Historic Markers in Texas

Montgomery, TX

Pioneers who settled this Montgomery County area as early as the 1850s rest in this community cemetery, the oldest marked graves belonging to Clara and William Fridge, who died in 1870 and 1872. Trustees of the nearby Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church acquired the deed in 1894, and among the unmarked graves lie seven victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic. A cemetery association reorganized in 1928 to keep the grounds.

Wichita Falls, TX

Founded in 1891 by the Rev. Mr. Thurston and twelve charter members, this was the first congregation organized on the east side of Wichita Falls, meeting in members' homes until it could raise a building. Two of its early structures were destroyed by dynamite, yet the community held together, relocating and rebuilding through the early 20th century. Under long pastorates it grew into a pillar of the city's African American community, producing pastors and sustaining Christian education and missionary work.

Athens, TX

Mt. Providence Baptist Church took shape in 1888, its earliest congregants worshipping in borrowed churches, homes, and brush arbors before trustees bought land in 1890. Its classrooms did double duty for pupils of the Blackshear School, and baptisms were held in a pool near the old Harbison-Walker brickyard. After World War II the congregation bought a surplus military barracks from Camp Fannin and hauled it in as their new sanctuary, later bricking it over and adding an indoor baptismal pool. The church remains a hub of community aid in Athens.

Port Lavaca, TX

Organized at the port of Indianola in 1870, this is one of the oldest Black congregations in Calhoun County, first led by the Rev. Joseph Whitlock. Two devastating hurricanes—in 1875 and 1886—drove the members from ruined Indianola to Port Lavaca, where they carried their church with them. Known first as Second Baptist, it took the name Mt. Sinai in 1905 during the long pastorate of the Rev. A. K. Black.

Hemphill, TX

Mt. Sinai Cemetery has served the families of southeastern Sabine County since its first burial in 1894, on land the Lutcher & Moore Lumber Company deeded in 1955. Some graves here are older still, relocated from the Morris, Anthony, and Robertson cemeteries after the Toledo Bend Reservoir flooded their original ground by 1968. Maintained today by a local association, it remains a tangible record of the county's timber-country past.

Whitesboro, TX

Alabama natives Burrel and Harriett Scarbrough settled north of Whitesboro before the Civil War, and in 1878 Burrel deeded 8.5 acres atop a hill for a community cemetery, named Mt. Tabor for the biblical mount of the Transfiguration. The earliest dated grave belongs to I. E. Lindsey in 1868, and Burrel himself was buried there months after the deeding. Cared for by the Scarbrough family and the Sandusky community for over 140 years, its curbed plots and ornate fencing shelter veterans of four twentieth-century wars.

Houston County, TX

In the years after the Civil War, East Texans built their communities around church and cemetery, and Mt. Vernon began when Henry Warren Payne and W. M. Conner donated land for both. A church house doubling as a school rose in 1871, and after fire destroyed it, Payne rode door to door to fund its 1884 replacement. The Baptist congregation formally organized in 1888, and the fenced family plots of its cemetery—begun with a child's grave in 1872—still trace the community's roots.

Coleman, TX

Established in 1891 on land donated at the base of Robinson's Peak, this rural Coleman County cemetery grew up alongside the Mount View School to serve the families who settled the area. The oldest marked grave dates to that first year, and more than a hundred of those buried here were born before 1900. A cemetery association formed in 2005 to protect and formally preserve the grounds.

Frydek, TX

Organized in 1866 as the Bethlehem Baptist Church by Joe and Abe Osborne and Louis Thompson, this congregation took root in the first year of freedom after the Civil War. Reorganized as Mt. Zion Baptist in the 1880s, its members worshipped in homes and then a log sanctuary, rebuilding faithfully after both a fire and a major storm leveled their church. More than a century and a half on, it still serves as a spiritual anchor for the Frydek community.

Burton, TX

Organized in 1852 on land donated by a pioneer settler, Mt. Zion Baptist Church drew early ministers from the nearby Baptist stronghold of Independence, home to Old Baylor College. When the town of Burton rose along the railroad in 1882, the congregation dismantled its building and rebuilt it in the new town, taking the name Burton Baptist Church. The sanctuary weathered the catastrophic 1900 storm and was eventually returned to its original site in 1983.

