Historic Markers in Texas

Linn, TX

On September 27, 1915, Tejano community leaders Jesus Bazán and his son-in-law Antonio Longoria, a Hidalgo County commissioner, rode to a Texas Ranger camp to report a horse theft. After a seemingly ordinary conversation with Captain Henry Ransom, the two men were followed and shot in the back as they rode away, their bodies left on the roadside until a neighbor buried them where they fell. No investigation followed, but the killings—amid widespread anti-Mexican violence—helped prompt the Texas Legislature's 1919 inquiry that reorganized state law enforcement.

Bazette, TX

The farming community of Bazette took root before the Civil War, named for a Baptist preacher who worked the area. In 1881 the local postmaster and storekeeper William Ellison deeded land for a Baptist church whose congregation may reach back to the 1860s, and in 1890 the deacons added an adjoining cemetery. The oldest marked grave, a child buried in 1891, still records the settlement's early years.

Port Lavaca, TX

When merchant C. U. Yancy built the Beach Hotel in 1904, it was the tallest building in Port Lavaca, a beacon for a coastal town courting tourists. Special excursion trains carried vacationers down from San Antonio and other inland cities to enjoy the Gulf, while traveling salesmen lodged in its rooms and townsfolk gathered in its dining hall. For generations it was the social heart of the community.

Sabine Pass, TX

Long before pavement, this Gulf Coast corridor linking Sabine Pass toward Galveston carried Native people, early settlers, traders, cattlemen, and Republic of Texas mail riders along the open shore. Confederate troops knew it as the "Road from Galveston," and in the 1920s Commissioner W.A. Vaughan rebuilt it with coastal shell, touching off a beachfront tourism boom. Folded into State Highway 87 in 1931, the route later aided World War II coastal defense before repeated hurricanes forced its closure in 1989.

Borger, TX

Edward Fitzgerald "Ned" Beale packed several careers into one 19th-century life: naval officer, general, explorer, diplomat, and frontiersman who fought at San Pasqual and carried early California gold east. In the 1850s he surveyed a southern wagon road toward Los Angeles, and the Texas Panhandle formed the crucial link tying the eastern trails to the West. Earlier paths blazed by Josiah Gregg and Randolph Marcy fed into the same corridor, which in the 20th century became Route 66 and then Interstate 40.

La Vernia, TX

Erasmus and Elizabeth Beall brought their large family from Warren County, Georgia, to Texas by 1853, buying land from San Antonio figures John James and banker John Twohig. The family plot began in 1854 with the burial of their eldest son, William Henry, and the last of the early Beall interments came in 1871. After lying quiet for more than a century, the site was folded into Countryside Memorial Park in the early 1980s.

Kimble County, TX

In the brutal Texas summer of 1954, new Texas A&M football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant hauled his squad to the tiny Hill Country town of Junction for a preseason training camp that became the stuff of legend. In punishing heat and spartan conditions, the vast majority of players quit; the hardened few who endured came to be remembered as the "Junction Boys." The ordeal became a defining chapter in the mythology of Bryant, who went on to become one of the most celebrated coaches in American football.

Nevada, TX

In the mid-1800s, settlers built the community of Empire and organized the Bear Creek Methodist Episcopal Church, whose graveyard took its first marked burials in 1873. Interred here are a Confederate veteran, physician-minister J.L. Brockman, and community leaders, their headstones bearing Masonic and Woodmen of the World emblems. Though Empire's boarding school and church are long gone, the cemetery and the relocated Masonic lodge endure as the settlement's last reminders.

Euless, TX

This burial ground grew up beside the Bear Creek Missionary Baptist Church, organized in 1853, with its earliest marked grave that of infant Hiram Jackson Farris in 1858. Isham Crowley, who came to Texas with the Peters Colony, donated the land and deeded it to the church trustees in 1876. Though the congregation later moved to Dallas County, the cemetery remains in use as the resting place of many eastern Tarrant County pioneers.

