Historic Markers in Texas

Austin, TX

During the building boom of the 1890s, developer Nichols Dawson raised a row of small stone houses in south Austin, cut from limestone quarried nearby and distinguished by their hexagonal front bays. His partner in the venture was his sister Mary "Molly" Dawson, one of the area's most respected educators, who served as principal of Fullmore School before opening a private school of her own. This surviving residence is a remnant of that family enterprise in brick, stone, and learning.

New Ulm, TX

German immigrants Conrad and Mary Theresa Juergens reached Texas in 1833 and built a cabin near this site. When the Texas Revolution sent settlers fleeing in the 1836 Runaway Scrape, the family stayed — and was raided by Karankawa people. Conrad was wounded and the pregnant Mary was carried off with two stepsons; she bore a daughter, Jane Margret, in captivity before mother and child were ransomed at a Red River trading post. Mary later remarried and died in Ohio in 1891.

Bomarton, TX

When the Wichita Valley Railroad pushed from Seymour to Abilene in 1906, it gave rise to Bomarton and drew settlers to the surrounding Baylor County plains. Trustees organized Mary's Creek School in 1908, one of thirty-eight rural schools in the county, starting with a single room and adding a second by the mid-1920s. Attendance peaked at sixty-nine pupils in 1930 before waves of consolidation eventually folded the district into Seymour.

Burleson, TX

Families settled along spring-fed Quil Miller Creek in the 1850s, and by 1869 Thomas W. Hollingsworth's mill and store gave rise to a town named Marysville—later Marystown—for his wife Mary, the community's first schoolteacher. The cemetery, set aside about 1860, holds pioneer settlers, county founders, Civil War veterans, and some fifteen diphtheria victims from a passing 1870s wagon train. Only the Baptist church and cemetery survive of the once-active settlement.

Mason vicinity, TX

Created and organized in 1858, Mason County took its name from Fort Mason, the frontier post garrisoned on and off from 1851 to 1869. The fort honored Lt. G. T. Mason of the U.S. 2nd Dragoons, killed near Brownsville in 1846. It was one link in a chain of Army posts spaced a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, built to shield settlers from Apache and Comanche raids.

Mason, TX

Completed in 1909, this was the third courthouse to serve Mason County, following a first built in 1872 and a red sandstone successor that replaced it after an 1877 fire. Designed by E. C. Hosford in the Beaux Arts style with a central dome, clock tower, and rusticated stonework, it anchored the county seat until it too was gutted by fire in 2021.

Mason, TX

Mason County's third jail was built in 1894 from brown sandstone quarried in the nearby hills, in a modified Romanesque Revival style marked by a massive entry arch, segmental window arches, and a central tower. Its ground floor held living quarters for the sheriff, while the cells sat on the second story.

Mason, TX

Built in 1869–70 by S. F. "Lace" Bridges, the Mason House served as a hotel and stagecoach stop on the San Antonio to El Paso Road. It offered weary travelers rest and local residents hearty meals, and was marred by a tragic 1900 fire that killed 23-year-old Annie Medlock. Later converted to apartments, it still keeps historic features such as its original kitchen cistern and stone fences.

Post, TX

Dedicated to Garza County pioneers Marshall and Gladys Mason, this building was donated by their children for use as a community museum and recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967. It honors the settler families who helped establish this corner of the West Texas plains in the early 20th century. The gift turned a family memorial into a public keeper of local history.

Mason, TX

Founded in 1904 by pioneer settlers as the German American National Bank of Mason, this institution anchored the finances of a heavily German Hill Country community. Anti-German feeling during World War I pushed the board to rename it Mason National Bank in 1918, even as it led local Liberty Bond drives. It weathered the Great Depression through a 1932 merger and early FDIC certification.

Del Rio, TX

New York transplant James H. Mason built a modest four-room frame house on this Del Rio site soon after buying it in 1887, later developing a spring on the property for mineral baths and a medicinal drink. In 1905 attorney and civic leader John J. Foster bought the place and greatly enlarged it, and his wife Mary added artwork to its interior detailing. The home stayed in the Foster family until 1962.

