Historic Markers in Texas

Robstown, TX

Robstown sprang up where two railroads crossed, and in 1914 local businessmen C.C. Brendle and V.V. Elick built a hotel as near the depot as they could manage. Its 36 rooms quickly became the town's social hub, doubling as a showroom where traveling salesmen laid out their wares. Passing through hard times and later German fraternal ownership, the three-story building — with its brick parapet, red tile roof, and arched doorway — still recalls the boomtown energy of early-century South Texas.

El Paso, TX

Businesswoman Alzina DeGroff bought the hotel on this site in 1899, and by 1926 had commissioned a striking new building from the Southwest's premier architect, Henry C. Trost. Renamed the Hotel Cortez in 1935, its Spanish eclectic brick facade bristles with terra cotta busts of conquistadors. Among its guests was President John F. Kennedy, who stayed here in 1963, the year of his death. The hotel closed in 1970 and was later restored and converted to offices.

Eagle Lake, TX

Eagle Lake grew up in the 1850s where three railroads crossed and stagecoaches paused, and Gamaliel Good's early hotel on this corner served the steady stream of travelers and traveling salesmen — the "drummers" — who kept a rail town's commerce humming. By 1912, when the surviving Hotel Dallas was built, the local economy had shifted to rice farming, and this house became the town's social and business hub. As railroads faded and automobiles took over, its trade declined, leaving it the last of Eagle Lake's historic hotels.

Galveston, TX

After the catastrophic 1900 hurricane that nearly wiped Galveston off the map, the island's businessmen and ordinary subscribers pooled a million dollars to build a grand hotel and signal that the port city would rebuild. Completed in 1911 and designed by the St. Louis firm Mauran and Russell, the Hotel Galvez rose in Spanish Colonial Revival style with a red tile roof and white stuccoed walls. Both hotel and city honor Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana and viceroy of Mexico for whom Galveston Bay was named.

Fort Davis, TX

Built in 1912 by the Union Trading Company and named for nearby Limpia Creek, the Hotel Limpia quickly became the social heart of Fort Davis. With a doctor's office, drugstore, guest rooms, and broad porches, it drew ranchers and wealthy "Summer Swallows" seeking the cool high-desert climate, where they could hear the news, play croquet, or await election returns. Later used as apartments and offices—including housing for Harvard University staff for nearly 25 years—it was reestablished as a hotel in 1978.

El Paso, TX

El Paso booster Zach White arrived in 1881 and staked his faith on the border city's future, building an international bridge and streetcar line and bringing electric lights and natural gas to town. His grandest gesture was the ten-story Hotel Paso Del Norte, completed in 1912 and designed by the celebrated firm of Trost and Trost to be fireproof, inspired by buildings that had survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. For generations it hosted travelers, cattlemen, and dignitaries from both sides of the Rio Grande.

Fort Worth, TX

Planned in 1919 by civic leaders eager to showcase Fort Worth's boom and completed in 1921, the Hotel Texas rose with elaborate terra cotta detailing under the city's noted architects Sanguinet and Staats. Its place in history was sealed on November 21, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy spent the last night of his life here before traveling on to Dallas.

Turkey, TX

When the Hotel Turkey opened in 1927 with twenty guest rooms, it welcomed the railroad travelers, traveling salesmen, and ranchers who did business in this young Panhandle town. Its decorative brickwork and arched porch were meant to project the ambition of a settlement that hoped the railroad would make it grow. The hotel stood as a symbol of the optimism that surrounded early West Texas rail towns.

Hebbronville, TX

Built in 1915 for owner Viggo Kohler, this Mission Revival hotel welcomed businessmen and travelers to Hebbronville. Soon after opening, it served as a makeshift fortress when area ranchers feared a raid by Pancho Villa's men amid the turmoil along the border. The town's oil boom brought a south wing in 1924, and the hotel has stood as a landmark on the courthouse square ever since.

Garrison, TX

The town of Garrison sprang up along the railroad in 1885, and by about 1900 Mattie Wiley was running her hotel at the heart of its bustle. Railroad crews, telephone workers, and traveling salesmen filled its rooms and gathered for her family-style meals in the dining room. With its hipped roof, decorative spindlework, and wraparound porch, the building is a fine surviving example of the Queen Anne–influenced railroad hotel.

