Historic Markers in Texas

Kerens, TX

In 1870 Lawrence S. Taylor sold five acres for school and church use, and the site soon served the Long Prairie community as schoolhouse, Methodist church, and graveyard together. The first burial, in 1872, was a child, Sallie K. Burt. Fraternal emblems and veterans' graves—reaching back to the Civil War—still mark the ground, also known as Alligator Cemetery.

Karnack, TX

When the United States braced for World War II, the Army turned to Monsanto to run a new East Texas plant that poured out more than 400 million pounds of TNT between 1941 and 1945. The site never truly stood down: it made propellant during the Korean War, and from 1956 Thiokol built solid-fuel rocket motors here, employing nearly 3,000 workers by the Vietnam era. Fittingly, in 1988 it became the first place on American soil where U.S. Pershing missiles were destroyed under an arms-reduction treaty with the Soviet Union.

Burnet, TX

When Longhorn Cavern became a state park in 1932, the young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps arrived to develop it. Between 1934 and 1942, CCC Company 854 explored the cave and, using hand labor and native stone, raised this rustic pavilion in the style the National Park Service made famous. It served as park offices for decades.

Burnet, TX

Long before it became a tourist attraction, this Hill Country cavern sheltered a remarkable cast of characters. Native peoples knew it well, Texas Rangers reportedly rescued a captive here, and Confederates manufactured gunpowder in its chambers during the Civil War. Later, outlaws said to include the Sam Bass gang hid in its depths, and it even housed a nightclub before opening to the public in 1932.

Santa Maria, TX

The Longoria family were among the first Spanish colonists to settle the lower Rio Grande in the mid-1700s, helping found communities such as Reynosa and bringing the cattle-ranching techniques of southern Spain to the region. In 1831 Irineo Longoria expanded the family's holdings north of the river, and generations of Longorias ranched, farmed, and built early irrigation works around Santa Maria. This cemetery, holding an estimated 371 graves, was restored by descendants to preserve their heritage.

Longview, TX

When surveyors laid out this East Texas townsite in 1870, they named it for the long view from Rock Hill, and the settlement incorporated the following year as the seat of Gregg County. Railroads, lumber, and cotton built the early town, which saw the notorious Dalton Gang stage its final raid on a local bank in 1894 and raised two future Texas governors. The 1931 Lathrop well nearby pushed the East Texas oil field into the largest in the world, transforming Longview into a petroleum and financial hub.

Longview, TX

Soon after Longview's federation of Women's Clubs organized in 1934, its members began raising money for a community center, ultimately supplying matching funds that persuaded the Gregg County commissioners to help build the structure in 1940. The building offered an auditorium, foyer, kitchen, dining rooms, and a drawing room for civic life. A fine example of the Moderne style, it features vertically banded windows with circular accents and a streamlined cornice.

Longview, TX

Longview Junction sprang up in the 1870s where the Texas & Pacific and International & Great Northern railroad lines met, drawing churches, hotels, boardinghouses, and businesses to serve workers and travelers. A mule-powered street railway ran from 1883 to 1912, linking the junction to downtown Longview. Annexed by the city in 1904, the community kept its own identity until automobiles gave people the mobility to move beyond it.

Longview, TX

Longview incorporated in 1871 and had volunteer firefighters by 1887, but nothing prepared it for the 1930s, when the East Texas oil boom flooded the town with people and money. The 1905 city hall quickly proved too small, so voters approved bonds for a new seat of government, completed in 1936 with a red tile roof and fossilized-limestone veneer blending Neoclassical and Mediterranean styling. The building housed both city offices and the central fire station.

Longview, TX

Longview owes its existence to the railroad: in 1870 O. H. Methvin deeded 150 acres to the Southern Pacific, and by 1871 the town had become the line's western terminus, soon a junction where the International & Great Northern crossed. The Texas and Pacific replaced an 1874 station with the Colonial Revival depot completed in 1940, whose passengers reached the platform through a tunnel and whose walls bore stylized quoins, keystones, and grey stone trim. Once boasting three depots, Longview retains only this one — the last survivor of the railway network that created the town.