Kerrville, TX

Built of locally quarried limestone, this late Italianate building went up after Charles Schreiner formed the Kerrville Masonic Company in 1890, its façade dressed with arched openings, stone quoins, and a pressed-metal cornice. Kerrville Lodge No. 697 met on the second floor until 1927, when it moved out and leased the space to the Odd Fellows. The ground floor served the town in turn as post office, C.C. Butt Grocery, and Texas Power and Light, and the property stayed in the Schreiner family until 1959.

Big Spring, TX

After the Staked Plains Lodge was chartered in 1884, its members saw a need for a Masonic burial ground in Big Spring, and lodge member George Bauer donated this land in 1885. The earliest documented grave is that of William Howerton, who died in 1886, and adjoining gifts grew the site into the sixteen-acre Mount Olive Cemetery. Among those laid to rest here are Masons and community leaders, Texas and Pacific Railway employees, and veterans of World War I, World War II, and Vietnam.

Eagle Lake, TX

The Eagle Lake Masonic Lodge purchased this burial ground in 1880, though the earliest known interment here dates to 1867. Its graves gather a remarkable cross-section of local life, from a mayor and U.S. representative to a World War II Women Airforce Service Pilot and the namesake of Oldham County. Curbing, obelisks, and Masonic gravestones still mark the historic grounds, tended today by a cemetery organization.

Gonzales, TX

The Gonzales Masonic Lodge No. 30 bought eleven acres here in 1849 for a cemetery, though two graves already predated the lodge's ownership. Buried among the grounds are veterans of the Texas Revolution—men like Andrew Ponton and Amasa Turner—along with three Texas Masonic grand masters and prominent local citizens. The lodge expanded the site in 1903.

Hondo, TX

In 1859 Freemasons and neighbors in the New Fountain Settlement built a two-story stone church-and-lodge hall here, and Hondo Valley Lodge No. 252 was chartered the next year. The adjoining cemetery opened in 1864 when Junior Warden Rubin Smith was killed by Indians, and twenty-two graves of Masons and their families lie within it—two headstones oddly bearing the Masonic emblem upside down. Though the lodge itself dissolved in 1883, it had already given rise to two daughter lodges nearby.

Lufkin, TX

Completed in 1900 by self-taught Black architect Will Engram—who arrived in Lufkin with a third-grade education and went on to build some hundred homes—this wood-frame hall became the meeting place for North Lufkin's Black fraternal orders, from the Free Masons to the Eastern Stars and Heroines of Jericho. Slated for demolition in the 1970s, it was saved through the efforts of Engram's daughter and now houses a Black History room. It stands among the last turn-of-the-century buildings in the community.

Fort Worth, TX

Springing from the Texas Masons' founding commitment to charity and education, the Grand Lodge planned a home for Masonic widows and orphans in the 1880s and accepted Fort Worth's offer of 200 acres and $5,000 to build it. Construction began in 1898, and a special excursion train carried Masons to the cornerstone ceremony in 1899. Over the decades the institution grew into the Masonic Home and School of Texas, caring for and educating hundreds of children on a campus designed by noted architects and now listed on the National Register.

Matagorda County, TX

Cattleman John Pierce and his Masonic brethren built this two-story hall at Deming's Bridge near the sprawling Pierce Ranch in 1875, sharing the ground floor as a Baptist church and community meeting place. When the town of Blessing was founded around 1903, the building was moved to follow the community. It survives as a rare frame relic of ranch-country civic life in coastal Texas.

Boyd, TX

Built in 1877 at Old Aurora, two miles east, this two-story building served the community in many roles—its lower floor first a school renting for $2.50 a month, then a drugstore and post office, while the upper floor was always a Masonic lodge hall. When the railroad bypassed Aurora and the town began to fade, the whole structure was moved here in one piece in 1900. Its journey mirrors the fortunes of a settlement left behind by the rails.

Henderson, TX

Built in 1884 by the Mims brothers, this Henderson building was purchased in 1893 by Clinton Lodge No. 23, A.F. & A.M. — a Masonic lodge chartered back in 1845, when Texas was still an independent republic. The Masons met on the upper floor until 1936, while the ground level served commerce as a grocery and, for decades, the Wright Drug Store. The structure remains a durable piece of Henderson's downtown commercial heritage.