Abilene, TX

When the Hotel Wooten opened in June 1930 to a crowd of more than two thousand, entrepreneur H.O. Wooten had delivered on his promise of New York–caliber lodging for West Texas. Rising seventeen stories, it was the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso, clad in buff brick with cast stone, marble, and granite detailing by Abilene architect David S. Castle. It endures as one of the city's finest examples of Art Deco design.

Wichita Falls, TX

The Hotter 'N Hell Hundred began in 1982 as the kickoff to Wichita Falls' centennial, built around an irresistible pitch: 100 miles in 100 degrees to celebrate 100 years. Organized by the Wichita Falls Bicycle Club and named from an offhand joke that the ride would be 'hotter than hell,' the first event drew more than 1,200 riders and hundreds of volunteers. Over the decades it grew into a multi-day festival with thousands of cyclists, its famous 'Hell's Gate' cutoff, and formal recognition from the Texas Legislature.

El Paso, TX

The Houchen Community Center traces its roots to 1893, when Michigan teacher Rose Gregory Houchen backed missionary work in El Paso's Segundo Barrio, a Hispanic neighborhood on the border. Her 1910 donation built a settlement house that opened in 1912 offering English classes, daycare, and kindergarten. As Mexican Revolution refugees poured in and disease spread, the center pivoted to health care, eventually running the Freeman Clinic and a maternity hospital that delivered more than 62,000 babies.

Rocksprings, TX

Built in 1897 by Samuel A. and Annie Bradford Hough, this Edwards County home—affectionately called "the Haven"—became a center of local civic and social life. Samuel Hough, one of the first graduates of Texas A&M, and the attorneys, county judges, and district clerks who lived here made the house a fixture of the young community of Rocksprings. Remarkably, the Hough family still owned the home when it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Amarillo, TX

This two-story brick residence was built in 1914 for John Malcolm Shelton, a Kentucky-born cattleman who became a prominent Panhandle rancher and businessman, and designed by Amarillo architect Joseph Champ Berry in the Prairie Style. After Shelton's death the home passed to his daughter Martha, wife of rancher Ted Houghton, who lived here until 1965. Its Prairie-Style detailing marks the arrival of national architectural fashion on the Texas plains.

Crockett, TX

This Crockett house was built by A. T. Monroe, a kinsman of President James Monroe, who issued the Monroe Doctrine. Its walls combine hand-hewn Louisiana heart oak with an inner brick core, and the home long served as a center of local social life. Since 1911 it has belonged to the family of prominent attorney George W. Crook and is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Houston, TX

Lawyers began practicing in Houston in 1837, just a year after Texas won independence, and by 1870 they formed an early bar association under Judge Peter W. Gray to raise professional standards and build a law library. That group and a 1901 successor both faded quickly, but the present Houston Bar Association, organized in 1904, took hold. Its early work included campaigning for the 1910 Harris County Courthouse and founding the county law library in 1915.

Houston, TX

Chartered in 1871, the Houston Cemetery Company was one of several private ventures through which the city's business leaders pursued civic improvement after the Civil War. Choosing a picturesque site of springs and gullies between Buffalo Bayou and Washington Avenue, they named it Glenwood and made its first burial in 1872. Its winding drives and curvilinear plots followed the eastern rural-cemetery model, and the park-like grounds drew Houstonians for leisure years before the city opened its first public park.

Houston, TX

On November 30, 1836, the Congress of the new Republic of Texas chose this raw townsite at the head of Buffalo Bayou as its temporary capital. Into a "Houston City" of mud, tents, and cabins came President Sam Houston and his government in April 1837, meeting in a two-story plantation-style capitol that hosted Indian treaties, diplomacy, legislation, and even church services. The city held its first great social event that spring—a San Jacinto anniversary ball—before the capital moved on, and Mirabeau B. Lamar succeeded Houston here in 1838.

