Historic Markers in Texas

Salado, TX

New Hampshire–born Hermon Aiken worked his way south to New Orleans, where as a ship's captain he ferried supplies to Galveston in support of the Texas Revolution before settling in Texas by 1840. A surveyor by trade, he married twice, raised a dozen children, and in 1859 moved to Salado, where he served as a trustee of the new Salado College. Active in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the Freemasons, he became a leader in his adopted community.

Edna, TX

A murder at Edna's Gato Negro Cafe in 1951 set in motion a case that reached the highest court in the land. When Pedro Hernandez was convicted by an all-Anglo jury, Mexican American attorneys Gustavo Garcia, Carlos Cadena, John Herrera, and James DeAnda argued that Jackson County's decades-long exclusion of people of Mexican descent from juries treated them as "a class apart." On May 3, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren agreed, ruling that such discrimination violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

Amarillo, TX

Built in 1910 for ranchers Will and Eula Jo Day Herring, this Amarillo house is a showpiece of Classical Revival style, with a pedimented entry portico, colossal paired columns, an Ionic wraparound porch, and a Palladian bay window. Bought in 1920 by Judge Jonathan and Alliene Crudgington, it served as the family's home until 1936 before becoming the Musical Arts Conservatory. It remains a landmark of early Panhandle prosperity and taste.

Harker Heights, TX

John Granberry Herrington and his wife Elvira Jane left Mississippi for Texas in 1873, pressing on past Nacogdoches—where fellow travelers stopped—to settle the wilderness of Bell County. There they bought land, built a cabin and barns, and raised twelve children. When John died in 1903, his family buried him just yards from his home, founding the cemetery that a family association still tends today.

Cat Spring, TX

In the German farming settlement of Cat Spring, Austrian-born Henry Hess and his wife Fransiska built this modest cottage in the mid-1870s, showing off the careful joinery and cypress construction their homeland traditions prized. The Kollatschny family bought it in 1904, enlarged it, and kept it for more than half a century. Its original siding and hand-painted interior stenciling survive as evidence of that early craftsmanship.

Hewitt, TX

In November 1894, twenty members of the older White Hall Baptist Church broke away to organize their own congregation on the growing prairie south of Waco, dedicating their first sanctuary here in 1895. A destructive 1924 storm leveled that building, and successive waves of growth carried the church through new worship centers in 1959 and 1988. The marker traces the arc of a small rural congregation that outlasted the storms and became a fixture of the Hewitt community.

Walker County, TX

Born in Virginia and raised in Tennessee, Hezekiah Faris came to Texas in 1835 to fight for the colony's freedom and took part in the decisive victory at San Jacinto. He located bounty and headright land in this vicinity, became a local leader, and named Faris Chapel for his home church back in Tennessee. He married Matilda Stevens Roberts, and over time the family name shifted to Farris.

Austin, TX

Clarksville was founded in 1871 by freed slave Charles Clark as a place where former slaves could reunite their families, govern their own lives, and worship freely after emancipation. Around 1879 former slave Peter Tucker built this board-and-batten Cumberland-style house, later home to Hezikiah Haskell—a Union soldier and Buffalo Soldier who married into the family. Standing on its original site with high physical integrity, the house was deeded to the city of Austin and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 2012.

Petty, TX

Hickory Grove is the resting place of former slaves, freedmen, and their descendants who made Lamar County home in the 1800s. Samuel and Dicie Lucinda Swann bought the land including this site in 1881, and in 1899 Samuel deeded three acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church as a burial ground; the earliest marked grave, from 1883, belongs to Dicie's mother Cherry Lee, who had come from Alabama in bondage. Among those buried here are veterans, a preacher, Masons and Eastern Star members, and families rooted here for generations.

Kilgore, TX

The Cross Roads community, straddling the line between Rusk and Gregg counties, saw a need for a church and cemetery in 1911 and bought five acres beside the existing Hickory Grove Cemetery. A church rose in 1912, took the Hickory Grove name in 1930, and was later moved across the road onto land donated by the Still family before a new auditorium replaced the original sanctuary. For more than a century it has been a steady source of support for its neighbors.

