road and the Rio Grande Valley against raids, part of the chain of frontier posts the U.S. Army strung across Texas before the Civil War. It stood only a few years, abandoned in March 1861 when federal troops were withdrawn from Texas at the outbreak of the war. Its brief life marks the fragile military presence that shadowed westward travel.

Van Alstyne, TX

In 1889 area merchants and landowners founded Columbia College to bring quality education to the Van Alstyne area, housing it in a three-story frame building on this four-acre site. The coeducational school taught all grades through college, blending vocational training with the arts and sciences, and grew from 40 students to nearly 600 within five years. It merged into the public school system in 1906 and served until fire destroyed the building in 1915.

Matagorda County, TX

This marker records the site of the Caney post office, established around 1838 near lands settled during Stephen F. Austin's colonization of Texas. Along Caney Creek, such a post office anchored a scattered farming community in the young Republic of Texas, linking isolated settlers to the wider world.

Matagorda County, TX

This site marks the vicinity of the old Caney Post Office, in a district where members of Stephen F. Austin's colony established some of Texas's earliest sugar plantations. Along the fertile bottomlands of Caney Creek, colonial-era settlers of the 1820s and 1830s planted cane in what became one of the state's pioneer sugar-growing regions.

Sherman, TX

Founded in 1871 as the Sherman Private School but known to all as "The Cap'n's," this school for boys was run by former Confederate captain John H. LeTellier. A demanding teacher who drilled his pupils in English, spelling, and math, he also joined their games, told war stories, and played guitar at upstairs dances. The school held high standards and turned out many future community leaders until it closed at his death in 1913.

East Columbia, TX

Long before she became a national symbol of the temperance movement, Carry Nation ran the Old Columbia Hotel on this spot around 1880, during an unsettled chapter of farming failures and a strained marriage in this corner of the Texas coastal plain. Only after moving on to Kansas at the end of the 1880s did she take up the hatchet and begin smashing saloons, turning private hardship with an alcoholic first husband into a very public crusade. The marker anchors that dramatic later fame to an ordinary boarding-house beginning in Brazoria County.

McAllen, TX

McAllen sprang up after the railroad arrived in 1905 and irrigation turned the Rio Grande Valley into rich vegetable farmland, drawing a hotel, church, bank, and newspaper in short order. In 1916, border unrest brought some 12,000 soldiers to the area to restore order, and the resulting population surge fueled a business boom. Amid the growth, the Casa de Palmas Hotel opened in 1918 and became a leading business, social, and civic hub for the whole valley.

Gruver, TX

Brothers James and Bob Cator established this camp in 1872 while hunting buffalo on the Texas Panhandle plains. Over the next few years the site grew into a trading post known as Zulu, a small outpost of commerce in a raw and open country. It stands as a marker of the brief, intense era of the commercial buffalo hunt.

Silverton, TX

The Celtic post office opened on May 2, 1891 — nearly a year before Briscoe County was even formally organized — when pioneer E.R. Thomas ran it out of the store in his home. It moved the next year to the house of county organizer Hayden W. Savage before being folded into Silverton's postal operations in 1893. Though short-lived, it was a lifeline for the earliest settlers and cowboys working the surrounding Panhandle ranches.

Lovelady, TX

In the segregated schools of early-20th-century East Texas, Black families in Houston County built their own path to learning. Two schools for African American children, Center Hill and Smith Grove, merged in 1925 to form the Center Grove School, and a whole community took its name from the campus. By mid-century it was sending most of its graduates to college, powered by strong sports, vocational, music, and science programs, and it served the area until desegregation finally closed it in 1969.

Plains, TX

On the treeless, roadless ranchland of 1920s Yoakum County, local men built a one-room frame school near this spot in 1924, hauling the lumber in by freight wagon. Serving 64 square miles, it doubled as a church for Methodist and Baptist services and a hub of community life, with a single teacher handling every grade, the janitorial work, and sometimes even the students' transport for $80 to $100 a month. When voters consolidated the district in 1939, the building was moved to Plains, where it later became part of the American Legion hall.

