Search Markers

Nacogdoches, TX

Along the historic King's Highway, in use since 1691, passengers boarded stagecoaches at Nacogdoches throughout the Civil War, one of the best-served stage towns in Confederate Texas with three stands and three lines. A Waco-bound traveler left at 6 a.m. and rode nearly five days to arrive, connecting onward to San Antonio, Austin, and beyond. In all, thirty-one stage lines carried mail, soldiers, and civilians across wartime Texas, most linking to railroads or steamers for far-reaching travel.

Austin, TX

After an earlier 1850s limestone statehouse proved structurally unsound and then burned in 1881, Texas financed a grand replacement by setting aside three million acres of public land. Detroit architect E. E. Myers won a national competition, and from 1882 crews raised a Renaissance Revival capitol of Texas Sunset Red granite hauled in on rail lines built for the job. When the Goddess of Liberty was hoisted atop the dome in 1888, the building stood more than fourteen feet taller than the U.S. Capitol.

Rusk, TX

In the late 1880s the Texas prison system laid a short rail line from the Rusk penitentiary to timber stands, where charcoal was burned to fire the prison's iron-ore smelters. Organized in 1894 and built by convict labor, the Texas State Railroad grew to reach Palestine by 1909, championed by two Cherokee County–born governors, James Stephen Hogg and Thomas M. Campbell. After the smelters and prison unit closed, the line passed in 1972 to the state parks system.

Palestine, TX

The Texas prison system first laid a short rail line from the Rusk penitentiary to timber stands where charcoal was burned to fire its iron-ore furnaces. Organized in 1896 and completed to Palestine in 1909, the convict-built railroad was meant to make the prison self-supporting and develop East Texas. After the furnaces closed and financial troubles mounted, the line was leased to commercial railroads until 1969, then handed to Texas Parks & Wildlife, whose inmate-restored tracks and vintage steam trains now draw tourists.

Temple, TX

In the 1930s, drought and wind stripped the southern plains of topsoil in one of the nation's worst ecological disasters, the Dust Bowl. As conservationists like Hugh Hammond Bennett pressed for solutions, Texas responded: after years of failed bills, Gov. W. Lee 'Pappy' O'Daniel signed the state's Soil Conservation Law in 1939, creating locally controlled districts and a state board — headquartered in Temple under first chairman V.C. Marshall of Bell County.

Woodville, TX

Allan Shivers grew up in East Texas and entered the state Senate in 1935 as the youngest man ever seated to that point, authoring Texas's old-age pension and unemployment compensation laws. After serving as lieutenant governor, he became one of the state's most powerful governors from 1949 to 1957—then its longest administration—winning the fight to restore the tidelands to Texas and reforming hospitals, prisons, and schools. He also chaired national governors' conferences and led the Council of State Governments.

Jefferson, TX

Charles Allen Culberson practiced law in Jefferson before rising through thirty-two years of Texas public office as attorney general, governor, and U.S. senator. As attorney general he recovered more than two million acres of public land claimed by railroads and backed Governor Hogg's antitrust reforms and the Railroad Commission, later leading the Senate minority and its Judiciary Committee.

Moscow, TX

Born near Moscow, Texas, in 1878, William Pettus Hobby rose from newspaperman to publisher to Lieutenant Governor, and became Governor in 1917 upon the impeachment of James Ferguson. His tenure brought free schoolbooks, compulsory attendance, a state budget system, and crucial leadership on Texas's World War I effort and the cause of woman suffrage. In 1931 he married Oveta Culp, herself a formidable public figure who would command the Women's Army Corps in World War II and later serve in President Eisenhower's cabinet.

Texas City, TX

Founded in 1910 to boost profits at the young port of Texas City, the Texas Sugar Refining Company grew into a nine-building, five-million-dollar complex employing hundreds and turning out a million pounds of "Diamond Star" sugar a day. It rode boom and bust — contracting to package sugar under the American Sugar label, sliding into bankruptcy over a mortgage default, reorganizing, and finally closing in 1932. Its buildings, later held by Monsanto, were among those destroyed in the catastrophic 1947 Texas City disaster.

