Historic Markers in Texas

Houston, TX

The Myer-Hall House rose in 1910 from the drafting tables of Sanguinet and Staats, a firm that helped define the streetscapes of early-twentieth-century Texas. Built for attorney and civic leader Sterling Myer, the half-timbered Tudor Revival house later became the decades-long home of engineer and businessman James Donald Hall and his family. Its gables, sunroom, and porte-cochere capture the aspirations of Houston's growing professional elite.

Alvarado, TX

Samuel Houston Myers brought his wife Patsy and six children to Texas in 1851, establishing a family farm; over the following years he outlived three wives and buried several kin on the land. The cemetery's first recorded burial came in 1873 with his granddaughter Mary, and early graves include Myers himself, a traveler who drowned in Quil Miller Creek, and a formerly enslaved woman remembered as "Aunt Rachel." A darker chapter unfolded in 1880, when young Sam Houston Myers, Jr. was hanged for a murder his brother-in-law later confessed to.

Houston, TX

Houston's warehouse district grew up east of Main Street along Buffalo Bayou, where waterways and five converging railroads made the city a shipping powerhouse by the Civil War. On this site an 1880s cotton warehouse was converted into a mattery factory and, after 1904, became the Houston branch of the Myers-Spalti mattress and furniture company. Over the following decades the firm added warehouse after warehouse, its buildings—ranging from brick and heavy timber to poured concrete—charting the evolution of Houston's industrial architecture.

San Antonio, TX

Born in Gonzales and raised in San Antonio, Myra Hemmings became one of 22 founders of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Howard University in 1913, and days later marched in the women's suffrage procession in Washington. Returning home, she taught English and drama in San Antonio's Black high schools for more than fifty years while founding the city's Delta Sigma Theta chapter and, with her husband, a dramatic guild. She also acted in stage productions and several feature films, shaping the cultural life of Black San Antonio.

Ennis, TX

When W.H. Parsons deeded ten acres for a cemetery in 1875, it took the name "Myrtle" from a child already buried on the tract. The grounds became a resting place for figures across generations of Texas history — Frederick Ranklin of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" and a veteran of the Texas Revolution, author Katie Daffan, and Marine Lieutenant Jack Lummus, killed at Iwo Jima in 1945 and awarded the Medal of Honor.

Quitman, TX

Myrtle Springs Baptist Church began in the fall of 1861, when William Setzler deeded land and a congregation gathered under a Rev. Coker, first meeting in a log schoolhouse before building a wooden church. Early members financed later buildings with gifts of cattle and eggs, and baptized converts in nearby ponds and springs until a baptistery was added in 1964. It grew into a Baptist Missionary Association congregation serving Wood County.

New Summerfield, TX

Begun in the 1860s on land deeded by pioneer Thomas Garrison, this burial ground served the vanished town of Lone Star and scattered East Texas homesteads, its earliest marked grave that of young Martha Wallace in 1866. At least fifteen Civil War veterans rest here, some beneath hand-cut sandstone markers now worn to bare initials. Though Lone Star became a ghost town, the cemetery endured, tended by a community association chartered for perpetual care in the 1960s.

Palestine, TX

Established in 1912, Banks Elementary was the first school for African-American children living south of the I&GN tracks in Palestine's South End. It honored Nathaniel A. Banks, the Lincoln High principal who ran a summer 'normal school' that trained Black teachers from ten surrounding counties for state certification. Several of its teachers stayed more than 35 years each, and after desegregation closed the school in 1965 the building served five more years as a federal Head Start center.

Montgomery, TX

Judge N. H. Davis built this cottage in 1851 using timber from an 1831 log house he had received as a legal fee, and the home grew with a kitchen wing in 1880 and a south addition in 1895. From 1881 to 1891 it also served the community as the site of Texanna Snow's school, and the house has remained in the Davis family ever since.

Waxahachie, TX

One of the earliest privately endowed libraries in Texas, the N. P. Sims Library and Lyceum grew from a bequest by Virginia-born farmer and investor Nicholas P. Sims, who died in 1902. Rising in Getzendaner Park—land donated by Confederate veteran and railroad president Captain W. H. Getzendaner—the Neo-Classical building of Carrara marble opened in 1905, with reading rooms below and an auditorium and athenaeum above. Later benefactors, including inventor J. Harry Phillips, added wings that carried the institution through the twentieth century.

