Historic Markers in Texas

Houston, TX

Maurice J. Sullivan taught himself architecture and turned that self-education into one of Houston's most prolific practices. Appointed City Architect soon after arriving in 1912, he worked fluently across revival styles and left the city schools, hospitals, and especially churches, from the Villa de Matel Chapel to St. Anne Catholic Church, along with the stepped-back Petroleum Building that introduced the modern skyscraper form to Houston. In 1922 he built his own picturesque family home, a signature of the city's elite 1920s neighborhoods.

Mauriceville, TX

Mauriceville grew up at the junction of two railroads built at the turn of the twentieth century and took its name from Maurice Miller, son of a railroad president. Merchant J.P. Hilliard anchored the new town with the first store and post office, and a station house, hotel, mills, schools, and churches soon followed—including a Baptist congregation for African Americans organized just behind Hilliard's store. As the surrounding timber gave out and the mills closed, the community waned, and its school district consolidated with Little Cypress in 1969.

Austin, TX

German stonemason Rafael Mauthe built this Austin home in 1877 on land he had purchased two decades earlier from the noted architect Abner Cook. After his death, his wife Mary lived here and managed nearby rental property, and in 1898 the house passed to Anne Katherine Brown Myrick, daughter of a Texas Supreme Court justice. An ornate porch added in 1903–04 layered Greek Revival and Classical detailing onto the home.

Ballinger, TX

Founded in the 1870s in prime ranching country, this community took the name of Samuel A. Maverick, who came to Texas in 1835 and fought in the war for independence. A signer and delegate at the 1861 Secession Convention, Maverick was such a figure that his refusal to brand his cattle gave the English language the word "maverick." His landholdings here in 1853 tied his name to this stretch of open range.

Eagle Pass, TX

Carved from Kinney County in 1856 and organized in 1871, Maverick County took its name from Samuel A. Maverick, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Its county seat, Eagle Pass, sits where the storied El Camino Real crossed the Rio Grande — the same road that carried Spanish missionaries, the explorer Louis St. Denis, Moses Austin, and generations of troops and settlers into Texas. The land holds Spanish mission ruins and old military posts, including Fort Duncan, which sheltered both U.S. and Confederate soldiers.

Eagle Pass, TX

Built in 1884–85 on land chosen by a citizens' committee, the Maverick County Courthouse rose as a fortress-like Victorian landmark on the Texas–Mexico border, its crenelated tower still keeping time with its original E. Howard works. Within its walls unfolded the sensational 1889 trial of Dick Duncan, convicted of murder on evidence gathered by Texas Rangers and hanged in 1891 in the county's only capital execution. The courthouse remains a striking monument to law and civic ambition on the frontier.

San Antonio, TX

Built in 1893 for real-estate developer William Harvey Maverick—son of Texas Declaration of Independence signer Samuel Maverick—this three-story limestone mansion rose on the banks of the San Antonio River and was designed by the prominent architect Alfred Giles. In 1914 it passed to attorney H.C. Carter, whose wife Aline added a rooftop observatory and a chapel and served as Texas poet laureate from 1947 to 1949. A noted astronomer and artist, she taught the stars to local children and hosted Christmas parties for San Antonio orphans here.

Del Rio, TX

Around the turn of the 20th century, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe fanned out across small-town America, often starting as peddlers before opening dry-goods and department stores that anchored growing Main Streets. Max Stool, who had fled an area of Russia once part of Poland, stumbled into Del Rio in 1904 on a westbound train and never left, building 'The Guarantee' department store with his wife Anna. Together they bought land, put up commercial buildings, and coaxed national chains into the young downtown.

Dickinson, TX

This 1962 home, designed for NASA engineer Maxime 'Max' Faget (1921–2004) from his own conceptual sketches, sits beside Dickinson Bayou. Faget began with NASA's forerunner in 1946 and went on to help design the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft—and in his garage workshop in 1969 he developed the concept for a reusable Space Shuttle, testing balsa-wood models on his own property. He retired in 1981 as one of the essential engineers who carried the United States into space.