Longview, TX

Opened in 1930 on Gum Street as the Longview Negro High School, this campus gave African American students a secondary education in the era of legal segregation. Rebuilt after a 1946 fire and later renamed for beloved teacher Mary C. Womack, it produced graduates guided by principals honored in the East Texas Black Educators Hall of Fame. A federal desegregation order finally closed and razed the school.

Westhoff, TX

Established in 1879, this DeWitt County burial ground served the rural families who had settled the surrounding ranch country in the decades after the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, it preserves a quiet record of the community that took root here in the late nineteenth century.

Lorena, TX

Lorena Cemetery was set aside in 1881 by pioneer Daniel Aerl just as railroad financier Gen. Grenville M. Dodge bought sixty acres and platted a town along his Missouri, Kansas and Texas line. Dodge named the village for Lorena Westbrook Robertson, a local landowner's daughter who is buried here, and the ground fills with the graves of pioneer families, community founders, and veterans, its earliest burials the infant Lemuel Crook and young Jacky Pool.

Lorena, TX

Organized in 1881, the Lorena United Methodist congregation first shared the local Baptist building before erecting its own sanctuary in 1886. The design owed its distinctive look to plans brought from the English home church of trustee Herbert J. Hudson, a devout Methodist layman from Cambridge who had come to Lorena in 1877 to run a store and private bank. Dedicated by Bishop A.W. Wilson, the church grew over the decades with classroom annexes that kept faith with the 1886 style, all while remaining woven into the town's civic life.

Lorenzo, TX

Lorenzo sprang to life on April 10, 1911, the day the Crosbyton-South Plains Railway ran its first train to the spot. It took its name from Lorenzo Dow, an employee of the livestock company that promoted the townsite and, in 1914, urged local farmers to plant cotton. Incorporated in 1924, the little High Plains town grew into a cotton-farming center with its own churches, school, and businesses.

Lorenzo, TX

After the Texas Legislature carved out the Crosby Land District in 1876, ranchers spread across the Panhandle, and in 1890 a group of Chicago and New York investors formed the C.B. Livestock Company. Planning a rail line from Crosbyton to Lubbock in 1910, the company platted towns along the route and named this one for its attorney, Lorenzo Dow. It deeded land here for a community cemetery in 1916, where a child lost to whooping cough was reportedly the first laid to rest.

Houston, TX

Lorenzo de Zavala was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the first vice president of the Republic of Texas. His plank-covered log house near Harrisburg, built in 1829, sheltered the wounded as a hospital after the decisive 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, and it was there that de Zavala died that November.

Houston, TX

Born in Mexico in 1789, Lorenzo de Zavala was a statesman of two nations — a liberal reformer who served in the Spanish Cortes, as Mexico's treasury minister, and as ambassador to France before Santa Anna's tyranny drove him to Texas in 1835. There he threw himself into the cause of independence, signed the Texas Declaration, and became the Republic's first vice-president; his home near the San Jacinto battleground served as a hospital for both sides after the fighting.

Victoria, TX

Lorenzo Dow Heaton came to Texas from New York as a boy, clerked in his brother's Port Lavaca drug store, and by 1870 had opened a Heaton Bros. pharmacy of his own in Victoria. He built this house facing the old Market Square in the late 1870s from hand-hewn lumber and square nails, expanding it with porches and fireplaces over two decades. Its Southern Colonial pillars and Georgian entrance make it one of the very few Victoria homes surviving from that era.

Hitchcock, TX

The education of Hitchcock's African American children began in 1903 in a private home and a Baptist church annex, and a permanent school opened in 1914 after residents raised money through fish fries and other fundraisers to buy the lot. Long known as the Hitchcock Colored School, it was renamed in 1949 for beloved teacher and principal Lorraine Crosby. Despite scarce funding, staff and families built up sports teams and a scout troop; the school graduated classes from 1960 until integration in the mid-1960s.

Los Ebanos, TX

This bend of the Rio Grande has been crossed for centuries, first recorded when José de Escandón's Spanish colonists forded here in the 1740s along a route that also carried a salt trail to El Sal del Rey. Over the generations it saw Mexican War troops in 1846, Texas Rangers chasing cattle rustlers in 1874, and smugglers during Prohibition. A licensed ferry and inspection station opened in 1950, and the hand-pulled crossing—named for the ebony trees on its banks—is said to be the only government-licensed, hand-operated ferry on any U.S. border.

