Historic Markers in Texas

New Summerfield, TX

This community cemetery grew up on the 1850s homestead of William and Clarissa Johnson, with its earliest documented burials — two young daughters of a local doctor — dating to 1856. After Clarissa remarried in 1858, the land became the McDonald Farm, and by 1870 the small graveyard was serving the whole community as McDonald Cemetery. Today it holds more than 550 documented graves, plus many unmarked, spanning well over a century of Cherokee County life.

Fort Davis, TX

McDonald Observatory grew from the bequest of William Johnson McDonald, a frugal Paris, Texas banker who loved reading science and gazing through a small telescope, and who left the University of Texas $800,000 to build an observatory. Erected in the 1930s atop a nearly 6,800-foot peak chosen for its clear, dark skies, it long held one of the world's largest telescopes. Astronomers there made discoveries ranging from interstellar polarization to new planetary satellites.

Klein, TX

In 1838 George McDougle brought his family to 100 acres carved from the John House survey, building a home and raising cattle on land his descendants would hold for a full century. This small burying ground reflects the 19th-century Texas custom of interring kin near the homestead; among its graves lie a Texas Ranger, a Civil War veteran who served as a Harris County commissioner, and several generations of the family.

Buda, TX

On a bluff above Onion Creek, the McElroy-Severn complex began in 1875 as a stagecoach house and post office serving travelers on the old San Antonio road. When the railroad drew mail service to the new town of Dupre — soon renamed Buda — in 1880, the station became a private home and ranch headquarters for more than a century. Its limestone post office, with carved stone lintels, and the much-remodeled center-passage house together recall Buda's scattered homestead beginnings.

McFaddin, TX

When a railroad line pushed through the McFaddin Ranch around 1900, a ranch settlement — briefly renamed Marianna by the railroad — sprang up with a depot, post office, church, and school. This board-and-batten mercantile, built in 1910, became the community's gathering place and for a time housed the post office. Its simple, sturdy design typifies the small-town general stores that anchored rural Texas commerce.

McFaddin, TX

The McFaddin ranch settlement was rechristened Marianna in 1906 by the railroad that reached it, and a post office opened the next year inside a general store, migrating between buildings before settling into this board-and-batten structure in 1913. At rancher A. M. McFaddin's request, the town reclaimed its original name in 1923. For decades the mail arrived and departed by train, a rhythm that continued until 1962.

Beaumont, TX

This classical revival mansion rose in 1906 on the homestead of William McFaddin, who had received land from the Republic of Texas for his service at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto and went on to build a sprawling ranching empire. Architect Henry Conrad Mauer designed the house for McFaddin's daughter, and it passed down through the family for generations. It stands amid the wealth generated by Southeast Texas ranching and the oil that gushed from nearby Spindletop.

Bleakwood, TX

Family tradition holds that Colonel Thomas S. McFarland set aside this ground as a family burial place around 1840, when he and his father William were figures of standing in the young Republic of Texas. The land later passed to the Wilson family, whose members began to be laid here in the 1890s. Descendants still tend the graves, keeping alive the memory of two pioneer East Texas families.

Crane, TX

Crane County's oldest house was built in 1909 by pioneer rancher R. D. McGee, on land he had homesteaded more than two decades before the county was even organized. Its classic 'dog-trot' plan—two rooms flanking an open central passage—was a practical answer to the West Texas heat. Hauling the lumber from Odessa took wagons three full days across the open range.

San Marcos, TX

This spot marks where the Camino Real—the King's Highway from Nacogdoches to the Rio Grande—forded the San Marcos River. The French explorer St. Denis traveled it in 1714 to open trade with the Spanish, and the Austins likely crossed near here during their 1820–21 colonization efforts. Thomas McGehee settled on the east bank around 1846, and the family's long association gave the crossing its name.

