Historic Markers in Texas

Dumas, TX

Carved from the Bexar Land District in 1876 and formally organized in 1892, Moore County took its name from Edwin W. Moore, commodore of the Republic of Texas navy. In its early days stagecoaches and freight wagons crossed a thinly settled Panhandle where ranching was nearly the only livelihood. That changed sharply after oil and gas were struck in 1926, and the county's economy grew into petrochemicals, helium, cattle feeding, and grain.

Dumas, TX

Louis Dumas donated this square and laid out the townsite in 1891, and Moore County organized its government the following year, raising its first courthouse in 1893. The original was replaced by the present brick building, erected by C. S. Lambie and Company for $155,000 and occupied by county officials in August 1931. Both courthouses have safeguarded county records and served as the civic heart of Dumas and the surrounding Panhandle.

Alton, TX

Financed by the neighboring cities of Edinburg, McAllen, and Mission, Moore Field opened in 1941 as a U.S. aviation training base, named for Lt. Frank M. Moore, a pilot killed in World War I. It trained airmen throughout World War II before closing in 1945, was reactivated during the Korean War, and since 1960 has housed research offices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its runways trace the long shadow of three American conflicts across a single Rio Grande Valley site.

Richmond, TX

John M. Moore built this Richmond house in 1883 for his bride Lottie, and as a prosperous rancher he went on to serve in the state legislature and in the U.S. Congress from 1905 to 1913. That same year he remodeled the home from its original Victorian design into the fashionable Neo-classical style. Richmond's First Baptist Church was founded within its walls, and cattlemen and politicians were frequent guests.

Rockport, TX

Built in 1906 for business owner J. Ed Moore and his wife Josephine Kennedy Moore, this story-and-a-half Craftsman bungalow reflects the comfortable domestic style of an early Rockport leader. Moore served several terms as mayor between the 1920s and 1940s and championed civic works—a yacht basin, a public beach park, and a modern sewer system—still felt in the coastal town today. The house's low overhanging roof, wrapped porch, squared columns, and dormer with tripartite windows mark it as a fine example of the period.

Seguin, TX

John Moore, an Irish-born newspaperman and civic leader, settled in Seguin and, through family ties, counted Theodore Roosevelt among his friends. In 1895 he built a modest three-room house here, then in 1900 commissioned a fine Queen Anne residence that wrapped the earlier structure inside it. His descendants carried on, including a son who served as Seguin's mayor for twenty-two years.

Ennis, TX

Built in 1905 for Malinda and Hardin T. Moore, this Neoclassical Revival house — with fluted Ionic and Doric columns, balustrades, and urns — announced the wealth of a family formed by two remarriages. Malinda had inherited substantial land and businesses from a first husband and managed them herself with notable diligence, while Hardin, a Civil War veteran and cattle merchant, brought his own holdings. She lived here until her death in 1930.

Houston, TX

In 1931–32 Edith L. Moore and her husband built this house from pine logs cut on their own land, laying up a fireplace from sandstone curbstones salvaged off Houston's downtown streets. They made their living by dairy farming and logging along Rummel Creek. Determined to keep her homesite wild, Edith Moore willed the house and 17.5 acres to the Houston Audubon Society in 1975 as a nature sanctuary.

Big Spring, TX

In 1906 pioneers moved onto the frontier north of Big Spring to buy farmland from rancher Sid Moore, and a one-room school rose the same year, its first term serving fifteen students. School and community both took Moore's name, and the building became the hub of local life—even hosting a double wedding on its front steps. Hard years followed, including 1917's loss of young men to World War I and a devastating influenza epidemic, and a 1945 fire finally closed the school for good.

Austin, TX

Contractor Charles Funk built this house in 1887 for John M. Moore—a former legislator and district attorney then serving as secretary of state under Governor Sul Ross—at a cost of $2,000. In 1901 it was bought by Laura A. E. Flack, a prominent Austin businesswoman who owned several buildings on Congress Avenue and who in the 1920s added a two-story neoclassical porch to the original Victorian design. Flack lived here until her death in 1933, and the house stayed in her family for another forty years.