Killeen, TX

After repeated flooding cut the Maxdale community off from Killeen, Bell County commissioners approved a bridge here in 1913—only to see it swept away by a flood before completion. They contracted again with Hess & Skinner Engineers, agents for the Missouri Valley Bridge Company, and the replacement opened in 1914 using a Parker truss for maximum strength at mid-span. It has carried traffic across the crossing ever since.

Killeen vicinity, TX

One of the oldest cemeteries in Bell County, this burial ground began in the 1860s serving the rural community of Pleasant Grove. When Frank N. McBryde, Sr. — who donated the land — secured a post office in 1883, the settlement took the name Maxdale. Its earliest documented grave is that of a young woman who died in 1867, and among those laid to rest here are pioneer settlers and veterans reaching from the Civil War through Korea.

Briarcliff, TX

James Edward Maxey brought his family from Arkansas to Texas in the 1850s, eventually settling in western Travis County where the Pedernales meets the Colorado. The cemetery began in grief: his three-year-old grandson Alfred died of a snakebite in 1873 and was laid to rest on a shaded knoll, the first of the family burials. Maxey later served as the first postmaster of the nearby 'Mud' post office, and the little community he helped anchor faded as its school and post office closed in the early twentieth century.

Fort Worth, TX

This late Queen Anne residence was built in 1904 in Fort Worth by contractor and carpenter Charles W. Maxwell, who lived here only briefly before selling to James Liston in 1907. The Liston family kept the home until 1941. Its corner turret, wraparound porch and wreath-and-scroll gable work show off the exuberant craftsmanship of the era's building trades.

May, TX

Methodism reached this corner of Brown County with circuit-riding preachers in the 1860s, holding services in private homes before Mt. Zion Methodist Church was organized in 1882. The May Methodist Church formally took shape in 1886, gathering in a schoolhouse until members built their own one-room church in 1894 and later a brick sanctuary with stained glass. Fire destroyed that building in 2000, but the congregation's century-plus of service through depression, drought, and war endured.

Yoakum, TX

This sturdy dogtrot house of hewn logs and stone chimneys went up in the 1840s, the frontier years when Texas was passing from republic to statehood. Built for the family of John Joseph May and later home to the Hickeys, its open central passage was a hallmark of early Texas building, designed to catch the breeze in a hot climate.

Killeen, TX

This small graveyard dates to the late nineteenth century, though only one headstone — that of James Moses Cowan, who died in 1888 — remains legible among an estimated dozen to twenty burials. Other graves are marked with plain fieldstones or nothing at all, and local tradition places members of the pioneer O.M. Hood family here. The land was folded into Fort Hood in 1942, and the site took the name Mayberry Park Cemetery only in the mid-twentieth century.

Maydelle, TX

In 1906 the state-owned Texas State Railroad pushed into this area hunting timber to fuel the iron works at the Rusk penitentiary, and a branch prison called Camp Wright rose at the railhead. When Rusk native Thomas Campbell became governor, he had the line extended to Palestine, opening the region to settlers who platted the town of Maydelle in 1910—named for the governor's daughter, who sang at its dedication. Cotton, timber, and tomatoes fueled its early years before the slow rural decline of the later twentieth century.

Burton, TX

The Mayer Cemetery marks the German community of Winedale, settled from 1836 in a district first opened by Stephen F. Austin's Old 300 colonists, some of them wine makers who gave the area its name. Brothers Henry and Martin Mayer arrived from Germany in 1846 and by 1864 had built the area's first cotton gin and a mill. The burial ground, set aside in 1876, holds Mayer and Menn family members along with blacksmiths, farmers, and ministers, and veterans from the Civil War through the Korean War.

Denison, TX

Architect Donald Mayes designed and lived in this low, horizontal mid-century home, one of several he built in Denison's Edgewood addition. Over his career he shaped much of the town's built environment—banks, schools, First Presbyterian Church, the county sub-courthouse, and dozens of houses—and chaired Denison's planning and zoning commission. The house's Colorado red ledgestone, hand-split cedar shakes, and ribbon windows show the modern style he favored.