Roxton, TX

As settlers poured into Lamar County in the late 1840s and 1850s, a Methodist congregation took root by 1852 and opened the burial ground that became Hickory Grove Cemetery. Its more than a thousand graves—many for infants and children—stand as sober witness to the hardships of pioneer life, while others hold veterans stretching from the Civil War through Korea. The diverse tombstones read almost as a stone archive of a frontier community's growth.

Linden, TX

In 1872 the Rev. James A. Steger, a Civil War veteran, deeded this ground to trustees of the Hickory Grove Methodist Church for use as a community burial place, though he may have buried family here even earlier. A Methodist sanctuary stood nearby, and a later building served for funerals and school classes. The congregation eventually disbanded, but the cemetery — resting place of several pioneer families — still marks where the community first took root.

Medicine Mound, TX

Brothers-in-law Lon L. Cobb and Ira Lee Hicks arrived in the already-thriving village of Medicine Mound in 1927 and opened a general merchandise store stocking everything from work clothes and cotton sacks to groceries and horse feed. In winter, regular customers gathered by the fire to talk and play checkers. When a 1933 fire nearly leveled the town, Hicks and Cobb rebuilt that same year using round granite cobblestones hauled from Oklahoma, and the store outlasted nearly every other local business before becoming a community gathering place and museum.

Jacksboro, TX

Settlers in the 1880s founded a community here called Hicks, named for a pioneer family, served by the Cooper School beginning in 1885. In 1889 George Washington and Levicia Jamison bought land at this site and buried their infant daughter Anna here in 1893, and the surrounding ground grew into a burial place for the area's founding families. Shaded by cedar and live oak, the cemetery today holds more than forty marked graves and several unmarked ones.

Brownsville, TX

Merchant Frederick Hicks and his wife Zuleika, a social worker, built this house in Brownsville around 1909, selling it a few years later to the Moler family and, in 1920, to banker and civic leader John Gregg. A fine example of the American Foursquare—a symmetrical descendant of the Prairie style—it features a hipped roof, dormer, deep porch with Tuscan columns, and a bay window, with a sunroom the Greggs later added. It stands as a well-preserved emblem of early-twentieth-century domestic architecture on the Texas border.

Brownsville, TX

Built about 1908, this Queen Anne house was among the first in West Brownsville, the town's earliest subdivision beyond the original townsite. Livery-stable owners Edgar and Goldye Hicks raised it as a country home; in 1922 it passed to Dr. O.V. Lawrence, a civic leader, school board and junior college president, and regional pioneer of X-ray technology. The September 1933 hurricane destroyed the property's outbuildings.

Hidalgo, TX

This graveyard on the lower Rio Grande dates from 1884, when its oldest surviving stone was raised. Expanded over the decades as the town of Hidalgo grew, it holds more than a thousand graves and veterans whose service ranges from the Texas Revolution to modern conflicts. Its handmade concrete blocks, wooden and wrought-iron crosses, and above-ground bovedas reflect the strong Mexican traditions of the border community.

Edinburg, TX

Hidalgo County was carved from Starr and Cameron counties in 1842 and organized in 1854, taking its name from Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the priest whose 1810 call to arms launched Mexico's independence movement. Its county seat shifted and was renamed more than once—from Edinburgh to Hidalgo, from Chapin to the modern Edinburg—as settlement moved across the lower Rio Grande. The naming reflects the region's deep Mexican heritage on the Texas border.

La Joya vicinity, TX

On September 18, 1934, veteran driller Otto C. Woods brought in the John M. Lawrence No. 1, Hidalgo County's first oil well, near this spot. The gusher flowed a thousand barrels a day or more — so much that oil at first pooled into a lake beside the derrick. The strike opened a field that would ultimately yield some twenty million barrels.