Irving, TX

Settled in the 1850s within the old Robertson's Colony, this stretch of North Texas prairie became something new after the Civil War, when freedmen moved in and reunited families that slavery had torn apart. Jim Green, the first Black landowner here, bought his acreage in 1878, and neighbors soon followed, organizing the Shady Grove Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and a Freedom School on land Green donated. For generations the Bear Creek community farmed, worshipped, and taught its children here, until the sprawl of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex and its airport all but erased the settlement.

Houston, TX

German immigrants settled near the junction of Langham and Bear creeks in the 1840s, and about 1879 seven charter members founded the Bear Creek German Methodist Church, at first meeting in members' homes. After an early building on poorly drained ground, the congregation moved the sanctuary in 1902 to three acres donated by Fred and Katherine Brandt, laying out a cemetery whose first recorded burial came in 1904. Flooding led to the Addicks Reservoir and the church's later relocation, and in 1968 the congregation became Addicks United Methodist Church.

Junction, TX

Bear Creek Settlement began in the 1850s when rancher Raleigh Gentry built a two-room log house and cleared a small farm, selling out to cattleman Rance Moore in 1862. A handful of hardy families settled here through the 1860s despite the dangers of the open frontier. Only after raids by Indians and outlaws were finally suppressed did new settlers arrive in greater numbers in the 1870s.

Jefferson, TX

Built in 1860 in the riverport town of Jefferson, the Beard House is a cottage-type dwelling raised on the eve of the Civil War. Its kitchen stood detached from the main house, a common practice in the Old South meant to keep heat and fire risk away from the living quarters. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Beasley, TX

Beasley grew up along the Texas & New Orleans Railroad in the 1890s, first named for Isabel Dyer before taking its founder's name when the post office opened in 1898. A 1910 land-auction boom drew German and Czech families from Washington County, and the town quickly gained stores, cotton gins, a hotel, and churches. It incorporated in 1970 and still anchors the surrounding farm country.

Crockett, TX

For seven decades, three generations of the Beasley family guided the East Texas town of Crockett from the horse-and-buggy age into the modern era. The first Dr. Beasley helped create the local school district and brought gas lighting to the courthouse square around 1900; his son and grandson later oversaw parks, public buildings, and civic improvements. Their tenure spanned the Texas Centennial celebrations and the town's steady modernization.

Columbus, TX

Benjamin Beason, one of Stephen F. Austin's original 300 colonists, settled by a busy Colorado River crossing in 1822 and built an inn, gristmill, sawmill, gin, and ferry that grew into a small settlement. In the spring of 1836 the crossing became a pivot of the Texas Revolution: Sam Houston camped his army on the east bank as a Mexican force approached from the west. Houston abruptly withdrew toward the Brazos, and his troops burned the settlement to the ground just before the enemy arrived.

Jasper, TX

This Jasper lot first belonged to Thomas Beaty, who bought it in 1843, and returned to the family when his grandson John T. Beaty reacquired it in 1888 and built a two-story Victorian home of native pine. A lawyer and former county sheriff, Beaty served three terms as state senator from the 14th District in the early 1900s. After his death the house passed to his daughter Marguerite and her druggist husband, and in 1971 it was sold to the city of Jasper, which later restored it.

Corsicana, TX

Beauford H. Jester and his wife Mabel built this colonial revival house in 1923 on what had been his family's Corsicana dairy farm. A lawyer who rose through the University of Texas Board of Regents, the State Bar, and the Texas Railroad Commission, Jester was elected governor in 1946 — and in 1949 became the only Texas governor to die in office, having kept this home throughout his tenure.

Beaumont, TX

Settled in 1825 as Tevis Bluff and incorporated as Beaumont in 1838, this Jefferson County seat grew as a riverboat port and center for lumber, rice, and ranching. Everything changed near here in 1901 with the Spindletop gusher, which turned oil into a modern industry and remade Beaumont into a hub of ports, shipyards, and petrochemical works. Few Texas towns pivoted so completely from frontier trading post to industrial powerhouse.

Beaumont, TX

The first Beaumont Enterprise rolled off the press in 1880, founded by John W. Leonard, and grew into one of southeast Texas's oldest continuous businesses. Among its editors was William P. Hobby, who joined in 1907 and went on to become governor of Texas, while James L. Mapes built the paper into a nationally respected voice. For more than a century the Enterprise has chronicled life across the Texas-Louisiana borderlands from the Trinity River to the Calcasieu.

