Historic Markers in Texas

New Braunfels, TX

This land had long been home to Karankawa, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa, and Waco peoples when the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants sent thousands of colonists to Texas in the mid-1840s. Led by Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, several hundred founded New Braunfels on Good Friday, 1845, on land bought from the Garza family and parceled out by lottery. By 1850 it ranked among the largest cities in Texas, humming with craftsmen, mills, breweries, and kilns.

New Caney, TX

Permanent settlement of the New Caney area began in the 1860s, first taking the name Presswood for a pioneer cattle-raising family, soon joined by the farming and cotton-ginning Robinsons. When the Houston, East and West Texas Railway arrived in the 1870s, the community became a livestock shipping point known as Caney Station, and in 1882 a new post office adopted the name New Caney. As East Texas timber boomed, the town shipped out mining props cut to shore up tunnel walls.

Brackettville, TX

When Fort Clark's aging 1870s cavalry barracks crumbled, the Army built three modern stone replacements in 1931–1932, and this fourth barracks rose on ground left vacant since the post commissary burned in 1892. Its state-of-the-art bays, mess hall, and offices were showcased to justify keeping Fort Clark as a permanent post. Over the next decade it quartered the 5th U.S. Cavalry, the Texas National Guard, the Buffalo Soldiers of the African-American 9th Cavalry, and, during World War II, 182 African-American women of the Women's Army Corps.

Montgomery, TX

Founded on December 1, 1868 to relieve the crowded "Old" Methodist plot, this Montgomery burial ground gathers a remarkable cross-section of early Texas. Among those at rest is Dr. Charles B. Stewart, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the young Republic's first secretary of state, alongside soldiers of the Texas army and veterans of the Civil War and later American conflicts. Its first interments were three men killed by vigilantes, a stark reminder that frontier order was still being fought for.

Buna, TX

This congregation traces its documented history to 1889, when the Hickory Grove school and church was moved off the flood-prone bank of Cow Bayou to higher ground and renamed for the cherry trees at its new site. Following the railroad and the growth of the community of Gist, the building relocated several more times, and in 1916 two Baptist congregations merged to form New Cherry Grove. Serving as a church, a school, and a Jasper County polling place, it has anchored southeastern county life for well over a century.

New Deal, TX

When the Santa Fe railway pushed north from Lubbock in 1909, it spawned a string of new High Plains towns, including one first called Monroe after land agent M.G. Abernathy's family. In 1935 the local schools consolidated into a district named for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs, and by 1949 the town itself took the name New Deal. Sitting on the busy corridor between Lubbock and Plainview, it thrived on cotton, rail, and highway traffic.

Houston County, TX

This burial ground began during the Civil War era with the grave of an unnamed traveler on the land of Mary "Polly" Rice, its oldest inscribed stone marking Walter Ashmore in 1870. Over the years the Duren and Hill families deeded more acreage, and the cemetery served the vanished community of New Energy alongside a school and a union church, still tended by descendants of the area's pioneers.

Hondo, TX

This spot on the old San Antonio Road was long known as Soldaten Kemp — "soldiers' camp" — a rendezvous for frontier patrols and freighters before German immigrants made it home. Rev. John Schaper organized a Methodist congregation here in 1858, and by 1860 a church stood on the site. In 1871 members deeded land for a new building, which pastor and stonemason Jacob Bader raised from native stone with his parishioners' help; for years it served as the community's only meeting hall.

Tyler, TX

New Harmony Baptist Church was established in 1867 and joined the Cherokee Baptist Association in 1869. Its early congregation worshipped in a log building beside a cemetery founded in 1870, organized a Sunday School in 1891, and built successive sanctuaries as membership grew. The church remains an active local institution supporting missions at home and abroad.

Clarksville, TX

Founded on land given in 1859 by George M. Sargeant for a church, school, and graveyard, New Haven Cemetery has gathered the settlers of Red River County for well over a century. Its first grave held a veteran of the War of 1812, and among the pioneer families rests the infant Dimple Dee Crockett, whose name lives on in the nearby Dimple community. Later gifts of land from the Jamison family expanded the burial ground alongside a Baptist congregation.

