Historic Markers in Texas

Lufkin, TX

Commercial radio reached Angelina County in 1938, when the Redland Broadcasting Association won the area's first license and station manager Darrell Yates built and launched KRBA-AM from a Lufkin drugstore. Broadcasting news, drama, music, sermons, and Lufkin Panther football, the station adapted with the times — hiring women during World War II, previewing rock-and-roll, and introducing African American and Spanish-language programming in the 1950s and 1960s. It broadcasts still, a fixture of East Texas life into the 21st century.

La Grange, TX

German stonemason Heinrich Kreische bought nearly 175 acres above the Colorado River in 1849 and built his home, barn, and smokehouse on the high bluff. In the 1860s he turned brewer, crafting "Bluff Beer" in a spring-fed operation with an elaborate cooling tunnel system, and sold it across Central Texas until 1884 — two years after a work accident took his life. The stone complex he left behind remains a landmark of German craft and enterprise.

Kress, TX

Kress Cemetery has served the High Plains community of Kress since 1907, when residents of the nearby town of Wright relocated after a railway was built through the area. Banker F.T. Skipworth deeded the land, and the oldest known grave, that of Mary F. McMillam, dates to 1910. Bankers, ranchers, farmers, and community leaders have been laid to rest here under the care of an association incorporated in 1945.

Georgetown, TX

In 1923, at the height of the Ku Klux Klan's power in Texas, ten Klansmen flogged and tarred a traveling salesman named Robert Burleson near Georgetown. District Attorney Dan Moody — a young Taylor native — prosecuted the attackers in a series of trials at the Williamson County Courthouse, winning a rapid guilty verdict in his first case and four more convictions after it. Widely regarded as the nation's first successful prosecutions of the 1920s Klan, the trials broke the organization's political grip in Texas and launched Moody toward the governorship.

Fredericksburg, TX

Frederick Kuenemann and his family were part of the great wave of German emigration that founded Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill Country in the 1840s, arriving in 1846 after a hard overland journey that cost them a daughter's life. The heart of this house is a fachwerk, or half-timbered, dwelling built around 1847—heavy timbers braced diagonally and filled with fieldstone, a building method carried straight from medieval Europe. Over the following decades the family prospered, turning a settler's cottage into a Victorian home ringed by furniture shops, a lumberyard, and a hardware store. The house's transformation mirrors the immigrant family's own rise.

Boerne, TX

German immigrant William Kuhlmann, a successful Boerne pharmacist and landholder, built this house in the late 1880s. It passed to Selina Long King, whose sons ran the local King & King Lumber Co., and later served the school district and even housed Hill Country artist Harry Anthony DeYoung while he taught in San Antonio. The city of Boerne has owned it since 1951, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1982.

Houston, TX

On May 25, 1953, KUHT-TV Channel 8 went on the air from the University of Houston as the first non-commercial educational television station in the United States. Built on the vision of regents chair Hugh Roy Cullen and station manager John Schwarzwalder, it pioneered televised 'distance education,' broadcasting courses, science and space programming, and local cultural and civic events long before public broadcasting was widespread.

Moody, TX

In 1881 Dr. P. M. Kuykendall bought this McLennan County land, and in 1900 he built a Queen Anne–detailed Victorian home from plans ordered from a St. Louis architect, complete with decorative fish-scale shingling. A prominent physician, he helped found the Moody Masonic Lodge and served on the Jefferson Academy board. He and his wife Ella and their four children made the house their home.

Kyle, TX

Kyle was born in 1880 when the International & Great Northern Railroad pushed its line between Austin and San Antonio, drawing settlers from older nearby communities. Fergus Kyle and the Moore family donated 200 acres, and the first town lots were auctioned beneath a live oak. In a striking chapter, 1940s voters elected an all-woman municipal government led by write-in mayor Mary Kyle Hartson, Fergus Kyle's daughter, whose brother Edwin became a Texas A&M dean and U.S. ambassador to Guatemala.

Kyle, TX

On October 14, 1880, a giant live oak shaded the public auction that founded the town of Kyle along the International & Great Northern Railroad. State representative Fergus Kyle and the Moore family had given the railway 200 acres, free rides brought bidders out to the townsite, and nearly every lot sold that day. The railroad soon set aside four acres around the tree for a short-lived school, and the oak itself has been preserved as the town's founding landmark.

