Historic Markers in Texas

Nazareth, TX

Named for Missouri brothers George and Jim Arney, this Castro County community opened its one-room frame school in 1901 for the children of settlers and ranch hands. The building doubled as the home of Arney Baptist Church, organized in 1905. The school operated until 1953, then served as a community center and polling place.

Comfort, TX

Built in 1916 by merchant Arno Schwethelm to house a leading Hill Country mercantile, this native-limestone building married a modern commercial function to the stonework of German immigrant craftsmen. Designed by San Antonio architect L. Harrington and raised by mason Otto Bartel, it even reused materials from an earlier structure on the spot.

Blakeney, TX

Along the alluvial terraces of the Red River, ancestors of the Caddo people built a substantial village and ceremonial center that thrived from about A.D. 1000 to 1700. These were settled farmers who raised crops and gathered around two earthen mounds for religious life; the ceramics, glass beads, and metal tools unearthed here show a society that was trading with the first European explorers to reach the region.

Henderson, TX

When Henderson businessman and civic leader John R. Arnold settled his family on this property in 1908, he added a second story to the existing home and put up a number of outbuildings—among them this unusually large outhouse. Its milled door and window trim was made to match the fine detailing of the main Arnold house, since demolished. Preserved on its own, it offers a candid glimpse of everyday domestic life for well-to-do Texans a century ago.

Marshall, TX

Blacksmith Albert M. Arnot built this Marshall, Texas, house in 1848, blending Greek Revival and Creole styling with an above-ground basement that held a dining room, harness shop, and cellar. Its later owners read like a roster of immigrant America — a German mill operator, the wife of a local Jewish merchant, and an Irish cobbler who set up his shop on the property. Each left a mark on the home's long history.

McKinney, TX

Built in 1889 for merchant Morris Aron and his wife Henrietta, this McKinney house was designed by New York architect Putnam Russell in the exuberant Queen Anne style. Its corner turret with a bell-shaped roof, intricate exterior ornament, and interior marble and woodwork announced the prosperity of the town's commercial class. The Harris family bought it in 1897 and kept it for more than half a century.

Rio Hondo, TX

The Arroyo Colorado, the Lower Rio Grande Valley's only natural waterway besides the Rio Grande, long blocked travel to the town of Rio Hondo on its east bank. After decades of flood-prone wooden bridges, a ferry, and a one-lane steel span, a new vertical-lift bridge opened in May 1953, stretching more than 380 feet and raising its span by electric motors when boats needed to pass. Designed by the New York firm Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Hall & MacDonald, it is the only lift bridge built in Texas between 1945 and 1960 that still operates.

Menard, TX

The Spaniards who garrisoned Presidio de San Sabá between 1757 and 1770 gave this stream — today called Celery Creek — the name Arroyo de Juan Lorenzo. They quarried stone from its bluffs to raise the presidio's walls, but the creek's deep banks cut both ways, giving hostile Indians concealed approaches from which to strike the fort just half a mile to the southwest. The presidio marked Spain's fragile northern frontier in central Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Prompted by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, the U.S. Army secured land at San Antonio for an arsenal in 1858, and the post soon became headquarters for the Army's Department of Texas. This thick-walled limestone magazine—still under construction when the Civil War began—was among the Federal properties surrendered in 1861 and completed for Confederate Texas, its carefully spaced vents guarding against sparks in the stored gunpowder. It armed south Texas and frontier defense, supplied the 1862 Sibley expedition, and served the U.S. Army as a frontier supply depot until 1947.

Art, TX

Organized in 1856 in the German settlement of Art, this Methodist congregation raised its first building in 1858 and a stone church in 1875, with the present structure following in 1890 on land donated by charter member Ernst Jordan, Sr. Until 1927 every service was held in German, a testament to the deep roots of German immigrant culture in the Texas Hill Country. The two Methodist churches in Art merged in 1939.

Art, TX

Raised of native stone and lumber in 1875, this building began as the area's second Methodist church, replacing an 1858 church-and-school structure lost to fire. After the 1890s it served solely as a school until 1945, when Mason County consolidated its scattered rural schools. Today it houses the Art Community Club, still the gathering point for a tiny Hill Country settlement.

