Historic Markers in Texas

Temple, TX

Built in 1895 by the sons and grandsons of Mary Margaret Messer, this modest farmhouse is a plainspoken example of vernacular Texas building — a Cumberland-plan house with board-and-batten siding raised by family labor rather than a hired architect. Purchased in 1920 by landowner F. A. Limmer of the nearby community of Alligator, the home and its outbuildings survive as a rare intact picture of the working farm complexes that once dotted Bell County.

Welllington, TX

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, most Collingsworth County communities were small settlements clustered around area ranches, and Methodist congregations sprang up among them under circuit-riding ministers. Worshipers gathered wherever they could—private homes, dugouts, schoolhouses, brush arbors, and shared Union churches. Over time the smaller groups disbanded and folded into larger ones, until by 1984 all had affiliated with the Wellington church.

Eagle Lake, TX

In a small Colorado County town, Methodism took root through a schoolhouse: by 1864 Emma Tracy Rhine had opened the community's first private school, and in 1872 the circuit rider Orceneth Fisher organized a Methodist congregation there. For decades the faithful shared a union church with Baptists, Episcopalians and others until each could build its own sanctuary, and in 1939 a grieving family gave land for the Colly Memorial church in memory of a daughter lost too young.

Joshua, TX

Before the railroad created the town of Joshua in 1881, area Methodists worshiped in the older communities of Caddo Grove and Marystown. With help from the Marystown church, a congregation was organized in Joshua in 1883 as part of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and continues today as the town's First United Methodist Church. Its roots in those vanished settlements make it a living thread of Johnson County's early history.

Mason, TX

When Mason County organized in 1858, Methodists here were served by both English- and German-speaking circuit riders, reflecting the region's mixed Anglo and German settlement. Four separate conferences long worshiped apart in the schoolhouse and courthouse before joining to build a shared sanctuary in 1877 and finally uniting by 1939. The congregation became known for raising up pastors and supporting missions and charities.

Panhandle, TX

As settlers pushed onto the Texas Panhandle in the late 1800s, the town of Panhandle became a stronghold of Methodism, its first congregation—Northern Methodist, founded in 1889—drawing worshippers of every faith. A Southern Methodist congregation followed in 1903, and both served as gathering places on the open plains. The two rival branches reconciled and merged in 1919, eventually forming the First United Methodist Church of Panhandle.

Chappell Hill, TX

This Methodist congregation was organized before 1847 under Robert Alexander, a missionary who had labored in Texas since 1837, and raised its first church in 1853. The pine sanctuary was destroyed in the catastrophic 1900 storm and rebuilt the next year, with a memorial window honoring Alexander's long service. Chappell Hill's standing in Texas Methodism is shown by the six statewide conferences held here between 1847 and 1878.

Ben Franklin, TX

This Methodist congregation was founded in 1854 through the efforts of local preachers Dan Clower and John B. Craig, the latter a former law partner of John B. Denton. A circuit rider was assigned that December to serve the Sulphur Forks Mission, and settlers milled the logs, shingles, and rafters for the first building at a nearby sawmill. The present church was built about 800 yards from the original site in 1898.

College Mound, TX

In 1844, as Texas stood as an independent republic, a cluster of families settled this Kaufman County vicinity and organized a Methodist congregation the following year under its first pastor. A log meetinghouse gave way to a frame building in 1865, and the present structure rose in 1897 on land donated by one of the original settlers. The church traces an unbroken thread from Republic-era pioneers through the community that grew up around it.

Douglassville, TX

Area Methodists founded a church on this site in 1856, soon after Douglassville itself was established, replacing open-air arbors and campgrounds as the community's center of worship. Served at first by traveling circuit riders, the congregation bought land for a parsonage in 1870. The present building, raised in 1908, was later remodeled and enlarged.

Austin, TX

In 1882 the trustees of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Mount Salem bought three acres of Travis County land for a sanctuary and burial ground, creating the spiritual and social center of the Walnut Creek community. Among those laid to rest here are members of families like the Madisons, who farmed this land from before emancipation, and Peter Elder, whose 1872 stone is among the oldest markers. The church itself burned in the mid-1930s, leaving the cemetery—many of its graves now unmarked—as the community's living memory.

