Historic Markers in Texas

Hillsboro, TX

Founded in 1923 within the Hillsboro public school system, this was among the first public junior colleges in Texas, reaching a peak enrollment of 410 students on the eve of World War II. Voters twice rejected the maintenance tax needed to sustain it, and the school closed in 1950 before reopening more than a decade later in 1962.

Hillsboro, TX

Begun in 1912 and finished three years later under supervising architect James Knox Taylor, this Renaissance Revival building was Hillsboro's fifth post office. Its tiled roof, arched entrance arcade, and elaborate terra-cotta and stone detailing reflect the dignified federal architecture of the era. It carried the town's mail until 1967 and was afterward adapted as the city's public library.

Cuero, TX

The town of Cuero was surveyed and incorporated in 1873 as the railroad reached inland from the doomed coastal port of Indianola. In 1875 the land company set aside twelve acres here for a municipal burial ground, and by 1880 local women had formed a cemetery association to maintain it, hiring a groundskeeper and later endowing its upkeep. The grounds grew to absorb the once-segregated African American cemetery, Evergreen, and hold veterans back to the Mexican War alongside victims of the Indianola hurricanes.

Monte Alto, TX

Founded in 1939 by Lee and Sherman Ewald on a hilltop north of La Villa, Hilltop Gardens became one of the first commercial aloe vera farms in the United States, pioneering the crop's cultivation in the Rio Grande Valley. Lee Ewald developed aloe-gel cosmetics with her daughters, marketing them through a company incorporated in 1962 in what is believed to be a first use of aloe gel as a cosmetic ingredient. Under later owners the farm grew to hundreds of thousands of plants and became part of a major aloe-producing corporation, opening to the public in 2012 with the largest U.S. collection of aloe species.

Corpus Christi, TX

In the early 1930s a coalition of Corpus Christi women—led by the county Red Cross chair and university-women's groups—launched tuberculin testing in the schools and opened a small hilltop sanatorium for a disease that medicine could not yet cure. Community support sustained the overcrowded collection of shacks and porches until a modern 100-bed hospital opened in 1953, and as antibiotics transformed treatment the county closed Hilltop in 1968.

Dallas, TX

Built in 1925 to designs by Lang and Witchell, this fourteen-story brick building was the very first hotel to carry the Hilton name. It promised comfortable rooms and good service at moderate prices, its U-shaped plan dressed up with elaborate terra cotta at the entrances. Later operated as the White-Plaza from 1938 until 1974, it stands at the origin point of one of the world's great hospitality empires.

Marlin, TX

After his first venture in the boom town of Cisco launched him toward becoming the world's foremost innkeeper, Conrad Hilton dreamed of Texas "wearing a chain of Hilton Hotels." This Marlin property was his eighth hotel, an early link in that growing chain. The marker honors Hilton, born in 1887, as one of the great figures of the American Southwest.

Hiner, TX

Local memory credits James J. Barnett, who reached Parker County in 1857, with founding the community of Hiner, aiding newcomers with transportation and shelter as they arrived. By about 1870 Wade Chapel Methodist Church rose on donated land beside the cemetery, serving as school and gathering place under its first minister, the Reverend James Hiner. The burial ground, with graves reaching back to 1872, holds at least seven Civil War veterans among the community's pioneers.

New Braunfels, TX

Heinrich Hinmann bought this New Braunfels property in 1855 and, with his wife Therese, raised ten children in the limestone house built around 1868. Its load-bearing masonry, hand-tooled stone courses, heavy lintels, and gallery porch reflect the German building traditions that shaped so many of the town's early structures. The home stayed in the family for more than a century, even serving as Dr. A.J. Hinmann's medical office in the 1920s.

Brownsville, TX

Built in 1950, the Hinojosa House stands in Los Ebanos, a Brownsville subdivision laid out in the 1920s with curved streets tracing the resacas—oxbow lakes left by the flooding Rio Grande. Ramon and Consuelo Hinojosa bought the last two lots developed there, broke ground in March 1950, and moved in that May, into a late example of the California-Monterey style marked unusually by a cantilevered second story in place of the customary balcony.

