Historic Markers in Texas

Jefferson, TX

This late Greek Revival house was probably built in 1860 by T. O. Alley, son of Jefferson co-founder Daniel N. Alley. Later owners included steamboat captain James M. Tucker, who served in the 16th Texas Dismounted Cavalry of the Confederate Army, and W. T. Atkins, an official of the Jefferson Iron Company who held the home the longest, from 1892 to 1923. Its succession of owners mirrors the rise and fall of a busy riverport town.

Chappell Hill, TX

This burial ground dates to at least 1844, its earliest marked grave, and takes its name from Jethro Atkinson, an 1857 mayor of Chappell Hill whose plantation lay nearby; the land had belonged to Robert Wooding Chappell, the town's namesake. A cemetery association formed in 1957 to provide perpetual care.

Paris, TX

Built about 1890 by Jethro D. Atkinson — a bank director and owner of Paris's first shoe store — this house was purchased in 1910 by social leaders Dr. Eugene Felder Morris and his wife Elizabeth. Its Victorian styling reflects the prosperous look of Paris before the catastrophic 1916 fire that swept much of the city. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1972.

Atlanta, TX

Public education in Atlanta, Texas dates to 1874, and for generations separate schools served Anglo and African American children. This building rose in 1936 as a school for white students, funded by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, and grew with additions as enrollment climbed. Integrated in 1970 and closed as a school in 1974, it was later saved from demolition by concerned citizens who bought it in 2001.

Novice, TX

Settlement of this Coleman County area began in the 1850s around Camp Colorado, a U.S. cavalry outpost held by Texas State Troops and Rangers during the Civil War. After the war, families from the South established farms and ranches and the Atoka community grew up with a store, a church-school, and a cotton gin. The 1880 cemetery holds early pioneers including former Texas Ranger and Republic of Texas soldier Rev. Hugh Martin Childress, his son the county's first sheriff, Civil War veterans, and workers killed in a 1910 railroad-bridge explosion.

Cross Plains, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Callahan County even before it organized, and many more arrived after the Texas and Pacific Railroad came through in 1880. The town was named Atwell in 1898 for a U.S. district attorney, and in 1917 the Howells deeded land for a shared burial ground to the community's Baptist, Christian, and Methodist churches. Among the graves are military headstones, including two young men killed in France during World War I — quiet markers of a farm town that peaked with stores, a gin, and a school before fading after World War II.

Aubrey, TX

In 1858 Dr. George T. Key moved his family from Missouri to Denton County and built log cabins near present-day Aubrey, one of which served as both school and church — the Key School House that cradled one of the county's first Methodist congregations. After years of meeting in the schoolhouse and members' homes, the church accepted a free town lot in 1885 and completed a frame building in 1886. A 1918 tornado leveled that structure, but the congregation rebuilt in brick by 1919, adorning it with Pre-Raphaelite-style stained glass, and continues to serve Aubrey today.

Beaumont, TX

Born in tiny Corrigan in 1909, Aubrey Wilson "Moon" Mullican became one of country music's great innovators — the self-styled "King of the Hillbilly Piano Players." His hard-driving, two-finger piano style drew deeply on the music of the African-American farm workers and sharecroppers he grew up among, and he carried it from Houston bars to the Grand Ole Opry and stages across the U.S., Europe, and Vietnam. Inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1974, his epitaph reads, "I'll sail my ship alone."

Ellis County, TX

Pioneers began burying their dead at this Ellis County site as early as 1856, and in 1865 it became part of a tract that Confederate veteran Rezi Jarvis Banks deeded to the Methodist Church for a school and church. His wife Minerva lies among the earliest marked graves. In its heyday Auburn was a thriving farming community with four churches, stores, and a post office, but the lack of a high school and the railroad's bypass eventually emptied it, leaving the cemetery as its chief remaining link to the past.