La Joya, TX

In 1749 the Spanish colonizer José de Escandón founded Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Reynosa on the Rio Grande, and surveyors laid out more than 10,000 acres of Los Ejidos—town commons—alongside 80 riverfront porciones so every settler had water access. Beyond ranching and farming, the commons served as a hub of the regional salt trade, while its mission, San Joaquín del Monte, worked to Christianize local tribes and taught settlers' children. After flooding forced the villa to move in 1802, the old lands gave rise to communities like La Joya, Abram-Perezville, and Peñitas that endure today.

Seguin, TX

This one-room adobe house was built in 1849 for German immigrant Justus Gombert in the young town of Seguin, later stuccoed and enlarged over the years. After the Civil War it served as a campground for the Freedmen's Bureau, and Texas Ranger captain Ben McCulloch briefly owned it in 1870. Threatened with demolition, 'Los Nogales'—Spanish for walnuts—became the first preservation project of the Seguin Conservation Society in 1952.

Mirando City vicinity, TX

For thousands of years the springs of Los Ojuelos were a rare and precious source of water in arid South Texas. A Spanish land grant reached the site in 1810, but Comanche resistance blocked settlement until a Texas Ranger outpost under "Rip" Ford arrived in 1850, letting José María Guerra build the caliche chapel and ranch structures that survive as some of the region's finest Spanish-Mexican architecture. Over the decades the village thrived on the peyote trade—long central to Native American ritual—until oil drilling and the drying of the springs left it nearly abandoned by the 1930s.

San Elizario, TX

Around 1855 the farmer and rancher Gregorio Nacenseno García built this territorial-style adobe as his family home, its distinctive inset gallery — the portal — giving it the name Los Portales. By the 1870s it had become a schoolhouse, and its first teacher, Octaviano Larrazolo, went on to serve as governor of New Mexico and a United States senator. The building ties the Hispanic ranching world of the Rio Grande to a nationally significant political career.

Alice, TX

In 1831, while Texas was still part of Mexico, Marcelino Lopez of Camargo secured a land grant from the state of Tamaulipas and founded Los Preseños on San Fernando Creek. The little settlement thrived on a trade route linking Corpus Christi with Laredo, San Diego, and Eagle Pass, and appeared on maps for nearly half a century. When N.G. Collins bought out the Lopez family in 1877 and platted the town of Collins, Los Preseños faded into memory.

Wichita Falls, TX

The men of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery—many of them Texans from the Wichita Falls area—were captured by Japanese forces on Java in March 1942, in the opening months of America's Pacific war. Held prisoner for three and a half brutal years, the survivors were not freed until Japan's surrender in September 1945. Their fate was so obscured during the war that they became known as the 'Lost Battalion.'

May, TX

The first burial ground here began in the 1870s as Hog Creek Cemetery, sited about a half-mile away until rocky soil prompted the community to move it after only two graves. The relocated plot took its first burial in 1874 and was formally deeded to Brown County in 1892 for cemetery and church use. A chapel followed by 1932, and when the local association reorganized in 1949 it renamed both itself and the cemetery Lost Creek.

Bastrop, TX

The Lost Pines are an island of loblolly forest stranded some 80 miles west of the main Texas pine belt, likely a surviving remnant of vast prehistoric woodlands. Explorer Zebulon Pike noted the trees in 1807, and by the 19th century they had become the backbone of the local economy, their lumber floated out by riverboat and hauled by ox-wagon across Texas. Ideal soil and moisture have kept this ancient stand intact where the surrounding forests long ago retreated eastward.

Groesbeck, TX

Established by volunteers in 1846 and, by legend, named when a man lost in the woods stumbled onto the open prairie, this site holds the graves of many early settlers — among them Azariah G. Moore, a soldier of the Texas War for Independence. A Baptist church stood here from about 1850, and the present sanctuary is the fourth to serve the congregation. One early member, A. J. Rogers, was made a deacon after returning home from the Civil War.