Collinsville, TX

Chartered in 1875, Hiram Lodge No. 433 first met on Collinsville's original town square. When fire and then the arrival of the Texas & Pacific Railroad in 1881 reshaped the town, the lodge—like most of Collinsville—picked up and moved to be near the tracks. Over generations its Masons aided widows and orphans, backed war bonds, and supported local schools and the Scottish Rite children's hospital.

Cooper, TX

Hiram Rattan, born in 1805, came to Texas in 1835 and settled on his brother Larkin's land grant—ground that would later become the city of Paris—before both families moved to Delta County in 1839. Hiram earned two land grants raising grain and livestock, while Larkin chased the California Gold Rush before returning to Illinois. The family knew frontier hardship firsthand: four relatives were killed in Indian raids, and the Civil War split their loyalties without shaking their devotion to Texas.

Austin, TX

Henry Hirshfeld left Germany at fifteen, worked for uncles in Mobile, and served in the Confederate Army before settling in Austin to enter the mercantile trade. By 1873, a rising businessman, he built this one-story stone cottage with its distinctive widow's walk and jigsaw porch detailing. A founder and first president of Congregation Beth Israel and an early appointee to the State Board of Trade, Hirshfeld moved his growing family to a larger house next door in 1888 and kept the cottage as rental property.

Austin, TX

In the boom years after the Civil War, Austin was reinventing itself as a state capital and commercial hub, and German-born merchant Henry Hirshfeld rode that prosperity from a modest limestone cottage to this grand two-story brick and cut-stone home in 1885. Designed by architect John Andrewartha in exuberant Victorian and Eastlake taste, its double gallery, bay, and intricate stonework announced a family that had arrived. A leader in Austin's Jewish community and a founder of the Austin National Bank, Hirshfeld saw his descendants live here into the 1970s.

Hubbard, TX

Banking in Hubbard began as a small private operation soon after the town's 1881 founding, and by 1895 two rival banks had opened. Oliver and Allen raised a two-story Victorian stone building for their firm, which failed in 1903 and passed to the First National Bank, and later to the First State Bank. A 1973 storm finally destroyed the historic building that had anchored the town's commerce for generations.

Stephenville, TX

In 1929 the Stephenville City Council set out to tame its dusty streets, hiring the Thurber Construction Co. to pave the town with the high-quality bricks made in nearby Thurber and prized by builders statewide. Laid over a macadam base, the brickwork was paid for largely by property owners even as the Depression loomed, and residents took pride in the durable new thoroughfares.

Kingsville, TX

In the 1880s and '90s, tick-borne "Texas fever" was killing beef cattle by the thousands and choking the industry with quarantines drawn from the Rio Grande to the Atlantic. In 1894, on the vast King Ranch, this dipping vat—reputed to be the first of its kind—became the proving ground where scientists from Texas A&M and the U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry tested an oil-and-sulphur formula on 25,000 infested cattle. Their success lifted the federal quarantine in 1898 and gave ranchers a powerful new weapon against livestock disease.

Jefferson, TX

This Victorian cottage stands near the ferry crossing that helped make Jefferson a booming inland river port in the mid-1800s. Its first known owners, John M. and Nancy Dollehite, took possession in 1851, and among its distinguished residents was Ernestine Sterne, who served as Jefferson's postmaster from 1872 to 1875. Katherine R. Wise, its owner since 1946, restored the home to its earlier grace.

La Porte, TX

Before La Porte built a public school for its Black children, they learned in a local church that doubled as classroom and sanctuary. Around 1909 a former Methodist church was moved to this site to serve as a one-room schoolhouse for grades one through eight, older students traveling eight miles to high school in Baytown. For decades it was known simply as "Mrs. Dewalt's school" after its devoted teacher Viola Dewalt, until a new brick campus opened in 1953.

