Search Markers

Mertzon, TX

This site marked a stopping point on the Southern Overland route that carried mail and passengers between St. Louis and San Francisco from 1858 to 1861, the great stagecoach line better known as the Butterfield Overland Mail. The spot was later used as an Army camp called Camp Charlotte. The state of Texas set the marker here in 1936.

Point Comfort, TX

This point on the Texas coast served as an early landing where supplies were unloaded for the interior. During the Texas Revolution, Captain Jack Shackelford's Alabama volunteers, the "Red Rovers," came ashore here on their way to the fighting. A town founded at the site in 1836 was short-lived, burned in an Indian raid in 1840, and the state marked the spot in 1936.

Segovia, TX

Creed Taylor built a two-story native-stone ranch house here in 1869–71, reputed to be the finest home west of San Antonio before fire destroyed it in 1926. Taylor's own life reads like a chronicle of frontier Texas: he fought at Gonzales, Concepción, and the Siege of Bexar in the revolution, rode with Jack Hays's Texas Rangers through the Bandera Pass and Plum Creek fights, and served in the Mexican War of 1846. A rebuilt house on the site burned again in 1956.

Freeport, TX

Thomas Phillip Crosby came from New York in 1830 and built a landing on the Brazos to serve the lower river's plantations, understanding that access to water was the key to commerce. Wounded at the 1832 Battle of Velasco, he returned to run docks, a store, a post office, a ferry, and even a voting precinct. When Stephen F. Austin died in 1836, the steamboat Yellowstone carried his body to Crosby's Landing on its way to burial at Peach Point Plantation.

Huntsville, TX

On this ground stood the first church building in Huntsville, erected soon after trustees bought the land in 1849 for the town's Cumberland Presbyterians. The sanctuary opened its doors to other denominations as well, and it embodied a frontier faith carried across Texas by itinerant preachers such as Sumner Bacon; from here Andrew Jackson McGown published the denomination's newspaper, the Texas Presbyterian. Battered by the Civil War and the deadly 1867 yellow fever epidemic, the congregation disbanded, and the building was later moved and eventually collapsed.

Abilene, TX

Beginning in 1885, Abilene police chief John J. Clinton (1848–1922) fired his revolver into the air each New Year's Eve at midnight—first to signal that saloons must close and that rowdy cowboys and townsmen observe the curfew, and later, once the saloon days had passed, simply as a beloved tradition he kept for thirty-seven years. Irish-born, Clinton had been a Confederate soldier and later an Army scout wounded at "The Fight for the Water Hole," and had policed Dodge City before Abilene.

Weches, TX

Daniel McLean first came to Texas in 1813 with the Gutierrez-Magee expedition and survived the disastrous Battle of the Medina. He returned as a member of Austin's original colony, settling this league in 1821 as the first permanent resident of the area now in Houston County. He and his brother-in-law were killed in a raid in 1837, and he lies buried near this marker.

Laredo, TX

Coal mining along this stretch of the Rio Grande above Laredo reached back to Spanish times, but it boomed after Welsh engineer David Darwin Davis found coal veins in Webb County and became superintendent of the Cannel Coal Company in 1888. The company town—renamed Darwin around 1900—swelled with miners, many from Mexico, and gained stores, restaurants, and boardinghouses during the 1900–1910 boom. As petroleum replaced coal, Darwin declined, and by 1930 it was all but abandoned, leaving a mine dump and cemetery behind.

Berkeley, CA

On this site once stood a brick building where painter David Park (1911–1960) kept a studio in the 1940s. Though his abstract expressionist work drew praise, Park famously hauled several years' worth of those canvases to the city dump and turned instead to richly colored scenes of everyday figures. From that break came the Bay Area Figurative style, soon taken up by fellow Berkeley painters Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff and recognized as a major West Coast postwar school of art.