Fort Worth, TX

On Christmas Day 1894, evangelist the Rev. Frank Tribune gathered five founding members—four of them women—to organize Mt. Zion Baptist Church, aided by the prominent Black Baptist leader the Rev. Dr. A. R. Griggs. The congregation worshipped in a 1907 frame building, then a tabernacle, before raising this brick sanctuary beginning in 1919 and adding an education building in the mid-20th century.

Ben Wheeler vicinity, TX

In 1874, families from four small communities gathered on Ephraim and Malinda Curtis's farm to organize Mt. Zion Church, offering spiritual and material support through the hard, uncertain years of Reconstruction after the Civil War. The Curtises deeded land for a sanctuary in 1877, and as the congregation outgrew each building it moved and expanded, reaching a third sanctuary in 1990. A Colored Methodist Episcopal congregation, it sent a number of its members into the ministry.

Carthage, TX

This burial ground began on land owned by pioneer settlers Richard and Polly Golden, whose daughter and son-in-law buried a child here in the 1840s before deeding the tract to the Mt. Zion Methodist Church and Cemetery in 1850. More land came from the local farmers' Grange when it disbanded, and the cemetery—still in use—holds many of Panola County's early leaders and veterans of American military service. The site is a layered record of frontier settlement, faith, and civic organization in East Texas.

Burton, TX

This five-acre burial ground lies on land granted in 1831 to Robert Clokey, a colonist in one of Stephen F. Austin's colonies. Its first grave, an infant's, dates to 1852, and some unmarked graves may hold victims of the yellow fever epidemic that swept the area in 1867. Named for the Mt. Zion Baptist Church that stood here from 1857 to 1882, the cemetery holds 132 marked graves representing 55 pioneer families.

Cumby, TX

Faith came early to this corner of northeast Texas: the Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal congregation organized here in 1846, even before Hopkins County existed, and in 1849 the Rev. Anthony Travelstead gathered thirteen members into a Cumberland Presbyterian church. After years of worship in oak groves, brush arbors, and homes, the two congregations jointly built a church in 1861 on land given by local settlers. The Methodists moved away in 1914, but the Presbyterian congregation—and the cemetery—endure.

Fairfield, TX

Early settlers raised the first Mt. Zion church—a simple log building—in 1854 near Doddy Hollow, with the Reverends G. W. Walker and Timothy Green among its founders. Over the following decades the congregation moved twice as families donated fresh tracts, at one point sharing a structure with a school and a Grange hall. Its cemetery, given by J. C. James and A. P. Vaughn, became the resting place of many Confederate veterans.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1866 — the year after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished in Texas — Mt. Zion was one of Houston's first three African American churches, its congregation meeting at first in a tent on Commerce Street. That same fall the Freedmen's Bureau opened a school on the church's property, one of the earliest in the city for formerly enslaved children and adults, and the congregation kept teaching there into the 1880s. Through fires, a devastating norther, and the great hurricane of 1900, the church rebuilt again and again, helping to found many other congregations along the way.

Robstown, TX

Shortly after Riley and Ella Mays brought their twelve children to Robstown in 1917, they and the Ira Collier family gathered neighbors to found Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, holding its first service in a schoolhouse in 1918. Regional Baptist leaders supplied early pastors before the congregation called the Rev. C. B. Baycoat, and the church raised its first sanctuary in 1930 and a full-time ministry by 1950. Later decades brought new buildings and the purchase of the Phyllis Wheatley School as a community activity center.

Brenham, TX

After emancipation in 1865, African American families settled the west side of Brenham in a community called Watersville, where Reverend J.R. Smith held brush-arbor services in 1877 that grew into Mt. Zion. The congregation bought this site and built its church in 1878, rebuilding after damaging winds in 1926 and dedicating a new fellowship hall in 1984. Standing on what is now called Heritage Corner, the church entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.

Bangs, TX

This hilltop graveyard has served the Thrifty and Fry communities of Brown County for well over a century, its oldest legible burial dating to 1864 and a weathered rock slab hinting at use as early as 1862. Among those laid to rest are pioneer settler Charles Mullins, who brought his family west in 1858, people killed in frontier Indian attacks, and workers caught up in the oil boom of 1926–27. The stones read like a timeline of the West Texas frontier, from first settlement through the derricks of the petroleum age.