Center Point, TX

Pennsylvania-born and a Union veteran of the Civil War, Nelson Orcelus Reynolds enlisted as a Texas Ranger in 1874 and quickly made his name, capturing the Horrell brothers and brokering a peace to end their feud with the Higgins faction—a feat that won him command of the newly formed Company E. He was later charged with jailing and guarding the notorious gunman John Wesley Hardin for trial. After leaving the Rangers in 1879 he served as Lampasas County sheriff and settled in Center Point, where he died in 1922.

Nacogdoches, TX

Long home to the Nacogdoches Indians, this East Texas region saw Spanish settlement begin in 1716, though the presence was repeatedly abandoned and re-established amid French encroachment. The town of Nacogdoches was founded in 1779, and the area became the scene of the Fredonian Rebellion in 1827. Organized as a municipality under Mexico in 1832, it was made a Texas county in 1836.

Nacogdoches, TX

Raised in 1917–1918 to a design from the office of federal architect James A. Wetmore, this brick post office set a note of classical dignity at the center of the Nacogdoches town square. Its Palladian windows and cast-stone trim mark it as a restrained example of the beaux arts style the U.S. Treasury favored for public buildings of the era. It carried the town's mail until 1964, then served in turn as public library and, later, a visitor center.

Nacogdoches, TX

Incorporated by an independent board in February 1845 and opened that September, Nacogdoches University was a pioneering co-educational school granted four leagues of land for its support. Its first president was Marcus A. Montrose, an outstanding early Texas educator. In time the institution was absorbed into the public school system.

Nada, TX

Nada grew on land once part of Stephen F. Austin's colony, settled beginning in the 1880s by German and Czech immigrant families who built stores, schools, and a Catholic parish. The founding of a public school in 1883, a post office in 1894, and the Church of the Nativity in 1896 anchored a farming community that by 1904 boasted a cotton gin, stores, and a dance hall. Its descendants still work the same agricultural land generations later.

Nada, TX

The Nada post office opened in 1894 with William J. Engbrock, Jr. as first postmaster, and for nearly a century it migrated around town with each new postmaster's trade — housed by turns in general stores, a doctor's pharmacy, and a service station and garage. It followed the community's shifting center of gravity, even moving to be near the new State Highway 71 in the 1930s. A permanent facility was finally built in 1987.

Galveston, TX

New Jersey native Nahor Biggs Yard reached the raw new town of Galveston in 1838 and built one of its first residences. A successful businessman, he is best remembered for a sweeping public life—city alderman, county commissioner, school board member, church and Masonic leader, colonel in the first regiment of Texas troops, and president of the philanthropic Howard Association. His career traces the making of a frontier port into an organized city during the Republic era.

Moody, TX

When Joseph Naler brought his family from Georgia to the Central Texas prairie in 1851, the country around present-day Moody was still raw frontier. The first grave dug on his land in 1863 was for his wife Polly, and over the decades the plot grew from a family burying ground into a chartered community cemetery holding many of the district's earliest settlers. That the graveyard predates the town of Moody itself makes it a quiet record of who came first.

Travis County, TX

Nameless, Texas reportedly earned its wry name in the 1880s after residents grew tired of having their proposed post-office names rejected by the government. This little Hill Country farming community once supported its own school and gathering places, but like countless rural Texas settlements it faded as families drifted toward larger towns and better roads. Today a schoolhouse site and the community cemetery are just about all that remain to mark where Nameless stood.

Jacksonville, TX

This hospital began in 1919 as the nine-bed Cherokee Sanitarium in a small Jacksonville apartment house. A larger facility followed in 1925, and in 1930 it was renamed to honor Nan Travis, mother of staff physicians J.M. and R.T. Travis. Through decades of expansion it grew to serve patients across East Texas, merging in 1997 into a larger system as the East Texas Medical Center–Jacksonville.

De Soto, TX

Otway Bird Nance moved his family from Kentucky to this Dallas County land in 1851, securing title through the Peters Colony in 1856. The farmhouse begun in the 1850s was later enlarged with Victorian detailing and even rotated to face east in the early 1900s, while its barn, curing shed, and elevated water tank survived alongside it. The family held the place until 1951, and De Soto acquired it in 1975.