Medina, TX

Soon after John Travis Walker and his wife Mariah settled 400 acres near Medina in 1897, their family built these log cribs to store feed for sheep, goats, draft animals, and a milk cow. The craftsmanship—rough-hewn logs, single-saddle notches, and pole-rafter roofs pinned with wood—reflects building traditions carried by Anglo settlers from the Upper South into Central Texas. Every task was done by hand, with muscle from the family and their animals.

Wolfe City, TX

Around 1873, pioneers Lemuel P. Wolfe and Abbey Wilson built a grist mill here, grinding corn with a wheel turned by oxen treading an incline. The millhouse held the area's first post office and became the heart of a settlement called Wolfe's Mill, which incorporated in 1886 as Wolfe City.

Denton, TX

Built in 1912–13 as a combined library and gymnasium, this is the oldest surviving building on the University of North Texas campus. In 1925 a history professor founded a museum here, and for six decades the building housed an eclectic collection of books and artifacts gathered from around the world. After the museum closed, the structure carried on as offices, classrooms, and even a college radio station.

Fort Worth, TX

When Kentucky-born William Henry Hitch brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1855, he became the anchor of a small pioneer migration, drawing the Trigg, Liggett, and Martin families to follow. The graveyard on his former farm holds the oldest burial from 1858 and stands today amid a growing Fort Worth as a quiet trace of those first settlers.

Hitchcock, TX

By local tradition, the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad won its right-of-way through Emily Hitchcock's land in 1875 by promising a depot bearing her late husband's name. The railroad platted the town of Hitchcock in 1891, and the depot that opened by 1893 became a hub where passengers, freight, and farm produce all passed through. The last surviving GCSF depot in the area, it was moved to this spot in 1975 and turned into a museum in 1982.

Palo Pinto, TX

This burial ground began with the family of Jesse Hittson, a Virginia-born pioneer who came to the area in 1855 and started raising cattle at an important early Brazos River crossing that became known as Hittson Bend. Hittson helped organize Palo Pinto County in 1857, and his is the oldest marked grave here. Five generations of the family rest at this site, including relatives who rose to prominence in the cattle industry and the region's development.

Putnam vicinity, TX

Battle Creek earned its name in 1840 when a party hunting raiders was itself attacked near the water. Two decades later cattleman John Hittson built what is believed to be the first ranch headquarters in Callahan County on that same ground — just corrals, branding pens, and a modest shelter used at roundup time. It marks the moment open Texas rangeland began to be organized into working ranches.

Medina, TX

Built in 1870 for Fabian L. Hicks — a county official and Texas Ranger — this ranch house was styled after his family home in North Carolina, using stone and cypress cut from the ranch itself, with hardware freighted in by ox wagon from San Antonio. It replaced the log cabin the family had occupied since 1855, marking the shift from frontier survival to established Hill Country ranching.

Marble Falls, TX

William H. Hoag, an electrical engineer from New York City, and his wife Beatrice built this arts-and-crafts bungalow in 1910 before selling it to a local rancher in 1914. Over the decades it passed among farming and ranching families—including county commissioner Albano J. Fuchs—remaining in the Faubion family until 1946. Its unusual porch and columned bays on a solid balustrade make it an early Hill Country example of the bungalow style.

Roby vicinity, TX

As settlers filtered into Fisher County in the early 1880s, a community took shape and borrowed the middle name of Roby postmaster Vachel Hobbs Anderson. Local landowners Robert and Ann Hayter set aside ground for a cemetery in the early 1900s, first used to bury Indiana native Thomas J. Bone in 1906. Though the town later drifted north toward a new school, the cemetery endures as its memorial.

Rotan vicinity, TX

Education in the Hobbs community began in a tent on Buffalo Creek in 1887 and grew through a church-schoolhouse built with funds from a Louisiana congregation. Over the decades the district consolidated dozens of tiny rural schools — Guinn, Sardis, Lone Star, Chicken Foot, and many more — into a single system, with WPA-built classrooms added in the 1930s. As the farm population drained toward the cities after World War II, enrollment collapsed, and the district was dissolved and annexed to neighbors in 1989.