Belton, TX

German immigrant Fred Muehlhause reached Texas in 1885, married Louise Albrecht in 1892, and worked as a craftsman shoemaker before opening the Belton Shoe Shop downtown in 1906. A respected civic leader, he was elected city alderman in 1907 and had builder James M. Scott construct this Queen Anne residence in 1908 to his own written specifications, complete with a spring-fed limestone cistern. The house and its carriage, wash, and smoke houses stayed in the family until 1992.

Fredericksburg, TX

The oldest part of this Fredericksburg house was built about 1848-1850 by Willis Wallace on land granted by the German Immigration Company, using traditional fachwerk timber-frame construction. German farmer Heinrich Mueller, Jr. later acquired it, and his daughter and son-in-law A.W. Petmecky — a justice of the peace for forty-two years — added a limestone wing in 1895.

Muenster, TX

In 1889 the Flusche brothers contracted to sell 22,000 acres along the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, and Jot Gunter donated land for a school, church, cemetery, and park. The first Mass on December 8, 1889, marked the founding of this German Catholic town, whose settlers persevered through drought, typhoid, and tornadoes that twice destroyed their church. Cooperative ventures in insurance and bulk marketing, along with a 1926 oil boom, carried the farming and dairy community into prosperity.

Merkel, TX

Human activity in Mulberry Canyon reaches back to prehistoric times, when Native American peoples hunted buffalo, deer, and bear across the land. The canyon saw the 1849 forty-niner mail route and, from 1858 to 1861, the Butterfield Overland Mail's stagecoaches before cattle ranchers arrived in the 1870s and the last buffalo herds passed through in 1878. Pioneer families then planted maize, corn, and cotton and raised more than half a dozen small communities, served by ten churches and ten schools, whose descendants still occupied the canyon in the 1990s.

Ravenna, TX

Two miles from the Red River, the farming community of Mulberry took root in the early 1880s, its land anchored by Civil War veteran Captain Thomas Lightfoot, who donated ground for both a cemetery and a one-room school in 1883. The burial ground grew to hold pioneer families, a shaded "Mexican section" begun after the Portillo family arrived in 1902, and the victims of the floods, cyclones, and tornadoes that repeatedly struck Mulberry Bottom. A cross now stands over the unmarked graves between the old cemetery and the vanished schoolhouse.

Houston, TX

In 1909, banker William Mulcahy and his wife Mattie bought this newly built home in the developing Houston Heights, where Mulcahy was climbing from bank teller to bank president. Its Dutch Colonial Revival design is distinctive: a T-shaped cross-gambrel roof, native cypress siding, and an inset front porch on square paneled posts. The family held the house for ninety years, a rare span of continuous ownership.

Muldoon, TX

First settled in the 1830s on land from an 1831 Spanish grant through Stephen F. Austin, the Muldoon community took its name from Father Miguel Muldoon, an Irish-born, Spanish-educated priest who ministered to Austin's colonists and received leagues of land in return. The town boomed after the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad arrived in 1887, gaining stores, churches, a hotel, a cotton gin, and its distinctive 1890 precinct courthouse. Muldoon blue sandstone from the local quarry went into courthouses, churches, and even Galveston's coastal jetties before the community faded with the railroad's decline.

Tennyson vicinity, TX

Set on the rolling frontier of Coke County, Mule Creek grew up around a small settlement whose very name is the stuff of tall tales—recalled either as an early horse-and-mule ranch or a stagecoach mule that died at the nearby creek. The Abilene-to-Fort Concho stage once rolled through, and for years a combination school-and-church served as the community's heart. As West Texans drifted toward town life in the twentieth century, the settlement thinned, leaving its cemetery—blanketed each spring with bluebonnets—to tell the story.

Muleshoe vicinity, TX

Established in 1935 as a wintering ground for migratory waterfowl, Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge sits along the Central Flyway, one link in a chain of sanctuaries stretching from Mexico to Canada. Each fall its playas fill with the largest wintering concentration of sandhill cranes in North America, alongside countless other birds. Spanning more than 5,000 acres, it is among the oldest of Texas's federal refuges.

Center, TX

Brothers James Allen and John M. Mull brought their families from Alabama to Shelby County in 1894, only to lose John's wife Mary to smallpox two years later. Fear of contagion barred her from the city cemetery, so a neighbor offered a burial spot on his land along the San Augustine road, and in 1901 John Mull bought the ground and organized what became Mull Cemetery. The family and at least ten relatives lie here, a small graveyard the city of Center has maintained since 1956.

