Historic Markers in Texas

Kerens, TX

Kerens sprang up in 1881 when the Texas & St. Louis narrow-gauge railway surveyed a townsite here and named it for a St. Louis railroad official who apparently never laid eyes on the place. Streets bore the names of railroad men, isolated cotton farmers streamed in from the prairie, and nearby Wadeville simply picked up and moved — homes, businesses, and all. Cotton gins, a bank, and a cottonseed-oil mill made Kerens a thriving cotton town until a 1931 highway and the crop's decline reshaped its fortunes.

Kerens, TX

This congregation began in 1869 in the home of Noble Wade in the community of Wadeville, where a Cumberland Presbyterian church was organized and its first building doubled as a school and a Masonic lodge hall. When the railroad created Kerens in 1881, the congregation followed, completing a new church in 1883 that it shared for years with Baptists and Methodists. Four of its members went on to full-time Christian ministry.

Kermit, TX

Kermit rose on the far West Texas plains as the seat of Winkler County, organized in 1910 in ranch country near the New Mexico line. The town carries an unusual namesake: Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had visited a nearby ranch. What began as a ranching center was transformed by the discovery of oil and gas, making Winkler one of the state's leading energy-producing counties.

Kermit, TX

Built in 1910 by the county clerk — the very year Winkler County was organized — this modest dwelling is recognized as the oldest home in Kermit. It later passed to the Mosley and Baird families and stands as a survivor from the town's earliest days.

Kerrville, TX

Carved from sprawling Bexar County and organized in the spring of 1856, Kerr County took its name from James Kerr (1790–1850), a pivotal figure in early Anglo-Texas settlement. Kerr was the first American settler on the Guadalupe River, general manager of DeWitt's Colony, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and a congressman of the young republic. The county seat bounced between Kerrsville, Comfort, and finally Kerrville as the region took shape.

Gonzales, TX

In the 1820s, Mexico opened Texas to Anglo-American colonists through empresarios like Green DeWitt, who was granted land to plant a colony. James Kerr, a former Missouri state senator, was commissioned to lay out its capital and settled with six other men along this stream, which has carried his name ever since. A destructive Indian raid in 1826 forced the fledgling settlement to be abandoned.

Lufkin, TX

Regarded as the oldest continuously operating business in Angelina County, Kerr's began in 1870 as a general store in the early county seat of Homer, opened by Civil War veteran Capt. Joseph Kerr, a South Carolina native. When the railroad founded nearby Lufkin, Kerr moved his store there in the 1880s, and his sons carried on the firm. Over its long life the business evolved from general store to tin shop to steel fabricator.

Kerrville, TX

Formally created in 1856 and named for Republic of Texas soldier James Kerr, Kerr County drew its first settlers — among them San Jacinto veteran Joshua D. Brown, who donated land for the public square and helped name the seat Kerrsville (the "s" later dropped). Anglo-American pioneers and German immigrants built the town into an important cattle-raising and shipping point by the 1870s. Incorporated in 1889 with Joseph A. Tivy as its first mayor, Kerrville soon added waterworks, electricity, and a fire department, growing into a hub of ranching, medicine, and tourism.

Kerrville, TX

The Kerrville Daily Times traces its lineage to the Center Point News, founded in 1910 and moved to Kerrville in 1925 by James J. Starkey, son of Kerr County pioneers. Starkey renamed it more than once—settling on The Kerrville Times—while writing a "Pioneer History" column until his death. His nephew G. Rankin Starkey and co-publisher Sam Braswell converted it to a daily in 1949, and over the decades it absorbed rival papers to become the Hill Country's only daily. It remains one of the oldest continuously operating businesses in the county.

Kerrville, TX

Chartered in December 1890 by Masons who had belonged to a lodge in nearby Center Point, Kerrville Lodge No. 697 began with 21 members and Ed Smallwood as its first Worshipful Master. For decades it met in a two-story stone building erected by Kerrville pioneer Charles Schreiner. The lodge moved into new quarters in 1927 and again into a purpose-built home dedicated in 1974.