Alice, TX

Sons of a Mississippi family, the McGill brothers built one of South Texas's notable ranching operations, purchasing the Santa Rosa Ranch in 1916 and rising to lead the Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. In 1941 Frank McGill erected this office building for the family's ranching enterprise, reportedly patterning it after San Antonio's Alamo, which had impressed him on a visit. With its corbelled stone parapet and Greek touches, it later passed to a museum corporation as a South Texas landmark.

Tarkington, TX

Established in 1861, McGinnis Cemetery began at the very outset of the Civil War, when the farming families of rural Liberty County were being drawn into the conflict that would reshape Texas. Frontier cemeteries of this era often gathered pioneer settlers and the war generation side by side. It carries a Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

Milam, TX

McGown Cemetery opened with the 1842 burial of pioneer Anne Kyle, just five years after Sabine County was organized. Its namesake, George Washington McGown, served as a justice of the peace during the Republic of Texas era and became the first of his family laid to rest here in 1859. Civil War veterans followed, among them his son Andrew, a four-term county sheriff, and members of the prominent Browning family.

Saint Jo, TX

Allen R. McGrady and his wife Elizabeth Cox McGrady moved to this area along Clear Creek in 1859, settling on 160 acres. The cemetery began in the 1860s after a McGrady employee was killed by Indians and buried on the family farm, and an acre was set aside as a graveyard for family and neighbors. Allen and Elizabeth, who both died in September 1899, are buried here among the pioneers of Montague County.

McGregor, TX

McGregor was born of the railroad. In 1882 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe and the Texas and St. Louis lines drew statewide crowds to a public auction of town lots, and settlers from nearby hamlets like Banks and Eagle Springs moved in. Named for pioneer physician Dr. Gregor Carmichael McGregor, the town grew as an agricultural shipping hub and boomed again during World War II with a new ordnance plant.

Nelsonville, TX

In the early 1850s a close-knit band of Scottish immigrants—McGregors, Carmichaels, McLeans and more, many from the isle of Lismore in Argyllshire—settled western Austin County by way of North Carolina. They founded Galatia Presbyterian Church and, in 1868, opened this graveyard with the burial of Mary McGregor. When the last interment came in 1900, the cemetery remained as the community's final trace.

McGregor, TX

Founded in 1904 by T.E. Streight, the McGregor Mirror soon drew a young typesetter named Chas Hall, who with his wife bought the paper in 1918 and launched a family dynasty that has now run it for three generations. The Mirror still operates in the same building where it began, which houses one of the earliest Model 14 Linotype machines in Texas, bought at the State Fair in 1925 and used into the 1990s. For over a century the paper has chronicled the life of its community.

Wills Point, TX

Thomas J. McKain came to Texas from Florida in 1870 and, four years later, built this house for his bride Mattie Cornelia Bagby — the first couple married in the young town of Wills Point. The lumber traveled by ox-wagon all the way from Longview. A merchant who promoted immigration to Texas, McKain served repeatedly as mayor along with stints as alderman and school trustee, helping shape the community in its formative decades.

Richardson, TX

Long before European or American settlers reached North Texas, Native peoples camped around the natural spring now called McKamy Spring, one of the few above-ground springs still surviving in the area. Early settlers of Breckenridge—the community that preceded Richardson—used it as Bowser Spring until the railroad drew the town elsewhere. Richardson's first mayor, Thomas McKamy, later drew on the spring to supply water for wells and even the construction of the Central Expressway, bought the surrounding land, and placed a marker there honoring the Native Americans who had used it before him.

Forney, TX

Merchant and landowner John Alexander McKellar built this Forney house in 1873, and around 1902 his son B. Yancy McKellar remodeled it into the Colonial Revival form seen today. Its two-story Ionic columns, stained glass, and wraparound porch reflect the prosperity of a leading local family. The home stayed in McKellar hands until 1977.

Groesbeck, TX

This burial ground lies in what was once McKenzie Prairie, named for Joseph S. McKenzie and his family, who settled here in 1853. Its oldest grave belongs to Elizabeth Etemon and her infant daughter, who died passing through in 1865; the McKenzies gave land for the burial and marked it with a sandstone stone that Elizabeth's grieving husband carved before continuing his journey. From that single act of kindness the one-acre plot grew into a community cemetery for the McKenzies, their neighbors, and their descendants.

