Historic Markers in Texas

Navasota, TX

Built as a modest one-story frame store in 1873 and enlarged in 1885 with native sandstone walls and a second floor, this Navasota building became a fixture of the town's commercial life. In 1886 builder and horse breeder John Wesley Leake bought it, and his family held the property for more than eighty years while a parade of important firms did business behind its Victorian storefront.

Leakey, TX

Dating to at least 1881 and once known as the Floral Cemetery, this burial ground sits on land John and Nancy Leakey sold for a dollar and a cemetery plot. Its oldest documented graves are those of Sara Catherine McLaurin and fifteen-year-old Allen Lease, killed in April 1881 in what is remembered as the last Indian raid in the Frio Canyon area. Among more than 900 burials lie pioneers, Civil War veteran John Colter Brice, elected officials, and countless children lost to measles, typhoid, diphtheria, and influenza.

Leakey, TX

When John and Nancy Leakey built a home and sawmill in the Frio River Canyon in 1856, they were the first to settle this remote stretch of the Hill Country—and their home soon hosted the circuit-rider services that grew into this congregation. From a schoolhouse meeting place to sanctuaries raised in 1890 and 1922, the church tracked the growth of the town named for its founding family. Easter sunrise and community Thanksgiving services have long knit it into local life.

Leakey, TX

Education in the Leakey area began in settlers' homes in the 1850s and evolved through the Floral School and Academy on land the Leakey family deeded in 1883. As county lines shifted—Edwards County, then Real County in 1913—Leakey twice served as county seat and steadily built up its schools, opening new buildings in 1922 and 1930 as surrounding rural districts consolidated in.

Leander, TX

Leander began as a relocation of the older town of Bagdad, founded in 1854, after the Austin & Northwestern Railroad bypassed the original site in 1882. A new town was platted along the rail line and named for railroad official Leander Brown, and homes and businesses simply picked up and moved to it. The post office followed in 1882, and the school that opened in 1893 grew into the county's largest district.

Waelder, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1810, Leander C. Cunningham fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived out a long life on the Texas land his generation had wrested into a new republic, dying in 1896. He is remembered here alongside his wife Ann, who was born in Kentucky in 1808.

Burton, TX

Virginia-born Leander H. McNelly served as a Confederate soldier before Reconstruction Governor E. J. Davis named him one of four captains of the Texas State Police in 1870. Later, as a Texas Ranger, McNelly commanded a special force—the Washington County Volunteer Militia—sent to quell the violent Sutton-Taylor feud. He then took his men, who proudly called themselves the "Little McNellys," to the Rio Grande to fight cross-border cattle raiders in the so-called Las Cuevas War.

Leander, TX

Organized in 1857 by the Rev. R. M. Overstreet as Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church, this congregation first worshipped in the town of Bagdad. When the railroad bypassed Bagdad in 1882 and the new town of Leander sprang up along the tracks, the members voted to follow, erecting a building in 1884 on land given by church member Sarah J. Walker. The church's move captures how the railroad reshaped the map of Central Texas.

Leander, TX

Schooling in this part of Williamson County began in 1855 at Bagdad, a pre-Civil War community that faded once the railroad drew settlers to nearby Leander. A free public school opened there in 1893, and local business leaders formed a high school association in 1899 to sustain it. The first Leander High School class graduated in 1931, and the schools grew alongside the town.

Leander, TX

This Methodist congregation was organized around 1860 in Bagdad, a Williamson County community a mile to the west. Early worshipers met with circuit preachers and missionaries in a log schoolhouse and a Masonic hall until they built a sanctuary in 1879. When the railroad drew settlement to Leander in 1901, the church followed, and the old Bagdad sanctuary was moved to land deeded by Sarah J. Walker.

Leander, TX

In December 1982, highway archeologists near Leander uncovered the skeleton of a woman who lived roughly 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, quickly nicknamed the "Leanderthal Lady." About 30 years old and 5-foot-3, she was found in an intact grave at the Wilson-Leonard site, one of the earliest such burials known in the United States. Her remains opened a rare window onto the peopling of North America.