Corpus Christi, TX

After Texans accepted annexation on July 4, 1845, General Zachary Taylor massed some 4,000 U.S. troops at Corpus Christi, holding the new state's coast for eight months before marching to the Rio Grande and the opening of the Mexican-American War. Among the men encamped here were three future presidents—Taylor, Pierce, and Grant. A sulphur-rich artesian well drilled beside the camp later became the heart of Artesian Park, deeded to the city in 1854 as one of Texas's earliest public parks and cherished for generations after.

Houston, TX

Arthur Benjamin Cohn (1871–1938), an Arkansas native, built this Queen Anne–style home in Houston not long after buying the property in 1905. As principal accountant for the estate of William Marsh Rice, Cohn played a key role in bringing Rice Institute into being in 1912 and became its first business manager. The house—marked by paired classical columns and bracketed eaves—served as his residence for its first few years.

Brownsboro, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1873 and brought to Texas as a child, Arthur Columbus Horton trained in medicine in St. Louis and Dallas before spending four decades doctoring the people of Henderson County. Beyond his practice he served as county health officer and school board member, championing the consolidation of rural schools. He answered the call during two of Texas's worst catastrophes — the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the 1937 New London school explosion — and played a key role in eradicating malaria from East Texas.

Temple, TX

Born in Gainesville in 1865, Arthur C. Scott graduated from Bellevue Medical College in 1886 and by 1892 was chief surgeon of the Santa Fe Hospital in Temple. In 1897 he partnered with Dr. R. R. White Jr., and in 1904 the two founded the Temple Sanitarium — later the renowned Scott and White Hospital. Scott became a nationally recognized authority on the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Temple, TX

A Gainesville-born physician trained at Bellevue, Dr. Arthur C. Scott became chief surgeon of a Temple railroad hospital in 1892 and soon partnered with Dr. Raleigh R. White. In 1904 the two founded the Temple Sanitarium, renamed Scott & White Hospital in 1922, and Scott earned international standing as an authority on diagnosing and treating cancer. In 1933 the institution became the earliest accredited cancer treatment center in Texas, seeding a health system renowned across the Southwest.

Corpus Christi, TX

Canadian-born and trained in Michigan and New York, Dr. A. E. Spohn arrived on the Texas coast in 1868 as a military quarantine surgeon and settled in Corpus Christi after marrying into the prominent Kenedy ranching family. He grew into the region's leading physician, and in 1905 a sanitarium bearing his name opened on North Beach with backing from local ranching and mercantile fortunes. After a 1919 hurricane, Henrietta King donated land for a new hospital, and from a 1923 brick building Spohn Hospital grew into a modern medical complex.

Port Arthur, TX

Inspired by his railroad-building grandfather, Rochester-born Arthur Stilwell dreamed of a line linking the midwestern farm belt to the Gulf. In 1895 he laid out the town of Port Arthur on 4,000 acres and pushed the Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf Railroad south to reach it, then drew settlers with an experimental farm, water wells, a hotel, and a pleasure pier. By 1900 he had cut a canal to deep-water port facilities, giving the young town its outlet to the sea.

Hallettsville, TX

Born around 1807, Arthur Henry Vollentine came to Texas about 1833 as a colonist of empresario Martin de Leon and served in the Republic of Texas Army at Goliad during the revolution. He and his family fled during the Runaway Scrape in 1836, later returning to the Lavaca River country to farm and ranch under his V5 cattle brand. Appointed one of Lavaca County's first commissioners in 1846, he helped make Hallettsville the county seat and lies buried here with his family.

Hallettsville, TX

Arthur Pendleton Bagby was an Alabama-born West Point graduate who cast his lot with the Confederacy, rising from colonel of the 7th Texas Cavalry to major-general. He rode in Sibley's ill-fated 1862 New Mexico campaign, helped defend Galveston, and led a brigade at the Louisiana battles of Mansfield and Pleasant Hill during the 1864 Red River Campaign. He lived to become the last surviving member of his 1852 West Point class and is buried at Hallettsville.

Hurst, TX

Daniel Arwine left Indiana for Texas in 1865, part of the wave of settlers who poured into the north-central prairies after the Civil War. A deputy U.S. Marshal, he set aside six acres in 1879 for a school, a church, and a burial ground, and the schoolhouse doubled as a place of worship and community gathering. His young daughter Katy was the first laid to rest here, and Arwine himself, his wife, and his parents lie among the 279 known graves that Boy Scouts and local families have long tended.

