HistoricSiteMarkers

Historic Markers in Texas

15,117 markers in the database — showing 7,621–7,680.

Lange's Mill

Doss, TX

Established in 1849 by the Doss brothers, Lange's Mill was run by William F. Lange and then Julius Lange through the 1870s and 1880s, and its flour and meal earned a reputation across the region. As one of the last old burr mills in Texas and among the best preserved, it survives as a window into frontier-era milling. Ancient pictographs on a nearby cliff hint at far older use of the land.

Langston School

Del Rio, TX

San Felipe ISD opened this two-room schoolhouse for African American students in the 1930s and ran it again from 1945 to 1956, naming it for Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes. A single teacher taught as many as thirty children across grades one through eight, while those seeking high school had to travel to Del Rio or as far as San Antonio or Houston. As the district integrated, Langston School closed in 1957.

Langtry

Langtry, TX

Langtry sprang up in 1882 as a water stop for the Southern Pacific's steam locomotives, built on land deeded by the Torres family and named most likely for a railroad crew boss. It gained lasting fame through saloonkeeper Roy Bean, the self-styled "Law West of the Pecos," who so admired British actress Lillie Langtry that legend tied her name to the town she eventually visited. Ranchers, a rock-crushing plant, and even tuberculosis patients seeking dry air passed through before a 1920s rail rerouting left it a quiet tourist stop.

Langtry School

Langtry, TX

The first Langtry school stood on this site before 1900, and a 1911 building carried a bell that called children to class and neighbors to Sunday school. In this remote corner of west Texas the academic year often ran six months or less, covering reading, writing, civics, and arithmetic. The present schoolhouse, built in 1934 for ten grades, later absorbed Pumpville's students, closed in 1972, and now serves as a community center named for longtime teacher Vashti Skiles.

Lanham Mill Community

Glen Rose, TX

After coming to Texas from Tennessee around 1870, William and Mary Lanham settled where the Paluxy River meets White Bluff Creek and helped petition the state to carve out Somervell County. By 1877 Lanham ran a grist mill on the Paluxy, adding a cotton gin a few years later, and a rural community of farms, churches, a school, and a cemetery grew up around the works until fire destroyed the operation in 1898. The settlement slowly faded, and today only the Lanham Mill Cemetery marks where it stood.

Lanius House

Fort Worth, TX

Clarence Lanius, a Bonham-born cattleman with ranches scattered across Texas, moved with his wife Myrtle into this fashionable Fort Worth home in the early 1920s. The house is a fine example of the Bungalow style then in vogue, with broad flared eaves, a wide porch, and a porte-cochere sheltering the drive. It stood in what was then the city's finest residential district as Fort Worth boomed on cattle wealth.

Lankford-Stinson House

Winnsboro, TX

This Winnsboro home was probably built in the early 1890s for merchant and civic leader J. M. Lankford, then remodeled in 1906 after Civil War veteran J. A. Stinson bought it. Stinson was father-in-law to Texas Governor James S. Hogg, and the house—kept in his family until 1956—shows Colonial Revival touches in its stately columns and front portico. It stands as a well-preserved example of small-town Texas domestic architecture from the Gilded Age.

Lantex Theater

Llano, TX

The Lantex Theater opened on May 19, 1927, on the north side of Llano's courthouse square, where a packed house paid thirty cents for adults and a dime for children to watch a Universal Pictures feature. Beyond movies, it hosted school concerts, the Llano Opry, WWII bond drives, public meetings, and town celebrations. After a 1951 fire left only the facade standing, owner Rex Wooten rebuilt it with modern amenities, and it has remained a thriving business and gathering place ever since.

Lappe House

Mason, TX

Near the busy Fort Mason crossing of the Colorado River stands the home of Maurice Lappe, a Swiss immigrant who came to Texas in 1884. His house served as a seat of local court, and his property was among the first in Llano County to boast wire fencing and orchards.