Celeste, TX

Born to tenant farmers near Celeste in 1924, the sixth of nine children, Audie Murphy left school after the eighth grade and honed his marksmanship hunting for the family table. Rejected by the Marines for his slight build, he enlisted in the Army on his eighteenth birthday and became the most decorated American soldier of World War II, earning the Medal of Honor and two dozen other decorations. He later portrayed himself in the film of his memoir, To Hell and Back, before dying in a 1971 plane crash.

Stephenville, TX

The Audie Murphy Arena began on the Euless property of car dealer Ray Woods, who met the famed war hero and film star Audie Murphy on a defense bonds drive and bonded over a shared love of horses. Murphy's appearances as a featured guest drew crowds of cowboys to the rodeos held there. In 1952 Woods bought a ranch in Erath County and moved the arena to Stephenville, where it hosted local rodeos and saw the founding of the Erath County Trail Blazers before being relocated again in the mid-1960s.

Farmersville, TX

On his 18th birthday Audie Murphy enlisted in the U.S. Army, and over more than two years of combat across North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France he became the most decorated American soldier of World War II, earning every Army valor citation, including the Medal of Honor. When he came home to Farmersville on June 15, 1945, thousands packed the town square, and Life magazine put the reunion on its cover.

Houston, TX

Built in 1926 for Houston investor Michele DeGeorge, an Italian immigrant who reached the United States in 1881, the Auditorium Hotel showed off Italian Renaissance detailing in its upper floors, designed by architect Joseph Finger. Standing at the heart of Houston's theater district beside the old city auditorium, it became a fixture of the growing downtown. Its rise reflects the commercial energy transforming the city in the 1920s.

Alvord, TX

Platted in 1865 out of D. D. Shirey's farmland and named for the naturalist John James Audubon, this Wise County town thrived for a generation on the edge of the cattle country. Shirey's stagecoach inn grew famous for its lavish table and its wondrous lazy Susan, and by the 1870s the town had churches, a school, cotton gins, stores, and professional men. When the Fort Worth & Denver Railroad bypassed it in 1883, Audubon slowly faded, its post office closing in 1904.

San Augustine, TX

Built in the 1920s by prominent citizen E. H. Blount, this commercial building first held three businesses before the August Theatre moved into its center in 1927 and grew to fill most of the block. Operated by the Wade family, the theatre became one of San Augustine's great social gathering places through the mid-twentieth century. Depression-era photographs by Russell Lee later guided an authentic 1990s restoration of the storefront.

New Braunfels, TX

August Tolle came to New Braunfels as a boy in 1845, part of the great German migration that settled the town, and grew up to open a drugstore with his brother-in-law in 1858. With his wife Karoline, also German-born, he raised five children, and in 1891 he bought this house, which later passed to their son Alfred. Restored by subsequent owners, the home shows off vernacular Victorian touches—decorative fretwork, carved rafter tails, and four-over-four shuttered windows.

Laredo, TX

August C. Richter (1863–1940), a San Antonio native, settled in Laredo in 1888 and came to own "El Precio Fijo," an early fixed-price department store whose very name announced a modern way of doing business on the border. His wife, Julia, was a force in the city's cultural and educational life. Their mansion stands as a monument to Laredo's Gilded Age merchant class.

New Braunfels, TX

August Dietz arrived in New Braunfels in 1849 as part of the great wave of German immigration that gave the town its distinctive character. He bought this lot in 1866 and soon built the sturdy cottage, its mortared rock walls twenty inches thick, selling it the following year. Later enlarged, the house keeps its original ceilings, windows, casements, and front door, and was restored in 1973.

Fredericksburg, TX

German immigrant August Ebers built the east half of this stone house in 1860, with a kitchen, a "big room," and a loft bedroom, adding a west wing before 1880. After Ebers died in a well accident in 1884, his family kept the farm going, and the home became a community gathering place for dances and even served as an election polling place, staying in the family until 1962.

Comfort, TX

In 1856 a young Prussian merchant named Friedrich August Faltin arrived in the German-settled town of Comfort and bought out a local general store, bringing the retailing skills he had learned in his father's shop in Danzig. Over the next quarter-century he built one of the Texas Hill Country's leading mercantile houses, adding banking and postal services and, in 1869, forming a partnership with Charles Schreiner that seeded the sprawling Schreiner enterprises. His business outgrew its quarters, and in 1879 he commissioned San Antonio architect Alfred Giles to design the Victorian Italian building that still stands here.