Lubbock, TX

When Texas Technological College handed out its first diplomas on May 30, 1927, the graduates immediately organized an alumni association to stay tied to their new school. From offices in the Administration Building it launched a magazine in 1937, weathered lean postwar years thanks to a "100 Club" of donors, and grew alongside the booming college of the 1950s and 1960s. Renamed several times, it became the Texas Tech Alumni Association at its 75th anniversary in 2002 and today anchors the campus through the McKenzie-Merket Alumni Center.

Lubbock, TX

The Livestock Judging Pavilion was among the first four buildings on the new Texas Tech campus and the very first raised specifically for agricultural education, reflecting the school's founding emphasis on farming and ranching in the 1920s. Designed by noted Fort Worth architect Wyatt C. Hedrick, the versatile hall even hosted early basketball games before settling into its role as a monument to agriculture's place in the university's origins.

Lubbock, TX

Completed in 1927 to house the cows of Texas Tech's Animal Husbandry Department, this dairy barn was deliberately designed as an Arts and Crafts bungalow to appeal to the farmers the young college served, setting it apart from the campus's Spanish Renaissance Revival architecture. Architect Wyatt Hedrick laid out a working dairy complete with milk house, milking rooms, calf stalls, and a cast-concrete silo. By 1930 the operation supplied milk, butter, and ice cream to the cafeteria, and students could offset their tuition by selling the products of cows they kept there.

Kermit, TX

When Texas joined the United States in 1846 it claimed some 98,300 square miles reaching into five future states. After the Mexican War, anti-slavery forces sought to shrink the slave state of Texas, and in the Compromise of 1850 Texas gave up a third of its area for $10 million, using the money to pay Republic debts and seed a public school fund. A corner post four miles east marks the resulting boundary at the 103rd meridian and 32nd parallel, where Texas meets New Mexico's southeast corner.

Dallas, TX

Opened in 1931 as the largest suburban theater in Texas, the Texas Theatre was an "atmospheric" movie palace designed to transport audiences, its Venetian-court auditorium glittering with 118 twinkling stars beneath a painted night sky. Built at the commercial heart of Oak Cliff with rare Motiograph sound equipment, it drew crowds for decades. On November 22, 1963, it earned lasting fame when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in its auditorium after the Kennedy assassination, and later renovations, a role in the film "JFK," and a foundation's rescue kept this landmark alive into the twenty-first century.

Decatur, TX

In 1927 local businessman E. F. Boydston bought a former feed lot for $400 and sensed opportunity in the growing tide of automobile travelers. He built a gas station and let motorists camp overnight, then added cabins, garages, and the Texas Lunchroom, later the Texas Cafe — facing the buildings in stone and even petrified wood. Popular with students, families, and travelers for decades, the complex faded after a highway bypass diverted traffic in the 1960s.

Socorro, NM

In early 1862, Confederate forces from Texas pushed up the Rio Grande in an ambitious campaign to seize New Mexico Territory and open a path to the West. Near Socorro they clashed with Union troops at the Battle of Valverde, part of a short-lived Confederate bid for the Southwest that ultimately failed. This memorial recalls those Texas volunteers and the Civil War's often-overlooked western theater.

Dallas, TX

With some 90,000 Texas men away fighting for the Confederacy, the civilian labor of a whole society fell to the women left behind in a land of few factories and a tightening naval blockade. They ran farms, businesses, and newspapers; loaded shells and made gun caps; spun, wove, and dyed homemade cloth; brewed coffee from acorns and medicine from herbs; and faced raids and marauders along thousands of miles of coast and frontier.

Dallas, TX

Dallas's Love Field made Texas aviation history twice in the mid-1920s. On May 12, 1926, National Air Transport — a forerunner of United Air Lines — launched the state's first airmail service, sending single-engine monoplanes named "Miss Dallas" and "Miss Fort Worth" on a twelve-hour hop toward Chicago. The following year the same route carried Texas's first air passengers and express, at a dime a mile, cutting fifteen hours off the train.

San Antonio, TX

On October 28, 1928, a San Antonio station billed as "Radio Sam" launched a two-hour nightly broadcast entirely in Spanish — the first program of its kind in Texas. Owner Sam Liberto and businessman Edward Buckley recruited Julián F. Lozano to produce and announce "The International Goodwill Program," which he hosted in a spirit of cross-cultural understanding until his death in 1951. The tradition he began seeded the many hours of Spanish-language radio that San Antonio stations still air today.