Beaumont, TX

Ringed by pine forest, Beaumont was a lumber town from its founding, marking one square on its original plat as "Steam Mill Square." From Lucien Hopson's 1840 saw pit floating logs down a canal, the industry grew through hand-powered shingle mills, then steam mills in the 1850s, and after the ruin of the Civil War a dense thicket of companies powered the city's recovery. Tycoon John Henry Kirby bought up several mills around 1900, but by the 1920s the surrounding forests were exhausted and the city mills gave way to operations deep in the woods.

Poth, TX

Founded in 1852 by Augustin Toutant-Beauregard, of an old Louisiana Creole family, this ranch was among the early landholdings that opened South Texas to stock-raising. Its owner was a brother of the Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard, and iron rings still mounted in stone here once anchored the scaffolding used to butcher hogs.

Nederland, TX

Beauxart Gardens—its name blending Beaumont and Port Arthur—was a federal subsistence homestead colony created under the New Deal's National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. One of five such colonies in Texas, it settled fifty families on 2.5-to-4.5-acre plots of fertile rice land, where residents worked part-time at area refineries while keeping gardens and livestock. The government transferred title to a homestead association in 1936, and the community—with its parks, roads, and community center—still retains its New Deal identity.

Crockett, TX

This lot began as part of a Republic of Texas grant to Andrew Edwards Gossett, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, and around 1900 became part of a new Crockett residential development. In 1912 Charles Harrison Beazley built this Victorian-trimmed cottage using timber from his own farm, milled at the family sawmill, and moved his wife Bettie and their sons into town so the boys could attend better schools. The house records a familiar turn-of-the-century move from farm to town in the name of education.

Victoria, TX

German-born Charles (Carl) August Beck bought forty acres here in 1862 and a decade later built this Greek Revival house as a wedding gift for his son Charles Theodore Beck. It became headquarters for a cattle operation that grew to roughly 25,000 acres, and in 1923 it turned to dairying under Arthur Yariger, whose family has held it since. The home marks the sweep of Texas ranching from open range to dairy farm.

Athens, TX

Deeded from Stonewall Riddlesperger in 1901, Beck's Chapel Cemetery became the resting place of many of Henderson County's 19th-century pioneers, its earliest recorded burial dating to 1900. Interred here are members of the founding Ward, Beck and Anding families—farmers, justices of the peace and school trustees who supported the neighboring chapel and schoolhouse. A cemetery association formed in 1997 to care for the grounds, shaded by crepe myrtles and a great magnolia.

Austin, TX

When café owner Herman Becker bought part of the old Bouldin homestead in south Austin in 1891, he set the stage for a neighborhood school: in 1935 his son and son-in-law, owners of Becker Lumber Company, donated three acres to the school district. Designed by Giesecke and Harris, the Art Deco building opened in 1936 and nearly doubled in size within three years. Later additions rounded out the campus.

Clarksville, TX

Also known as Robbinsville Cemetery, this burial ground recalls the vanished community of Robbinsville, named for early settler John Robbins and once a gathering place for area farmers. It took the Becknell name after Mary Becknell, widow of trailblazer William Becknell, deeded the land to a Methodist church for burials in 1861. William Becknell himself lies here among pioneer families, along with a number of unmarked graves.

Beckville, TX

Methodist worship reached this corner of the Republic of Texas in 1844, when the area was served as part of the San Augustine Circuit and the congregation was known as Liberty Chapel under its first pastor, the Rev. Jeff Shook. Members met in a community meetinghouse until 1874, when they built their first sanctuary. The church's roots reach back before Texas statehood and before Beckville itself was formally organized.

Idalou, TX

Tennessee-born Abner Becton reached the Estacado area in the late 1890s, married Cornelia Bryant, and in 1898 settled on land near W.E. Bledsoe's ranch on the South Plains. The small community that grew up here took the Becton name, and this ground became its public cemetery, with the first known burial in 1932. Still active and cared for by Becton descendants, it stands amid the farmland that replaced the open range.

