Search Markers

Egypt, TX

In 1838, during the Republic of Texas, William Jones Elliot Heard bought more than 2,000 acres in what became Wharton County and founded the Egypt Plantation, setting aside three acres for a family burying ground. Its oldest marked grave, covered like others by a brick crypt, belongs to Heard's young son George, who died in 1854, and his wife America was laid to rest here the following year. Still tended by Heard's descendants, including the Northington family, the cemetery holds many of his heirs and a number of unmarked graves.

Brookfield, IL

Dedicated in 1964 and anchored by an F-86 Sabre jet, this monument in Ehlert Park honors those who served in the Korean Conflict between 1950 and 1953. The Sabre was the iconic American fighter of that war, dueling MiGs in the skies over the Korean peninsula. Local veterans' groups—the American Legion, VFW, Moose, and AMVETS—joined to raise the memorial for their community's servicemen and women.

Columbus, TX

Henry M. Ehrenwerth raised this two-story commercial building in 1873-75 using bricks fired at a local kiln, opening it as a mercantile store. In the 1880s it rang with the noise of L.G. Smith's Red Elk Saloon and Gambling Hall, then settled into respectability when James Ramsey bought it in 1896 for a hardware, implement, and undertaking business. In 1925 it passed to the Untermeyer hardware firm.

New Braunfels, TX

A general store opened at the corner of Castell and San Antonio Streets in 1846, just a year after New Braunfels was founded, and passed through a succession of German-connected owners over the next century. Growing into one of the region's most successful mercantiles, Eiband & Fischer sold everything from groceries and china to farm machinery, and also served as cotton buyers and short-term bankers. A 1947 fire finally consumed the store, though its surviving annex still stands.

Town of Dryden, NY

In the rolling farm country of Dryden, New York, the Eight Square School House is one of the rare octagonal schoolhouses built during the mid-19th-century craze for eight-sided buildings. Octagonal architecture, popularized by phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler, was promoted as healthier and more efficient, letting light and a single stove reach every corner of a one-room classroom. Generations of local farm children learned their letters and figures here before the era of consolidated districts.

Temple, TX

Just after the railroad gave birth to the town of Temple in 1882, the Rev. L.J. Mackey organized a Baptist congregation to serve the African American railroad workers who helped build and run the new junction. Known first as Saint Love All Baptist Church and later as the First Baptist Church (Colored), the congregation relocated to this site in 1905 and adopted the Eighth Street Baptist name in 1911. It has remained a pillar of its community through generations of youth, senior, and outreach ministries.

Taylor, TX

Merchant Albert Eikel raised this three-story brick commercial block in 1893 to house his hardware company, hiring noted Williamson County architect Henry Struve for the design. Its cast-iron pilasters and paired rounded windows marked the confident face of a prospering railroad-era downtown. The Ira A. Prewitt Company bought the building in 1923 and traded here until 1981.

Palestine, TX

At the turn of the 20th century, waves of German immigrants brought Old World baking traditions to Texas towns, and F. H. Eilenberger was one of them—apprenticing in Galveston and Fort Worth before opening his own shop in Palestine in 1898. Moved to this site in 1918, the bakery became an East Texas institution, its bread carried across the region for decades. Today it endures for its fruit and pecan cakes, still made from the founder's family recipe and shipped worldwide.

Laredo, TX

El Barrio Azteca grew from land first platted into lots in the 1870s and 1880s, making it one of Laredo's earliest residential neighborhoods. Its residents worshiped at San Augustin Catholic Church and, after 1895, at the Presbyterian 'La Iglesia Presbiteriana Sinai,' reflecting a community of deep Mexican-American roots and varied faiths. The barrio grew alongside the border city during its late-nineteenth-century expansion.

Houston, TX

As Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans poured into Houston's Second Ward between 1910 and 1920, the cheap housing of the old Frost Town and Schrimpf's Field neighborhoods drew industrial workers seeking a foothold. By the 1930s residents had given their barrio a defiant nickname—El Alacrán, The Scorpion—anchored by churches, the Rusk Settlement House, a school, and sandlot sports leagues. Highway construction and urban renewal erased the neighborhood in the 1950s.