Jacksboro vicinity, TX

Ringed by distant "Seven Blue Hills" and overlooked by a lookout point called Spy Knob, Lost Valley saw repeated violence on the Texas frontier. Settler families were killed here in 1857, teamsters of the Warren Wagon Train were slain in 1871 just after General W. T. Sherman had passed safely through, and in 1874 a Texas Ranger escort under Major John B. Jones was ambushed on this ground. In later years the same valley settled into quiet farm and ranch country.

Lott, TX

Lott sprang to life in 1889 as a planned stop on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad, laid out on a straight line between Cameron and Waco. The Texas Townsite Company bought pioneer land, gave the railroad its right-of-way, and named the new town for railroad president Uriah Lott. Businesses, a post office, a school, churches, and a volunteer fire department followed in quick succession, and the town was incorporated in 1890.

Beeville, TX

Black education in Bee County began in 1876 in Stephen Canada's store, then a small frame schoolhouse, chartered by the county as "Colored Community School Twelve." A larger frame school followed on North Burke Street, where principal J.R. Lockett matched the offerings of the town's white schools until fire destroyed it in 1929. With help from the Chicago-based Julius Rosenwald Fund, a brick school with four classrooms and an auditorium opened in 1931, named for carpenters Mose Lott and Allen Canada — serving until integration closed it in 1964.

Goliad, TX

Acquired in 1896 and soon renamed for a local African American family, Lott Cemetery holds the graves of trail drivers, cattle-industry workers, and everyday families whose modest wooden crosses and sculpted obelisks trace the ups and downs of the local economy. When the 1902 tornado destroyed a nearby Methodist church and neighborhood, several dozen victims were buried in a communal grave along its eastern edge. Among those resting here are more than thirty veterans, two centenarians, and a man known only as "Bingo," raised by a prominent cattleman's wife.

Mineola, TX

Angus and Lena Beaird began this house in 1918, completing it in the early 1920s, before selling it in 1928 to Howard and Vivian Lott, prominent figures in the growth of Mineola and Wood County. Its Prairie School influences show in the hipped roof with dormers and a central front porch framed by boxed columns and a pedimented entry, softened by classical detailing. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1996.

Kilgore, TX

Built in 1920 on the former site of the Hearne Hotel, this bungalow was home to Lou Della Crim, whose farm south at Laird Hill became the stage for history. On December 28, 1930, the Bateman-Crim Wildcat Well No. 1 blew in on her land — the discovery well for this part of the colossal East Texas oil field. As the boom convulsed Kilgore, this house even quartered the Texas Rangers, including the legendary Capt. M. T. "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas, sent to keep order.

Laird Hill, TX

After oil was discovered in East Texas in October 1930, Kilgore businessman J. Malcolm Crim bet there was more to find and began drilling on land owned by his mother, Lou Della Crim. The well came in on December 28, 1930, and the strike sent Kilgore's population rocketing from 700 to 10,000 in three days. Producing 20,000 barrels a day, Lou Della Crim No. 1 helped prove the East Texas oil field to be one of the largest ever found, spanning more than 480 square miles before the well was plugged in 1961.

Corpus Christi, TX

Prussian-born Louis de Planque came to the Rio Grande borderlands during the Civil War, when Confederate cotton pouring through Brownsville and Matamoros made boomtowns of both. He photographed Union and Confederate troops alike and weathered devastating hurricanes in 1867 and 1875 that twice destroyed his studios. Rebuilding each time, the flamboyant "Don Luis" spent his final decades as Corpus Christi's celebrated portrait photographer, training his wife Eugenie to carry on the business.

Castroville, TX

Louis Haller was a teenager when he emigrated from France to the Alsatian colony at Castroville in 1845, part of Henri Castro's ambitious settlement scheme on the Texas frontier. He scouted for the Texas Rangers and hauled freight during the Civil War before marrying Leonie Naegelin and raising a family in this limestone house, built around 1877. Its distinctive corner fireplace, whose chimney angles up through the wall to emerge at the roof peak, marks it as a fine example of the region's Alsatian-influenced pioneer craftsmanship.

New Braunfels, TX

Built in 1893 by noted local contractor Christian Herry, this Victorian storefront in New Braunfels grew out of the family tin shop next door. Its owner, Louis Henne, was part of the German craftsman-merchant tradition that shaped the town, and the enterprise he expanded onto this site has passed through three generations. The building's ornamented facade still advertises the confidence of a Gilded Age Main Street business.