Hidalgo, TX

Until the early 20th century, the semi-arid Lower Rio Grande Valley was fit mainly for cattle grazing. In 1909 a steam-powered pump rose here to lift Rio Grande water onto some 40,000 acres, and expansions in 1911–12 by the Louisiana-Rio Grande Canal Company carried irrigation to the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo district. Sold to a county water district in 1920, the plant kept pumping until an all-electric station replaced it downstream in 1983.

Houston, TX

Commissioned by the Mexican American community of Magnolia Park and dedicated on Mexican Independence Day in 1934, this ornate quiosco was crafted in the faux bois, or false-wood, tradition by Houston molder Vidal Lozano. Its iron frame is sheathed entirely in hand-molded concrete shaped to look like bark-covered tree trunks, branch railings, and a thatched roof, with a step inscribed "Houston Mexicans to their city." It remains the only known public example of Lozano's artistry and still hosts community celebrations.

Hidalgo, TX

When Hidalgo County formed in 1852, the village here—first called Edinburgh—became county seat, linked to Reynosa, Mexico, by ferry. Renamed Hidalgo by 1861, the crossing gained regular ferry service in 1910 under Crisoforo Vela, first by rowboat and later by raft, until Joe Pate built a suspension bridge in 1926. Flood-battered spans came and went across the decades, giving way to modern concrete bridges in 1967 and 1988 that carry traffic between the two nations.

Cross Plains, TX

The Higginbotham brothers opened their first general store in De Leon in 1881, and over the following decades combinations of brothers, in-laws, and friends spread the name across Texas, selling everything a town needed — right down to undertaking. This Cross Plains store opened in 1914 and still keeps its original glass counters, cabinets, mirrors, tin ceiling, and floors in use. A century on, the company counted dozens of Texas locations, a rare survivor of the old-fashioned mercantile chain.

Dallas, TX

Designed by the prominent Dallas firm of Lang and Witchell, this building rose in stages between 1914 and 1923 to house the dry-goods manufacturing and distributing business of the Higginbotham-Bailey-Logan Company. Its simplified Renaissance Revival design, with geometrically detailed corner towers, reflected the confident commercial architecture of early-20th-century Dallas. The firm was known as Higginbotham-Bailey after 1945.

Dallas, TX

Rising four stories in Dallas's west end in 1909, this brick warehouse moved through a chain of tenants before becoming home to the Higginbotham-Pearlstone Wholesale Hardware Company in 1926. For half a century it supplied hardware across the region, its corbelled cornices marking the industrial energy of the growing city. It still stands as a focal point of the historic district it once helped define.

Higgins, TX

Higgins was platted in 1887 when the railroad reached this corner of the Texas Panhandle, taking its name from a wealthy railroad stockholder and quickly becoming an early cattle-shipping point. Ranching and farming defined the town, and oil drilling joined them after 1957 — but its darkest day came on April 9, 1947, when a devastating tornado killed an estimated 45 people and injured 140 more.

Higgins, TX

Higgins was platted in 1887 by E. C. Gray and the Patton brothers, who had bought land betting the Santa Fe Railroad would build through it—and it did, growing the town into a farming, ranching, and oil community named for a railroad stockholder. Gray deeded its cemetery in 1900, though burials had begun earlier, the oldest marked graves those of two children who died in 1889. Among the interred are a pioneer dentist-sheriff, early friends of humorist Will Rogers, and the forty-five townspeople killed when a tornado destroyed much of Higgins on April 9, 1947.

Canton, TX

High Cemetery opened in 1859 with the burial of Nancy Jane Hubbard, six years after the High community took shape in Van Zandt County. More than a hundred of its graves date from the nineteenth century, including that of Samuel A. High, the area's first permanent landowner and the man who donated the ground. Civil War veterans and generations of pioneer families rest here, making the cemetery a roster of the settlers who built the community.

Schulenburg, TX

The High Hill Post Office, established about 1858, united three neighboring villages and gave this six-acre burial ground its name. The land once belonged to George Herder, a German immigrant and veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, and its oldest stones mark settlers who died in 1861. Holding roughly 241 graves — mostly of German families — the cemetery was tended by relatives until an association formed in 1963 to care for it.