Mount Vernon, TX

Organized in 1875 by circuit rider the Rev. John J. Jones, this Franklin County congregation of thirty began meeting in members' homes and under brush arbors, holding baptisms in nearby Stout's Creek. Chronically short of funds, the church nearly disbanded in 1928 for want of a minister until the Rev. John H. Hayes stepped in to serve without a salary. Members built a new sanctuary from the old building's lumber in 1944, keeping the small rural congregation alive.

Mansfield, TX

Founded before 1886 by the Rev. D. F. Smith and fourteen charter members, New Hope Baptist Church first gathered once a month in the local New Hope schoolhouse. A charter member's son, J. J. Williams, donated land for a building in 1903, dedicated in 1905, and the congregation gradually moved from monthly to twice-monthly and finally full-time services by 1942. New sanctuaries in 1948 and 1972 kept pace with a growing membership.

Lubbock, TX

Born from a 1926 split with Caldonia Baptist Church, this historically African American congregation began as Mount Calvary Baptist before taking the New Hope name around the time it moved to a new home in 1929. Through the 1930s and 1940s it stood at the center of Black community life in Lubbock, hosting Juneteenth and Armistice Day observances and a baby clinic for young children. Long-serving pastors built out its sanctuary and educational buildings, and its radio broadcasts have carried worship into local homes for decades.

Mineola, TX

This fellowship began in 1864 as a Baptist Church of Christ and reorganized in 1890 as Stephen's Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, honoring an elder who had died the year before. A sanctuary rose in 1902 on Black Branch, a stream used for baptisms near New Hope Cemetery, and the congregation took the New Hope Baptist name in 1916 before moving to its present home the next year. Its shifting names and locations trace the movement of a Wood County farm community over half a century.

Waco, TX

In the years before emancipation, some of Waco's Black residents worshiped at the city's first Baptist church. In 1866 that church's leaders — including Baylor University president Rufus Burleson — helped organize a separate congregation of eighteen members, named New Hope Baptist Church by its first pastor, the Rev. Stephen Cobb. In its early years the young congregation met in an old foundry, at the Howard Institute, and in a shared Methodist building before settling at its present site in 1923.

Caddo, TX

In 1893, thirty members broke away from the nearby Macedonia Baptist Church to organize New Hope Baptist Church #3, with the Rev. C.J. McDonald as their first pastor. They worshiped alongside their parent congregation until 1899, when they built a sanctuary on two donated acres, only to see it burn in 1902 and be rebuilt. For decades the church gathered just once a month before calling a full-time pastor in 1948, and it marked a full century of service to the rural LaCasa community in 1993.

Streetman, TX

Pioneers from Alabama, Florida, and Georgia settled this Freestone County locality around 1849, planting cotton and corn on land that soon held a school and a public burial ground. The Little Hope Baptist Church organized in 1872 under missionary J. M. Gambrell, worshipping in a schoolhouse dubbed "St. Elmo" after a popular novel of the day. In 1886 the congregation took the name New Hope and built its own church beside the cemetery, which today holds some eight hundred graves.

Mineola, TX

New Hope Cemetery grew alongside the New Hope Baptist Church, organized in 1864, with its earliest surviving gravestone dating to 1875. Sold to the church for a single dollar in 1917, the ground carries the customs of its people — rock cairns, a tabernacle, and graves once kept as bare mounded barrows. Confederate and Union veterans lie here together, alongside educators, leaders, and neighbors, tended still by descendants who gather yearly.

Wills Point, TX

To draw settlers to the community that became New Hope, Mexican War veteran William James set aside land after 1871 for a school, church, and cemetery, and is believed to be the first person buried here. The oldest surviving marker belongs to Frances E. Whitfield, who died in 1876, and another grave is thought to hold a woman who died while traveling the Dallas–Shreveport Road in 1880. Four Confederate soldiers rest here as well, including one who surrendered with General Robert E. Lee.