Kerrville, TX

The Kerrville Mountain Sun traces its lineage to an 1870s frontier paper called The Frontiersman, which passed through several names before J. E. Grinstead—an adventurer, writer, and early photographer—gave it its enduring title after buying the paper in 1898. Grinstead sold the paper in 1917, and by 1919 it came under the full ownership of brothers W. A. and Clarence Salter. The Salter family continued to run the paper across later generations.

Kerrville, TX

In 1896, A. C. Schriner and D. H. Comparette sealed a deal with a handshake and $1,000 to start Kerrville's telephone exchange, first linking two wool warehouses before other businesses clamored to join. Within two years lines stretched to Rocksprings, Harper, Junction, and Medina, with remote ranches serving as toll stations well into the 1950s. Incorporated in 1907, the family-run company operated for more than a century.

Bastrop, TX

William Kesselus, a German immigrant, arrived in Bastrop in 1853 and set up as a tailor. In 1891 this building replaced his earlier frame shop, and his son Will carried on the business until 1919. It later held a succession of mercantile stores and stands as a marker of German influence in Bastrop.

Lampasas, TX

Built in 1870 of native rock hauled to the site by oxen, the Keystone Hotel served as a stagecoach inn on the routes crossing early Central Texas, its windows crowned by the keystone arches that gave it its name. Kept by J. L. N. Gracy, it stood amid the ordinary infrastructure of frontier travel — a wagon yard, a bell tower, quarters for employees, and, poignantly, the grave of a boy killed in an Indian raid. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Fort Worth, TX

A Tennessee-born major in the 7th Texas Infantry, Khleber Miller Van Zandt came to Fort Worth in 1865 and threw himself into building the frontier town. As merchant, banker, and rancher he helped make the city a rail hub and had a hand in founding its newspaper, public schools, streetcars, and First Christian Church. He served in the state legislature and the 1875 Constitutional Convention, and late in life led the United Confederate Veterans nationally.

La Vernia, TX

In the 1860s a cluster of farming families settled this stretch of Wilson County, and by 1872 John James had donated land for a schoolhouse that also hosted church services. The Easterling post office opened in 1887 and was soon renamed Kicaster for a nearby creek, but it closed in 1906, the school was phased out by 1940, and the churches drifted away. Today only Kicaster Cemetery, in use since the 1870s, marks where the community once stood.

Sherman, TX

Founded in 1875 as North Texas Female College, a Methodist finishing school for young women, this Sherman institution was rechartered in 1919 as a junior college and music conservatory. It took its later name from Lucy Ann Kidd-Key, the celebrated educator who led the school from 1888 to 1916 and built its reputation in music, literature, and the fine arts. Through its faculty and students, the college shaped culture well beyond North Texas.

Fredericksburg, TX

German-born blacksmith Frederick Kiehne built this house in 1850, and it stood out immediately: the first two-story home in Fredericksburg, where even prosperous neighbors made do with sleeping lofts. He raised it from hand-cut limestone, adobe brick, and native timber—the improvised toolkit of frontier builders. A county commissioner as well as a smith, Kiehne left a home enlarged by later owners and restored in the 1970s.

Dublin vicinity, TX

In 1873 several families settled the Green's Creek community, among them John M. Kiker, who arrived from Alabama with his wife Serena and their eight children. In 1878 Kiker and his brother-in-law John Holcomb built a steam-powered cotton gin, fueled at first by timber cleared from cotton fields and taken as credit against ginning bills, and later by coal and then oil. The gin was the community's main enterprise and doubled as an election precinct and meeting place, running until 1947.

Bay City, TX

Prominent ranchers and merchants Edward John and Ann Elizabeth Kilbride built this classical revival house in Bay City in 1910–11, a fine example of the large residences rising in early 20th-century Texas towns. Its elaborate rear porch reflected the home's nearness to the bay. Their daughter Margaret Kilbride Barkley inherited it in 1939, and the house—long a setting for the family's social gatherings—remained with the Barkleys until 1992.

