Historic Markers in Texas

Houston, TX

South Carolina native Irvin Capers Lord came to Houston in 1854 and worked as a machinist, co-owning Lord and Richardson's Eagle Iron Works. Elected alderman in 1858 and city marshal in 1863, he helped steer Houston through the Civil War and Reconstruction before becoming the city's 26th mayor in 1875. He later served as county commissioner, street commissioner, and sheriff.

Andrews, TX

The Irwin Ranch House is the last building left of Shafter Lake, once the largest town in Andrews County and its first real settlement. Built in 1908, its frame is made of concrete blocks hand-pressed from sand taken straight out of the dry lakebed. When the town faded, this lone structure remained to mark where a West Texas boomlet had briefly stood.

Crockett, TX

Ike Daniel was the kind of self-made man who seemed to run half a county at once. A native of Houston County, he built a sprawling enterprise across Kennard and Crockett — general store, gristmill, cotton gin, sawmill, and real estate — while also serving as county sheriff and representing the county three terms in the state legislature. His life spanned the hard rebuilding years after the Civil War into the booming early twentieth century.

Pattison, TX

Isaac Best (1774–1837) was one of the 'Old 300,' the first families to settle Stephen F. Austin's colony. Before coming to Texas around 1824 he had built a mill and a fortified refuge, Best's Fort, on the Pennsylvania–Kentucky frontier during the War of 1812. In Texas he received a land grant east of the Brazos and steadily expanded his holdings to some 8,000 acres; nearby Best Creek still bears his name.

Llano, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1837 and orphaned of his mother as a boy, Isaac 'Ike' Maxwell followed the westering tide to the Texas Hill Country in 1854, naming his new home Bluffton after the Arkansas town he had left behind. He scouted for frontier units during the Civil War, then served his county as justice of the peace and in the state legislature, where he helped secure the granite that built the Texas Capitol. A Church of Christ minister, he was remembered at his death in 1931 as the oldest living pioneer of Llano County.

Moulton, TX

Isaac D. Hamilton came from Alabama to Texas in January 1836, joining Captain Jack Shackelford's Red Rover Company under Colonel James Fannin just as the Texas Revolution reached its bloodiest hour. Fannin's command was captured and, in March 1836, executed in the Goliad Massacre—yet Hamilton was among the few who miraculously escaped the slaughter and lived to tell of it.

Galveston, TX

Harris Kempner arrived as a Polish immigrant and died in 1894 a Galveston powerhouse in banking, insurance, railroads, and cotton, leaving his empire to his 21-year-old son Isaac. After the catastrophic 1900 hurricane, Isaac Kempner threw himself into rebuilding the shattered island city's infrastructure and served as mayor from 1917 to 1919. On fashionable Broadway the family raised this columned 1906 neoclassical mansion, its art-glass windows and Corinthian grandeur later expanded by noted architect John F. Staub.

Galveston, TX

Isaac Heffron, born in Wales in 1853, immigrated to Galveston as a boy, married Texan Clotilde Gillet in 1876, and bought this Post Office Street house in 1881. A successful general contractor who served on the city's board of aldermen, he rebuilt the Victorian home as his family grew, adding a second story, a rear porch, and an ornate concrete balustrade. The family lived here until 1901, and his daughter and her husband remained until 1913.

Point Blank, TX

Isaac Jones was a self-reliant pioneer who moved to the Trinity River country in 1834, taking up a Mexican land grant on the river's west bank while Texas was still under Mexican rule. He served briefly in the army of the young Texas Republic between 1836 and 1838 and later ran a ferry at Jones Bluff, a vital river crossing for travelers and goods.

Junction, TX

On Christmas Eve, 1876, sixteen-year-old Isaac Kountz was killed on this spot while herding his father's sheep in Kimble County, one of countless flashpoints of violence on the Texas frontier. His younger brother Sebastian, only eleven, escaped, and a posse joined by Texas Rangers pursued the raiders to the Guadalupe River. Isaac was buried in the Junction Cemetery, and the marker recalls the perils that shadowed even the youngest members of settler families.

San Jacinto, TX

Isaac L. Jaques arrived in Texas in October 1835, on the eve of the revolution that would create the Republic. He fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in Captain Thomas H. McIntire's company. He died just months later at Lynchburg in August 1836.

Round Top, TX

Born in Georgia and arrived in Texas in 1835, Isaac Lafayette Hill taught school before the fight for Texas independence swept him up. He piloted the ferry at San Felipe that carried Sam Houston's retreating army in 1836 and then fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that same year. He later farmed his land grant near Round Top and represented Fayette County in the state legislature in the 1850s.

