Historic Markers in Texas

Llano, TX

Founded in 1856 as the seat of new Llano County, the town soon needed a burial ground, and by 1862 it held its first graves — a one-year-old child and a seventeen-year-old girl whose stones still stand. Trustees formalized the cemetery in the 1880s before deeding it to the city in 1907. Among those resting here is Frank Teich, the stonecutter remembered as the father of Texas's granite industry.

Llano, TX

The name Llano reaches back to 18th-century Spanish explorers, who applied it to the river running through this country—a name itself descended from a French term for the Lipan Apache. German colonists put down the first permanent settlements here around 1850, and in February 1856 the Texas legislature carved Llano County from Gillespie and Bexar, organizing it that August with Llano as county seat.

Llano, TX

By the 1890s Llano was a booming Hill Country town, and its fourth courthouse — designed by Austin architect A.O. Watson and built in 1892–93 — reflected that ambition in sandstone, marble, and locally prized granite. Fires scarred its interior in 1932 and 1952, and the iron fence that once ringed it is long gone, but the building endured as the civic heart of the county. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1980.

Llano, TX

In 1888 the hills of Llano County revealed their fortune in stone, when J. K. Finlay polished the first local granite and David Stewart opened a quarry just south of town. Within a dozen years the sculptor Frank Teich had leased ground from Stewart and founded Teich Monument Works, helping turn the county's thirteen varieties of granite into buildings and monuments across Texas. The county even yielded its own signature stone—"Llanite," a rare granite flecked with opalite that mineralogist N. J. Badu identified here. Hard to cut but prized for its quality, Llano granite gave this corner of the Hill Country a lasting industrial identity.

Post, TX

The Cap Rock Escarpment marks the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado, or "Staked Plains," one of the world's flattest and most complete plains regions, sloping upward from Texas into New Mexico. Shaped by ancient erosion of tough caliche caprock, it was crossed in 1541 by Coronado, whose expedition marveled at an endless sea of grass. Long shunned for its scarcity of water, the Llano later supported a great ranching empire and became a leading cotton and grain region.

Post, TX

Established in 1880 and spanning 192 sections, the Llano Ranch was known as the "Curry Comb" for its cattle brand. Its first shelter was a half-dugout roofed with buffalo hides, replaced in 1883 by a two-story frame house that became the center of local social life. A baby girl born here in 1884 marked the first recorded birth in Garza County, and her nearby grave the first recorded death.

Llano, TX

In 1901 music teacher Jennie Clopton gathered sixteen women to found a literary society that grew into the Woman's Culture Club, a civic force in Llano for decades. The club opened the town's first public library, funded scholarships, beautified public spaces, and coordinated a Works Progress Administration project to build a permanent library in 1938–39. It embodied the Progressive-era conviction that organized women could shape the life of a community.

Teague, TX

Llewellyn Notley (1888-1970) was a Texas-born educator and scholar who took bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Texas and spent more than four decades, from 1912 to 1953, as a teacher and school administrator. In his later years he devoted himself to local history, chairing the Freestone County Historical Survey Committee and helping lead a railroad museum association. His civic and historical work earned him a string of awards.

San Marcos, TX

Local banker Lloyd G. Johnson and his wife Katherine built this San Marcos home in 1919–1920, hiring noted architect Atlee B. Ayres, who blended informal Mediterranean styling with classical detail and a formal, symmetrical plan. The Masonic Lodge No. 342 bought the house in 1937 and met here until 1990, when it returned to private hands as a family residence once more.

San Antonio, TX

In 1934 the Works Progress Administration built this limestone auditorium on the old Locke Hill school grounds, its walls raised by federal workers from stone cut at a nearby quarry. Answering the county superintendent's push for better schools, the building became a gathering place for the whole community. When postwar growth outran the campus, the school was rebuilt nearby in 1976, but the New Deal auditorium remained as a reminder of a hard time when public work put people to build lasting things.

