Search Markers

Austin, TX

Local bookbinder and printer John Southgate built this high Victorian home for his family in 1888, dressing it with a bay window, shingled bands, and distinctive window surrounds. Businessman Charles Lewis bought it in 1913, and during his ownership the property also hosted a neighborhood ice cream shop and a one-room school run by his daughter. The house stayed in the Lewis family until 1979.

Southington, CT

This monument honors the residents of Southington, Connecticut who served in the nation's three great mid-twentieth-century conflicts: World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam Conflict. Together these wars swept up a generation of small-town Americans, sending men and women from a modest Connecticut manufacturing community to Europe, the Pacific, the Korean peninsula, and Southeast Asia. Memorials like this one became a fixture of New England town greens in the postwar decades, a communal way to keep the names and sacrifices of neighbors present in daily civic life.

Grand Prairie, TX

In 1910, Thomas H. Hall founded this cemetery to give his growing community a burial ground closer than the ones four miles away, dedicating four acres and laying out the plots himself with lot markers whittled from bois d'arc wood. The earliest graves date to that first year, and in 1918 Emma Motley funded the stone-and-wrought-iron arched entrance gate. Held by Hall's family until 1973, when it was deeded to a cemetery association, the grounds remain a touchstone of early Grand Prairie.

Lufkin, TX

Incorporated in 1938 and running by 1940, Southland Paper Mills was the first plant to turn southern pine into newsprint — a wood long rejected as too resin-rich for the job. The Lufkin complex cracked that problem, added bleached-pulp capacity in 1942, and transformed the paper industry across the South.

Fort Worth, TX

Organized in 1892 under Dr. I.L. Van Zandt and other elders, Southside Church of Christ took root in a fast-growing southern section of Fort Worth. After decades of steady growth it merged with the Central Church of Christ in 1916 and incorporated the next year, later relocating to this site in 1959. Through its outreach and missionary work the congregation has remained woven into the life of the city.

San Marcos, TX

For the first half of the twentieth century San Marcos, like most American towns, segregated its schools, teaching Mexican American children in a succession of separate buildings. When the city funded a new segregated school in 1948, members of the Mexican American community petitioned to integrate instead, arguing the building would only entrench division; Southside School opened anyway in 1949. In time it became one of the first Texas schools to offer bilingual education, and today houses a Hispanic cultural center.

Fort Worth, TX

Chartered in 1908 for graduate training in Christian ministry, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary moved from Waco to Fort Worth in 1910 onto a 200-acre campus given by the city's people, whose gift also raised Fort Worth Hall. Founding president B.H. Carroll and successors like L.R. Scarborough guided its early growth, and in 1925 control passed from the Baptist General Convention of Texas to the Southern Baptist Convention. It grew into one of the largest seminaries in the country.

Cleburne, TX

On October 29, 1864, messengers from nine Baptist churches met to organize an association to encourage cooperation and support their shared missionary work. Over the decades it carried several names before settling on the Southwest Metroplex Baptist Association in 2003, growing to some 66 churches and missions even as only First Baptist Church of Alvarado and Bethesda Baptist Church survived among its charter members. From a single room in its first director's home in 1950, the association's office moved several times before reaching a new building in West Cleburne in 1992.

Alexandria, VA

In 1791, as the brand-new United States laid out a federal capital on the Potomac, surveyors set about marking the ten-mile-square diamond that would become the District of Columbia. A team led by Andrew Ellicott, aided by the free Black astronomer Benjamin Banneker, placed sandstone markers at one-mile intervals around the perimeter — the first federal monuments of the new nation. This stone, one of the original boundary markers on the Virginia side, was later given protective care by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1916.

San Antonio, TX

Opened at midnight on July 14, 1923, this Colonial Revival building housed Southwestern Bell's Woodlawn telephone exchange, close enough to San Antonio's north-side neighborhoods that its thirty-five operators could walk to work. In 1936 it became home to Tobin Aerial Surveys, founded by WWI combat pilot Edgar Tobin, who pioneered commercial aerial photography and coordinated wartime mapping of much of the United States from these offices. Later serving the United Cerebral Palsy Association, the building was finally converted to residences.