Premont, TX

The South Texas town of Premont sprang up around 1904, and by about 1910 its Methodists had raised the community's first church — a modest 30-by-60-foot stucco chapel shared with other faiths and, at times, with secular gatherings. During the Second World War the building even served the public schools in 1943-44. The old chapel was razed in 1956 and replaced by the present sanctuary on the same ground, a continuity of worship spanning the town's whole history.

Montgomery, TX

Montgomery became one of the first Methodist charges organized in Texas in 1838, during the days of the Republic, and built what is said to be the first parsonage of any Protestant church in the young nation. This second parsonage, serving the Montgomery congregation, was acquired in 1886. Together they trace an unbroken line of Methodist ministry in one of Texas's oldest towns.

Austin, TX

This congregation grew from informal worship in the early 1870s at the home of Temple Washington, and by 1873 its thirteen original members had a sanctuary on San Antonio Street with the Rev. Frank Green as first pastor. Fire, rebuilding, and several moves brought the church to its present address by 1923. Among its early leaders were the Rev. Abraham Grant, who became an AME bishop, and Dr. William Laws, later president of Paul Quinn College.

Sherman, TX

Edward Metz came from Michigan as a young man to join his brother Charles in the leather trade, and in the 1870s the pair built a thriving business buying buffalo hides and furs from tribes in Oklahoma for sale to eastern markets. Credited with helping keep peace between Native peoples and settlers in Grayson County, Metz built this Victorian house with fish-scale siding in 1883 as a gift for his bride. Later home to a prominent local physician, it was restored in the mid-1970s.

Maydelle, TX

From 1908 to 1912 the Mewshaw State Sawmill here cut some 35,000 board feet of lumber a day, worked by convict laborers leased from the nearby Rusk State Penitentiary — a stark example of the convict-labor system that powered much Southern industry after Reconstruction. The village of Maydelle grew up along the rail line between Rusk and Palestine, and in 1933 a Civilian Conservation Corps camp was established here. Though the CCC camp closed in 1937, its conservation work endures in the I.D. Fairchild State Forest.

Mexia, TX

After a 1912 gas strike hinted at riches below, flamboyant wildcatter A. E. Humphreys struck oil near Mexia, and the 1920 discovery at the Rogers No. 1 well set off one of America's great free-wheeling booms before proration. Mexia's population exploded from 4,000 to 50,000 within days as millionaires, merchants, roughnecks, and hordes of 'undesirables'—later run out by the Texas Rangers—swarmed in for a share of the black gold. Storage could not keep pace with output as tanks for over thirty million barrels rose across the field.

Kingsville, TX

This camp on the Santa Gertrudis was a strategic waypoint during the Texas Revolution, hosting the northward march of General José Urrea's column of Santa Anna's army in early 1836. Among those who passed through were figures on both sides of the era's brutality — the merciful "Angel of Goliad" and Colonel Garay, alongside Colonel Portilla, who carried out the Palm Sunday execution of Texan prisoners at Goliad. After the Mexican defeat at San Jacinto, the same ground witnessed the ragged southward retreat of thousands of soldiers, camp followers, and captured livestock.

Houston, TX

This marker describes the Mexican army's battle line at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, with cavalry on the left, infantry and artillery centered behind a fortification of boxes and baggage, and the right wing far extended. In a swift assault, Sam Houston's Texans overran that line and won independence for Texas.

Liberty, TX

After the Texas Revolution's decisive fight at San Jacinto in 1836, Mexican soldiers taken prisoner were held here on this rise from August 1836 until their release in April 1837. According to the marker, the kindness shown them by the plantation's owners, Judge and Mrs. William Hardin, so moved many of the captives that they chose to stay and become citizens of Texas.

Abilene, TX

For generations, schooling for Mexican American children in Texas ranged from nonexistent to nominally equal, and Abilene's history tracks that hard road. By 1910 the city ran a separate public school for Mexican American pupils in the lower grades, and in 1920 opened an "Americanization" school meant to press English and Anglo customs on its students — facilities that were often visibly inferior to those given Anglo children. Only across the mid-20th century, as Mexican American Abilenians pushed into higher education and public life, did attitudes and institutions slowly integrate, until the neighborhood's old campus was repurposed in 1979.