Washington, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1790, Asa Brigham became a leading figure in Texas's fight for nationhood, serving as alcalde of the Brazoria municipality in 1835 and signing the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. He went on to serve the young Republic as auditor and, for most of its existence, as treasurer. He died in 1844 at Washington, the town where independence had been declared.

Rutersville, TX

Asa Hill came to Texas in 1835 and served the young republic in 1836, riding ahead of the enemy to warn settlers in the army's path. In 1842 he and two sons joined the ill-fated Mier Expedition into Mexico, where Hill drew a white bean in Santa Anna's deadly lottery and escaped execution, though he languished in prison until 1843; his youngest son, John C.C., was famously adopted by Santa Anna himself. Hill settled at Rutersville, enrolling eight children in its pioneering college before his death in 1844.

Columbus, TX

Born in South Carolina and raised in Georgia, Asa Townsend moved his large family from Florida to Colorado County, Texas, in 1838. A civic leader, he served on the committee advocating Texas's 1845 annexation to the United States and belonged to the Colorado River Navigation Association. During Reconstruction he organized ventures into Mexico and remained active in the Methodist church and Masonic lodges.

Donna, TX

Salvador Cavazos Gallegos and Maria San Juana Anzaldua founded Asadores Ranch in 1881 on land from the Mexican La Blanca grant to Lino Cavazos, raising cattle and horses and farming corn and beans along the Rio Grande. The family and its ranch workers formed a small but tight-knit community, and though the land was sold in 1902, they kept a one-acre burial ground used into the 1940s. The ranch typifies the many Hidalgo County settlements rooted in Spanish and Mexican land grants.

Edom, TX

Asbury Cemetery took its name from Asbury Lowery, whose 1855 burial opened the ground. Its most poignant grave belonged to Prairie Flower, the small daughter of Comanche captive Cynthia Ann Parker and Chief Peta Nocona, buried here in 1863 while living among her mother's Anglo kin; in 1965 her remains were moved to Fort Sill to rest near her mother and her brother, Chief Quanah Parker. Deeded to the Methodist church in 1879, the cemetery gathered Texas Rangers, pioneers, and Van Zandt County families across generations of memorial-day gatherings.

Houston, TX

In 1866, freedman William Burley came to Harrisburg to minister to newly emancipated African Americans, buying land along Brays Bayou for a home and a church that became the Methodist Episcopal Church of Harrisburg. The Freedmen's Bureau sponsored a community school on the grounds until 1870, an early Black public school for the area, and the congregation grew into a focal point of Black community life. Through renamings that reflected its history, it became Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church, and its members included Civil War veteran Wilson Burley of the 84th U.S. Colored Infantry and Tom Blue, once enslaved by Sam Houston.

Frost, TX

Founded in 1899 in the historically African-American community of Pelham, this school first met in the local Methodist chapel before a two-story schoolhouse rose near the cemetery in 1908. Uncommon for a rural Black school of its era, it taught all twelve grades, sending graduates on to college. In 1921 its trustees drew on the Chicago-based Rosenwald Foundation—Julius Rosenwald's landmark partnership with Southern Black communities—to build a larger school, which served until consolidation in the 1960s.

Azle, TX

On September 9, 1871, the Rev. J.C. Powers gathered 48 charter members to organize the Ash Creek Missionary Baptist Church on the still-dangerous Texas frontier, where he was said to preach with a gun beside his Bible while men kept rifles across their knees. A meeting house rose here in 1891, and in summers the congregation built brush arbors for prayer meetings on the grounds. The women famously set aside every egg laid on Sundays to fund Sunday school literature.

Azle, TX

The oldest known graves in this Azle burial ground belong to Dave Morrison and W. P. Gregg, both of whom died in 1874. The land was given in two one-acre parcels by Dr. James Azle Stewart, for whom the town of Azle is named, and by John Giles Reynolds, an early grist mill operator, and both men are buried here. A cemetery association formed in 1922 to keep records and care for the grounds, later adding land and a tabernacle, and the cemetery now holds more than 2,000 graves.