Cass County, TX

As the Kildare area was settled, the Moor family — local plantation owners — donated the land that became this cemetery, with its earliest dated burial that of Risdon Moor in 1868. A later gift of ground in 1937 and an association formed in 1982 expanded and maintained the site. Since 1980 a Kildare Memorial Day ceremony has honored the veterans buried in this plantation-and-timber corner of Cass County.

Kilgore, TX

Kilgore began in 1872 as a railroad town named for a Confederate colonel turned congressman, but its destiny arrived with the East Texas oil boom, which planted it at the center of one of the richest fields on earth. At its peak the town bristled with a famous forest of steel derricks and became a hub of petroleum production and supply. It also nurtured surprising cultural fame, as home to Kilgore College, its celebrated Rangerettes drill team, and the young concert pianist Van Cliburn.

Kilgore, TX

In 1935, with the East Texas oil field booming even as the Great Depression gripped the nation, Kilgore residents voted to found a junior college. Classes met in the high school until this building was finished in 1936 with help from the federal Public Works Administration. Designed by the San Antonio firm of Phelps and Dewees, the administration building is a fine example of the streamlined Art Moderne style of its day.

Kilgore, TX

African American education in Kilgore reached back to 1873 and its Baptist church, but in 1935 the school district built a substantial brick campus here for Black students under segregation. For nearly twenty-five years principal C. B. Dansby grew it from six grades to twelve, and the school was renamed in his honor after he died during a graduation ceremony. Dansby High served the community until Kilgore's schools finally desegregated in 1970.

Kilgore, TX

Public schooling in Kilgore began with classes in private homes and institutions, most notably the Alexander Institute, which moved to town in 1873 before later relocating and eventually becoming Lon Morris College. The Kilgore Independent School District formed in 1906 and built a two-story red brick school on this Longview Street site in 1913. After oil transformed the town around 1930, the swelling student population outgrew that building, which was replaced in 1933 by a new combined high school, junior high, and auditorium.

Kilgore, TX

When oil gushed in East Texas in the early 1930s, Kilgore transformed almost overnight from a sleepy town into a forest of drilling derricks and sudden fortunes—even as the rest of the nation sank into the Great Depression. Flush with that prosperity, the Kilgore National Bank's directors commissioned this handsome Art Moderne building in 1937, designed by Henderson architect James L. Downing. Its sleek, streamlined lines were a confident statement of boomtown wealth in hard times.

Kilgore, TX

Kilgore's first public library opened in 1933, launched by two local women's clubs. Federal Depression-era programs made the permanent building possible — funded by the Public Works Administration and built with Works Progress Administration labor, it was completed in 1939 in a style modeled on the cottages of Normandy. It still serves the community it was built for.

Killeen, TX

W.E. Bennett rolled out the first Killeen Herald in June 1890, just eight years after the Central Texas town itself was founded. Under later owners — notably civic leader W.T. Carter, who edited it from 1907 to 1950 — the weekly grew into a daily by 1953 and became the oldest continuously operated business in Killeen. Its columns chronicled the town's growth from a small railroad stop into a city.

Junction, TX

This hill country along the Llano was home to Jumano and Apache peoples when Spanish explorers passed through in the 1600s and 1700s, before the Comanche came to dominate the region by the mid-1800s. Frontier forts and the Texas Rangers guarded the area as Anglo settlement pushed westward, and the county was organized in 1876, named for an Alamo defender. Long troubled by outlaws until the Rangers restored order in the 1880s, it settled into a livelihood of sheep and goat ranching for wool and mohair.

Junction, TX

This is the third courthouse to serve Kimble County, designed by San Antonio architect Henry Truman Phelps, who created courthouses for more than ten Texas counties in the early 20th century. Though based on Classical plans, the building marks a shift in his style toward the Art Moderne of the late 1920s, seen in its geometric ornament, cast-stone pilasters, and stepped parapet. It stands as the civic centerpiece of a Hill Country county seat.

