Historic Markers in Texas

Quitman, TX

This modest 1860s cottage was bought in 1873 by James Stephen Hogg, who honeymooned here with Sarah Ann Stinson while serving as editor-publisher of the "Quitman News" and the local justice of the peace. From these small-town beginnings Hogg rose to become the first native-born governor of Texas, serving from 1891 to 1895. Preserved by local clubs and later restored by his daughter Ima Hogg, the cottage survives as a memento of that ascent.

Clarendon, TX

James T. Patman served as sheriff of Donley County from 1905 to 1916, a time when the great Panhandle ranches were being broken up and sold off as farmland. Born in Sulphur Springs and a Methodist, he married Allie Graves, raised a son and a daughter, and died in Clarendon. He was remembered as an outstanding peace officer of that transitional frontier era.

Pattison, TX

At the crossing of the Atascosito Road and the San Felipe Trail, James Tarrant Pattison and his wife Sarah settled a Republic of Texas land grant that grew into a 5,000-acre plantation with its own grist mill, sawmill, and cotton gin. The homesite doubled as a stagecoach stop, and the Pattisons founded the community's first church and school. The town that grew up here took the founder's name, and his heirs still live on the land.

Milam, TX

James Taylor Gaines lived a frontier epic: surveyor of newly acquired Louisiana lands, Sabine River ferryman, and veteran of both the War of 1812 and the filibustering expeditions of early Texas. He represented the Sabine region at Washington-on-the-Brazos in 1836, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Republic's constitution, and served in its congresses. He later followed the Gold Rush to California, where he died in 1856.

Anahuac, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, James Taylor White drove cattle from Louisiana into the Texas coastal prairies in 1828 and built one of southeast Texas's greatest Longhorn herds. On his ranch in 1832 colonists drafted the Turtle Bayou Resolutions, an early protest against Mexican rule, and during the Revolution he sheltered fleeing settlers and supplied beef to the Texas army. His postwar cattle drives to New Orleans, over the Opelousas Trail, foreshadowed the great trail-driving era to come.

Honey Grove, TX

James Thomas "Tank" Holt came to Fannin County as a boy in 1849 and, after riding with the Confederate cavalry in the Civil War, turned a freighting business into a diversified fortune. He invested in ranching, a cotton oil mill, and a national bank, and even built Honey Grove's first public water system. His career traces the arc of a frontier veteran becoming a pillar of a growing Gilded Age Texas town.

Daingerfield, TX

James Thompson served in the North Carolina militia in 1781, helping secure American independence, before joining the westward drift of pioneer families through Alabama and Mississippi to the young Republic of Texas, where he was revered as a patriarch. His kin carried that martial thread onward: a son-in-law fought in the War of 1812, and a grandson became a Texas Ranger and county sheriff, killed in an Indian fight. Thompson and many descendants rest in the Daingerfield Cemetery.

Grapevine, TX

Virginia-born James Tracy Morehead brought his family to the raw frontier of newly organized Tarrant County in 1852 and within two years was chosen its third Chief Justice. He is remembered for renaming the settlement of Dunnville "Grapevine" after the nearby Grape Vine Springs, and in 1858 he oversaw the elections that organized neighboring Parker County. His career traces the machinery of local government taking shape on the North Texas frontier.

Dallas, TX

Connecticut-born James W. Latimer (1783-1860) moved to Texas with his family in 1833 and, in 1849, founded the first newspaper in the frontier town of Dallas. Known at first as "The Cedar Snag" and then as the Dallas Herald, the paper he started was eventually absorbed into the Dallas Morning News in 1885. His press gave the young settlement one of its earliest public voices.

Gonzales, TX

Indiana-born James W. Robinson came to Texas in 1833 and was elected the Republic's first lieutenant governor in 1835, briefly serving as governor before shouldering a musket as a private at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. He later settled in Gonzales, sat as a district judge, and served on the state Supreme Court. The office he first held became the second-highest in Texas, wielding broad power over the Senate and legislation.