Laredo Air Force Base

Laredo, TX

Military aviation came to Laredo during World War I, when the Army carved auxiliary landing fields across South Texas to relieve an overtaxed Kelly Field in San Antonio, including one north of old Fort McIntosh. As the country geared up for another world war around 1940, that foothold grew into a full training installation, eventually known as Laredo Air Force Base. Thousands of airmen and gunners trained beneath the wide border sky.

Laredo Election Riot, 1886

Laredo, TX

By the 1880s Laredo had held annual municipal elections for well over a century, a civic tradition dating to its Spanish colonial founding. In 1886 that ritual erupted into violence as two rival political factions clashed — the Guaraches, named for the humble Mexican sandal and led by Darío González, and their opponents. The bloodshed reflected the intense, deeply personal nature of local politics in a close-knit border community where family, class, and party loyalties ran together.

Laredo Fire Department

Laredo, TX

Laredo's first fire company began in 1883 as a two-man volunteer outfit with hand hose carts and just nine miles of water pipe. Damaging fires during the city's 1890s growth spurred reorganization, but firefighters served largely without city support until 1912, when Laredo finally began paying them. Over the following decades the department added a fire marshal, motorized pumpers, new stations, and even a mutual-aid pact with Nuevo Laredo across the border.

Laredo Streetcar System

Laredo, TX

When Laredo introduced streetcars in 1889, the border city joined a nationwide wave of urban rail that reshaped how Americans moved through growing towns. Mule- and later electric-powered cars connected neighborhoods to businesses, spurring residential construction and knitting the economy of this Rio Grande trade center more tightly together. Streetcar lines like Laredo's were engines of Gilded Age urban growth before automobiles displaced them in the twentieth century.

Laredo Telephone Exchange

Laredo, TX

When telephone service reached Laredo in 1884, the technology was barely eight years old, yet this booming border city on the Rio Grande was quick to wire itself into the modern age. The switchboard operated out of a private residence — the home of Lázaro and María del Refugio de la Garza, later associated with the prominent Bruni family — a common arrangement in an era when the earliest exchanges were run from parlors and front rooms. It was a small but telling sign of Laredo's ambition as a commercial hub linking Texas and Mexico.

Laredo's First International Bridge

Laredo, TX

Long before any bridge spanned the Rio Grande here, the river's shallow ford drew Native peoples who crossed it for centuries, and later Spanish conquistadores who favored it as the shortest route between Bahía del Espíritu Santo and Nuevo León. That ancient crossing point eventually anchored Laredo's first international bridge, formalizing a passage that human travelers had used for generations. The site layers Indigenous trails, Spanish colonial expeditions, and the modern border into a single spot on the river.

Laredo's Washington's Birthday Celebration

Laredo, TX

In 1897 Laredo's lodge of the Improved Order of Red Men, a national fraternal society, resolved to celebrate George Washington's birthday, and in February 1898 they staged a two-day festival of parades and a mock battle. What began as a lodge event grew into one of the largest and longest-running Washington's Birthday celebrations in the country, a distinctly binational fixture of this border city. It endures as a signature Laredo tradition more than a century later.

Largest Pictograph Site in Texas

Paint Rock, TX

Along a half-mile of limestone bluff near Paint Rock, roughly 1,500 painted images record centuries of Native life, made by many different peoples across widely separated eras. It is the most extensive pictograph site in Texas, a gallery of the nomadic tribes who moved through this country long before European settlement. The paintings preserve stories, symbols, and events in the only medium their makers left behind.

Las Boregas Camp Site

Milam, TX

Las Boregas Creek marked the eastern edge of an 1794 Spanish land grant to Juan Ignacio Pifermo—the oldest grant in Sabine County—where El Camino Real, the main road into Spanish Texas, crossed the water. A well-used campsite grew up beside the creek, and around 1800 a Spanish army post was posted upstream to guard settlers and travelers. According to his journal, Stephen F. Austin, the 'Father of Texas,' spent his very first night in Texas near this creek in July 1821.