Austin, TX

Around 1850 the Irish-born merchant Martin Moore and his wife Elizabeth left their Austin business for a 521-acre farm north of town, raising five children in the log structures they built here. After Martin's death, Elizabeth sold the homestead in 1866 to Judge John Hancock, and it is believed his formerly enslaved man Orange and family lived on the land in the late 1860s. The sensitively restored cabins survive as a rare example of local pioneer farmstead architecture.

Crawford, TX

This state marker honors John Creed Moore, a Confederate brigadier general in the Army of Tennessee. Commended for gallantry at Shiloh, he led his brigade at Corinth and through the siege of Vicksburg, and later fought at Chattanooga and in the defense of Mobile. Texas erected the star-and-wreath marker in 1963.

Bonham, TX

Alexander Moore and his wife Mary Jane brought their family from Missouri to this part of Fannin County in 1857, and in the mid-1870s donated two acres to a growing community for a cemetery, with neighbor Martha Cashion the first recorded burial in 1876. A Baptist sanctuary rose just to the north on land the Moores also gave, and church, school, and graveyard together became the community center known as Moore's Chapel. A grim cluster of infant graves from the 1880s and 1890s records a typhoid outbreak, while veterans from the Civil War through World War II rest among the pioneer families still tended by a cemetery association.

Austin, TX

These iron spans began life in 1884 as part of a six-span bridge carrying Congress Avenue across the Colorado River in Austin, engineered by the King Iron Bridge and Manufacturing Co. of Cleveland. Dismantled in 1910 and stored, three spans were re-erected here in 1915 only to be swept away by a flood that same year. The surviving spans were finally rebuilt into the present bridge in 1922.

Paris, TX

Levin Vinson Moore brought his family from Tennessee to this area in 1836 and settled a farmstead beside a natural spring, soon joined by eleven other families from the southern states. The graveyard that began on the Moore farm holds burials dating back to 1873, including many of the Moores and their neighbors. In 1895 the family formally deeded a one-acre tract for burial purposes, cementing the cemetery in the county record.

Eustace, TX

This burial ground began on the farmland of Andrew and Nancy Moorehead, South Carolinians who reached Texas by the 1850s, and served their extended family before the surrounding land passed to the Melton family in 1884. In 1920 the Meltons formally set aside land for a community cemetery, though graves here predate nearby Eustace by decades, the earliest marked burial dating to 1870. Pioneer settlers and veterans reaching back to the Civil War rest here, and a family association still holds an annual memorial gathering.

Texarkana, TX

Built in 1895 for Rachel Perry Godbold Moores, widow of a member of Texarkana's pioneer Moores family, this Neo-Classical residence was designed by architect Henry Koerner with fish-scale shingling and elegant parquet floors. It passed to Robert Emmett Burke in 1904 and later housed the Ragland family for nearly half a century. The house stands as a showpiece of a booming late-19th-century railroad town on the Texas-Arkansas line.

Mooreville, TX

Irish immigrant Robert Moore built a hilltop general store above Cow Bayou in the 1850s, and by 1859 enough families had gathered that the settlement took his name. After Confederate veteran Edward McCullough acquired the land in 1865, this community burial ground took shape, its earliest marked graves dating to 1866 and bearing the surnames of the area's founding families. Since 1973 a cemetery association of their descendants has tended the grounds.

Kermit, TX

This wooden cable-tool rig was the last of its kind in the United States to retire from daily use, its bull wheels and rig irons of a type not manufactured since the 1920s. It drilled the Moorhead No. 1 well in Loving County, powered first by steam, then by a gasoline engine that ran its 'Yo-Yo' wheels and walking beam, before the well went electric in 1966. That year R. O. Moorhead gave it to Kermit as a Permian Basin oil-history exhibit, moved 35 miles fully intact.

Dallas, TX

When Dallas's YMCA expanded in the late 1920s, African American citizens of North Dallas raised $75,000—overshooting their goal—and, with a matching gift from the Rosenwald Fund, opened the Moorland YMCA in 1930. Named for YMCA leader Dr. Jesse Edward Moorland, the Italian Renaissance Revival building became a rare public gathering place for the Black community: a gym, a youth and education center, lodging for travelers turned away from segregated hotels, and a meeting ground for the local civil rights movement. It closed in 1970, and the building later became home to the Dallas Black Dance Theatre.