Baytown, TX

Born in Connecticut and Yale-educated, Ashbel Smith (1805–1885) arrived in Texas in 1837 and was soon appointed surgeon-general of the Texas army. He served the Republic as secretary of state and as minister to Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Spain, then sat in the state legislature after annexation. A Confederate colonel in the Civil War, he also presided over the first Board of Regents of the University of Texas and championed its Galveston medical branch.

Blessing, TX

After riding with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War, New Jersey native William Erastus Moore settled northeast of Blessing and named the farming community for Colonel Henry M. Ashby, a Tennessee commander he had served under. Moore ran a ranch, store, and post office and donated land for the Ashby Methodist Church. Nearby, freed slaves founded the Wilson Creek Community, organizing their own Baptist church and school, until cleared river channels and wartime out-migration slowly emptied the combined settlement.

Sulphur Springs, TX

Charles and Ruth Ashcroft were civic and social leaders in Sulphur Springs — Charles a bank vice-president, Coca-Cola bottling co-owner, and school-board president whose father had founded the city's first electric company. In 1938 they hired noted Tyler architect Shirley Simons to design this two-story Colonial Revival home, built on the site of the city's reputedly oldest house and finished in December 1939, its full-width portico of six Ionic columns and slate-roofed cupola largely unchanged since.

Austin, TX

This sturdy limestone house was raised in the 1870s for Austin pioneer Ashford McGill, decades before the land around it became a beloved public park. Businessman Andrew J. Zilker bought the property and gave it to the city in 1931, and Depression-era workers from the Federal Civil Works Administration remodeled the old home into a park building, adding the pergola-shaded courtyard visible today. It stands as a layered artifact — pioneer stonework wrapped in 1930s public-works craftsmanship.

Bailey, TX

Fraternal lodges were pillars of small-town Texas life, and Ashley Lodge No. 681 was the seventh Masonic body organized in Fannin County when it received its charter in December 1889. Its early brethren met above the everyday bustle of Bailey — first sharing a frame building with the Baptist congregation, later meeting over downtown storefronts. Fire twice reshaped the lodge's home, but the members regrouped, borrowing space in nearby Leonard until a new hall rose in 1952.

Galveston, TX

Completed in 1859, Ashton Villa is a stately Galveston mansion built of imported European materials in an ornate Mediterranean style. During the Civil War the grand house served in turn as headquarters for both Confederate and Federal forces occupying the island city. It survives as one of the earliest brick residences in Texas and a showpiece of antebellum Gulf Coast wealth.

Flatonia, TX

In 1854 Matej Novak, his brother Anton, and his children settled along Mulberry Creek in a Fayette County frontier district then called Hottentot, and other Czech Catholic families soon followed. After the Civil War the parishioners built a small stone chapel, where Father Joseph Bittkowski said the first Mass at midnight on Christmas Eve 1865, and it became the first predominantly Czech Catholic church in Texas. As the community grew, the town was renamed Praha, and in 1895 parishioners raised the present church of locally quarried stone, its vaulted ceilings adorned with frescoes by Swiss artist Gottfried Flury.

San Angelo, TX

In the Great Depression era, a small but determined community of Greek immigrants in West Texas organized first to teach their language and faith, then to build a church of their own. After renting an Episcopal building and losing an adjoining structure to a 1936 fire, they voted to erect the present church, dedicated in 1937 and designed by local architect L. H. Gaskins. For a time it was the largest Greek Orthodox parish in West Texas by territory, serving the faithful from San Angelo to Amarillo.

Bryan, TX

Begun in 1901 and finished two years later, this Classical Revival residence was built for Onah Ward Astin, widow of cotton planter James H. Astin, and designed by the Waco firm of Messer and Smith. Its two-story gallery and Corinthian columns announced the wealth that cotton brought to the Brazos Valley. Planter Holland Porter bought and expanded the home in 1946, lending the house its double name.

Granbury, TX

Andy C. Aston kept a promise of a fine home to his young bride Dorothy by commissioning builder E.J. Holderness to raise this ornate Queen Anne house in 1905. A warm and community-minded hostess, Dorothy Aston often opened the home to large gatherings until it left the family in 1925.