Gilmer, TX

During the Civil War this East Texas site hummed with the unglamorous but vital work of keeping an army moving. A shoe factory turned local leather into footgear for Confederate soldiers, while a nearby harness shop produced the bridles, saddles, and rigging that hitched horses and mules to gun carriages, wagons, and ambulances. Fed by a tanyard that processed over 2,000 hides a year, East Texas plants supplied the South hundreds of saddles and harness sets each month.

Commerce, TX

This ground has served as a burial place since the 1860s, and pioneer settler Rebecca Hart Williams Little—who reached the area in the 1830s—formally deeded it for church and school use in 1871. Among those laid to rest are early settlers, infants and children, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars. A one-room school once stood alongside it until 1945.

Aquilla, TX

In October 1872, landowners deeded four acres in Hill County to a group of Methodist trustees, and tradition holds that pastor Isaac Pierce Lowery proposed the congregation's biblical name of Lebanon the following year. The first church building burned in the early 1880s, prompting members to move to the present site. An early school on the church grounds served the surrounding community well into the twentieth century.

Albany, TX

Georgia-born William Henry Ledbetter came to Texas in 1858 and built a salt works on Hubbard Creek during the Civil War, weathering raids on the exposed western frontier before relocating nearer the protection of Fort Griffin. In the mid-1870s he raised this picket house — walls of upright timbers set in the ground — a construction method common on a frontier short on sawn lumber. Ledbetter served as Shackelford County's first county judge, and the city of Albany moved and restored his home in 1953.

Albany, TX

Discovered by trail drivers in 1861 and developed by W. H. Ledbetter beginning in 1862, this Hubbard Creek salt works answered the desperate Confederate need for salt — the only means, before refrigeration, of preserving meat. Large furnaces and kettles hauled in from East Texas turned out salt for Confederate troops west of the Mississippi, state militia, ranches, and settlers who traveled up to 200 miles to fetch it. Frontier cavalry guarded the works from raids, and after nearby Fort Griffin was established in 1867 a cannon was even loaned for its defense; production continued until 1880.

Roxton, TX

This quiet country burial ground grew up around the 1860 grave of a one-year-old child on Herbert Lee's farm, and he set the land aside for a cemetery in his Civil War-era will. Most of those laid to rest here were buried between 1870 and 1890, in the lean years of Reconstruction when few could afford ornate stones. Among them rest a citizen of the Republic of Texas and veterans of the Civil War.

Celeste, TX

This burial ground took shape around 1860, in the years when families were still carving farms and communities out of the North Texas blackland prairie of Hunt County. A rural cemetery like this one served scattered settlers as both a resting place and a fixed point of community memory, long before the surrounding towns had churches or courthouses of their own. Its later designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes that continuity across more than a century of local life.

Quitman, TX

North Carolina natives Benjamin and Alice Lee arrived around 1853 and built up a cotton plantation of more than 1,230 acres worked by their large family and enslaved people. Benjamin became a community leader and county commissioner, and the family burial ground begun at his death in 1856 gradually opened to neighbors and grew into a thirteen-acre public cemetery. Its graves—including four Lee sons who served in the Confederate army, alongside bankers, a mayor, a doctor, and newspaper publishers—read like a roster of the community's history.

Seagoville, TX

When James J. Lee donated this 1.125-acre tract in 1870, he made a deliberate act of charity: plots were never to be sold. As the first cemetery in southeast Dallas County, it became a democratic resting place, gathering some 1,500 burials that cut across the era's hard lines of race and rank — a Confederate founder, a Mexican War general, dozens of people of Mexican descent, and an enslaved man brought to Texas in 1855.

Brownwood, TX

Organized in 1888 and named for AME Bishop Benjamin Franklin Lee, Lee Chapel gathered Brownwood's Black community first in a Baptist church and then in a brush arbor at the home of its pastor, the Rev. George E. Smith—who also founded the town's first school for Black children. In 1906 the congregation's building was moved to this site, where the church has continued to serve ever since. Its story braids together worship, education, and community survival under segregation.