Jefferson, TX

Royal and Martha Lockett came to Texas from Georgia in the late 1850s with their eleven surviving children and the people they enslaved, and seven of their eight living sons went on to serve in the Confederate Army. The earliest marked grave is that of young Walter R. McGarity, a Lockett grandson who died in 1862. Family memory holds that a Union soldier who died on the Lockett Plantation was also buried here, and by 1999 the grounds held Confederate and World War II veterans among six generations of descendants.

Lockett Community, TX

Named for the Lockett families who settled here in 1888, this Wilbarger County farming community grew from a scattering of pioneer homesteads into a network of schools, churches, cotton gins, blacksmith shops, and general stores. Farming that began behind a yoke of oxen gave way over the decades to modern tractor equipment, and the Lockett Seed Company grew into a hub later acquired by Pioneer Hi-Bred as a cotton-breeding headquarters. Consolidating school districts and a Texas A&M agricultural research center capped the community's evolution across nearly a century.

Cuero, TX

These three acres are the oldest known African American burial ground in DeWitt County, tied to the once-thriving farming community of Lockhart whose earliest settlers included sharecroppers and former slaves. Formally purchased in 1910 by the Lockhart Colored Cemetery Association, the grounds hold 263 known graves—among them many veterans and Paul Wimbish, a former slave who became a successful county businessman. Handmade concrete headstones with decorative tilework and hand-etched inscriptions exemplify a Southern folk tradition of memorializing family and faith.

Galveston, TX

This Queen Anne residence began before 1889 as a modest one-story cottage and was transformed around 1894 by raising the original section to a second floor over a new ground level. Its owner, William B. Lockhart, was a son-in-law of Walter Gresham — builder of Galveston's famed Bishop's Palace — and rose to prominence as a county and federal judge, as did his son John after him. The house stands as a survivor of Galveston's Gilded Age prosperity.

Chappell Hill, TX

Dr. John W. Lockhart, a Chappell Hill physician and frequent host to Sam Houston, built this home in 1850 from cedar and black walnut hand-cut on the property. The house anchored a self-sufficient 1,000-acre place complete with its own blacksmith shop, cotton gin, and store. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark of the antebellum plantation era.

Lockhart, TX

Built in 1923 for Lockhart's African American students—reportedly with materials salvaged from a former white school—this two-story brick and stucco schoolhouse was designed and partly funded through the Rosenwald Foundation, with the district and Black citizens raising the rest. Before it opened, Black children had studied in scattered churches, lodges, and even a funeral parlor. Accredited in 1926 and renamed G.W. Carver High School in 1946, it closed with integration in 1964 and later housed a Head Start program.

San Antonio, TX

One of the oldest public schools in Texas, Lockhill has taught children continuously since 1868, when classes were first held in a former supply depot. It took its name from William J. Locke, who donated the land, and for a time was called 'Shavano.' The present building went up in 1923, and in 1985 the school's marker, gates, and archway were moved from the original site a mile away to keep the history close.

Robert Lee, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1849, Locklin Bartholomew Murray came to Texas as a boy and, by about 1888, settled to ranch in the Yellow Wolf Valley near Sanco. In 1894 the citizens of Coke County elected him sheriff and tax collector, and he held the office through four straight terms until 1902, building a reputation as an honest and effective lawman. He and his wife Susan raised seven children to adulthood on the frontier.

San Gabriel, TX

This burying ground grew from the earliest days of Anglo settlement in Milam County, on land tied to a Mexican grant Abigale McLennan Fokes acquired in 1835. The first recorded burial, in 1844, was blacksmith Peter M. Mercer, and Fokes later set the site aside as a cemetery. Named for the family of pioneer William Lawson Locklin, it holds some 400 graves, including veterans of the Texas Revolution and the Republic of Texas Army.

Henderson, TX

Henry T. Lockridge settled in Rusk County in the 1850s and, after serving in the Confederate Army, bought the land in 1863 where he and his wife Jane spent the rest of their lives. The family cemetery on that property holds its oldest marked grave from 1881, though earlier burials are believed to lie there. Long inactive after the 1940s, it saw new burials again beginning in 2004, and much of the surrounding land is still owned by Lockridge descendants.