Sierra Blanca, TX

August Fransal was one of the daring stage drivers who carried the mail across the perilous Ben Ficklin Overland line between San Antonio and El Paso, guiding his mule-drawn coach through country contested by Apache raiders. He served as a Texas Ranger in the early 1880s under Captain George W. Baylor and worked as a teamster at Fort Davis, later making his living as a hunter who sold fresh game in El Paso.

Grapeland, TX

In continuous use since the 1850s, this cemetery rests on four acres donated by Lucinda Sheridan Murchison, widow of an early landowner, with its earliest documented grave dating to 1854. Among those buried here are pioneers, children—including an unidentified girl who died passing through with a wagon train—victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars. A cemetery association formed in 1950 to care for the grounds.

San Marcos, TX

Augusta Hofheinz had this Classical Revival house built in 1908, three years after the death of her husband Daniel, who had run a hotel he built in San Marcos in the late 1870s. Their son Walter supervised construction, and Augusta lived here until she died in 1924. With its symmetrical facade, giant classical columns, and deep entablature, the home is a polished example of the style and was listed on the National Register in 1983.

Grapeland, TX

Probably built in the 1850s, this rural "union" church opened its doors to several denominations and doubled as the Augusta community's schoolhouse in its early years. Its fabric—shiplap siding, Greek Revival trim, Victorian-era shingled gables, and an early-twentieth-century steeple—records generations of change layered onto one modest frame building. It still gathers the community each year for homecoming observances.

Liberty, TX

Augustine B. Hardin, born in Georgia in 1798, was among the fifty-nine men who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. That document, adopted at Washington-on-the-Brazos as Santa Anna's army advanced, formally severed Texas from Mexico. Hardin lent his name to the cause and lived out his years in the Liberty County that his generation helped found.

Brownsville, TX

Built in 1904 in Brownsville, this Late Victorian home blends Italianate and Queen Anne flourishes—polygonal bays, a curved two-story porch, and decorative hood mouldings—into a showplace of the border city's social and civic life. Augustine and Laura Celaya designed it themselves and kept it in the family for generations. It reflects the prosperity and taste of a leading Rio Grande Valley family at the turn of the twentieth century.

Crockett, TX

Gus LeGory came to Texas from Mississippi in 1855 and, after serving in the Civil War, returned to work with a Trinity River steamboat company before building his own overland and river freight business. In 1870 he opened a Crockett saloon and went on to promote the town through banking, coal production, and agriculture. He married Eliza Wortham in 1875 and raised six children, living to age ninety.

Houston, TX

Augustus Chapman Allen was a New York-born schoolteacher and bookkeeper who came to Texas in the 1830s and threw in with the Texas Revolution, even funding a ship, the Brutus, to move troops and supplies. With his brother John Kirby Allen he bought marshy land along Buffalo Bayou after independence in 1836 and platted a brand-new town, naming it for the victorious general Sam Houston. When the young Republic's Congress accepted their offer and met there in 1837, a speculative real-estate gamble became a capital city.

Moscow, TX

This double-log house, built in 1859 by Augustus Darby in the East Texas piney woods of Polk County, was raised by enslaved labor: for six months, twenty-five enslaved people drew and straightened square nails from old lumber and hand-sawed the rough cypress that sealed the pegged structure. The inscription's plain accounting of that work is a stark window into how antebellum Texas homes were built on the eve of the Civil War. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Gonzales, TX

Augustus H. Jones took up arms during the pivotal year of 1835, when Texian colonists rose against the Mexican government and set the Texas Revolution in motion. He fought at the Storming of Bexar, the hard street-by-street fight that drove Mexican forces from San Antonio, and served in the Goliad area, another flashpoint of that struggle for independence. The state honored his service with a marker bearing the star and wreath, a tribute erected nearly a century and a quarter later.