Shiner, TX

Relocated to this spot in 1889 by builder David Kokernot, this frame hall did double duty in the small German-Czech town of Shiner — serving both a Methodist congregation and a Masonic lodge, and hosting the community's first Sunday school. When the church moved out in 1914, the Masons took over the whole building, which was recognized as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Kildare, TX

Erected jointly in 1878 by the Baptist congregation and Jim's Bayou Masonic Lodge No. 491, this heart-cypress building is the oldest surviving structure in the small East Texas town of Kildare. Built by local craftsmen Skillman and Bricker, it was framed in cypress chosen for its extreme durability—a choice proven by its continuous use ever since. Though the church relocated in the 1950s, the building still serves as a lodge hall and community space.

Brazoria, TX

Beneath this oak in March 1835, Texans organized Holland Lodge, the first Masonic lodge in what would become the state of Texas. The gathering came on the eve of revolution, as Anglo settlers in Stephen F. Austin's colony built the civic and fraternal institutions of a new society. The tree has been honored ever since as the birthplace of Texas Freemasonry.

Sherman, TX

Home to Travis Lodge No. 117, chartered in 1852, this classical revival Masonic temple was built in 1924 on a site the Masons had acquired in 1916. Designed by local architects, it boasts giant-order columns, a grand portico, and a segmental arch entry pediment, an imposing civic landmark in Sherman for six decades. The lodge kept its headquarters here until 1985.

Fort Worth, TX

As Fort Worth boomed in the early twentieth century, so did its Masonic membership, and in 1929 ten member bodies chartered the Masonic Temple Association to build and maintain a shared home. Funds were raised and the new temple was completed in 1932, giving the city's fraternal organizations a common gathering place. The association has anchored Masonic life in Fort Worth ever since.

Fort Worth, TX

Completed in 1932 to give Fort Worth's Masonic bodies a single home, this temple was designed by the local firm of Wiley G. Clarkson & Co. Its facade blends Neo-Classical dignity with fashionable Art Moderne touches, featuring upper-story Ionic columns and bas-relief doors of Monel metal. The building has served as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark since 1984.

Cameron, TX

Massillon Farley served in the Texas army during the revolution of 1836, stationed at the camp at Harrisburg on April 21 — the day Texas independence was won at nearby San Jacinto. He went on to help build the new civil order of the fledgling republic, becoming the first chief justice of Milam County. His life spanned the arc from battlefield soldier to frontier jurist.

Masterson, TX

In 1927 three companies joined forces to build a natural gas plant and pipeline carrying fuel all the way to Denver, and a small company town of workers' cottages, a hotel, and a one-room school grew up around it, first called Bivins. World War II brought a second boom: a federal Bureau of Mines helium plant opened nearby in 1943, ringed by seventy-five new homes and a recreation hall for the Exell workers. Renamed Masterson after the post office rejected "Bivins," the community thrived until the 1960s, when residents were told to move on and the twin camps emptied by 1970.

Matador, TX

The Matador Ranch began as an open-range operation in 1879 and, after Scottish investors formed the Matador Land & Cattle Company in 1882, grew into one of the great cattle empires of the American West. At its height it ran 90,000 cattle across nearly 900,000 acres of owned Texas land plus leases stretching into the Dakotas, Montana, and Canada, all managed from corporate offices in Scotland. Long-serving general managers like Murdo MacKenzie made it a byword for scientific ranching until its liquidation in 1951.

Matagorda, TX

Founded around 1829 as part of Stephen F. Austin's colony, Matagorda Cemetery is among the oldest burial grounds in Texas, its weathered stones chronicling the hardships of coastal frontier life. Those interred include victims of the 1862 yellow fever epidemic, soldiers of the Texas Revolution and Civil War, Karankawa people, and Samuel Rhoads Fisher, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence.