Kyle, TX

Colonel Claiborne Kyle, one of Hays County's first settlers, buried his adopted son here in 1849 — the earliest recorded interment, though local lore claims a man hanged from a live oak on the grounds came first, giving rise to 'the hanging tree.' Kyle is said to have set aside land for a community burial ground, formalized when his son Polk deeded five acres in 1877 and further parcels were added into the next century. Among the pioneers and family members resting here are veterans of the Civil War and every major conflict through Vietnam.

Kyle, TX

When the International and Great Northern Railroad pushed south from Austin toward San Antonio in 1880, the Kyle and Moore families donated 200 acres for a roadbed, depot, and townsite, and a canvas tent quickly gave way to a permanent station. For decades the depot was the beating heart of Kyle — shipping cotton, cattle, and lumber, carrying the mail and Western Union telegrams, and moving nearly everyone who traveled. Its waiting rooms and entrances were segregated in keeping with the Jim Crow laws of the era, and after an 1916 fire the depot was rebuilt on the same site in 1917.

Kyle, TX

Long dismissed as the 'Old Slave Cemetery,' this ground holds the enslaved and freed people of Claiborne Kyle's plantation, where census records counted more than two dozen enslaved men, women and children by 1860. Burials stretched from the 1850s into the 20th century, though most graves were marked only by fieldstones or wooden markers now lost. A few carved headstones survive—Philis Martin, Vinie Kyle, a World War I veteran among them—and community-led restoration since the 1990s has reclaimed the site from obscurity.

Bellville, TX

Built in 1920 for rancher and civic leader Louis A. Machemehl and his family, this Craftsman bungalow was designed by the prominent Houston architect Alfred C. Finn. Its unusual one-and-a-half-story form, with a small second floor rising above the main roofline, is the style sometimes nicknamed an "airplane bungalow." Geometric ornamentation and broad porches mark it as a fine local example of the Craftsman movement.

McKinney, TX

The square nails in its first floor suggest this Queen Anne residence was built before the late 1880s as a one-story home, with second and third floors added soon after 1900. That expansion came when Louis Alfred Scott — a successful McKinney businessman and civic leader — purchased the house. Its octagonal tower, gingerbread trim, and Colonial Revival porch make it a showpiece of turn-of-the-century architecture.

Denison, TX

L. A. Washington, Jr. was a grandnephew of George Washington, whose own father had been raised under the first president's guardianship. A physician, he came to Texas in 1849 carrying family treasures — Washington's inaugural suit and personal letters — while his wife, Martha, hailed from a noted West Virginia family. The marker, recorded in 1968, honors the couple's place in the region's early history.

San Antonio, TX

Luther Bynum Clegg, a North Carolina native who founded the San Antonio Printing Company, commissioned noted architect Harvey Page to design this house in 1901-02. Page, who called it one of his most interesting works, is believed to have remodeled the residence after Roy Bitel bought it in 1925. The home later passed to Josephine Haltom Henning in 1937.

Johnson City, TX

Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., an educator and six-term Texas legislator, and his wife Rebekah, an educator and journalist, bought this modest 1901 frame house in 1913 and raised five children here. From its east porch in 1937, their eldest son Lyndon launched his first campaign for Congress. That race began a political ascent that carried him to the presidency of the United States.

Comanche, TX

The two oldest rooms of this Comanche home were built in 1877 of rubblestone hauled to the site by ox wagon. Texas pioneers L. B. and Alice Beeman Russell bought it in 1886 and added rooms as their family grew, and descendants live here still. L. B. Russell wore many hats — lawyer, judge, mayor, editor, historian, fiddler, and Mason — earning the fond title 'The Grand Old Philosopher of Comanche.'

Dallas, TX

L. Butler Nelson Memorial Park unites two historic African American cemeteries in Dallas, the oldest holding an 1896 grave for Cherry Lawler, an eighty-five-year-old grandmother. Purchased and named Woodland in 1911 and joined by neighboring Hillside a decade later, the grounds fell into neglect until the Rev. L. Butler Nelson and, later, Lillie Belle Dandridge rallied the community to care for them. When Dallas acquired the property in the 1970s, it named the park for Nelson, honoring the business owners, pastors, educators, civil rights activists, and veterans—some reaching back to the Spanish-American War—who rest here.

