Historic Markers in Texas

Jefferson, TX

Built between 1855 and 1867 by William P. Hudgins in the thriving riverport of Jefferson, this house with its 13-foot ceilings and wide-board floors passed through several owners before W. L. and Mattie A. Blake, respected teachers at the Jefferson Central (Negro) School, purchased it in 1897 and kept it in their family for six decades. Its later preservation ensured the survival of a rare antebellum-era home tied to Black educators of the post-emancipation South.

Lakeway, TX

Wiley Hudson gave his name to this bend of the Colorado River when he settled his family here in 1854, one of a handful of households scratching out a life among the cedar and live oaks. Neighbors forded the river to grind corn at Anderson mill and to visit hamlets with names like Round Mountain and Nameless, and during the Civil War the Hudson men took up arms for the Confederacy. The old rural world vanished when Mansfield Dam was completed in the 1940s and Lake Travis flooded half the tract, forcing even the cemetery to be moved and turning ranchland into lakeside subdivisions.

Kennedale, TX

When John and Winnie Hudson's young daughter Ary Mae died in 1878, her grave became the first on the family's Tarrant County land, soon joined by her twin sister, reinterred from a distant county to rest beside her. In 1892 the Hudsons deeded three acres for a community cemetery, and by 1996 more than five hundred graves recorded the pioneers of the surrounding countryside. Community funds organized across the 20th century have kept the ground tended.

Sierra Blanca, TX

Carved from El Paso County and organized in 1917, Hudspeth County took its name from Claude Benton Hudspeth, a native Texan born in 1877 who rose from large ranching interests to serve in the Texas Legislature and the U.S. Congress. Sierra Blanca became its county seat.

Sierra Blanca, TX

Built in 1917 in the far West Texas town of Sierra Blanca, this building is distinguished as the only adobe county courthouse in the state. Its earthen construction reflects the materials and traditions of the arid borderlands where it stands. It remains the seat of government for sprawling, sparsely settled Hudspeth County.

Leon Valley, TX

Settlement here began in 1858 when Joseph Huebner, an Austrian immigrant and San Antonio businessman, bought land and built limestone structures along the creek that still bears his name. He opened a stagecoach stop on the San Antonio–to–Bandera line, offering blacksmithing, fresh stock, and shelter to travelers stranded by the flooded creek. In 1930 the property passed to Judge John F. Onion and his wife Harriet, and grassroots preservation later saved the homestead as a natural and educational site.

Hueco, TX

Hueco Tanks, whose natural rock basins trapped precious rainwater, was one of the most important watering places in the Southwest, used by Native peoples, emigrants, and travelers alike. Near here the Apache repeatedly contested passage through their country. From 1858 to 1861 the site served as a station on the Southern Overland Mail line linking St. Louis and San Francisco.

Houston, TX

When federal courts ordered Houston's schools to integrate in 1970, the district tried to sidestep real desegregation by counting its growing Mexican-American population as legally "white" — pairing them with Black students while leaving Anglo schools untouched. In protest, the Mexican-American community launched a two-week boycott and opened twenty-one "huelga" (strike) schools, staffed by certified teachers and University of Houston volunteers, that taught core subjects alongside a proud Mexican-American identity. Roughly four thousand students enrolled before the boycott ended on September 16.

Alvord, TX

In 1874, during one of the last Indian raids in Wise County, tragedy struck a newly arrived settler family. While C. W. Huff and his son worked a remote part of their land, raiders killed Mrs. Huff and her daughters Palestine and Molly. Neighbors buried the victims in a wagon bed, and in 1879 Huff donated the land around the grave for a cemetery.

Kaufman, TX

This Kaufman home was built in 1889 by W.L. Huff and bought in 1892 by Dr. J.W. Park, a Texas-born physician. Because doctors were scarce, Park was licensed in 1877 and practiced for two years in Egypt, Texas, before returning to earn his degree at Louisville Medical College in 1880. Settling in Kaufman, he practiced until the day before his death in 1941, raising six children across two marriages.