Alto, TX

Born in Georgia in 1788, Isaac Lee lived in Mississippi and Arkansas before reaching Texas in 1828, settling near San Augustine and later Nacogdoches. He took part in the 1832 Battle of Nacogdoches and served in the Army of the Republic of Texas during the fight for independence. In old age he moved to a farm near Alto to live with his daughter, dying there in 1880 at age 92.

Hemphill, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, Tennessee migrant Isaac Low reached this corner of Sabine County in 1828 and, during the Texas Revolution, ran a ferry across the Sabine River to help settlers flee the advancing Mexican army. He later served as a county commissioner, and his son Jesse donated the land for this cemetery, where the earliest marked grave lies. Others buried here include a Civil War captain and a man whose 1883 murder touched off a three-year local feud.

Point, TX

In 1902 Isaac Newton "Newt" Gresham, an Alabama-born Rains County farmer and newspaper editor, called ten neighbors together in a nearby barn to help local farmers organize against low crop prices. That meeting founded the Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union of America. Beginning as a secret society, the idea spread rapidly across the South and West and grew into a national organization.

Weatherford, TX

Born in Georgia in 1793, Isaac Parker came to Texas in 1833 with the pioneer family that built Fort Parker in Limestone County. He fought in the Texas Revolution, served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas, took part in the 1845 statehood convention, and later sat in the state legislature. In the 1850s he introduced the bill that created the county named in his honor.

Weatherford, TX

Isaac Parker came to Texas in 1833 and took up arms in 1836 during the Texas fight for independence, then helped build the young republic as a member of its Congress from 1839 to 1845 and a delegate to the 1845 convention that led to statehood. A pioneer, soldier, and legislator, he later served as a state senator before his death in 1883 in the county that bears his family name. This centennial-era marker honors a life that spanned the frontier from wilderness to statehood.

Bald Prairie, TX

Tennessee native Isaac Phillip Stem enlisted in frontier service at seventeen and, after moving to Texas in 1836, joined the Republic of Texas army at Houston. He fought at the 1840 Battle of Plum Creek against Comanches who had raided the coast, served in the Somervell Campaign, and rode with mounted volunteers in the war with Mexico before joining the U.S. Infantry. He later settled in Robertson County as a farmer and rancher, dying in 1893.

Beckville, TX

Born about 1793, Isaac R. Youngblood moved from Georgia to Texas before 1846 and became a Panola County pioneer, helping lay out local roads as an overseer. In 1858 he deeded two acres here for a school and church, granting use of a nearby spring as well. Tradition holds that he died after falling into his 90-foot well and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Galveston, TX

This 1886 Galveston residence, built in a Queen Anne style with Eastlake detailing and a front double gallery, was home to Isabella O. Maas and her daughter and son-in-law. Active in civic and charitable causes, Mrs. Maas lived here until her death in 1891, after which the city health officer, Dr. W. C. Fisher, occupied the house for decades.

Shoreacres, TX

In the boom of weekend "fish camps" that made Shoreacres a Galveston Bay retreat for Houston families, furniture executive Isaiah P. Walker and his wife Annie bought a lot in 1928 and completed their home in 1932. Nicknamed the "Little Castle," its rough-cut stone facade and a turret enclosing a spiral staircase gave it a fortress-like look, and four concrete "faux bois" pine columns—in the rustic style popularized by Mexican artist Dionicio Rodriguez—frame the porch. It is the oldest surviving fish-camp residence in Shoreacres.

Lubbock, TX

Isham and Texana Tubbs married in Kaufman County in 1877 and moved to the Monterey area of Lubbock County around 1890, when the region was just being settled. Isham helped found the local school board and a Methodist congregation, and in 1907–08 he hauled East Texas lumber in by rail and wagon to build this Queen Anne home, modeled on a magazine sketch his wife admired. Its two separate living spaces sheltered the family under one roof.

Fort Worth, TX

When the Rev. W. Marion Isham brought his family from Georgia to Tarrant County around 1870, he donated an acre of land for a community burial ground. The oldest legible stone belongs to N.L. Sweet, who died in 1870, though plain sandstone markers hint at even earlier graves. Expanded in 1941 and still tended by a cemetery association, the graveyard remains an anchor of local memory.

Hurst, TX

Organized in the 1870s with eleven charter members, this congregation was named for its founding minister, the Rev. Marion Isham. In 1876 B. H. Ross donated land for a church and school, and the small frame building doubled as a community schoolhouse until 1891. In 1952 the growing fellowship moved to Hurst, where it worships today as First United Methodist Church.

