Historic Markers in Texas

Sherman, TX

Born in Kentucky and raised in Sherman, Mita Holsapple Hall graduated from Mary Nash College and, in 1921, organized the town's first Camp Fire Girls group. For the next 44 years she led that youth movement locally and nationally, earning honors along the way, and she co-authored a county history for the 1936 Texas Centennial.

Wrightsboro, TX

Mitchel Putnam fought in the Texas War for Independence and was wounded at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, where Texian forces secured their break from Mexico. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1962 to honor his service in the brief, pivotal campaign that created the Republic of Texas. His story is one of the ordinary soldiers whose sacrifice underwrote Texas independence.

Granbury, TX

This bend of the Brazos and the surrounding country take their name from early settler Nelson Cooney Mitchell, whose feud with the Truett family ended in a murder conviction and his hanging in 1875. Mitchell lies in this cemetery among many other pioneer families, alongside the graveyard's earliest marked grave—a one-year-old child who died in 1872. Local tradition holds that some unmarked graves may predate the Civil War.

Colorado City, TX

Mitchell County was carved out of West Texas territory in 1876 and organized in 1881 when the railroad arrived, turning Colorado City into a booming supply hub known as the region's 'Mother City.' Named for War for Independence veterans Asa and Eli Mitchell, the county blended cattle, sheep, and later oil into its economy. Its landmarks — a former Comanche village site and Seven Wells, remembered as a last buffalo watering hole — mark the transition from Indigenous and frontier land to a railroad-era ranching center.

Victoria, TX

When Victoria voted to create an independent school district in 1898, its plan laid bare the era's racial order: eight schools, four for Anglo children and four for African American children. Prominent architect Jules Leffland designed the imposing three-story building completed on this site in 1902, later renamed to honor early trustee J.D. Mitchell. Fires in 1935 and 1943 cost the school its top floor, but the building endured and still serves as an educational center today.

Fort Worth, TX

Jeweler James E. Mitchell insisted on exacting craftsmanship when he built this home, completed in 1907 to the design of the noted Fort Worth firm Sanguinet and Staats. It passed in 1920 to his friend Dr. Charles B. Simmons and later to Simmons's daughter Maurine and her husband, Dr. Frank Schoonover, who lived there into 1979. The house reflects the polish of Fort Worth's professional class in a booming cattle-and-railroad city.

Jacksonville, TX

Settlers from Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas founded the Pine Springs community — later Mixon — in the 1850s, and in 1853 Josiah Thomas set aside land for churches and religious use. The cemetery's oldest marked grave dates to 1854, with many early burials marked by local red iron-ore rock, and tradition holds that members of local Indian tribes lie in unmarked graves. More than 125 veterans rest here, from the War of 1812 to the present, including twenty-two Confederate soldiers.

Keene, TX

Southwestern Adventist University began in 1883 as the Keene Industrial and Missionary Academy, training workers for the Seventh-day Adventist church while pairing classroom study with a practical trade. When Harry H. Hamilton became president in 1937, he oversaw construction of the Mizpah Gate to replace an old turnstile in the fence that had once kept out starving livestock. Built by students of brick and petrified wood from nearby Somervell County, it was dedicated that June as a gift of the graduating class.

Lexington, TX

Moab was one of many "freedom colonies" African Americans founded across Lee County after emancipation—communities of Black landowners farming their own ground for the first time. Families raised cotton, corn, and livestock and followed seasonal "cotton picks" across Texas and New Mexico to supplement their income. By the 1930s the settlement had a school, two churches, a cemetery, and a post office; today Mt. Nebo A.M.E. Church remains as its anchor, and descendants return each year.

Mobeetie, TX

Mobeetie claims to be the oldest town in the Texas Panhandle, beginning as a trading post in 1874 and relocating to sit nearer the protection of Fort Elliott the following year. First called Sweetwater and renamed in 1879, it grew into a rough, lively hub of hunters, cowboys, and gamblers, and in 1881 became the judicial seat of the 35th District — where Temple Houston, son of Sam Houston, served as district attorney and state senator. Bypassed by the Santa Fe Railroad in 1888 and battered by an 1898 tornado, the town faded into decline.