Beaumont, TX

Along the Gulf prairie of Southeast Texas, early rice growers depended so entirely on rainfall that their crop earned the wry name "Providence Rice." J. E. Broussard changed that: a pioneer grower and irrigator, he founded the Beaumont Rice Mill in 1892 and helped organize the Rice Millers' Association, spurring mills across neighboring counties. The present mill building went up in 1907, and Broussard's descendants have kept the firm running ever since.

Farmers Branch, TX

This site marks the first agency, opened in January 1845, of the colonization venture better known as Peters' Colony. Under a contract secured from the Republic of Texas in 1841, William S. Peters and his associates introduced more than ten thousand settlers across seventeen counties of North Texas, seeding communities like Farmers Branch.

Weslaco, TX

Citrus was central to the Rio Grande Valley economy as groves boomed in the 1920s and 1930s — so fast that production outran the means to market it. In 1932, seventeen citrus associations formed the Rio Grande Valley Citrus Exchange, shipping under the TexSun and Tex Maid labels and adding box, juicing, canning, and cattle-feed operations. It became a public corporation in 1956 and closed in 1991, but left a lasting mark on the Texas citrus trade.

Vernon, TX

A lawyer and World War I veteran, T. Edgar Johnson relocated his family from Breckenridge to Vernon and, in 1930, opened the Johnson-Davis Ford Company at this spot. In an era when the automobile was reshaping rural Texas, the dealership not only survived the Great Depression but became a leading regional transportation business for three decades. Johnson also poured himself into civic life, serving on the Pease River Flood Control District and leading the Vernon Chamber of Commerce as its 1937 president.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1967

Thaddeus Kosciuszko was a Polish-born military engineer whose fortifications helped the Continental Army win the Revolution, most famously at Saratoga and West Point. After the war he returned home to lead a doomed uprising for Polish independence, and when exile brought him back to America he lodged in this Philadelphia house in 1797–1798. Here he received visitors including Thomas Jefferson and drafted a will devoting his American assets to freeing and educating enslaved people.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1950

Thaddeus Stevens made Lancaster his home from 1842 until his death in 1868 and lies buried in this cemetery, which he chose because it admitted people of all races. As a congressman he was among the fiercest advocates for abolition, equal rights, and free public schooling, insisting on the "equality of man before his Creator." His epitaph, which he wrote himself, made his lifelong convictions his final statement.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 1954

Before he became one of the most powerful and uncompromising figures in Congress, Thaddeus Stevens lived in Gettysburg, leaving in 1842. Here he built his early career as a lawyer and ironmaster while championing two causes that defined him: the abolition of slavery and the defense of free public schools in Pennsylvania, which he famously fought to preserve in 1835. From these Adams County beginnings he rose to lead the Radical Republicans and shape Reconstruction after the Civil War.

West Columbia, TX

Thaddeus Constantine Bell, born in October 1822, is remembered as the first male child born within Stephen F. Austin's colonies in Texas — a distinction from the very first years of Anglo-American settlement under Mexican rule. He lived until 1871; his wife, Elizabeth Cayce Bell, born in 1830, preceded him in death in 1864. The marker records a life that spanned Texas's passage from colony to Republic to statehood.

Fort Worth, TX

Built in 1906–07 by Col. Thomas Marion Thannisch, one of north Fort Worth's early developers, the eastern portion of this block rose to serve the booming Stockyards district as a hotel and office space. As cattle trade swelled the neighborhood, the building was enlarged in 1913 into a three-story commercial structure. Its decorative brickwork, chevron detailing, and corbeled parapet still mark the streetscape of the historic Stockyards.

Amarillo, TX

Established in 1877 by Colorado merchants W. H. Bates and D. T. Beals, the LX was one of the great open-range cattle operations of the Texas Panhandle, spreading across roughly 1,000 square miles between present-day Dumas and Amarillo. LX cattle were trailed north to Dodge City and on to the newly opened ranges of Montana and Wyoming as the buffalo vanished. A British firm bought the ranch in 1884, and when Potter County organized in 1887, the 38 LX cowboys voted to make Amarillo the county seat. Among its hands was Charles Siringo, later famous as a cowboy author and detective.

Richmond Hill, GA

In the mid-1930s the automaker Henry Ford built "the Bottom," the first of his employee housing projects in the Ways Station area of coastal Georgia, later renamed Richmond Hill. The name came from the swampy "bottom" land Ford had cleared and drained; on it rose 75 two- and three-bedroom homes, a recreation building, and a baseball field. Ford charged no rent until 1945, when tax rules required it — whereupon he simply raised workers' pay to cover the modest fifteen-dollar-a-month charge.