High Island, TX

Perched on a salt dome rising some 45 feet above the flat Bolivar Peninsula, High Island was the only ground to stay dry when Gulf storms drowned the coast. Anglo farmers settled here in the early 1800s within the 1837 Martin Dunman land grant, and the community grew after the railroad arrived in 1886, gaining a depot, businesses, and the Sea View Hotel that sheltered refugees during the deadly 1900 and 1915 hurricanes. Oil strikes beginning in 1916 turned the salt dome into an economic engine, and today the same high ground draws birders from around the world as a famed migratory stopover.

Ozona, TX

Built in 1902 as the first station out of Ozona on the San Angelo–Ozona mail line, this stand kept ten fresh horses ready at the 20-mile point of an 86-mile run. It served one of the last commercial stagecoach lines in Texas, its 'hacks' carrying whiskey peddlers, lightning-rod salesmen, and traveling preachers. Automobiles arriving in 1908 and the railroad in 1910 soon put the line out of business.

Crosbyton, TX

Henry Clay Smith was a true High Plains pioneer — the first to open a post office, farm, break land, and drill a water well in Crosby County. When the Civil War began he was mining at Pinos Altos, New Mexico, and joined efforts to seize the gold and silver mines for the Confederacy until Indian raids and the Confederate withdrawal in 1861 closed them down. He served four years for the South and spent the rest of his life on the plains, building a rock house in 1877 now replicated in a Crosbyton museum.

Edgewood, TX

Highland Cemetery, established by 1894, served a Van Zandt County farming community that took shape once a new road opened easier access to markets. Settlers built a school in 1889 that doubled as a meeting house for Methodist and Church of Christ worshippers, and the surrounding families raised cotton, then tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and eventually cattle. Its obelisks, Woodmen of the World marker, and graves of Civil War veterans make it one of the last vestiges of the vanished Highland settlement.

Melissa, TX

The Highland community grew up in the mid-1800s as a stop on the stagecoach route between Buckner and Bonham, and in 1858 settler Charles H. Wysong gave three acres for a church, school, and cemetery. The oldest marked grave, dated 1861, belongs to Robert Strother, and generations of north central Collin County pioneers rest here. A cemetery association organized more than a century ago still cares for the grounds.

Brookshire vicinity, TX

Erected in the 1890s on land owned by D.R. Boyd, this small white frame schoolhouse first bore his name before becoming known as Highland Home School. A single teacher taught grades one through seven, and the building doubled as a gathering place for the surrounding rural community. Like countless one-room Texas schools, it closed in 1929 when it was consolidated into the Waller Independent School District.

Dallas, TX

In 1855, a handful of pioneer families gathered in the frontier village of Dallas to form a Christian Church congregation, worshipping in homes and the county courthouse before building their first church in 1867. Civil War veteran Gen. Richard M. Gano served for years as minister and elder, and an 1877 dispute over instrumental music split the group, with those who remained becoming a Church of Christ that has relocated and renamed itself several times over the generations.

Dallas, TX

Highland Park Methodist Church began in February 1916 as the University Church at Southern Methodist University, its first members drawn from faculty and students, with the Rev. A. Frank Smith as first pastor. As families settled the new suburb of Highland Park, the congregation grew, built its "Little Brown Church," and in 1926 raised a grand Gothic Revival sanctuary on land SMU had donated. Rapid postwar expansion pushed membership past 10,500 by 1995.

Dallas, TX

Rising in 1926 in the fast-growing enclave of Highland Park, this Gothic Revival church by architects Roscoe DeWitt and Mark Lemmon announced the ambitions of Dallas's booming interwar suburbs. Its bell tower holds a 48-bell carillon, and pointed-arch windows glow behind delicate stone tracery. Major additions between 1950 and 1961 kept pace with a swelling congregation.