Austin, TX

Founded in 1909 to serve Austin's growing African American community, L.C. Anderson High School became the heart of segregated East Austin—a place that, despite unequal resources, produced excellence in academics, athletics, and music. After Brown v. Board of Education, the district's "freedom of choice" plan left the school effectively segregated, and by 1971 a federal court's remedy meant closing Anderson and busing its Black students to white schools across the city. The shuttering of Austin's only Black public high school tore out a community's anchor even as it advanced integration.

Harlingen, TX

When Levi and Lenna Snavely bought this Rio Grande Valley land in 1919 it was dense chaparral of mesquite and ebony. Having come to Harlingen from Oklahoma a decade earlier to grow citrus and market their fruit under the "La Bonita" label, the couple commissioned architect Birger A. Elwing to design this picturesque Norman-style, hollow-tile home, completed in 1928 and named for their brand.

Mexia, TX

Mexia merchant and banker Lewis Philip Smith built this house in 1876 with his second wife, Mattie J. Beeson Smith, on a home site that had cost $400 in gold in 1868. Its cedar-shingle roof, cedar-post foundation, twelve-light windows, and square-nail construction reflect the craftsmanship of the era. A Mason, Methodist, and town leader, Smith died young in 1886, and six generations of his family have since lived in the home.

Uvalde, TX

Louis Schwartz, a native of Alsace-Lorraine, immigrated to the United States in 1866 and settled in Uvalde, at first peddling dry goods and medicines from a wagon across the surrounding country. In 1878 he opened a mercantile store near Main and Camp streets, moving it to a new building around 1900. After his death in 1924 his sons carried the business on until it finally closed in 1960 — more than eight decades as a fixture of Uvalde commerce.

Canyon, TX

Buffalo hunter turned cattleman L. T. Lester settled the high plains near Canyon in 1889 and opened its first bank in 1900. In 1904 he built this comfortable home—its fireplace mantels and marble lavatories hauled from Kansas City—which became a hub of political, social, and church gatherings. Active in civic life, Lester helped bring what became West Texas State University to Canyon in 1910.

Brenham, TX

La Bahia Road began as an east-west Indian trail—perhaps older still an animal path—crossing southeastern Texas and Louisiana, and grew into one of the earliest overland routes European explorers used in Texas. La Salle likely walked it in the 1680s, the Spaniard Alonso De León followed in 1689, and over the next century and a half it carried the Gutiérrez-Magee expedition, the "Old 300" colonists of 1821, and troops of the 1836 Revolution, near which Fannin's men were massacred at Goliad. In the twentieth century its path helped guide the surveyors who mapped modern Texas highways.

Navasota, TX

Long before wagon wheels cut its ruts, this was a Native footpath threading southern Texas and Louisiana. In 1690 Alonso de León and the Franciscan Father Massanet marched a small army of men, horses, and pack-flour along it to found the Mission of San Francisco de los Tejas near the Neches—naming the church, and eventually the state, for the 'friendly' Tejas people. By the 1800s the same corridor had become the Opelousas Road, driving Texas cattle to distant markets.

Edna, TX

This home was built in 1888 of cypress and Texas heart pine, fastened with square nails and wooden pegs in the sturdy vernacular manner of the period. It was restored by the L. A. Payne family in 1956 and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1967. The house stands as a well-preserved example of late-nineteenth-century Texas domestic building.

Nacogdoches, TX

La Calle Real del Norte followed an eighteenth-century trail linking the villages of the Nacogdoche and Nasoni peoples in the East Texas woods. Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and settlers traveled it, as did French traders and American adventurers, long before Anglo-American colonists arrived. The old road was a thread of contact and commerce across the contested Spanish-French-American borderland.

La Grange, TX

La Grange's Masonic lodge organized in 1847, with John Murchison as its first worshipful master, and became a fixture of civic life in Fayette County. The Masons laid the cornerstone of the Fayette County Courthouse in 1891, and though the lodge briefly lost its charter to inactivity in the 1880s, it reformed in 1889 under its original number. The present lodge temple was dedicated in 1939, and its rolls have long included local judges and state leaders.

La Feria, TX

La Feria's community cemetery dates to 1917, when Bernt Anderson deeded the land, and its first recorded burials were two small children. A corner plot known as "Babyland" holds the unmarked graves of several children, a quiet testament to the era's high infant mortality. Alongside community leaders lie veterans of the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II, with some families burying several generations here.