Bedford, TX

Pioneers began burying their dead on this ground in the 1860s, the earliest marked grave belonging to a child who died in 1871. In 1877 Milton Moore deeded the surrounding tract to a local Church of Christ, and for over fifty years the community gathered here for its annual Old Settlers Reunion. Among those interred is W. L. Hurst, namesake of the nearby city of Hurst.

Bedford, TX

Founded about 1874 by members of the Spring Garden Church of Christ, this congregation—first called New Hope—built its meetinghouse on Milton Moore's farm beside a small cemetery. Moore deeded the five acres to the church in 1877, and in its early years the building also served as the community's school. The name Bedford Church of Christ came into use by 1900.

Bedford, TX

Settlers from Bedford County, Tennessee, gave this Tarrant County community its name in the 1870s, founding New Hope Church in 1874 and, in 1882, Bedford College — a private school that doubled as the public schoolhouse and turned out graduates who became leaders across many fields. The college burned in 1894 and never reopened, but in 1912 some five hundred people gathered on the old church grounds for the first Bedford Reunion. That homecoming grew into a beloved annual event drawing crowds in the thousands, complete with sermons, music, and speeches by congressmen, until the last reunion in 1969.

Bedias, TX

The Rev. Anderson Buffington, a Baptist missionary who had fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, organized this congregation in 1848 in the early-statehood settlement of Bedias. After meeting in a schoolhouse, members built this structure in 1859, where it doubled as a school into the early 1900s and helped spawn other Baptist churches nearby. Restored in 1974, the building was deeded to the local cemetery association.

Burton, TX

Czech immigrants Joseph and Anna Bednar arrived in Texas in 1876 with their six children, part of the wave of Central European families who settled the farmlands of Austin County. After Joseph's death that same year, Anna and the children worked as tenant farmers until she bought 195 acres in 1883, and much of that land has stayed in the family under continuous cultivation. Over generations the Bednars helped build a thriving Czech community, founding Sacred Heart Catholic Church and cemetery, the County Line School, and the roads and mail routes that knit the area together.

Schulenburg, TX

Built in 1888 by the King Iron Bridge Company of Cleveland with a Kansas subcontractor, this sixty-foot iron span carried the Old Praha Road across Mulberry Creek and opened easy access to the growing town of Schulenburg. A pin-connected, box-chord modified Pratt low truss — the "bedstead" type — it cost just $1,422 to erect and served a major travel route into the early twentieth century. Few bridges of its distinctive style still stand.

Pettus, TX

Carved largely from San Patricio County in 1857 and organized in 1858, Bee County took its name from Barnard E. Bee, who served the Republic of Texas as secretary of war, secretary of state, and minister to the United States. A cattle region since Spanish colonial times, it became an important beef producer after 1865 and gained its first railroad, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass, in 1886. Oil was discovered here in 1929, and the county seat has been at Beeville since 1860.

Beeville, TX

Bee County was carved from five neighboring counties in 1857, its first commissioners meeting on the banks of Medio Creek. This 1912 courthouse—the county's fourth—was designed by local architect W. C. Stephenson in the French Beaux Arts manner, bringing a grandeur the county had never seen. Builder W. C. Whitney died during construction, and Stephenson's partner Fritz Heldenfels finished the Classical Revival landmark, crowned by an unusual lady of justice depicted without a blindfold.

Beech Creek, TX

Georgia native James G. Collier brought his family to the Beech Creek community in 1852 and built the area's first sawmill; three years later, eight charter members organized this Baptist church in his home. Remarkably for its time and place, the congregation welcomed both Anglo and African American members, and in 1867 it ordained Henry Gainer, a Black man, as minister. From baptisms in nearby creeks to its first sanctuary on land Collier donated in 1892, the church grew alongside the community it served.

Jasper, TX

Baptist worship reached this corner of Jasper County as early as the 1850s at Allen's Chapel, on the homestead of pioneer George W. Smyth. As the Beech Grove community grew, settlers built a combined church and school in 1875 and formally organized the congregation, holding baptisms in nearby Sandy Creek into the 1950s. Fire, relocation, and rebuilding carried the church through a series of sanctuaries across more than a century.