Mullin, TX

Charles Mullins, the town's namesake, arrived with cattle in 1857, and tradition holds that a Methodist circuit rider preached in his home. The congregation worshiped in the Mullin schoolhouse for years before J. E. Martin and his wife donated this site in 1893 and a building rose in 1896 under the Rev. Marion Mills. After a 1919 cyclone wrecked that structure, the present native-stone church was raised in 1920 using much of the original material.

San Angelo, TX

This cemetery honors Isaac Mullins, a Virginia-born pioneer who came to the Republic of Texas in 1837 and helped organize Tom Green County, serving on its first commission and in the state legislature. His "IC" cattle brand became one of the most famous in Texas as he trailed herds to markets as far as California, and in the 1860s he captained a company of Texas Rangers. He gave land for a school and deeded this site as a cemetery in 1881, where he lies among Civil War veterans and pioneers of the old Mullins community.

Thrifty, TX

In 1894 Brown County commissioners cut a public road from Bangs to Cross Cut, and its chief crossing of Jim Ned Creek fell at Mullins Ranch, prompting the county to buy eleven acres here. The Mullins brothers had settled the area in 1857, helping found the nearby towns of Mullin and Thrifty, and their ranch became a regular stop for Methodist circuit preachers, a favored spot for camp meetings, and an open watering hole for cattlemen and neighbors. Many of those gathering traditions continue at the site today.

Plano, TX

McBain Jameson and Jeremiah Muncey settled this vicinity in the early 1840s, when North Texas was still a dangerous frontier of scattered cabins. Late in 1844, hunters came upon the slain bodies of Jameson, the Muncey family, and a small child, along with signs of an Indian raid; a nearby settler's son named Rice was killed as well, and two Muncey boys vanished forever. Remembered as the last such raid in Collin County, the marker was moved to this site in 1998, about a mile from the actual home and graves.

Victoria, TX

Built in 1871 as the Continental Hotel, this Victoria building served travelers for more than two decades before Professor O. E. H. Mundt bought it and turned it into the classroom home of the school he founded in 1893. The school ran until 1904, and in 1946 the Mundt family sold the old building to a Veterans of Foreign Wars post, giving it a third civic life.

Dallas, TX

Galilee Baptist Church was organized in 1894 near the railroad tracks on Central Avenue, where members famously hung heavy rags in the windows to muffle the din of nearby taverns — earning it the nickname "Rag Doll Church." After relocating to Munger Avenue in 1911 and taking that name under Rev. Abraham Lincoln King, the congregation built its first permanent structure and grew steadily through the pastorates that followed. A new sanctuary was completed in 1940–41, and the church became a center for worship, education, and civic life in the community.

Coolidge, TX

In 1876 Henry Martin Munger began buying and fencing an 1,800-acre Limestone County survey for a great cotton farm, and his sons carried the enterprise far beyond it. Robert Munger patented cotton-processing machinery and built the Continental Gin Company into the nation's largest maker of such equipment, while Stephen became a Dallas banker and SMU trustee. The Munger community around the farm grew into a full village with a school, churches, gin, depot, and railroad before cotton's decline emptied it by the late 1940s.

Dallas, TX

Organized in 1914, Munger Place Methodist Church has long served the Munger Place and East Dallas neighborhoods with a range of community programs. Its landmark sanctuary was built in 1925, during the pastorate of Rev. George M. Gibson, and designed in the English Gothic style by prominent Dallas architect C. D. Hill. Symmetrical side gables, a corner square-plan tower, and unusual window tracery mark it as a distinctive work of ecclesiastical architecture, recognized as a Recorded Texas Historical Landmark in 1990.

Yoakum, TX

During the Depression, the small railroad town of Yoakum decided in 1930 — at a packed commission meeting of some 300 residents — to build and own its own electricity rather than buy from an outside utility. The plant that engineers raised in 1932 lit the town until 1938, then served as an auxiliary station and later a city machine shop before local library boosters lovingly converted the sturdy industrial building into a public library in the late 1980s.