Junction, TX

Built in 1892 as Kimble County's third jail, this two-foot-thick hewn-stone building earned a reputation for being 'as secure as Huntsville State Prison.' Among its many prisoners was Gip Hardin, held here in 1896—brother of the notorious Texas gunman John Wesley Hardin. The fortress-like structure was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Junction, TX

In 1877 the Denman brothers—Claud, Lon, and Sel—started Kimble County's first sawmill on the South Llano River, powered by a mill dam that Claud, a stonemason, built himself. The green "rawhide" lumber they cut had to be nailed before it warped and hardened; a house still standing on East Main was framed from it. Their enterprise brought milled wood to a remote stretch of the Texas Hill Country frontier.

Manor, TX

The community of Kimbro, named for landowner Lemuel Kimbro, was settled in the late 1870s by Swedish, Danish, and German immigrants who worked the cotton fields of eastern Travis County. At its height it had homes, farms, the Swedish Evangelical Free Church, a school, a cotton gin, and two stores. The school closed in 1947 and the church was moved away in 1954, leaving little but the graves of its founders.

Taylor, TX

This modest family plot holds the graves of a pioneer Williamson County family, named for Daniel Kimbro, buried here in 1882. Kimbro had come to the Republic of Texas in 1836 — the very year independence was declared — settling first at San Augustine, then Bastrop where he crafted looms, spinning wheels, and wagons, before camping in a tent on Brushy Creek in 1846. A signer of the petition to create the county, he helped build the community whose descendants rest around him. Mid-twentieth-century farming damaged or plowed under many of the old stones.

Kosse, TX

Limestone County's rich kaolin clay, found in the Wilcox formation, made it a center of 19th-century Texas pottery. Most kilns were of the "groundhog" type—a brick- or rock-lined underground passage drawing heat from a firebox to bake ware within. German immigrant Lee Kimik built one such kiln active in the 1870s and 1880s, notable for its deeper sidewalls and for the rare practice of marking his pottery, which he sold directly to nearby Headsville. Archeologists documented the site in 1984.

Uvalde, TX

Raised in 1927 in memory of cattleman and civic leader William Davis "Billy" Kincaid, this four-story hotel became the crossroads of Uvalde's ranching economy, its lobby a standing meeting place for ranchers and cattle traders. Over the decades it hosted Texas governors, congressional leaders, and celebrities, including President Lyndon Johnson — a Uvalde-country figure — and future president Ronald Reagan.

Batesville, TX

William Davis Kincaid learned the cattle trade in West Texas before bringing his family in 1905 to land he bought southeast of Uvalde, building one of the region's notable ranches and serving as a bank and school-board president before his death in 1914. In his honor his family raised the Kincaid Hotel in Uvalde in 1927, which became the business and social hub where ranchers from across the region made "The Kincaid" their headquarters.

Austin, TX

Thomas Kincheon, a former slave from Mississippi, founded this rural community shortly after emancipation in 1865—one of many freedmen's settlements Black Texans built on marginal land where they could live and worship free of outside interference. Kincheonville's life centered on Zion Rest Baptist Church, founded in 1903 as both congregation and school, and tradition holds that Anglos and Hispanics lived here alongside African Americans. Austin's 1928 master plan and the Great Depression drained the community, and its land was sold for suburban development in 1952, though street names still honor the Kincheon family.

King, TX

This congregation began in 1875 when Baptists gathered to worship in the Stringtown log schoolhouse and baptized converts in Cowhouse Creek. A land gift from Monroe and Mary Puett in 1880 gave the church a home, and a new sanctuary rose in 1901 through volunteer labor; the congregation took the name King Baptist Church in the 1930s. Rebuilt again in 1974, it has served this corner of Coryell County for well over a century.

Gatesville, TX

This burial ground was already in use before it was formally deeded in 1880 to the Stringtown Baptist Church for church and school purposes, with a number of graves dating to 1873 and unmarked burials likely older still. For generations, residents of the King community gave their time and money to tend the site, and a cemetery association organized in 1960 to sustain the effort. Today descendants support a trust fund to preserve it.