Crews, TX

In this cabin lived "Grandma" Parker, a frontier herb doctor who brewed medicinal teas in a great pot over an open fire and walked miles across dangerous country to tend the sick. She made her home here for more than a decade before failing eyesight forced her to sell the cabin in 1888. Her story preserves the memory of the self-taught healers who served isolated settlements before formal medicine arrived.

Cuero, TX

Nancy Shows was among the pioneer settlers of the DeWitt County frontier in the 1850s, where her husband Adam Shows built the nearby Hebron Church around 1855. Mother of eight children, she represents the settler families who put down the first roots — homes, churches, and cemeteries — in this stretch of early Texas.

Beaumont, TX

In 1825 Nancy Nixon Tevis and her husband Noah settled a bluff on the Neches, becoming the first known Anglo-Americans there and later receiving a Republic of Texas land grant covering much of what became Beaumont. Widowed young, Nancy held her ground with eight children through the Runaway Scrape of 1836, ran a profitable ferry, and joined with others in 1837 to found the town — renaming it from Tevis Bluff to Beaumont. Fiercely protective of her rights, she once appealed directly to President Sam Houston over a land dispute.

Naples, TX

When the railroad bypassed the prosperous town of Wheatville, a rival community sprang up beside the tracks and inherited its momentum. The post office moved here in 1882 as "Station Belden," then was renamed Naples in 1895. As the surrounding hardwood forests were logged out, the local economy shifted back to cattle and farming.

Naples, TX

The earliest recorded burial here is Elizabeth A. Baker, who died in April 1883, followed by others reinterred from the local school grounds. In 1892 J. H. Mathews sold about an acre to the trustees of Belden Public School for $12.50 to use as a cemetery, and when the town of Belden was renamed Naples in 1895 the graveyard's name changed with it. Among the interred are a Texas state representative and Amanda Sheppard, mother and grandmother of two U.S. congressmen.

Arlington, TX

Between 1853 and 1900 dozens of narrow gauge railroads threaded through Texas—cheap to build and run, they served as 'taps' to towns off the main line and as logging roads pushing deep into woods and swamps. They hauled passengers, cattle, and crops like sugar cane, and one line whimsically operated as the 'Two Mules and a Car.' The two engines running at Six Flags Over Texas, built in 1887 and 1903, were rebuilt to original specifications.

Burnet, TX

Settlers reached the Naruna area as early as the 1840s, and the town took its name from the riverboat that carried its first postmaster to Texas. In 1877 residents organized Providence Baptist Church under Ira Reese, holding baptisms in Deer Creek and later sharing a sanctuary with local Masons. Renamed Naruna Baptist Church in 1932, it endured even after the railroad bypassed the town and thinned its population.

Grapevine, TX

Established in 1859 by Kentucky migrants Thomas Jefferson Nash and his wife Elizabeth, this 450-acre farm is one of the last surviving nineteenth-century agrarian sites in North Texas. During the Civil War the Nash brothers left to serve with Confederate troops while Elizabeth and the children kept the farm; all returned to expand their holdings. The 1869 I-house, a crib barn, cistern, and family cemetery still stand, and in 1888 the Nashes gave right-of-way to the Cotton Belt Railroad that spurred the region's growth.

Jefferson, TX

Built by Jefferson S. Nash after he arrived in 1846, this was the first iron furnace in Texas, exploiting the region's abundant ore, hardwood for charcoal, and molding clay. Workers poured charcoal and ore down the stack from a ridge behind the furnace, then cast the molten iron into farm tools, cooking pots, and smoothing irons—and, during the Civil War, cannonballs and possibly firearms. Nash struggled constantly for machinery, labor, capital, and transport, yet his works helped launch an East Texas iron industry that grew to at least sixteen operations.

Forreston, TX

In 1873 pioneer Thomas Alexander Williams moved his family to the Garden Valley area and promptly carved a schoolhouse out of his own farmland — a common act of community-building on the post-Civil War Texas frontier. Renamed for the Nash Post Office a decade later, the school taught local children until 1938, when consolidation moved them to neighboring districts. The surviving two-story frame schoolhouse now serves as a community center.