Las Calaveras Cemetery

Ben Bolt, TX

José María Valadez, born in Tamaulipas, Mexico, bought land in this part of South Texas in 1864 and, with his wife Josefa, built a ranching enterprise raising cattle and sheep and growing corn and cotton. He named the place La Laguna de las Calaveras—the lagoon of skulls—for skeletal remains found there, thought to belong to Indigenous people lost in a great flood. The cemetery, whose earliest marked grave dates to 1878, has served the Valadez family and the Ben Bolt community for generations.

Las Moras Masonic Lodge Building

Brackettville, TX

Raised in 1878–1879 as the first county-owned courthouse for Kinney County on the far Texas frontier near Fort Clark, this sturdy building served the county for three decades. In 1911 it passed to the Las Moras Masonic Lodge, chartered in 1876, while its ground floor housed the Brackettville post office from 1918 to 1983. Across more than a century it has held courts, lodge meetings, mail, and county offices — a single building carrying much of a frontier town's civic life.

Las Moras Spring

Brackettville, TX

Las Moras Spring, the largest in Kinney County and ninth largest in Texas, has drawn people for more than 11,000 years, from flint-knapping prehistoric hunters to Coahuiltecan, Apache, and Comanche peoples following trails into Mexico. Spanish expeditions recorded stops here, and in 1840 Republic of Texas troops destroyed a Comanche village at the spring. Fort Clark rose beside it in 1852, and the Army later walled the pool and built a huge WPA swimming pool in 1939.

Las Rucias

Los Indios, TX

On June 25, 1864, in the far southern reaches of Texas along the Rio Grande, Confederate Colonel John S. "Rip" Ford's forces clashed with Union troops at Las Rucias and drove them from the field. The engagement was part of the seesaw struggle for control of the border cotton trade that funneled Confederate goods through Mexico. The State of Texas raised this marker in 1936 to remember the little-known Civil War fight on the Rio Grande frontier.

Lasara

Lasara, TX

Carved from the old San Juan Carricitos Spanish land grant, Lasara was laid out in 1926 by developers W. A. Harding and Lamar Gill, who fused their wives' names, Laura and Sara, into the town's. Within that first year a post office, a Union Sunday School, and a schoolhouse all took root, and the school became the community's social heart. Once a cattle-shipping point, the town settled into its role as a hub for the surrounding ranch country.

Lasker Home for Children

Galveston, TX

Built around 1870 as a galleried Greek Revival home for Galveston attorney Marcus C. McLemore, this house was bought in 1901 by the Society for the Help of Homeless Children to serve the city's orphaned and needy young. Businessman Morris Lasker funded a major 1912 expansion, and the following year the institution was renamed in his honor.

Last Battle of the Civil War

Brownsville, TX

On May 13, 1865—more than a month after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox—Confederate and Union soldiers clashed here on the Rio Grande in the Battle of Palmito Ranch. Colonel John S. "Rip" Ford's Confederates won the fight, a bitter irony given that the war was already effectively over and word of its end had not reached this remote corner of Texas. It stands as the last land engagement of the American Civil War.

Last Great Panhandle Cattle Drive to Montana

Panhandle, TX

After 1880, Texas herds streamed north each season to fatten on northern grass, and in 1892 the N Bar N ranch organized the last of the great Panhandle drives from these headquarters. Under manager J.L. Harrison and trail boss Tom Coffee, one hundred cowboys pushed roughly 25,000 cattle all the way to Montana between April and September. The herds belonged to the Niedringhaus brothers, St. Louis tinsmiths who had poured an enamelware fortune into ranching before the range was fenced and sold off to smaller farmers.