Gonzales, TX

Perched on a hill above King Flats on the Guadalupe River, this burial ground has served the area since the 1830s, when John Gladden King—a member of the DeWitt Colony's governing council—and his wife Parmelia settled the land in 1830. The oldest marked grave belongs to two-day-old William G. Hall, who died in 1838, and seven generations of the King family rest here. Among the graves lie Texas Rangers and veterans of conflicts spanning the War of 1812 through the Korean War.

Guthrie, TX

Carved from the sprawling old Bexar County in 1876, King County was named for William King, who died at the Alamo. Ranching defined it from the start, and its famous cattle brands—the "6666," "Pitchfork," "SMS," and "Matador"—still signal that heritage. With just 173 people in 1890, formal organization in 1891 leaned on petitions padded with the names of itinerants and even favorite horses, and cowboys outvoted the ranchers to make Guthrie the county seat.

Guthrie, TX

Sparsely settled King County in the West Texas ranch country lost two courthouses in a row—one to a 1905 tornado, the next to an 1914 fire—before hiring Fort Worth architect Ernest E. Churchill to design a sturdier one that same year. His two-story concrete building, blending Classical Revival with Prairie-style lines, served as the seat of justice until 1982, when it became the county library. It still stands as a monument to the civic hopes of a thinly populated frontier county.

Seguin, TX

This burial ground holds one of Seguin's founding families, the Kings, who came from Tennessee during the days of the Republic of Texas. Brothers John, Henry, and William George King helped establish the town, and William—a Texas Ranger and veteran of the Mexican War—was one of several Rangers laid to rest here. The first burial, in 1852, was a six-month-old child, and generations of the family followed.

Uvalde, TX

King Fisher rose from teenage ranch hand to the undisputed power over a vast stretch of Southwest Texas known as "King Fisher's Territory," centered on Eagle Pass. Hired to guard herds from cross-border raiders, he imposed a rough order — his henchmen rustled cattle and terrorized some settlers while protecting others — and a roadside sign reputedly warned travelers to "take the other" road. Indicted many times but never convicted, he reformed after a Texas Ranger arrest in 1876 and was serving as acting Uvalde County sheriff when he and gunman Ben Thompson were killed from ambush in a San Antonio theater in 1884.

Whitney, TX

This Methodist congregation held its first meeting in 1875 in the Pecan Grove community, gathered by a circuit-riding preacher, the Rev. I. M. Reeve. When the railroad town of Whitney was founded in 1879, the fellowship built a sanctuary and became the Whitney Methodist Church, later renamed King Memorial in 1901 to honor pioneer and church member Capt. Newton J. King. Across the generations it has been a source of leadership and service to the town.

McCamey, TX

Rising 3,000 feet as part of an uplift in the southern Permian Basin, King Mountain likely took its name from rancher Guy King, who drilled the first water well on its summit around 1900. The heights and their Rim Rock are tied to the oil fields that later defined Upton County, and many Indian relics have been found along the escarpment — traces of far older human presence.

Kingsville, TX

Founded in 1853 by Capt. Richard King, the King Ranch became a vital way-station on the wartime "cotton road" — the Confederacy's lifeline to the outside world. As the Union blockade choked Southern ports, wagons hauled cotton across South Texas to King's operation, then on to Matamoros, Mexico, where it was traded for guns, medicine, and coffee. The ranch fed and sheltered teamsters and Confederate troops alike, and drew both bandits and Federal raiders determined to cut the trade.

Kingsville, TX

Many of Kingsville's early Black residents came as railroad workers, and their first worship gatherings reportedly met under a mesquite tree where missionary William Green preached. In 1908 trustees of the Mount Zion Baptist Association bought land, and on Easter Sunday 1910 nine charter members formed King Star Missionary Baptist Church, the town's first African American congregation. Its building also housed Kingsville's first classes for Black children, and by the 1950s the church joined a program in which Black and white congregations exchanged members monthly to build understanding.

San Antonio, TX

The King William neighborhood grew on farmlands once tilled by Mission San Antonio de Valero — the Alamo — that were distributed to residents after the Spanish government secularized the mission in 1793. Subdivided in the mid-1800s, the area drew many German immigrants fleeing political and economic turmoil, and it took its name around 1866 when Ernst and Emma Altgelt honored Wilhelm I of Prussia. Later arrivals, including Mexican families displaced by the 1910 Revolution, added to a neighborhood now prized for the richest, most intact collection of historic architecture in San Antonio.