San Antonio, TX

Built in 1734 for prominent Bexar citizens Geronimo and Javiera Cantu de la Garza, this block-long Spanish colonial compound had limestone walls three feet thick and lush gardens. Generations later, José Antonio de la Garza used its vault to safeguard merchants' valuables and, granted royal permission in 1818, minted the small coins called 'jolas'—making the home likely the first mint in Texas. During the 1835 Siege of Bexar, Ben Milam's troops battled two days to seize the fortress-like compound as their headquarters, and Milam died taking the city.

Dial, TX

From 1840 a log cabin here served as school, church, and community hall, while the Dial family's cotton gin and grist mill drew settlers. By 1880 the community had a post office and an academy that won renown under Confederate veteran and educator Robert W. Lane. Among the later teachers, in 1903–05, was a young Sam Rayburn, who went on to serve nearly half a century in Congress and set a record as Speaker of the House.

Seguin, TX

In 1851 the Jamaica-born land agent Jacob De Cordova settled beside good springs on the San Antonio Road, building a home that doubled as a stage stop and mail station. The land passed through a cluster of German bachelors—earning it names like "Nine Men's House"—before the Dietz brothers gave it their name and Johann Stautzenberger anchored it with a store, post office, and school. A singing society, the Frohsinn Maennerchor, and Friedens Church grew out of the little schoolhouse before consolidation, better roads, and the automobile quietly erased the town.

Weesatche, TX

Prussian immigrants Fredrick and Auguste Wilhelmine Dobsky settled here in 1847, and their descendants built a community around Henry Dobsky's general store—expanded over the years to include a post office, gristmill, blacksmith, saloon, and the area's only telephone exchange. A 1909 dance pavilion made Dobskyville a social hub until a 1942 storm destroyed it. The town declined after the Depression and World War II, its school closing in 1948 and its founding home dismantled in 1969.

South Bend, TX

After repeated failures, the Donnell family completed a dam and mill on the Clear Fork in 1876, and for nearly half a century it ground meal and flour for a vast frontier region. The mill yard became a community gathering place beside a river crossing once traveled by the 2nd U.S. Cavalry under Albert Sidney Johnston and Robert E. Lee. From this hard-won settlement grew Eliasville and a lineage that produced two University of Texas presidents.

Dozier, TX

In 1893 the men of the newly settled Dozier community built a one-room schoolhouse for the children of the surrounding Panhandle farms and ranches, with Seigniora Russell as its first teacher. Like many frontier schools it served triple duty for church and community gatherings and was moved three times before being rebuilt in 1913. The school consolidated with Samnorwood in 1934, and an elementary grade lingered until 1941.

Paradise, TX

First called Tylewater, this Wise County settlement gained the name Draco when it won a post office in 1883 under postmaster W. J. Mann. For a brief while it bustled with two churches, a school, a general store, a blacksmith, a cotton gin, and even a horse-racing track. But when the post office closed in 1889 the community began to wither; the school held on until 1933, and the last building was hauled away in 1937.

Matagorda County, TX

In 1832, when Texas was still Mexican territory, Jane McManus hoped to plant a colony of thrifty European settlers on a Mexican land grant she ultimately never received. A New York congressman's daughter and friend of Stephen F. Austin, she remained devoted to Texas even after her colonial plans collapsed, later living at Eagle Pass and building a career as a journalist and author. She was, the marker notes, the only known woman among the era's empresarios.

Belton vicinity, TX

John Thornton Dulaney left Virginia in 1849 to chase the California gold rush, then settled in Bell County, Texas, where after the Civil War he built a bustling farm complex around a grist mill, cotton gin, store, and blacksmith shop. A tinkerer by nature, he machined his own mill parts and often fed 35 people a day, including his millhands. His enterprise anchored the neighborhood—complete with a church and school he built—until it wound down around 1912.

Mexia, TX

Public schooling for African American children in Mexia began in 1883, and after fire destroyed the first building, this site received a two-story brick schoolhouse in 1915. It was named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, the celebrated Black poet and author from Ohio, and held ten classrooms and an auditorium under principal T. K. Price. A larger school replaced it in 1948 and served until integration in 1968, after which the buildings were eventually demolished—leaving the site as a landmark of the community's educational history.