Comfort, TX

German immigrant Frederich Christian Meyer arrived in Comfort in 1862 and ran a stage stop and weigh station, gradually enlarging a log cabin and building a two-story stone home in 1869 for his wife Ernestine, a midwife who kept a separate building with maternity rooms for the women of the surrounding ranches. As rail lines reached the Hill Country in 1887, the Meyers added a hotel, and Ernestine and her children ran the business for decades after Frederich's death. A daughter, Julia Meyer Ellenberger, added a second guest house in 1920 and operated the complex until 1956.

Meyersville, TX

Meyersville grew from an 1843 settlement opened by Peter Bluntzer, who drew fellow immigrants from the French border region of Alsace to the DeWitt County prairie. Named for early arrival Adolph Meyer, whose home hosted the post office from 1851, the community anchored itself with Lutheran and Catholic congregations and, in time, a public school. It became known for its turkey farms and reached its height around 1923.

Geneva, TX

Mial Scurlock and his brother William left Mississippi in 1834 to settle in Texas, then part of Mexico, receiving a land grant in the Sabine District where they began farming. When the Texas Revolution broke out, the brothers joined the Texas army at San Augustine. Mial fought in the Siege of Bexar and then in the defense of the Alamo, where he was killed on March 6, 1836.

Miami, TX

The town of Miami took shape when the Santa Fe's Southern Kansas branch pushed through in 1887, and its cemetery followed close behind, with pioneer William T. Lard's reinterred grave among the earliest. In 1900 the Scottish-owned Cresswell Ranche & Cattle Company sold Roberts County several acres for a burying ground, deeded to Judge S.G. Carter for a single dollar. Shaded by cedar and cypress in the open Panhandle style, it holds Civil War veterans, soldiers of two world wars and Korea, and two Texas Rangers.

Miami, TX

In 1933 a Panhandle farmer plowing wheat turned up chalky bones far too big for any cow or buffalo. Local investigators, and later University of Texas scientist Dr. E.H. Sellards with WPA funding, uncovered the remains of several mammoths lying beside Clovis fluted spear points — one resting just inches from a mammoth's vertebra. The find placed human hunters and mammoths together at an Ice Age watering hole roughly 12,000 years ago.

Miami, TX

When the Southern Kansas Railway Company of Texas laid track through Roberts County in 1887, the town of Miami sprang up at the end of the line as a workers' camp with a tent hotel and a field kitchen. The railroad sank a public water well and strung telegraph lines to nearby Fort Elliott, and passengers and supplies for the fort and the town of Mobeetie began arriving by rail. This depot was built in 1888, passed to the Santa Fe Railroad in 1899, and stayed in service until 1978.

Austin, TX

Michael Butler left Limerick, Ireland, in 1866, learned bricklaying in New York, and by 1873 had settled in Austin, where his riverside brickyards would operate until 1958. Using mule-powered machines to press Colorado River clay into molds, Butler's plant supplied most of Austin's brick buildings between 1873 and 1900—and some three million bricks that support the interior of the Texas Capitol. His family later deeded 91 acres of the old brickyards to the city, land now honored as Butler Park.

Anderson, TX

Born in Tennessee, Michael Moore Kennard brought his family to Texas in 1830 as part of Robertson's Colony, likely pausing along the way to raise a crop. He received a large land grant in what is now Grimes County and earned still more land for his service in the Texas Revolution. His trading firm, Fanthorp, Womack & Kennard, was the county's first mercantile business.

Bellville, TX

Born in Grantham, England, in 1820, Michael Robert Pilley joined the Mier Expedition of 1842 — the ill-fated raid in which Republic of Texas forces crossed into Mexico and were captured, an episode remembered for the deadly "black bean" lottery imposed on the prisoners. This marker, placed in 1936, commemorates his part in that chapter of the young Republic's turbulent border struggles.