Kyle, TX

During the Civil War, Hays County's established cattle industry became a supply line for the Confederate army, with ranchers designated as "Government Stockraisers" tasked with feeding the Commissary Department. Driving herds across quicksand-bedded, flooded rivers while dodging raiders and enemy patrols, men like the Day brothers, Jesse Driskill, and Mexican War veteran William Washington Moon turned Texas beef into a war effort — some of them serving in uniform besides.

Dallas, TX

John and Emily Hunnicutt Beeman brought their family to Texas during its days as an independent republic, gaining title around 1842 to a 640-acre tract where they founded this cemetery. Among the first burials, in 1845, was their infant grandson Holland Coffee Bryan — son of their daughter Margaret and John Neely Bryan, the founder of Dallas. John and Emily lie here alongside other family members and early neighbors in a burial ground now holding more than a hundred graves.

La Grange, TX

German-Texan stonemasons raised this Italianate commercial building for F. W. Grassmeyer in the late 1850s, and for decades it served as a hotel. In 1893 German immigrant Fritz Presun bought it as a regional sales office for large American breweries, adding a bottling works — the Crown Soda Factory — a few years later. His son carried the business forward, even branching into oil and gas, tying the little building to the wave of German enterprise that shaped central Texas.

Houston County, TX

In the years after Texas won its independence, families like the Beesons and Boxes carved farms out of the East Texas woods, and their private burial grounds became the enduring record of that first generation. Established in 1852 with the burial of William R. Box, this family graveyard gathers together settlers who arrived in the early 1840s, three brothers who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, and Confederate soldiers of the next generation. The Beeson descendants who still tend the plot keep an unbroken line of memory stretching back to Houston County's founding families.

Beeville, TX

Mexico granted land on Poesta Creek in 1834 to settlers Anne Burke and James Heffernan, but the young colony soon met disaster: a Comanche raid in 1836 killed Heffernan, his kin, and companions as they planted a crop. Bee County organized in 1858, and after a bitter county-seat dispute the town of Beeville rose on land donated by Burke.

Beeville, TX

Beeville got its first post office in 1859, but the 1918 Classical Revival building — with its Doric portico, fanlight doorway, and brick parapet — was the first raised on federal ground. During its construction a feud between two dirt-hauling contractors turned deadly: in 1917 Robert B. Brown shot and killed J. P. Hermes, who had come at him with a knife. Brown's conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that helped establish the right to meet a lethal threat with lethal force.

Mico, TX

In 1854 sixteen Mormon families led by Lyman Wight founded a settlement called Mountain Valley along the Medina River, building homes and mills in the Texas Hill Country. Pressed by conflict with Native raiders, they abandoned the community in 1858, and its lands were later submerged beneath the waters of Medina Lake. Today the drowned townsite lies hidden above this dam.

Kerrville, TX

When the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad made Kerrville its last stop, San Antonio lumberman Frank J. Beitel bought land here in 1889 to open a lumberyard, betting on the county's timber and coming growth. The business thrived, expanding into a warehouse, retail building, and lumber shed, and gained its own rail spur for loading goods after the town's depot was rebuilt in the 1910s. For more than a century the yard supplied the materials that built Kerrville.

Asherton, TX

Designed by noted San Antonio architect Alfred Giles and built in 1910, Bel-Asher was the home of Asher Richardson and his wife Mary Isabelle, whose combined names christened the house. Richardson founded the town of Asherton and routed his Asherton and Gulf Railway Co. through it in 1905, tying the community into the wider rail network. Built of native sandstone with prairie-school influences and broad projecting eaves, the house has stayed in the family for generations and was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1990.

Aubrey, TX

Around 1856 Richard and Mary Jane Belew led their family and 39 other households by wagon from Tennessee to a hilltop north of Aubrey, founding the Belew Schoolhouse settlement. The community bought its first burial ground from Belew in 1880, and more than 70 red-sandstone markers still note its earliest graves. In 1902 a Ladies Cemetery Society formed, and its 85-year run of Thanksgiving dinners funded new land, a sexton's house, and a pavilion; veterans from the Civil War to the Gulf War lie here.