Stamford vicinity, TX

The Bean and Whitaker families were among the first to settle the New Hope community after arriving in 1883, and burials on Bean farmland began with the graves of an elderly relative and a string of infants and children in the 1890s. In 1899 William F. Bean deeded land nearby for a formal community burying ground, which grew to three acres taking in those earliest graves. Ministers, a schoolteacher, and generations of settler families rest here.

New Hope, TX

Pioneer settler Joseph Wren gave five acres here in 1875 for a community cemetery, and the local congregation—until then meeting in a log building two miles away—moved to the site later that year. Mattie Brookshire suggested the name "New Hope," and the cemetery's first burial, in 1876, was that of an infant girl, Mary Sudduth. A schoolhouse served the community here into the 1920s, and an annual homecoming still draws people back each May.

Cedar Park, TX

Though Baptist worship reached this rural Block House community as early as 1848, the church was formally organized in 1868 in the home of James and Elizabeth Trammell, with six charter members. Its cemetery opened the next year, and for nearly fifty years the church building doubled as the neighborhood's public school. Ministers raised here went on to serve as far away as Brazil and to help found the Texas Baptist Children's Home.

Wheelock, TX

Founded in the 1800s in the woods west of the Spring Creek Settlement, New Hope Missionary Baptist Church found a permanent home when member Lucy Bell Stubbs Mitchell donated land in the 1890s. In 1911 it moved to this site, rebuilt from the old church's materials. Beyond worship, it served as the social, political, and educational heart of Wheelock's African American community.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Founded in 1873 by the Reverend Nathan Oggs, himself a former slave, New Hope gathered a congregation of freedpeople who first worshiped in their pastor's home before raising their own building in 1876. Over the following decades the church grew, moved several times, and settled at its present site in 1957. Its membership traces ancestral roots back nine generations.

Port Arthur, TX

Organized in early 1906 by the Rev. Mr. Stevenson and a small group of founders, this congregation became the first Baptist church for African Americans in Port Arthur, first worshiping in a horse stable cleared out each weekend. Storms and floods repeatedly destroyed its buildings—a common hardship before the city's seawall was built—yet the congregation rebuilt again and again, forging bonds with neighboring Black churches and dedicating a new sanctuary in 1982.

Cooks Point, TX

Just five years after Emancipation, in 1870, a group of freedmen and freedwomen gathered under a brush arbor near Jim Branch to found this congregation. Like Black churches across the postwar South, it became far more than a place of worship — a school, a meeting hall, and an engine of community organization. Growing membership carried it through a series of buildings and a century of improvements, always at the heart of the Teals Prairie community.

Gladewater, TX

In 1893, members of a nearby congregation moved into downtown Gladewater seeking work and founded New Hope under a brush arbor, led by Reverend Louis Holoway and seven others. Like countless Black churches born after emancipation, it became far more than a house of worship—the first school for African American children in Gladewater met within its walls. Rebuilt and expanded across the 20th century, it has anchored its community for well over a century.

Gilmer, TX

Organized in 1855 with fifteen charter members, the New Hope Missionary Baptist congregation first gathered in a one-room log schoolhouse in the New Hope community. Over the generations it moved and rebuilt more than once—raising sanctuaries in 1883, 1914, and 1950—each time carrying lumber from the old building into the new, a literal thread of continuity. Many of today's members descend from that founding congregation.

Milam, TX

Around 1818, Elder William Cook—who had emigrated from North Carolina to southwestern Louisiana—began preaching on both sides of the Sabine River, holding early services in a log cabin on the Chambers family land. Bethel Baptist Church was formally constituted in 1841 as part of the Pilgrim Church of Regular Baptists, later renamed New Hope about 1870. The congregation joined the Southern Baptist Convention in 1927 and built its present brick sanctuary in 1970.

New London, TX

On the afternoon of March 18, 1937, natural gas that had accumulated undetected beneath the New London Junior-Senior High School ignited, leveling the building and killing hundreds of students and teachers in one of the deadliest school disasters in American history. The final toll reached 311. Because the gas was odorless, no one had smelled the danger—prompting the Texas Legislature within weeks to mandate that a warning odor be added to natural gas.