Clarksville, TX

Founded in 1841 by the Reverend John W. P. McKenzie — a Methodist circuit rider and former missionary to the Choctaws — McKenzie College grew from a single log cabin into four large buildings spread across 900 acres. Chartered in 1854, it enrolled some 300 boarding students a year and ranked among the finest schools in the Southwest before the Civil War, closing in 1869.

Honey Grove, TX

This congregation reaches back to Methodist services held in Honey Grove's shared Union Church in the 1840s, one of the first footholds of the faith in North Texas. Members put up their own building in 1881 and named it for J.W.P. McKenzie, a pioneering Methodist preacher and educator in the region. The graceful Gothic structure standing today was raised in 1912, its builders folding native stone salvaged from the 1881 church into new walls topped with conical towers and arched, stained-glass windows.

McKinney, TX

McKinney was founded in 1845 and named for Collin McKinney, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence—the same man who gave his name to the surrounding county. During the Civil War, future Texas governor J. W. Throckmorton raised Company K of the 6th Texas Cavalry here, a well-regarded Confederate unit. The town grew into a center of manufacturing, trade, and medicine for the region.

Waxahachie, TX

Henry McKinney rode a year with Company C of the Texas Rangers' Frontier Battalion before settling near Waxahachie, where he and his wife Viola bought a 71-acre tract in the fertile Blackland Prairie in 1903. In 1913 he hired local builder Jack Harris to raise this 2,000-square-foot Prairie-Style farmhouse, its wrap-around porch, dormers, and cedar-shake roof completed that August. With its original barn, corrals, and chicken house still standing, it remains one of rural Ellis County's few intact early-20th-century family farmsteads.

Hillsboro, TX

This Victorian house was built in 1896 by A. P. McKinnon, a Georgia-born lawyer who came to Hillsboro in 1873 and earned a wide reputation for his exacting ethics and busy practice. In 1903 it passed to banker Samuel Houston Anderson, who lived here 35 years, and since 1966 it has been lovingly preserved as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Cushing, TX

McKnight Cemetery began in the 1850s as the family burying ground of William Newton and Rebecca McKnight and opened to neighboring communities by the Civil War. It served hamlets like Glenfawn, Linn Flat, and Toliver—the last of which faded into a ghost town after the Texas and New Orleans Railroad bypassed it, drawing residents to rail-served Cushing. Among those interred are Confederate soldiers and World War II R.A.F. Wing Commander Lance C. Wade, a celebrated fighter ace.

McKinney, TX

This burial ground began in 1851 as a private grief, when settler John R. Jones laid his infant son to rest here, and it soon grew into a public cemetery for the pioneer families of the Wilmeth settlement. The McLarry family donated the land, and the community namesake J.B. Wilmeth lies among the graves. Generations of descendants still tend the site, making it a living register of Collin County's earliest settlers.

Rogers, TX

Established in 1885, McLean Cemetery served the farming families of the blackland prairie around Rogers in Bell County during the boom decades that followed the arrival of the railroads in Central Texas. Community cemeteries of the Gilded Age tracked the steady growth of settlement across the region. It holds a Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

McLean, TX

Organized in the early 1900s as settlers filled the Texas Panhandle, this congregation is thought to be the oldest denominational church in Gray County. Methodists in McLean met in a one-room schoolhouse under the first pastor, the Rev. G. R. Fort, until they built their first sanctuary here in 1904. Lay groups such as the Ladies Home Missionary Society gave the young town service and leadership, and descendants of the founders still worship here.

Waco, TX

McLennan County was created and organized in 1850, named for Neil McLennan (1787–1867), a Scottish-born pioneer who came to Texas in 1835 and settled on the Bosque River in 1840. He built the area's first dwelling, a log cabin, near what became Waco, the county seat. His name endures on one of Central Texas's most important counties.