Bay City, TX

Matagorda County traces its origins to March 1834, when the area was organized as a municipality of Mexican Texas along the Gulf coast. With Texas independence it became a county in 1836, formally organized in 1837, taking its name from the bay it fronts. The seat sat at Matagorda until 1894, when it moved to Bay City.

Bay City, TX

This corner of the Texas coast was home to the Karankawa people and the landing place of the French explorer La Salle in 1685. Colonists of Stephen F. Austin settled the area between 1822 and 1836, and the municipality of Matagorda organized under Mexican rule in 1834 before becoming Matagorda County in the new Republic of Texas. Erected by the state in 1936 for Texas's centennial, the marker honors early settlers, delegates to the conventions that declared independence, and Mary S. Wightman Helms, remembered as the first woman teacher in Texas.

Matagorda County, TX

One of the oldest Masonic lodges in Texas, Matagorda Lodge No. 7 dates to June 1838, when masons petitioned the young Grand Lodge of the Republic of Texas for a charter under first master Seth Ingram. From the start it shaped community life—hosting the first Episcopal services, running a lending library, and backing public schools—before financial strain and the Civil War forced its deactivation in 1868 and a 1911 recharter under its original number. Its rolls have carried veterans of every American conflict from the War of 1812 through Vietnam.

Matagorda County, TX

Matagorda Methodist Church traces its founding to January 1839, when circuit rider Jesse Hord pushed through "black mud, a pouring down rain and a howling norther" to preach in coastal Matagorda. Four worshippers came forward at candlelight to form its nucleus. The congregation weathered the devastating 1854 hurricane and later storms, completing its present pine-and-cypress church in 1893 — where the original Bible, bell, and hand-made pews still serve.

Bay City, TX

Near the mouth of the Colorado River stood Matagorda, one of early Texas's busiest ports and, during the Civil War, one of eight Texas harbors that blockade runners used to ship out cotton and bring in guns and supplies for the Confederacy. Federal ships claimed a blockade but could never truly occupy the peninsula, resorting to hit-and-run raids on salt works. In a failed December 1863 landing near Caney Creek, a sudden norther swamped Confederate skiffs and drowned twenty-two men, including the young brother of their commander.

San Benito, TX

In the 1910s, as commercial agriculture displaced ranching and the Mexican Revolution drove migration north, racial tensions along the lower Rio Grande erupted into lethal violence. Law enforcement and vigilantes killed prisoners without trial along the road between San Benito and Brownsville — beginning with Rudolfo Muñiz, lynched in custody in July 1915. Contemporaries called the period La Matanza, "the Massacre," and by some estimates hundreds or thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans died; a 1919 legislative inquiry forced a reorganization of the Texas Rangers.

Queen City, TX

William Franklin Mathews, a Confederate veteran and farmer, built this Victorian residence in 1878 shortly after moving to the newly founded town of Queen City, where he prospered as a merchant. After passing through several owners, the house was bought in 1918 by Ross A. Powell, another local merchant, and it remains owned and preserved by a Powell descendant. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1973.

Plano, TX

After an 1895 fire, Plano rebuilt its Mechanic Street in brick, and S. J. and Nancy Mathews relocated their store into one of these new buildings in 1906. Mathews Department Store sold dry goods, clothing, and millinery handmade by Nancy and her daughters until 1947, after which the building carried on as a department store and other businesses. Its detailed brick façade, transom windows, and ironwork from Sherman Iron Works survive as one of Plano's few nineteenth-century stores in continuous commercial use.

Austin, TX

In 1916 Austin's school district built three elementary schools, including a pair of identical buildings—Metz on the east side and Mathews on the west—both designed by architect Dennis R. Walsh. Mathews, named for physician and founding school-board member Dr. William J. Mathews, still stands in use with a simplified Classical façade of brick pilasters and a pedimented entry. A 1930s renovation added to the building while leaving its central face intact.

Galveston, TX

Born in Bremen, Germany, Mathilda Wehmeyer arrived in Galveston in 1870 and advertised teaching for young children, especially those of the city's large German-American community, using the German concept of 'kindergarten.' After the 1885 fire destroyed 40 blocks of the East End and her first house, she built an Italianate home and school in 1887 and taught there until 1898. The Great Storm of 1900 finally displaced her from the house.