Valley Spring, TX

When James Jackson Larremore led his family to the Texas Hill Country in 1853, Llano County was raw frontier along the Llano River. His daughter Martha married Civil War veteran James S. Huffman, who acquired 300 acres running from Smoothin' Iron Mountain past Cold Creek, and as settlers put down roots they needed a place to bury their dead. The first recorded grave dates to 1884, and by 1917 the family formally dedicated the ground as Huffman Cemetery, tending it across the century until forming an association in 1980.

Austin, TX

Built in 1886 in East Austin's Robertson Hill neighborhood, this Victorian home was constructed for Hugh B. Hancock, a successful Black businessman during the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era. It later passed to a German-born railroad engineer's family, who kept it until 1959, and was moved to its present site in 1979. It carries a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark designation.

Liberty, TX

Tennessee-born Hugh B. Johnston helped govern the Texas frontier at the birth of a nation, serving as the first alcalde of the Liberty municipality in 1831. As a delegate to the 1835 Consultation and later a member of the Republic of Texas Congress, he was among the officeholders who steered Texas from a Mexican province through revolution and into independent statehood before his death in 1850.

Orange, TX

Hugh Ochiltree left North Carolina for Texas in 1840, read law under his prominent cousin, and volunteered for the Mexican War, fighting at the Battle of Monterrey. Settling at Sabine Pass and then at Madison—today's Orange—he built a mercantile and cotton-commission business and championed deep-water ports on the Sabine and Neches rivers. He served as the town's first postmaster, county commissioner, county clerk, and, during the Civil War, provost marshal of Orange.

Lampasas County, TX

These springs bear the name of Moses Hughes, remembered as the first settler in this part of Lampasas County in 1853. Tradition holds that his wife regained her health by taking the mineral waters here. Their arrival helped open the region to settlement in the years just before the Civil War.

Stoneham, TX

The family of Jefferson Edmond Hughey settled a 260-acre homestead in this part of Grimes County by 1859. They laid out a family cemetery whose earliest marked grave, that of Hughey's mother-in-law Mary Ann Garmany Boozer, dates to 1876, and built a nearby chapel that doubled as the community schoolhouse. The land stayed in Hughey hands until 1989, and the burial ground—home to Confederate veterans' graves—still marks the region's earliest settlers.

Willow City, TX

In 1902 Jacob Gold, Jr. deeded this Hill Country land to his daughter Anna and her husband Hugo Crenwelge, and three years later the couple raised a sturdy home from limestone quarried right nearby. Its hand-cut ashlar blocks, two-level gallery, and jig-sawn trim are hallmarks of the German-Texan building tradition that shaped Gillespie County. The house stayed in the family for six decades, a lasting emblem of immigrant farm life on the Texas frontier.

Seguin, TX

When Texas Lutheran College relocated to Seguin in 1929, it brought with it Hugo and Georgia Gibson, a scholarly couple who would shape the young institution for decades. Hugo, trained in theology and classical Greek, led the foreign languages department and founded the college's celebrated a cappella choir; Georgia, holding a master's from Columbia, served as Dean of Women and taught mathematics. The pair, instrumental in winning the college's accreditation, built this frame house on Erkel Avenue in 1934 and lived here until Hugo's death in 1963.

Houston, TX

Houston architect Hugo Neuhaus designed this 1950 house for himself as a showcase of the International style, all horizontal planes of brick and glass merging indoor rooms with a plunge pool and terraced gardens. Trained at Yale and Harvard under European modernists Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, Neuhaus went on to serve as local associate to Philip Johnson, a link that tied his work directly to Mies van der Rohe. His own home became a celebrated emblem of Houston's embrace of modern design.

Lampasas, TX

Built of native limestone and cedar in New England colonial style between 1860 and 1872, this Lampasas cottage was bought in 1872 for $3,000 in gold by Elizabeth Bullock Smith Huling. As a Kentucky orphan she had fled toward the Sabine River in the 1836 "Runaway Scrape," the panicked flight of Texas families ahead of Santa Anna's advancing army. Her husband, Thomas B. Huling, fought in the Texas Revolution and later served as a congressman of the Republic of Texas.