Dallas, TX

Karl Hoblitzelle came out of Missouri to help stage the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, then founded the Interstate Amusement Company in 1905 and built a theater empire spreading from Texas across the South. A pioneer who wired his houses for sound and air-conditioned them, he set national trends as an exhibitor, with the Majestic Theatre as his flagship. In later life he became a leading philanthropist, funding schools and hospitals and donating his archives to the University of Texas.

Hochheim, TX

Hochheim grew up in 1856 around Valentine Hoch's home and stage stand on the old Austin–Indianola road, its very name meaning "Hoch's home." German settlers built a Methodist church in 1864, a post office opened in 1869, and the county's first Protestant congregation relocated here in 1882 as the Hochheim Presbyterian Church. A Masonic lodge, chartered in 1856, anchored community life, buying and later fully occupying the schoolhouse that served the town into 1938.

Hochheim, TX

Rachel S. Crawford, a pioneer settler with her husband James, donated the land for Hochheim Cemetery, where they and many descendants lie buried. The graveyard also holds numerous unmarked graves of immigrant pioneers who first reached Texas through the nearby Gulf port of Indianola. Among those interred are veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and both World Wars, spanning more than a century of use.

Dallas, TX

Educator Ela Hockaday, trained in Texas and in graduate study at Columbia and the University of Chicago, was recruited in 1913 to lead a new preparatory school for Dallas girls. Opening that September with ten students and four part-time teachers in a house on Haskell Avenue, the Miss Hockaday School for Girls grew steadily around her cornerstones of "character, scholarship, courtesy, and athletics."

Levelland, TX

Hockley County was created in 1876 and organized in 1921, its seat at Levelland—known as Hockley City until 1912. It bears the name of George W. Hockley, who commanded the artillery at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto and served as Secretary of War for the Republic of Texas. The marker ties the sweep of the South Plains to the founding generation of Texas independence.

Levelland, TX

When the Santa Fe railroad reached Hockley County in 1925, the population exploded and drew many minority laborers to work the land in an era of strict segregation. In 1927 the county set aside two acres for a segregated cemetery for indigent and minority residents; the first recorded burial, in 1930, was of Jerry McHenry, an African American man. Little used after Levelland's cemetery was desegregated in the 1960s, it holds fourteen marked graves and over 100 unmarked burials.

Temple, TX

This small Bell County graveyard takes its name from J. W. Hodge, a successful rancher and farmer who bought the surrounding land in 1870, though burials here reach back at least to 1868. Alongside Hodge and his wife Martha lie other early settlers, including community leader Joseph Dennis, born back in 1810. Occupying less than an acre, it survives as a well-kept example of a Central Texas pioneer graveyard.

Jefferson, TX

Berry and Lavenia Hodge moved from Kentucky and had this Greek Revival house built along the Daingerfield Road in 1852. Their son Robert Blount Hodge rode with the 3rd Texas Cavalry, C.S.A., and died of wounds from the Battle of Atlanta in 1864. Hodge, a prominent landowner and surveyor, later sold the cypress-built home to newspaper publisher D.W.H. Taylor of the Jefferson Jimplecute, and it was restored by T.J. Taylor, Jr. in the 1950s.

Sugar Land, TX

Alexander Hodge rode with Francis Marion's South Carolina brigade in the Revolution before bringing his family to Texas in 1825 as one of Stephen F. Austin's celebrated "Old Three Hundred" colonists. His 1828 land grant, Hodge's Bend, set aside the ground for this cemetery, which opened with the 1831 burial of his wife Ruth and received Hodge himself in 1836. Around seventy-five graves of his descendants and neighboring pioneers followed, the last in 1942.

Palestine, TX

After the International & Great Northern Railroad reached Palestine in the 1870s, brothers A. B. and Dan Hodges arrived from the Tennessee Colony settlement and became leading merchants. Dan built this Queen Anne home in 1895 for his wife Margaret Sue and their five children, a fine example of late-Victorian style. It was bought and lovingly restored in 1959 by oil-industry leader William Gray Darsey, Jr.