Manor, TX

This cemetery lies on land settled in 1833 by Gordon C. Jennings and his family, who came from Missouri as part of Stephen F. Austin's "Little Colony." Gordon became the oldest defender to die at the Alamo in 1836, while his young daughter Catherine earned lasting local fame for riding to warn neighbors as the Mexican army advanced during the Runaway Scrape. Catherine later married Sylvester Lockwood, and their descendants still tend the graves of these Texas pioneers.

Livingston, TX

Built in 1911 by Philadelphia's Baldwin Locomotive Works, this engine first hauled timber in Florida before being bought in the 1920s for the Carter-Kelley Lumber Company's East Texas operations. Running on the Houston, East and West Texas Railway between mill towns in Angelina and Polk counties, it carried logs and finished lumber—much of it first dragged from the woods by oxen. It stayed in service until 1952, a workhorse of the region's booming timber industry.

Elmo, TX

Founded in the 1800s, Locust Grove grew into a typical East Texas farming community with a sawmill, stores, a doctor, three churches, and a two-story building that doubled as schoolhouse and Baptist church. A post office opened in 1893 under postmaster James Hiram Hughes, and the community was later renamed Hiram in his honor. Today the Locust Grove Baptist Church, whose 1919 church house still stands, and its cemetery are the community's remaining landmarks.

Fredericksburg, TX

The log room and loft at the heart of this house were raised by German emigrant Gerhard Rörig during Fredericksburg's very first winter of 1846–47, when the settlement was only weeks old. The cabinetmaker Johann Martin Loeffler later added the rock-and-half-timber rooms and cooking fireplace typical of the German Hill Country, and the Loeffler-Weber family kept it as a home or weekend "Sunday House" for ninety years. It is a living record of German building traditions transplanted to Texas.

Dallas, TX

At the "Three Forks" of the Trinity River, colonists of the Peters Colony began arriving after 1841, drawn by land grants that required them to farm a few acres and raise "a good and comfortable cabin." The surrounding forests of oak, cedar, walnut, and bois d'arc supplied the timber, and John Neely Bryan's 1842 cabin marked the beginnings of Dallas. Within a decade milled lumber and brick were replacing logs, and an 1860 fire swept away most of the town's original cabins.

Temple, TX

Dr. Arthur Carroll Scott, co-founder of the renowned Scott and White Hospital, used this cabin from the 1920s until his death in 1940 as a private study and retreat. Assembled from two old log corn cribs and warmed by a fireplace of stones brought by rock-collecting friends, it stood in an oak grove where a farm bell, not a telephone, summoned him for emergencies. Trained at Bellevue and once chief surgeon for the Santa Fe Railway, Scott helped grow a small 1904 sanitarium into one of the nation's foremost medical centers.

Burnet, TX

Logan Vandeveer came from Kentucky in 1833 and was badly wounded fighting for Texas independence at San Jacinto in 1836. Settling in Burnet County to sell beef to nearby Fort Croghan in 1849, he helped organize the county and served as the town's first postmaster. In the early 1850s he built this house near Hamilton Creek for a daughter; the Burnet County Historical Society moved it here in 1973, flooring its porch with stones from an early county courthouse.

Lakeway, TX

John Henry Lohmans left Hanover, Germany, for the Republic of Texas in 1842, first running a dairy farm near Austin before pushing west in 1867 to carve a homestead from the timbered hills above the Colorado River. A road-builder as well as a farmer, he personally financed Lohmans Ford Road, one strand in the web of early crossings that let settlers and goods move through this rugged country. Today's Lohmans Crossing Road still traces the general path of that pioneer route.

Lohn, TX

German immigrant Boi Albert Cornils arrived in this area in 1884 and married Bertha Lembke, another young immigrant, settling on ranchland east of Lohn. In 1896 the couple deeded five acres for a free public school beside an existing community burial ground on their property. Now holding several hundred graves, many of them veterans', the cemetery keeps the memory of Lohn and its people.