Humble, TX

Believed to be Humble's oldest burial ground, this cemetery holds a documented grave from 1879 and, by tradition, the unmarked resting place of Jane Elizabeth Humble, wife of the town's founder Pleasant Humble. Its first legal record is an 1914 deed to trustees, though burials long predate it. A Civil War veteran and several World War I soldiers lie among the town's pioneer families.

Humble, TX

Around the turn of the 20th century, Humble's Masons still belonged to lodges in neighboring towns until, with help from Justice of the Peace F. K. Wise, they chartered their own lodge in 1908. They first met in the bank building of Ross Sterling — future Texas governor — and after a 1912 fire bought the property to build their own hall. The lodge remained active in civic affairs for decades.

Baytown, TX

Ross S. Sterling and five partners founded the Humble Oil Company in 1911, incorporating in 1917 and financing a Baytown refinery by selling half its stock to Standard Oil of New Jersey. First oil flowed into the still in 1920, and a company town grew up around the plant, complete with low-interest home loans for workers. By World War II the refinery's research was producing vital war materiel, and the enterprise eventually became part of what would be renamed Exxon in 1972.

Greenville, TX

The Humboldt community began to grow in 1866 when a caravan of families arrived from Tennessee. The first burial was likely an infant in 1868, and the Dinsmore family deeded the land as a burial ground in 1890. The 38 marked infant graves before 1932 — and the grave of a teacher who died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic — testify to the harsh realities of pioneer and early-modern life.

Crosby, TX

Humphrey and Sarah Merriman Jackson came to Texas in 1823 as members of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300," settling east of the San Jacinto River. Their land grant helped open the San Jacinto District and enlarge Austin's colony, adding fresh ground for Anglo settlement. Sarah died just a year after arriving, and the couple lies buried nearby beneath a distinctive zinc grave marker.

Crosby, TX

Trained in law and opposed to slavery, Irish emigrant Humphrey Jackson left his Louisiana sugar plantation to join Stephen F. Austin's colony in 1823, unknowingly settling just outside its bounds. He helped petition Mexican authorities to form the San Jacinto District under Austin's control and was elected its alcalde, becoming one of the earliest civic leaders in what is now Harris County before his death in 1833.

Martindale, TX

The Jennings and Humphreys families settled around Martindale in the 1850s and established this hilltop cemetery on land Joseph Humphreys bought in 1855. Randolph Reed Jennings, said to have died of yellow fever on his way to the area, was the first buried here, and tradition holds that a number of unmarked graves belong to people once enslaved by the pioneer families. Descendants still gather to maintain the grounds, which were enlarged in 1946.

Marfa, TX

Built in 1883 by local craftsman Saturnino Naborette, this Marfa home belonged to rancher and merchant John Humphris and his wife Mary, its central hall flanked by four rooms on each side in the plain, sturdy style of early West Texas. In 1915 schoolteacher Sally Humphreys bought the house and ran it as a boardinghouse until 1937. Recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1996, it survives as an example of frontier building methods.

Hunt, TX

Farmers and ranchers settled the forks of the Guadalupe River in the late 1850s, forming the Japonica and Pebble communities. In 1912 Alva and Lizzie Joy bought land at the confluence and named the new settlement for prior owner Robert Hunt; a post office followed in 1913. By the 1930s the area drew artists like E.M. Schiwetz and grew into a hub of summer camps and retreats while staying a small rural community.

Henderson vicinity, TX

Thomas Hunt, Sr., his wife Louvisa, and their family came from Blount County, Tennessee, to Rusk County in 1851 and set aside ground for a family burial place; the oldest marked grave, from 1856, belongs to a daughter-in-law, Mary Finley Hunt. Alongside marked stones are graves noted only by rocks and many that are unmarked. Formally recorded in county deeds in 1915, the cemetery holds veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Greenville, TX

By 1929 Greenville had already worn through six earlier courthouses, and the seventh — the one still standing — caught a moment when American public architecture was pivoting from stately classical revival toward the streamlined optimism of art deco. Local firm W. R. Ragsdale & Sons joined Austin's Page Brothers to raise a six-story landmark of solid masonry, decorative terra cotta, and triple-arched entries that remains the seat of Hunt County government.