Rockport, TX

Built in 1868-69 for John M. Mathis, a founder who helped plat the town and became Rockport's first mayor in 1870, this raised coastal cottage blends Italianate, Classical, and Greek Revival details. Mathis later deeded it to his cousin Thomas, a rancher, shipper, and banker who was central to the region's cattle and coastal trade. Its arcaded basement and columned portico speak to the ambitions of a young Gulf Coast port town.

Pittsburg, TX

Local tradition holds that this cemetery began in 1871 when W. P. Jones buried his wife, Delila, here, meaning only to move her later to an established graveyard — but her grave stayed and became its first. In 1883 O. S. and Jane Bradfield deeded the land to the Fairview Baptist Church. Annual spring cleanups, a tradition since 1909, still draw the descendants of pioneers, lodge members, and veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam who rest here.

Rockdale, TX

In January 1909, Mary Ann Coffield Perry gathered friends on her front porch in Rockdale to found the Matinee Musical Club, a group devoted to studying and performing music. Its yearbooks recorded annual themes on classical music, Texas women, and American composers, and its 1916 mascot was a young George Sessions Perry, who grew up to become a noted Texas writer. Active in both state and national federations of music clubs, the group brought culture to a small Texas town for generations.

Austin, TX

In 1953 University of Texas chemistry and physics professor Frederick Albert Matsen and his wife Cecelia built this limestone-and-cedar home with Austin architects Carlton Brush and Joseph Buffler. Drawing on the couple's admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright, active in their native Racine, Wisconsin, the two-story house embraces mid-century modern and International ideas—horizontal lines, natural light, and a plan that follows the slope of the land. It stands as a well-preserved expression of postwar modernist domestic design.

Lampasas, TX

Matt Smith came to Burnet County as a boy and built a career on the Texas frontier as a deputy sheriff and deputy U.S. Marshal. After marrying Rebecca Wells in 1891, the couple moved to Lampasas in 1896, where they ran the Lampasas Hotel with its restaurant and saloon. Around 1902 they built this Queen Anne cottage, with the scrolled brackets and cross gables typical of the style.

Hemphill, TX

Georgia-born Matthew Arnold Parker came to Texas from Louisiana in 1822, settling on land later confirmed as his headright grant in Sabine County. He served in the Defensive Sabine Volunteers in 1836, and that December President Sam Houston appointed him the county's first chief justice, a post akin to county judge. Parker later sat on a commission rooting out fraudulent land claims, married twice, and fathered sixteen children before his death in 1862.

Houston, TX

Matthew Burnett and his wife Sarah came from Arkansas in 1831 and settled on Cypress Creek near the Harrisburg Road. Their homesite became a waypoint of the Texas Revolution: the Republic's interim government paused here in March 1836, and on the evening of April 16 Sam Houston's army of some 1,100 men camped here, consuming the family's livestock and grain before marching on. Four days later that army won independence at San Jacinto, and the Burnetts—refugees of the Runaway Scrape—returned to make their home a well-known tavern on the road to Houston.

Marshall, TX

This state marker honors Matthew Duncan Ector, a Texas lawyer and legislator who rose to brigadier general in the Confederate army. He led troops through some of the war's hardest fighting in the Western Theater — Richmond in Kentucky, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, and the Atlanta Campaign — before helping defend Mobile. Texas erected the memorial in 1962, a century after the conflict that defined his public life.

Corpus Christi, TX

Matthew Dunn arrived from Ireland and hitched his fortunes to the American army, enlisting as a sutler — a civilian supplier — with Gen. Zachary Taylor's troops, who landed at Corpus Christi in 1845 on the eve of the Mexican War. There he met Col. Henry Kinney, the town's founding promoter, who urged Dunn to bring his four brothers over from Ireland; between 1849 and 1868 they did, and Kinney deeded Dunn some of his land. From this frontier foothold the Dunns became one of South Texas's prominent families.