Rocksprings, TX

Built about 1895 by J.P. Taylor, an Englishman, this ranch house stood along the old Fort McKavett–Fort Clark Road when the country was still open range. In 1907 early settlers E.E. and Mary Sproul Morriss bought Taylor's acreage, patented more land, and turned the place into a social center for the region. Its name, "Chaparral," nods to the roadrunners and dwarf oaks that thrived across the surrounding brush country.

Port Huron, MI

On September 25, 1900, the schooner "John S. Martin," a 225-foot vessel loaded with iron ore, was being towed down from Lake Huron by the steamer "Grover." Maneuvering to avoid the wreck of the "Fontana," the "Martin" collided with an upbound ship in the busy, narrow waters of the St. Clair River. The episode is one of countless collisions and sinkings that made the Great Lakes shipping lanes among the most perilous stretches of nineteenth-century commerce.

Scranton, PA

In the mid-19th century, northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite fields ran on ingenious gravity railroads — lines that let loaded coal cars coast downhill by their own weight, with stationary steam engines hauling the empties back up a chain of inclined planes. The Pennsylvania Coal Company's route carried anthracite between the mines around Pittston and the canal at Hawley for more than three decades. This surviving 'Pioneer' car, retired when the gravity line gave way to conventional steam locomotives, was handed over to the City of Scranton in 1909 as a relic of that vanished technology.

Lexington, MA

This monument stands in Lexington, Massachusetts, a town whose name is woven into the founding of the nation—yet its message reaches beyond the men who mustered on the town green. Titled after the conviction that "something is being done," it honors the women whose courage and labor shaped their communities even when the official record kept their names in the margins. In the spirit of the town's revolutionary heritage, it insists that boldness and history-making were never the province of one gender alone.

Cozad, NE

The 100th meridian is one of the most consequential lines in American geography — the rough boundary where the humid eastern farmland gives way to the arid, short-grass High Plains. Cozad grew up literally astride it, and the line loomed large in 19th-century settlement, railroad promotion, and the hard reckoning between eastern farming methods and a drier West. Marking the meridian turned an invisible line of longitude into a landmark travelers could stand on.

Buffalo, NY

Standing where Lake Erie meets the Niagara River, the Buffalo Lighthouse rose in 1832–33 just as the city was booming into the western gateway of the recently completed Erie Canal. Its 44-foot tapering octagonal stone tower guided schooners and steamers into one of the Great Lakes' busiest harbors. Remarkably, it remains the oldest building in Buffalo still on its original site, even after its lantern room was replaced in 1857.

Henderson, TX

On August 5, 1860, fire consumed the entire business district of Henderson, one of Texas's most prosperous towns. That summer, blazes across the state stoked a panic that abolitionists and enslaved people were burning Texas towns, and Henderson's fire fed the flames of secessionist fury. A committee of fifty-two citizens hanged Green Herndon and an enslaved woman for setting it, though evidence was never established. Secessionist Louis T. Wigfall seized on the disaster, and Texas delegates later listed the burning of Henderson first among the events leading to secession.

Fort Worth, TX

As Anglo settlement pushed into the north Texas frontier in the mid-1800s, Native peoples grew increasingly determined to defend their lands, and raids and reprisals flared from 1859 into the 1870s. In September 1865, fifteen mounted warriors attacked two Denton County men near this spot; Wright was killed outright, and Smith, struck by an arrow, rode to Denton for help only to die of blood poisoning from the wound.

Berkeley, CA · est. 1998

On the morning of September 17, 1923, a grass fire swept out of Wildcat Canyon and, driven by hot, dry winds, tore through Berkeley's northeast neighborhoods, reaching as far as this downtown block. In only a few hours it consumed nearly 600 homes and dozens of blocks before firefighters — aided by companies ferried over from San Francisco and hundreds of university students — finally contained it when the wind fell. No lives were lost, but thousands were left homeless, including a large share of the university's students and faculty.

Paducah, KY

This spot marks the western edge of the water at the height of the catastrophic Ohio Valley Flood of February 1937—when more than 90% of Paducah lay submerged, 27,000 residents fled, and damages topped $22 million. The disaster drove over a million people from their homes across the region. In response, a twelve-mile floodwall, the TVA dam network, and upstream reservoirs were built to ensure it could never happen again.