Mobeetie, TX

Said to be the first established cemetery in the Texas Panhandle, Mobeetie Cemetery was born of necessity beside a town that grew from an 1875 buffalo hunters' camp and army post. Tornadoes and time have erased many markers, but the oldest surviving stone dates to 1882. Among its graves lie outlaws, accused horse thieves, victims of an 1898 cyclone, and the famed Texas Ranger Captain G. W. Arrington.

Mobeetie, TX

Soon after Wheeler County was organized in 1879, settlers at Old Mobeetie formed a Union church, and on April 2, 1894, its thirteen Baptist members organized their own congregation. They met in public buildings until a sanctuary was raised in 1919. After the Panhandle & Santa Fe Railroad bypassed Old Mobeetie and the town declined, the church building was moved to New Mobeetie in 1942, carrying its ministry across two communities.

Mobeetie, TX

Mail service in Wheeler County began at Fort Elliott before a U.S. post office opened in 1879 in the town of Mobeetie—earlier called Sweetwater—with George A. Montgomery as first postmaster. When the town relocated a mile north to the Santa Fe rail line, a new post office rose here in 1928. Rural routes expanded to reach the region's growing farm families in the 1930s, then contracted as drought and hardship emptied the surrounding land.

Mobeetie, TX

Mobeetie grew from an 1874 buffalo hunters' camp and the 1875 founding of Fort Elliott, and Methodists were preaching there by 1881. A mission congregation formed by 1884 lost its sanctuary and most of the town to an 1898 tornado, later buying a shared Union Church. When the town relocated toward the railroad in the late 1920s, the congregation followed, worshipping in a basement before completing its present sanctuary in 1947.

Jacksboro, TX

In November 1940, Battery F of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery — a Texas National Guard unit — mobilized here for active duty. Shipped out from San Francisco in late 1941, the men were still at sea when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and they were sent to defend Java, where the unit was captured in March 1942. For three and a half years they endured captivity across Asia, forced into brutal labor, much of it on the Burma–Siam Railway, where most of the deaths occurred; the survivors came home only after Japan's surrender.

Temple vicinity, TX

Founded in 1857 by New York physician Dr. Chauncy W. Moffet and his wife Amelia, the town took its name from a misspelling of theirs. A Union loyalist in a Confederate state, Dr. Moffet was pressed into Confederate service, later aided the Union, and vanished mysteriously after returning home in 1868. The town was platted that year and grew to hold three churches, a school, a post office, stores, and small industries.

Temple, TX

Moffat Cemetery began as a family and Masonic burial ground, its oldest marked grave that of Mary Marshall, who died in 1861. Land set aside from a farm sale in 1869 grew through gifts to the Leon Masonic Lodge and, from 1921, to a dedicated cemetery association. Among those resting here is pioneer Isaac Thomas Bean, who came to Texas with his family in 1823, and the grounds hold both upright stones and distinctive stone cairns.

Gainesville, TX

Ned Moffett, Sr. (1842–1924), a Missouri native whose family was recorded in early census records as Mulatto, owned 90 acres along Elm Creek that he opened for celebrations by Gainesville's African American community. In 1943 the city bought the land from his heirs to create Moffett Park, and the following year it hosted a major Juneteenth celebration. Though use declined after nearby Leonard Park was integrated in the mid-1960s, the park endures as a monument to the city's African American community life.

Goldthwaite, TX

Ambrose Bull bought part of the Moses Hughes tract in 1859 and became one of the first settlers of the Bulls Springs community, where a cemetery took root in the 1870s—its earliest burial believed to be War of 1812 veteran George Washington Joy. Placed in trust in 1899, the grounds hold 83 surveyed graves, many unknown, amid concrete curbing, brick crypts, iron fencing, and stone markers. Many of the tombstones bear poems written by grieving family members.

Lometa, TX

The Moline community took root along Lampasas County's northern edge in the 1880s, and by 1916 its growing families needed their own school after neighboring ones overflowed. Kenneth and Olive Patterson donated five acres, and citizens raised a three-room building on a prominent hill. Over the next three decades Moline expanded into the largest rural school in the county before closing in 1949; the community around it faded into a ghost town.