San Antonio, TX

The rare passage of Venus across the face of the sun, which Edmond Halley realized could help measure the size of the solar system, drew astronomers around the world when the paired transits came due. For the December 1882 event, Belgian astronomer Jean-Charles Houzeau—an abolitionist who had once surveyed in Uvalde and left Texas at the outbreak of the Civil War—chose San Antonio as one of his two observing stations for its clear skies and good communications. Using a heliometer of his own design, his team captured 124 photographic plates, matching the work of far larger nations.

San Antonio, TX

Laid down in 1914 in San Antonio's Monte Vista district, Belknap Place is the oldest surviving concrete street in Texas and a landmark of early road engineering. It used a patented two-layer "granitoid" process, developed in the wake of the nation's first concrete street in Bellefontaine, Ohio, that has let the pavement endure a century without major repair. Its stamped brick surface even gave horseshoes a non-slip grip — a telling detail from the moment when horse traffic was giving way to the automobile.

Palestine, TX

Uriah Jasper Bell, a Confederate veteran and ordained Baptist minister, brought his family to Anderson County in 1871 to lead the Ft. Houston Baptist Church. The family cemetery began in sorrow when his only daughter, Lula Bell Kent, died in a fire in January 1890, just months after her wedding, becoming its first burial. Bell, his wife Nancy, their six sons, and generations of descendants rest here.

Belton vicinity, TX

Settlement along the Lampasas River began in 1847, and Bell County was created in 1850, taking its name from Peter Hansbrough Bell—a San Jacinto veteran, Mexican War officer, and governor of Texas. The county seat soon moved from Nolanville to Belton, and by 1860 nearly 4,800 people lived there. When the Civil War came, the county sent a dozen troop companies and supplied its cause with flour mills, a hat factory, tanneries, and workshops.

Belton, TX

Designed by Jasper N. Preston & Son of Austin and built in 1885, the Bell County Courthouse rose in Renaissance Revival style with arched passageways, a columned clock tower, and rusticated limestone. Its original tower was removed in the 1950s but faithfully rebuilt in 1999 from historic photographs. The building's style echoes through downtown Belton, much of which was rebuilt after an 1889 fire.

Belton, TX

Three successive courthouses have stood on this square since Bell County was organized in 1850, on land donated by Matilda F. Connell Allen for the county seat. Before any courthouse existed, the county's first business was conducted in John Danley's blacksmith shop, where his anvil served as the council table. A modest $199 frame building of 1851 gave way to a limestone courthouse in 1859 whose cost so angered voters that every commissioner was turned out of office, and a grander third courthouse followed in 1885.

Baytown, TX

Henry Falvel Gillette, a Connecticut-born educator, came to Texas in 1840 and by 1859 had bought land on Galveston Bay for a plantation he named Bell Prairie. The estate included a two-story brick home, a carriage house, and quarters for the enslaved people whose labor sustained it, along with a wharf used to import cattle from England. Gillette also superintended a nearby orphans' home and helped found a Masonic lodge; his plantation house, battered by the 1900 hurricane, finally burned after a lightning strike in 1915.

DeBerry, TX

This East Texas farming community grew up around the early Kinlock post office, its settlers sharing a five-acre burial ground deeded to the Bell-Fountain Baptist Church, founded before the Civil War. The earliest marked grave, a child who died in 1850, and the several Confederate veterans laid to rest here mark the sweep of pioneer life through the war years. After the church burned in 1880 and the congregation dispersed, descendants preserved the site, fencing the plot and raising a tabernacle where the church once stood.

Rockett Community, TX

Founded in 1875 on land given by John and Elizabeth Gibbons, this cemetery and its associated church took the name of Confederate veteran Jodie M. Bell, a church and civic leader in the Rockett Community and the first person buried here in 1877. The Red Oak Masonic Lodge helped raise a two-story chapel and meeting hall on the deeded ground. The lodge later moved to Red Oak in 1894.

Waco, TX

The neighborhood took its name in 1886 when Joseph Bell drilled Waco's first artesian well atop the rise that became Bell's Hill. The local school opened as the Sixth District School in 1889 and was renamed for the hill in 1906. When unstable soil caused the building to collapse in 1923, a new schoolhouse rose on the site of the old Bell water well, and the school has served the neighborhood's children ever since.