Greenville, TX

Hunt County's first railroad arrived on October 1, 1880, when a Missouri, Kansas & Texas (Katy) train rolled in from Denison. The line was no accident: a group of Greenville businessmen guaranteed a $5,000 cash bonus and secured the right of way across the county to bring the tracks their way. Pushing on to Mineola almost immediately, the Katy touched off a boom in Greenville's population and economy.

Hunt, TX

The Hunt Japonica Cemetery lies between the town of Hunt and the early community of Japonica, its oldest legible stone marking the 1872 grave of George T. Henry, sixteen years after Kerr County was organized. It holds many area pioneers and their descendants, along with a large number of unmarked graves. Though flooded on several occasions, the cemetery remains in use.

Bridgeport, TX

Born in New York in 1815, William Hudson Hunt came to Texas in 1836 to join the fight for independence, then served the young Republic as a soldier and surveyor—helping locate the site of the capital and joining the Santa Fe Expedition. In 1855 he pioneered Wise County, building a ranch on the West Fork of the Trinity, laying out the town that became Decatur, and helping route the Butterfield Overland Mail through the county. His remains were reinterred here after Lake Bridgeport flooded his family cemetery.

Marfa, TX

In 1940 the town of Marfa won a Works Progress Administration grant of more than $15,000 to build a new gymnasium, named to honor athletic director Boren Hunter. Its builders used plastered adobe infill walls — an unusually traditional, earthen material for a structure of this kind — combined with concrete pilasters and steel roof trusses. For generations the gym anchored school games and community gatherings alike.

Huntington, TX

Settlers eyed this spot in the 1880s, but Huntington only boomed when the railroad arrived in 1900, carving a town from the virgin pine forests at the height of the southern timber industry. Named for Southern Pacific chairman Collis P. Huntington, it filled quickly with sawmills, churches, stores, saloons, and a rail station, thriving on lumber and cotton. Its library, dedicated in 1953, memorializes nineteen local men lost in World War II.

Huntsville, TX

Authorized under the Republic of Texas and begun in 1848, the Huntsville "Walls" Unit became the state's first penitentiary, receiving its first inmates into a half-finished facility in 1849. Over the next century it ran inmate-labor textile mills, endured the notorious convict-lease system until its 1910 abolition, and launched Depression-era ventures like the license-plate plant and the famed Texas Prison Rodeo. Its cells held figures from Kiowa chiefs Satanta and Big Tree to gunfighter John Wesley Hardin.

Huntsville, TX

When the main rail line bypassed a divided Huntsville in 1871 — townsfolk fearing lost business, "undesirables," and a repeat of the 1867 fever brought by travelers — local leaders funded a short "tap" line from the Phelps junction into town, paid for by white and Black citizens alike. The first train arrived in March 1872. The line earned its nickname "Tilley's Tap" from beloved conductor John Robert Tilley, who ran it like his own, pausing to fish or finish a domino game before departing.

Huntsville, TX

English immigrant George Robinson began printing the Huntsville Item on August 20, 1850, in a two-story building he shared with a dentist. Through the Civil War—during which Robinson served in the Texas state troops—epidemics of yellow fever, and repeated fires that burned the newspaper office again and again, the Item endured, passing to his son Fred and later to a series of owners. One of the oldest newspapers in Texas, the Item has published continuously across three centuries.

Huntsville, TX

Kentucky native Pleasant Gray and his wife Hannah settled here in 1835 on land granted through Mexico's colonization effort, beside natural springs that had long served as a campsite for the Bedias Indians and for travelers passing through. Gray and his brother opened a trading post, subdivided the land, and advertised lots as far as Alabama and New Orleans, naming the new town for Huntsville, Alabama. Incorporated in 1845 and even noted by British adventurer William Bollaert, the springs supplied the town's water until an artesian well replaced them in the 1890s and the spring was finally boarded over.