San Angelo, TX

When a devastating flood swept down the South Concho River in September 1936, it destroyed much of San Angelo's parks and its public pool. Voters twice went to the polls before a bond—paired with federal Works Progress Administration funds and labor—cleared the way, and work began in 1938. The Pueblo Revival complex designed by John G. Becker opened in 1939, drawing 795 swimmers in its first two days, its exposed vigas and hexagonal stone tower a signature of Depression-era public building.

Bailey's Prairie, TX

In 1850 Mordello Stephen Munson — son of Henry William Munson, a member of Stephen F. Austin's colony — set aside this tract at his family's Ridgely Plantation on Bailey's Prairie as a burying ground for kin and friends. The little cemetery ties one of the founding colonial families of Anglo Texas to the coastal prairie they helped settle. It has stood as their resting place for well over a century.

Hallettsville, TX

Considered the oldest organized group in Lavaca County, this Masonic lodge was chartered in 1851 and named for early Texas colonist and Masonic leader John Murchison. Around 1855 it built a three-story hall that did triple duty as a church and a school known as the "Masonic College." A lodge member, Friench Simpson, later served as grand treasurer of the Grand Lodge of Texas in 1900.

Neches, TX

Born in North Carolina to Scottish immigrants in 1810, Murdoch McDonald came to the Mound Prairie area of Anderson County in 1839 and farmed alongside the family of Dr. George Lester, whose daughter he married. In 1871 he donated three hundred acres to the International Railroad on the condition that a town and station be built, and when the rails arrived in 1872 he raised a hotel that became the community's social center. Remembered as the founder of Neches, he remained a local leader until his death in 1889.

Tyler, TX

North Carolina native Archibald Michael Murphey opened a jewelry and watchmaking business in Tyler in 1868, drawing on a trade he had begun as a young apprentice. His sons carried it on, and by the early twentieth century a younger son had taken over, moving the store to this site in 1919. Passed down within one family, it long offered watches, diamonds, silver, and even pianos and organs.

Jefferson, TX

Brothers John C. and James M. Murphy came from Tennessee to the booming riverport of Jefferson in 1850 and built this sturdy structure in the busy warehouse district to serve their wholesale cotton business. As steamboat commerce faded, the building found new life—county offices and courts in 1884, then city hall in 1915, sheltering everything from a volunteer fire company to a dance club. A Diebold safe installed in 1877 still stands inside, a working relic of the town's mercantile heyday.

Murphy, TX

Settled in the early 1840s by pioneers from a dozen states drawn to the fertile Blackland Prairie, this community farmed and ranched the tall-grass, black-soil country for well over a century. It took the name Murphy in 1888 when William Murphy granted right-of-way to the St. Louis Southwestern Railroad, though the city itself wasn't formally established until 1958. Founding Maxwell, McMillen, and Murphy families built the stores and schools of an agrarian town that faded by 1970—only to revive in the 1980s as a Dallas suburb.

Murphy, TX

In 1872, on the death of his sister Susan Emberton, William A. Murphy set aside a corner of his North Texas land as a private family burial ground, laying it out with sons' families to the north and daughters' to the south. As the Murphys drifted west in the late 1800s, the plot opened to the wider Murphy community, taking its last burial in 1988. Today it rests among cedars first planted by William and Dorothy Murphy's daughters.

Nursery, TX

Built in 1897, the Murphy Home blends the Southern plantation form with the New England saltbox, an unusual pairing that spoke to the tastes of prominent Nursery citizens. It passed through several notable local families before becoming best known as the longtime home of W. M. Murphy, Sr.

Mathis, TX

In 1875, San Patricio chief justice Patrick Frances Murphy and his wife Elizabeth — daughter of the empresario James McGloin — bought "The Point at Echo" and built this modest Greek Revival house on the east bank of the Nueces, using cypress hauled by oxen from Indianola. The property later passed to Margaret Mary Healy-Murphy, widow of Patrick's brother, who devoted her fortune to founding a church campus in San Antonio with a convent and a free school for Black children, established what the marker calls the first order of nuns in Texas, and used this ranch house for retreats before selling it to sustain her mission.

Murphy, TX

Murphy started as 'Old Decatur,' renamed in 1888 after William Murphy donated land for a rail depot and post office. The Works Progress Administration built Murphy School here in 1939, though consolidation shuttered it as a school by 1950. The city later repurposed the sturdy Depression-era building as its city hall, police station, and firehouse.