East Columbia, TX

East Columbia began in 1823 as Bell's Landing, a town in Stephen F. Austin's colony founded by Josiah H. Bell. The oldest part of this house was raised about 1847 on cedar pole framing by George Lewis Nash, whose family lived here some forty-five years. Merchant James P. Wright's wife Martha bought and expanded it in 1892, and their descendants preserve it still.

Round Top, TX

Purchased in 1843 by the German Emigration Society, or Adelsverein, the 4,428-acre Nassau Plantation was named for Duke Adolf of Nassau and became one of the show places of early Texas. Though Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels rejected it as a colonist way station—fearing German settlers might lose their culture near non-German neighbors—it hosted his lavish horse races and feasts, and quieter visits by his successor, John O. Meusebach. Never colonized, the two-story oak plantation grew cotton before the bankrupt society sold it in 1848, and it was later divided among German farming families.

Angleton, TX

Born into slavery in Charleston in 1840 and brought to Texas by his enslaver, Nathan H. Haller rose after emancipation to become a farmer, county commissioner, and Republican political leader. Elected to the 23rd and 24th Texas Legislatures in the 1890s, he was Brazoria County's first Black legislator and authored a bill to establish a branch of the University of Texas for Black students. He and his colleague R. L. Smith were the last African Americans elected to the Texas Legislature until 1966, as the disfranchisement of the Jim Crow era closed the door behind them.

Irene, TX

Louisiana-born Nathaniel Addison took up arms as a soldier in the Texas Army in 1836, the year Texas won its independence. He lived on to 1900, dying in Hill County long after the frontier struggles of his youth. This marker also remembers his wife, Margaret Ann, a Missouri native who shared his pioneer life.

West Columbia, TX

Nathaniel C. Hazen arrived in Texas in January 1836, at the height of the revolution against Mexico. Captured with James Fannin's command, he was led out to be executed in the Goliad massacre of March 27, 1836, yet managed to escape that mass killing. He went on to fight at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in Captain William H. Patton's company, only to die in Columbia before the year was out.

Presidio, TX

Where the Rio Conchos meets the Rio Grande lies La Junta, the finest farmland for hundreds of miles and a natural trading hub that Native peoples occupied for thousands of years. When Cabeza de Vaca passed through in 1536 he met the agricultural Patarabueye and the nomadic, trading Jumanos, who lived in jacal homes and pit-houses. Spanish missions, settlement, and enslavement over the following centuries steadily eroded the region's Indigenous character, though descendants remained.

Cestohowa, TX

The burial ground for the Czestochowa parish was pieced together from acre donations in the 1870s and became a chronicle in stone of Polish immigrant life in Texas. Its markers—many inscribed in Polish until the 1930s—record the parish's founding priests, its authors and pastors, and the toll of the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, which took Frances Gawlik and three of her children within a single week. Among more than 800 graves lie dozens of military veterans, from Confederate soldiers to men who served through Vietnam.

Cestohowa, TX

This parish grew out of one of the oldest Polish colonies in America, planted in Karnes County by immigrants who had followed the pioneers of nearby Panna Maria. After lightning destroyed the "Mother Colony" church in 1877, the Czestochowa settlers built their own sanctuary—a decision that stirred real controversy among the tight-knit Polish community before ending in reconciliation, sealed by a gift of a painting of Our Lady of Czestochowa, Poland's patroness. Blessed in 1878 and enlarged in the 1930s, the church anchored a community that Americanized even its spelling, from Czestochowa to Cestohowa.

New Braunfels, TX

On March 27, 1960, four St. Mary's University students exploring the hills near New Braunfels broke into a vast, still-growing cavern named for the natural rock bridge at its mouth. Dedicated in 1964 by Governor John Connally, the early-Cretaceous formation proved to hold far older human stories — artifacts dating back some 7,000 years, ancient remains, and Indian campsites. The caverns join deep geologic time with the long presence of Native people on the land.

Corpus Christi, TX

Commissioned in March 1941 as the nation prepared for war, Naval Air Station Corpus Christi grew into one of the country's great flight schools, graduating some 35,000 aviators and earning the nickname 'the University of the Air.' Its trainees included future president George H. W. Bush and astronaut-senator John Glenn, while hundreds of WAVES served as instructors, controllers, and technicians across its many auxiliary fields.

