Search Markers

Temple, TX

In 1900 Temple's Women's Literary Club and Self Culture Club joined forces to found a public library, opening it first in a corner of the post office. A grant from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie's library program funded a permanent building that opened in 1904, run for years by volunteer women until the city assumed support. After fire, moves, and a 1963 relocation into a former post office, the Renaissance Revival library endured as a civic fixture.

Navasota, TX

Built in the mid-1890s for newlyweds Ward B. and Annie Foster Templeman, this Navasota home rose during the town's cotton-boom prosperity. Originally a Queen Anne design, it was later bricked and reworked in the Prairie School style, keeping its wraparound porch, multi-light windows, and a copper-clad dome atop a corner turret. It stands as a showpiece of a cotton economy flush enough to build in the latest fashions.

Gloucester, MA

In the working harbor of Gloucester—one of America's oldest fishing ports—a lighthouse first rose on Ten Pound Island in 1821 to guide sailing vessels safely past the ledges and into port. Decades later, in 1880, the painter Winslow Homer boarded at the keeper's house and produced a celebrated series of harbor watercolors. The little island thus binds together two American stories: the hard maritime commerce that built New England, and the art it inspired.

Rockwall, TX

This modest cabin, built around 1920 and moved here from the Pullen Farm on Highway 205, once housed a tenant farming family in Rockwall County. In the decades after Reconstruction, tenant farming and sharecropping shaped rural Texas life, with families working land they did not own in exchange for a share of the crop. The preserved dwelling offers a rare, tangible look at that hardscrabble agricultural world.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Founded in 1838 by settlers who rolled in by wagon from the Old South, Tennessee Colony chased fertile, well-watered farmland — and found wealth in cotton shipped down the Trinity from Magnolia Ferry. The town grew into a trade center reaching as far as Dallas, with stores, craftsmen, a Masonic lodge, and a two-story church-school-lodge hall finished in 1860. Its schools were famous enough to draw students from surrounding towns, including the Clark brothers who would later help found the forerunner of Texas Christian University.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Settlers from the southern states founded Tennessee Colony in 1838, a decade before Anderson County existed, and one of their first acts was to raise a log church on a nearby hill. The burial ground beside it holds graves reaching back to the 1840s and 1850s, though most were marked only by fieldstones long since scattered; the oldest legible stone belongs to Mrs. Manurva E. Shelton, who died in 1862. Deeded to a cemetery association in 1974, it still serves the community it has held for well over a century.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Founded in 1902 as the Redbud Chapter, this was the first Order of the Eastern Star chapter chartered in Anderson County, organized for the wives and female relatives of the Tyre Masonic Lodge. It took the Tennessee Colony name in 1936 and met monthly, then twice monthly, in the Masonic hall. Membership grew sharply after World War II as the chapter's fellowship and charitable work became part of the community's fabric.

Crockett County, TN

This marker points the way to the grave of a Revolutionary War soldier who joined the Continental cause in 1776 and endured the brutal winter encampment at Valley Forge, where Washington's ragged army drilled itself into a disciplined fighting force. After years of battle he turned west, fighting in the frontier campaigns against Native nations before receiving an honorable discharge at Pittsburgh — then the raw edge of American settlement at Fort Pitt. Like many aging veterans, he eventually followed the frontier south and west, coming to rest in the West Tennessee country that became Crockett County.

Timpson, TX

This East Texas congregation began in 1857 as a Union church serving Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian families, many of whom had migrated from Tennessee. First called Mount Carmel, its one-room frame building — with log seats — doubled as the community schoolhouse, and the name changed to Tennessee Church by 1871. The three denominations shared quarters, including a two-story building whose upper floor housed a Woodmen of the World lodge, until they finally divided in 1913.

Timpson, TX

Organized in 1857 as Mount Carmel, this was the first Presbyterian congregation in Shelby County. A one-room log cabin gave way to a two-story frame building in 1877 that also served the Methodist and Baptist congregations, the public school, and a fraternal lodge. The church built its own sanctuary here in 1914, and its rolls, dating to 1858, name many of the community's early settlers.