Waco, TX

McLennan County was organized in 1850 by Waco's founders to strengthen their young city, though for decades the surrounding county outpaced the town in wealth. This fourth courthouse rose during the height of central Texas cotton prosperity, designed in Renaissance Revival style by architect J. Riely Gordon with limestone, marble, and Texas red granite. It still houses the county's courts and a public law library.

Rosebud, TX

Scottish immigrant Neil McLennan built his home on this bluff above Pond Creek in 1835 on land granted through Sterling Robertson's colony, part of the first wave of Anglo settlement in central Texas. Frontier life was perilous: in 1836 his brother Laughlin's family was attacked, and the McLennans sheltered for years in the fortified town of Nashville. Neil later scouted the country that would bear his name, settling in McLennan County until his death in 1867, while Rosebud grew up on his old grant.

Geneva, TX

McMahan's Chapel traces its roots to 1833, when a "religious society" gathered at Colonel Samuel McMahan's home, becoming a Methodist congregation the next year and completing its first building in 1839 under the Rev. Littleton Fowler. It is remembered as the oldest continuously existing Methodist church in Texas. Established in the days of the Republic, it has rebuilt twice while never breaking its line of worship.

Bryan, TX

This Queen Anne home was built in 1904 for lumberman and Brazos County clerk George Washington McMichael, who died the same year. In 1912 it was bought by prominent planter Alfred Flournoy Wilson, and it stayed in the Wilson family for nearly sixty years. Its corner turret, wraparound porch, and conical-roofed pavilion made it a Bryan landmark, recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1985.

Murphy, TX

This medallion marks McMillen Cemetery, established in 1901 and later designated a Historic Texas Cemetery. Burial grounds like it anchored the small farming communities that dotted Collin County's Blackland Prairie in the early twentieth century, often outlasting the settlements they once served.

Nevada, TX

John W. and Evaline McMinn settled this Collin County prairie in 1849, and the community that grew around them took their name. They gave land for a cemetery in 1894, though burials here reach back to 1877, and residents added a church and school to anchor the settlement. When the railroad reached nearby Nevada, families drifted toward the town, and today the graveyard is nearly all that remains of the McMinn community.

Tilden, TX

McMullen County was carved out of the South Texas brush country in 1858 and organized in 1862, only to be abandoned during the Civil War when bandits ruled its thickets; it was reorganized in 1877 with Tilden as its seat. It honors John McMullen, an empresario who, with James McGloin, planted the Irish colony at San Patricio and served in the provisional government on the eve of the Texas Republic. The marker also surveys how Texas's 254 counties got their names, from Alamo defenders to Confederate figures.

Abilene, TX

Between 1840 and 1920 Texas Methodists founded nearly eighty colleges, and after several in the Northwest Texas Conference closed, the Rev. James Winford Hunt led a drive to build a new one in Abilene. A former newspaperman turned circuit-riding minister, Hunt rallied community support and a 1921 fund drive timed to a visit by Bishop William Fletcher McMurry, for whom the school was named. Chartered that November, McMurry College opened its doors in September 1923.

Richmond, TX

German merchant Phillip Vogel built this residence in the 1850s in the restrained Greek Revival style then in fashion. Saddlery-shop owner A. D. McNabb bought it in 1887; his wife, Charlien Gloyd, was the daughter of the famed temperance crusader Carry Nation, who had run a boarding house in Richmond in the 1880s. The McNabb family kept the home until 1972, when it was moved from its original Jackson Street location.

Brownsville, TX

Brownsville architect A.H. Woolridge designed this Monterey-style home in 1937 for Jack and Vivian McNair. Jack had come to Brownsville in 1921 to join his brother in clothing manufacturing, eventually building McNair Clothing Manufacturing Company into the largest private employer south of San Antonio before selling to Levi Strauss in 1972. The house remains a fine local example of the Monterey style, with its second-story balcony, shuttered windows, and low-pitched roof.