Corsicana, TX

Carved from Robertson County in the spring of 1846, Navarro County was born in the first months of Texas statehood and named for José Antonio Navarro — a Tejano soldier and statesman who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and helped write the state's early framework. Corsicana was fixed as its county seat. The marker records the moment a stretch of blackland prairie became an organized part of the new state.

Corsicana, TX

Created by the first Texas Legislature in 1846 and named for independence signer José Antonio Navarro, Navarro County shuffled through a string of makeshift courthouses — settlers' homes, a log cabin, a building that burned in 1855, and an ornate 1880 design that was condemned by 1904 for being too small and structurally unsound. The present courthouse, designed by Dallas architect J. E. Flanders and finished in 1905, rose in red Burnet granite and gray brick in the grand Beaux Arts Classical Revival style, crowned by a clock dome and a columned entry. Its history is the story of a frontier county growing into permanence.

Dawson, TX

A flour mill built in the 1860s on the waters of Rock Creek drew pioneer farmers from miles around, who sometimes waited days to grind their wheat into a luxury reserved for Sunday breads and special occasions. Bought in 1867 by John Summers and sons, the mill anchored a growing village of store, school, blacksmith, and post office, with Confederate veterans among its leaders. Though the mill closed in 1881 and the post office soon after, the church, cemetery, and tabernacle still mark the historic community.

Corsicana, TX

When Texas joined the Confederacy, roughly 87 men from Navarro and neighboring counties enlisted at Corsicana in July 1861 as the Navarro Rifles, led by county founder Clinton M. Winkler. Formally Company I of the 4th Texas Infantry, they marched east to Virginia and fought under the celebrated Texas general John Bell Hood. From their baptism of fire at Yorktown to Hood's bayonet charge at Gaines' Mill outside Richmond, the company earned a fierce reputation, closing the war with 19 dead, 59 wounded, and 10 captured.

Geronimo, TX

The Navarro School began in 1889 as a single-room building near Geronimo, named for José Antonio Navarro, a Tejano statesman and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. It grew with the community — a second structure early in the 1900s, an agricultural high school in 1912, and new facilities in 1953 — mirroring the steady maturation of rural Texas education across more than a century. Sports and extracurricular life flourished as the school became a center of the Geronimo area.

Schulenburg, TX

In 1853 Seth and Caroline Hazel deeded land for the Navidad Baptist Church and its cemetery, serving the pioneer community of Lyons, which had grown up in the 1840s on a grant first made to Kesiah Crier in 1831. When the railroad drew business north to Schulenburg in the 1870s, Lyons withered away, but its cemetery endured. Among those buried here are early Texas pioneers—including relatives of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred—and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Texas Revolution.

Eagle Lake, TX

From 1829 through the Civil War, hopeful Texans tried to turn the meandering Colorado River into a highway for cotton, hides, and lumber, only to be defeated by "the raft" — a miles-long tangle of sunken and floating timber choking the river near its mouth. The keelboat David Crockett managed the first navigation in 1838, but goods still had to be unloaded and hauled by wagon around the obstruction to Matagorda. Despite chartered clearing companies and a state-authorized bypass channel, the raft endured until faster railroads made river shipping obsolete.

Brownsville, TX

William Neale, an Englishman who had served in the Mexican navy in the early 1820s and later ran the Matamoros-to-Boca del Rio stage line, built this fine Southern Colonial home of imported lumber and lived here from 1834 until 1896. During the 1859 border conflict known as Cortina's War, his son William Peter Neale was killed in the house's right front room. The home's craftsmanship earned it recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Moscow, TX

John Wesley Hardin, born in 1853 as the son of a Methodist minister, grew up in this part of East Texas and became one of the most notorious gunmen of the Old West, credited with killing dozens of men. A fierce Southern partisan, his violent resistance to Reconstruction-era Union occupation troops made him a folk hero to some and launched a lawless career; he always insisted he shot only in self-defense. He was finally killed in El Paso in 1895.