Marlin, TX

Built around 1898-1900 by B. C. Clark, the Highlands Mansion rose in sturdy cypress crowned with a stained leaded-glass dome and windows imported from Italy. An elegant expression of Gay Nineties taste, it stood among the showplaces of turn-of-the-century Texas and figured prominently in early Marlin society. It was carefully restored in the 1960s and named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Morgan Mill, TX

Georgia-born John B. Hightower brought his family to Erath County before the 1860 census, ranching a large spread on which they had already buried three children. In 1870 the family formally set aside nearly two acres as a cemetery, whose first non-family burial was Reuben Phillips, found dead near the ranch after an Indian attack. Deeded to a cemetery association in 1895, the burial ground still holds veterans, lodge members, and generations of area residents.

Ringgold, TX

Ever since 16th-century Spaniards chased Indian rumors of 'Seven Cities of Gold' across Texas, the state has spun tales of hidden riches—and this one is largely true. In 1936 the Texas Highway Department paved stretches of U.S. 81 and 287 in Montague County with concrete made from local sand that assayed out to contain gold. The metal was too finely embedded to mine profitably, but an estimated $31,000 in gold lies distributed along some 39 miles of roadway.

Cleveland, TX

This Craftsman-style bungalow stands in a residential subdivision laid out in 1919 on land sold by an oil company north of Cleveland's commercial district. Hill and Sara McClanahan moved in during 1923 and raised three children here while Hill ran a general store and grocery in town. The one-story home is distinguished by its steeply pitched roof, tongue-and-groove siding, and a front porch supported by unusual posts pairing cypress trunks atop brick columns.

Belton, TX

Established in 1852, Hill Cemetery is among the early burial grounds of Bell County in central Texas, dating to the first decade of statehood. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2005, it preserves the graves of the pioneer families who settled the Belton area. Its antebellum origins make it a rare record of the region's frontier beginnings.

Houston County, TX

This family burying ground began in sorrow in November 1900, when Maxie Gregg Hill and his wife Mollie set aside part of their farm to bury their infant son Dudley. Over the following generations the Hills and their descendants—sixteen children and their families—came to rest here, and the ground became a gathering place for family reunions. Among the graves lie veterans of four American wars, from World War I through Vietnam.

Hillsboro, TX

Hill County was created and organized in 1853 and named for Dr. George W. Hill, who had served in the Congress and legislature of Texas and as Secretary of War of the Republic. The village of Lexington was its first settlement, but Hillsboro has been the county seat since its earliest days. The marker records the county's founding at the moment Texas was organizing its interior into governable units.

Hillsboro, TX

Built in 1890 of rusticated limestone, this was the fourth courthouse for Hill County and the third in Hillsboro, replacing an 1874 brick building as the growing county demanded grander quarters. Waco architect W. C. Dodson gave it a modified French Second Empire style, its three stories crowned by a striking seven-story clock tower.

Hillsboro, TX

Built in 1893 as Hill County's third jail, this brick-and-limestone building was designed by Waco architect W. C. Dodson, who also drew the county courthouse. Its Victorian and medieval-revival lines dress up a practical plan: living quarters for the sheriff and jailer in front, steel-clad prisoner cells in back. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1981.

Hillsboro, TX

During the Civil War, Hill County turned itself into a Confederate supply center, sending infantry and cavalry companies into service while its workshops turned out flour, shoes, saddles, and machinery. The county's commissioners court equipped and clothed troops, supplied food and medicine to soldiers' families, and raised the money through bonds, scrip, and a special property tax.

Fredericksburg, TX

This graveyard grew up alongside the Morris Ranch, an internationally known racehorse breeding and training operation in Gillespie County. Charles Morris, nephew of ranch owner Francis Morris, served as its first general manager with help from his siblings; the earliest legible stone belongs to his father William, who died in 1894. The cemetery holds generations of the Morris family and other members of the ranch community.

San Felipe, TX

This land near San Felipe de Austin was first held by the colorful jurist Robert "Three-Legged Willie" Williamson, whose town was burned during the Texas Revolution as Sam Houston's army fell back. As families returned in 1836 to rebuild, the earliest part of the Hill House rose from the ashes. Passing through many owners and gaining a second story in the late 1800s, the cypress-built home stayed in one family for more than a century.