Belton vicinity, TX

In 1851, eight families from Tennessee came to this curve of the Leon River looking for good, affordable farmland, and named their new home Tennessee Valley. Sheltered by the Sparta Mountains, its fields gave grain, cotton, nuts, and peaches for nearly a century, though the Leon River's floods were a recurring threat. In 1954 that same river was dammed to create Belton Lake, deliberately flooding Tennessee Valley and two neighboring communities to protect the wider region.

New Orleans, LA · est. 1998

Built in 1842 in New Orleans' French Quarter, the Avart-Peretti House passed through Creole owners and later served as the studio of the painter Achille Peretti. In 1946 and 1947 the playwright Tennessee Williams lodged here and wrote 'A Streetcar Named Desire,' drawing on the very streets and streetcar lines outside his window. The play's steamy, decaying New Orleans owes much to this address.

Columbus, MS · est. 1974

Tennessee Williams was born in this Columbus, Mississippi, house in 1911, spending his earliest years in the Deep South whose voices and tensions would fill his plays. He rose to become one of America's foremost dramatists, winning the Pulitzer Prize for both 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' works steeped in Southern settings. The marker honors this as his first home.

Tennyson, TX

The rolling country around Mt. Margaret in Coke County was long ranged by Native peoples before open-range cattlemen moved in during the late 1870s. Permanent settlers followed in the 1880s, and in 1894 a post office opened under the unlikely name of the British poet Alfred Tennyson, with Sarah E. Kiser as its first postmaster. Schools came and went, but the community's ties endured through an annual homecoming and Easter sunrise services held near the old landmark hill.

Burkburnett, TX

Cowboys and settlers renamed this stream when they found, near where it meets the Red River, the ruins of a military post held by the U.S. Tenth Cavalry from 1873 to 1875. Its Black troopers and white officers — Buffalo Soldiers, many of them Civil War veterans who had also served at Fort Sill — guarded the frontier during the Indian Wars. Legend holds that after an Indian attack on the timber outpost, the men and horses lost in the fighting were buried together in a single grave somewhere along the creek.

Dallas, TX

The Tenth Street District grew from the enslaved people first brought to Oak Cliff in the 1840s into a thriving African American enclave after the Civil War. By 1900 hundreds of Black residents lived here, building a segregated commercial district, churches, and schools that nurtured talents the marker credits, including blues artist T-Bone Walker and Olympian Rafer Johnson. Highway construction in the 1950s and integration reshaped the neighborhood, yet its historic homes remain among the best-preserved of their kind in Dallas.

Terlingua, TX

In the Chihuahuan Desert near the Big Bend, Terlingua boomed after an 1890 strike of cinnabar—the ore that yields mercury, or "quicksilver." For a few decades it ranked among the nation's leading sources of the metal, and Howard E. Perry's Chisos Mining Company drew some 2,000 workers to a company town complete with a hilltop mansion, jail, church, and theater. When the mines flooded and mercury prices fell after World War II, the town emptied, leaving the desert ruins that make it one of Texas's most famous ghost towns.

Aransas Pass, TX

The original Aransas Harbor Terminal Railroad, built in 1892, hauled rock from mainland quarries to build the jetties guarding the pass. When a deep-water channel was dredged to Harbor Island, the displaced sediment formed a roadbed, and a new terminal railroad opened in 1912 along eight trestles, becoming an important cotton-shipping link. During World War I its "Toonerville Trolley"—coaches pulled by a converted Model T truck—carried workers to a Harbor Island shipyard. Business faded after Corpus Christi became a deep-water port in 1922.

Panhandle, TX

Renamed from "Carson City" in 1887, Panhandle was expected to boom as the meeting point of two railroads — until the Fort Worth & Denver City line swung 16 miles south, seeding Amarillo instead. Yet the town thrived anyway as a shipping hub, moving more freight during the great ranching era and the 1926 oil boom than any other stop on the Santa Fe line except Chicago.

Post, TX

Terrace Cemetery grew out of the earliest days of Post City, the model town founded on the Caprock in 1907 by cereal magnate C.W. Post. When two young deaths made a burial ground necessary, the Double U Company appealed to Post at his Battle Creek, Michigan headquarters; he supplied both land and a layout, along with a somber note on bowing to a power greater than his own. Platted at just under twenty acres in 1912, the cemetery has since grown to hold several thousand graves.