Last Great Panhandle Cattle Drive to Montana

White Deer, TX

Each spring after 1880, Texas herds streamed north to fatten on distant grasslands, and in 1892 the N Bar N outfit staged the last of the great Panhandle drives from this headquarters. Under manager J. L. Harrison and trail boss Tom Coffee, a hundred cowboys pushed ten herds—25,000 head in all—clear to Montana between April and September. The cattle belonged to the Niedringhaus brothers, St. Louis tinsmiths who had poured an enamelware fortune into ranching, on range once leased from a British-backed syndicate.

Last Review of the Confederacy

Chatfield, TX

Confederate General Jo Shelby's Missouri cavalry — the storied 'Iron Brigade' — wintered in Texas in 1864-65 and, refusing to surrender as the Confederacy collapsed, bivouacked near Chambers Creek south of Chatfield. On June 2, 1865, the last organized Confederate unit lined up here for what became known as the 'last review of the Confederacy' before Shelby led hundreds of his men south to offer their swords in Mexico.

Late Pleistocene Ingleside Fauna

Ingleside, TX

When highway engineers dug for caliche near what is now Swan Lake in 1939, they uncovered one of the richest fossil deposits ever found at a single Texas site. Over the next two years, excavators recovered the remains of 42 species of Ice Age vertebrates—mammoth, saber-toothed cat, ground sloth, camel, bison, tapir, and more. The find opened a remarkable window onto the Late Pleistocene world that flourished along the Gulf Coast long before human settlement.

Latexo Baptist Church

Latexo, TX

The congregation that became Latexo Baptist Church was organized in 1900 as the Stark Switch Baptist Church, in a community first known as Oldham. When the Louisiana Texas Orchard Company became the area's major employer, the town renamed itself Latexo in the company's honor, and the church followed suit in 1905. As settlement shifted east toward a new highway after 1930, the church relocated in 1945 and has thrived there, marking a century of service in 2000.

Lathum Cemetery

Lathum, TX

This small burial ground holds four pioneer settlers of the San Saba County frontier. The first grave was that of young George Lathum, who died of a rattlesnake bite in 1863; nearby lies Chaney Couch, killed by Indians in 1864, along with Isabella Couch and Elizabeth Christian. Relatives of these families went on to found the nearby Deer Creek Cemetery and a school and chapel named for Isabella Couch.

Laughlin Army Air Field

Del Rio, TX

In 1942, with the nation racing to train pilots for World War II, the U.S. Army built an airfield east of Del Rio, where year-round clear skies and open ground offered near-ideal flying conditions. It was named for Lt. Jack Thomas Laughlin, a Del Rio native shot down over the Java Sea and the first local pilot killed in the war; his widow and infant daughter attended the 1943 dedication. Instructors trained crews on the B-26 Marauder before the base closed at war's end and reopened as an Air Force base in 1952.

Laughter Undertaking Company

Abilene, TX

Dan T. Laughter learned the undertaking trade in a northeast Texas furniture store — a common pairing in an era when the same craftsmen who built cabinets built coffins — before settling in the booming West Texas railroad town of Abilene in 1900. He founded this firm in 1905, won sole ownership on the flip of a coin in 1908, and ran a combined funeral home and ambulance service into the 1970s. Under Russel and Willena North it carried on as North's Funeral Home, one of Abilene's enduring family businesses.

Launching Site of First U.S. Army Warplane

Brownsville, TX

In the spring of 1915, as revolutionary turmoil spilled across the Rio Grande, the U.S. Army was just beginning to imagine what airplanes might do in war. From the old cavalry drill field at Fort Brown, two Signal Corps aviators took a fragile Curtiss biplane aloft to scout the movements of Pancho Villa's forces along the border. When ground fire struck their machine, it marked the first time an American military aircraft came under fire in hostilities—a small, dangerous milestone in the birth of American air power.

Laurel Hill Cemetery

Mission, TX

Laurel Hill Cemetery has served Mission, in the lower Rio Grande Valley, since 1913, when graves were relocated from the town's first, unsuitable burial ground. Among those interred are city founder John J. Conway, author and television personality Dr. Cleo Dawson, and the aviator and stuntman Floyd "Slats" Rodgers, along with pioneers and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. Its false crypts, mausoleums, and statuary reflect the region's blended traditions.