Maypearl, TX

Maypearl sprang up on the International & Great Northern line in 1903, and when landowner William P. Wilemon died in 1907 and was buried on his farm, townsfolk resolved to make a proper cemetery. His widow Minnie sold four acres, including his grave, to trustees for the purpose, and the grounds came to hold the doctors, teachers, farmers, and fraternal members who built the town. Tombstones mark veterans of wars from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Henderson, TX

This pioneer burial ground served the New Salem community, a 1850s settlement with a stagecoach stop, post office, and academy nestled between Quinn Mountain and the Angelina River. Tradition holds that two enslaved people were the first laid to rest here, and its oldest marked grave belongs to a two-year-old child who died in 1856. Veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War lie beneath marble and granite stones amid historic jonquils and crepe myrtles.

Maysfield, TX

Area Methodists were meeting as early as 1847, but this congregation was not formally organized until 1854, served by itinerant circuit-riding preachers who first gathered worshippers in a schoolhouse. A separate Maysfield circuit came in 1885, and a sanctuary was built in 1897 that stood until fire destroyed it in 1933. The congregation worshipped in the local Presbyterian church until 1952, when its present building was donated and moved in from Ben Arnold.

Rockport, TX

Tucked among hackberry, mesquite, and live oak on Texas's Coastal Bend, this family burying ground dates to the turn of the twentieth century, when Charles H. McLester—an engineer on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad—and his wife Eliza inherited the land in 1903. The McLesters were among the vegetable farmers of the nearby Sparks Colony, and the first grave, dug in 1909, held their thirteen-year-old son Bennie. Generations of educators, city officials, and veterans followed, and descendants still tend the plot.

Walker County, TX

John McAdams, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, brought his family to what became Walker County around 1840 and built a life as a rancher, planter, and mill owner; the community that grew around his land took his name. The cemetery began in 1849 with the burial of his first wife, Hester, and grew over generations to hold family, neighbors, and a separate section McAdams set aside for the people he enslaved. Maintained since 1937 by a cemetery association, it now spans nearly thirteen acres.

Walker County, TX

John McAdams III, a veteran of the Texas Revolution and the Republic of Texas Army, moved from the Sabine District to present Walker County and, with his first wife Hester White, built this home in the 1840s. A land speculator, planter, and rancher, he also ran a cotton gin and sawmill, and the surrounding area became the McAdams community, with a post office from 1888 to 1917. The house was moved here in 1968 from its original site a mile east.

McAllen, TX

Methodism reached the lower Rio Grande Valley by 1849, when circuit-riding preachers covered the long river country from Brownsville to Roma on horseback. When McAllen took root, the Rev. C. W. Godwyn arrived in 1909 to gather local Methodists, and a modest frame sanctuary went up that same year. Growth came quickly in the booming Valley town, prompting a larger building in 1913 and the present church in 1928.

McAllen, TX

Chartered in December 1915 by Master Mason R. M. Bounds and some thirty fellow Masons, this lodge first met in early downtown McAllen commercial buildings before erecting its own temple here in 1927. Its membership drew from many Masonic jurisdictions and included two men who rose to serve as Grand Masters. The lodge has remained an active force in the civic life of McAllen for more than a century.

McAllen, TX

When the federal government built this Spanish colonial revival post office in 1935 and dedicated it in January 1936, McAllen was a fast-growing town on the Texas–Mexico border that had already outgrown five earlier postal quarters since 1907. The building's baroque frontispiece, corbelled cornice, and red tile roof reflect the regional revival style that shaped much South Texas public architecture of the era. After serving the mail until 1957, it was repurposed for federal and city offices and named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1986.

Linn, TX

The McAllen Ranch reaches back to Spanish colonial Texas, when José de Escandón's Nuevo Santander opened the lower Rio Grande and José Manuel Gómez received the vast 95,000-acre Santa Anita grant in 1790. Through marriages and shrewd purchases, the grant passed to María Salomé Ballí, who with Irish immigrant John McAllen reunited and expanded the holdings to more than 160,000 acres, supplying beef and hides—and refuge—to both sides during the Civil War. Run under the SM brand by her descendants, it became one of the oldest Texas ranches in continuous family operation.