Austin, TX

Born in Georgia in 1797, James Wales Jones was one of the Old Three Hundred—the first colonists Stephen F. Austin brought into Mexican Texas in the 1820s. He took up arms in the Texas War for Independence and lived out his days in the young republic and state he had helped to found, dying in 1847. His wife, Hetty Stiles Jones, survived him by more than half a century.

Brenham, TX

James and Catherine Walker settled on this Austin-colony land grant after July 1824, making their double-pen cedar-log house one of the oldest surviving log dwellings in Texas. As "Old 300" colonists, the Walkers raised sons who fought in the 1836 Texas Revolution and worked the family league of more than 4,000 acres. The house was moved twice, served for a time as a barn, and was carefully restored in 1986 using its own surviving structural evidence.

McKinney, TX

Built about 1868 by civic leader James Waller Thomas for his family of thirteen, this modest Collin County house began as a single room and has changed little since 1902, preserving original flooring, chimney, and rough-hewn timbers from before rail service reached North Texas. Thomas also edited and published the county's first newspaper, and his outspoken support for the Union and for the rights of Black settlers made him enemies — the site witnessed an attempt on his life during the turbulent Civil War and Reconstruction years.

Bigfoot, TX

James Washington Winters fought at San Jacinto in the 1836 revolution that won Texas independence and later joined the Somervell Expedition. A loyal follower of Sam Houston, he refused to sign the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy at Oakville on July 4, 1861, yet served as a captain, provost marshal, and scout in the militia patrolling the country between the Nueces and Rio Grande. He spent eight years in Tuxpan, Mexico, and raised a large family with his wives Piercy Tullos and Elizabeth Wier.

Bigfoot, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1817, James Washington Winters fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived to age 86, and in 1936 — the centennial of Texas independence — the state erected this marker at his grave.

Bryan, TX

Born in Ireland in 1821, James Wilson immigrated to the United States in 1842 and trained for the ministry, graduating from Lafayette College and Princeton Theological Seminary before his ordination as a Presbyterian minister in 1850. Sent to Texas in 1856, he spent 53 years as a circuit-riding missionary, organizing Presbyterian congregations across the Brazos Valley. He and his wife Laura, a published poet, are buried near a church he founded.

Abilene, TX

Raised on the Texas High Plains, James Winford Hunt worked as a newspaper publisher before becoming a Methodist minister in 1903. While serving as a pastor in Abilene, he persuaded the Northwest Texas Conference of the Methodist Church to found a college in the city — McMurry College, which opened in 1923 with Hunt as its first president. Widely known for his writings and sermons, he made his mark as a Christian educator.

Fort Worth, TX

Completed in 1915 for Thomas and Annie James, this gambrel-roofed Fort Worth home was bought four years later by Kanetaro Fujita, president of the Gosho Company, a Japanese cotton-exporting firm. The business, incorporated in 1917, thrived on the trans-Pacific cotton trade until it was dissolved just after the United States entered World War II. Fujita returned to Japan in the 1930s, selling the house to his company.

Manchester, TX

Jane Chandler Gill was an Englishwoman who died in 1816, soon after settling at Jonesboro in what is now Red River County — decades before Texas independence, when the region was still a remote borderland of New Spain. Her grave is counted among the oldest marked European-American burials in Texas.

Houston County, TX

Jane Dotson Lively came from Alabama to Houston County in 1850 with her husband Thomas, for whom the surrounding community of Livelyville was named. She helped establish a church and school on the family's land and was remembered as a courageous pioneer and community leader. Mother of thirteen and twice married, she lived to be one hundred, dying in 1922.

Dallas, TX

Born into slavery around 1800, Jane Elkins was the first documented enslaved person purchased in the newly created Dallas County, sold and leased between owners until she was hired out to care for a widower's children. When that man was found bludgeoned to death in 1853, Jane — who alerted authorities and later said a prominent citizen was the killer — became the sole suspect. Tried in a single week by an all-white male jury, with no lawyer, no witnesses, and no investigation, she was convicted and hanged ten days later.