San Antonio, TX

In 1850 the German immigrant John Moos and his bride Rosina built this house near the headwaters of Leon Creek, laying it up of field stone mortared with caliche in the style typical of pioneer Texas Germans. Its location made it useful as a relay station for the stagecoaches running the long road from San Antonio toward El Paso and California. The homestead thus served both as a family dwelling and as a link in the overland travel network of antebellum Texas.

Junction, TX

Meliton Morales was born in Mexico in 1837, kidnapped by Indians as a youth and held captive for nine years before making his way to Texas in 1855. In 1874 he drove 200 Spanish goats and 2,000 sheep into Kimble County and, in 1881, built the small rock house that still stands, raising nine children and serving on the county's first jury. His remarkable life crossed borders, cultures, and the violent frontier to plant a ranching family whose descendants still hold the land.

Moran, TX

Settlers reached this rugged West Texas country in the 1860s and, during the Civil War, built the temporary fortress settlement of Mugginsville on Deep Creek for protection. A branch of the western cattle trail once passed nearby, but the town truly took shape after the Texas Central Railroad arrived in 1881; Swope Hull opened a store and the 'Hulltown' post office in 1883, and the community was renamed Moran in 1892 for a railroad president. Incorporated in 1919, it boomed as a supply point during the oil and gas rush of 1910–30.

Moran, TX

After Hulltown—later Moran—was founded in 1883, the community elected trustees who in 1896 bought two-and-a-third acres for a public burial ground, the oldest marked grave being that of Lucy Brazell Snider. Over the following decades the cemetery grew to hold more than 1,800 people, including town pioneers and many military veterans, and a native-stone boundary fence was built in 1933 with Depression relief funds. A cemetery association formed in 1926 still maintains the grounds.

Hallettsville, TX

Czech immigrants Ignac Jalufka and Jakob Hollub brought their families to northern Lavaca County in 1874, and the community they founded in 1881 was named Moravia after their homeland. In 1889 Jalufka raised a two-story frame building here—groceries and a saloon below, a dance hall above—that became the community's social hub for masquerades and celebrations, while he also ran the post office. Passing through several owners and surviving prohibition, the trimmed-down general store stayed in business over a century, closing in 1990 before reopening in 1996.

Bryan, TX

This small burial ground was set aside in 1889 by Josef Stasta for the Moravian Brothers, with a deed requiring it be used only as a Moravian cemetery. Most of its handful of headstones are inscribed in Czech, a quiet record of the Central European families who settled the Brazos County countryside. Though only fifteen graves are marked and the last burial came in 1906, as many as forty-one people may rest here.

Corpus Christi, TX

In the early 20th century, Czech-speaking settlers—most of Moravian descent—streamed into southwestern Nueces County, drawn by Stanislav Kostohryz's advertised "Bohemian Colony Lands" and the promise of affordable farmland. The community that grew up around them, Kostoryz, needed a gathering place, and in 1923 residents formed what became the Moravian Club of Nueces County. Across three successive halls—one displaced when the Navy bought land for Cabaniss Air Field—the club anchored dances, church socials, Czech-language music, and even semi-pro baseball.

Ben Wheeler, TX

Born near Ben Wheeler, Morgan Gurley Sanders published newspapers and clerked for the state senate before building a long career in Texas and national politics. A Democrat, he served in the state legislature, as county and district attorney, and for nearly two decades in the U.S. Congress, where Speaker John Nance Garner placed him on the powerful Ways and Means Committee in 1931. Defeated in 1938, he remained an active figure in Van Zandt County until his death.

Grapevine, TX

This small, long-abandoned burial ground holds a single visible grave marked by the remains of a sandstone cairn, a common way of marking graves in the region between the 1850s and 1870s. With no written records surviving, its dead may have been members of the Peters Colony, pioneers who first entered the Grapevine area in 1844. Nearly erased by time, the site is one of the last traces of Tarrant County's founding generation.