Overton, TX

Local tradition holds that the Rev. J.D. James arrived around 1840 with his family and about 300 enslaved people, and the community around his plantation became known as Jamestown. His church seated white worshipers in the morning and enslaved Black worshipers later in the day; from that congregation, called El Bethel, several Black churches later sprang. After the Civil War, members formed El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church No. 1 and built their first sanctuary here around 1872, gradually raising up African American pastors and a rich array of church auxiliaries even as the surrounding town faded.

Sanderson, TX

El Buen Pastor Methodist Church was founded in 1901 by Juan Zepeda, Sr., and Vicente Rodriguez, who met in members' homes until 1908, when the congregation built this church from locally made adobe bricks. A member crafted the pulpit and benches, and a bell tower was added in the 1940s, creating a fine vernacular example of Gothic Revival style. The little adobe church served its Mexican-American congregation until 1968.

Brazos County, TX

El Camino Real, the 'Royal Road,' ran roughly a thousand miles from Saltillo in Mexico into present-day Louisiana, following ancient Indian and buffalo trails. Its oldest marked segment was blazed in 1691 under Domingo Terán de los Ríos to link the provincial capital with the Spanish missions of East Texas, and in 1820 Moses Austin traveled it to San Antonio to request the land grant that opened Texas to Anglo-American settlement. In 1918 the state and the Daughters of the American Revolution set granite markers every five miles along the Texas route.

Normangee, TX

The Camino Real—the Old San Antonio Road—was first blazed in 1691 by Domingo Terán de los Ríos, first provincial governor of Texas, guiding a mission expedition with Father Damián Massanet from the Rio Grande across a chain of rivers to the missions of East Texas. Generations of explorers, soldiers, and settlers followed the same route, among them Moses Austin in 1820, and the Republic of Texas later made the road a boundary for its land grants. This 1936 centennial marker honors that ancient highway of empires.

Benchley, TX

El Camino Real — the King's Highway, also called the Old San Antonio Road — was the great overland route by which Spanish colonization reached into Texas, formally marked by the first Texas governor in 1691 but following far older paths worn by buffalo, Native peoples, and traders. Over the centuries it carried explorers like La Salle and St. Denis, mission-founders such as De León and Massanet, and finally Moses Austin and the thousands of American settlers who followed him in 1820. Soldiers and supply trains moved along it through the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War.

El Paso, TX

El Camino Real, the 'King's Highway,' was the great royal road linking Mexico City to the far northern Kingdom of New Mexico across the vast Spanish empire. From 1581 onward, conquistadors, priests, merchants, and settlers passed this way, their ox-carts and mule-trains carrying the traffic of a new realm. For centuries the road was the artery of Spanish colonial life in the Southwest.

Victoria, TX

The Camino Real, or King's Highway, was a network of routes linking Spanish missions and presidios across Texas and Louisiana. Beginning in 1725 a lower branch passed through present-day Victoria County, serving Presidio La Bahía—built atop the ruins of La Salle's Fort St. Louis—and the mission of Espíritu Santo as they repeatedly relocated along the Guadalupe and San Antonio rivers. The road remained a vital link between Béxar and East Texas for another century.

El Campo, TX

El Campo began in 1882 as "Prairie Switch," a camp on the New York, Texas, and Mexican Railroad that shipped cattle and supplies for area ranchers. By the 1890s it had grown into a full town of homes, businesses, schools, and churches, its character shaped by an influx of European immigrants. Fires in 1896 and 1901 leveled much of downtown, but the city rebuilt, and oil and gas strikes in the 1930s brought a boom atop its enduring agricultural base.

El Campo, TX

El Campo's schooling began around 1891 in a simple wooden building, and the independent school district was organized in 1895, its early classrooms scattered among a church, a restaurant, a store, and a Swedish school. Brick schoolhouses rose and were replaced across the decades as the district consolidated rural schools and, in 1961, merged with the Crescent district. Integration was completed by 1968, and by 1994 the district served more than 3,500 students of varied backgrounds.

El Campo, TX

El Campo's reading life began with a library association in 1902, grew into a public library at the downtown fire station in 1927, and found a permanent home in this crisp Moderne building completed in 1940 after a Wharton County Library branch opened in town. Its streamlined entryway, light fixtures, and signage marked it as a proud product of its era's design. When the library outgrew the space in 1965 it found new purpose, becoming a community art center in 1983.