Pittsburg, TX

When Mr. and Mrs. G. O. Hart gave an acre of land in 1892, the families of this East Texas neighborhood gained something they had long wanted: a church of their own, so they no longer had to make the trip into Pittsburg for Sunday worship. Organized that September with the Rev. J. H. Floyd as first pastor, New Mine Baptist Church stayed small and rural through the generations. Its pews have long held descendants of the original charter members.

Pittsburg, TX

George and Julia Hart deeded land to the New Mine Baptist Church in 1892, and for years the congregation buried its dead in neighboring graveyards before founding one of its own in 1930. The first grave was James Quillin's that year, and in 1937 George Hart himself was reinterred here at his family's request. The congregation has maintained the grounds ever since, gathering each year for a memorial service, business meeting, and dinner that doubles as a family reunion.

O'Donnell, TX

New Moore rose in 1924 on the old Singleton Slash L Ranch, after a Dallas buyer carved 17,000 acres into quarter sections and sold them cheap to families hungry for land. Life in the little farming community turned on its schools, general store, church, and cotton gin, but the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the crushing drought of 1953 wore the settlers down. When the New Moore School closed that same year, families drifted toward the cities and the community faded away.

Henderson, TX

New Prospect Baptist Church and its cemetery were established in the 1850s by settlers who had migrated to East Texas from Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and named the congregation for a church back home. Organizers Thomas Ballenger and B. F. Montgomery secured the first property here in 1855 from Miles Yandle, son-in-law of the surveyor Hansel Wright. The burial ground still holds many of the region's pioneer families.

Beckville, TX

Begun in 1870 in the rural community once called Scruggs, New Prospect Cemetery took shape on land donated by homesteaders for a church and graveyard, its oldest recorded burial that of Elizabeth Scruggs. More than a hundred graves lie unmarked among the pioneer settlers, many of them children, resting here. Veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and the Korean War are buried in its grounds, still tended by descendants.

Longview, TX

This Gregg County cemetery grew up around the New Providence Missionary Baptist Church, founded in the 1880s, with its first recorded burial in 1896. Fire, windstorm, and lightning destroyed the church, and the congregation disbanded—reorganizing only briefly to tend the graves. Among the fifty-eight burials rest veterans of five American wars, a former county judge, and a former district judge.

Maysfield vicinity, TX

Constituted in 1866 with eight charter members just after the Civil War, New Providence Primitive Baptist Church first met in a Maysfield schoolhouse under its founding elders. Members received this property in 1899 and built a white frame sanctuary the same year, worshipping in it into the twenty-first century. The grounds still serve as a family gathering place, and the congregation continues to follow its founders' doctrines.

Red Rock, TX

Settlers reached the Red Rock area by the 1850s, and by the mid-1870s the community supported a post office and the Red Rock Male and Female Academy. When the MK&T Railroad laid track about a mile east in 1890, residents picked up their homes and businesses and moved to the rails—and in 1913 established this cemetery on land given by L. A. and Adrienne Turner. Families have donated ground repeatedly since, and the cemetery association still tends it today.

Honey Grove, TX

Settlers reached this Fannin County area in the mid-1840s, among them Philip Greenleaf Williams, who built a water-powered gristmill near Bois D'Arc Springs. When he drowned in the Red River in 1848 while bringing his family from Virginia, they buried him here beside a child said to already rest at the spot—his stone bears the cemetery's earliest date. The grave markers of the Self family, for whom the community was named, and many other pioneer households fill the burial ground.

Decatur, TX

In April 1893, Reverend Josephus Wesley Ford and several families organized this Freewill Baptist congregation southwest of Decatur. Ford, who had earlier pastored in Missouri, led the church until his death in 1898. Meeting at first only once a month, the congregation grew and eventually settled into a former schoolhouse after the Perrin School consolidated into Decatur's district.

Clarksville, TX

New Shamrock Cemetery was established in 1918 near Clarksville in Red River County, taking its name from the older Shamrock community it succeeded. Its Historic Texas Cemetery designation, granted in 2001, preserves it as a record of the families of this North Texas farming region in the early twentieth century.