Houston, TX

Mollie Arline Kirkland married into a circus family in 1858 and toured the South with the Bailey Family Troupe until the Civil War, when she followed her husband's regiment as a nurse and entertained the troops of Hood's Texas Brigade. After the war the Baileys bought a small circus and settled in Texas, billing it as "A Texas Show for Texas People." Widowed in 1896, Mollie ran the beloved traveling show herself until 1917, earning the title "Circus Queen of the Southwest."

Proctor, TX

During the Civil War, Mollie E. Moore wrote poems that Texans memorized, clipped from newspapers, and mailed to their soldiers — verses honoring fallen heroes, home units, and Confederate victories — while also nursing and doing social work at Camp Ford near Tyler. A spirited young woman who rode horseback with a pistol at her side, she went on to national fame as a poet, novelist, and columnist, married a newspaper editor, and led New Orleans society for two decades. Near this spot, at Old Mooresville (now Proctor), she often visited her brother's family.

Nocona, TX

When the Rev. Abraham Molsbee brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1888, he helped plant Church of the Brethren congregations across the northwest of the state and into Indian Territory. The graveyard beside his chapel began that same year with the burial of his 20-year-old son Orville, and over generations it grew from a family plot into a community burial ground formally deeded in 1942. Its rows chronicle frontier hardship and the service of veterans from the Confederacy through World War I, World War II, and Vietnam.

Monohans, TX

The shifting dunes near Monahans hold traces of an astonishingly deep human past—flint points, grinding stones, and the bones of mammoths and giant bison from a wetter, grassier age. Spanish explorers Cabeza de Vaca and Antonio de Espejo met the Jumano people here in the 1500s, and for more than a century Apache and Comanche fought over its scarce water and shinnery-oak acorns along the Comanche War Trail. Later the California gold rush sent emigrant wagons through the sand, first mapped by Army engineers in 1849 and 1854; the state set aside 3,000 acres as a park in 1957.

Monaville, TX

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, one-room schools like Monaville, Aurora, and Bracy Island sprang up across rural Waller County to serve scattered farm families. The schools organized into districts in the 1890s, and in 1904 local landowners deeded an acre here to the Monaville school. State efforts to build larger high school units led to a 1930 consolidation into the Monaville Independent School District, but as the rural population thinned after the Depression the district's schools closed by 1953, with students absorbed into neighboring towns.

Mabank, TX

Formed in 1895 when the tiny Elm Grove and Harper districts merged, Mono School—its name meaning "One"—served the farming families of Roddy and Elm Grove in Van Zandt County. At its height it employed four teachers and taught children through the tenth grade. When wartime factory jobs pulled families toward the cities after World War II, enrollment dwindled and the school closed its doors in 1950.

Hutto, TX

When the land here was held by a handful of families in 1870 — among them that of Edward Mandell House, later a nationally known political advisor — the growing settlement of Stringtown gained a school on an acre House donated in 1893. Settlers named it for House's daughter; a clerk's slip turned “Monadale” into the enduring “Monodale.” Its Swedish and Czech immigrant cotton farmers were served by the school district until it consolidated with Hutto in 1949.

Crockett, TX

The Monroe-Crook House was built in 1854 by A. T. Monroe, a prominent merchant and grandnephew of President James Monroe, in a refined Greek Revival style with insulating brick set between its inner and outer walls. Attorney George W. Crook bought the home in 1911, and it has since been preserved by his family. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1969.

Montague, TX

In the early 1880s, families from the mountain provinces of northern Italy—Raimondi, Fenoglio, Perona, Corado—began settling in Montague, and by the early 1900s as many as fifty Italian families lived there. Most were Catholic, and in 1901 they founded St. John Catholic Church; the year before, the bishop of Dallas had bought three acres for this cemetery, where Giroloma Vitali was the first buried in 1901. Its stones record Italian, German, Polish, and Hispanic families among more than 250 marked and unmarked graves.

Montague, TX

The first settlers reached Montague County in 1849, and after the county formed in 1857 the town of Montague rose as its seat. Pioneer James M. Gibbons is remembered as donating the cemetery's first plot when his wife Elizabeth died in 1862. Among the graves — about sixty bearing legible nineteenth-century dates — rest Confederate veterans, early Texas Rangers, and numerous founding families of the area.