Whitney, TX

The U.S. Army's Fort Graham, established in 1849, drew settlers who stayed even after the post closed in 1853, and the Neal family's arrival by 1860 seeded the community of Elm Mott. The Neals donated land for a school, church, tabernacle, and lodge, while merchant Jehu Gist opened a store and secured a post office he named Huron for his youngest son. Though the school consolidated away in 1949, Cedar Creek Baptist Church still gathers area residents and the descendants of Huron's founding families.

Shive, TX

Established around 1880 near Shive in Hamilton County, Hurst Ranch Cemetery served the ranching families who settled this stretch of Central Texas during the cattle era that followed the Civil War. Its recognition as a Historic Texas Cemetery marks it as a lasting record of that pioneer community.

Ozona, TX

Pharis Hurst, born in Pennsylvania, served in the U.S. Army during the Civil War and was discharged after losing an arm in the siege of Vicksburg—one of the war's decisive campaigns. Like many veterans, he came to Texas afterward, making a living as farmer, teacher, and postmaster. He lived in Ozona from 1917 to 1927, his marker recording a life of service and quiet perseverance after a grievous wartime wound.

Farmersville, TX

Allen Daniel brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1847 and bought 480 acres here in 1851, only to die and be buried on his own land the following year. His daughter Tennessee, who married D. E. Huson, later gave the ground around her father's grave to the community as a public cemetery. Among the hundreds of marked and unmarked graves lie town founders, pioneer families, and many former slaves and their descendants, including the Nelson, Sneed, Glass, and Bryson families.

Arlington, TX

In the 1890s Arlington was a small farming and trading community only recently stitched into the rail network of North Texas. This Queen Anne cottage, built around 1896 with its ornamental "gingerbread" trim, stood on land held by merchant I. L. Hutcheson, whose son later chased the Texas oil boom in Archer City. When former educator and farmer S. T. Smith bought the house in 1919, it passed into a family that kept it for another sixty years.

Galveston, TX

John Henry Hutchings came from North Carolina to Galveston in the 1840s and, with partners John Sealy and George Ball, built the banking and commission house of Ball, Hutchings & Co. On Avenue O he raised one of early Galveston's rare brick homes—complete with a schoolroom—using bricks fired on a Brazoria plantation. During the Civil War the firm ran cotton through Matamoros, Mexico, and Hutchings served the Confederate government; the storm-battered house, later expanded by architect Nicholas Clayton, stayed in the family into the twentieth century.

Galveston, TX

Erected in 1856 for businessman John Henry Hutchings and his bride Minnie Knox, this Galveston residence was first designed to resemble an Italian villa. After an 1885 storm damaged it, the celebrated architect Nicholas Clayton undertook extensive repairs, blending Romanesque and Renaissance Revival styles, adding a third floor, and stuccoing the brick walls into the form it wears today. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1962.

Galveston, TX

By 1895, Galveston was the commercial capital of Texas, and its Strand district was nicknamed the "Wall Street of the Southwest." Longtime partners George Ball, John Henry Hutchings, and John Sealy hired the city's celebrated architect Nicholas J. Clayton to design a pair of connected Renaissance Revival office buildings for their banking and commission house, complete with rusticated stone arches, terra cotta detailing, and deep pressed-brick foundations. The structures still bear the Hutchings and Sealy names on their entablatures.

Hutchins, TX

The town of Hutchins grew from a trading post serving settlers along the western bank of the Trinity River. This ground was used for burials long before it was formally platted in 1895—the earliest marked grave belongs to eleven-year-old Alonzo B. Clark, who died in 1875—and it holds several generations of the area's pioneer families, veterans, and civic leaders.

Stinnett, TX

Hutchinson County, carved from the Bexar District in 1876 and finally organized in 1901, moved its seat from Plemons to Stinnett in 1926 just as major oil discoveries transformed the Panhandle. The 1927 courthouse, designed by Amarillo architect W. C. Townes in Spanish Renaissance Revival style, rose in brick and cut stone and also housed the county jail. Friezes at its entrances celebrate petroleum, farming and ranching, and cattle — the three industries that made the county.