Rockdale, TX

First known as Pleasant Grove Cemetery, this Milam County burial ground shared its site with the community's school and church, its earliest marked grave dating to 1856. It took its lasting name from Madison Murray, a Civil War veteran who moved from Mississippi in the late 1860s, became a community leader, and ran the old schoolhouse as a private academy. As settlements rose and faded, the cemetery went on serving the Pleasant Grove, Bushdale, and Bethlehem communities, cared for by an association organized in 2004.

Graham, TX

When pioneer Thomas Price bought land in the Fish Creek community in 1874, he and his neighbors repaired an abandoned log cabin and set it aside as a shared meeting house where settlers of every denomination worshiped together. The Fish Creek Methodist Society organized in 1886, served by a circuit-riding minister, and moved through cabin and schoolhouse before the W. L. Chandler family donated land in 1907. Renamed Murray Methodist Church, it has remained a vital part of the community.

Gatesville, TX

Settled largely by families from Sardis, Mississippi, this Coryell County community got its first schooling when Lemuel Murrell built a log schoolhouse in the late 1870s, with Alabama native Robert Earl Timmons as its first teacher. By the century's end nearly a hundred children were enrolled, and a new frame schoolhouse rose in 1909-10, its term often starting in mid-October so students could first help harvest the cotton. The school consolidated with Jonesboro in 1948, leaving the building as one of Coryell County's few surviving rural schools.

Ore City, TX

On the antebellum frontier, formal education was scarce, which makes the Murry Institute remarkable: founded in 1853 by two Tennesseans, it was the first school in Upshur County. Far from a mere grammar school, it taught engineering, higher mathematics, Greek, and Latin alongside common subjects, earning a reputation for excellence in a raw new country. The Civil War forced its doors shut in 1861.

Slocum, TX

Muse Cemetery holds burials reaching back to 1859, when six-month-old Mary E. Gilmore was laid to rest, though a 1969 survey found some 261 unmarked graves hidden beneath the sand of its oldest section. It took its name from the pioneer Muse family who arrived after the Civil War, even though none of them appear to be buried here. To the east lies a separate plot for the community's Black citizens, its earliest marked grave that of Jackson Roach in 1882.

Gail, TX

Rising to 2,862 feet on the West Texas plains, Mushaway Peak has carried many spellings and long served as a landmark of Native American origin. Around 1872 a village near here was a trading point where Apaches and Comanches dealt with Comancheros tied to New Mexico's markets. As U.S. Army expeditions swept the region in the mid-1870s to force the last free bands onto reservations, the peak guided soldiers, buffalo hunters, and surveyors alike — before cattlemen claimed the valley in the 1880s.

Duncanville, TX

When a proposed new school stirred tax fears at an 1887 Duncanville town meeting, six citizens simply paid to build it themselves. The next year Robert N. Daniel funded a separate little music room, outfitted with a piano for instruction. Left standing when the school was later demolished, the modest building was moved and restored in 1975 to serve as a community museum.

Port Aransas, TX

Mustang Island, one of seven Texas barrier islands, took its name from the wild horses descended from shipwrecks and Spanish expeditions, and was long frequented by the nomadic Karankawas. Robert Ainsworth Mercer settled here in 1855 with his family, founding the El Mar Rancho, but the small community scattered during the Civil War when the USS Arthur blockaded Aransas Pass and shelled the island after settlers fired on Federal sailors in 1862. Ranchers returned after the war, and by the 1920s tourism had become the island's economic mainstay.

Marlin, TX

Though the land fell within Sterling Robertson's 1834 colony, Mustang Prairie drew few settlers until Reconstruction and the railroad's 1870 arrival at nearby Bremond brought merchants and families—many of them from Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi. The community anchored itself with the New Hope Baptist Church, established by 1872, and a schoolhouse that first shared the church building before a three-room frame school rose in 1877. Storms, tornadoes, and dwindling enrollment eventually closed both, and by 1940 the schoolchildren were bused to Kosse and Bremond.

Tarzan, TX

This West Texas watering place was already known in 1849, when U.S. Army Captain Randolph B. Marcy paused here while leading emigrants from Fort Smith, Arkansas, toward El Paso. Noted in 1859 as "Mustang Pond" just north of the Emigrant's Road, it was the first reliable water west of Big Spring—a vital marker on the long, dry route west.