Childress, TX

When Childress was still a young Panhandle railroad town, its residents depended on a handful of pioneering physicians for care. Built in 1916, this double-galleried Colonial Revival building first housed the clinic of Drs. J.D. Michie and H.D. Barnes before Dr. T.M. Morgan bought it in 1925 and ran it as the Morgan Hospital until he died in 1941. It stands as a memory of the small-town doctors who delivered medicine on the early Texas frontier.

Abilene, TX

Welsh-born Morgan Jones reached the United States in 1866 and became a legendary railroad contractor, laying more than 1,000 miles of track across Texas and the West. By 1884 he headed the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway, and after 1906 he built the Abilene and Northern and completed the Abilene and Southern railways. Moving to Abilene in 1908, he poured extensive investments into the region and fueled the city's growth until his death.

Morgan Mill, TX

Tradition holds that the first person buried here was a young girl who died as her family traveled west in the 1870s; the oldest marked stone, for Amanda Counts, dates to 1880. In 1883 Isaac Henderson deeded about three acres to the people of Morgan Mill for a community burial ground, which has since grown past six acres. A cemetery association formed in 1926, and descendants still gather each May for a work day and reunion. Those interred include veterans from the Civil War through Desert Storm.

Morgan Mill, TX

The community of Morgan Mill, named for early settler George Bryan Morgan, dates to the mid-19th century and gained a post office in 1877. For years congregations gathered under a summertime brush arbor for revivals and meetings, until 1910 when this permanent tabernacle replaced it. Serving churches, the local school, and community groups alike, the structure remains a gathering place today.

Cuero, TX

Charles Morgan launched the first mail and passenger steamship service between the United States and Texas, putting the Columbia on the New Orleans–to–Galveston run in 1835 and soon operating cargo and mail lines all along the coast and to Mexico. From his base at Indianola his ships carried cotton, sugar, army supplies for frontier forts, and even loads of Mexican gold and silver bound for the U.S. mints. After the Civil War he expanded into railroads and dug the Houston Ship Channel in 1875, before the line passed to Southern Pacific in 1883.

Morgan's Point, TX

One of the oldest continuously used burial grounds in Harris County, this cemetery was founded by Colonel James Morgan, a soldier of the Texas Revolution, on land he bought in 1834 as part of an estate called The Orange Grove. The earliest marked grave, from 1838, belongs to his niece Sarah, a smallpox victim; his wife Celia followed in 1840, and Morgan himself in 1866. The family's grand tombstone was twice stolen and once found submerged in the bay, and the graveyard now sits ringed by industrial development.

Fredericksburg, TX

Built in 1907 for newlyweds Edmund and Anna Moritz, this Fredericksburg house was raised from limestone quarried by the Moritz family and finished with the help of Anna's father, carpenter John Metzger, Sr. Its late-Victorian styling blended with Germanic building traditions, including the characteristic use of native stone. Passing to the Hitzfeld family in 1914 and the Jacobys in 1941, it links three of the town's founding German families.

Bandera, TX

In March 1854 a band of Latter-day Saints led by church elder Lyman Wight settled near the year-old town of Bandera on the Medina River. Wight had broken with Brigham Young and brought a colony of 250 to Texas in 1846, moving from Austin to Fredericksburg—where they ran grist and saw mills—before founding "Mormon Camp." Here they raised houses with gardens between them, milled grain, and crafted native-wood furniture to sell back East. When Wight died in 1858 the colony scattered, though a remnant stayed on in Bandera.

Sulphur Springs, TX

In 1868, just after emancipation, African American worshippers in the Old Tarrant settlement gathered under the Rev. Mike Wiggins to form what became this congregation. When the new county seat of Sulphur Springs was laid out, the church moved into town in 1876 and has been a community anchor ever since. After a 1974 fire, neighboring churches and local businesses helped rebuild it, a testament to its standing in the wider community.

Alto, TX

In 1901 Michigan peach farmer Roland Morrill and partner W. W. McFarland came to Cherokee County to plant a large commercial orchard beside a rail line, founding the Morrill Orchard Company. A company town of school, commissary, post office, and worker housing grew up around it. The Panic of 1907 and a 1914 blight killed the peach trees, and though the firm limped on with other produce, the crash of 1929 finished it, leaving only the superintendent's house as a marker of its brief prosperity.