Gun Barrel City, TX

Centerville became the seat of its county in 1848, chosen for its central location and built on land donated by Texas statesman James Harper Starr, with the clerk's records kept in a log-cabin courthouse. But its moment was brief: when the county was reduced in size in 1850, the seat moved to Athens and Centerville faded away entirely. Only the marker recalls the vanished town.

Marshall, TX

For years, schooling for Marshall's Black children happened wherever space allowed — in homes, churches, and lodge halls. In 1894 Professor H. B. Pemberton, Sr., persuaded city officials to back a real school and arranged a loan, repaid by the Black community itself, to build "Central School" on this site. It grew to include a high school by 1906, and after Central High moved in 1925 the campus continued as Hillside School until it closed in 1941.

Daingerfield, TX

Chapel Hill College was chartered in 1850 and opened in 1852 in a brick building on land donated by Republic of Texas surveyor Allen Urquhart. Founded by the Marshall Presbytery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church to train ministers, it also taught medicine, law, and the liberal arts. A shortage of students and funds forced it to close in 1869.

Chappell Hill, TX

Founded in 1852 by the Methodist Church as the Chappel Hill Male and Female Institute, this was one of early Texas's pioneering schools. After a separate boys' college opened nearby in 1856, this campus became a school devoted to educating girls, a rare commitment in its era. It served the community until closing in 1912.

Mullin, TX

Chesser Valley took its name from John Dan Chesser, a Missouri native who came to Texas in 1854 and, after serving in the Texas State Troops during the Civil War, homesteaded 160 acres here with his wife Elizabeth. Their expanding log home doubled as church, hospital, and travelers' hotel, and the valley became a gathering place for camp meetings where families came by wagon to worship under a brush tabernacle. A one-teacher school opened in 1868, but after the Chesser house burned in 1926 the little community all but vanished.

Corpus Christi, TX

What began in 1896 as a one-year experiment to teach Corpus Christi's Mexican American children grew into a thriving school, gaining a permanent building in 1901 and later named for benefactor Cheston L. Heath. Under longtime principal Rose Dunne Shaw—who ran a soup kitchen for her pupils during the Depression—it educated generations of students until 1968, when they were integrated into other district schools; the site later became the Nueces County Courthouse.

Lamesa, TX

Around 1887, Chicago lumberman W.C. Bishop and George N. Fletcher founded the OTO (later Bar TO) ranch in Dawson County, and in 1889 a post office opened at its headquarters — named Chicago partly in wry jest at the empty surrounding plains. A village grew up around it, serving nearby spreads like C.C. Slaughter's Long S, until Lamesa won the county-seat contest in 1905. Within days Chicago's homes, businesses, school, and churches had picked up and moved south, and the community vanished.

Del Rio, TX

The Chihuahua Road was a bustling nineteenth-century trade artery linking the silver and gold country of Chihuahua, Mexico, with the Texas port of Indianola. It carried everything from stagecoaches and ox-carts to California-bound Forty-Niners chasing the gold rush. The road's commercial reign lasted until 1877, when the railroad reached San Antonio and rendered the long overland haul obsolete.

Belton, TX

Robert Childers, a pioneer settler and veteran of the 1836 Army of Texas, built the first water-powered mill in Bell County here in 1847. Sold in 1856 to G. W. Shanklin, who was said to have built the best water race in Texas, the site also served as a stage stand on the Old Military Road and a crossing point for cattle bound up the trail. It was a hub where settlement, commerce, and travel converged on the early Texas frontier.

Riverside, TX

Founded in 1838 by James C. De Witt, Cincinnati was once an important shipping point on the Trinity River, part of the network of riverboat landings that moved goods through early Texas. The town flourished only briefly: a devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1853 emptied it, and Cincinnati was abandoned. Today only a marker recalls the vanished river port.

Clifton, TX

R.G. Grant built a water-powered wooden mill on the Bosque River here in 1857, and during the Civil War the building served as a commissary and storehouse for the Confederate Army. Under later owner William Kemp, a new stone mill supplied flour and cornmeal hauled by ox cart to frontier settlements and forts across West Texas, and former governor and U.S. senator Richard Coke once held an interest in it. Rebuilt with a distinctive mansard roof and cupola, the mill later became an electric power plant before it was demolished in 1915.