Fort Worth, TX

What began in 1896 as a modest livestock show organized by Fort Worth Stock Yards men and Texas cattle raisers grew, decade by decade, into one of the great institutions of the cattle world. A 1908 coliseum brought horse shows and cutting competitions; by 1918 the renamed Fat Stock Show had added what is often called the first indoor rodeo, along with youth events and society pageantry. After relocating to this site in 1944, it swelled into a multimillion-dollar, weeks-long rodeo and exhibition drawing hundreds of thousands.

El Paso, TX

El Paso's rodeo tradition reaches back to the vaqueros and the great Western cattle drives, with a documented rodeo in the city as early as 1896. Civic groups nurtured a string of stock shows and rodeos through the 1920s and 1930s, and by 1940 they had merged into a combined livestock show and rodeo. The event found a permanent home at the El Paso County Coliseum in 1942 and, as it grew with horse shows and parades, was renamed the Southwestern International Livestock Show and Rodeo in 1964.

Dallas, TX

Founded in 1943 amid the pressures of World War II, Southwestern Medical College set out to give Dallas and North Texas a medical school that met the rigorous national standards born of the Flexner Report. Classes for its first 200 students met in prefabricated military buildings beside Parkland Hospital, and during the war the school doubled as an Army specialized training unit whose students served as military medical officers. Affiliation with the University of Texas in 1949 and a growth surge beginning in 1968 built it into today's UT Southwestern Medical Center, home to multiple Nobel laureates.

Itasca, TX

The orphanage grew out of an act of mercy in Dallas, where the women of First Presbyterian Church arranged care for four children of a deceased member. The church then resolved to found a statewide home, and the Files family gave the land where it opened in 1906 under the Reverend M. D. McLean. From the start it used the progressive "Cottage Plan," housing children in family-style homes rather than a single institution, and earned a strong reputation before its school closed in 1957.

Austin, TX

Travis County official and historian Frank Brown built this ornate structure in 1886, and the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company bought and restyled it in 1898 with a façade by architect A. O. Watson. It served as Austin's first dedicated telephone building, housing the company that was wiring the city for a new age of communication. The John L. Martin family later owned the building from 1922 to 1976.

Georgetown, TX

Southwestern University traces its roots to a cluster of pioneer Methodist colleges chartered by the Republic of Texas and the early state, whose charters it gathered up when Georgetown citizens offered land and support around 1870. Classes began in 1873 under founding regent Dr. Francis Asbury Mood, and the school was formally chartered as Southwestern University in 1875 after ceding the name "Texas University" to the state. Women were admitted from 1878, and the campus took permanent form with the Main Building completed by 1900.

Georgetown, TX

The oldest building on Southwestern University's permanent campus was planned in the 1890s and raised between 1898 and 1900, holding chapel, library, classrooms, and offices under regents J. H. McLean and R. S. Hyer. Donations poured in from across Texas—including land from the plantation of the late Republic president Sam Houston. Built in Neo-Romanesque style by craftsmen who had worked on the State Capitol, it embodied a young state's ambition for higher learning.

Irving, TX

This Irving-area burial ground began in 1868 with the graves of a woman and her daughter, now nameless, laid to rest on Seveir Smalley's land. In 1874 Edmund D. Sowers and his wife Freelove donated an adjoining acre as a public cemetery, and Sowers raised an imposing family monument from the sale of his own land. Many of the area's pioneer settlers lie buried here, in a plot still tended by the Sowers Cemetery Association.

Irving, TX

By 1856 Edmund and Freelove Sowers, newcomers from Illinois, had settled this corner of Dallas County, where neighbors farmed, hunted, and cut timber and Ed worked as a blacksmith. His general store, post office, and schoolhouse in the 1870s and '80s drew physicians and families until a small crossroads community — famous for its Fourth of July picnics and ballgames — took shape. Sustained by dairy and poultry, Sowers survived until Irving annexed it in the 1950s, leaving only its cemetery behind.

Brevard County, FL · est. 2020

Set on Florida's Space Coast near the launch pads that carried the program aloft, this 2020 marker honors the countless workers whose labor turned the Space Shuttle from a dream into reality. From 1981 to 2011 the reusable orbiters flew 135 missions, building the International Space Station and launching landmark observatories. Behind each launch stood engineers, technicians, and support crews whose names rarely made headlines.