Athens, TX

The first recorded burial at Lollar Cemetery was the 1867 interment of John S. Partin, infant son of Samuel and Elizabeth Partin, on land then owned by Asa Dalton. The cemetery is thought to be named for neighbor John Lollar, whose farm lay just across the Van Zandt County line, though whether he rests here is unknown. Serving families such as the Fanchers, Brannans, Drivers, and Lewises for more than seventy-five years, it received its last burial—Eli Lollar Fancher—in 1944.

Tilden, TX

Settlers began moving into this stretch of McMullen County ranch country in the early 1880s, naming the place Loma Alta for its high hills. A school opened in 1896 and moved several times before consolidation in 1943, while a post office operated only from 1910 to 1921. Together the two institutions anchored a large, sparsely settled ranching area.

Three Rivers, TX

Beginning in 1973, highway-department archeologists excavating here uncovered a Native American burial ground used across many centuries, with graves in two soil layers dating to roughly 850 B.C. and 250 B.C. The people were hunter-gatherers who took deer and bison with dart-tipped spears; some two hundred graves held sewing and cooking tools, shell ornaments, and red and yellow pigment. A few men were buried with white-tailed deer antler racks, a sign of high status, and trade goods reveal exchange with distant coastal and interior groups.

Rio Frio, TX

In 1868, just after the Civil War, the Lombardy Irrigation Company dug a two-mile ditch by pick and shovel to bring water to more than 800 acres of the Frio River valley. Beyond irrigation, the ditch powered a cotton gin and grist, flour, and shingle mills, and the settlement that grew around it was simply called "The Ditch" until a post office gave it the name Rio Frio in 1875. For a century afterward the same channel watered lands held by descendants of its founders.

Lometa, TX

Lometa owes its existence to the railroad: in 1885 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe pushed northwest from Temple and planted a depot in open ranch country. Platted in 1886 and renamed Lometa, from the Spanish for 'little mountain,' the town drew residents away from nearby Senterfitt and became a thriving trade center for cotton, cattle, wool, and mohair. Rail branches and, later, state and federal highways kept goods and travelers flowing through the town for generations.

Harlingen, TX

Lon C. Hill built the first home in Harlingen in 1904—and, in a sense, built the town itself. A tireless promoter of railroads and irrigation, he helped transform the lower Rio Grande Valley from arid brushland into productive farm country. His climate-adapted Victorian house became a gathering place where valley pioneers met to plan the developments that would shape the region.

Jacksonville, TX

Founded in Kilgore in 1875 by pioneer educator Dr. Isaac Alexander, this Methodist school became the oldest junior college in Texas. It moved to Jacksonville in 1894, operated as a junior college from 1912, and was renamed to honor Pittsburg banker R. A. "Lon" Morris in 1924. It was the first Texas junior college with a Phi Theta Kappa scholarship chapter and among the longest-standing members of the Southern Association of Colleges.

New London, TX

Founded in 1856 in the piney woods of East Texas, London Baptist Church took root in a frontier era when congregations often shared quarters — here with an Odd Fellows Lodge in a building along the Henderson-to-Waco stagecoach road. Fire claimed the structure in 1877, but the congregation rebuilt in 1897 and thrived when the great East Texas oil strike of 1930 turned sleepy London into a boom town. Through fire, rebuilding, and sudden petroleum prosperity, the church remained a fixture of community worship and outreach.

London, TX

In the early days of Kimble County a ranching couple turned their hotel and wagon yard into a trade center, where the wife gathered the neighborhood's mail. In 1882 she formalized the arrangement and became the first postmaster of the new London post office. Its central location made the settlement the direct road between Mason and Junction, and postmasters served it for well over a century.

London, TX

Laid out around 1878 as the hoped-for courthouse square of a proposed county, this town took the name London after the postmaster's first choice honoring his wife was rejected by postal authorities. Sitting astride the Western Cattle Trail, London counted trail drivers among its residents and sold supplies to crews pushing longhorn herds north, supporting a blacksmith, stores, a cotton gin, churches, and a school. A future Texas governor spent part of his childhood here.