Seguin, TX

El Capote Ranch traces to Jose De La Baume, a French officer who came to North America with Lafayette, fought in the American Revolution, and later won a 27,000-acre Spanish land grant in 1806 that Mexico reaffirmed after independence. Virginia's Michael Erskine acquired it in 1840, raising cattle he drove to California and New Orleans and hosting notable travelers along the San Antonio–Gonzales road. Part of the land later passed to Edith Kermit Carow, Theodore Roosevelt's wife, and Roosevelt reportedly rode a ranch-bred horse at San Juan Hill in 1898.

San Antonio, TX

This San Antonio cemetery traces its origin to the Battle of Medina of August 18, 1813, when a Republican Army of the North — Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians seeking to free Mexico from Spanish rule — was crushed by the Royalist army, and hundreds of the dead were interred here. A chapel built over the soldiers' burial crypt grew into the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen, and the site became a community cemetery for the surrounding land-grant families. Among those later buried here are Alamo survivor Enrique Esparza and French immigrant naturalist Gustave Toudouze.

Santa Barbara, CA

El Castillo was a Spanish coastal fortification guarding Santa Barbara during the era of Alta California's presidios and missions, its dates spanning the final years of Spanish rule and the Mexican period that followed. Built as Spain fortified its remote Pacific frontier, the little battery stood watch over the channel until the early 1840s, on the eve of California's passage into American hands.

Encino, TX

A magnificent live oak once spread its canopy over this stretch of the South Texas plains, growing in a hollow scooped out by sheltering livestock and eroding winds. "The Oak in the Hole" guided early trails and land grants, sheltered a stagecoach station, and gave the nearby town of Encino its name. An extended drought killed the great tree in the 1890s.

Shafter, TX

In the mid-19th century rancher Milton Faver built El Fortin de la Cienega, a fortified adobe compound on defensible ground along Cienega Creek, as the second headquarters of the vast Presidio County ranching empire he began in the 1850s. Natural springs watered the cattle, gardens, corrals and workers' dwellings, and Faver employed Mexican vaquero families to run the operation. After his death in 1889 the property passed to his son Juan and later to neighboring ranchers, remaining in their families until the 1980s.

Presidio vicinity, TX

Around 1773 the Spanish garrison across the Rio Grande at Presidio del Norte set up El Fortín de San José on this side to shield local farmers, and the settlement kept the name even after the post was abandoned about 1810. When Ben Leaton acquired extensive property here in 1848, the place became known as Fort Leaton, and his adobe fortress is all that survives of the old community. The marker pointedly corrects earlier signs: this is neither the original Presidio del Norte nor the Spanish mission Apóstol Santiago.

Shafter, TX

Built in 1857, El Fortin del Cibolo was the fortified heart of Milton "Don Meliton" Faver's ranching empire in the Big Bend country. Guided to the area's dependable springs, Faver seized control of the region's only steady water, irrigating vast gardens and a peach orchard whose crops fed soldiers at Fort Davis and the miners of nearby Shafter. Its thick adobe walls, corner towers, and gun ports made it the first major outpost between Fort Davis and the Rio Grande.

Cestohowa, TX

In the 1700s the Spanish crown planted forts across its northern frontier to guard ranches and missions, and El Fuerte del Cibolo stood watch over the ranch country between San Antonio and La Bahía. Manned in two stretches between 1734 and 1782, its small garrison protected herds and settlers on land the King of Spain had granted to private ranchers. Remarkably, soldiers from this outpost helped drive cattle to the Gulf Coast to supply Bernardo de Gálvez's forces fighting the British — a Spanish contribution to American independence.

Brownsville, TX

El Globo Nuevo pairs a one-story 'border brick' storehouse built in 1897 with a free-standing folk Victorian cottage, the Garza House, built about 1894. The complex was raised and operated until 1920 by Mexican immigrant brothers Adolfo and Manuel Garza-Galvan, its one-room-deep L-plan an early example of Mexican vernacular building on the Texas side of the river. Adolfo and his wife Virginia lived in the cottage until her death in 1952, and the property has remained with the family's descendants.

Mission, TX

El Granjeno Cemetery began in 1872 with the burial of Don Antonio Garza, on land his brother Don Juan Garza Escheverria donated for the villages of El Granjeno and Madero. A native of Reynosa, Mexico, Don Juan lies here among many of his descendants, alongside veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and the Vietnam War. The graveyard has long served families on both banks of the Rio Grande.