Port Bolivar, TX

Born in Maryland in 1798, Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long followed her husband into the dangerous filibustering expeditions that sought to wrest Texas from Spain. Left to hold a fort on the Bolivar Peninsula through a brutal winter with her daughter and an enslaved woman named Kian, she gave birth there amid hunger and danger — the episode that earned her the honorary title "Mother of Texas." She later received her own headright of land in Austin's colony, unusual for a woman, and opened her San Felipe boarding house to the rallies and intrigue of the Texas Revolution.

Richmond, TX

Jane Wilkinson Long earned the name "Mother of Texas" through the winter of 1821, when—stranded at Point Bolivar with her small daughter and an enslaved girl named Kian while her husband's filibustering expedition marched into Mexico—she gave birth in a snowstorm and then rose to gather food and firewood for her family. In the decades that followed she ran two of the most famous boarding houses of the colonial and republic eras, hosting William B. Travis, Sam Houston, and Mirabeau B. Lamar. On this Richmond site she opened a house in 1837 that became a hub of Texas social and political life until her plantation prospered in the 1840s.

Austin, TX

Jane Y. McCallum lived in this Austin house while helping lead the Texas woman suffrage movement in the early 20th century. As a force in the Texas Joint Legislative Council — the so-called 'Petticoat Lobby' — she pressed for political and social reform, and as Secretary of State from 1927 she famously rediscovered and preserved an original signed copy of the Texas Declaration of Independence.

Port Arthur, TX

In this refinery town on the Gulf Coast, a restless, outspoken girl named Janis Joplin grew up chafing against her hometown's conservatism before leaving in 1962 to study art in Austin. There she fell into the folk-club scene, then carried her raw, blues-soaked voice to San Francisco, where the 1967 Monterey festivals and the album Cheap Thrills made her a star. She burned bright and briefly, returning home once for her high-school reunion in 1970 only weeks before an overdose ended her life at 27; her final album, Pearl, became a posthumous classic.

Walker County, TX

Robert and Jane Jardine Browne raised their first cabin here in 1849 from hewn pine logs on walnut posts, on land granted in 1835 to Jane's uncle and surveyed by the Republic of Texas. As the family grew, so did the house — a second log cabin, then a lean-to bedroom, dining room, and detached kitchen added by their Texas-born son. Purchased from the family's heirs in 1940, the homestead was restored in 1966.

White Hall, TX

Here in 1833 planter Jared Ellison Groce built the home known as "Groce's Retreat," and here he died on November 20, 1836, the year Texas won its independence. The Retreat name outlived the house, carrying on as a post office and village that grew up two miles east after the original home was torn down. Groce was among the wealthiest of Stephen F. Austin's colonists.

Van, TX

After seismograph surveys and leasing of thousands of acres, the Pure Oil Company began drilling in a cotton patch on W. T. Jarman's farm in 1929. Crowds brought picnic lunches to watch, and after one disappointing all-day vigil the Number One well quietly came in on the morning of October 14, turning the sleepy village of Van into an overnight boomtown. It was the first of 591 wells in a field that would yield hundreds of millions of barrels of oil.

Jacksonville, TX

When Devereux and Polly Ann Jarratt came from Virginia to settle this East Texas ground in 1850, their sons set aside a burial plot in 1858 — its first grave that of a nameless transient worker known only as Mr. Watts. Added to by many hands over the following century, the cemetery became a shared resting place formally organized by descendants and neighbors in the 1960s.

Jarrell, TX

Jarrell was born of a railroad gambit: developer Orlando D. Jarrell persuaded executives of the Bartlett and Western Railway to route their line through leased land rather than the nearby town of Corn Hill, and in 1909 he began selling lots. When the tracks arrived in 1911, most of Corn Hill's residents — and even two dozen of its buildings — moved to the new town, which thrived on cotton until the crop's decline and the railway's 1935 closure shrank it. The town endured a devastating tornado in 1997 before incorporating in 2001 and entering an era of rapid growth.

Hawkins, TX

In the Jim Crow era, when Black Texans were shut out of most higher education, the Texas Negro Disciples of Christ and the Christian Women's Board of Missions joined forces in 1904 to build a school. On land donated by Ida and J.J. Jarvis, the institute opened in 1913 with a dozen elementary pupils and steadily grew—adding high school, junior college, and by 1937 a full four-year college that won accreditation in 1950.