Stockdale, TX

This home was built in 1898 for Robert and Rachel Emma Smith, Rachel being the daughter of John R. King, an early Texas military and political leader whose descendants have held the house almost continuously since. Among later residents was Wade Lorenz, a former Texas Ranger turned Stockdale businessman and rancher. A variation on the traditional I-house plan, it is dressed with decorative woodwork on its porches.

Austin, TX

In October 1901, William M. Tears opened a funeral home on East 6th Street to serve African Americans in Austin, a business his son took over in 1923. A second Black-owned firm, King and Company, opened nearby in 1933. In 1955 these two East Austin institutions merged into the King-Tears Funeral Home, which has continued at this site with expanded services and community charitable work.

Austin, TX

In 1916 the heirs of Texas Governor Elisha Pease formed a company to subdivide his estate into what became Austin's Enfield neighborhood. In 1922 Belmont "Belle" Graham, a Pease cousin, and her husband Florian Bibb King built this house, which the Von Rosenberg family later owned from 1928 until 1988. Blending Prairie School and Renaissance Revival details — a porte cochere, composite columns, and a wide hipped roof — the home reflects the tastes of Austin's early-20th-century residential expansion.

Kosse, TX

Bardin and Elizabeth Susan King married in Alabama in 1842 and spent decades pushing west by wagon—through Louisiana, then across several Texas counties—before settling on 189 acres in Limestone County in 1870 to raise cotton and grain. Deeply woven into the Headsville community, Bardin preached as a Baptist lay minister and joined the Grange and Masons. When Susan died in 1879 she was buried on the farm, and in 1881 Bardin set aside an acre as a family graveyard; family tradition holds that an African American freedman named Speight also rests here in an unmarked grave.

Temple, TX

In 1893 the Temple chapter of the King's Daughters and Sons, a Protestant charitable order made up largely of educated women, set out to provide care for the town's poor. They rented rooms in a small house and opened King's Daughters Hospital in 1896, appointing staff physicians and a superintendent, Cornelia Parsons. Considered ahead of its time, the institution grew into a lasting provider of affordable medical care.

Temple, TX

Nurse training began at Temple's King's Daughters Hospital as early as 1897, and formal classes started in 1903; by 1906 the hospital chartered an official nurses' school, extending its program to three years. Under leaders like director Mary Julia Putts, the school endured even the lean Depression years before a shortage of enrollees forced it to close in 1948. Its alumnae organized in 1921 and served in both world wars.

Lincoln, TX

This marker commemorates the King's Highway, or Camino Real, the Spanish colonial road system that once linked the missions and settlements of Texas and stretched toward Mexico and Louisiana. Placed in 1918 by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas, it was part of an early-20th-century effort to trace and memorialize the historic route. The road carried soldiers, missionaries, traders, and settlers for well over a century.

Giddings, TX

This marker commemorates the King's Highway, or El Camino Real de los Tejas—the Spanish royal road later known as the Old San Antonio Road—that linked colonial mission and settlement across Texas. The Daughters of the American Revolution, working with the State of Texas, marked its course with a series of granite monuments in 1918. The historic route was among the earliest overland thoroughfares connecting the region's far-flung communities.

San Antonio, TX

Placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas in 1918, this marker honors the King's Highway — El Camino Real de los Tejas — the historic network of routes that Spanish soldiers, missionaries and later settlers followed to link the East Texas missions with San Antonio and points south. For two centuries it was the principal artery of overland travel across the region.

Nacogdoches, TX

This marker commemorates the historic overland route known variously as the King's Highway, El Camino Real, and the Old San Antonio Road — a corridor rooted in the Spanish colonial era that linked missions, settlements, and the wider Southwest across what became Texas. It was placed in 1918 by the Daughters of the American Revolution together with the State of Texas as part of a broad effort to mark the road's course.