Brevard County, FL · est. 2011

This plaque flew aboard the final Space Shuttle mission in July 2011, the last flight of a program that carried Americans to orbit for three decades. Its words thank not only the astronauts but the thousands of engineers, technicians, and workers who made spaceflight possible from Florida's Space Coast. It stands as a tribute to the end of an era at the heart of the U.S. human spaceflight program.

Columbia County, GA

On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry over Texas, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost in one of the defining tragedies of America's space age. That spring, Columbia County, Georgia — which shares the lost orbiter's name — marked Arbor Day by planting a living grove in the crew's honor, a memorial chosen to grow fuller with each passing year rather than weather like stone. The gesture linked a small Southern community to a national moment of mourning shared across the country.

Fayetteville, TX

Built in the late 1800s for the Forres family, this Fayetteville dwelling grew the way many rural Texas homes did—room by room, as fortunes and families expanded. Its German vernacular lines reflect the central Texas communities settled by German-speaking immigrants in the nineteenth century. A 1920s saloon fire next door scorched its south wall, and the house passed down through the family to Minna Spacek, staying in their hands until 1978.

Colorado City, TX

This burial ground began with heartbreak in April 1898, when R.F. and Addie Hargrove buried their infant son on their West Texas farm and then gave 2.5 acres to the surrounding Spade community for a cemetery and school. The little settlement that grew alongside the great Ellwood-Renderbrook Spade Ranch supported a schoolhouse, a post office, a cotton gin, a store, and a blacksmith. Among those laid to rest here are victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic and veterans of the Civil War and World War II, including a member of the Women's Army Corps.

Sabine Pass, TX

Ashley W. Spaight's 11th Battalion of Texas Volunteers—the "Swamp Angels"—grew out of the Sabine Pass Guards militia of 1861 and served the Confederacy defending the Texas Gulf Coast and the Louisiana border against Federal raids. Many of its men died not in battle but in the yellow fever epidemic that swept Sabine Pass in 1862. Those who survived went home to become community and business leaders across southeast Texas.

New York, NY

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was a brief but pivotal conflict that ended Spanish colonial rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam and announced the United States' arrival as a global power. This monument in Jamaica, Queens, was raised in 1941 by the United Spanish War Veterans — a fraternal order of that war's aging survivors — through their Captain George H. Tilly Camp No. 66. Erected as a second world war engulfed the globe, it was the veterans' way of ensuring their own service would not be forgotten.

Pinellas County, FL

This Florida park is dedicated to the American servicemen who fought in the Spanish-American War of 1898. That brief but consequential conflict, sparked in part by the sinking of the USS Maine, sent U.S. troops to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Florida's ports and rail lines made it a major staging ground, and many soldiers passed through the state on their way to war.

Sacramento, CA

Dedicated in 1925 to the veterans of the Spanish-American War, this memorial was raised by a local women's auxiliary of the United Spanish War Veterans. The brief 1898 conflict with Spain vaulted the United States onto the world stage, and its veterans organized for decades afterward to honor their service.

Gardner, MA

In the spring of 1898 the United States went to war with Spain, and within months young men from mill towns across New England—Gardner among them, then famous as the "Chair City" for its furniture works—shipped south and across the Pacific. Victory was quick, but it handed the nation an overseas empire, and the fighting did not end with Spain's surrender: American troops spent four more years suppressing a Filipino independence movement in the grinding conflict this memorial calls the Philippine insurrection. Raised by Gardner's own citizens, the monument gathers both chapters of that 1898–1902 struggle into a single act of remembrance.

Mount Vernon, WA

This memorial honors the veterans of 1898–1902 — the Spanish-American War that freed Cuba and carried the United States into Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the bitter Philippine-American War that followed, and the China Relief Expedition that marched during the Boxer Rebellion. It was raised by the United Spanish War Veterans and the Nelson A. Miles women's auxiliary. These were the conflicts that announced America's arrival on the world stage.

North Attleborough, MA

In the winter of 1898 the battleship USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana harbor, killing more than 260 American sailors. "Remember the Maine!" became the rallying cry that helped push the United States into war with Spain that spring — a short, decisive conflict that ended with American forces victorious and Spain surrendering its remaining colonial holdings. Towns across the country, North Attleborough among them, later raised memorials to the local men who answered the call to serve in that first overseas war of the new American century.