Fabens, TX

Established in 1910, La Isla Cemetery served the farming community of Fabens in the lower El Paso valley, where cotton and other irrigated crops were taking hold along the Rio Grande. The cemetery grew alongside the Mexican and Anglo families who worked this borderland during a period of rapid agricultural settlement. It is recognized today as a Historic Texas Cemetery.

Mission, TX

The lands of La Lomita — 'The Little Hill' — trace to a 1767 Spanish grant and were donated for church use in 1861, their farms and ranches supporting the priests and their charities. The original chapel rose in 1865 at a campsite on the Brownsville-Roma trail, was rebuilt over the years, and moved to this site in 1899. The nearby city of Mission took its name from this Rio Grande Valley landmark.

Mission, TX

In 1849 French priests of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate fanned out from Brownsville to minister across the lower Rio Grande Valley, and a Reynosa merchant named Rene Guyard gave them part of his Rancho La Lomita for a mission to serve his ranch hands. The first chapel rose here in 1865, and after Guyard's 1871 death the Oblates inherited the land, farming it to fund further missionary work. Though the farm proved a financial drain and most of it was sold in 1909, the little La Lomita Chapel gave its name to the nearby town of Mission.

Brownsville, TX

Adrian Ortiz left Spain as a teenager and settled in Brownsville before he turned eighteen, taken in by relatives who trained him in the merchant's trade. In 1892 he built this store to house La Madrilena — "native of Madrid" — a mercantile business that anchored the community for more than sixty years. Its vernacular brickwork, corbeling, parapets with pinnacles, and transomed doors still speak to the ambitions of a nineteenth-century immigrant merchant.

La Marque, TX

The settlement that became La Marque grew from an 1838 Republic of Texas land grant along Highland Bayou, then boomed when the Galveston, Houston, and Henderson Railroad linked the two cities in 1860. A post office arrived in 1869, and by 1900 the community had settled on the French-flavored name La Marque, thriving on dairy farming and an interurban electric line to Houston. When the petrochemical industry rose along Galveston Bay in the mid-20th century, La Marque reinvented itself as a bedroom community for industrial workers, incorporating in 1953 after resisting annexation by neighboring Texas City.

Shafter, TX

La Morita was the third ranch that Milton Faver carved out of the Big Bend borderlands of Presidio County in the nineteenth century. A Midwesterner turned Chihuahua Trail merchant and freighter, Faver moved his family to the region by 1857 and built a ranching empire spanning thousands of acres of sheep and goat country. At La Morita, abundant springs fed a system of pools and ditches, and his hands raised adobe dwellings, stone fences, and corrals in the traditional style of the frontier Southwest.

Benavides, TX

This cemetery began in 1894 on land that was once part of Rancho La Mota de Olmos—'the cluster of elms'—settled by Francisco Bazán Villarreal, a native of Nuevo León who received the surrounding land grant in the 1870s. Many of those buried here were born on the ranch itself, and the graves include Bazán and Don Pedro Bazán, a well-known curandero, or folk healer. Still active today, the roughly 250-foot-square ground holds more than a hundred graves.

Linn, TX

Much of what is now Hidalgo and neighboring counties lay within two great Spanish land grants, San Juan de Carricitos and San Salvador del Tule, first awarded in the late 1700s. Through a business loan and later litigation, the Tule lands passed to the Cardenas family, who founded La Noria Cardenena Ranch in 1829, naming it for the fresh-water wells, or norias, of the region. Despite years of raids, the Cardenas and Cavazos families intermarried and built a durable ranching operation, leaving behind an old cemetery, ranch house, and chapel.

McAllen, TX

Older than the city of McAllen that grew up around it, this burial ground likely began as a small ranch cemetery in the 1800s, with its earliest known interment — Gertrudis Cavazos — in 1895. Much of the land came from the Arnold family, with other parcels acquired from the city. Its graves hold veterans of conflicts reaching back to World War I, some who served in foreign armies, amid religious iconography, Masonic emblems and Woodmen of the World markers, tended since 1930 by a dedicated association.