Post, TX

When cereal magnate C. W. Post founded Post City in 1908, workers gathered round rocks from nearby ranch canyons to build the piers of this cemetery gateway. Scottish immigrants George Samson and James Napier designed and built it, and Samson went on to serve the community as a leader for half a century.

Sanderson, TX

Terrell County was carved from Pecos County in 1905, part of the wave of new counties organized across West Texas as railroads and ranching pushed settlement into the arid Trans-Pecos. It was named for Alexander Watkins Terrell (1827–1912), a Confederate officer who went on to serve sixteen years in the Texas Legislature. The town of Sanderson, a stop on the Southern Pacific line, became its seat of government.

Terrell, TX

A school has stood on this Terrell, Texas, site since 1901, when a two-story primary school was built to serve children living north of the Texas and Pacific Railway tracks. Rising enrollment led the school board to replace it in the 1930s, and the current Georgian Revival building — designed by noted Dallas architect Mark Lemmon with Public Works Administration funds — was completed in 1936. It was renamed in 1979 to honor longtime superintendent John E. Langwith.

Fort Worth, TX

Platted in the late 1880s and knit together by early streetcar lines, Terrell Heights became one of Fort Worth's premier African American neighborhoods. Banker William Madison "Gooseneck Bill" McDonald bought lots here and financed homes for Black families—doctors, dentists, educators, ministers, and laborers among them. Residents like NAACP leader Dr. George D. Flemmings and businesswoman Lucille Smith made the neighborhood a center of Black civic and professional life through the desegregation era.

Alto, TX

Organized in 1851 and chartered by the Grand Lodge of Texas the next year, this Masonic lodge first met in the small Linwood community before relocating to Alto in 1852. It was named for a prominent public figure of the Republic of Texas who served as its attorney general and represented the young nation as both an Indian commissioner and a diplomat abroad. The lodge worshiped in two earlier buildings before its present hall was built in 1966.

Terrell, TX

Authorized by the Texas Legislature in 1883 and opened in 1885, this institution admitted 330 patients in its first year under Dr. D. R. Wallace, an internationally recognized pioneer of psychiatry. It grew steadily until, by 1920, its 2,300 patients made it the largest hospital of its kind west of the Mississippi. Only the fountain in its circular park and an old water tower survive from the original grounds.

Terrell, TX

When the Terrell State Hospital opened in July 1885, the institution set aside part of its grounds to bury patients who died in its care, with the first interment that October. Most of the graves are unmarked, a separate section serves the hospital's Jewish dead, and some burials date to a 1907 smallpox epidemic. Burials ran thirty to thirty-five a year through the 1950s and 1960s before gradually declining.

San Saba, TX

In 1859, Stephen Woodson Terry and his wife Volumnia Jane moved their family from Tennessee to this part of San Saba County, joining the first wave of pioneers to the area. The family cemetery has held Terry descendants and friends since 1880, when their ten-year-old daughter Pocahontas became its first burial. Stephen served the frontier community as its tenth county sheriff, and later kin like Judge Lloyd Warden Terry carried the family's public service forward.

Brownfield, TX

Carved from Young and Bexar territories and created in 1876, Terry County was not formally organized until 1904, when settlers finally arrived in numbers to work its farmland. It honors Colonel Benjamin Franklin Terry, the planter who raised the celebrated Terry's Texas Rangers cavalry regiment and fell early in the Civil War in 1861. Brownfield became its county seat at the heart of this farming country.

Brownfield, TX

Terry County had no jail at all until 1916, twelve years after it organized, when this small frame structure with two steel cells went up on the courthouse square. A new courthouse jail replaced it in 1926, and the little building passed to farmer A. T. Fowler, who moved it to his land and plastered its walls for storage. Donated to the Terry County Heritage Museum in 1974, it was relocated and restored on this site.

Kendleton, TX

For decades, whites-only "straw primaries" like those run by Fort Bend County's Jay Bird Democratic Association quietly stripped African Americans of any real political voice across the South. In 1950 local farmers and businesspeople, led by figures such as Willie Melton and Arizona Fleming, sued, lending John Terry's name to a class action against A. J. Adams and the Jay Birds. The fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1953's Terry v. Adams struck down the scheme as an unconstitutional evasion of voting rights.