Wichita Falls, TX

In the boomtown years of the 1890s, local craftsmen raised this late Victorian residence in Wichita Falls for attorney and real estate investor Samuel Hodges, complete with a wraparound porch and the delicate spindled Eastlake trim then in fashion. In 1910 it passed to Dan Hardy, a merchant and oilman who, with his wife Myrtle, became known for civic leadership and generosity. The house stayed in the Hardy family for more than seventy years.

Austin, TX

A rare Austin example of the Craftsman style, this house was designed in 1909 by prominent architect Charles H. Page, Sr. for businessman Milton Hodnette. Its horizontal lines, deep overhanging eaves, broad porch, and contrast of local limestone against brick are hallmarks of the aesthetic, down to lanterns possibly wrought by local craftsman Fortunat Weigl. Decades later, stone from the low wall that once encircled the property was reused to build a garage.

Fredericksburg, TX

Built around 1900 for J. A. Hoerster, this limestone Victorian commercial building has anchored a Fredericksburg streetscape for over a century, later held by the Wieser family for more than fifty years. Its narrow storefront columns and bracketed second-floor balcony framed a rotating cast of tenants—retail stores, a barber, a dentist, even city offices. It stands as a well-preserved example of small-town Main Street commerce.

Art, TX

Daniel Hoerster served as a cattle brands inspector in Mason County during the mid-1870s, a time when the Hill Country's German settlers, ranchers, and vigilantes were locked in the bloody feud remembered as the Mason County War. In 1875 he was killed by cattle rustlers amid that struggle between law and lawlessness.

Austin, TX

German immigrant Henry Hofheintz built this store in Austin sometime between 1850 and 1875, where it served as a grocery and dry goods shop for nearly a century. A later one-story addition did duty as both saloon and residence, and the property stayed in the family—passing to his daughter Catherine and her husband Adolph Reissig—until 1966. Its German-influenced design typifies the modest neighborhood businesses that dotted 19th-century Texas towns.

Mason, TX

In the summer of 1890, brothers-in-law William Hofmann and Ernest H. Bogusch opened a general store on the courthouse square in Mason, then a young ranching town in the Texas Hill Country. Renamed Hofmann Dry Goods Company in 1903, it grew beyond dry goods into a commodities brokerage and a favorite gathering spot for townsfolk and surrounding farmers. Kept in the same family for generations, it became a fixture of Mason's downtown economic and social life.

Dublin, TX

Former Confederate cavalry blacksmith William Alexander Hogan brought his family from Mississippi to Dublin after 1870 and opened a shop on Elm Street as railroads drew cattlemen and cotton farmers to the region. His son Chester carried on the trade, and Chester's son Ben—who caddied at 11—grew into a world champion golfer who used blacksmithing skills to modify his clubs and, in 1953, opened his own club-manufacturing plant. The Hogan family held the land until donating it to Dublin in 1997.

Brenham, TX

In 1914 educator Columbus H. Hogan helped found what became the only funeral home serving African Americans in Washington County. Because local hospitals were segregated, the business also ran ambulance service to Houston and Galveston, carrying Black patients to care they could not receive at home. Hogan, a civic and religious leader, later gave land for a nearby cemetery, and his son Booker T. Hogan, Sr. carried on the family enterprise.

Houston, TX

Houston business and civic leader Will C. Hogg commissioned this art deco commercial building in 1921, during the city's early-20th-century boom. Designed by the engineering firm of Barglebaugh and Whitson, its façade is defined by rows of industrial windows, while a rooftop penthouse with Mediterranean touches housed the offices of the Hogg family enterprises. Early tenants included an auto company and a life insurance firm.

Azle, TX

In the hard years after the Civil War, a Confederate widow named Sarah Hoggard set aside part of her North Texas farm to bury a Black child who had died passing through with his family — an act of grace that seeded a burial ground. Over the following decades the Hoggard and Reynolds families, joined by marriage and rooted in the area's first cotton gin and grist mill, filled the plot with the graves of Parker County's pioneers. Formally deeded in 1899 and renamed in 1984, the cemetery reads today as a chronicle of frontier settlement.