Bowie, TX

Montague County was carved out of the North Texas frontier in 1857 and organized the next year, taking its name from Daniel Montague, a pioneer surveyor who mapped the region and fought as a militia commander in the Mexican War. Surveyors like Montague were the advance guard of Anglo settlement, translating raw land into the grid of counties and farms. The town of Montague became its seat.

Montague, TX

Montague County, created in 1857 on the North Texas frontier, cycled through log, frame, and stone courthouses—several lost to fire and one wrecked by a 1912 storm—before commissioners hired Waco architect George Burnett to design the present Classical Revival building. Completed in 1913 by contractor A. H. Rodgers, the three-story brick and stone "temple of justice" features four staircased entrances, porticos, and dentils. It has anchored county government for more than a century.

Montague, TX

In 1888 Montague County established a poor farm east of town, renting land to an operator who housed and fed the needy in exchange for their labor; its first year listed sixteen paupers. Moved to a larger tract in 1899, it grew a "big house" for residents and, by the 1930s, hosted a WPA garment project and a Texas A&M horticultural research station. The county closed the institution in December 1939 after more than fifty years of caring for its poor.

Brackettville, TX

Around 1887 Yldefonso Montalvo, also known as Obed Woods, built this house from cedar pickets and caliche plaster gathered close at hand. The educated son of an English mother and a Mexican father, he worked as a rancher and for nearby Fort Clark and a local store, raising nine children here with his wife Guadalupe. The dwelling reflects the resourceful vernacular building of the Texas borderlands.

Rusk County, TX

Built by Julien Sidney Devereux (1805–1856)—a justice of the peace, county commissioner, and legislator—Monte Verdi was a frontier interpretation of southern Greek Revival architecture, set so high on his roughly 10,000-acre plantation that much of Rusk, Cherokee, and Nacogdoches counties could be seen from its upstairs porch. It was one of the most significant antebellum plantations in Texas, worked by scores of enslaved people whose labor made its scale possible. The house was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Cushing, TX

Monte Verdi was the 10,700-acre plantation of Julien Sidney Devereux, and this marker names the enslaved men, women, and children whose labor sustained it—people like Scott and Tabby, born in the 1780s and 1790s, carried from Georgia to Alabama to Texas, and the many families documented in 1846 and in the 1856 probate that listed 80 enslaved people. Freed in 1865, they built new lives on the plantation's former lands, and their descendants—rarely taking the Devereux name—carried surnames like Anderson, Booker, Henry, and Lewis into the surrounding communities. One couple, Green and Phoebe, founded the Anadarko Christian church and school in 1868.

San Antonio, TX

Monte Vista rose between 1890 and 1930 as one of San Antonio's fashionable suburbs, where brewery presidents, oilmen, cattle barons, and civic leaders built showcase homes. Its streets hold an eclectic mix of Georgian, Renaissance Revival, Mediterranean, Victorian, and Art Deco designs, some by noted architects such as courthouse designer J. Riely Gordon and Atlee B. Ayres. The district survives as a colorful record of the city's turn-of-the-century growth.

Uvalde, TX

A Methodist mission took hold in the small community of Montell in 1889, its early members gathering wherever they could—including a summer brush arbor—before a Union Sunday School formed by 1895. A permanent sanctuary was dedicated in 1908, hosting monthly services that paused only briefly during World War II. Descendants of those pioneer families still worship here on alternating Sundays.

Lubbock, TX

Monterey High School opened in 1955, taking its name from one of the two original townsites platted for Lubbock. That earlier Monterey was founded in present-day northwest Lubbock by W. E. Rayner in 1890, but in a notable 1891 compromise Rayner joined forces with the rival townsite's promoters to establish Lubbock in its current location. The school thus carries forward the name of a would-be town that merged into the city instead.

Montgomery, TX

Baptists in Montgomery organized a fellowship in 1850 and bought this site the same year, calling their first full-time pastor, the Rev. Thomas Chilton, in 1853. The present vernacular Gothic Revival sanctuary went up in 1902 under Pastor O. P. Stark, who is said to have designed the building himself. A 1918 storm toppled the upper steeple, an education wing followed in the 1940s, and the congregation worshiped here until 1979.