Laredo, TX

Samuel Matthias Jarvis, a Columbia-trained engineer from New York, joined Zachary Taylor's army in the Mexican-American War, later married in Nuevo León, and settled his family in Laredo after the Civil War. As county surveyor and mayor from 1868 to 1872, he laid out streets and parks, mapped the city, and expanded the old Spanish town plan of 1767. He donated the land for this plaza, known by his name since at least 1881.

Jasper, TX

Jasper County was one of the twenty-three original counties of the Republic of Texas in 1836, and its seat — the old Bevil settlement founded around 1824 — was renamed for Revolutionary War hero William Jasper. After an 1849 fire destroyed the first log courthouse, a succession of buildings followed, culminating in the 1889 red-brick courthouse whose clock tower, WPA annex, and later remodelings chart the county's changing fortunes.

Jasper, TX

Far from the great battlefields, Jasper County was a vital rear-area hub for Confederate Texas — voting overwhelmingly for secession and serving as a communication, supply, and transportation center during the war. Texas troops crossed it on the 1862-64 Louisiana campaigns, a mounted courier route ran through it, and it hosted a quartermaster depot and brigade headquarters of the Texas State Troops. When the war ended, Union occupation forces under George Custer bivouacked on the town square.

Walker County, TX

Organized in 1870, just after the Civil War, Jasper Missionary Baptist Church was among the first African-American congregations in Walker County, its founders first worshipping under a brush arbor. With the church came a wave of legally recognized marriages long denied under slavery, and soon a school where children walked miles for a seventh-grade education. Rebuilt over generations and completed anew in 1994, it has anchored fellowship, learning, and scholarships in New Waverly for over a century.

Jasper, TX

Jasper's tradition of higher learning began in 1851 with the Jasper Collegiate Institute, a partly tax-supported, coeducational school led by Edinburgh-educated East Texas educator Marcus Montrose. Weakened by the losses of the Civil War, it gave way in 1878 to the Southeast Texas Male and Female College, which earned wide respect and the financial backing of local citizens before closing in 1910. Its properties, including a building erected in 1900, were then deeded to Jasper's public elementary and high schools.

Jasper, TX

In the era of segregated sport, logging contractor Elmer Simmons built the Jasper Steers, an African American baseball team, buying bleachers, lighting, and dressing rooms from a defunct Louisiana club and reassembling them as Steer Stadium east of Jasper in the 1940s. The barnstorming Steers traveled across the United States and Canada, one of many independent Black semi-pro teams whose players insisted they could beat any professional club. In a telling local twist, the stadium hosted the white high school's home games, and Simmons even signed one of its pitchers to his by-then integrated roster before the team played its last game in 1961.

New Braunfels, TX

Johann Carl Ludwig Jauer and Anna Caroline Alemeier married in 1851 and settled on land acquired through an 1847 contract with the German Emigration and Railroad Company's Fisher and Miller Colony. The burial ground was likely begun with the 1853 death of an infant daughter, and a single stone marks the graves of Ludwig, Anna, and their daughter Karoline. A prominent landowner, Ludwig remarried in 1880 and was ultimately buried elsewhere on his Clear Springs land.

San Antonio, TX

Developer Jay E. Adams arrived in San Antonio from Denver in 1888 to invest in real estate, and he set out to develop an upscale district north of the city that he named Laurel Heights. To set the tone for the neighborhood, he built this elaborate three-story Queen Anne house of rusticated limestone and wood, crowned with a rounded corner tower and adorned with stained glass, carved stone, and griffins flanking the entry. A matching brick-and-stone carriage house completed the showpiece.

Springtown, TX

Along an 1860s wagon route locals called Jay Bird Lane, a donation of three acres in 1883 preserved a camp-meeting ground that quickly became the center of rural community life. A frame building served the Union Grove school and hosted the Jay Bird Freewill Baptist Church, while a cemetery grew alongside from 1884 — the school, church, and burial ground bound together for generations of area families.