Moody, TX

George Hill came to Moody as a child from Tennessee and worked the family farm before taking a job at nineteen in a local hardware store that he eventually bought. In 1904 he built this Queen Anne–influenced bungalow for his family, selling it to his brother Charles in 1910. The house is a typical example of the comfortable homes many rising small-town merchant families built at the turn of the twentieth century.

Victoria, TX

Built in 1898–99 for attorney Joe L. Hill, this Victorian brick residence was sold in 1905 to Mary V. O'Connor, widow of prominent rancher Dennis O'Connor. During her family's long ownership it housed George Howard, bookkeeper for the O'Connors' sprawling oil, ranching, and banking interests, and became a hub of Victoria's social life. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1981.

Langtry, TX

Robert T. Hill came to Comanche, Texas as a teenager and grew fascinated with the land itself, eventually earning the title "father of Texas geology." Educated at Columbia and working for the U.S. Geological Survey, he mapped many of the state's defining geological regions. In 1899 he led a party surveying the Rio Grande, charting 350 miles of steep canyons and perilous rapids from Presidio before hiking out at Langtry—the first documentation of the river through the Trans-Pecos.

Huntsville, TX

Hillary Mercer Crabb came to Mexican Texas in 1830, part of the wave of Anglo-American settlers who took land grants along the Sabine before Texas won its independence. He fought in the Texas militia, including the 1832 Battle of Nacogdoches, and the farming community that grew around his homestead became known as Crabb's Prairie. When Walker County was organized in 1846 he became its first probate judge, and later served as a legislator who introduced the bill creating Madison County. A committed Unionist, he left the area rather than support secession in 1861.

San Augustine, TX

Raised in 1872 and enlarged to twelve rooms in 1878, this house was built almost entirely from the land around it — hand-hewn timbers, locally cut heart-pine floors and ceilings, and brick fired at the old Ayish Bayou kiln. Its seven fireplaces are dressed with marble mantels imported from France, carried inland by boats up the Sabine River. The blend of local craft and worldly finish speaks to a prosperous Reconstruction-era East Texas.

Temple, TX

Hillcrest began as a rural family graveyard—known first as Williamson Branch Graveyard—when area residents started burying their dead here in the 1870s, before the city of Temple even existed. Landowners John and Mary Williams deeded acreage for a public cemetery in 1884, and a cemetery company formed in 1893 as the growing town and Bell County built up its infrastructure. Today roughly 18,000 people rest here, their gravestones inscribed in Chinese, Czech, Korean, Vietnamese, German, and more.

Canton, TX

Laid out within Canton's original 1850 town plat, Hillcrest Cemetery has served the East Texas community for well over a century, its oldest documented grave dating to 1860. Among the marked and unmarked burials rest Van Zandt County pioneers, community leaders, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars. The grounds stand as a quiet chronicle of the town's founding families and their descendants.

Forney, TX

The oldest marked grave here, that of M. Elizabeth Collins (1813–1867), predates the founding of Forney itself. When the railroad town took shape, the site was platted in 1880 as a public cemetery and later enlarged with adjoining land—early upkeep even included a short-lived experiment of grazing sheep on the grounds. Those buried at Hillcrest include pioneer settlers, community leaders, and five known Civil War veterans.

Canton, TX

George McIntosh Hilliard opened a general merchandise store in Canton in 1896, and with his sons expanded it into a downtown fixture selling everything from farm equipment to furniture. A 1919 brick building even housed an undertaking business alongside hardware and dry goods, reflecting how a rural store met every need of its community. The Hilliard stores stayed open through mid-century population declines, serving Canton for over a hundred years.

Hillsboro, TX

Hillsboro City Cemetery was established in 1855, as settlement spread across Hill County in the years before the Civil War. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002, its grounds preserve the resting places of the community's founding generations.