Bay City, TX

In 1901 this block was a strawberry field and stand of trees just outside Bay City, until the school district bought it for $300 and put up a two-story, eight-room frame schoolhouse. A string of buildings followed on the site over the next half-century, including a 1930 Spanish Colonial Revival high school, and generations of Bay City children passed through — taught by figures like Tenie Holmes, whose decades of teaching earned her a school named in her honor. The last structure came down in 1986.

Belton, TX

In 1850 the widow Sarah Lawler, Tennessee-born and in Texas since 1837, put up a large shed-like building here to board the workmen surveying and building Nolanville—soon renamed Belton—as seat of the newly created Bell County. Amid tents, brush arbors, and log shanties, settlers moved in before the town was even fully laid out. After her husband Eli's death in 1838, Sarah had supported her family by taking in boarders, helping pioneer the county's growth.

Holliday, TX

Northern settlers organized this congregation as the "Wichita Class" in the community of Stringtown, holding services in both German and English by 1888. Renamed "Bowman" in 1893 for Bishop Thomas Bowman, it raised a church in 1897 and moved the building south to this site in 1901. For two decades it hosted annual conferences before merging with a Wichita Falls church in 1932.

Blum, TX

This trail, often called the Chisholm Trail because it fed into that famous route to the north, entered Hill County at Kimball Crossing. Drovers pushing cattle up from South Texas rested and reshod their horses at Towash and Fort Graham before fording the Nolan River into Johnson County. It was one strand in the great web of cattle trails that carried Texas beef to distant railheads.

Commerce, TX

By 1883 Commerce had outgrown the public school opened a decade earlier, so the local Educational Association bought this ground for a new two-story frame schoolhouse that became Commerce High School. Fire took that building in 1898, a brick successor followed, and a third school completed in 1937 was later renamed to honor longtime superintendent A. L. Day.

Tom Bean, TX

Named for two great white outcrops of rock nearby, Whitemound was settled in 1849 when Henry Lackey brought his nine children south from Missouri. A town blossomed around A. S. Lackey's grist mill, complete with a post office, churches, doctors, and the Bosworth Academy. When the Cotton Belt Railroad bypassed the site in 1888, residents drifted away, and Whitemound faded into memory.

Midland, TX

Before 1884, the young town of Midland had to ship its drinking water fifty miles by rail from Monahans — a costly, precarious lifeline on the arid Staked Plains. That year residents dug this well by hand, six feet across and fifty feet deep, and fitted it with a pump and a trough that watered both townspeople and their cattle. For a spell it supplied the entire community, turning a rail-dependent camp into a place that could stand on its own.

Longview, TX

Earpville was settled in the late 1840s by James Earp and his relatives from Alabama, growing along a stagecoach line into a hub with a post office, stage stop, Methodist church, and stores that served the region's farmers. When part of Earp's homesite was sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1870, the new town of Longview rose beside the tracks and Earpville faded away. Its disappearance is a classic case of the railroad choosing a town's fate.

Hemphill, TX

East Mayfield sprang up here in 1912 around a large sawmill built by Hiram Knox of the Knox Lumber Company, and was named for Texas Railroad Commissioner Earle B. Mayfield. Incorporated in 1914, the company town swelled to roughly 1,200 people with homes, businesses, churches, a school, a movie theater, and a hospital. But once the surrounding timber was cut out and the mill burned in 1937, there was nothing to rebuild for, and the town emptied out.

Austin, TX

Edward Mandell House came to Austin in 1885 drawn by the pull of state politics, and he became one of the most influential operators of his era, managing the campaigns of four Texas governors. In 1912 he steered Woodrow Wilson to the Democratic presidential nomination, moving onto the national and world stage. The rambling shingle-style home built for him on this site in 1890 hosted many political meetings before it was sold in 1914 and finally razed in 1967.