Pearland, TX

After the 1915 hurricane destroyed Pearland's high school, local teenagers spent twenty-two years commuting to Webster for classes. Determined to educate their children at home despite farm hardship and the Depression, townspeople approved a bond in 1937 and built this brick schoolhouse, which won state accreditation in its very first year so graduates could attend college. With fifty-eight students, a school newspaper called The Gusher, and maroon-and-white Oilers teams, it quickly became the hub of community life.

Donora, PA · est. 1995

In late October 1948, a temperature inversion trapped industrial fumes over the mill town of Donora, turning a fog into a lethal, acrid smog. Emissions from the local zinc works choked the valley for days, killing about twenty people and sickening thousands before rain finally cleared the air. The disaster shocked the nation and became a rallying cry for regulating what factories could pour into the sky.

Killeen, TX

The 1st Cavalry Division traces its lineage to the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, raised in 1855 at Fort Belknap, and was formally constituted at Fort Bliss in 1921 to guard the Mexican border. Dismounted and sent to the Pacific in World War II, it seized the Admiralty Islands and, on MacArthur's order as his 'First Team,' captured Manila. In Korea it raced to Osan and became the first force into Pyongyang; in 1965 it was reborn at Fort Benning as the Army's first airmobile division and went on to serve in Vietnam. Since 1971 it has been based at Fort Hood.

Colorado City, TX

In the late 1870s, cattlemen were the first wave to settle Mitchell County, and the 96 Ranch became one of its anchor spreads. Round Rock merchant James Durham Wulfjen caught ranch fever on an 1884 visit, filed on three sections along the Colorado River, and coaxed his wife Mary Jane from town comfort to a lonely cabin on an old buffalo hunter's camp. He registered the enduring "96" brand in 1885 and, with his sons, grew the outfit to more than 12,000 acres of fine Durham cattle and saddle horses. The Wulfjens also helped raise schools and a church, knitting a working ranch into a lasting community.

Matagorda County, TX

Built in 1909 for A. B. Pierce, a Spanish-American War veteran who helped found the town of Blessing, this home became a gathering place for the area's civic leaders and visiting Episcopal clergy. It was here in 1916 that Pierce's wife Adelaide co-organized the Matagorda County Federation of Women's Clubs and served as its first president. The house has been a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark since 1968.

Haines Township, PA · est. 1997

This central Pennsylvania village was founded in 1786 by a Jewish immigrant who, in a striking act of generosity, gave land and even a communion set to the Christian congregations of his new community. More than a century and a half later, his example inspired a remarkable gathering: in 1949, tens of thousands of people came here for a day devoted to religious and racial understanding, complete with a vast outdoor pageant staged on a natural hillside. The founder's tolerance had become a symbol for a nation grappling with prejudice after World War II.

Austin, TX

Built in 1889 for Myron D. Mather, president of the Austin Water, Light & Power Company, this Shingle-style house is said to incorporate granite left over from the state capitol's 1888 completion. It briefly belonged to Texas Supreme Court Justice Leroy G. Denman in 1897, and in the decade after 1920 it operated as the Austin Military School — the source of its enduring nickname, "The Academy."

San Antonio, TX · est. 1936

For 13 days a small garrison held the former mission against a far larger Mexican force. Their deaths rallied Texas; weeks later Sam Houston's army won independence at San Jacinto.

Albany, TX

The newspaper known today as The Albany News traces a lively lineage of frontier journalism, beginning with a Union veteran's Frontier Echo founded at Jacksboro in 1875 and carried west to Fort Griffin and then Albany. Rival editors sparred in print through the 1880s until the Echo, Tomahawk, and Star merged into a single paper prized for its coverage of crime, politics, religion, and public morals. A succession of long-serving 20th-century editors gave it stability, and historians still mine its columns for insight into West Texas life.

Morristown, NJ

During the Continental Army's hard winters at Morristown, this house on the corner of South Street served as quarters for General Nathanael Greene, one of Washington's most trusted commanders. The marker recalls a moment of Revolutionary intrigue: Colonel Alexander Hamilton meeting here in connection with a suspected spy, reportedly preparing a deliberately inflated tally of American strength to deceive the enemy. Such deception was a real weapon of the war, used to make a ragged, undersupplied army look far more formidable than it was.