Corpus Christi, TX

Orphaned and brought to Corpus Christi as a boy in 1845, Matthew Nolan served as a bugler through the Mexican-American War, rode with the Texas Rangers under 'Rip' Ford, and became Nueces County sheriff in 1858. He fought for the Confederacy along the Texas coast, returned to the sheriff's office as a major, and was murdered in 1864; he lies in Old Bayview Cemetery beside the brother who died as his deputy.

Marshall, TX

Born in 1863 to enslaved parents who purchased their family's freedom, Matthew W. Dogan was valedictorian at Rust College before becoming a mathematician and, in 1896, the second African American president of Wiley College. Over nearly five decades he built thirteen campus buildings, doubled enrollment, secured a Carnegie Library erected by student labor, and raised a substantial endowment. He shielded students and faculty in a segregated community until his 1942 retirement, and is buried in Wiley Cemetery.

Ennis, TX

Pearl C. Matthews bought this Ennis property in 1900 when he and his brother Will, owners of a McKinney department store, opened a second store in town, and he built the present house in 1908 after years in a cottage on the site. Arkansas native Harry Atwood purchased the home in 1917, and it stayed in the Atwood family for decades. His grandson Felix Atwood, a lieutenant colonel in World War II, later lived here while practicing law in Dallas.

Houston, TX

William and Regina Matthews had this Craftsman bungalow built in 1915, hiring the W. T. Carter Lumber and Building Co. to raise a well-detailed house with a hipped roof, L-shaped porch on tapered columns, tracery windows, and exposed rafter ends. William worked as a civil engineer and chief draftsman for the Sunset Central Lines railroad. In 1930 the Johnsons—Ernest, a pumper and labor leader for Sinclair Oil—bought the home and converted the attic into dormered bedrooms for their five daughters.

Sherman, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1869 and raised in Texas, Mattie Davis Lucas earned a teaching certificate as a teenager and became one of Grayson County's most energetic civic reformers. Working through women's clubs, she drove the founding of a Carnegie library, organized home-front war work, and led efforts to collect and preserve local history. Her push to mark the 1936 Texas Centennial placed several historical markers, and she co-authored the county's first published history — which appeared just days after her death.

Henderson, TX

Charles M. Thompson and his wife May built this house in 1892 for May's mother, Martha "Mattie" Gibson Trammell, a certified teacher. Here Mattie schooled young men and women in the rudiments of etiquette until 1910, running a small private academy out of the home. Its unusual hipped roof crowned by a large central dormer marks it as an architectural curiosity, and later owners added rooms in the early twentieth century.

New Diana, TX

Families from Alabama and Georgia settled this area in the 1850s, and oral tradition holds that enslaved people were among the first buried here, with the earliest recorded grave that of Milla Ann Greer Oliver in 1861. Deeded for a church and cemetery by William and Martha Greer in 1887, the "Old Family Cemetery" holds more than four hundred burials, including veterans of every conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam. A cemetery association formed in 1970 to care for the grounds.

Austin, TX

Born in Lockhart in 1868 and educated at Guadalupe and Tillotson colleges, Maud Anna Berry Smith Fuller taught for a quarter-century before becoming one of Austin's most revered African American religious and civic leaders. A devoted Baptist, she organized youth groups and led international missionary work, rising in 1928 to the presidency of the Women's Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention and earning an honorary doctorate in 1954. She and her husband also ran an East Austin funeral home, and her long life stretched from Reconstruction to 1972.

Galveston, TX

This late Victorian home, built in the mid-1890s, was owned by Maud J. H. Moller, who with her husband Jens moved in prominent Galveston business and political circles at the height of the island's cotton-port prosperity. Cotton exporter and Swiss Consul Ulrich Muller later lived here as well. Its curving porch stair, Queen Anne columns, and corner pavilion capture the ornate confidence of Gilded Age Galveston.

Maud, TX

Organized as a mission in 1874 by a circuit-riding Methodist minister on a farm in the Three Springs community, this congregation built its first meetinghouse right away on the Ball family's land. Charter member Samuel D. Knapp went on to found the town of Maud and serve as its first postmaster, donating the site to which the building was moved in 1880. The mission became a full church in 1897, and after a tornado and several rebuildings the present sanctuary went up in 1940.