San Antonio, TX

This land carries some of the deepest layers of Texas history: home first to the Coahuiltecan peoples, then granted in the 1720s and 1730s to the Spanish missions of San José and Espada, and crisscrossed by branches of the El Camino Real. From these ranch lands, vaqueros drove cattle east to help supply Bernardo de Gálvez's campaigns against the British during the American Revolution. Over the following decades, Spanish and Mexican land grants passed to soldiers and prominent Béxar families like the Pérez and Navarro clans.

Gainesville, FL

In the 1600s, the region around present-day Gainesville lay at the heart of Spanish Florida's cattle-ranching frontier, worked largely through the coerced labor of the Timucua people who had lived in the area for generations. The largest of these operations was the La Chua ranch, whose name — itself a Spanish reshaping of an Indigenous word — echoes the layered histories of the place. These ranches supplied beef and hides to St. Augustine and beyond until raids and the collapse of the mission system swept them away in the early 1700s.

New Orleans, LA

For nearly four decades in the late 1700s, Louisiana was a Spanish colony, and New Orleans served as capital of the Province of Luisiana after France ceded the territory in 1762. This custom house on Moss Street, dating to 1784, recalls the era when Spanish officials collected duties on the goods and shipping that flowed through the busy Gulf port. The city's Spanish decades left lasting marks on its architecture, law, and street names before Louisiana passed back to France and then to the United States in 1803.

Devine, TX

Long before Anglo settlers arrived, this stretch of South Texas was crossed again and again by Spanish expeditions pushing north from the Rio Grande. Cabeza de Vaca wandered through the region in the 1520s–30s, and over the next two centuries soldiers, missionaries, and settlers — among them Alonso de León and Domingo Terán de los Ríos — followed, founding missions and presidios. At least twenty such expeditions passed through what is now Medina County before 1844, leaving Spanish names on its rivers and landmarks.

Pecos, TX

Long before permanent settlement, Spanish explorers probed the country along the Pecos. In 1583 Antonio de Espejo, returning from the New Mexico pueblos, reached the river and named it Río de las Vacas for the great buffalo herds; guided by Jumano Indians to their camp on Toyah Lake, he followed the waters down toward the Big Bend. Seven years later, Castaño de Sosa became the first European to travel the Pecos its full length on his own march into New Mexico.

Wilson, TX

This ancient road across the Llano Estacado was first traced by Native peoples and later followed by Spaniards, U.S. Army units, and cattle drovers, running from Gholson Spring past Tahoka Lake toward Big Spring and the North Concho. In the 17th century it carried Spanish visitors including Father Salas, who came from New Mexico in 1629 at the pleas of the Jumano Indians, and treasure- and pearl-seeking expeditions in 1650 and 1654. The trail knit together centuries of movement across the high plains.

Spanish Fork, UT

Placed by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, this monument records those believed to be buried in Spanish Fork's pioneer cemetery, some of whose remains were later relocated. Spanish Fork was settled by Latter-day Saint pioneers in the 1850s, and its earliest burial ground holds the first generation who broke ground in the Utah Valley. Reconstructing such a roll of the dead is careful, reverent work, honoring settlers whose original graves were often unmarked or lost to time.

Spanish Fort, TX

Long before it was a town, this site on the Red River was home to a fortified village of the Taovayas, an agricultural Wichita-affiliated people. In the mid-18th century it was the scene of a stinging defeat of a Spanish military expedition by allied Indians, and in 1778 the Spanish officer De Mézières named a post here Fort Teodoro in honor of Teodoro de Croix, commander of the northern provinces. Permanent Anglo settlement came only after 1850, and the place kept the name Spanish Fort.

London vicinity, TX

In 1808, in the last years of Spanish Texas, Capt. Francisco Amangual led some 200 soldiers from San Antonio to chart the most direct road to Santa Fe—a response to American explorer Zebulon Pike's recent trek into New Mexico. Leaving on March 30, Amangual's party pushed through this valley along the East James Creek, hunting buffalo and bear and battling stampedes, reaching Santa Fe on June 19 before returning months later; traces of the route are still visible today.