Baytown, TX

In the depths of the Great Depression in 1934, voters of the Goose Creek school district chose to found Lee Junior College, betting on higher education when money was scarce. Its first 177 students paid under $15 a semester and met at night in a high school, and four women made up the 1935 graduating class. Renamed Lee College in 1948, it became a pioneer in prison education in 1966 with courses inside the Texas Department of Corrections aimed at reducing recidivism.

Giddings, TX

Straddling the Old San Antonio Road on land first surveyed for Moses and Stephen F. Austin's colony, Lee County became in 1854 the heart of Wendish settlement in America, when Pastor Johann Kilian led his Sorbian-speaking congregation from Central Europe to a new home here. Their school was the only one in the United States to teach in Wendish, a Slavic language that survives in the modern world chiefly here and in Australia. The county was organized in 1874 and named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee, with Giddings as its seat.

Giddings, TX

Completed in 1899, the Lee County Courthouse rose after fire destroyed the county's first courthouse in 1897. Designed by J. R. Gordon in the muscular Richardsonian Romanesque style—named for the influential Louisiana-born architect Henry Hobson Richardson—it echoes public buildings of its era with heavy stone and rounded arches. Its builders, a San Antonio firm, set it on the high ground dividing the Colorado and Brazos river basins, a commanding perch for the seat of county government.

Prosper, TX

In 1875 Masons around the Rhea's Mill community, tired of traveling to McKinney for meetings, won a charter for their own lodge from the Grand Lodge of Texas. When the Santa Fe railroad made Prosper the area's rising town, the members voted in 1903 to relocate and built a lodge hall there in 1904. The fraternity has remained part of Prosper community life ever since.

Sherman, TX

Lee Simmons (1873–1957) stepped into public life when Denison citizens urged him to run for sheriff, winning election in 1912. In the 1920s successive governors tapped him to inspect and then oversee the Texas prison system, and by 1930 he was its general manager, earning a strong reputation and famously founding the Texas Prison Rodeo. He died before finishing his autobiography, fittingly titled "Assignment Huntsville."

Navasota, TX

This African-American Methodist congregation traces to 1860 and, after the Civil War, built a church in 1866 in a Navasota neighborhood called 'Freeman's Town.' Formally organized in 1876, the group raised its present Gothic Revival sanctuary in 1896 — worshipping in the basement until the building was finished — and renamed itself to honor its pastor, the Rev. Edward Lee. With its arched and stained-glass windows and tower entry, the church has served its members for well over a century.

Caldwell, TX

Lee W. Henslee (1872–1927), a native of Burleson County, was named county sheriff in 1902 during an era when law and order were still hard-won. Known as "Mr. Lee," he seldom drew a gun, earning respect through quiet persuasion, and his family lived in the county jail. He later became the county tax collector in 1916.

Granbury, TX

This Eastlake-style house was built in 1890 for J.C. Lees, a Canadian-born Granbury merchant, and sold to S.L. Bowden in 1895. Bowden's daughter Maude lived here after marrying Hardy H. Bryan in 1903, and the home stayed in the Bryan family for nearly seventy years. Its corner tower with fish-scale shingles and pyramidal roof marks it as a fine example of late-Victorian architecture on the Texas frontier.

Leesburg, TX

The Leesburg Cemetery has served this small Camp County community since 1870, its graves quietly recording the lives of the families who settled and sustained East Texas in the decades after the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, the grounds mark the endurance of a rural settlement whose story is written in its headstones.

Leesburg, TX

Established around 1870 on land donated by Dwight Hays Townsend, this graveyard grew into the resting place of a whole rural East Texas community. Its earliest burials are believed to be two children reinterred from the old Leesburg schoolyard, and its oldest marked grave dates to 1870. Generations of pioneers, community leaders, and war veterans lie here, a stone record of the people who built and defended Leesburg.