Aurora, TX

Aurora Cemetery holds graves dating to the 1860s and grew after Confederate veteran Finis Dudley Beauchamp donated the site to a Masonic lodge in 1877. A deadly 1891 epidemic — likely a form of meningitis — added hundreds of graves, and one poignant child's epitaph is still widely quoted. The cemetery is also famous for the legend that an airship crashed nearby in 1897 and its pilot was buried here; bypassed by the railroad, the town faded but the burial ground endures with over 800 graves.

Waco, TX

Designed by prolific Southern architect R.H. Hunt and completed in 1925, this Waco church is a substantial essay in Gothic style, its brick mass rising from a raised basement beneath a prominent bell tower. Time and misfortune reshaped it: the tower's original tracery was gone by the 1940s, and a 1954 fire forced the replacement of the sanctuary's art glass. What remains is a landmark that has weathered the ordinary accidents of a long congregational life.

Waco, TX

As the 19th century closed, Waco's Fifth Street Methodist congregation had simply grown too large, so in 1900 the conference approved a new church for the city. Chartered the next year with 81 members, Austin Avenue Methodist built its first sanctuary in 1902 and grew alongside its neighborhood, eventually outgrowing that home and building anew a block away. Through the decades it sustained a steady tradition of community outreach.

Nacogdoches, TX

When Texas legislators moved in 1917 to expand public education, Nacogdoches beat out 27 rival towns to become home to the new East Texas teachers college, led by historian-president A. W. Birdwell. Completed in 1922–23 and named for empresario Stephen F. Austin, the classical-revival Austin Building served as the school's administrative and classroom heart and remains its oldest academic building still in use. Once serving a few hundred Anglo East Texans, it now anchors a university of thousands from many backgrounds.

Sherman, TX

Chartered in 1849 by the Presbytery of Brazos, Austin College opened in Huntsville during the days of the young Texas state, its early trustees drawn from the founding generation of statesmen who had shaped the Republic. A rigorous classical curriculum, the state's first law school, and Texas's first graduate degrees marked its early ambition. After the Civil War, epidemics and hard times prompted the 1876 move to Sherman, where the college matured into a modern liberal arts institution.

Huntsville, TX

The Presbyterian Church founded Austin College at Huntsville in 1849 and put up this Greek Revival building in 1851–52, its two-story portico and Doric columns announcing higher learning on the antebellum frontier. When the college relocated to Sherman in 1876, the structure was deeded to the state for the new Sam Houston Normal Institute — a teachers' college that grew into today's Sam Houston State University.

Bellville, TX

Austin County traces its beginnings to the 1821 grant that brought Stephen F. Austin's first Anglo-American colonists to Mexican Texas, and its seat, San Felipe de Austin, served as the capital of Austin's colony and the cradle of Texas's provisional government during the 1835–36 crisis. Organized as a Mexican municipality in 1828, it became a county of the new Republic in March 1836, named for the empresario himself. Bellville has been the county seat since 1848.

Bellville, TX

Declaring their old lockup "unsafe, unfit, and inadequate," the Austin County Court contracted in 1896 with the Pauly Jail Building Co. of St. Louis to erect this jail for $19,970. Its Romanesque Revival design—crenelated parapets, bartizans, and stone window arches—was made to harmonize with the county's 1886 courthouse, which later burned. The gallows, used only once in 1901, have since been removed and the jailer's quarters enlarged, but the original exterior survives.

Huntsville, TX

Erected in 1851, Austin Hall was the first building of Austin College, one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in Texas, and it served students continuously for a quarter century. After the college relocated, the hall passed to a private academy and then to the forerunner of Sam Houston State, keeping its doors open to learning. Its long educational service makes it a rare survivor of antebellum Texas academic life.

Austin, TX

Tax-supported public secondary education came to Austin in 1881, when the city school district opened a high school department under school-board president A. P. Wooldridge and Superintendent John B. Winn. The first class of 31 girls and 17 boys met on the third floor of the West Austin School, and as enrollment grew the school moved from a Baptist church to the Temporary State Capitol to an opera house before finally getting buildings of its own. Over more than a century Austin High became known for innovative programs and academic excellence.