Bellville, TX

Established in 1850, Montgomery Cemetery is among the oldest burial grounds of Austin County, dating to the first years of Texas statehood. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2007, it preserves the resting place of pioneer families who settled this stretch of the Brazos country. Graves from so early a date are a rare surviving record of antebellum frontier life.

Conroe, TX

Montgomery County was carved from Washington County on December 14, 1837, during the days of the Republic of Texas, and organized that same year. It was named for Richard Montgomery, the Continental Army brigadier general killed in the 1775 assault on Quebec. The county seat began at Montgomery in 1837 before shifting to Conroe in 1888.

Conroe, TX

Montgomery County was the third county created by the Republic of Texas, established by act of Congress on December 14, 1837, in response to a settlers' petition, and its sprawling original boundaries later gave rise to several neighboring counties. The town of Montgomery served as the first seat, where log cabins and a wood building housed county government until 1889, when an election moved the seat to Conroe. A brick courthouse rose here in 1891, and the present Art Deco building was completed in 1936 amid the prosperity of the Conroe oil boom, later expanded as the county grew.

Montgomery, TX

A prosperous farming area in 1861, Montgomery County threw its wealth and men into the Confederate war effort, sending two companies into the famed Hood's Texas Brigade. Young boys, old men, and the partially disabled filled home guard and state units, while the courthouse hosted a sewing room where families clothed their own soldiers. By 1864 the sacrifice was so total that not a single store remained open in the town of Montgomery.

Plainview, TX

Built in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression, this Plainview store housed Montgomery Ward for nearly four decades. Its glazed terra cotta and multicolored tile — a signature look the mail-order giant repeated across its Texas stores — brought big-city retail style to the High Plains. The building endures as a landmark of the town's early commercial growth.

Garwood, TX

This family burial ground served pioneer planters James S. Montgomery, a veteran of the War of 1812, and George W. Thatcher, whose households fled the advancing Mexican army in the panicked 1836 flight known as the "Runaway Scrape." Returning after the Texas Revolution, both men prospered as planters, and Montgomery went on to represent the county in the Congress of the Republic of Texas. The earliest grave here is likely that of Montgomery's young son, who died in 1836.

Mount Pleasant, TX

The community of Monticello, named for Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, took shape in the 1850s and won a post office in 1857, growing into a small hub of mills, gins, a brick factory and a school. Its Baptist congregation appears in association records by 1878 and in 1919 moved to this site, where members donated pine trees, hauled the logs by mule wagon to a local mill, and raised a cross-gabled frame sanctuary in just three months. The church long served as the community's spiritual and social heart, and by the 21st century, as lignite mining and recreational lakes reshaped the land, it stood as one of Monticello's last historic landmarks.

Sterling City, TX

Montvale sprang up in 1884 when settlers relocated the earlier community of St. Elmo to a spot along the Shafter Military Trail, an old road running from Fort Concho. Within a few years it had a school, a platted townsite, a Methodist church, a hotel, a post office, and a cluster of stores and shops. But the creation of Sterling City as county seat in 1891 drained the town's fortunes, and today only a community cemetery marks where it stood.

La Grange, TX

In 1848 the remains of Texans killed in the 1842 Dawson Massacre and the 1843 "Black Bean Death Lottery" were gathered and reburied in a sandstone vault on this bluff above the Colorado River. Cared for over the years by the Kreische family and later the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the grave was finally crowned during the 1936 Texas Centennial by a 48-foot shellstone shaft with an Art Deco mural. Local citizens later donated the surrounding acreage to the state as parkland.

Moody, TX

When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad bypassed the older settlement of Perry in 1881, a new town was platted on settler William Naler's land two miles south. It took its name from Col. W. L. Moody of Galveston, who oversaw the track-laying and honored his own family. Incorporated in 1901, Moody grew into a full community of schools, churches, businesses, and fraternal orders.