Palestine, TX

Little is documented of Micham Main before his 1820 marriage to Elizabeth Van Winkle in Illinois, but in 1833 the lure of favorable Mexican colonization laws drew the family to the Nacogdoches District of what became Texas. He received a land grant in David G. Burnet's colony in 1835, farmed as required, and briefly served in the Republic of Texas army in 1836. When Anderson County was created in 1846, Main was one of three Illinois-Palestine men appointed to choose and name the county seat—Palestine—though later accounts credit fellow settler John Parker with the naming.

Galveston, TX

A French-Canadian trader, Michel B. Menard reached Texas in 1829 and settled on Galveston Island in 1833, then signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. As a founder of the Galveston City Company he steered the island's early development into a major port, and later served the Republic in its Congress. Menard County was named in his honor in 1858.

Marble Falls, TX

Ernst Gustav Michel, a German immigrant, and his wife Lillie Agnes opened a drugstore on this site in 1891. After fire destroyed the first store in 1905, Michel raised a three-story building with the drugstore and soda fountain below, a 300-seat opera house on the second floor, and the family's quarters above — only for it to burn again in the great block fire of 1927. All four of the Michel children who reached adulthood became pharmacists, and the family has kept a drugstore here since 1891.

Navasota, TX

Eliza Johnson raised this limestone-rubble building in 1874 after a fire swept the block, complying with a new city ordinance that demanded fireproof construction. Local investor August Horst bought it in 1877 and soon passed it to his wife's brothers, the Mickelboroughs, whose families held it until 1929. Over the decades its rooms hosted a saloon, a grocery, a confectionary, an ice cream parlor, and the offices of attorneys and dentists.

Arlington, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1810, Middleton Tate Johnson became such a foundational figure in North Texas settlement that he is remembered as 'the Father of Tarrant County.' He served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas and left a wide mark on the region's early development. He died at Austin in 1866, and neighboring Johnson County was named in his honor.

Midfield, TX

Midfield rose at a crossroads equidistant from four coastal-plain towns, gaining a post office in 1904 and a railroad stop a decade later. When young Iva Nell Hale died of appendicitis in 1913, her grieving father pressed banker W.B. Gaumer to set aside a community graveyard, which Gaumer formally deeded in 1916. As the town dwindled late in the century, residents formed an association to keep the ground and its records.

Midfield, TX

Area Methodists worshiping at Hawley Methodist Church became charter members of a new Midfield congregation in 1907, first gathering at the Keller Hotel before building a sanctuary and parsonage on Junetta Street. As the surrounding population thinned, the congregation merged with Markham Methodist in 1970. In 1981 the members bought back their old building and reopened it as the Midfield Community Church.

Midkiff, TX

Tucked where four West Texas county lines nearly meet, Midkiff began in the 1880s when railroads sold cheap land to lure settlers onto the ranching plains. Rancher John Rufus Midkiff opened a general store in 1902 and strung the area's only telephone line thirty miles to Midland along a barbed-wire fence. The sleepy ranch country roared to life after oil was struck in 1950, spawning an oil-camp town before the revived name of Midkiff took hold.

Midland, TX

Built by rancher David Fasken to move cattle, supplies, and passengers, this 66-mile standard-gauge line ran from Midland out to the ranch towns of Fasken, Florey, and Seminole from 1916 to 1920. It was a rough-and-ready operation: trains stopped so crews could open pasture gates and shoot coyotes and rattlesnakes, and stranded passengers were sheltered at the ranch during breakdowns. Abandoned in 1920 after just four years, the railroad left a roadbed still visible across the West Texas prairie.

Andrews, TX

Chartered in 1916 by David Fasken's Midland Farms Company, the Midland and Northwestern ran sixty-five miles of standard-gauge track from Midland toward Seminole to ship cattle and lure settlers to the plains. It was a shoestring operation—an engine borrowed from the Texas and Pacific, aging equipment, and crews said to shoot coyotes from the cab to break the monotony. Flash floods that washed away its crossties helped finish it off, and the line was abandoned in 1923 as unprofitable and poorly located.