Point Blank, TX

Born in Georgia in 1795, George Tyler Wood came to Texas in 1839 and rose through the Republic's Congress, the 1845 Annexation Convention, and the first state Senate, which he left to fight in the Mexican War. As governor from 1847 to 1849 he rallied defenses against frontier raids, urged public schools and land sales to pay the state debt, and had Texas's laws codified, its library founded, and its penitentiary built. He is buried near here.

Galveston, TX

In the winter of 1816–1817, Galveston Island sheltered a polyglot force of adventurers united in the cause of freeing Mexico from Spain. Two young leaders — the impetuous Spanish general Francisco Xavier Mina and the French privateer Louis-Michel Aury, already styled "Commissioner" of Galveston — drilled troops and stockpiled supplies here. Mina sailed in April 1817 with eight ships and some 235 men; he won early victories before being defeated and killed, while Aury remained behind raiding Spanish shipping.

Crabbs Prairie, TX

Mark Manning was born in 1750 and served in the American Revolution from the Halifax District of his native North Carolina. Living to a remarkable old age, he came to Texas at the age of 97 to join sons who held large land grants and helped settle Walker County—sons who had themselves fought in the Texas Revolution. Manning was one of some twenty or thirty Revolutionary War veterans who followed the nation's westward movement all the way to Texas, and he is buried in a nearby family cemetery.

Manchester, TX

On December 2, 1832, Sam Houston crossed the Red River at the old Jonesboro Crossing and set foot on Texas soil for the first time, arriving as an envoy of President Andrew Jackson. The future hero of San Jacinto and president of the Republic entered a Mexican Texas already stirring toward revolution.

Baytown, TX

John Peter Sjolander came to America from Sweden in 1871—by his own account jumping ship at Galveston Bay to escape a cruel captain—and settled at Cedar Bayou, enchanted by its overhanging trees and flowering vines. Self-educated in three languages by his mother and devoted to Robert Burns, he farmed, raised six children, and wrote pastoral verse that earned him fame as "The Sage of Cedar Bayou." His 1928 collection, "Salt of the Earth and Sea," gathered his ballads of Galveston Bay legend and nature poems like "The Bluebonnet."

Dallas, TX

Marie Isabella "Belle" Boyd became one of the Confederacy's most celebrated spies, beginning her career at just seventeen when she reportedly shot a Union soldier who had threatened her mother. Charming Federal officers into revealing secrets that reached Confederate hands, she endured several imprisonments and eventual exile before reinventing herself as a lecturer and dramatic reader. In the 1880s she lived in a stately mansion near this Dallas site with her third husband before selling the house in 1887.

Cooks Point, TX

Andrew S. Broaddus was already a Virginia legislator when, in 1854, he led a mile-long wagon train of some 200 people west to the Texas frontier, where the newcomers raised Salem Baptist Church as a piece of the home they'd left behind. A restless public man, he debated Sam Houston at a nearby campground, sat in the 1861 Secession Convention and several sessions of the Texas Legislature, and helped choose the site for what became Texas A&M. He closed his life as a district judge, father of thirteen, on the land near this spot.

Burkburnett, TX

A Tennessee-born steamboat captain who reached Texas in 1837, Gilbert built mills and was among the first to navigate the upper Trinity River before filing for land here in 1856. He raised his cabin by a spring, dug a trench to fend off buffalo herds, and endured repeated raids that drove his family away and back again; his daughter Hettie, born in 1860, is remembered as the county's first known white child, and the peach trees he planted long guided arriving pioneers.

Emory, TX

Founded in 1887 by H. W. Martin as "The Argus," this paper became the "Rains County Leader" by 1900 and remained the county's only newspaper. Tom W. Hill, Sr. bought it in 1904 and edited it for more than three decades, beginning a remarkable family stewardship. From 1937 onward the Hill family—father, sons, and daughters—carried the paper forward across generations.

New Braunfels, TX

At an ancient river crossing on the San Antonio–Nacogdoches Road, once traveled by Texas's earliest trail-blazers, about 200 German colonists ended a six-month journey from Europe. On Good Friday in 1845 they founded New Braunfels, naming it for the estate of Prince Solms-Braunfels, commissioner-general of the German Emigration Society. They were part of a wave of German settlers between 1844 and 1847 whose language, food, and customs left a lasting imprint on Texas.