New Summerfield, TX

This East Texas Methodist congregation traces its roots to the Union Chapel community around 1878, when a church rose on land given by the Fullertons and served worshippers of every denomination while doubling as the local schoolhouse through the week. As a new town grew up nearby at the turn of the century, the congregation followed it, taking the Summerfield name and rebuilding in wood, then brick, over the decades that followed. Through mergers and renamings, it has anchored community life in Cherokee County for well over a century.

New Summerfield, TX

Schooling in this Cherokee County community began in the 1850s inside the Union Chapel Church, which doubled as a worship house and gathering place. A one-room schoolhouse followed in 1895, and the school's name shifted with the local post office until the town — and the school — became "New Summerfield" to avoid duplicating another Texas Summerfield. Through fires, windstorms, and consolidations, the school remained the community's hub.

Manor, TX

Swedish immigrants and the Rev. J. O. Cavallin organized the New Sweden Evangelical Lutheran Congregation in 1876, raising their first sanctuary two miles west of this spot where the old cemetery still lies. The present church, a landmark of rural Travis County, was built in 1922 on land donated by Johanna Petterson, and services were held in Swedish until 1923. The congregation still gathers, tending both its ministry and its immigrant heritage.

Caldwell, TX

Around 1870, Czech-Moravian immigrants seeking fertile land and the religious freedom denied them in Europe settled this part of Burleson County. Services first met in a family home until a pastor answered the call in 1877, and the congregation built its first sanctuary in 1893, taking the name New Tabor. Rebuilt after a 1915 tornado and again in 1953, the church hosted the state convention of Czech-Moravian churches and nurtured a web of societies for men, women, and youth.

Caldwell, TX

New Tabor was settled by Czech and German immigrants in the 1870s and 1880s and named for the town of Tabor in their Bohemian homeland. In 1888 Henry Ginzel sold land to community trustees for a cemetery, whose first burials that year included an infant and a settler named Martin Fojt. The many infant and child graves speak to the hardships of pioneer life, while a cluster of 1919 deaths likely marks the influenza pandemic; more than 35 military veterans rest here among over 800 graves.

Haltom City, TX

When the Rev. Greene Fretwell, a former slave, died in 1886 there was no Black cemetery in this corner of Tarrant County. His widow Frances gathered donations, and in 1889 the trustees of Trinity Chapel Methodist Church bought two acres for a church and burial ground, worshipping under a brush arbor until a frame church could be raised. Over the following decades the grounds expanded into what is now collectively called New Trinity Cemetery.

New Ulm, TX

Founded in 1841 as Duff's Settlement for landholder James C. Duff, this Austin County community was renamed New Ulm in 1853 to honor the German city many settlers had left behind. When the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad laid tracks a mile south in 1892, the town center shifted, but the old cemetery—its earliest recorded burial dating to 1853—remained. Among those interred is Josef Lidumil Lesikar, a leader in bringing early Czech settlers to America.

Morgan's Point, TX

At the junction of Buffalo Bayou and San Jacinto Bay, Philadelphia-born Colonel James Morgan bought 1,600 acres in 1835 and laid out New Washington, working as merchant, land agent, and civic leader. Mexican troops burned the town during the Texas Revolution while Morgan served as a colonel, but it was rebuilt and flourished until nearby Houston outgrew it. Morgan's 1850s dream of a navigable channel along Buffalo Bayou was realized in 1876 when steamship magnate Charles Morgan dredged the Houston Ship Channel; the town, now Morgan's Point, was incorporated in 1949.

New York, TX

The Reynolds family arrived from Georgia in 1856 and, as devout missionary Baptists, gathered a community of worship that formally organized as a church in 1865. In 1873 the family deeded five acres for a two-story building shared by the Baptists, Methodists, the local school and the Masonic lodge. The congregation joined the Southern Baptist Convention in 1915 and, through revivals, singing and creekside baptisms, remained a center of community life for generations.

New York, TX

The New York Cemetery grew from a tiny 1870s burial ground beside the local Methodist church into a community graveyard sustained by the gifts of many settlers. Martha Dismuke gave an acre in 1883, Mary Walker half an acre in 1884 after her husband—founder of the community store and church—died, and later families added still more land. Circuit-riding minister-physician Dr. Thomas Hunt Hall and his kin are among the many families whose graves, more than 600 by century's end, chronicle the New York community.