Llano, TX

Among Llano County's early rural schools, Lone Grove sat on a main road between Llano and Burnet and grew important enough to become district number two when the county was divided in 1884. The surviving schoolhouse dates to 1910 and, in 1937, was one of only two county rural schools to offer high-school courses before consolidating with Llano in 1947.

Lone Oak, TX

Organized in 1858, Lone Oak Baptist Church gathered a small circle of Hunt County pioneers around its first pastor, Thomas Hooker, on land donated by the McBride family. The original building later burned, and the congregation raised the present church in 1899. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1970.

Snook, TX

Traveling preachers served the Lone Oak community until residents organized a Baptist church in 1905. In 1911 they called the Rev. A.S. Broaddus, who led the congregation for an extraordinary 42 years — stepping away only to serve as a U.S. Army chaplain in both World Wars. Multi-day summer revivals, with family camping, brush-arbor services, and dinner on the grounds, marked the rhythm of church life.

Kemp, TX

In 1858, passing strangers lost a son to sudden death, and settler Weaver A. Cotton befriended them by providing a grave beside a tree near the log school-and-church building. He later gave the community a burial ground, deeded in 1883. Cotton, his family, and many other pioneers rest here.

Geronimo, TX

In January 1897, German immigrant families around Geronimo gathered at the Specht School and formed a 'friedhof gesellschaft,' or cemetery association, to establish a community burial ground. Within a week they bought five acres from Ernst Puls and named it Lone Oak Cemetery, where the first burial—the infant son of Ernst and Bertha Puls—took place the next year. More than 900 people now rest here, including reinterred graves from older sites.

Mart, TX

This McLennan County burial ground began as land bought in 1880 by trustees of the Lone Oak School for a church and school. It was pressed into use as a cemetery by September 1881, when the infant son of the Goodman family was laid to rest here. Confederate veterans and a lone Union veteran of the Civil War also lie among the pioneer dead.

Palestine, TX

This congregation traces its beginnings to worshipers who gathered in the early 1890s in a schoolhouse at a spot known as Rocky Point. When the church bought land in 1903, a single pine tree standing on the property gave it the name Lone Pine Baptist Church, and the congregation was formally organized in 1908 with thirty-four charter members under the Rev. A. M. Thompson. From a dirt-floored "tabernacle" built in 1920 the church grew steadily, dedicating a new auditorium in 1957, and it has served the community for well over eight decades.

New Summerfield, TX

Founded before the Civil War with the earthy nickname "Skin Tight," this community took the name Lone Star when its post office opened in 1883 and blossomed into a center of trade, education, and culture. At its height it boasted businesses, a public school, four churches, two lodges, and the Lone Star Institute. A devastating 1893 fire, a railroad that passed it by, and disappointing oil prospects each drained away its future.

Anahuac, TX

In the early 1900s, east Chambers County was becoming rice country, but the crop needs a steady supply of fresh water. Beginning in 1902, Berriman Richard Garland and A. L. Williams dug this canal from the mouth of Turtle Bay to irrigate the fields, and by 1904 the Lone Star Canal Company was shipping rice out by sailing vessel. Salt water intruding during dry seasons repeatedly killed crops, prompting a dam, locks, and a river district to manage the water. Through hurricanes, closures, and changing owners the canal endured and still serves the region's farms and industry.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1851 Corpus Christi founder Henry L. Kinney launched the ambitious Lone Star Fair to boost his young town's economy and lure new settlers — while quietly recruiting men for General José M. J. Carbajal's revolt in northern Mexico. Kinney went deep into debt building racetracks and pavilions, enlisting former governors to promote it, and staged bullfights, circus acts, and stock shows when the fair opened in May 1852. He hoped for 30,000 visitors; barely 2,000 came, and the failure bankrupted him.

Denison, TX

Chartered on June 6, 1874, just a year after Denison itself was founded, Lone Star Masonic Lodge grew alongside the young railroad town. Its members met in several locations before raising this brick hall, built in two stages in 1900 and 1915 and topped by a distinctive bracketed eave. The completed hall was dedicated on New Year's Eve 1915, with ceremonies carrying into the first day of 1916.