Oak Park, IL

Erected in 1928 by Oak Park Camp No. 80 of the United Spanish War Veterans, this memorial honors local men who served between 1898 and 1902 in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrection, and the Boxer Uprising in China. Those overlapping conflicts marked the United States' abrupt emergence as an overseas power, sending American troops from the Caribbean to the Pacific and East Asia. The veterans' organization raised such monuments to keep that service in public memory.

Toledo, OH

Raised by Spanish-American War veterans, patriotic groups, and the citizens of Toledo, this monument honors local men who served in the 1898 war with Spain and in the campaigns that followed — the Philippine Insurrection and the China Relief Expedition. Together these conflicts marked the United States' abrupt arrival as an overseas power at the turn of the twentieth century.

Sabine Pass, TX

As war with Spain loomed in the late 1890s, Congressman Samuel Bronson Cooper urged the War Department to fortify the strategic Sabine Pass, and by May 1898 — a month after the declaration of war — engineers under Maj. James B. Quinn were building two batteries on land granted by Augustus Kountze. The guns were finished but never fired in anger; the short war ended that December with the Treaty of Paris. Fifteen years later the abandoned site turned deadly when a boy was killed by an exploding ammunition cache, and hurricanes have since worn the earthworks nearly away.

Pierce Township, OH

Like hundreds of little crossroads hamlets that took root across southwestern Ohio in the 1800s, Spann grew up where two country roads met near Dutch Creek. A settlement of this kind lived on its essentials: a shared water well, a general store that doubled as the post office beginning in 1860, and, a bit later, the Ten Mile Presbyterian Church, which gathered the community from 1912 until 1943. As farms consolidated and travel patterns shifted, places like Spann faded from the map — though here the old general store still stands as a survivor of that vanished village.

Sparks, NV

In 1904 the Southern Pacific Company, then straightening the old Central Pacific line across Nevada, moved its shops and headquarters here and laid out five blocks of employee housing, selling lots for a dollar to workers who had to build within 120 days. The railroad even sliced up its Wadsworth houses, shipped them free by rail, and relocated its whole workforce on July 4, 1904. Incorporated in 1905 and named for Governor John Sparks, the town boasted one of the world's largest roundhouses and served as base for the mighty cab-forward "Mallet" locomotives that hauled trains over the Sierra Nevada.

Austin, TX

Built in 1927 for former state treasurer Sam Sparks and his wife Bertha "Polly" Sparks, this Spanish eclectic residence rose in Judges Hill, one of Austin's oldest neighborhoods and long home to the city's judges. The prolific Austin firm Page Brothers, later architects of the 1930 Travis County courthouse, designed it in brick, limestone, cast concrete, and tile. Bas-relief around the windows, arched doorways, and ornamental ironwork mark its careful craftsmanship.

Port Arthur, TX

John and Melinda Sparks brought their family from Tennessee to the Lake Sabine country of southeast Texas in 1838, settling on the Jeremiah Mixon headright and setting aside land for a family burying ground. The Port Arthur Land Company acquired the tract in 1896, and today the only surviving marker is a 1948 monument to Arthur Stilwell Smith, an infant who lived just ten days in 1896. The site preserves the faint trace of an early pioneer family on land later swallowed by a boomtown.

Dundalk, MD

Rising on the tidewater east of Baltimore, the Sparrows Point works grew from an 1880s Pennsylvania Steel venture into the sprawling core of Bethlehem Steel's empire — for a time the largest steel mill on Earth. Its furnaces and shipways turned out the steel and vessels that armed and supplied the nation through both World Wars, and a whole company town grew up around the jobs it created.

Spartanburg, SC

When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Spartanburg became a training ground for the war effort, hosting Camp Wadsworth where thousands of soldiers prepared for the trenches of France. This memorial honors the county's own sons who never came home, and its dedication of an airport to their memory reflects the era's faith in aviation as a symbol of progress rising from wartime sacrifice. The choice to name a place of flight after fallen infantry ties Spartanburg's grief to the new age of the air.

Spearman, TX

Spearman rose where the Santa Fe Railway pushed its line across the Hansford County plains, reaching the townsite in 1920 and making it the county's first rail shipping point. Named for a railway land officer, the town drew the county seat in 1929 and built its courthouse two years later, anchoring a country of wheat, cattle, and later oil. A burst of growth in the early 1960s and its distinctive brick-paved streets marked it as a thriving Panhandle farm town.