McKinney, TX

The Elm Saloon opened around 1883 in a two-story frame building beside McKinney's only railroad passenger depot, taking its name from a large elm near the entrance. According to an 1884 newspaper account, the gunfighter Frank James was arrested over a fight at the saloon, adding a note of frontier notoriety to its history. Rebuilt in stone by the 1890s and known variously as the Rock Front or Old Rock Saloon, it remained a local landmark until it closed in 1902.

Calvert, TX

S.W. Cox began a Sunday school at the Elmo schoolhouse in 1899, and later that year, with the help of Rev. R.M. Crawford, a Baptist congregation was organized. A separate sanctuary was built in 1907, staffed by ministerial students serving as weekend pastors. As the rural population dwindled, members worshipped here until 1969, when they merged with the First Baptist Church of Calvert.

Orange, TX

Chartered in 1856, the rail line reaching Orange was meant to knit Texas to a trade route pushing west from the Mississippi. Because the tracks halted at the Sabine River, the first depot here earned the name End of the Line Station, where trains unloaded cargo for transfer to riverboats and ocean freighters. Service continued in part through the Civil War—when some nearby rails were torn up to fortify Sabine Pass—before the interstate route was finally completed in 1881.

Maud, TX

Where Trammel's Trace met the water, a crossing first used by Caddo people and later by French and Spanish explorers became Mark Epperson's ferry sometime before 1837. Travelers relied on it until a wooden bridge, and then the modern span of 1924, made the ferry obsolete. When Lake Texarkana flooded the original site in the 1950s, the state moved this 1936 monument seven miles to higher ground.

Hale Center, TX

Epworth was Hale County's first settlement, born in 1884 when Methodist minister Horatio Graves of New York established a post office and dreamed of founding a religious colony on the high plains. He named it for Epworth, England, birthplace of Methodism's founder John Wesley, and carried the mail while selling supplies to settlers and XIT Ranch cowboys. Drought forced the site's abandonment by 1893, and its people helped found nearby Hale Center.

Lorenzo, TX

In 1879 a colony of English Quakers led by Isaac Paris Cox settled the high plains of West Texas, founding a town first called Marietta for Cox's wife Mary. Renamed Estacado when Crosby County was organized in 1886, the idealistic religious colony struggled against the harsh, isolated conditions of the Llano Estacado and had disintegrated by 1893, with remaining families relocating to Galveston County by 1895.

Shiner, TX

In 1897 local trustees bought two acres to build the two-room Evergreen schoolhouse, which served the Henkhaus community with a windmill-powered well, a wood stove, and a teacherage for the principal and his assistant. One room held grades one through four and the other grades five through eight, teaching about sixty children over a seven-month term. Community plays, dances, and ball tournaments even raised the money to wire the school for electric lights around 1940, before overcrowding and consolidation closed it in 1951.

Exeter, NH

This marker stands where Exeter's first meeting house once rose, the wooden heart of a New England town founded in 1638. In colonial New England the meeting house served double duty as church and town hall — the place where settlers worshipped, argued, and governed themselves. Though the original building is long gone, the spot remembers the earliest days of one of New Hampshire's oldest towns.

Calvert, TX

Dr. Ben F. Hammond arrived from Alabama in 1853 and built a plantation nearby, and when he granted right-of-way to the Houston & Texas Central Railroad in 1869 a depot, post office, and a few stores sprang up to ship planters' goods. As the railroad's fortunes faded, the town withered and had vanished by 1950. Many area residents today descend from the people whom Hammond and neighboring planters gave land to at Emancipation in 1865.

Alvarado, TX

As cotton spread across Johnson County in the 1890s, John Ezell built a gin on his land midway between Alvarado and Cahill in 1896, and it quickly became a major rural enterprise. Fire destroyed it in 1899, but Ezell rebuilt with new equipment before the next season. J. Otto McLeroy took over in 1917, and the gin—served by two rail lines carrying cotton to Dallas, Fort Worth, and Waco—operated until 1948 before its building burned in 1953.