Yoakum, TX

Founded in the 1850s and named for the family of county judge James D. Terry, Terryville raised a cavalry company for the Confederate Army and had a post office by 1869. In the 1880s the post office and most residents relocated about 2.5 miles away, and the original office closed in 1907. Today an old cemetery marks the first townsite while a Baptist church survives at the second.

Marion, TX

This limestone and stucco house, built in the 1870s, was the home of Carl August Edward Tewes, a German immigrant who arrived in 1854, served in the Civil War, and became a Guadalupe County merchant and longtime New Berlin postmaster. Its central-hall plan marks it as a characteristic early Texas pioneer dwelling, and it stayed in the Tewes family for a full century until 1976. The house embodies the German immigrant experience that shaped south-central Texas.

Taylor, TX

Frederick Bean "Tex" Avery was born in Taylor in 1908 and spent his boyhood there before heading west into the movie business. Directing at Warner Bros. and MGM from 1935 to 1955, he shaped Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Droopy, and reached for a Bugs catchphrase he remembered from his Dallas high-school days: "What's up, Doc?" His wild, fast, logic-defying gags reinvented the American cartoon and echo through animation to this day.

Canyon, TX

In 1959, along U.S. Highway 60 west toward New Mexico, teacher-turned-curio-shop-owner Harry Wheeler set out to lure travelers with something unmissable: a 47-foot, seven-ton concrete cowboy. Over ten months he shaped wire mesh, rebar and concrete into the figure, then dressed it in Levi-Strauss pants and a hand-stitched shirt topped with a Stetson-style hat. Highway reconstruction thinned his tourist trade and he sold the property in 1963, but 'Tex Randall' endured as a beloved roadside landmark of the Texas Panhandle.

Port Neches, TX

Woodward Maurice "Tex" Ritter, born in Panola County in 1905, grew from a Texas farm boy into one of America's most beloved singing cowboys. He carried cowboy ballads from a Houston radio station to Broadway—where he earned his nickname—and then into a long run of western films in the 1930s. A Country Music Hall of Fame member, he is best remembered for singing the haunting title song of the film "High Noon."

Harrisburg, TX

On April 19, 1836, the Texas army under General Sam Houston crossed Buffalo Bayou near this spot on a raft built from the dismantled house of settler Isaac Batterson. From this crossing the troops began the final march that ended two days later in the decisive victory at San Jacinto, winning Texas independence.

Bellaire, TX

After the Alamo fell in March 1836, Sam Houston's army retreated eastward with Santa Anna's Mexican forces in pursuit across the prairies of southwest Harris County. On April 18, Texan scouts led by Erastus 'Deaf' Smith captured three Mexicans near this spot — including courier Capt. Miguel Bachiller — whose dispatches revealed the size, location, and plans of Santa Anna's division. Armed with that intelligence, Houston intercepted the Mexicans and crushed them in a surprise attack at San Jacinto on April 21.

Panhandle, TX

When Carson County's oil boom peaked in the 1920s, Panhandle became a hub for oil-field supply houses and lodging was scarce. Clark and Margaret Downs opened the Downs Hotel in 1926 to meet the demand; it became the Texan Hotel after changing hands in 1932. Later converted partly to apartments, it still welcomed a few guests after World War II and, by the early 21st century, was the last boom-era hotel in Panhandle still operating.

Georgetown, TX

Envious of the lucrative Santa Fe Trail trade crossing the plains, Republic of Texas president Mirabeau B. Lamar launched the Texan Santa Fe Expedition in 1841—a mix of soldiers, merchants with $200,000 in goods, teamsters, and a newspaperman, hauling their hopes north in twenty-one ox-drawn wagons. Their first day's march ended near this spot on the San Gabriel River. Six hundred miles of drought and unknown country lay ahead, and the expedition ended in betrayal, capture, and imprisonment in Mexico City.