Douglass, TX

A French-Canadian trader and diplomat, Louis Juchereau de St. Denis moved with rare ease among the Spanish, French, and Caddo worlds of the early 18th-century borderlands. Sent from Louisiana after a Spanish priest sought French help, he crossed into Spanish Texas, won over authorities in Mexico City, and guided the 1716 expedition that planted missions and a presidio in East Texas. From his base at Natchitoches he supplied the missions and traded—often illicitly—with the Caddo, becoming both indispensable and, to Spanish eyes, dangerous.

Brenham, TX

German immigrant Louis Lehmann, Sr. built this house in the pioneer Berlin community of Washington County in the 1870s for his wife Friederike and their children. Framed and sided in longleaf pine and cedar, it rests on axe-grooved tree trunks that carry its foundation beams, its original center-passage plan later expanded with added rooms and porches. Lehmann led the Ebenezer Lutheran Church, served in the Confederate Army, and headed the local agricultural association, and the home stayed in his family until 1945.

Waco, TX

Missouri-born Louis Moore came to Texas about 1834, received a Mexican land grant, and enlisted in the Texas Army in April 1836, guarding the baggage at Harrisburg during the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He later served with the Texas Ranger company that established Fort Fisher, raised nine children, and spent his last years in the Chalk Bluff community.

Galveston, TX

Louis Trezevant Wigfall (1816–1874) was a South Carolina–born lawyer and firebrand who rose through Texas politics to the U.S. Senate, where he became one of the most uncompromising voices for Southern secession. On the eve of the Civil War he famously rowed out to Fort Sumter as an aide to General Beauregard to press its surrender, then served the Confederacy as a colonel of the 1st Texas Infantry, a brigadier general, and a Confederate senator. Texas placed this marker in 1963.

Sadler, TX

Louis Wilmouth, born in Kentucky in 1806, was among the Texan volunteers at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence. He lived out his years in Grayson County, dying in 1893, and rests in Harshberg Cemetery near Sadler alongside his wife, Ellen Vittitoe Wilmouth.

Houston, TX

Louis Wiltz Kemp sold asphalt for Texaco, but his real calling was rescuing Texas history from oblivion. Traveling the state for work after 1920, he documented the neglected graves of more than a hundred Texas heroes and arranged their reinterment in the State Cemetery. As chair of the historians' board for the 1936 Centennial he directed the placement of over 1,100 markers and helped create the San Jacinto Monument, where his own words are carved.

Salado, TX

Addie Barton (1858-1921) moved to Salado as a girl so she could attend Salado College, and after graduating she became a teacher. Answering a call to mission work in 1883, she was commissioned by her home Baptist church and went to Saltillo, Mexico, teaching at the Madero Institute and other girls' schools. The upheavals of the Mexican Revolution forced her home in 1910, where she served refugees and the needy until her death.

McMullen County, TX

Born in Philadelphia, Louisa Renshaw Covey came to Texas with her husband in the 1850s as a missionary-teacher and won a reputation as a gifted instructor. Together the couple founded and ran three colleges—Alma Institute at Hallettsville, Concrete College near Cuero during the Civil War, and McMullen College at Tilden in 1881. Her life spanned the hard early decades when Texans built schooling from almost nothing.

Louise, TX

The town of Louise sprang up in 1881 along the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway, named for the daughter of a railroad director and soon a shipping and marketing hub. In 1891 a missionary called local Methodists together to organize a church, and its 1893 building doubled as the public schoolhouse and community gathering place. Moved to its present site in 1940, the church has served the town ever since, still counting descendants of its first families among its members.

Louise, TX

As the town of Louise grew in the early 1900s, it welcomed its first bank, chartered by the state in 1909 and led by president W.F. O'Briant. A two-story brick building attributed to Victoria architect Jules Leffland anchored the commercial district and served the community until 1927. Over the decades the building also housed Louise's first telephone exchange, public library, and post office, making it a hub of local life.