New York, NY · est. 1996

The Algonquin Hotel was home to the legendary Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s, a daily luncheon gathering of New York's sharpest wits, including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Alexander Woollcott. Their traded barbs and quips rippled out through newspapers and magazines, helping shape American humor and literary taste. Other giants of the age — William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, James Thurber, and New Yorker founder Harold Ross among them — also passed through its oak-lined rooms.

Marshall, TX

The Rev. Walker Montecue Allen, an Alabama-born Cumberland Presbyterian minister, author, and teacher, moved to Marshall in 1876 with his wife Eliza Ann and their nine children. Three years later he and his older sons did most of the carpentry and masonry to raise this two-story house in the late Greek Revival style. The Allen family lived here until 1942, a span of more than six decades under one roof.

Morristown, NJ

In the spring of 1780, Morristown was the winter headquarters of the Continental Army, where Washington's troops endured one of the harshest seasons of the war. It was here that the young Marquis de Lafayette, newly returned from France, brought word to Washington and his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton that a French expeditionary force of soldiers and warships was sailing to join the American cause. That alliance, forged after the American victory at Saratoga, transformed a struggling colonial rebellion into an international war that France now openly backed with men, money, and its navy.

Cotulla, TX

Amanda Burks and her husband moved their ranching operation to the La Salle County frontier in 1876, and after his death the following year she ran the ranch herself for more than fifty years. A believer in education, she was honored when the growing town of Cotulla renamed its 1909 brick school in her memory shortly before her death in 1931. A new school bearing her name rose in 1953.

Corpus Christi, TX

Mexican Americans served by the hundreds of thousands in World War II, only to return home to entrenched discrimination. In Corpus Christi, decorated Army veteran and physician Dr. Hector P. Garcia gathered some 700 fellow veterans in 1948 to found the American G.I. Forum, dedicated to securing the benefits and rights they had earned. When a Three Rivers funeral home refused services for a fallen soldier, Private Felix Longoria, the Forum's response — the 'Longoria Affair' — thrust it into national prominence as a leading Latino civil rights organization.

Terrell, TX

Banking in Terrell began in 1875, just two years after the town's founding, with a private bank opened by C. M. Bivens, John H. Corley, and F. A. Waters. Over the following decades a tangle of mergers and buyouts consolidated the town's competing institutions, with founders and directors including future Texas governor Oscar B. Colquitt and railroad magnate Edward H. R. Green, son of financier Hetty Green. Successive consolidations, including a Depression-era merger, produced the American National Bank, long the county's oldest and largest.

Mercedes, TX

In 1905, at the dawn of the Lower Rio Grande Valley's transformation into an agricultural powerhouse, developer B. F. Yoakum gathered investors to turn arid brushland into irrigated farmland. Their company bought a quarter-million acres and built the townsite of Mercedes as its headquarters, and by 1908 pumps were lifting river water into a growing web of canals. Within a dozen years the system had swelled to three main canals and five pumping plants, and it passed to public water districts in 1930 that still serve Valley farmers today.

Emory, TX

Between 1910 and 1912, James Alexander Amis hand-poured and cured the cast-concrete blocks for this unusual family home in Emory. Amis was a one-man engine of local enterprise, running a sawmill, lumberyard, truck farm, livestock operations, a pickle factory, and an undertaking business. He even sponsored a 1914 hot-air balloon flight over town and later championed building Highway 19 through the city.

Plano, TX

Hunter and Mary Farrell built this Victorian home in 1891, a substantial house typical of Plano's prosperous late-19th-century farm families. In 1934 Mrs. Farrell gave her daughter Ammie Wilson a life tenancy, and "Miss Ammie"—with her husband Dudley's support—became a noted breeder of prize-winning Hampshire sheep. Her trophies brought unusual renown to the small agricultural town.

Wichita Falls, TX

Completed in 1907 to a design by local architect Joseph C. Pate, the Anderson House rose on a hill overlooking a prospering Wichita Falls. It was home to businessman Guy Dewitt Anderson and his wife—a civic leader who served as a commissioner for the 1936 Texas Centennial—and later to oilman W. E. Connors, whose fortune reflected the region's petroleum boom. The Victorian residence still marks the former prominence of its neighborhood.