Iola, TX

Built in 1848 with hand-hewn cedar in its log foundation, ceilings, and beams, this home remained in the family of Isham D. Davis for 115 years. His wife Martha was a daughter of Mathew Caldwell, one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The house stands as a sturdy relic of the earliest years of Anglo settlement in Grimes County.

Lockhart, TX

Georgia-born Isham Jones Good came to Texas in 1835 as a volunteer for the fight for independence from Mexico, narrowly escaping the 1836 Goliad Massacre that claimed Colonel Fannin's command. He returned to settle the frontier, fought in the 1840 Indian battle of Plum Creek, served as an early postmaster and Caldwell County's first sheriff, and helped organize the county in 1848 before turning to cattle ranching in Hays County.

Bryan, TX

Isom Palmer — a son of the frontier firebrand Martin 'Ringtail Panther' Parmer — came to Texas with his family in 1825 and took part in the 1826 Fredonian Rebellion near Nacogdoches. He fought under Capt. John M. Bradley at the Siege of Bexar in 1835 and served as sergeant-at-arms at the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence, later settling in Brazos County in the early 1870s.

Port Arthur, TX

In 1903 Frederick Shepherd founded this African Methodist Episcopal congregation in his Port Arthur home, with the Rev. Napoleon Harris—whom he had helped establish a nearby A.M.E. mission the year before—as its first pastor. The sanctuary built in 1904 also housed the area's first public school for African Americans. As the congregation grew it built ever-larger sanctuaries, taking the name Israel Chapel A.M.E. Church in 1959.

San Antonio, TX

Italian immigrants began settling northwest of downtown San Antonio in the 1870s, and by 1890 enough families had gathered to charter the Christopher Columbus Italian Society in a fruit store on Commerce Street. Over the following decades the society built a hall and helped found San Francesco Di Paola Church, and in 1957 it dedicated a statue of the explorer in what became Columbus Park.

Italy, TX

Frustrated by neglected streets and services, African American residents of the Italy neighborhood known as "the Hill" won a hearing with the city council and, around 1950, established their own Colored City Council, electing John Henry Farrow as mayor. Ebony magazine featured the men in 1951, and in 1953 they built a small frame "Colored City Hall" as their meeting place.

Itasca, TX

Fourteen years after Itasca was founded along the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, the town replaced its first depot with this Victorian structure in 1895, built large enough for both passengers and freight. For decades it stood as a landmark and a symbol of the area's early growth, serving as a transportation hub until the late 1960s. It was moved to its present site in 1972 to preserve it.

Houston County, TX

This burial ground opened in 1861 with the grave of Henry G. Ivie, an early settler of southeastern Houston County, on land from his own holdings in the Stephen English Survey. It served families across a three-county area centered on the Ivie Community and was long tied to the neighboring Ivie Baptist Church, which shared the site with a school. Today the cemetery quietly records the pioneers who first worked this rural corner of East Texas.

Magnolia Springs, TX

Born near Kirbyville around 1911, Ivory Joe Hunter grew up in a musical family and made his first recording for the Library of Congress in 1933 before hosting a radio show in Beaumont. Traveling the country as a performer, he scored hits like "Since I Met You Baby" and "I Almost Lost My Mind," reaching Black and white audiences alike and appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. He later became a country artist at the Grand Ole Opry, and his songs were recorded by artists including Elvis Presley.

Huntington, TX

This burial ground dates to 1873, when Cyrus Ivy buried a grandson on his family farm and set aside land for a cemetery. A Georgia native who reached Texas in 1852, Ivy became a community leader as the settlement around him grew to include a gristmill, cotton gin, post office, and two stores by the 1890s. Neighboring families soon shared the graveyard, whose interments include veterans reaching back to the Civil War.

Peoria, TX

Built in the 1840s, this log structure was among the first homes in the settlement that grew into Peoria, and portions of its original hand-hewn walls survive behind glass within a later frame house. It was long the home of Col. V.H. Ivy and his sons, two of whom became pioneer doctors. Successive owners enlarged and enclosed the cabin, and the marker was moved to the community center in 2010.