Houston, TX

Chartered in 1874 as cotton flooded through the booming port city, the Houston Cotton Exchange and Board of Trade built this Victorian Renaissance Revival hall in 1884–85 to the design of architect Eugene T. Heiner. Trading floors and galleries filled the upper stories while the exclusive Houston Club and a basement saloon served the merchants below; a fourth floor was added in 1907. The exchange departed in 1924 and the building was restored in 1973.

Crockett, TX

When Houston County needed a new courthouse in the late 1930s, its leaders turned to federal Public Works Administration funds to build one in 1939. Designed by a county native and raised by a Dallas contractor, the building wore the sleek Moderne lines and Art Deco detail that were the height of Depression-era fashion. It has remained the seat of county government ever since.

Houston, TX

Completed in January 1899 to a design by architect Olle J. Lorehn, this is Houston's oldest fire house — a two-story brick structure with rusticated stone details, a five-bay front, and a central arched entry flanked by apparatus bays. Updated in the 1920s as the department traded horse-drawn wagons for motorized engines, it stayed in active service until 1968.

Houston, TX

In 1890 investors from an Omaha loan and trust company came to Houston, bought some 1,756 acres northwest of downtown, and set out to build a model suburb. Named Houston Heights for its elevation about 23 feet above the city, the development came with electrified streetcar lines, laid-out streets, sidewalks, and utilities — an early planned community. Incorporated in 1896, it grew into a distinct town before residents voted for annexation by Houston in 1918 to broaden the tax base for their schools.

Houston, TX

After the former city hall burned in 1912, Houston Heights mayor J. B. Marmion and the council hired architect A. C. Pigg to design a building that combined city offices, a fire station, and a small jail. Completed in 1914, it served its full civic role only until 1918, when Houston annexed Houston Heights. It then became Fire Station No. 14, active until 1995, and still stands as a decorative brick-and-cast-stone neighborhood landmark.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1900 and housed since 1912 in its own clubhouse, the Houston Heights Woman's Club gave women a platform to shape their community and step beyond traditional roles in an era that denied them the vote, property rights, and jury service. Members established a school library in 1905, rolled surgical bandages for the Red Cross in both World Wars, and earned a Treasury citation for their wartime service. Their charitable work has continued for generations, from toys for hospitalized children to quilts for children in protective custody.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1874 by two former Confederate Army surgeons, the Houston Infirmary became one of the city's leading hospitals in the decades after the Civil War. It grew alongside the railroads pouring into Houston in the 1870s and 1880s, organizing medical care for their crews and reflecting the era in its segregated wards for white, Black, and Hispanic patients. After nearly forty years and a family dynasty of physicians, competition from a dedicated railway hospital helped bring its closure in 1913.

Houston, TX

Houston architect Alfred C. Finn designed this 1925 armory to replace an outgrown 1892 building, dressing it in banded brick and stone with carved relief panels evoking English masonry. Home to the Houston Light Guard—a storied volunteer militia unit—the building later passed through the hands of the State of Texas and a community college. Its handsome facade still speaks to the civic pride once invested in a city's citizen-soldiers.

Houston, TX

In September 1935, in the teeth of both the Depression and Jim Crow, Houston's Black community leaders founded the Houston Negro Chamber of Commerce to build economic power where segregation had walled it out. With J.E. Robinson Sr. as its first president, the chamber promoted Black-owned businesses, pushed residents to pay poll taxes so they could vote, and championed fair housing and employment. During World War II its office even doubled as a rations headquarters. In 1964, under Mack H. Hannah Jr., it became the Houston Citizens Chamber of Commerce, which endures today.

Houston, TX

Houston's library grew from the debating societies of the 1840s, whose members formed a circulating library and, in 1854, the Houston Lyceum, a whites-only, dues-paying men's club. Women admitted in 1887 became the persistent advocates for free public access, and in 1899 the city funded a library; a $50,000 gift from Andrew Carnegie brought a grand building that opened in 1904. Under longtime librarian Julia Ideson, the system expanded into branches, a bookmobile, and a larger central facility later named in her honor.

Bluff Dale, TX

The Putnam brothers assembled 25,000 acres on Upper Berry Creek in 1879, building a three-story commissary for travelers and pioneering some of the area's first cattle dipping vats. The land passed through several owners before the I.T. Houston family bought its heart in 1942, and four generations have worked the ranch since.