Mercedes, TX

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo fixed the Rio Grande's main channel as the U.S.–Mexico line, but the river's wandering course bred endless disputes. In 1906 an unauthorized canal shifted the Rio Grande and stranded the 419-acre El Horcon tract—home to the freewheeling resort of Rio Rico—on the Mexican side, where it drifted under Mexican control. After the U.S. ceded the tract to Mexico in 1970, a Rio Rico native's lawsuit secured U.S. citizenship for some 200 people born there before the transfer.

Geneva, TX

Near here stood El Lobanillo, a Spanish rancho and pueblo tied to Gil Ybarbo, who left his ailing mother and other refugees here in 1773 when Spain forced colonists out of East Texas and western Louisiana. The land was formally granted in 1794 and passed in the early 1800s to John Maximillian, and the site is remembered as the oldest continuously occupied place in East Texas.

Marfa, TX

Completed in 1930 and named for the nearby Paisano pass, this Marfa landmark was built by the Gateway Hotel Company in hopeful anticipation of an oil boom that never came. Designed by the noted El Paso firm Trost and Trost around a central courtyard in Spanish Baroque style, it was reckoned the finest hotel between El Paso and San Antonio. Its grandeur outlasted the boom that inspired it.

Anthony, TX

Named for the mountain pass that gave it life, El Paso has long been a gateway—first for Indigenous peoples, then for Spanish priests, gold-seekers, traders, and stagecoaches funneling through the Rio Grande corridor. Federal troops occupied this borderland longer than any other part of Texas during the Civil War, and the city grew into an agricultural, industrial, and military center dotted with Spanish missions.

El Paso, TX

El Paso's story runs four centuries deep, from the Indian peoples who lived here before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s through Spanish colonization, Mexican rule, and Anglo industrialization. The Rio Grande became an international border, splitting the old El Paso del Norte into what became Ciudad Juárez to the south and El Paso to the north. Fort Bliss in 1854, the Butterfield Overland Mail in 1858, and the railroads of the 1880s brought booming growth to this crossroads at the pass.

El Paso, TX

Built in 1857 as a 4-4-0 "Classic American" locomotive, this engine began life hauling freight and passengers across the upper Midwest before a second career in the Southwest. By 1889 the line that became the El Paso & Southwestern Railroad had acquired it, converted it from wood to coal, and put it to work opening the mining country around Bisbee, Arizona. Dubbed "Old Number One," it served more than fifty years before retirement, later starring briefly on film and finding a permanent home in El Paso.

El Paso, TX

The El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, begun in Arizona in 1888, reached El Paso in 1902 and made the border city the headquarters of its far-flung operations. This seven-story office building went up for the line in 1906, presiding over rail shops that served the Southwest. By the time the Southern Pacific absorbed the company in 1924, it was running more than 1,200 miles of track.

El Paso, TX

When the Civil War came, El Paso County voted overwhelmingly—871 to 2—for secession, and local Confederates organized companies for frontier defense. From this far western outpost the South launched its 1861–62 campaign to seize New Mexico and Arizona and win a Pacific outlet, but by mid-1862 the last Confederate troops had withdrawn. Union forces then held El Paso under martial law for the rest of the war—the longest military occupation anywhere in Texas—while sympathizers like the scout Henry Skillman ran couriers and spies from across the border.

Laredo, TX

Long before Spanish colonizers arrived, Indigenous travelers used a natural ford across the Rio Grande here, and around 1746 Jacinto de León marked the crossing that would bear his name. When José de Escandón's colonization push reached the region, Tomás Sánchez de la Barrera founded a ranching settlement nearby in 1755 that grew into Laredo. Maps later relabeled the ford "Paso de los Indios," a memory of its far older use, as cattle, sheep, and the salt trade moved across the river.

Laredo, TX

Long before roads and bridges, travelers depended on natural fords to cross rivers safely, and around 1746 Jacinto de León identified such a crossing near this spot on the Rio Grande. Indigenous peoples had almost certainly used the ford for centuries before him, threading a route that later carried Spanish colonists, traders, and settlers. The crossing helped fix the location of what would become Laredo.