Leesville, TX

Organized in 1875 in the small Gonzales County settlement of Leesville, this Baptist congregation lost its first meeting house to an 1886 storm, then rebuilt across O'Neal Creek on land bought from pioneer settler N. H. Guinn, raising this plain frame church in 1887-88. Its steeple came down in 1924, and after a devastating 1936 flood the town itself picked up and moved three-quarters of a mile west to the new state highway. The church stayed put, becoming one of the last markers of the original townsite.

Leesville, TX

Settled before the Civil War, the Gonzales County town of Leesburg — later Leesville — was a busy trade center when this one-room brick schoolhouse went up in 1868, with the site deeded to the Leesburg Male and Female Institute in 1873. Everything came from close by: red bricks fired in a nearby kiln, lumber from the Daniel Brown Sawmill on O'Neill Creek, and labor from local residents. Classes ran until 1918, after which the building served as community center, lunchroom, and even a private home before being restored.

Ector County, TX

In 1833, while Texas was still under Mexican rule, Alexander LeGrande carried out a sweeping survey for empresario John Beales, whose land dealings gave him claim to a staggering 70 million acres and the title of Texas's greatest land king. LeGrande's route ran some 2,000 miles across West Texas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and eastern New Mexico, an effort dogged by hardship and tragedy and ultimately abandoned. His work preceded the better-known exploration credited to Captain R. B. Marcy of the U.S. Army by years.

Fredericksburg, TX

In 1882 German immigrant Henry Lehne raised this limestone house in the old-country farmhouse tradition brought to the Texas Hill Country by Fredericksburg's German settlers. He farmed and ranched, hauled goods to San Antonio as a teamster, and outlived two wives while raising nine children under its roof. A frame addition built by his daughter and son-in-law in 1933 extended a family occupancy that lasted 109 years.

Hondo, TX

Built in 1907 for prominent Hondo businessman Ernest Roland Leinweber, this three-story commercial block was raised by prolific South Texas contractor Gus Birkner, who had a hand in building the Texas State Capitol. Constructed of locally made brick, it blends touches of Classical and Romanesque styling and has long housed a rotating mix of professional and commercial offices. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1986.

Lela, TX

Lela sprang up around 1902 along the proposed line of the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf railway, and residents quickly organized a school, first known as Story. When flooding forced the community uphill, the school moved with it, and the discovery of natural gas in the 1920s brought new prosperity and a brick schoolhouse. After nearly ninety years, the Lela district closed in 1992 and merged with nearby Shamrock.

Lemley, TX

The earliest grave here, dating to 1857, lies on land the Thomas B. Martin family settled in 1853 on the raw Texas frontier. After Martin sold the tract to the Lemley brothers, who had come from Illinois in the 1850s, the burial ground took their name and served family, friends, and neighboring settlers — including at least five Civil War veterans, with many graves marked only by native stones.

Corsicana, TX

Corsicana resident A. L. Lemon built this house in 1895 of Louisiana cypress, and in 1902 sold it to John Wesley Edens, a substantial landowner who farmed and ranched 2,400 acres and served locally as deputy sheriff, tax collector, and city councilman. The late Victorian home, dressed with Eastlake and Queen Anne detailing, stayed in the Edens family for more than forty years. It stands as a well-preserved example of the ornate domestic architecture that flourished in prospering Texas towns of the Gilded Age.

La Grange, TX

Albert and Amelia Lenert, both of whom came to Fayette County from Germany as children, moved to La Grange in 1894 and built this fine Victorian Italianate home for their family. Its symmetrical façade, inset central porch, Moorish-arched side porch, and crisp milled detail reflect the prosperity of German Texans in the late nineteenth century. The Lenerts' descendants held the house until 1979.

Galveston, TX

A Connecticut sea captain's son who went to sea at fourteen, Lent Munson Hitchcock left New England to join the fledgling Texas Navy around 1836. He came to Galveston in 1837 and became part of the port city's early leadership, serving as harbor master, alderman, and treasurer before volunteering for the Confederate army. Active as a Mason and Episcopalian, he left his name on the town of Hitchcock, christened for him in 1891.