Jefferson, TX

Built in 1888, the private railway car "Atlanta" carried the Gilded Age financier Jay Gould, whose empire included the Union Pacific, Missouri Pacific, and Texas and Pacific railroads. Fitted with observation rooms, staterooms, baths, a kitchen, and dining room in mahogany and curly maple, it was a rolling mansion. Passed down through the Gould family, it later served as a residence during the 1930s East Texas oil boom before being preserved at Jefferson in 1954.

Ennis, TX

On a Sunday in June 1902, a professional baseball game was shifted from Corsicana to a cramped Ennis field with a fence barely 200 feet from home plate. There Jay Justin Clarke slugged eight home runs and drove in sixteen runs in a single game — minor league records that still stand more than a century later, as his Corsicana team routed its opponent 51-3.

Beaumont, TX

Jean Baptiste 'Jonas' Chaison was born in Nova Scotia to French parents and, after his family's imprisonment during the French and Indian War, fled to France before returning to North America. He joined the American cause in 1775 and, by the marker's account, served through the Revolution — at Brandywine and Germantown, wounded at Eutaw Springs, and present at Yorktown under Lafayette. He later settled as a farmer, moved to Beaumont around 1840, and lived, the marker says, to well past a hundred; the Daughters of the American Revolution marked his grave in 1944.

Galveston, TX

The notorious privateer Jean Lafitte made Galveston Island his base in 1817, sailing under the Mexican flag as he preyed on Spanish shipping in the Gulf. Here he built Maison Rouge, a red house doubling as a fort with an upper story pierced for cannon and furnished lavishly with plunder. Forced out by the United States in 1821, he burned his home, fort, and village and sailed for the Yucatán; the present structure rose in 1870 atop his old cellars and foundations.

Fort Davis, TX

Carved from Presidio County and organized in 1887, this West Texas county was named in honor of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States. The town of Fort Davis, which had served as Presidio County's seat, became the new county's seat. The marker records the administrative birth of a mountainous, sparsely settled corner of the Trans-Pecos.

Fort Davis, TX

Erected in 1910–1911 to replace the county's original 1880 adobe courthouse, this Classical Revival building was designed by the Dallas firm of L. L. Thurman and Co. and built by a Louisville, Kentucky, contractor. A massive Doric portico fronts the concrete-and-stone structure, whose walls show alternating bands of locally quarried pink rusticated stone beneath a Beaux Arts clock tower fitted with a Seth Thomas timepiece. More than a century on, it still serves as the seat of Jeff Davis County government.

Fort Davis, TX

The town of Fort Davis grew up around the U.S. Army post established in 1854 to guard travelers on the San Antonio–El Paso Road, and it served as a county seat for both Presidio and, from 1887, Jeff Davis County. This crenellated, fortress-style jail was built in 1910–1911 alongside a new courthouse, designed by Dallas architect L.L. Thurman and disguised in scored plaster to resemble cut ashlar stone. Divided into an office, kitchen, jailer's quarters, and cell block, it held prisoners until 1978.

Belton, TX

Born into slavery in Kentucky, Jeff Hamilton was a child when Sam Houston reportedly bought him at auction to spare him a cruel master, and he became Houston's personal servant during the governor's final years, standing at his bedside when he died in 1863. In freedom, Hamilton worked as custodian for Baylor Female College, following the school to Belton in 1886. Late in a long life that reached to 1941, he was honored by many groups for his firsthand link to Houston's era.

Belton, TX

Born into slavery in Kentucky and brought to Texas as a child, Jeff Hamilton became the enslaved personal servant and companion in the household of Sam Houston, the revolutionary general and Texas statesman, serving through Houston's governorship and until Houston's death in 1863. Freed by emancipation, Hamilton spent more than fifty years in the Belton area and worked for decades as custodian of Mary Hardin-Baylor College. His remembered life offers a rare, intimate window onto one of Texas's most famous households from the vantage of the man enslaved within it.

Jefferson, TX

Long home to the Caddo Indians, this corner of Texas drew Anglo-American colonists in the early 1800s, and Jefferson was founded in 1839 on a curious double grid — one aligned to the compass, another angled to Big Cypress Bayou. As a bustling inland port on the Red River system it welcomed riverboats daily and served as a major Confederate supply center during the Civil War. A cleared logjam in 1873 lowered the water, killed the port, and sent the town into a long decline that tourism later reversed.