Granbury, TX

Andy Aston and George Landers erected this native-stone building with a patented iron front as a saloon in 1893, and it saw its share of frontier drama, including a 1901 duel that wounded a bystander on the square. When temperance crusader Carrie Nation visited Granbury in 1905, sentiment was shifting, and voters outlawed liquor the next year. Aston then turned the space into a buggy and harness shop staffed by skilled leather craftsmen, and it later held many other businesses.

Houston, TX

When Judge Roy Hofheinz set out around 1960 to build the world's first fully enclosed, air-conditioned stadium, skeptics abounded—until the Astrodome opened in April 1965 with President Lyndon B. Johnson in the stands. Its 642-foot clear-span lamella roof, luxury "sky boxes," and (after 1966) the first synthetic turf, "Astroturf," earned it the title "Eighth Wonder of the World." Over decades it hosted baseball, football, basketball, rodeos, Ali fights, the 1968 basketball "Game of the Century," the "Battle of the Sexes," and even 16,000 Hurricane Katrina refugees in 2005.

Banquete, TX

In the opening weeks of the Texas Revolution, a party of Texan volunteers under Dr. James Grant was caught by General José Urrea's Mexican cavalry near the forks of the Agua Dulce on March 2, 1836. Grant, Major Robert C. Morris and roughly a dozen others were killed in a running fight across the coastal brush country southwest of San Patricio. The State of Texas raised this marker in 1936 to name the fallen on the revolution's centennial.

Flint, TX

In July 1839 the army of the young Republic of Texas gathered at this site under commanders including Edward Burleson, Thomas J. Rusk, and Albert Sidney Johnston before marching against Chief Bowles and his Cherokee and allied warriors. The clash on July 16, 1839, ended the Cherokees' presence in East Texas as the Republic forced them from their lands. The battle was a decisive and bitter chapter in the Republic's Indian policy.

Riverwalk Park, TX

The Atakapan peoples lived along the upper Gulf Coast of what is now southeast Texas for centuries, subsisting on fish, small game, and wild plants rather than farming, and leaving behind shell middens that mark their old campsites. Their name derives from a Choctaw word; the survivors of Cabeza de Vaca's 1528 ordeal may have encountered them, and French sailor Simars de Bellisle was held captive among them after 1719. Organized as a loose confederacy of scattered bands, the Atakapans faded from Texas in the early 19th century, dying out or merging into other peoples.

Jourdanton, TX

By 1722 the Camino Real—the King's Highway—already ran through this region on its way from the Rio Grande to San Antonio, crossing the boggy ground the Spanish called 'atascosa.' Carved from Bexar County in 1856, Atascosa County took that name for its muddy terrain. Its first county seat, Navatasco, rose on land granted to José Antonio Navarro before the seat moved to Pleasanton and finally Jourdanton, in a county long known for livestock, oil, gas, and strawberries.

Jourdanton, TX

Atascosa County's courthouse history reads like a map of shifting frontier fortunes: created from Bexar County in 1856, the county moved its seat from Navatasco to Pleasanton and finally, in 1910, to Jourdanton, cycling through log cabin, frame, and red-rock buildings along the way. The present Mission Revival courthouse, completed in 1912 to designs by San Antonio architect Henry T. Phelps, crowns that journey with curvilinear parapets, corner tower bays, and tile roofing. It remains the civic anchor of this South Texas county seat.

Jourdanton, TX

This log cabin replicates Atascosa County's first courthouse, built in 1856 near Amphion on land granted by Jose Antonio Navarro — a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence who helped organize the county. The first court convened in 1857, presided over by a roster of frontier officials whose names the marker preserves: sheriff, chief justice, clerks, and judges of a brand-new South Texas county. It memorializes the moment raw frontier settlement became organized civic government.

Lytle, TX

Eleven Master Masons organized this lodge in Benton City in 1872, receiving a charter from the Grand Lodge of Texas the next year. Their first hall, built of stone in 1876, doubled as space for the local public school, a common arrangement in frontier communities short on public buildings. In 1909 the lodge relocated to nearby Lytle, continuing its role in local civic life.

Liberty, TX

By the mid-1700s Spain and France were contesting the borderlands of what is now East Texas, and in 1757 Spanish authorities planted a settlement here on the Atascosito Road specifically to block French traders from reaching the region's Native peoples. The road itself was ancient by colonial standards: explorer Alonso de León had crossed the nearby Trinity River in 1690, and the route—later called the Lower Road—carried heavy traffic between Goliad and Louisiana for a century. This quiet spot was once a strategic seam of empire.