Midland, TX

For a brief decade beginning in 1910, the raw new railroad town of Midland supported its own two-year coeducational college, headed by first president H. R. Garrett. Students rode a horse-drawn bus to the three-story gray brick building, edited a yearbook wryly named 'The Sandstorm,' and numbered some 250 by 1917. Financial strain forced the doors shut in 1921, and the building was eventually torn down.

Midland, TX

Midland sits where old cattle trails once crossed and where, tradition holds, the last Comanche raid into Texas passed. The Texas and Pacific Railroad reached the spot in 1881, and its position halfway between El Paso and Fort Worth gave the town its name. Sheep and Hereford cattle came first, then farmers drawn by windmill-pumped water—until the 1928 Permian Basin oil discovery made Midland the headquarters of a booming petroleum empire.

Midland, TX

Midland County was created and organized in 1885, its name drawn from its position roughly halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso on the Texas and Pacific Railway — it was first called Midway. The railroad brought the settlers and commerce that gave the county life on the arid plains of West Texas. Midland would grow into a hub of the region.

Midland, TX

Sitting midway between El Paso and Fort Worth on the Texas and Pacific Railroad, the townsite took the name Midland in 1881, and Midland County was created in 1885. The area had been a crossroads of trails and the site of one of the last Comanche raids into Texas before cattlemen, sheepmen, and windmill-watered farmers moved in. The 1928 Permian Basin discovery made Midland an oil headquarters, and in 1954 the ancient "Midland Man" remains were found nearby.

Midland, TX

Oil found in the Permian Basin in the 1920s carried the region through the Great Depression and drew company headquarters to Midland, yet the county itself saw no producing wells until the 1940s. Geologist H. L. Beckman and the Rowan Drilling Company staked Humble Oil's No. 1 Mrs. O. P. Buchanan well here, spudding it in September 1944 and completing it in November 1945 at a depth of more than 12,500 feet. It became Midland County's first producer before being plugged in 1947.

Midland, TX

In 1953 pipeline welder Keith Glasscock spotted fossilized human bones weathering out of a ranch near here — a skull, rib, and hand fragments of a woman who may have lived as early as 9,000–9,500 B.C. Found alongside the bones of extinct horse, camel, mammoth, and sloth, plus tools and ancient hearths, the discovery drew a team of leading archaeologists, geologists, and anthropologists. "Midland Man" ranks among the oldest human remains yet found in the Americas.

Midland, TX

Chartered in Odessa in 1902 as the Odessa National Bank with just $25,000 in capital, this institution moved to Midland within a year and reinvented itself alongside the West Texas economy. It rode the cattle trade until a devastating drought forced a 1923 reorganization, then hitched itself to the oil boom that reshaped the Permian Basin from 1927 onward. Through decades of "boom and bust," mergers, and ever-taller downtown towers, the bank remained a fixture of Midland's commercial life.

Midland, TX

Built of concrete blocks in 1908 in the Western Ranch style, this was the first house in the young town of Midland, then a rough cattle settlement on the West Texas plains. It was home to Raymond and Edith Lawrence and stands as a tangible link to the community's earliest days.

Midlothian, TX

Midlothian grew out of the Peters Colony, an ambitious 1840s effort to draw settlers onto the north-central Texas prairie. The Hawkins family arrived in 1848 and set aside land for a church and, beside it, a cemetery whose earliest marked grave belongs to Mary Elizabeth Hawkins in 1873. As the town incorporated in 1888 and prospered, the burial ground grew alongside it, gathering mayors, pioneers, ranchers, farmers, and the anonymous poor into one shared record of the community's life.

Midlothian, TX

In the decades after the Civil War, American Presbyterianism was split between a northern branch (PCUSA) and a southern one (PCUS), and small Texas towns often supported a congregation of each. Midlothian brought its two together in 1911, and the united congregation raised a sanctuary just before the First World War. Generations of members have anchored the town through cooperative charities like Manna House and through national and global mission work.

Midlothian, TX

Education in the Midlothian area began in an 1850 log cabin that served as both school and church in the Hawkins settlement. After the town's founding, railroad president George B. Sealy donated a block for schooling, and by 1906 the Midlothian Independent School District had formed, opening a two-story brick schoolhouse in 1907. Black students, taught at a separate campus later named for Booker T. Washington before integration, were part of a system that grew through grammar schools, an elementary school, and beloved traditions like the May Fete.