Lampasas, TX

Dr. J. A. Adkins built this Lampasas house in 1868, in the lean years after the Civil War when hard cash was scarce on the Texas frontier. Rather than turn away patients who could not pay, he accepted stone in place of money — and that stone became the very walls of his home. The house stands as a literal record of a country doctor's practice.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Raised in the mid-1850s, when northeast Texas was still a young patchwork of cotton farms and frontier homesteads, this house has sheltered the same family for its entire life. Its original shutters, columns, and porch banisters survived into the twentieth century, a rare continuity in a region where most early wood-frame dwellings were lost to weather, fire, and rebuilding. Such farmsteads were the everyday architecture of antebellum settlement in Franklin County.

Wichita Falls, TX

Raised in 1892, this sturdy sandstone-and-brick building housed Joseph Kemp's wholesale grocery for thirty-five years, expanding with a two-story addition by 1901. During the 1930s oil boom it turned to petroleum supply under the Industrial Supply Company, whose skilled masonry, arched windows, and 18,750 square feet still testify to Wichita Falls' commercial rise.

Georgetown, TX

Built in 1895 by the C. S. Belford Lumber Company for grocer J. A. McDougle, this ornate Victorian home with its stained-glass windows passed through a string of Georgetown owners, including a long-serving county treasurer, before being restored in 1969. It stands as one of the finer examples of the town's turn-of-the-century domestic architecture.

Corsicana, TX

Georgia-born James A. Megarity served in the Confederate army through some of the Civil War's hardest fighting, including Gettysburg and Petersburg, and was present at Robert E. Lee's surrender. Having married Narcissa Hardman in 1859, he brought his family to Texas in 1872, rented land for a time, and bought this site in 1876 to build a home. His holdings grew to 187 acres, making him a prosperous farmer and a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

Brownwood, TX

By 1901, Brownwood was prosperous enough for a leading citizen to build a home that announced his standing. J. A. Walker, a prominent Texas Baptist and early benefactor of Howard Payne University, raised this Colonial Revival house with its ornate portico and wraparound veranda. It stayed in the Walker family for more than 75 years before a careful 1979 restoration.

Alpine, TX

Julius Canselor Bird came to West Texas at eighteen as a Texas Ranger, guarding crews building the transcontinental railroad, then homesteaded ten sections along Calamity and Ash Creeks south of Alpine. With his wife America Walker he raised Durham cattle, helped found and finance the First Baptist Church, and later opened Alpine's first Buick dealership — a life that spanned the region's leap from frontier to automobile age.

Gainesville, TX

Joseph D. "Ikard" Sugg (1854-1925), the youngest of thirteen children born in Mississippi, headed west as a teenager and worked a cattle drive north from the Red River in 1868. He became a prominent rancher in partnership with his brother Cal, leasing land across Indian Territory and Texas and even selling horses to the Mexican government, while always considering Cooke County his home. At his death he left bequests to the county poor farm and to the upkeep of this cemetery.

Arlington, TX

Built in 1878 by early landowner J.D. Cooper, this house shows the plain craftsmanship of its era—colonial-style lines, square nails, and wide board floors. Later moved by the City to preserve it, it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965. Structures like it mark the settlement of North Texas in the decades after the Civil War.

Giddings, TX

Chartered by the Grand Lodge of Texas in 1865, this Masonic lodge began in the community of Evergreen and moved to Giddings in 1872 after the railroad bypassed its original home. For generations the lodge lent its hall to public schools, community groups, and government agencies, weaving itself into the civic fabric of the town. A new lodge hall rose on this site in 1969-70.

Hungerford, TX

Joel Hudgins came to the Republic of Texas in 1839 and settled near Hungerford, where after his death his widow and four sons expanded the family's land and cattle. In 1915 J.D. Hudgins and his children bought their first Brahman cows—descendants of stock brought from India in 1906—and helped found the American Brahman Breeders Association. With the 1933 bull 'Manso,' the ranch developed one of the world's largest registered American Gray Brahman herds, exporting cattle to dozens of countries.

McKinney, TX

When dry-goods merchant John David Stiff built this McKinney residence in 1893, he gave it the flourishes of the Queen Anne style then fashionable across small-town America — paired dormers and delicate fish-scale shingling that signaled a prosperous merchant on the town square. The house stayed in the Stiff family for nearly eighty years, until 1971, before being recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Clarksville vicinity, TX

J. D. Tippit grew up on a farm near this spot, served as a decorated World War II paratrooper, and joined the Dallas police in 1952. On November 22, 1963, working a beat in Oak Cliff shortly after President Kennedy was shot, he stopped a suspicious man for questioning and was gunned down. The man was Lee Harvey Oswald, and Tippit's killing helped lead to the assassin's capture.