Laurel Hill Cemetery

Coldspring, TX

Laurel Hill Cemetery took its name from the laurel trees ringing the baptismal pool of the local Baptist church, and its land was donated in 1848 by General James B. Davis, adjutant-general of the Republic of Texas army. Burials began in the 1840s; the oldest surviving stone marks two-year-old Frances California Snow, who died in 1854. Davis himself was buried here in 1859, and later neighbors donated additional strips of land as the grounds were fenced.

Laurine Cecil Anderson

Austin, TX

Born to enslaved parents in Tennessee in 1853, Laurine Cecil Anderson educated himself at Memphis schools and Fisk University before coming to Texas in 1880 to lead a training school in Brenham. He went on to head what is now Prairie View A&M University, served as founding president of the Colored Teachers State Association, and for thirty-two years led Austin's only high school for Black students. Two days after his death in 1938, the city's school board voted to name that school in his honor.

Lavaca County Courthouse

Hallettsville, TX

Lavaca County traces its roots to an 1842 judicial county created by the Republic of Texas, reestablished by the new state in 1846 after the judicial counties were ruled unconstitutional. This is the fifth building to serve as its seat of justice — earlier ones included a log courthouse and, after a fire, sessions held under a live oak in old Petersburg. Designed by noted Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner in Richardsonian style and built of Mineral Wells sandstone in 1897-1899, it was dedicated on July 4, 1899, and later listed on the National Register.

Lavaca Lodge No. 36, A.F. & A.M.

Port Lavaca, TX

Chartered in 1848, this was the first Masonic lodge in Calhoun County, part of the wave of fraternal organizations that anchored civic life in young Texas towns. The lodge went dormant during the Civil War era, then was revived in 1886 when a lodge from storm-battered Indianola relocated to Port Lavaca after a devastating hurricane. It carried the W. P. Milby name until 1935, when its original Lavaca Lodge No. 36 identity was restored.

Lavon

Lavon, TX

Drawn by the rich Blackland Prairie soil and Bear Creek's water, settlers reached the Lavon area in the 1850s, and the town proper took root when the railroad arrived in 1886. Originally called Thompson or Thompson Switch after early postmaster and merchant Elbert Thompson, it was renamed Lavon for his son to avoid confusion with another town. WPA crews built a school here in the late 1930s, and in the 1950s Lavon Dam turned the area into a fishing and boating retreat—one restaurant even appeared in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.

Lavon School

Lavon, TX

Between 1938 and 1940, the Lavon Independent School District replaced the community's earlier two-story schoolhouse with a five-classroom building erected through Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, with local crews rotated so every man needing work earned about $3.50 a day. Designed by architect Hoke Smith with a hardwood-floored gymnasium and lunchroom, the school was dedicated in the fall of 1941 by Congressman Sam Rayburn. After districts consolidated in 1949 it served as an elementary school and later as a factory, library, and city hall.

Law Office of James W. Throckmorton

McKinney, TX

From this McKinney law office practiced James W. Throckmorton, who served as governor of Texas in 1866 and 1867 during the fraught early years of Reconstruction before military authorities removed him from office. The building's front has been remodeled, but its interior survives much as he knew it. It stands as a tangible link to Texas politics in the turbulent aftermath of the Civil War.

Law West of The Pecos

Langtry, TX

In this dusty building beside the Rio Grande, Judge Roy Bean dispensed his own brand of justice as the self-styled "Law West of the Pecos," holding court between pouring drinks and consulting a single 1879 statute book he rarely opened. Trials spilled onto the porch, drunks were chained to mesquite trees, and fines went straight into the judge's pocket. His notoriety peaked in 1896 when he staged a banned heavyweight title fight on a Rio Grande sandbar to outwit the Texas Rangers—and he named his saloon-courtroom the "Jersey Lilly" for an English actress he adored but never met.