Moody, TX

Soon after Moody was founded in 1881, settlers sought a burial ground nearer than the old cemetery at Perry, and bought this tract from J. Parker Naylor. It was first used in 1889 for the grave of seven-year-old Flora Welch, and hackberry trees were transplanted here from the Leon River in 1890. A women's federation, later the Moody Cemetery Association, cared for the grounds — Miss Rob McCauley presiding for thirty-five years — and many of the town's early pioneers rest here.

Galveston, TX

This building carries a century of caring for Galveston's children. St. Mary's Orphanage, run by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word from 1867, first stood on the beach until the catastrophic 1900 hurricane destroyed it; the congregation rebuilt inland, raising this brick structure in 1950. When the era of orphanages gave way to foster care and the home closed in 1967, Galveston College acquired it with a Moody Foundation grant and renamed it Moody Hall.

Canadian, TX

By 1910 Canadian was a thriving railroad and marketing hub, prosperous enough that English-born rancher, banker, and academy trustee Robert Moody set out to build a hotel worthy of the town. Rising on the site of the former McIntosh Hotel, his three-story brick building opened late that year with 40 guest rooms and a handsome oak stairway. The Moody Hotel became a beloved landmark and popular waystation until shifting travel habits eventually closed its doors.

Moody, TX

This Methodist congregation traces its roots to an 1855 union church in the pioneer settlement of Perry, a few miles northeast. When the Santa Fe Railroad crossed central Texas in 1881, the new town of Moody sprang up along the tracks and drew Perry's residents to it — a common pattern as railroads redrew the map of Texas settlement. The first sanctuary rose in 1884, and the congregation has worshiped on its current site since 1956.

Moody vicinity, TX

Founded in 1877 by German Methodist settlers, this congregation grew out of the efforts of immigrant brothers who first worshiped in homes and a country schoolhouse. A frame church rose here in 1908, and services were preached in German until 1939 — a marker of how long immigrant communities carried their mother tongue into the Texas countryside. Fire took the original building in 1969, and the present structure replaced it.

Humble, TX

After decades of reported gas seeps near the San Jacinto River, the Higgins Oil Company brought in a major gas well in 1904 and the first oil well followed in 1905, opening the great Humble oil field. A boom town called Moonshine Hill exploded to some 10,000 people almost overnight, its tents mixed with a church, school, stores, and saloons. Among its operators was the Moonshine Oil Company of Walter Sharp, Ed Prather, and Howard R. Hughes; despite later booms, the settlement faded away.

Moore, TX

Moore Catholic Cemetery began before its land was even formally donated, with the earliest known grave that of Christine Tehas, who died in 1894. Ben Duncan deeded the ground to the parish in 1902, and the headstones—mostly Spanish, but also English and German—reflect the mingled peoples who settled this South Texas frontier. Among those buried here are pioneer settlers, veterans of Indian conflicts and both World Wars, and a Virginia-born formerly enslaved man.

Waco, TX

Missouri native Louis Moore came to Texas about 1834 and received title in 1835 to land on the east bank of the Brazos above the old Waco village. When his son John died in 1858 and his wife and infant daughter soon after, Moore buried them atop the highest hill on his estate, beginning what grew from a family plot into a community burial ground. Formalized by an association in 1921 and now spanning more than eleven acres, the cemetery holds veterans from the Texas Revolution to the present.

Trinity County, TX

South Carolina natives John W. Moore and his wife Rosella Meredith brought their family to East Texas in the 1850s and donated nearly six acres of their Mossy Creek land grant for a community cemetery, with the earliest recorded burial in 1860. Among the first laid to rest were sons Preston and William Moore, believed by family tradition to have been hanged for refusing to fight for the Confederacy in a county fiercely loyal to the Southern cause. Alongside many infant graves from disease epidemics lie veterans of the Civil War and every major American war through Vietnam.

Moore, TX

Established on land deeded by Moses Veith in 1896, Moore Cemetery was the community's first public burial ground, replacing the scattered private plots and church graveyards of earlier years. Among those interred are pioneers and men who fought in frontier Indian conflicts and both World Wars. The town itself was named for R. B. "Mustang" Moore, an early Texan killed by Comanches in 1861, and was first known as Moore Hollow.