Canton, TX

When Sarah Morris was laid to rest here in 1866, she had been in Texas less than a decade, part of the wave of Kentucky and Upper-South families who resettled the blackland country before and after the Civil War. Her son Elijah bought the surrounding farmstead in 1886, and the family plot grew into the community burying ground for the China Grove and Denman neighborhoods. Its stones quietly record the arc of a rural settlement — Confederate and World War I veterans, and the children and elders lost to the epidemics that swept such isolated communities.

Daingerfield, TX

Created and organized in 1875 with Daingerfield as its seat, Morris County took its name from William W. Morris, who came to Texas in 1849. A state legislator, Morris served in the wartime 8th Legislature that armed Texas and built up its frontier and coastal defenses, and returned to the 13th Legislature in the 1870s. He was one of many Confederate-era figures memorialized in the naming of Texas counties.

Fredericksburg, TX

Raised from native limestone in 1893, this schoolhouse anchored the Morris Ranch, a Hill Country operation famous for breeding and training thoroughbred racehorses. Its central assembly hall and flanking classrooms doubled as a house of worship for several local congregations, a common frugality on the rural Texas frontier. The public school taught children here until 1962, when it folded into the Fredericksburg district.

Graford, TX

Built in response to devastating Brazos River floods, Morris Sheppard Dam was an early Texas experiment in flood control, water conservation, and hydroelectric power. The federal government financed much of the three-year, $8.5 million project through the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, completing the 2,740-foot dam in 1941. Its reservoir, Possum Kingdom Lake, drowned bridges, roads, and an entire town but later blossomed into a recreation destination after World War II.

Port Arthur, TX

Built in 1915 for Dr. Harvey D. Morris, this Port Arthur home later sheltered the Booz and White families and gained its grand wraparound porch and paired-Ionic portico in a 1920s remodeling. Standing along fashionable Lakeshore Drive, it typifies the stately residences that rose as the Gulf port city prospered in the early 20th century. Its architecture reflects the cosmopolitan ambitions of a booming oil-era town.

Graham, TX

Mississippi native John Edward Morrison brought his family to Young County in 1876 and opened a blacksmith shop on the town square, steadily building an empire of grocery, dry goods, hardware, and lumber stores. In 1888 he added undertaking supplies to his inventory, giving rise to the Morrison Funeral Home. Passed to his son Adger and later descendants, the business has now served Graham for more than a century.

Kaufman, TX

This burial ground began in 1853 with the grave of the Morrow family's infant son Alexander, marking one of the earliest settlements in the Kaufman area. In 1892 his mother Mary Elizabeth Morrow deeded the land to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which built a chapel named in her honor. After the congregation disbanded, the chapel served a local school district, and a cemetery association took up its care in the 1930s.

Richmond, TX

This ground began as a burial place in 1825, when Stephen F. Austin "Old 300" colonist William Morton laid a fellow Mason to rest and later built the first known Masonic tomb in Texas. Among those interred here are Mirabeau B. Lamar, president of the Republic of Texas, and Jane Long, remembered as "the Mother of Texas." Passing through Masonic and civic hands over more than a century, the cemetery ultimately took Morton's name and became a memorial to its founder.

Richmond, TX

Organized in 1850 and chartered the next year, Morton Lodge No. 72 took its name from "Old 300" colonist and Mason William Morton. Its early halls did double duty as community anchors — one 1855 building even housed the Fort Bend County courthouse before fire destroyed it in 1887. The lodge's succession of buildings, culminating in this 1913 structure, tracks the civic maturing of Richmond.

Morton, TX

This burial ground began by chance in 1923, when a traveling family camped nearby and buried an infant who had fallen ill. Other graves followed, and in 1932 landowner Morton J. Smith deeded ten acres to the city so the makeshift plot could become a proper cemetery. Through donations, an association, and eventually a county cemetery tax, the grounds grew into a chronicle of Cochran County's settlers and a resting place honoring more than 300 veterans.

Richmond, TX

William Morton was among the "Old 300" — the first families granted land in Stephen F. Austin's colony — and operated Morton's Ferry here in the 1820s. The core of this house, built with hand-hewn braced-frame construction, dates to the mid-1830s, making it a rare survivor from Texas's earliest Anglo settlement. Later owners, notably the Dr. John McCloy family, reshaped it between 1873 and 1904 into the L-plan home seen today.