La Porte, TX

Founded in 1897 by prominent Houstonians meeting downtown in the Binz Building, the Houston Yacht Club weathered reorganizations and financial troubles before settling into a Spanish mission clubhouse on Galveston Bay in 1927. From its earliest regattas the club sent members racing at every level, including the Olympics. In wartime its members lent their boats to patrol the ship channel and bay, and its clubhouse sheltered residents during natural disasters.

Independence, TX

When Margaret Lea Houston, widow of Sam Houston, died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1867, fear of contagion made it impossible to carry her body to Huntsville to lie beside her famous husband. She was buried here instead, near her mother Nancy Lea and the church and homes both women loved. The little family cemetery preserves the resting place of a woman who quietly shaped one of Texas's towering figures.

Lovelady, TX

Founded in 1900 to mine lignite — a soft coal between peat and bituminous — this company opened a slope mine here and built the company town of Wooters. The early years were a struggle to find buyers, but power plants, gins, and other East Texas customers eventually took the fuel, and by 1916–1925 the operation employed some 200 workers, a diverse workforce that included men recruited straight off ships arriving in Galveston. Natural gas undercut the market, and the company dissolved in 1932.

Huntsville, TX

Margaret Moffette Lea was a college-educated Alabama woman of nineteen when she married the 46-year-old Sam Houston in 1840, becoming the Republic of Texas's first true First Lady. She steadied the famous general — curbing his drinking and drawing him into the church — while raising eight children and managing the family plantation through his years in the U.S. Senate and the governorship. She endured breast cancer surgery in an era before anesthesia was common, and outlived her husband by four years before dying of yellow fever in 1867.

Houston, TX

Ships had used shallow Buffalo Bayou to link Harrisburg to Galveston Bay since the 1820s, but as Houston grew, so did the need for a deeper channel. After decades of lobbying by local congressmen and civic leaders, and pressure sharpened by the destruction of Galveston's port in the Great Storm of 1900, Houston's backers proposed the landmark "Houston Plan" in 1909, offering to pay half the cost of dredging. Congress accepted, setting a precedent for federal cost-sharing, and the 52-mile deep-water channel opened in 1914. Within a few years Houston was among the nation's leading cotton ports, and refineries, paper mills, and container terminals soon lined its banks.

Houston, TX

In March 1960, thirteen students from Texas Southern University formed the Progressive Youth Association and planned Houston's first sit-in. Marching in pairs to Weingarten's Supermarket, they occupied the lunch counter in silent shifts as employees refused service and onlookers hurled insults. Their nonviolent protest sparked weeks of demonstrations that led Houston's lunch counters to quietly desegregate that August.

Grapeland, TX

Rising to 552 feet, the highest point around, this oblong knoll gave Native Americans, pioneers, and soldiers a commanding view of the East Texas landscape and was already known as Houston's Mound by the 1830s. William T. Sadler, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto and a respected surveyor, acquired land including the mound in the 1820s. He and other surveyors used its vantage as a benchmark to verify the boundaries between Houston County and its neighbors.

Fort Stockton, TX

Around 1910 the railroad stop of Hovey sprang up along the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient line, and within a few years it had a depot, a store, shipping pens, and a school. After the first schoolhouse burned, this 1916 building served as a one-teacher, seven-grade school for the Anglo and Hispanic children of the surrounding ranch country until it closed in 1938. It later became a community center and was moved to Fort Stockton in 1987.

Taylor, TX

Born in Ohio in 1848, Howard Bland, Sr. came to Texas in 1878 and built a homestead near Taylor around raising sheep. His annual sheep-shearing contest grew into a beloved community fair, and Bland donated the land to keep it going. A restless entrepreneur, he ran everything from a flour mill and ice house to a hotel, power company, theater, and newspaper, and served in local government and the state legislature.

Houston, TX

Built in 1880 beside a new railroad junction, the Howard Oil Company was among Houston's earliest cottonseed-oil mills, and the community of Chaneyville rose around it. Largely peopled by freed slaves and their descendants who labored in the mills and rail yards, Chaneyville became a center of Black Houston. Rebuilt twice after devastating fires, the plant grew into the largest cotton-oil mill in Texas, shipping oil worldwide for margarine and soap until the early 1920s.