Gonzales, TX

This grave marks the resting place of Hutson B. Littlefield, a volunteer soldier who fought in the Texas War for Independence. The State of Texas erected the marker, with its Star and Wreath emblem, in 1962 to honor his service.

Hutto, TX

This corner of Williamson County was settled in 1855 by J. E. Hutto and Adam Orgain, a former slave, near the early village of Shiloh. When Hutto sold land to the International & Great Northern Railroad in 1876 a town took shape, and he became its first postmaster the next year. Fueled by the railroad and by Swedish immigrants who turned nearby farms over to cotton, Hutto grew from a single church and school in 1882 to a bustling town that incorporated in 1911.

Hutto, TX

Organized in 1882, Hutto Baptist Church first gathered in the local schoolhouse before raising its own sanctuary in 1883. Central Texas weather tested the young congregation repeatedly, destroying or damaging its building in storms in 1886, 1895, and 1921, each time answered by rebuilding. By 1922 a new church stood at Main and Farley, anchoring a congregation that has served Williamson County for more than a century.

Hutto, TX

This burial ground took shape in the late 1880s, when it was known as Elmwood Cemetery, and the earliest marked grave dates to 1887. As ownership passed from family to family, the site filled with the community's story: settlers from distant states and countries, members of fraternal orders, veterans reaching back to the Civil War, and children whose short lives are recorded in stone. In 1950 a newly formed association bought the land and renamed it for the town of Hutto.

Hutto, TX

Lutheran worship in Hutto began in 1890 when ministers from Palm Valley Lutheran Church held occasional services for the area's fast-growing Swedish population. In 1892 August Swenson led the effort to organize a formal congregation, which built its first church in 1893—only to see it destroyed by a tornado and rebuilt the next year. Services here were conducted in Swedish until 1940, long preserving the immigrants' mother tongue.

Hutto, TX

Swedish immigrants who settled around Hutto founded a Lutheran congregation in 1892, only to see their first sanctuary torn apart by a tornado two years later. In 1903 the church set aside this ground as a cemetery, and among its earliest burials are children reinterred from an older site. The stones—some marked with Masonic and Woodmen of the World symbols—trace the families, faith, and losses of an immigrant farming community.

Hutto, TX

This congregation grew from two threads of Methodist life in the Hutto area: an American fellowship meeting in the Shiloh Schoolhouse from the late 1870s, and a community of Swedish Methodist immigrants who gathered in homes before founding their own church in 1892. Each built its own sanctuary before the two finally united as a single congregation in 1938. The story mirrors the ethnic layering of central Texas farm country.

Bridgeport, TX

J. E. Barnes bought this ground from P. J. and Mary E. Hyde in 1885, though the earliest graves — his wife Dizania and their son Felix — date to 1879. The cemetery also holds many settlers from the vanished community of Jim Ned two miles north, a town named for an Indian chief that once boasted a church, school, store, and post office before it faded away after 1900. Around 75 graves here are unmarked, and others are indicated only by rocks and fences.

Austin, TX

Marketed in 1892 as the city's most fashionable address, Hyde Park was Austin's first planned suburb, the creation of streetcar magnate Monroe M. Shipe. He ran an electric line up from Congress Avenue, built a lake and pavilion, and raised one of the city's iconic moonlight towers to draw residents north. Sculptor Elisabet Ney and other notables settled among its Victorian homes and later bungalows before the neighborhood's 1970s revival.

Hye, TX

The tiny community of Hye grew up around Hiram Brown's store in 1880, and its post office opened in 1886 inside the present store with its distinctive metalwork facade. Its greatest claim to fame is personal: at age four, future president Lyndon B. Johnson mailed a letter here, his first act as a postal customer. Decades later, in 1965, President Johnson had his Postmaster General Lawrence O'Brien sworn into the cabinet at this very post office.