Law's Chapel Methodist Church

Atlanta, TX

George and Martha Law, pioneers from Georgia, founded this congregation in 1853, making it the first Protestant church in the area. Members began worshipping under a brush arbor, then in a log structure, before joining the Methodist Conference in 1859 and starting their lasting building in 1869.

Lawhon Springs Cemetery

Lexington, TX

Native peoples long used the reliable water at the Yegua Spring before English-born pioneer John Lewis Smith and his son Samuel settled here in 1848, dug out the spring, and gave it the family name. The Smiths had followed the American frontier from Virginia through Kentucky and Alabama into Republic-era Texas. The first person buried on the hillside was an enslaved man of John Lewis Smith who asked to rest beside him; graves of the Smith family, marked as Citizens of the Republic of Texas, and generations of area pioneers followed.

Lawler Community

Florence, TX

Founded before the mid-1800s, this rural community took its name from early settler L. T. "Uncle Lee" Lawler, beloved for leasing his land free of charge so neighbors could build a school, church, and cemetery. Its first school, begun before 1872, honored land donor Edward Stevenson. Once a gathering point for pioneer families, the area is now given over to farms and ranches.

Lawn Atlas ICBM Launch Facility

Lawn, TX

At the peak of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force ringed bases with intercontinental ballistic missiles, and this site near Lawn held one of the first subterranean Atlas F silos in the country. Sunk 185 feet deep and built of concrete, resin, and steel to survive a nuclear blast, the silo was linked by tunnel to a launch control center manned by a five-person crew of the 578th Strategic Missile Squadron from 1962 until the Atlas program ended in 1965. Most Texans never knew such weapons stood beneath their farmland.

Lawrence Cemetery

Terrell, TX

When the Texas and Pacific Railroad pushed through in 1873, a group of investors formed a colony association to promote the new town of Lawrence, named for one of their directors. The town's cemetery began the same year with the burial of a seven-month-old child and has since grown to hold more than four hundred graves, many of them the area's earliest pioneers.

Lawrence Chapel Cemetery

Thrall, TX

Adam Lawrence, a Kentucky-born pioneer who received a Texas land grant in 1822, donated this tract for a cemetery in 1840. A farmer and cattle raiser, he fought in the Texas Revolution of 1836 and in numerous frontier conflicts, and legend held that he once leaped his horse twenty feet into a river to escape pursuers. The burial ground he gave still marks the community he helped found.

Lawrence Clifton Elliott

Fort Worth, TX

Born in Greenville, Texas, in 1901, Lawrence Clifton Elliott showed his knack for flight by building an experimental airplane in high school. After training as an Army pilot, he began a 35-year federal aviation career in 1928, based for 25 years at Fort Worth, where he helped mark domestic flight routes, develop aviation weather broadcasting, and set standards for aircraft maintenance and safety. During World War II he served as a regional manager of the U.S. Civil Aviation System.

Lawrence Family Cemetery

Dawson, TX

This family burial ground sits on an 1835 land grant to David McCandless, who came to Texas as a Robertson colonist in the last days of Mexican rule. The plot passed to his daughter Macca Orange and her husband Joseph Thompson Lawrence, and was opened in 1868 with the heartbreaking burial of their six-year-old daughter, Sarah Medora. Deeded formally in 1913, the cemetery is still tended by the family's descendants.

Lawrence Farmstead

Mesquite, TX

Stephen Decatur Lawrence, son of an original Mercer colony settler, received about 640 acres on his twenty-first birthday and began building here in 1874, adding a T-plan clapboard house in 1882 that grew into a striking Victorian home with a central tower and steeply pitched roof. Barns, a smokehouse, a root cellar, and a wash house rounded out a working blackland-prairie farmstead where Lawrence raised eleven children across two marriages. The family held the land until 1995, when part of it became a city historical park.