Enochs, TX

La Pista de Vida Agua — the "Trail of Living Water" — threaded across the Llano Estacado by stringing together lakes that had drawn travelers since prehistoric times. Comanchero traders followed it by the late 1700s, and in the 1800s it carried the Fort Sumner Wagon Road and a mail route that ultimately linked toward the Santa Fe Trail. Today the once-reliable lakes hold only spring seepage, but the route remains etched into the land.

La Porte, TX

A group of Colorado land developers formed the La Porte Land and Town Company in 1890, bought over a thousand acres, and began selling lots to settlers lured from New York and the Midwest. A railroad reached the Sylvan Beach Resort in 1899, and the beach joined agriculture as the town's economic mainstay. Storms in 1900 and 1915, a nearby oil strike in 1916, and post–World War II industrialization steadily reshaped La Porte from a farming and resort town into part of the greater Houston industrial coast.

Dallas, TX

This Church of Christ congregation began meeting in members' homes at the close of the 19th century and in 1907 bought property near what became Fair Park, worshipping in a white frame building for decades as street names—and its own name—changed around it. It helped found a sister congregation in Oak Cliff in 1949, relocated to Bruton Road in 1954, and followed its members to northeast Dallas, dedicating a new building on La Prada Drive in 1979. It preserves the Restoration Movement traditions of elder-led governance and a cappella singing.

Helotes, TX

This stone villa was the home of Miguel Menchaca, a descendant of the Canary Islanders who came to San Antonio in 1731 as some of Texas's earliest civil settlers. Built in the 1850s, its thick rock walls held gun-slits for observation and defense, and a spring beneath the house supplied water during times of siege on the frontier.

Rockdale, TX

After coal was discovered near Rockdale and the railroad arrived, mining opened the district to labor by the 1890s, and many of the workers came north from Mexico during years of revolution. Settling on land north of the tracks, these families named their community La Recluta — "recruitment" — sharecropping to feed themselves while the men worked the mines, often paid in tokens good only at the company commissary. Their story holds both hardship, including a 1913 cave-in that trapped miners for six days, and hope, embodied in La Escuelita, the little schoolhouse where children of Spanish-speaking homes were taught in English.

Dallas, TX

On this ground in 1854, European idealists founded La Reunion, a colony inspired by utopian social theory that drew French, Belgian, and Swiss settlers to the Texas prairie near the young town of Dallas. Though the ambitious experiment in communal living soon faltered, many colonists stayed on, enriching the region with their skills and culture. The Daughters of the American Revolution placed this marker in 1924 to remember them.

Dallas, TX

In the late 1850s a company recruited French, Belgian, and Swiss colonists to found La Reunion, an experiment in European settlement on the Texas prairie near the young town of Dallas. The venture failed within a few years, but a number of families—Loupots, Remonds, Reverchons, Santerres, and others—chose to stay, becoming business, agricultural, and cultural leaders in the growing city. This cemetery, holding early colonists like an aged French grenadier and a colony director's young child, remained in family use into the 1930s.

Cotulla, TX

Travelers had crossed this land on the old Presidio Rio Grande Road for centuries before the U.S. Army built and garrisoned Fort Ewell here in 1852 for protection. The first permanent settler, William A. Waugh, opened a rancho at the Cibolo Crossing in 1856, and in 1858 the county was created and named for the French explorer La Salle. County government organized in 1880, and Cotulla became the county seat in 1883.

Bryan, TX

When it was completed in 1928, the seven-story La Salle was the tallest building in downtown Bryan, a Classical-detailed landmark rising across Main Street from the depot on the Houston and Texas Central line. Built for businessman Robert Wistar Howell, it offered a dining room, coffee shop, ballroom, and roughly a hundred guest rooms to travelers, politicians, and military visitors to Bryan and nearby College Station. It slipped into use as a nursing home and then stood closed for two decades before a rehabilitation returned it to service as a hotel in 2000.

San Marcos, TX

In the early 1900s San Marcos's Mexican American community organized to improve its working and living conditions, and in 1912 more than a thousand people rallied in nearby Uhland toward that end. From this ferment grew mutual aid societies, including La Sociedad Mutualista Cuauhtémoc, whose modern form took shape from 1918 and expanded in the 1940s to represent the community. Named for the last Aztec emperor, it bought land in 1944 that became El Parque Cuauhtémoc, a gathering place for dances, fiestas, weddings, and political meetings later enclosed as Cuauhtémoc Hall. Through scholarships, aid, and celebration, the society remains a unifying force in San Marcos.