Edna, TX

Jackson County's first Presbyterian congregation formed in 1855 under John Adams Brackenridge in Texana, a bustling riverport and county seat that has since faded into a ghost town. The members raised this frame sanctuary in 1859 on the eve of the Civil War. When Edna sprang up along the New York, Texas & Mexican Railroad, the building was hauled there in 1884, later served as a warehouse, and now survives as a witness to antebellum pioneer life.

Texarkana, TX

Texarkana was born from a railroad land auction in December 1873, when the Texas & Pacific platted lots to open a regional shipping point at a spot long used as an Indian trade trail between the Mississippi and Mexico. Its distinctive name, blending Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, had been floating around before the town even existed, claimed by everyone from a physician to a medicine-show barker. Incorporated separately on each side of the state line, it grew from 40 auction-goers into a city of tens of thousands within a century.

Marshall, TX

Marshall's first railroad reached Caddo Lake by 1858 to connect with Red River steamboats, but the town's fortunes soared when Congress in 1871 chartered the Texas & Pacific to build west along the 32nd parallel. The T&P moved its maintenance shops to Marshall, and in 1911–12 built this passenger depot at the junction of the Texarkana and Louisiana lines. Its architect blended prairie school lines with Renaissance and Mediterranean details, crowning the brick-and-concrete station with a tile roof to anchor the view down Washington Street from the courthouse.

Abilene, TX

When the railroad reached Abilene in 1881 the town's first depot was literally a parked rail car, soon replaced by a two-story station with a hotel and dining room upstairs. Public demand for something grander produced the current Texas & Pacific depot, built 1910–11 in an eclectic blend of Mission Revival and Prairie School style, with a tile roof, octagonal tower, and diamond-paned sashes. Thousands packed the grounds in March 1911 to hear former President Theodore Roosevelt speak; after passenger service ended in 1984 the city restored the building, reopening it in 1994.

Terrell, TX

Terrell was born in 1873 along the route of the Texas & Pacific Railroad, its land donated by local families on the condition that a depot be built here. The first frame depot rose that year and quickly grew as freight traffic swelled; this brick freight depot replaced it in 1911 during a wave of national rail expansion. It served the region's economy until closing in 1977, retaining its broad hipped roof and freight doors.

Fort Worth, TX

The Texas & Pacific Railroad reached Fort Worth in 1876 and became a driving force in the city's growth. In 1931 company officials, led by president John L. Lancaster, built this passenger terminal—a striking Art Deco design by architect Wyatt C. Hedrick. As rail travel declined through the 1950s, the terminal saw the city's last T&P passenger train depart on March 22, 1967.

Sweetwater, TX

When the Texas and Pacific Railway pushed west across the state in the early 1880s, it remade the map of West Texas one whistle-stop at a time. Sweetwater got its first train on March 12, 1881, and grew up along the tracks as a genuine railroad town—homes, stores, and shipping pens clustering where the line ran. For nearly a century the depot moved settlers in and cattle and crops out, until passenger service ended and the station came down in 1969.

Colorado City, TX

When the Texas & Pacific Railway pushed through this valley in 1880, it turned a scatter of tents and dugouts into the "Cattle Capital of West Texas." Ranchers like Charles Goodnight and the great XIT had already trailed herds into a country where the last buffalo were vanishing and Texas Rangers guarded against raids. By April 1881 the railhead served some 350 residents with a county government, school, and newspaper, and soon shipped out thousands of cattle and freighted in the barbed wire and windmills that fenced the open range.

Baird, TX

The Texas & Pacific Railway reached this spot in 1880, platting a town by the camp of surveyor Matthew Baird and soon building a roundhouse and division-point depot. Baird prospered, becoming county seat in 1883. The present two-story brick depot, raised in 1911 in a Prairie style with a distinctive Flemish parapet, replaced an earlier frame building and stood as the town's landmark until the railroad left it in 1977.

Fort Worth, TX

On February 15, 1877, ranchers from northwest Texas met in the Young County Courthouse in Graham to fight the cattle rustling plaguing the open range. They formed the Stock-Raisers' Association of North-West Texas, pooling brands, marks, and ranch records to track stolen stock. Growing into a statewide body headquartered in Fort Worth, it drew in cattle barons like C.C. Slaughter and Burk Burnett and became a lasting force in the Texas cattle industry.