Harlingen, TX

In 1929 grocer Howard E. Butt moved his growing business's headquarters to Harlingen, and the following year he and his wife Mary bought this newly built house from John and Ruth Townsend. Through the 1930s his H.E.B. Grocery expanded to more than 28 stores across the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas, while the couple became known for philanthropy and civic work. The Italian Renaissance-style home, marked by Palladian windows and spiral entry columns, was theirs until 1943.

Port Lavaca, TX

Born in Tolosa, Texas, in 1901, Howard G. Hartzog earned degrees from Baylor and George Washington University and even played a season with the New York Giants before returning to practice law in Port Lavaca. Elected state representative in 1933, he spent fourteen years writing bills on education, vehicle safety, and water conservation, then served seventeen years as Calhoun County judge across six terms. His tenure saw the Lavaca Bay Causeway, the Matagorda Ship Channel, a new library, an airport, and hospital expansions as the county boomed in mid-century.

Calvert, TX

Calvert boomed as a cotton and railroad town in the late 1800s, and its homes reflected the era's taste for exuberant Victorian styling. In 1897 Mrs. S. M. Howard built this Eastlake-style cottage, a year after buying the property from her sister-in-law, giving it fishscale shingles, a wide gingerbread veranda, and finely detailed interior woodwork. The house stayed in the Howard family into the 1940s and typifies Calvert at the turn of the century.

Rio Grande City, TX

Built in 1877 from lumber salvaged off a sunken steamboat, with mesquite-block floors and handmade brick, this Rio Grande City house was the home and business of John Peter Kelsey, a New Yorker who came to the border in 1848 to become a Starr County judge and major landowner. Its very timbers speak to the steamboat commerce that once moved goods up the Rio Grande. Later owners carried the property into the twentieth century, and it took the name of Howard L. Bass, who acquired it in 1954.

Brownwood, TX

Howard Payne College grew out of an 1889 resolution by the Pecan Valley Baptist Association to found a college of its own, with Brownwood chosen as the site. Named for benefactor Edward Howard Payne, the school opened in September 1890—classes meeting in a hall as the cornerstone of its main building was laid the same day. It absorbed the neighboring Daniel Baker College in 1953 and reached university status in 1974.

Henderson, TX

Brothers David and James Howard, settlers from Richmond, Virginia, built Rusk County's first brick home here in 1855, molding the bricks on site with a mud mill and later a patented machine and kiln. Their bricks went into the old courthouse and much of the town's later construction. Texas statesman Sam Houston, a cousin of David Howard's wife, was a frequent early guest.

Sheffield, TX

Howard's Well was one of the few reliable water sources on the brutal San Antonio–El Paso road, rediscovered by ex-Texas Ranger Richard A. Howard during John Coffee Hays's 1848 expedition to map a wagon route west. Forty-niners bound for California gold, mail lines, and army surveyors all watered here across the mid-19th century. It was also a crossroads of conflict: in 1872 Comanches and Kiowas ambushed a wagon train nearby, a raid that hardened federal Indian policy.

Van Alstyne, TX

Chartered in 1875 in the frontier community of Farmington, this Masonic lodge followed its members to Howe when the railroad bypassed the older settlement in 1887. Its first hall rose above the town's early Methodist chapel, a common pairing of sacred and civic life on the Texas frontier. Over the decades it absorbed a neighboring lodge and drew in the veterans and civic leaders who shaped Grayson County.

Newton, TX

James William and Louisa Cheshire Howell brought their family from Alabama in 1872, and their kin bought up adjoining land until the settlement of Howell earned a post office in 1889. Son Marmaduke is credited with introducing terrace farming to Texas in 1882, a soil-saving practice on the region's rolling land. A one-acre cemetery was set aside in 1876 — its oldest marked grave a Howell grandchild who died in 1875 — and later deeded to the family's descendants.