Austin, TX

Edwin Waller's 1839 plan for Austin set aside two blocks for schools at Rio Grande and 12th Street, and by 1881 the school board was teaching every grade there, from primary through high school. Austin High moved to this campus in 1925, and the late 1920s brought a burst of student life—the Red Jackets, the Red Dragon drama club, and the 'Austin Maroon' newspaper. Renamed for Stephen F. Austin in 1953, the school used the site until 1975, after which it joined the Austin Community College system.

Austin, TX

Austin's public high school, founded in 1881, gained its first purpose-built home here after fire destroyed its temporary quarters in the old State Capitol. Completed in 1900 with a domed rotunda, the ornate red-brick "Old Red" building housed pioneering programs, including the John T. Allan manual training center and one of the nation's earliest home economics departments. It served as a high school until 1925 and later a junior high before fire claimed it in 1956.

Austin, TX

Master Masons met at surveyor Edwin Waller's home on October 11, 1839, just a week before President Mirabeau B. Lamar arrived to establish the government of the Republic of Texas in its new capital. Grand Master Branch Archer authorized Austin Lodge No. 12 that November, with Alexander Russell as its first worshipful master. Its rolls read like a roster of early Texas leadership — vice president Edward Burleson, whose 1851 Masonic burial was the first in the State Cemetery, and governors Edward Clark and Hardin R. Runnels among them.

Austin, TX

As Austin outgrew its older graveyards in the early 20th century, a private corporation bought farmland northwest of town in 1927 and opened Austin Memorial Park, recording its first burial in 1928. The city bought the grounds in 1941 to serve the public, though highways, a recreation center, and new construction later trimmed its edges. Among those interred are Pulitzer-winning novelist James A. Michener, legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, actor Zachary Scott, and famed University of Texas coaches Dana X. Bible and Harvey Penick.

Austin, TX

The seminary grew from the Austin School of Theology, founded in 1884 by Revs. Richmond Kelley Smoot and Robert Lewis Dabney to train Presbyterian ministers who would stay in Texas and the Southwest. Though that school closed in 1895, enthusiasm carried a new Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary into being in 1902, and in 1908 it moved to this site to partner with the University of Texas. After World War I it added a Spanish-speaking department to serve south Texas.

Austin, TX

Founded in donated quarters, the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary moved to this site in 1906 under President T. R. Sampson, who dreamed of binding the school closely to the nearby University of Texas. Buff-brick, Mission Revival buildings rose here — Lubbock Hall, Sampson Hall, faculty homes, and a 1941 chapel — even as the seminary briefly closed during World War I. Though the early buildings were razed by 1996, the seminary's partnership with the university endured through classes, lectures, and exchanges.

Austin, TX

In 1856, when Texas was still a frontier state and psychiatry a young and uncertain field, the legislature created a hospital for the mentally ill here. Construction began in 1857, and the institution opened in May 1861 with about a dozen patients housed in its Administration Building. Renamed Austin State Hospital in 1925, it remains the oldest mental hospital in Texas.

Austin, TX

Established in 1882, this cemetery holds the graves of patients of the Austin State Hospital, one of Texas's earliest public institutions for the mentally ill. Many of those buried here were poor, unclaimed, or long forgotten, making the ground a quiet record of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century society cared for — and set apart — its most vulnerable. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002.

Jefferson, TX

This brick building rose before 1866, in the years when Jefferson thrived as the greatest inland port in the Southwest, its steamboats reaching the Gulf by way of Big Cypress Bayou. Under one roof it held offices, a grocery, a saloon, and a drugstore. In 1882 it was given to Sallie Harrison as a wedding gift on her marriage to C. A. Culberson, who would later serve as Texas governor and U.S. senator.

Austin, TX

Catherine North began this house as a family residence in 1847, and in 1892 Austin banker Ira Evans completed it in the grand style of a French chateau. In 1929 the charter members of the Austin Woman's Club bought the home and lovingly remodeled it with period materials, giving their organization a landmark headquarters in the heart of the city.