Fannett, TX

Leo Edward Craigen's life traced the arc of the post-Civil War South. Wounded at the bloody Battle of Shiloh in 1862, he lost a leg to surgery yet returned to serve with the Confederate cavalry until the war's end. He rebuilt an ordinary but rooted life in Jefferson County, Texas — teaching at the Taylor's Bayou School, marrying one of his own students, and finally carrying the rural mail through the Fannett area for the last fifteen years of his life.

Mission, TX

Leonardo Alaniz, remembered as "Leo Najo" after a playful twist on conejo (rabbit), grew up in Mission after arriving from Nuevo León in 1909 and became one of the first Mexican-Americans to reach professional baseball. Prized for his batting average and blazing speed on the bases, he climbed from South Texas teams to the minor leagues and briefly into the Chicago White Sox organization in 1925 before a leg injury closed the door on the majors. Back home, he managed the Mission 30-30s, raised a large family, and in 1973 became the first player formally inducted into the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.

Guthrie, TX

Born in 1813, Leo Roark came to Texas in 1824 as a boy during the earliest years of Anglo colonization under Mexican rule, and grew up to take part in the Texas War for Independence. He was present at the disturbances at Anahuac, one of the flashpoints that helped spark the Texas Revolution. He lived a long life on the Texas frontier, dying in 1892, and the State of Texas honored him with this marker in 1962.

Galveston, TX

Alsatian immigrant Leon Blum joined his brother in a Texas mercantile partnership around 1852, and by 1868 the family firm of Leon & H. Blum had become Galveston's leading wholesale dry-goods house. From offices reaching New York, Boston, and Paris, the company supplied the southwestern states, Indian Territory, and Mexico for more than two decades. This 1880 headquarters, later enlarged with input from noted architect Nicholas Clayton, outlived the firm's collapse in the 1890s depression and went on to house retailers and a newspaper.

Leona, TX

Leon County was carved from Robertson County in 1846, the very year Texas joined the Union, and organized within months. It honors Martín de León, the Mexican empresario who founded Victoria and brought settlers to the region before the Republic. The county seat began at Leona before moving to Centerville in 1850.

Centerville, TX

Built in 1887 of locally made slate brick, the Leon County Courthouse is one of the oldest Texas courthouses still standing in its original form. The county dates to 1846, and its seat moved from Leona to Centerville in 1850, where two earlier courthouses stood on this same ground before it. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Gatesville, TX

A crossing of the Leon River on the Old Georgetown Road, in use by 1854, this site began with R. G. Grant's ferry and Coryell County's first metal truss bridge, a bowstring span erected in 1882. After floods wrecked that bridge in 1899 and 1900, the George E. King Bridge Company of Iowa built the present 137-foot Pratt through-truss span in 1904, with pin-connected members, lattice railings, and stone abutments. It carried east–west traffic as part of State Highway 7 and later U.S. Highway 84, and was restored in 1994.

Leonard, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Fannin County in the 1840s and 50s, among them Solomon L. Leonard, a Confederate sympathizer who amassed 10,000 acres around Wildcat Thicket — a tangle of brush where fugitives and outlaws, and figures of the bloody Reconstruction-era Lee-Peacock feud, took cover. When the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad arrived in 1880, Leonard's heirs platted a townsite and auctioned lots at a picnic on this very square, an event still held every year. A saloon, hotel, post office, newspaper, and school followed, and Leonard became the market town of a rich farming district.

Orange, TX

Leonard Frederick Benckenstein made an early fortune in Detroit's insurance and securities trade and was a millionaire by his thirties, but a visit to Beaumont during the 1904 Lucas gusher drew him into the Texas oil boom. After early successes and heavy losses, a Louisiana drilling lease led him to co-found Vinton Petroleum Company with Orange businessmen W.H. Stark and Dr. E.W. Brown. He settled in Orange to manage the venture and helped organize the city's Red Cross chapter and its First National Bank.

Cuero, TX

Born in Cuero, Leonard Roy Harmon joined the Navy in 1939 and served as a mess attendant aboard the cruiser U.S.S. San Francisco. During the Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942, as enemy fire raked the ship, Harmon helped evacuate the wounded and was killed shielding an injured shipmate with his own body, earning the Navy Cross. In 1943 the destroyer escort U.S.S. Harmon—the first U.S. warship named for a Black man—was christened by his mother.