Laws Chapel Cemetery

Cass County, TX

This cemetery began as a family plot when Henry G. Law died in 1854, soon after his family moved to Cass County from Georgia. It grew into a community burial ground after his brother Richard donated six acres to the Laws Chapel Church in 1869, and was later shared with the nearby Piney Grove Baptist Church founded in 1887. Expanded in 1941, it still serves the area and holds generations of local pioneers, veterans, and families.

Lawson Daniel Gratz

Willow Park, TX

Born into slavery in 1839 on a Kentucky plantation, Lawson Daniel Gratz enlisted in the Federal army in 1864 and rose to first sergeant in the 114th U.S. Colored Infantry, serving at the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond and standing at Appomattox when Lee surrendered. He later reenlisted with the 10th U.S. Cavalry — the Buffalo Soldiers — and kept serving even after an explosion cost him the sight in one eye. Settling at last in Parker County, he raised fourteen children and was remembered for his leadership and unbending devotion to duty.

Lazbuddie

Lazbuddie, TX

In 1902 Thomas Kelly bought more than 55,000 acres of the legendary XIT Ranch and built the Star Ranch, dotting the high plains with thirty windmills, corrals, and a schoolhouse. As the great ranch was carved into smaller farms, a community took root: D. Luther 'Laz' Green and Andrew 'Buddie' Sherley opened the Lazbuddie commissary in 1924, giving the town both its heart and its whimsical name. Post office, churches, schools, and grain elevators soon followed.

Leadbelly in Deep Ellum

Dallas, TX

In the early twentieth century, Deep Ellum — the neighborhood around Elm Street and Central Avenue in downtown Dallas — was one of the largest and most vibrant Black urban communities in the country, its clubs, dance halls, and street corners alive with music. It was here that Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, who arrived around 1910, first heard a jazz band and discovered the 12-string guitar, and where he met his musical partner Blind Lemon Jefferson. Together with their Deep Ellum peers, they helped shape American blues, jazz, country, and rock for generations to come.

League of United Latin American Citizens, Council 60

Houston, TX

The League of United Latin American Citizens formed in Corpus Christi in 1929 to unite Texas Hispanics against discrimination while promoting education, patriotism, and equality. In 1934 more than twenty Houston men chartered Council 60 in Magnolia Park, going on to open jobs for Mexican Americans in wartime industry and the city's police and fire departments. The council backed landmark court fights—including Hernandez v. Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court—and launched the "Little School of the 400," a model for the national Head Start program.

League Park

League City, TX

When Galveston developer John Charles League platted his townsite in 1890, he set aside land not just for a school and church but for this park, established in 1895 through a sale to the railroad. For decades League Park was the beating heart of the community—hosting campaign speeches, medicine shows, revivals, and summer band concerts from a two-story bandstand rebuilt after the catastrophic 1900 hurricane. During World War I it became a rallying ground for Red Cross drives, and residents funded a new bandstand for the American Bicentennial.

Leagueville Cemetery

Murchison, TX

The Leagueville community grew from the Aaron York survey, and tradition holds its cemetery began beside an early schoolhouse on land donated by B.T. and Annie Roberts. That pioneer schoolhouse also hosted worship, and in 1880 the congregation that became Leagueville Baptist Church organized there. The oldest marked grave, that of Alabama native Jacob Colvin, dates to 1863, and pioneer families like the Reagans, Adairs, and Colvins rest among many unmarked early burials.

Leah Moncure, P.E.

Bastrop, TX

In an era when engineering was almost entirely a man's profession, Leah Moncure of Bastrop apprenticed at her surveyor father's side, earned a civil engineering degree from UT Austin, and in 1938 became the first woman in Texas to register as a professional engineer. Born with a congenital heart condition doctors thought she wouldn't survive, she instead built a 32-year career with the Texas Highway Department in research, right-of-way, and road design. A UT scholarship in her name still supports women studying engineering.