Hermleigh, TX

Named for the Kiowa chief Lone Wolf, whose people ranged across this stretch of West Texas until the 1870s, this community took root when settler John Mahoney donated land for a cemetery and school. A one-room schoolhouse rose in 1901, doubling as a church, and a store, post office, and scattered farms soon followed. The little settlement gradually faded as its school consolidated, but its pioneer cemetery, with graves dating to 1892, still serves area families.

Loraine, TX

This mountain bears the name of Lone Wolf, a Kiowa chief held as a hostage by General Custer following the Washita campaign and later released. After his son was killed, Lone Wolf vowed revenge on white settlers, and a clash occurred along the El Paso Road north of Fort Concho near this landmark. The chief died in 1879.

Rising Star vicinity, TX

Long Branch Baptist Church was formally organized on July 16, 1885, holding its first services in an old schoolhouse on land given by R. B. Covington. Thirteen charter members were led by the church's first minister, W. B. Cobb, and missionary pastors kept up monthly services in the years that followed. The congregation built its first sanctuary on this site in 1905–06 and long served the surrounding Long Branch community.

Reagan, TX

Founded by former slaves in connection with a Methodist Episcopal church, this three-acre burial ground served the Black community of Long Branch for more than a century. Families who had come from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia by 1870 built a two-room school, chose teachers from their own ranks, farmed as tenants, and gradually became landowners. Their sons served in every American conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam—including Anthony Shaw of the 104th U.S. Colored Infantry—and among those buried here is Silvia King, who recorded her remarkable life story before her death in the 1930s.

Cumby, TX

In the late 1830s, Texas Rangers camped in a grove of blackjack oaks west of present-day Cumby, and settlers gathered nearby for protection at a place called Black Jack Grove. To the south, James M. and Mary Long settled along Turkey Creek in the 1850s, reportedly setting aside land around 1860 to bury a girl who died as her family passed through. The oldest marked grave belongs to John M. Webb (d. 1869), and among later burials rest Civil War veterans and Woodmen of the World members.

Lometa, TX

Founded in 1876 as Sims Creek Baptist Church by the noted early Texas minister Noah T. Byars, this congregation of eight charter members grew under a succession of itinerant preachers. For decades it worshipped in the Long Cove schoolhouse, which doubled as the community's social hub until fire claimed it in 1925. A wooden sanctuary followed, but by 1981 the dwindling flock voted to disband, leaving a cemetery holding Civil War and World War II veterans among the rural pioneers.

Granbury, TX

Also called Temple Hall Cemetery, this burial ground is the last trace of two vanished pioneer settlements—Temple Hall and Center Mill—that grew up along Long Creek in the mid-1800s. Its earliest known graves are the Haley children, who died in 1864 and 1865, and it holds judges, county officials, mill builder Thomas Parkinson, and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. A cemetery association has tended the grounds since about 1909.

Sunnyvale, TX

Long Creek Cemetery grew out of the mid-19th-century Mercer Colony settlement, where Black Hawk War veteran Capt. A. Webb established a homestead and was joined by his father-in-law, War of 1812 veteran Benjamin Crownover. The first burial came in 1855, when Crownover's daughter Leona Caldwell was laid to rest beneath a pecan tree; Webb later deeded land for a school, church, and public burial ground that became the heart of the Long Creek community. Generations of area families, ministers, teachers, and members of fraternal orders lie here, and an association formed in 1910 still tends the grounds.

Marquez, TX

Named for the pioneer Long family, this Leon County settlement of farm families centered on a school built in the 1880s that doubled as church and community hall. When it burned in 1918 neighbors rebuilt it larger together, and a store so small that customers were served through a window kept the community supplied — until the school consolidated with Marquez in 1929 and the little store closed with it.

Lampasas, TX

Pleasant C. Cox first saw this land in the 1830s and returned by wagon train from Missouri in 1851, settling here and helping petition for the creation of Lampasas County in 1856. Most of the dozens of graves on his patented land are unmarked, the earliest belonging to a Cox child; his widow, Martha Jane, was the last laid to rest here in 1912. Limestone markers, fieldstones, and interior fencing still record a founding pioneer family.