White Hall, TX

Around 1851 North Carolina native Dugald McAlpine settled the pioneer community of Wallace's Prairie and bought a large tract that included several early burial sites. His relative Malcomb was interred here in 1866, and McAlpine fenced the grounds as a family graveyard before his own death in 1876; descendants deeded three acres for cemetery use in 1886. Those buried here span former slaves, McAlpine kin, civic leaders, and veterans of wars from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Lometa vicinity, TX

Robert D. McAnelly arrived in this country in the early 1830s and worked as a surveyor mapping large tracts of the surrounding land, his homestead marking a threshold for the settlement of Lampasas and San Saba counties. McAnelly's Bend on the river took his name in 1858, and his son Cornelius was recorded as the first white child born in Lampasas County. The marker commemorates the family's role in opening this stretch of central Texas frontier.

Amarillo, TX

In 1903 pioneer settler David Nichols McBride quarried Alibates dolomite from the canyon rim and burned his own lime on site to raise this Panhandle ranch house, framing it with timbers salvaged from an old railroad bridge over the Canadian River. Having claimed his homestead in the heart of the vast, London-owned LX Ranch, McBride proved up his land under the patient terms of state settlement law. The house survived him and eventually passed to the National Park Service within the Lake Meredith recreation area.

Killeen vicinity, TX

When Mancel T. McBryde brought his family from Georgia to Bell County in the early 1860s, the Texas frontier was still a place where families made their own institutions—including where to lay their dead. Upon his wife Jane's death in 1885, he chose a rise south of the family home for her grave, beginning a burial ground that gathered McBryde and Hoover descendants, their graves facing east and the oldest ringed in stone. Kin still tend it today.

McCamey, TX

McCamey sprang up almost overnight in 1926 when a wildcat well came in, and within a year some ten thousand people had rushed to the new oil town. Named for driller George B. McCamey, whose discovery well opened dozens of fields across Upton County, it settled into a durable life of ranching—horses, sheep, and goats—once the boom cooled. Its parks and the Mendoza Trail Museum keep the memory of that frenzied birth alive.

McCamey, TX

When the 1920s oil boom conjured McCamey out of the desert, the town had no school at all—just twenty pupils in a tin shack in 1925. A year later 550 children crowded into dance halls, skating rinks, and churches, using apple and orange crates for desks. This 1927 building finally gave them a proper home, and it doubled as the community's civic center, hosting everything from weddings to Draft Board meetings until it closed as a high school in 1961.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1908 the widowed Mary Alice Ward McCampbell bought beachfront land in Corpus Christi's old Irishtown and commissioned a home for herself and her three sons overlooking the bay. When the catastrophic 1919 hurricane drove floodwaters into the first floor, the family watched from the second-story porch as the house held. Long a family home, it was later moved to Heritage Park in 1984 to be preserved.

Crockett, TX

John McCarter was born in Pennsylvania in 1813 and came to Texas in 1832, four years before the Republic itself was born, settling with his wife Jane and their nine children on a farmstead in Houston County. Like many pioneer families, they set aside a corner of their land as a burial ground, and John became its first occupant when he died in 1895. In 1907 Jane formally deeded the plot to the surrounding community, tying the graveyard to the schoolhouse settlement that grew up nearby. Descendants still gather each year to tend the graves.

Angelina County, TX

In 1860 Orange McCarty and his wife Mary Arrington bought a large tract in Angelina County, but their planned move from Mississippi stalled when the Civil War erupted and two of their sons died fighting for the Confederacy. The surviving family, joined by the Arringtons and McCalls, finally settled here in 1866 and built a log cabin above Jack Creek, setting aside this acre for burials that were in use by 1873. It endures as the resting place of a founding Angelina County pioneer family.

Beeville, TX

Erected about 1867 near Poesta Creek on the courthouse square, this is Beeville's oldest business building—a pioneer-western structure with southern porches that housed a general store, lodging house, and post office. It was built by G. W. McClanahan, the town's first merchant, who also served as schoolteacher, postmaster, county clerk, innkeeper, and Sunday school superintendent.

Coldspring, TX

Built in the 1880s, this Coldspring home was bought in 1913 by merchant Robert Hugh McClanahan, Jr., who served as county tax collector and as postmaster from 1914 until his death in 1940. After a 1915 fire destroyed the courthouse and the town square was relocated, McClanahan had his house turned to face the new town. Long a haven for travelers, it later passed to his son-in-law, Marshall Douglas Trapp.