Alto, TX

Fastrill was a company town built by the Southern Pine Lumber Company in 1922, its name stitched together from three men tied to area logging. At its peak it held 600 residents—Anglo, African American, and Mexican American in separate sections—served by a general store that began in a boxcar, a school, and worship structures, while 200 loggers cut 50 million feet of timber a year. When the surrounding pine was exhausted, the company closed the town in 1941 and moved the workers' families to Diboll, leaving only two graves behind.

Rusk, TX

In 1847 land speculator James Ferguson bought 1,600 acres in Cherokee County and built a mill, running it for several years before losing it to a court judgment. In 1869 Charles E. Ford, a New England Quaker, bought the mill and modernized it to grind corn, saw lumber, and repair machinery, building a small empire of 14 gins and mills across the county. His son kept the mill turning until 1917; today only the mill pond and traces of the race remain.

La Feria, TX

La Feria's first bank opened in this building soon after its 1912 founding, just as the Rio Grande Valley's railroad-fed farm boom was drawing settlers and capital south. Founded by Illinois-born Bailey H. Dunlap — who became the town's first mayor in 1915 — it won a state charter, was rechartered as a national bank in 1925, and moved to new quarters by 1927.

Bellville, TX

Chartered in 1858 with roots in the Chappell Hill lodge, Bellville Lodge No. 223 raised a two-story building on this spot the same year. Fraternal meetings filled the upper floor while the ground floor served as church and schoolhouse until 1881—a common arrangement in young Texas towns where one building had to do the work of many. Its early members shaped the community's political, business, and religious life.

Pittsburg, TX

In 1898, at the request of a local coal-mining firm, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie put up $5,000 to match community pledges and build the first of 31 Carnegie libraries in Texas here in Pittsburg. The masonry building did triple duty as library, opera house, and city hall, holding 3,000 books and hosting professional drama, lectures, graduations, and clubs — including women stitching supplies for World War I hospitals. It anchored the town's cultural life until a modern school opened in 1926, and the library itself burned in 1939.

Waco, TX

Around 1850, when Waco was a rough young settlement on the Brazos, worshipers reportedly crowded into a log house to hear the itinerant Methodist preacher Joseph P. Sneed — the beginning, by local tradition, of the town's first congregation. Over more than a century that flock moved through a frame chapel, a brick church, and the halls of Waco Female College before settling into ever-grander sanctuaries. Known affectionately as the "Mother Church," it traced the growth of Waco itself from log cabins to a thriving Texas city.

Friona, TX

Friona was founded in 1906 when a Kansas City land company, hired to sell off the vast XIT Ranch range in small tracts, laid out the town. Religious-minded settlers organized the Union Congregational Church in 1908, and with donated lots and a $770 grant they dedicated Friona's first church building — a frame structure with hand-painted arched windows and a belfry — in 1909. After that meetinghouse burned in 1921, this adobe chapel replaced it, serving the congregation until 1969 and later becoming a Girl Scout hall and pioneer heritage chapel.

Rankin, TX

When pioneers abandoned nearby Upland and resettled at Rankin in 1912 along the Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway, they first worshipped in the railroad depot before building a shared church on this corner. Future oil baron Ira G. Yates led the donors, and Baptist, Church of Christ, and Methodist trustees jointly oversaw the "Rankin Union Church," finished in 1915. For a time it also housed the local school and remained the county's only church until the late 1920s.

Whitley County, IN

In 1836, as northern Indiana was being carved into farms and townships barely a decade after statehood, Richard Baughan claimed 240 acres of this land directly from the federal government. By 1841 he had raised a combined flour and saw mill on the site, the kind of water-powered enterprise that anchored a frontier settlement — grinding the settlers' grain and cutting the lumber for their first real houses. The same ground served as the seat of Whitley County's earliest court, making it both the commercial and civic heart of a county just finding its feet.

Yorkville, IL

This site held the first county seat and courthouse of Kendall County, Illinois, from 1841 to 1844, in the earliest years after the county was organized. Frontier county seats were fiercely contested prizes, and the courthouse was the hub of law, land records, and civic life. Kendall County's seat soon moved on, leaving this spot to mark its brief founding role.