Bacliff, TX

Established in 1910 by landowners G. C. Perkins and W. Y. Fuqua, Clifton-by-the-Sea was a bayside resort that rose as prosperity returned to Galveston County after the catastrophic 1900 storm. Reached by the rail line along Galveston Bay's western shore, it offered a hotel, summer homes, and a pier-mounted bathhouse and pavilion that hosted dances with Houston and Galveston orchestras. Hurricanes repeatedly wrecked the resort until a 1943 storm ended it for good; after World War II the area became home to petrochemical workers and, in 1948, took the name Bacliff.

Mineola, TX

After moving to the railroad town of Mineola in 1897, Dr. Walter Jackson Coleman was persuaded to open a pharmacy, launching the Coleman Family Drug Store in 1902. He earned his patients' trust with house calls and by accepting food as payment, while his son Charlie mastered patent formulas and won a pharmacist's license. Two more sons ran an adjoining clinic in the 1930s, and the family business served Mineola until 1964.

Beaumont, TX

A crossing near this spot on the old Opelousas Trail carried travelers over the Neches as early as 1750, when Spanish, French, and Anglo explorers, priests, and traders followed Indian traces toward Louisiana. Its greatest era came from the 1820s to 1900, when great cattle herds forded here to bypass the streets of Beaumont. Though many operated it, the ferry took its lasting name from the Collier family, who ran it for fifty years.

Anna, TX

Collin McKinney had already helped draft the Texas Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the Republic of Texas when he settled this area around 1846, buying 640 acres for $500. His family helped build the Mantua Road, organize the town of Mantua, and found a church before he divided his land among his heirs and died in 1861. His house stood until it burned in 1980, and both a county and its seat carry his name.

Columbus, TX

Founded on February 3, 1851, by the local Masonic lodge, the Columbus Female Seminary was the first organized school in Columbus, occupying the first floor of the lodge hall. For many years it taught literary subjects, music, and art to the town's young women. The building was destroyed by the great hurricane of September 1909.

St. Stockton, TX

Fed by water rising along geological faults, Comanche Springs gushed as one of the largest and most reliable oases in arid West Texas, drawing Native peoples since pre-Columbian times. Spanish wanderers — possibly Cabeza de Vaca around 1536 and the Mendoza expedition in 1684 — paused at its waters, as later did Comanche raiders on their war trail, gold seekers bound for California, and the Butterfield Overland Mail. Modern irrigation eventually drew down the aquifer until the springs ran dry.

Commerce, TX

On this ground the Missionary Baptist Church built a sanctuary in 1893, beginning a long chain of congregations that passed through the property over the next seventy years. The Commerce Church of Christ acquired and enlarged the building in the early twentieth century, notable for the many East Texas State Teachers College faculty who served as its elders and preachers. Baptist and later Lutheran congregations owned the site into the 1960s.

Westbrook, TX

Settlers C. P. and Mattie Conaway opened this West Texas community in 1891, and by 1896 a one-room school served nine pupils who wrote on slates and drank from a shared water bucket. As farm families arrived the school grew — a brick building with an auditorium replaced the frame one after a 1929 fire, and enrollment peaked at 115 in 1933-34. Consolidation with Westbrook ended its run, and the building was dismantled in 1947.

Rye, TX

Concord Baptist Church was organized on May 24, 1845, with a small band of charter members in the earliest days of Texas statehood. It sent delegates to the Baptist State Convention founded in 1848 at Anderson, marking its place in the state's organized Baptist life. General Sam Houston, whose mother-in-law Nancy Lea and wife Margaret were among the founders, is recorded as having attended services here.

Liberty Hill, TX

In country first settled in the 1850s, a succession of one-room schools — Clear Creek, then Concord — served the scattered families of the Bear Creek settlement. In 1896 the Elliott family donated land on the creek for a schoolhouse that grew as enrollment climbed to 133 by the 1930s. The school faded in the 1940s as young people left for the war effort.

Lancaster, TX

In 1862, with the Confederacy scrambling to arm itself, a partnership of Dallas-area men set up a small factory here to manufacture pistols for the State of Texas. Frontier Texas had little heavy industry, so improvised arms works like this one were vital to supplying troops far from the Southern manufacturing centers of the East.