Junction, TX

Built between 1877 and 1879 on caliche soil without a foundation, this was the first two-story house in Kimble County, raised by Civil War veteran B.F. Pepper, who had led a wagon train of settlers to Texas from Missouri. In the family of Dr. R.H.P. Wright since 1905, it was the girlhood home of Fay Wright, who as wife of Governor Coke Stevenson became First Lady of Texas in the 1940s.

Alto, TX

The Holcombs have gathered on this Cherokee County ground every year since 1897, when about 200 kin arrived by horse and buggy, pitched tents at Cold Springs, and honored family patriarchs Joseph and Zachariah Holcomb. The clan had come to Texas from Arkansas beginning in 1842; their reunion grew into a multigenerational institution, adding a pavilion in the 1950s and continuing for more than a century.

Houston, TX

Houston businessman and developer Oscar Holcombe built this Tudor Revival home in 1925, hiring architect L. W. Lindsay and landscape architect Herbert Skogland for its gardens. Its half-timbering, elaborate chimney, and decorative brick entry portico mark it as a showpiece of the era. Holcombe, who served eleven nonconsecutive terms as mayor between 1921 and 1957, lived here until his death in 1968.

Granbury, TX

Contractor E.J. Holderness, known for many of Granbury's Victorian buildings, built this frame house for his own family in 1896, giving its front porch intricate Eastlake-style trim. He enlarged and lived in it until 1913, and in 1926 it passed to Mary Narcissa Rylee Aiken, a member of a pioneer Hood County family. Her daughter Mabel later preserved the residence.

Laredo, TX

In 1880, missionaries Annie Williams and Rebecca Toland, backed by the Women's Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, set out to bring formal schooling to the young women of the Texas-Mexico border. The Laredo Seminary they founded opened its doors in 1882 as a boarding school and grew into a lasting educational institution later known as the Holding Institute. It stood as a rare avenue of advanced learning for girls in a still-frontier region.

Holland, TX

Holland grew out of three settlements that began drawing farmers to this fertile ground in the 1830s, first clustering around a place called Mountain Home. In 1878 Civil War veteran James R. "Rube" Holland built a steam-powered cotton gin, a post office took his name, and when the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad arrived in 1881 the town shifted to a new site. Czech and German immigrants poured in, and by 1920 Holland was a thriving cotton town of over a thousand, with banks, hotels, gins, and an opera house.

Alpine, TX

In 1912, as Alpine rode a boom in mercury mining in the Big Bend country, cattleman John R. Holland raised this Spanish Colonial Revival hotel as the young town's gathering place. For decades it hosted the civic, social, and business life of the community, expanding under his son Clay before finally closing its doors in 1969. Named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1980, it endures as a symbol of West Texas's boomtown optimism.

Houston, TX

Organized at Brazoria in 1835, Holland Lodge was the first Masonic lodge in Texas, working under a dispensation from Louisiana until the Texas Revolution scattered it. Its charter survived the war in the saddlebags of Dr. Anson Jones, who carried it to San Jacinto; reopened in 1837 in the young Republic's capital, the lodge helped found the Grand Lodge of the Republic of Texas and took the No. 1 designation.

Carthage, TX

When emancipation came, freedpeople across the South built their own communities from the ground up, and land like this—deeded by Spearman Holland to former slaves after the Civil War—became the anchor for a church, a school, a lodge hall, and a cemetery. More than 500 graves rest here, though only a fraction are marked, among them fraternal-order members and veterans of every war from World War I to Vietnam. Still serving its community today, the burial ground is a living monument to a settlement that has endured for well over a century.

Burnet, TX

Long a watering place for Native peoples, these cool springs on Hamilton Creek drew Henry E. McCulloch's Texas Ranger camp in 1847. A visiting Georgian, Samuel E. Holland, judged the valley ideal for a home and bought 1,280 acres to become the first permanent settler in what became Burnet County. The Ranger post gave way to Fort Croghan in 1849, and Holland's efforts grew the site into a thriving pioneer community.