Jefferson, TX

Founded in 1836 and named for Thomas Jefferson, this East Texas town rode the steamboat trade up the Big Cypress Bayou to become the state's chief river port between 1846 and 1870. During the Civil War its wharves and workshops turned to the Confederate cause, running a quartermaster depot that produced boots, shoes, ironwork, and preserved meats for the army. When the river traffic faded, the antebellum mansions remained, and a 1939 oil strike nearby added a new chapter.

Port Lavaca, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1801, Jefferson Beaumont served as chief justice of Calhoun County from 1848 to 1856 during the early years of Texas statehood. It was in his honor that Jefferson County, Texas, took its name. He died in 1865 on the Gulf Coast he had helped govern.

Jefferson, TX

During the Civil War, the prosperous river port of Jefferson became a vital engine of the Confederate war effort in East Texas. A major quartermaster depot established here in 1862 supplied clothing and camp equipment, a Cotton Bureau station bought up the cotton that funded the cause, and county iron works cast plows, kettles, and cannon balls. Cattle and sheep were driven here for slaughter and shipment, and a boot factory helped outfit the army, while troops leaving Texas embarked from the town.

Beaumont, TX

Justice in Jefferson County has been dispensed on this Beaumont site since 1838, when a simple jailhouse rose on land acquired from pioneer settler Nancy Tevis just two years after the county was organized. A succession of buildings followed — an 1854 courthouse that doubled as a church and, during the Civil War, a Confederate hospital, then an 1893 brick structure. The great Spindletop-era oil boom finally outgrew them all, and in 1931 the fourteen-story Art Deco courthouse that stands today replaced them.

Houston, TX

Completed in 1924 and run jointly by the City of Houston and Harris County, this Neoclassical hospital rose atop the 1840 Houston City Cemetery—its basement built above ground because the graves were never removed. At the request of Confederate veterans and their families, it was named for the former Confederate president in honor of the many veterans buried beneath it. Serving indigent patients for just thirteen years, the building later housed a psychiatric ward, a juvenile detention unit, and, since 2005, residential lofts.

San Antonio, TX

In 1871, nine-year-old Jeff Davis Smith and his eleven-year-old brother Clint were seized by Lipan and Comanche raiders while herding sheep near their Kendall County home—a fate that befell many settler children on the Texas frontier. By tradition Jeff was bought by the Apache leader Geronimo and made to live among the tribe until Mexican bandits captured him around 1878 to claim a $1,000 reward for his return. He later married and settled in San Antonio, living until 1940.

Waxahachie, TX

Jefferson Madison Dunaway built this house in 1855 for his bride, Sarah Ann Brack, quarrying stone for the chimneys from nearby creek banks and framing the structure in cypress. The home stayed in the family for generations, sheltering the households of Jefferson Richard "Jeff" Dunaway and Richard Waldo Dunaway.

Jefferson, TX

During the Civil War, Jefferson was a bustling inland port and supply hub in East Texas, and munitions had to be stored somewhere safe. This single-room brick powder house was engineered for exactly that purpose, its deliberately light roof meant to vent the blast upward if the powder inside ever ignited. After the war, Union troops occupied the site and used the buildings for encampment. It survives as the only freestanding ordnance magazine in Texas.

Jefferson, TX

Built about 1860 by stage-line contractor Robert W. Nesmith, this Jefferson building led a remarkable series of lives. In 1869 the Sisters of Charity bought it for their convent, hospital, and school, St. Mary's; in 1875 the Sinai Hebrew Congregation acquired it, added an auditorium, and used it as their synagogue until about 1900. It was later restored by the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club as a playhouse.

Jefferson, TX

Built in 1907 with local funds and a grant from Andrew Carnegie's foundation, this was one of thirty-four Carnegie libraries in Texas — a state where the public-library movement had taken root as early as 1881. It became a cultural center in a town that prized learning. Its survival reflects Jefferson's long-standing civic pride.