El Paso, TX

El Paso del Río del Norte — the Pass of the North — is the lowest snow-free route through the Rocky Mountains between the Atlantic and Pacific, and for that reason it became a great artery of continental travel. Through it run the trunk lines of telegraph and railroad that knit the modern nation together, and the city of El Paso grew up to mark the spot and carry on its name. This marker was placed in 1936 during the Texas Centennial.

El Paso, TX

The first ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in all of Texas was organized in El Paso in 1918, its members meeting in homes and later the Odd Fellows Hall until they could raise a building of their own. Completed in 1931, this Mission Revival chapel announced their permanence with a rose window, a Renaissance-style arcade, and an arcaded tower. It marks the church's earliest institutional foothold in the state.

El Paso, TX

Completed in 1916, El Paso High School was the city's first purpose-built high school and remains its oldest surviving one. The noted firm Trost and Trost designed a classical-revival landmark in the foothills of the Franklin Mountains, folding the athletic field into the academic plan and adding then-novel touches like a rooftop garden, a cadet armory, and skylit laboratories.

Odessa, TX

This 800-horsepower Cooper-Bessemer compressor engine went to work in Culberson County in 1931 as the first machine of its kind at El Paso Natural Gas Company's original transmission station. Founded in 1928 by Houston attorney Paul Kayser, the company was among the earliest gas transmitters in the Permian Basin. Over 38 years of service the engine ran more than 152,000 hours and moved over 144 billion cubic feet of gas toward El Paso and the Southwest.

El Paso, TX

Built in 1904–05, the El Paso Union Passenger Station rose as the hub of the city's busy international railroad traffic on the U.S.–Mexico border. It was designed by the celebrated Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham — the same firm behind Washington, D.C.'s Union Station — and stands today as a monument to the railroads that drove El Paso's early growth.

El Paso, TX

Chinese immigrants reached El Paso just as the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived in 1881, opening a rooming house and grocery even as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 slammed the door on newcomers nationwide. Those who stayed built the largest Chinese community in Texas, growing produce and running laundries and restaurants while sending earnings home. Later waves came under unusual circumstances—hundreds escorted north by General Pershing during the Mexican Revolution, then refugees from the Great Depression and the Communist victory in China—each generation weaving Chinese life more deeply into the border city.

El Paso, TX

Between 1880 and 1924, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants — many from Christian Mount Lebanon — left the fading Ottoman Empire for economic opportunity in America, and a notable number entered through Mexico rather than Ellis Island. El Paso became a gateway to the Southwest, and the earliest settlers arrived by the 1890s, clustering along El Paso Street and running grocery and dry-goods stores in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. By 1953 the city counted some 450 Syrian families whose businesses and professions had become woven into its life.

San Diego, TX

On January 6, 1915, nine men of Mexican descent gathered in San Diego, Texas, and signed a manifesto calling for armed insurrection to wrest the Southwest from the United States and forge a new nation — enlisting Mexican Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Japanese Americans. The plot was betrayed almost at once when a signer tried to recruit the wrong man, and no rising came on the appointed day. But near-daily raids that summer in the Lower Rio Grande Valley triggered a wave of extrajudicial killings, as law officers and vigilantes murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ethnic Mexicans, prompting President Wilson to flood the border with troops.

Laredo, TX

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, land loss, agricultural industrialization, and hardening racial lines fueled bitter conflict between Texans of Mexican descent and Anglo Texans. In response, activists convened El Primer Congreso Mexicanista in Laredo in 1911, a landmark gathering that condemned discrimination, lynching, and disenfranchisement and organized for civil rights and mutual aid. It drew delegates from across South Texas to demand dignity and equality.

San Antonio, TX

Built in 1810 as a military barracks in San Antonio de Béxar, El Quartel became a flashpoint in the struggle over Spanish rule. Here in January 1811 Juan Bautista de las Casas raised forces to arrest the royal governor in Texas's first overthrow of Spanish authority, only for Juan Zambrano to muster a counter-revolt that restored the crown weeks later. The barracks were apparently destroyed during the Texas Revolution, when defenders chose instead to make their stand at the Alamo.