Victoria, TX

In the 1870s, W.J. McNamara — a Victoria town councilman who traded in cotton, wool, and hides — built this rural Victorian Gothic house during the boom years that followed the Civil War, when South Texas market towns were thriving on the region's ranching and fiber trade. The McNamara-O'Connor family donated it in 1959, and it was restored to serve as a historical and fine arts museum. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Luling, TX

Founded about 1867 on land deeded to the Soda Springs Methodist Church by early settler Margret Hinds, this cemetery took its first recorded burial—Henrietta Gant—in 1868. Once known as Soda Springs Methodist Cemetery, it was renamed McNeil sometime before the church disbanded in 1919. More than 390 graves hold the area's early settlers and their descendants, and an association still cares for the grounds.

Crosbyton, TX

In 1882 Brazoria County rancher James Calvin McNeill bought 8,000 acres in Crosby County to grow his cattle operation, later expanding it to more than 18,000 acres. Managing two far-flung ranches proved hard, so in 1890 his cousin George M. Williamson arrived to help, and in 1902 his son James Calvin McNeill Jr. took the reins. When the elder McNeill divided the property among his children in 1930, the ranch had already become a fixture of the region's cattle country.

Smith Point, TX

This small burial ground holds Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix, daughter of the Cherokee chief Major Ridge, who was assassinated in Georgia in 1839 in the bitter aftermath of the treaty that led to Cherokee removal. Sarah came to Texas in 1848, treated Galveston's yellow-fever victims in 1850 with a Cherokee remedy, and later settled at Smith Point with her second husband. Family tradition holds that her grandson's grave rests beneath a live oak he grew from an acorn as a boy, and descendants still tend the McNeir Cemetery.

San Augustine, TX

In 1882 a group of worshippers near San Augustine, dismissed from the town's First Presbyterian Church, organized a new congregation at a place called Union Church. First named for Hugh Wilson, organizer of the first Presbyterian church in Texas, it was soon renamed McRae in honor of the North Carolina minister who helped found it and served as first pastor. Captain T.W. Blount deeded land for a church and the adjoining cemetery, whose oldest marked grave predates the congregation to 1866; though the church dissolved in 1969, the cemetery remains active.

Shelbyville, TX

Long known as Wayfare and later McWilliams Graveyard, this cemetery served Todd Springs, a community named for a local landowner and springs that was largely populated by African Americans. Before the Civil War the area held plantations; afterward, freedmen farmed the land and built up a thriving community with businesses, a school, and a lodge before the population thinned in the 1930s and 1940s. Its graves—marked by obelisks, slabs, and Masonic markers—hold farmers, preachers, teachers, and community leaders, and it is maintained today by a cemetery association.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth leased 100 acres on Decatur Road in 1925 for a new municipal airport, timed to the Air Mail Act that year, and by May 1926 National Air Transport — a forerunner of United Airlines — flew the field's first mail run to Chicago. Renamed Meacham Field in 1927 for a former mayor, it gained the nation's first air-conditioned passenger terminal in 1937 and, during World War II, trained U.S. Navy pilots and ferried fighters and torpedo bombers toward the Pacific. After commercial flights moved on in 1953, it became one of the world's leading centers for corporate and general aviation.

Milam, TX

Virginia-born Dr. Richard A. Meador and his wife Mary Ann came to Sabine County in 1844, when Texas was still an independent republic, and built a home near this site. When their young daughter Sarah died in 1850, they buried her in the family garden for want of a public cemetery, and the plot grew into the Meador Family Cemetery as later generations were laid to rest there. Roughly forty graves remain, tended by a family association.

Meadow, TX

Meadow began in 1904 on open land grazed by the L-7 Ranch, then moved in 1917 to meet the Santa Fe Railway line — settlers famously arriving in boxcars, livestock in one end and furniture in the other. A boxcar first served as the station until this depot, built in 1911 far to the northeast at White Deer, was moved here in 1923 and used until 1965. Preserved in a park in 1967, it survives as a relic of the town's railroad beginnings.