McKinney, TX

The Howell House stands on land granted in 1845 to Edward Bradley, a member of the Peters Colony that drew settlers into North Texas. His daughter Mary Ann inherited the property, and her husband, merchant Daniel Howell, built the first part of this home in 1861-62 — much of its cypress lumber hauled by wagon all the way from Jefferson. Four generations of the family occupied and enlarged the house over the years.

Texarkana, TX

Howell W. Runnels came to the Republic of Texas in 1842 and served in the state legislature in the late 1850s, building this home around 1874 with an open central hall and wide verandas. His wife, the former Martha Adams, served as Texas's first lady during the term of her brother-in-law, Governor Hardin R. Runnels. The house reflects the standing of a prominent political family in early Texarkana.

Waco, TX

This cabin was raised in 1858 from hand-hewn, saw-notched native yellow pine on land patented in Rusk County to Matilda Hoyle around 1853. After 1880 it long belonged to the Snelgrove family, passing through Eli Benjamin and Julia Kilgore Snelgrove and their son John. In 1955 it was purchased, moved to Waco, and restored by local historian Roger N. Conger.

Hubbard, TX

Hubbard was founded in 1881 as a shipping center and supply point on the St. Louis and Southwestern Railway. It took its name from Richard B. Hubbard, a Civil War colonel of the 22nd Texas Infantry who became governor of Texas and later U.S. minister to Japan. A banking and market town, it was also known for its mineral waters.

Bastrop, TX

This home was built in 1890 by Robert W. Hubbard, a Confederate veteran remembered for having fought in one of the last engagements of the Civil War. It later passed to a family descendant and was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964. The house stands as a tangible link between the postwar generation and the conflict that shaped their lives.

Hubbard, TX

Founded in 1881, the same year the town rose, the Hubbard City News grew through mergers with rival papers and decades of family ownership to become a leading voice in central Texas. Brothers who had once set type for the paper went on to lead and own it, and it survived until a 1973 tornado destroyed its office. The paper was sold to a Mexia publisher in 1969.

Lindale, TX

This hilltop once overlooked the East Texas plantation that Richard B. Hubbard and Serena Carter established after arriving from Georgia in 1854, working 720 acres with 44 enslaved people. Their son, Richard Bennett Hubbard—a Harvard-trained lawyer who served in the Confederate army and later as governor of Texas—buried twin daughters here in 1863. Family members and, marked with ironstone, enslaved people lie in this plot, while the governor himself rests in Tyler's Oakwood Cemetery after a career that included service as U.S. Minister to Japan.

Hubbard, TX

Rich farmland, a railway, and hot mineral springs drew settlers to Hubbard, and by 1911 the growing town voted to tax itself for a public school system. The architectural firm of Field and Clarkson designed the imposing two-story brick and limestone building, which opened in 1914 in a prairie style touched with rural Georgian influences. It served as Hubbard's only high school until 1978 and was later rescued by the community as a center for museums, a library, and the Tris Speaker Sports Museum.

New Boston, TX

Built in 1904 for Robert M. Hubbard and designed by architect Bayard Witt, this exuberant Victorian home crowned with eight irregular gables and leaded glass hosted statesmen and leading figures of Texas society. Hubbard himself became a public servant of consequence: named to the Texas Highway Commission in 1918 by Governor W. P. Hobby, he chaired it until 1925 and pushed to raise the highway department's standards during the automobile age's crucial early years.

Gainesville, TX

Born in Woodbine in 1892, Hubert H. Moss trained as a teacher, served in World War I, and returned to become a chemistry professor at the new Gainesville Junior College and a trusted student advisor. From 1946 until his death in 1952 he was Cooke County school superintendent, and as chamber of commerce president he campaigned for a reservoir to secure the city's water. Gainesville completed Hubert H. Moss Lake in 1966 on the very site he had recommended.

Hungerford, TX

This burial ground traces to 1851, when the family of Joel and Rachel Hudgins began using it, though the land's story reaches back to an 1824 grant. Rachel had already outlived one husband and buried children before marrying Joel, a widower, in 1847; of their thirteen children together, only six reached adulthood—a stark measure of frontier mortality. Joel served as a civic leader and founded a local school, and generations of descendants have continued to tend the cemetery into modern times.