College Station, TX

Almost as soon as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas opened in 1876, it created the Corps of Cadets to meet its mandate to teach military science to its then all-male student body. The Corps sent more officers into World War II than any other institution in the country, including West Point, and spawned enduring traditions like the Aggie Band, Fish Drill Team, and Ross Volunteers.

College Station, TX

Authorized by the Texas Legislature in 1871 under the federal Morrill Act, the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas opened its doors in 1876 on 2,416 acres donated by Brazos County residents—the first state institution of higher learning actually operating in Texas. Beginning with six students and a mandate to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts, it grew into a vast university, desegregating in 1963, admitting women fully in 1971, and taking the name Texas A&M University. Its Corps of Cadets sent thousands of officers into national service.

Kingsville, TX

Kingsville citizens won a state normal (teacher-training) college in 1917, though World War I delayed its opening until 1925 under first president Robert Bartow Cousins, when it adopted the Javelina mascot and blue-and-gold colors. Renamed the Texas College of Arts and Industries in 1929, it grew with King Ranch land gifts and became a hub of the Chicano movement and the first Lone Star Conference school to integrate its football team. After stints as Texas A&I, it joined the Texas A&M System in 1989 and took its present name in 1993.

Spur, TX

Opened in December 1909 on land given by the Swenson land and cattle company, the Rolling Plains station (Substation No. 7) was one of seven experiment stations the Texas Legislature authorized that year to solve regional farming problems. Scientists here pioneered soil and water conservation, including a terracing method called the "syrup pan" that captured scarce rainfall and boosted crop yields. Work at the station helped shape national soil-conservation policy and brush-control and livestock research still felt worldwide.

Denton, TX

After the railroads reached Denton County, subsistence farming gave way to cash crops bound for distant markets, and in 1910 the state placed one of its Hatch Act–funded agricultural experiment stations here as Station No. 6. Relocated to the Luper farm in 1913 after soil trouble, its scientists spent six decades breeding hardier grains — cold-tolerant oats like Nortex and Mustang, wheats such as Quanah and Frisco — that doubled yields and beat back rust. The work seeded a web of seed, mill, and supply businesses across the region before the station closed in 1972.

Chillicothe, TX

On this forage-crop station in 1909, scientists planted the first Sudan grass grown in the United States — seed the Department of Agriculture had carried all the way from Khartoum. What followed was more than half a century of patient sorghum breeding under researchers like A. B. Conner, J. R. Quinby, and J. C. Stephens, culminating in hybrid seed that dramatically boosted yields. Their work reshaped farming across the semiarid Great Plains.

College Station, TX

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas — the ancestor of today's Texas A&M — threw itself into the war effort with remarkable intensity. More than 2,200 Aggies served, some enlisting with Allied armies even before America joined, and the campus was designated a U.S. Army training base where soldiers learned radio mechanics, auto and carpentry trades, and meteorology for aviation and gas warfare. The Signal Corps meteorology school here was the only one of its kind among the Allied nations, and as male faculty left for service, women joined the teaching staff for the first time in the college's history.

McKinney, TX

Organized in 1883 by a roster of McKinney's leading citizens—including former Texas governor James W. Throckmorton—the Collin County National Bank opened with $75,000 in capital and grew into a pillar of the local economy. From its first home on the courthouse square it moved and expanded over the decades, financing the growth of McKinney and Collin County for more than a century.

Bonham, TX

When the Texas and Pacific Railroad reached Bonham in 1873, it brought the small wooden depot that this larger brick station replaced in 1900. Damaged by fire in 1918 and rebuilt the next year, the depot served travelers and freight until 1950. Its Romanesque Revival lines mixed with early-20th-century knee-brace eave brackets record the changing architectural fashions of the rail age.

Austin, TX

Lincoln's 1860 election set off a secession crisis across the South, and Texas was swept along despite Governor Sam Houston's refusal to convene the legislature. Secession leaders organized their own convention in Austin in early 1861, adopted an Ordinance of Secession, and then — unusually — put the question directly to voters, who ratified it. When Houston would not swear loyalty to the Confederacy, the convention removed him and installed his lieutenant governor.