Thurber, TX

This hilltop neighborhood took shape after 1917, when the Texas and Pacific Coal Company followed W. K. Gordon's Ranger oilfield strike into the petroleum business and renamed itself the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company. To house staff transferred from New York for the new oil division, the firm built thirty-one homes here on what became New York Hill, reached by brick steps and sidewalks climbing from town. When the company town of Thurber was dismantled in the 1930s, the buildings came down, leaving only traces on the slope.

Hungerford, TX

In 1880, lured by Texas's offer of free land to railroad builders, investors chartered the New York, Texas & Mexican Railroad to run 91 miles between Rosenberg and Victoria. Silver-mine millionaire John W. Mackay bankrolled it and his brother-in-law, Count Joseph Telfener of Italy, oversaw construction using Italian laborers whose pasta rations earned the line its nickname, the "Macaroni Line." The promoters named six stations for family members, including Hungerford, honoring their father-in-law and the railroad's vice-president. The venture faltered and was sold to Southern Pacific in 1885, but the little farming and ranching community it seeded endured.

Houston, TX

New Zion Temple began in 1933 as 'The Little Church on Ruthven Street,' a storefront Church of God in Christ congregation that Bishop Hayward W. Falls built from donated supplies in Houston's Freedmen's Town. Falls later led it out of the denomination to become nondenominational and made it the headquarters of the Worldwide Fellowship, from which affiliated churches spread across several states and abroad.

Weatherford, TX

Robert S. Porter, who became newly organized Parker County's first county judge, settled this fertile ground in 1855 among a cluster of pioneer families. A Cumberland Presbyterian congregation took root in members' homes in 1871, and after Jim D. Newberry donated land in 1874 for a church and cemetery, the community itself came to bear the Newberry name. A church, a school, and a tabernacle followed, and the cemetery — its earliest grave a teenager drowned in the Brazos in 1879 — still chronicles the families who built the place.

Comanche vicinity, TX

Pioneers reached this stretch of Comanche County in the mid-1850s and named their settlement for the nearby South Leon River. In 1872 P.W. Brewer set aside land for a cemetery and church, and the oldest documented grave, that of Rosie E. McCurdy, dates to 1875. Renamed Newburg in the 1880s, the graveyard holds local pioneers and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Mexican War.

Jacksonville, TX

The Rev. John Madison Newburn, who came to pastor Jacksonville's First Baptist Church in 1896, built this Victorian home with classical revival touches in 1903. Closely tied to Jacksonville College, the house served as a dormitory when campus housing ran short, and after a 1928 fire destroyed a small local hospital, Lula Newburn opened her home as a temporary hospital until a new one could be built. Owned by Newburn heirs, later a Rawlinson family home and a day care, it returned to Jacksonville College in 1994.

Newlin, TX

Newlin is a tiny farming community on the rolling plains of Hall County, in the Texas Panhandle country that opened to Anglo settlement only after the buffalo and the Comanche were gone. Its cemetery, laid out in 1904, gathered the pioneer families who broke this cotton-and-cattle land in the early twentieth century. In 2009 the State of Texas recognized it as a Historic Texas Cemetery, protecting it as a record of the people who settled here.

Sylvester vicinity, TX

Rancher Jim Newman, one of Fisher County's earliest settlers, established a spread here around 1879, and the community that grew nearby took his name when the county's first post office opened in 1881. By the early 1900s Newman had schools, churches, and a store, and its cemetery—set aside in 1906—holds sixteen veterans, including Civil War soldier R. L. Creswell. As population steadily declined, the churches and school closed one by one, leaving the still-active cemetery as the town's last trace.

Walker County, TX

Newport was founded in 1846 by Joseph Werner, a German emigrant who staked his hopes on the traffic of the Trinity River. Like many antebellum Texas river towns, its fortunes rose and fell with the water: when steamboat navigation on the Trinity declined, the town was left behind and abandoned.