Livingston, TX

Andrew and Mary McKee came to Texas in 1845 and bought this land in 1854; when Mary died in childbirth in 1857 she became the first person laid to rest here, at a spot she is said to have marked herself. By the close of the Civil War the burial ground served the whole Midway community. Its graves hold pioneer settlers and their descendants, former slaves, and veterans of American wars from the Civil War to Vietnam.

Midway, TX

Though its exact founding is lost to sparse records, the Midway Church of Christ is thought to have organized around 1854, with traveling preachers serving it until Joseph Addison Clark became its first settled minister in 1855. Many of its early members helped build up Midway and Madison County. The congregation has worshiped on this same site ever since, enlarging its meeting house over the years while its roots reach back before the Civil War.

Wichita Falls, TX

Beginning in 1948, African American graduates of Booker T. Washington High School repeatedly sought admission to Hardin Junior College, part of Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, only to be turned away — even honor students accepted by mail were rejected in person. With NAACP encouragement, Willie Faye Battle and fellow applicants pressed the issue into federal court in Battle, et al. v. Wichita Falls Junior College District. Following the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the first Black students enrolled that summer.

De Berry, TX

Deep in the piney woods of East Texas, these mineral springs drew settlers before 1850 and blossomed in the 1880s into a bustling farm town and health resort called Breckenridge Springs. After Spencer Midyett's store landed a post office in 1887, the renamed community swelled with a cotton gin, sawmill, stores, a school, and a hotel and boarding house catering to visitors who believed the mineral waters could cure what ailed them. Like so many East Texas timber towns, Midyett faded once the forests were logged out after World War I, its post office closing in 1920 and its school folding into Carthage's by the 1940s.

Lubbock, TX

From the 1880s onward, Hispanic workers shaped Lubbock County—first as ranch hands, then as the rail crews recruited out of El Paso to build the lines that opened the South Plains. Railroad row houses and cotton-picking camps hardened into ethnic enclaves, and in the city a barrio known as "Mexican Town" or the "Chihuahua District" took root amid poverty, segregation, and overcrowding. The Great Depression and a devastating 1970 tornado both fell hardest on these residents, yet the community grew into a third of the city and built dozens of civic and civil-rights organizations.

Brownsville, TX

Brothers Miguel Fernandez and José Fernandez-Toral immigrated from Asturias, Spain, and built an import-export business in Brownsville. After their partnership dissolved, Miguel opened one of the city's first hide yards here in 1890, during a drought that forced ranchers to slaughter herds; the yard rendered tallow, bleached bones and horns, and baled hides for distant markets while stocking ranch supplies. The distinctive Border Brick-style building, expanded around 1900, stayed in the family until 1984 and was listed on the National Register in 1990.

Frelsburg, TX

Tennessee-born Mike Muckleroy came to Texas in 1840 and, just two years later, joined the campaign that drove the Mexican general Adrian Woll's thousand troops out of San Antonio and back across the border. Settling in Colorado County on a Republic of Texas land grant, he farmed and built a two-story log house topped with a watchtower to guard against Indian raids. Beloved as "Uncle Mike," he served terms as county commissioner before his death in 1896 at nearly eighty-eight.

Milam, TX

First described by Stephen F. Austin as he camped along El Camino Real de los Tejas in 1821, Milam is among the oldest towns in Texas, originally known as Red Mound and prized by settlers for its fertile land. Sitting close to the great road, it saw a steady stream of explorers, veterans, and pioneers before losing its county seat in 1858 and slowly fading.

Milam, TX

Founded in 1828 as Red Mound and renamed in 1835 for Texas Revolution hero Benjamin Rush Milam, this town served as an early seat of justice and a hub of the Republic of Texas, complete with an internal revenue post. During the Civil War it housed the Confederate quartermaster's department for Sabine County. It was the first Texas home of John S. Roberts, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and of John C. Hale, who died at the Battle of San Jacinto.