Dallas, TX

On this spot in 1842, John Neely Bryan—the founder of Dallas—launched the first ferry across the Trinity River, giving travelers a way over the water that would anchor a new settlement. In 1854 developer Alexander Cockrell replaced the ferry with a wooden toll bridge, sturdier infrastructure for a fast-growing town. The crossing became a linchpin in Dallas's rise from riverbank hamlet to commercial city.

Jacksonville, TX

In 1885 a two-story frame building on this hillside became Jacksonville's first free public school, only to be destroyed by a tornado in 1890. A three-story brick school known as the East Side School rose here in 1910–12 and taught students until 1939. In 1940 the Works Progress Administration and the local school district began building a sports stadium here, the Tomato Bowl.

Cameron, TX

Around 1841, frontier Ranger and Indian agent Shapley P. Ross built the first home in what became Cameron, choosing the spot for its reliable spring. Here he raised his son Lawrence Sullivan 'Sul' Ross, who would become a Confederate general, Texas governor, and president of Texas A&M. The pavilion later raised on the site hosted picnics, rallies, and an 1892 gubernatorial debate between Governor James Hogg and George Clark.

Nacogdoches, TX

Erected in 1836 by John Forbes — commissary general of the army at San Jacinto — this Nacogdoches house became, in April 1839, the first home in Texas owned by Sam Houston, hero of the revolution and president of the young republic. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936 during the centennial of independence. It ties the towering figure of Houston to the East Texas town where so much of the revolution's leadership gathered.

Ames, IA

In the mid-1850s, as the young state of Iowa filled in with homesteaders drawn by federal land patents, Washington J. Graham raised one of the first houses on the west side of what would become Ames. Graham did more than settle: he helped assemble the land that seated the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, the institution that grew into Iowa State University. This rock marks where that frontier household once stood.

Jefferson, TX

This site marks the first ice factory in Texas, an innovation that transformed daily life in the state's punishing climate. Before mechanical refrigeration, ice had to be shipped south at great cost; the arrival of local ice manufacturing in the late nineteenth century revolutionized food preservation, brewing, and everyday comfort. The works here are associated with the Blackburn Syrup operation in the river town of Jefferson.

Junction, TX

On a lot where a public corral had operated since 1877, John Allen built a livery stable in 1879 that quickly became the busiest spot in early Junction. It fed and housed visiting ranch teams, hired out horses and buggies, and drew men to gossip and trade. Owned by T. M. Hodges in its final years, the stable was made obsolete by automobiles in the 1920s.

Nederland, TX

In the late 1890s, Dutch immigrant G. W. Kilsdonk, Jr., working as agent for the Port Arthur Land Company, recruited settlers from his native Holland to this corner of Jefferson County. Among the businesses he built was a two-story mercantile store on this site that supplied goods and served as a hall for the young community's churches, clubs, and organizations. The original building burned in 1909.

La Grange, TX

In December 1840, in the young Republic of Texas, Bishop Beverly Waugh journeyed from Galveston to the college town of Rutersville—named for the pioneer Methodist missionary Martin Ruter—to organize the first annual conference of the Methodist Church in Texas. On Christmas Day he called the delegates into session at Rutersville College, where they heard reports from nine preachers, admitted four more, and ordained two deacons. From these humble beginnings the Texas Methodist conference grew steadily across the state.

Charlton, MA

In 1778, while the Revolution still raged, the earliest Methodist gatherings in the town of Charlton were held at the Batchelder home that once stood a half-mile west along the old road. Methodism was then a young and fast-spreading movement in America, often taking root in private farmhouses before congregations could raise meetinghouses of their own. Charlton's United Methodist Church placed this marker in 1984 to remember where its faith community began.

Ysleta, TX

Founded around 1681 at Ysleta, this Spanish mission is among the oldest in what became the United States, established generations before the famous missions of California. It grew alongside the Tigua (Tiwa) people who helped the Franciscan padres build it and who have maintained their presence and traditions there for centuries. Rebuilt and restored over time, it remains an active church at the heart of Ysleta, often called Texas's oldest community.