Austin, TX

During the Civil War, Austin was no sleepy statehouse town but a working engine of the Confederate effort. Behind the secession convention and the wartime legislative sessions ran a gritty industrial machine: an arsenal on Waller Creek, a gun-cap factory turning out shells by the thousands, and a foundry casting cannon. Citizens paid for it with hardship — fever and diphtheria, food shortages, and hotels that demanded gold or tobacco before they would rent a bed.

Austin, TX

Austin's "moonlight towers" are 165-foot iron structures first raised in 1894–95, when their carbon-arc lamps cast a bluish glow said to light the entire young city at once. The idea of flooding a town with artificial "moonlight" from tall towers was tried in several 19th-century cities, but Austin's are the last surviving system of their kind. Converted over the years to mercury-vapor lamps, more than two dozen of the original towers still burn from dusk to dawn.

Authon, TX

This burial ground began as a family cemetery for Kentucky-born pioneer Isom Cranfill, whose 15-year-old son Linn Boyd was killed in an Indian attack near the family home in 1871. Sitting along the old Fort Worth–Fort Belknap Military Road, the site was later deeded to the Authon Church of Christ and remains a public cemetery holding many of the area's early settlers.

Newton, TX

Built in 1912 by turpentine producer L. M. Autrey, this Newton County house passed through a succession of the area's leading businessmen — road contractor N. A. Dawson, then for more than half a century the family of lumberman and civic leader Thomas Williams. Framed in long-leaf pine and modeled on the Malbis Plantation near Mobile, Alabama, it blends classical and Victorian styling. Its owners trace the industries — turpentine, roads, and timber — that built the East Texas piney woods economy.

Houston, TX

Built in 1921 by the Episcopal Diocese of Texas as a gathering place for Rice University students, Autry House echoed the Italian Mediterranean style of the young campus nearby. It was designed by Houston architect William Ward Watkin with the Boston firm Cram & Ferguson and named for Texaco general counsel James Lockhart Autry, whose widow Allie funded its construction. It became an early hub of student life at Rice.

Avalon, TX

Organized on July 6, 1879, as Mt. Nebo Baptist Church, this Ellis County congregation began with two elders and sixteen charter members. Early worship took place in the Muscrat School and beneath a brush arbor before a sanctuary rose in 1924–25, followed later by Sunday school rooms and a parsonage. Renamed Avalon Missionary Baptist Church, it has served the community for well over a century.

Killeen, TX

Rising in 1923 to replace a brick schoolhouse lost to fire, the Avenue D School served the growing railroad town of Killeen. Dallas architect C.J. Leinbach gave the three-story building decorative stonework and, in the custom of the era, separate entrances for girls and boys. In a resourceful touch, the community furnished the interior with money raised by selling advertising space on the auditorium curtains.

Galveston, TX

This Galveston congregation traces its roots to the enslaved members of the city's First Baptist Church in the 1840s, who by the early 1850s worshiped separately as the African Baptist Church. After the Civil War the property was deeded to the congregation, which reorganized under Black leadership and later took the name Avenue L Missionary Baptist Church. Its pastors went on to lead district associations, a national convention, and a college, making the church a pillar of Black religious and civic life.

Amarillo, TX

Avery Turner, a Santa Fe Railroad executive who spent fifty-eight years with the line, moved to Amarillo with his wife Mary in 1902. In 1910 the couple built this two-story Dutch colonial revival house—a rare style locally—modeled on Mary's family home in New Jersey, with a full-width porch, Tuscan columns, and a brick carriage house. Mary was active in the Red Cross and Salvation Army, and the home stayed in the family until her death in 1951.

Avery, TX

In the cotton country of Northeast Texas, a small frame church with a steeple and belfry rose in 1896 in a settlement then called Douglas. Like many rural churches of its era it did double duty, sheltering other denominations and serving as a schoolhouse until 1901. When the town was renamed Avery in 1902, the congregation carried on as a mission church, slowly building youth and missionary groups before reaching full-station status in 1950.