Bastrop, TX

In 1862, as the Confederacy scrambled to arm itself, N. B. Tanner established a factory at Bastrop to manufacture guns and bayonets for the war effort. It operated until the Confederacy's collapse in 1865. Such small, improvised arms works reflected the South's chronic struggle to supply its armies.

Lakeside, TX

As Civil War veterans aged into the twentieth century, communities across the South built spaces to honor and care for them. Fort Worth businessman Khleber Van Zandt organized a large United Confederate Veterans camp in 1889, and by 1901 it had chartered a 373-acre park for the "recreation, refuge and relief" of old soldiers and their families. The grounds hosted picnics and statewide reunions for two decades before the dwindling ranks of survivors led the association to dissolve in the 1920s.

Houston, TX

A Buffalo Bayou shipping warehouse on this site was pressed into service during the Civil War as a compound for Union prisoners of war, holding some 350 Federals captured in early 1863 by General John B. Magruder's Confederate forces. Houston was a vital Confederate center, home to training fields, hospitals, foundries, and rail lines, and served as headquarters for the Military District of Texas. The city's several prison compounds were part of that wartime machinery.

Canyon, TX

On land he claimed on Christmas Day of 1887, L. G. Conner dug a half-dugout—a dwelling cut partly into the earth with windows at ground level—that became the first home in what would grow into Canyon, Texas. The little dugout doubled as the town's first post office and hosted the 1889 election that organized Randall County. It was also the birthplace of Mamie Conner, recorded as the first white child born in the county.

Burkburnett, TX

Arkansas natives J. D. and Dora Cooper established a farmstead here around 1900, and in 1910 J. D. persuaded the county to create a school district for the growing community that bore their name. Cooper School opened about 1910, and Cooper Methodist Church, organized in 1913, met in the schoolhouse until a chapel was built a few years later. Both institutions eventually merged with neighbors — the school in the late 1920s and the church in 1947.

San Marcos, TX

Founded in 1868 by educator O. N. Hollingsworth, the Coronal Institute crowned a San Marcos hilltop—hence its name—as a private, coeducational school that also drilled its boys in military training. It changed hands from Rev. R. H. Belvin to the Methodist Church, weathered an 1890 fire that destroyed its limestone hall, and rose again as a handsome three-story building. Hundreds of students passed through before the Methodists closed it in 1918 and the San Marcos district bought the site in 1925.

Rio Grande City, TX

On the eve of the Civil War, the lower Rio Grande Valley was thrown into turmoil by partisan leader Juan Cortina. On December 27, 1859, his band was surprised at daybreak here by U.S. Army troops under Major Heintzelman, joined by Texas Rangers, and scattered in defeat, with Cortina fleeing across the river. Regarrisoning of nearby Ringgold Barracks calmed the border, but raids flared again during and after the war until Cortina's power finally waned.

Cost, TX

The rural community of Cost—once known as Oso—patched together its schooling from scattered district schools until, in 1915, trustees hired noted architect Henry T. Phelps to design a proper schoolhouse. The two-story brick building opened in 1916 to 125 students, and over the years its curriculum grew from the basics to music, homemaking, shop, and athletics. After the district was folded into Gonzales in 1949, the school closed in 1959 and its very bricks were carried off to build a house across the road.

Olney, TX

A lone cottonwood and a dependable spring made this spot a vital oasis on the nineteenth-century Texas frontier, its ground still scarred by wagon ruts. In 1849 Captain Randolph B. Marcy camped here while mapping a road for California gold-seekers, and over the next decade the spring watered soldiers establishing Fort Belknap, surveyors scouting Indian reservations, and the Butterfield Overland Mail. Rangers and cavalry under "Rip" Ford and Earl Van Dorn also staged here before riding north to fight Comanche raiders.

Cottonwood, TX

After the U.S. Army's campaigns of 1874 broke the power of the Plains tribes, settlers rushed into this corner of Callahan County, drawn by game, water, and good ranching and farming land. Cottonwood Springs, founded in 1875 at the head of Green Briar Creek, quickly grew into a trading center with stores, two churches, and a school—though it saw its share of gunfights. When a post office opened in 1883, the name was trimmed simply to Cottonwood.