Pharr, TX

Organized in 1913 after a group of Spanish-speaking residents sought their own place of worship, this was the first congregation to minister to Pharr's Spanish-speaking Protestants and the second-oldest church in the city. Its early names—"The Mexican Methodist Church" and later "North Pharr Latin American Methodist Church"—trace shifting language about the Mexican-American community it served before it became La Trinidad in 1970. New sanctuaries in 1959 and 1995 marked its steady growth.

La Vernia, TX

Founded about 1846–47 by Claiborne Rector, who built a stage stop and blacksmith shop to serve travelers on the Chihuahua Road, this Wilson County settlement grew up along one of early Texas's major trails—still traced by Main Street today. First called 'Post Oak,' it was renamed for the green oaks of the area when mail service began in 1856. Settled largely by Southerners seeking fertile land, it became a Civil War recruiting and officer-training center.

La Vernia, TX

The roots of this congregation reach to 1853, when circuit rider J. S. McGee held services at nearby Bethesda. La Vernia Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was organized in 1876, meeting by tradition in the Masonic Hall until a church was built in 1881; a storm destroyed it five years later, and the present sanctuary rose in 1887. In 1970 the older Post Oak Methodist congregation merged into La Vernia.

Hillsboro, TX

Dr. John S. Scofield gave the Indian name "Lackawanna" to the 2,500-acre tract he bought here in 1858 after moving from Kentucky, serving Hill County as a doctor and county judge. He introduced shorthorn cattle to the area, and his son Frank raised prize-winning shorthorns on the inherited ranch. After the first house burned, the present structure was built in 1917, and the ranch was sold in 1945.

Ladonia, TX

Settled around 1840 and first called McCownville after early resident Frank McCown, this Fannin County community was platted with unusually wide streets by carpenter-merchant James H. Cole. Local legend says the name changed in 1857 to honor Ladonna Millsay, a singer traveling by wagon train from Tennessee, and by 1858 a post office made "Ladonia" official. The arrival of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway in 1887 turned it into a booming cotton-marketing town of 2,000 before it slowly declined in the 20th century.

Ladonia, TX

The chief burial ground of Ladonia grew from two sections—an I.O.O.F. (Odd Fellows) cemetery and a Presbyterian one—before their management merged around 1902. Among its earliest graves are an infant from 1866, the "Stranger's Tomb" of an unknown traveler who died in 1867, and Baptist pastor and Civil War veteran William Lovelace Foster. Over generations it gathered in Fannin County officials, early settlers, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Ladonia, TX

A Presbyterian congregation first organized in Ladonia in the mid-nineteenth century, and between 1910 and 1912 it raised this handsome brick sanctuary, awarding the $6,400 contract to builder W.H. Markley of Commerce. The design is an unusual example of Mission Revival style adapted to a church, prized for its fine detailing and simple, well-proportioned form. Though the congregation dissolved by 1976, the building endured, and its defining central parapet was rebuilt in 1997.

Gilmer, TX

The Lafayette community grew here in the 1850s, named by early settler Matthew F. Locke for his son Lafayette. In 1858 Locke deeded three acres to the Philadelphia Baptist Church for a burial ground that already held two family graves; the oldest documented is that of his brother-in-law T. E. Montgomery, who died in 1855. Though the community faded in the 1920s, the cemetery endures as a marker of the area's pioneer beginnings.

Galveston, TX

In 1817 the privateer Jean Lafitte established a fort and settlement on Galveston Island, using it as a base to prey on Gulf shipping. Here in February 1821 his men clashed with the Karankawa people in the Battle of the Three Trees. Ordered to leave by the United States government, Lafitte abandoned and burned the post later that year.

Lagarto, TX

Lagarto Cemetery traces its origin to the early 1870s, when an unknown traveler died at the home of storekeepers Samuel and Mary Beall and was buried on their land; in 1876 they formally deeded two acres for a community cemetery. Among those laid to rest here are Texas Ranger Charles Fusselman, killed in Presidio County in 1890, and John Pollan, a veteran of the Texas war for independence. Though the ranching town of Lagarto declined after the railroad bypassed it in 1887, descendants of its pioneers have kept the cemetery in use ever since.