Abilene vicinity, TX

Born in Alabama in 1816, J. D. Windham came to Texas in 1839 during the days of the young Republic and pushed onto the western frontier, becoming the first physician in Brown County in 1865 and in Callahan County in 1874. Beyond doctoring, he kept a general store and set out the county's first orchard here at Tecumseh, the kind of many-hats life a frontier settlement demanded. He and his wife, Frances Monteith, raised nine children before his death in 1901.

Grapevine, TX

John E. Foust (1861–1926) came to Grapevine in 1880 and opened a general store that, among its goods, stocked coffins. Step by step—and with the help of his wife Daisy—he built those sidelines into a full funeral company while serving as a civic leader who helped grow other area businesses. His son joined in 1923 and ran both the funeral home and the store into the 1960s, and Foust family members served Grapevine's business and civic life for more than a century.

Stanton, TX

Around 1900, J. E. and Nettie Millhollon trailed their cattle from Glasscock County into Martin County, claiming this homesite and thirty-four sections of West Texas rangeland. Business and church leaders in nearby Stanton, the couple had this house built in 1907 by N. H. Hunt of Big Spring, a prolific builder along the Texas & Pacific Railroad. Later owners restored the property beginning in 1970.

Canyon, TX

Raised on West Texas ranches and rodeo arenas, J. Evetts Haley turned a UT history degree into a lifelong mission to preserve the story of the cattle country. As the first field secretary of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Society from 1925, he interviewed old trail drivers and collected the documents and artifacts that stock museums across the region, and he wrote acclaimed books on Charles Goodnight and the XIT Ranch. An outspoken public figure, he helped found the body that became the Texas Historical Commission.

Galveston, TX

Built in 1884 to designs by Nathaniel Tobey, Jr., this Galveston house is a fine example of Italianate architecture, with paired brackets, a bay window, balcony, and hooded moldings over its tall windows. It was home to John Francis Smith, founder of the J. S. Smith & Bro. Hardware Company on The Strand, who likely ordered much of the woodwork from supply catalogs.

Bluff Dale, TX

Jeptha Franklin Warnock reached Erath County in 1898 and opened a hardware store in Bluff Dale in 1908, building this brick-parapeted storefront to house it in 1915. From here he supplied the tools and implements that kept the surrounding farms and ranches running. With its wooden storefront and transom windows, the building is a well-preserved example of the small-town commercial architecture that once lined Main Streets across Texas.

Austin, TX

Built in 1925, this Colonial Revival house on Waller Creek was home from 1926 to author, educator, and folklorist J. Frank Dobie and his wife Bertha until their deaths. Dobie taught a beloved University of Texas course on the life and literature of the Southwest and wrote many of his books here, often naming the house in their prefaces. Friends such as Carl Sandburg, Walter P. Webb, and Roy Bedichek gathered under its roof.

Hale Center, TX

J. Frank Norfleet rose from a ranch hand with little schooling to a Panhandle cattleman whose holdings grew to 20,000 acres, and a short-line railroad town briefly bore his name before competition and thin finances killed it. In 1919 a swindle cost him his savings, and rather than accept the loss he spent nearly five years chasing the con men across North America and the Caribbean, an odyssey he later put into a book. His dogged manhunt made him a folk figure of frontier justice.

San Marcos, TX

John Howard Barbee, born outside San Marcos in 1854, was a rancher, builder, and developer who helped found the Farmers Union Gin Company. In 1906 he moved into town and built this Classical Revival house — with Doric columns, a prominent pediment, and dentil trim — for his wife Abbie, an accomplished singer. Over the following decades the home passed through families tied to the commerce and schools of San Marcos.

Quitman, TX

An Alabama native who reached Texas in 1877, J.H. Jones taught school, won election as Wood County clerk, and prospered as a Quitman merchant. In 1902 he gave this land to the Old Settlers of Wood County Association, whose members gathered each year to honor the region's pioneers. Save for a pause during World War I, the homecoming reunions continued here, and in 1952 the grounds passed to the Governor Hogg Shrine State Park.

Scotland, TX

German-born John H. Meurer settled in Archer County around 1900 as a land agent, selling more than 60,000 acres and helping found the German Catholic towns of Windthorst and Scotland. In 1911 he built this eleven-room, one-and-a-half-story home with its wraparound porch. After remaining in his family until 1941, the house was purchased by St. Boniface Catholic Church to serve as a residence for parish priests.

Jefferson, TX

Built around 1858, this house became the longtime home of the J. H. Rowell family beginning in 1879, in the riverport town of Jefferson. Rowell was a fixture of local government, serving Jefferson through several terms as both mayor and alderman. The dwelling was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.