Pharr, TX

After Wisconsin native John Closner built the lower Rio Grande Valley's first steam-powered irrigation system in 1895 and won a prize for his sugar cane at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, investors poured in. In 1909, H. N. Pharr and partners formed the Louisiana-Rio Grande Canal Company, building pumping stations to draw Rio Grande water across some 40,000 acres of arid land and turn it into farms and planned communities. The harvests that followed made the Valley the "Winter Garden" of Texas and drew a wave of Anglo settlers into a largely Hispanic region.

Dallas, TX

Convinced their city's future lay in aviation, Dallas leaders drew crowds to air shows and in 1917 secured a World War I Army flying school, which the Signal Corps named Love Field for Lt. Moss Lee Love, an aviator killed in a 1913 crash. Through the 1920s it hosted flying schools and pioneering air-mail routes and welcomed the likes of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, then served in World War II with a ferrying group, WASP pilots, and a Lockheed modification center. Nearly closed after a larger airport opened in 1973, it revived into one of the nation's busiest airports.

Bremond, TX

Founded by T.W. Parker in 1920 as Bremond Colored High School, this school educated young African Americans during the era of legal segregation, focusing on vocational and agricultural training. It was renamed in the 1940s to honor Charles Love, its longtime principal from 1925 to 1965. The school closed in 1965 when its students integrated into Bremond High School.

Richland, TX

In the volatile years of the Republic of Texas, the Navarro County frontier saw clashes with Native peoples and an empresario contract granted to Charles Fenton Mercer to stabilize settlement, pitting established "old Texian" families like the Loves—veterans of San Jacinto—against later arrivals such as colony agent Dr. William Nicks Anderson. When Love killed Anderson on Nubbin Lane in 1855, the grievance passed to their kin: Anderson's widow vowed revenge, and Love was slain near the same spot in 1873. The bloodshed spread across Texas, and the feud is remembered still among the many descendants living in the area.

Jacksonville, TX

This long ridge, with views stretching thirty miles, guided travelers along an old Indian trail and later a pioneer road through McKee's Gap, named after Thomas McKee led Tennessee Presbyterians here in 1846 to found Larissa. The village thrived as home to Larissa College until the railroad bypassed it. Around 1900 John Wesley Love planted a 600-acre peach orchard here, and after his death the scenic lookout became a public park developed as a WPA project.

Allen, TX

Lovejoy School was born in 1917 when the Forest Grove and Lick Springs districts merged, taking their name from Mrs. J.L. Lovejoy, a local clubwoman who championed education across the area. Grades one through nine met in a four-room "Little Red Schoolhouse" for decades. When new families poured into the rural district in the 1960s, the school expanded to keep pace with its swelling enrollment.

Lovelady, TX

As Lovelady grew into a railroad hub for the surrounding farmland in the 1870s, its residents set aside ground for a community burying place, with land conveyed to the cemetery association in 1878 and again in 1896. The first grave, dated 1878, was that of young Parham Bridges Baker, and by 1885 some twenty graves dotted the ground. A textbook example of an early Texas community graveyard, it remains tended by the local cemetery association.

Brownwood, TX

Scottish-born contractor Tom Lovell built this two-story Brownwood home around 1889, during a career that also produced courthouses, a local Episcopal church, and even a state capitol building in Arizona. In 1902 it passed to the Rev. Charles Holt Dobbs and his wife Elizabeth, Presbyterian missionaries who rode the rural country around Brownwood as traveling teachers. Their daughters Anna and Bess later ran a kindergarten in the house for more than thirty years.

Mentone, TX

Loving County was carved from Tom Green County in 1887 and organized in 1893, in the last decades when the arid Trans-Pecos of West Texas was being fenced, ranched, and settled. It honors Oliver Loving (1812–1867), the pioneering cattleman whose long drives helped open northern markets to Texas herds after the Civil War. Mentone, the county seat, anchors what remains one of the most sparsely populated counties in the United States.

Sunnyvale, TX

James and Margaret Loving came by covered wagon and flatboat from Kentucky to Texas in 1843 as members of the Peters Colony, arriving in still-unorganized Dallas County as its sixteenth family. On a 640-acre grant they built a log cabin, raised corn, wove their own cloth, and even boiled soil from a salt lick to make salt. James was a brother of the famed trail driver Oliver Loving and was killed by a horse thief in 1869.