Bonham, TX

District Judge Eugene David McClellan and his wife Alice, a piano teacher at Carlton College, built this two-story Queen Anne home in Bonham in 1879. When their daughter Cornelia married attorney Henry Allen Cunningham in 1907, the couple moved in, and the house stayed in the family into the 1960s. Its projecting bay, full-gallery verandas, fish-scale shingles, and sunburst gable details make it a showpiece of late-Victorian craftsmanship.

Austin, TX

Architect Charles H. Page designed this house in 1906 for Judge James Wooten McClendon and his wife Annie, on land her father gave as a wedding gift. McClendon served 26 years as Chief Justice of the Court of Civil Appeals, and fellow judges rented the home before the family sold it in 1944. In 1960 it passed to University of Texas head football coach and administrator Ed Price, whose family lived in the 2½-story American Foursquare, its buff-brick walls blending Prairie, Craftsman, and Eclectic styles.

Palestine, TX

Judge Alexander E. McClure, a Tennessee lawyer who came to Texas in 1840, built this Palestine home in 1849 and served as Anderson County's first district clerk. In 1884 it passed to Confederate veteran Z. A. McReynolds, who had survived the sieges of Vicksburg and Atlanta and went on to hold nearly every county office. It later sheltered his daughter and her husband, Colonel Godfrey Fowler, a soldier of the Spanish-American War, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and World War I.

Flower Mound, TX

This small community burial ground dates to the 1850s, before Denton was even chosen as county seat. Here lie pioneers who came from Tennessee in 1855—the Boyd, McCombs, Nowlin, Sigler, and Rivers families—including Nehemiah Boyd, who died of pneumonia after being caught by a blue norther while raising a log cabin for his family. Archaeological evidence suggests as many as 100 people were buried here between the 1850s and 1890s, their graves once marked by native sandstone.

McCook, TX

McCook was settled in the 1920s by descendants of the Polish colonists who founded Panna Maria in 1854—the oldest Polish settlement in the United States. Urban Kotzur, his son Leon, and neighbor Frank Prukop bought land here in 1925, and the Kotzurs arrived in 1926 to clear the South Texas brush for farming. A post office, a school, and Immaculate Conception Catholic Church soon followed, extending a Polish-American community deep into the Rio Grande Valley.

Comanche, TX

James Madison McCrary came to Comanche around 1870 and, with his father and brother, ran a mercantile on the town square and launched the county's first cotton gin. In 1876 he began this limestone house of central-hall plan, its stone quarried near Austin and its facade marked by segmental arches and gable-end chimneys. A noted horticulturist, McCrary later farmed east of town before retiring here, and his descendants held the home until 1987.

Honey Grove, TX

Settlers farming the blackland prairie gathered in Ezekiel Phillips Warren's home in 1859 to organize a Methodist congregation, and in 1877 William Bain McCraw and others donated land for a church and cemetery. The grounds hosted ten-day summer camp meetings and even a school taught in the church building, becoming an anchor for the community. Though the congregation disbanded in 1966 and the building was razed in 1983, an annual homecoming still draws people back each May.

Dallas, TX

Mahulda Bonner McCree granted the first land for this cemetery in 1866, though burials had already taken place here during the Civil War years. Over time it grew to more than three acres, gathering the graves of Peters colonists, war veterans, and many families tied to the area's early Methodist and Baptist churches. It remains a well-documented record of early Dallas County settlement.

Brazoria, TX

Tanner John McCroskey came to Texas among Stephen F. Austin's 'Old 300' colonists and built this home to satisfy his 1824 Mexican land grant. Its later owners read like a roll call of early Texas: Oliver Jones, who chaired the commission that designed the Republic's flag and seal; district judge and legislator Robert J. Townes; and Asa Stratton, under whom the land became a sugar and cotton plantation. Nannie Stringfellow preserved the dwelling after 1945.

Bogata, TX

When the three McCrury brothers and their two sisters came down from Missouri in 1835, they were joining the thin scatter of Anglo settlers pushing into what was still Mexican Texas. The private burying ground on John McCrury's land opened with his own death in 1864 and slowly grew into the community graveyard for the surrounding McCrury area, gathering the pioneer families of Red River County. Formally recorded as a cemetery in 1953, it is still tended by a local association.