Meadow, TX

Methodist services reached this corner of West Texas as early as 1904 through pioneer circuit rider the Rev. J. A. Sweeney, and in 1920 the Rev. J. W. Baughman formally organized the congregation with seventeen charter members. Worshippers met in the schoolhouse and the Baptist church until they built their own sanctuary in 1922. Long tied to the Plains Circuit, the church welcomed its first full-time pastor in 1951.

Fort Worth, TX

This congregation grew from two small Methodist mission churches planted in eastern Fort Worth in 1911, first led by theology student Alonzo Monk, Jr. Having outgrown their buildings, they merged in 1928 as Meadowbrook Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and 475 charter members first worshipped in a new frame sanctuary on Meadowbrook Drive. A Gothic-style stone sanctuary followed in 1949 as the suburban community around it grew.

Andrews, TX

When a circuit-riding preacher gathered seven charter members in 1907, Andrews County had its first church. For years the little flock met in the schoolhouse until a rancher's gift helped raise a one-room sanctuary in 1912, open to worshippers of every denomination. Fire took that building in 1944, but the congregation rebuilt, growing by the 1950s into a sanctuary seating hundreds.

Odem, TX

Col. William Marshall Means, a veteran of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, settled here in the 1850s and served as county sheriff, and a Methodist-built two-story hall became the heart of Meansville. The community's promise collapsed after 1876, when a shooting spree by the colonel's sons led to a deadly manhunt, the killing of Means and a sheriff, and finally a Texas Ranger order forcing the family out. Nearby Kaleta rose and faded in turn, its school and post office gone and the town wiped from the map by the great storm of 1919.

Lockhart, TX

Cotton farmer Alexander Duff Mebane built this prairie-school brick house in 1918 near the fields where he did his life's work. He bred a hardy, high-yielding cotton that resisted drought, storms, and the boll weevil, and it spread worldwide under the name Mebane Triumph. The home stayed in his family until 1947.

Fredericksburg, TX

Saddle and harness merchant Henry Meckel bought this Fredericksburg property in 1886 and improved a stone house already on the lot dating to around 1860, adding a second level of concrete blocks and a double gallery of milled wood. In 1927 Dr. J. J. Hanus purchased the building for a hospital and reworked its facade to the look it wears today. It later served as a Catholic convent from 1949 to 1979 before being restored in 1985.

Comstock, TX

In the spring of 1875, the Texas-Mexico borderlands were still contested ground, and the U.S. Army leaned on the skilled Black Seminole (Seminole-Negro) Indian scouts to track raiders across the brush country. On April 25, Lt. John L. Bullis and three of those scouts caught up with a far larger Comanche party near this spot and were forced to withdraw under fire. When Bullis's horse bolted and left him stranded, the scouts turned back into danger to save him — a rescue that earned all three the Medal of Honor.

Medicine Mound, TX

The area's earliest inhabitants were Comanche and Kiowa people who camped around four dolomite hills—the Medicine Mounds—prized for their healing properties. After the land was deeded to a railway in 1854 and Anglo settlers arrived in the 1870s, a small village grew, then relocated 2.5 miles north in 1908 when the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway came through. At its peak Medicine Mound held 22 businesses and 500 people, but the Depression and a 1933 fire that burned the whole town drove its decline, and the last business closed in 1966.

Quanah, TX

Built in 1910 by the Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway, this depot stood in country sacred to Chief Quanah Parker's Comanches, who came to the nearby mounds to pray and to roll in the gypsum dust they believed could heal. Later a Santa Fe station, it saw its share of holdups and shootings — it still carries bullet holes — yet survived the 1935 fire that consumed the rest of the town. Retired in 1959, it was hauled down Highway 287 to its present home.

Hondo, TX

Carved from sprawling Bexar County in early 1848, Medina County took its name from the river winding through it and was organized that same summer, just as Texas settled into its first years of American statehood. Castroville served as the original county seat before Hondo claimed the honor in 1892. The land was, and remains, a country of farms and ranches.