Amarillo, TX

The arrival of a railroad across the Panhandle gave rise to Amarillo, made county seat of Potter County in 1887, and for a decade the town enjoyed a trade monopoly over the South Plains, ranking as the nation's largest rural cattle-shipping point in the 1890s. When a rival routing threatened to bypass it in 1898, citizens persuaded the Santa Fe to make Amarillo the terminus of its new line; the railroad then moved its headquarters there and, by 1908, folded the town into its transcontinental main line. Branch lines followed, cementing Amarillo as the commercial hub of the High Plains.

Amarillo, TX

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe was one of the great railroads that stitched the American West together, and its arrival on the Texas Panhandle turned windswept cattle country into shipping towns almost overnight. Amarillo grew up around the rails, moving cattle, wheat, and people across the high plains. A depot like this was the town's front door, where drummers, homesteaders, and freight all first set foot in the city.

Panhandle, TX

The oil boom of the 1920s brought a surge of business to this Panhandle railroad town, and in 1928 the Santa Fe line built a new depot to match. Blending Prairie School, Mission, and Tudor elements, the brick station showed off bracketed overhangs, stepped parapets, and cast-stone window surrounds. One of the last brick depots on the company's western lines, it carried passengers until 1971 and became the town's city hall in 1985.

Fort Worth, TX

Developer Thomas S. Weaver raised this brick building around 1905 and named it "Atelier," French for an artist's studio. Over the decades it housed architects and contractors, a restaurant, and financial firms, including the banking house of noted Fort Worth benefactor W. R. Edrington. In 1936 it briefly served as the temporary home of the Carnegie Library.

Gatesville, TX

This burial ground is nearly all that remains of Ater, a small Coryell County community first known as Sardis that took its name from storekeeper and postmaster Joe Ater. Gravestones dating to 1868 mark the resting places of some of the area's earliest settlers, and among the dead lie veterans of conflicts stretching from the War of 1812 through the Korean War. As the little town faded, a cemetery association took up the work of preserving its heritage, and the state recognized the site as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002.

Athens, TX

Laid out in 1850 and named — like so many hopeful young American towns — for the ancient seat of learning in Greece, Athens became the seat of Henderson County in the pine-and-prairie country of East Texas. During the Civil War it served as a supply depot and training ground, sending roughly a thousand men to the Confederate armies. In peacetime it leaned into manufacturing, farming, and folk tradition, later billing itself as the 'Black-eyed Peas Capital of the World' and home of the Old Fiddlers' Contest.

Athens, TX

When an informal burial ground closed in 1857, the town of Athens established this cemetery on land donated to a Masonic lodge, beginning with the grave of a prominent planter and, beside it, a child who could not be buried in the Masons' ground. Over the following century the adjoining plots merged and grew through repeated gifts of land, with a trust still funding its care. Its rows hold the pioneers who forged the community alongside veterans of conflicts from the Indian wars through Vietnam.

Athens, TX

Chartered in 1854, Athens Lodge No. 165 was the first Masonic lodge in Henderson County, founded just a few years after the town of Athens itself. Its members first met above a store on the public square and grew from eleven master masons to more than fifty within two years, obtaining a formal charter in 1856. Over generations the lodge helped seed new lodges in surrounding communities and drew its members from the county's leaders in business, law, education, and public service.

Lometa, TX

The first school in this stretch of Lampasas County was a two-story boarding school for boys that opened in the 1880s. When teacher Abbie Atherton secured a post office in 1892 and served as its postmistress, her name spread to the community and the school alike. On land donated by W. T. Nelson, the schoolhouse grew as far-flung ranch families sent children on rides of up to five miles, until it consolidated with the Lometa system in 1942.

Sulphur Springs, TX

Irish-born Sarah Hamilton Crouch lived in Texas before the Civil War, but it was after her 1868 divorce that she rose as a prominent businesswoman in Sulphur Springs. Following her 1873 marriage to Joseph Atkins, she had this distinctive brick house built in the late 1870s — believed to be the town's first brick structure — in an unusual four-point design. It stood on Atkins Street for more than a century before being dismantled and relocated to Heritage Park to escape demolition in 1986.