Paris, TX

Built in 1858 and remodeled in 1907, this home became the residence of Dr. L. P. McCuistion, a physician for 57 years who founded the Sanitarium of Paris in 1914. His work helped turn Paris into a regional hospital center. The house's story spans from antebellum Texas to the early-twentieth-century rise of organized medicine.

San Antonio, TX

This burial ground traces to Samuel McCulloch, Jr., wounded at Goliad in October 1835 in the opening weeks of the Texas Revolution and long remembered as among its first casualties. He received this land as a bounty for that service, and the earliest marked grave belongs to his father, who died in 1855. After McCulloch deeded acreage to a Baptist congregation in 1861, the site grew into a community cemetery holding area pioneers, Civil War veterans, and noted potter Louis Meyer.

Brady, TX

Created in 1856 from the vast Bexar territory, McCulloch County honors Ben McCulloch, a Texas hero who fought in the Revolution and in the Indian, Mexican, and Civil Wars. Frontier and Indian dangers slowed settlement so severely that two decades passed before the buffalo were hunted off and ranches took hold, and the county finally organized in 1876 with Brady as its seat. It holds the geographic center of Texas and the site of the 1831 Calf Creek fight, where James Bowie battled a much larger Indian force.

Brady, TX

McCulloch County was organized in 1876 as settlement pushed into the Texas Hill Country, with Brady chosen as its seat and a first courthouse raised in 1879. The present building, completed in 1900 by contractors Martin and Moodie, was a "turn-key" job that leaned on local hands and native sandstone quarried nearby. Its Modified Roman lines, arched vaulting, Victorian cupola, and pine woodwork made it the dignified heart of county government.

Brady, TX

Built in 1909–1910 by the Southern Structural Steel Co. of San Antonio, this red-brick Romanesque Revival building was the second to serve as the McCulloch County Jail. Sheriff T. L. Sansom was its first resident, living in the first-floor jailer's quarters while prisoners were held in cells on the upper two floors. When a new jail opened in 1974, the old building found new life as home to the Heart of Texas Historical Museum.

Laneville, TX

McCune Cemetery grew out of the Chinquapin community in the pine country of Rusk County, its roots reaching back to pioneer James L. McCune, who came to Texas in David G. Burnet's colony and took a land grant in 1835. His son married a local Cherokee woman, Delila Storm, in 1836, and their third child's 1852 burial opened the family graveyard. More than 200 graves now rest beneath hickories, oaks, and chinquapins on land still held by McCune heirs.

Lewisville, TX

The McCurley family came from Illinois to settle Denton County in 1852, and George Collins McCurley set aside land here for a burial ground, church, and school. His brother Abraham, who died in 1871, was the first family member laid to rest, and by 1877 neighbors were burying their dead here too. When Lewisville Lake was created in 1951, all 106 graves had to be relocated to this spot beside Old Hall Cemetery, where George McCurley himself is buried.

McDade, TX

Laid out in 1871 and named for Brenham lawyer James McDade, this Bastrop County town grew into a busy freight center and stagecoach stop, its school-church raised the following year. But prosperity came with lawlessness: a vigilante group organized in 1883 hanged three men on Christmas Eve, and the next day's reckoning erupted in a gunfight at the Rock Saloon, a building that survives today as a museum.

McDade, TX

Organized on July 18, 1880, under the Rev. J. D. Wright, this Baptist congregation first worshiped in a shared union church building in the small railroad town of McDade. The Baptists bought that building outright in 1900 and used it until 1948, when they moved an army chapel purchased from nearby Camp Swift onto this site, tying the church's story to the World War II installation next door.

Hubbard, TX

Hubbard sprang up in 1881 when the Cotton Belt railroad pushed its line from Tyler toward Waco, and one of the town's first fine homes rose the next year. Local merchant and banker Joe B. McDaniel built this late-Victorian house of walnut and pine for his widowed mother, Elizabeth Bonner McDaniel, adorning it with ornate banisters, decorative columns and gables, and tinted glass.