Freer, TX

In 1868 English immigrant Edward Nixon Gray and his wife Rosa Garza-Garcia Gray began building El Rancho La Gloria, which through steady land purchases grew into one of south Texas's largest ranches—some 40,000 acres running thousands of cattle, sheep, and horses, with a 22-room mansion and its own school. Drought, disease, and economic depression brought its decline in the 1890s; Gray died in 1897 and his widow sold the homestead in 1901. Later owners undertook preservation of the site.

Linn, TX

On the South Texas plains northeast of Linn lies a natural salt lake the Spanish claimed for the crown upon its discovery in 1746, invoking the old principle that salt itself was a form of money. For generations people across a wide region hauled away salt from its shores, and during 1863–64 its works helped supply Confederate Texas. Later legal battles over who owned the lake helped shape the state's foundational laws on private mineral ownership.

Edinburg, TX

This large natural salt lake northeast of Edinburg was South Texas's principal source of salt during the Civil War, placed under state guard in 1862 and sold to families, the Confederate army, and traders on the vital "cotton road" through Mexico. Salt was indispensable to the wartime South—for curing meat under the meat tithe, tending cavalry horses, and tanning leather for shoes and harness—so Union forces repeatedly wrecked the works from 1863 until war's end. The lake also figured in the long legal fight over Texas mineral ownership, settled toward private landowners in the constitutions of 1866 and after.

Wills Point, TX

On a February day in 1912, sixteen-year-old Elbert Gray was lowered by rope down a sixty-foot well barely a foot wide to reach two-year-old Calvin Stepp, who had fallen in. When the child slipped near the surface, Gray descended a second time — head first — and brought him out after a four-hour ordeal, both boys emerging with only cuts and bruises. Newspaper accounts led the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission to award Gray its medal in 1913. Decades later he lost the fingers of one hand while working in a Dallas war-defense plant during World War II.

Miami County, OH

Spanning the Great Miami River near Troy, the Eldean Covered Bridge dates to 1860, when the Hamilton Brothers of Piqua raised it for Miami County using the Long truss design patented decades earlier by Stephen H. Long. Originally called Allen's Mill Bridge for the gristmill it served, it carried farm wagons and local traffic across a river that could turn treacherous in flood. At 224 feet across two spans, it stands among the longest surviving covered bridges in Ohio and one of the finest examples of its truss type in the country.

Hidalgo, TX

Born in New York City in 1806, Elder B. Barton threw in his lot with the Texas cause and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive clash that secured the Republic of Texas's independence. Settling along the lower Rio Grande, he married Santitos Balli of Matamoros, raised sixteen children, and parlayed his veteran land grants and a supply business into a lasting mark on Hidalgo County's frontier economy. He died on his ranch in 1884, a bridge between the Anglo republic and the older Mexican society of the borderlands.

Mendocino County, CA

This bronze plaque designates Elder Creek in the remote California Coast Range as a Registered Natural Landmark, recognized in 1964 by the National Park Service under the Historic Sites Act of 1935. Elder Creek is a rare, undisturbed watershed valued for illustrating the natural history of the United States, and it has become one of the nation's most closely studied pristine streams. The marker reflects the mid-20th-century federal effort to identify and protect landscapes of exceptional scientific value.

Waverly Township, PA · est. 1948

Born in Connecticut in 1775, Elder Miller joined the stream of New England settlers who pushed into northeastern Pennsylvania's Abington region around 1800. On his own farm he hosted the township's first church and its first school, serving his neighbors as both preacher and teacher until his death in 1857. His homestead became the seedbed of community life on a raw frontier.

Patroon, TX

North Carolina preacher William Brittain and his wife Rosanna, drawn by the promise of frontier missions, migrated to the Republic of Texas in 1837 and raised a log cabin here. One room served as classroom and chapel for the settlers of the Sabine River steamboat port of East Hamilton. A pioneer Baptist leader, Brittain helped found several Shelby County congregations and served as moderator of the Sabine Association in 1847. When steamboat traffic ended the town faded, leaving only this cemetery on the site of the Brittains' home and chapel.

Houston, TX

Opened in 1939 at Elgin and Dowling in Houston's Third Ward, the Eldorado Ballroom was built by philanthropists C. A. and Anna Dupree as a showcase for the Black community's professionals and business people. It launched the careers of musicians like Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb and hosted the biggest names in blues and R&B before closing in the 1970s; it later passed to Project Row Houses.