Moscow, TX

Settled by David Green during the days of the Republic of Texas, this Polk County town opened its first post office as Green's in 1847, renamed Moscow in 1853, and incorporated in 1856 as a stage stop on the Nacogdoches-Liberty Road. Proud of its schools, Moscow ran a free school system as early as 1851 and hosted early industries from a cannery to a factory making architectural pillars. Its arrival as a railroad town in 1881 brought the tiny Moscow, Camden & San Augustine, one of the shortest railroads in Texas.

Moscow, TX

In the small East Texas town of Moscow, the Moscow Male and Female Academy educated local children beginning in the years before the Civil War. From 1857 it operated under Masonic auspices as the Moscow Masonic Academy, a common arrangement in an era when fraternal lodges and churches often filled the gap left by the absence of tax-funded schooling. In time it was folded into the emerging public school system.

Camden, TX

Chartered in 1898 by lumberman W. T. Carter, the Moscow, Camden & San Augustine Railroad linked the sawmill town of Camden to the main line at Moscow along just seven miles of track. It became Texas's shortest mixed-train railroad, carrying both passengers and freight behind a single engine. One of its retired engines, "Panama No. 201," had helped build the Panama Canal in 1914 before serving here.

Fredericksburg, TX

Johann Nicholas Mosel received this Fredericksburg lot from the German Emigration Company in 1847 and raised a rough limestone dwelling, the oldest part of the present house, which he later may have used as a "Sunday house" after moving to an outlying farm. German immigrant August William Jordan bought the property in 1860, and it passed to Henry Duecker, who added frame rooms in 1924. The layered structure earned a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark designation in 1986.

Caldwell, TX

Where the Old San Antonio Road crossed the Brazos River, Michael Boren launched a public ferry around 1846, and it took its lasting name from Daniel Moseley, who ran it from 1849 while his family kept it going until 1868. For decades the ferry carried travelers, livestock, and freight across the river, until the Houston & Texas Central railroad bridged the crossing in 1912. A highway bridge now spans the Brazos where the ferry once worked.

Austin, TX

A Connecticut native who became a leading figure in the American lead industry, Moses Austin carried his ventures from Virginia into the Mississippi Valley and on to Spanish Texas. In 1820 he reached San Antonio de Bexar and, with the help of Baron de Bastrop, won Governor Antonio Martinez's permission to settle 300 Anglo-American families in the province. Austin died in 1821 soon after learning his petition had been granted, and his son Stephen F. Austin carried out his dying wish by leading the "Old 300" into Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Connecticut-born Moses Austin came to San Antonio in 1820 and petitioned Spanish authorities for the right to bring three hundred families to settle Texas. The hardships of that journey broke his health, and he died in Missouri in 1821, just after learning his petition had been granted. His dying wish was that his son Stephen carry out the plan—which Stephen F. Austin did, becoming the 'Father of Texas.'

Independence, TX

A grandson of Moses Austin, whose 1821 contract opened Texas to Anglo-American settlement, Moses Austin Bryan came to Texas in 1831 and worked alongside his uncle Stephen F. Austin. He fought at San Jacinto in 1836, served the Republic as a diplomatic secretary, joined the 1842 Somervell Expedition, and rose to major in the Confederate army during the Civil War.

Brenham, TX

Born in Ireland, Moses Baine emigrated to the United States in 1819 and, with his wife Cecilia, joined Stephen F. Austin's colony at San Felipe in 1830. He fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto and afterward built a permanent home near Brenham in 1837, later serving in the Somervell Expedition as a soldier of the Republic of Texas. Returning home in 1843, he prospered as a stock raiser and farmer.

Shelbyville, TX

Born in Tennessee, Moses Fisk Roberts came to Texas in 1836 and lost his right eye fighting in the Texas Revolution. A farmer whose beloved fox hounds earned him the nickname "Dog" Roberts, he became a respected public servant in Shelby County — serving in the Congress of the Republic, the State Legislature, and as justice of the peace and county judge.