Spring Branch, TX

This gravel-bed low-water ford carried horse-drawn carriages across the San Antonio–Blanco Road toward the German settlement of Spring Branch, and despite frequent flooding its use grew between 1875 and 1906. Postmaster Hans Von Specht ran the local post office from his hilltop home overlooking the crossing, which came to bear his name. Automobiles later used the ford until a low-water bridge replaced it in 1920, followed by a new Civil Works Administration bridge in 1934.

Butte, MT

On June 8, 1917, fire broke out deep in the Speculator (Granite Mountain) mine beneath Butte — the fabled "richest hill on earth" — filling the shafts with smoke and poison gas. By the time it was over, 168 miners were dead, the deadliest hard-rock mining disaster in American history. The catastrophe hardened Butte's copper miners and helped touch off a wave of labor unrest across the mountain West.

Pinegrove Township, PA · est. 1999

On April 15, 1885, Samuel Speechley completed a natural gas well here at a depth of 1,963 feet, briefly powerful enough to supply Oil City and its neighboring towns. Drillers discovered at its base a deep gas-bearing sandstone that was named the 'Speechley Sand' in his honor and later traced across much of Pennsylvania into West Virginia. Remarkably, the well kept producing under a succession of owners into the early 1990s.

Waco, TX

Born in the home of early settler Israel Washington Speegle, this congregation formally organized in 1850 as Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, taking the Speegleville name after merging with a neighboring church in 1883. Led largely by part-time pastors and lay members, it sustained Sunday School, summer creek-side baptisms, and community outreach across the generations. As Lake Waco was built and enlarged, the church relocated more than once to make way for the rising water.

Mission, TX

Mission's public library grew out of women's civic energy: the Tuesday Club formed in 1910, and in 1914 the Civic League of Mission set out to care for a city park and start a library. For decades the collection moved between borrowed shelves and temporary rooms before winning a permanent home in 1948. In 1974 Juanita Speer Farley and her husband Hal donated a new site honoring her pioneer parents, George and Lyda Speer, and the library took their name.

Milam, TX

Widowed Rebecca Hopkins Speights arrived in Sabine County in 1842 with five children and eventually some 250 acres, part of which became a cemetery upon her burial in 1857. The ground was tied to prominent early Texans — revolution veteran and first county judge Mathew Arnold Parker, and legislator and merchant Joshua M. Hopkins Speights. Of its fifty-one marked graves, more than half are Speights, and an unknown number of unmarked graves hold enslaved members of the family's household.

Beaumont, TX

Set aside by the Marble family in the early 1870s, this small graveyard holds burials reaching back to the Civil War years, beginning with Martha Marble. The land passed to a daughter and son-in-law whose family name it still carries, and later generations formally recorded it as a cemetery in county deeds. Descendants organized an association to tend the historic ground.

Crockett, TX

About 1870, the schoolteachers John and Adele Spence built this house in Crockett; after John's death, Adele sold it in 1891 to druggist B. Frank Chamberlain and his wife Una, whose family added a kitchen and bay windows and kept the home until 1978. Its foursquare form, symmetrical windows, and center dormer on a pyramidal roof make it a tidy example of late-19th-century small-town Texas architecture. The house was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1994.

Reading, PA · est. 2021

Born in Reading in 1823, Spencer Fullerton Baird became one of nineteenth-century America's most influential naturalists, amassing collections that helped build the young Smithsonian Institution into a research powerhouse. He served as its first curator and later its second secretary, and as the first U.S. Commissioner of Fisheries he pioneered federal science in service of the nation's waters. His work bridged the era of gentleman-collectors and modern institutional science.

Lakehills, TX

John B. Spettel, Jr. built a fortune in area cattle through partnerships with his brother, brother-in-law, and neighbors, and by 1881 he and his wife Theresa Leibold had settled into this ornately trimmed house above the Medina River. Standing near Mitchell's Crossing on the road between Castroville and Bandera, it became a favorite stop for travelers. When the Medina Dam was finished in 1912 and the lake rose over its original site, the whole house was moved to higher ground.