Brazos County, TX

The Leonard School opened in the late 1890s on land donated by Sam Luther, serving a farming community of Polish, German, and Czech immigrants drawn to the rich soil of the Brazos River bottoms. Its two rooms, divided by a movable partition, doubled as a community hall for dances, weddings, and elections, and the school year bent around the cotton harvest so children could help their families in the fields. Lacking running water or electricity until the 1930s, the humble schoolhouse served for half a century before consolidation sent its students to Bryan in the 1940s.

Mount Joy, TX

Born in Virginia in 1840, Leroy Nelson DeWitt came to this corner of North Texas with his parents in 1854 and put down deep roots as a merchant and farmer. He married Mary Collier in 1861 and, the next year, joined the Confederacy to serve on the frontier through the end of the Civil War. Afterward he became a recognized leader in the area's civic, church, and business affairs until his death in 1918.

Georgetown, TX

In the 1880s Georgetown was a growing Central Texas county seat, and its limestone commercial blocks reflected a new prosperity. This Italianate storefront, raised in 1884, housed a drugstore that served townsfolk for three-quarters of a century, passing from Sanders & Lesesne to the long-running Stone's pharmacy. Its arched windows and pressed-metal cornice mark the era's confident Main Street architecture.

Smithville, TX

This Folk Victorian home was built in 1900 by premier local builder Virgil Sullivan Rabb Jr. Its longtime owner, Joseph Charles 'JC' Leshikar, was the son of Czech immigrants who bought his first Smithville saloon at 24, then expanded into land, oil and gas, and banking, raising his family here from 1903 to 1976.

Dallas, TX

Clement LeTot, a Frenchman and Crimean War veteran, put down roots in northwest Dallas County in 1874 and by 1881 had founded the little rail-line town that bore his name. Following the frontier custom of the day, he set aside part of his land as a family burial ground, first for two young sons in the mid-1880s and eventually for himself in 1907. Long since absorbed into the sprawl of Dallas, the cemetery is one of the last tangible traces of an immigrant-founded community.

Galveston, TX

Levi Charles Myers Harby, born in South Carolina in 1793, served in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812 and spent two years as a prisoner of war in England after his prize ship was recaptured. By 1836 he had "gone to Texas," and he later settled in Galveston, where his wife Leonora founded the first Jewish Sunday school in Texas and the city's Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Society. When the Civil War came, Harby served the Confederacy as an artillery captain aboard the CSS Neptune in the Battle of Galveston and ended the war commanding the harbor.

Brazoria, TX

Between 1848 and 1851, enslaved workers built this plantation house for Levi Jordan, hauling materials shipped by sea from Florida to Velasco and up the San Bernard River. It stands in the heart of Texas's antebellum plantation belt, where cotton and sugar were worked by forced labor. The site later became one of Texas's most significant archaeological windows into enslaved and freed communities.

Orange, TX

Irish immigrant brothers bought an existing Orange shipyard in 1859 and built wooden ships for decades, a trade their descendants carried into the steel age. Under Edward T. Malloy, who joined in 1939 and later bought control, Levingston Shipbuilding boomed during World War II, delivering 160 tugs, tankers, and rescue vessels to the Army and Navy between 1941 and 1945. After the war it reinvented itself as a world leader in offshore drilling rigs before closing in 1985.

Buckholts, TX

This burial ground reaches back to the 1830s colonies of Sterling C. Robertson, when Thomas Curry—whose late wife Satsa Vann was a Cherokee leader's daughter—brought his family to a league of land along Little River. His descendants married into the Lewis family, prominent in building the communities of Corinth, Buckholts and Cameron; Squire William Michael Lewis, a justice of the peace and Confederate cavalryman, was buried beneath a ranch oak in 1867, founding the cemetery. A typhoid epidemic a decade later added more graves to a plot whose burials mostly predate 1900.