Historic Markers in Texas

San Augustine, TX

This 1914 depot stood on the Gulf & Interstate line organized by John Henry Kirby, one of the great Texas lumber barons, and took its name from the Brooke family who gave the land. For decades the depot was the beating heart of Brookeland, until construction of the Sam Rayburn Dam in 1960 forced the railroad to relocate and left the station surplus. Hauled 40 miles and lovingly converted into a farmhouse, it survives with its distinctive features preserved.

Round Rock, TX

Erected in 1876, this Victorian limestone building with its stepped parapet and keystone arches thrived in Round Rock's booming railroad era. From about 1887 to 1912 it housed the Round Rock Broom Company, whose brooms won a gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Over the years the versatile structure also served as a general store, furniture store, school, skating rink, and car repair shop before being preserved in 1969.

Bandera vicinity, TX

This ranch was settled in 1867 by former New Yorker Judge Edward M. Ross, a Mexican War veteran who had served in the 1850s at Camp Verde, the Army's nearby camel post. His hand-cut native-stone house passed to his daughter Kate, wife of Ebenezer Buck of a prominent pioneer family, who inherited it in 1901. In 1920 the Bucks turned the ranch into Bandera's first guest ranch, famed for its food and hospitality until their deaths in 1941.

Odessa, TX

This shallow depression is a surviving buffalo wallow, worn into the West Texas ground over untold years by bison rolling in the dirt to shed winter coats and drive off insects. Great herds once migrated across these plains between Canada and Mexico, sustaining the Plains Indians who followed them for food, clothing, and shelter. In the 1870s the herds were slaughtered en masse—encouraged by the army, settlers, and hide hunters—and had all but vanished by the time Odessa was founded in 1886.

Calvert, TX

Founded around 1870 as one of Calvert's earliest industries, this foundry was built of locally made brick and fitted with an iron facade shipped from St. Louis. Ore hauled by horse-drawn wagon from nearby deposits and from Cherokee County, a hundred miles away, was forged here into farm tools and other durable goods, and the works drew investment from prominent Texas businessmen, including a member of the noted Adoue family.

Pecos, TX

Erected in 1929 by pioneer physician Jim Camp, this was the first permanent hospital in the vast Trans-Pecos region of far West Texas. "Dr. Jim," who arrived in Pecos in 1900 and once operated on kitchen tables for lack of equipment, spent decades pushing to build a modern facility and was named Texas Doctor of the Year in 1950. The building was converted to offices in 1954 and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Mineral Wells, TX

Established in 1925 and named for National Guard general Jacob F. Wolters, this camp began as a summer training ground for horse-mounted cavalry, with Mineral Wells donating the first fifty acres. Through the 1930s a Civilian Conservation Corps company improved the grounds, and in 1940 the site was chosen as a major training base for the national draft. During World War II it swelled into an infantry replacement center holding nearly 25,000 troops, and it also housed German prisoners of war.

Decatur, TX

This spot recalls the lawless years after the Civil War, when outlaws like Jesse and Frank James kept a chain of hideouts across Texas from the Rio Grande to the Red River, stashing stolen horses until posses lost the trail. The era produced a rogues' gallery—Cole Younger, Belle Starr, John Wesley Hardin, Sam Bass and others—who robbed and killed and vanished into wild country. Order returned only after the Texas Rangers were reorganized in the 1870s and given broad arrest powers.

New Braunfels, TX

Built around 1870 of adobe brick with cypress floors and doors, this New Braunfels home still keeps its original rolled-glass windows and a pane of ruby glass in the front door. Over the years it sheltered a succession of German-Texan families, including merchant Fritz Scholl, Judge Adolf Giesecke, and flour miller H. Dittlinger. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Abbott, TX

D. C. Carr established this ranch in 1854 on land straddling Hill and McLennan counties, part of the early growth he and his brother J. C. brought to the towns of Abbott and West after arriving in Texas in 1840. A log cabin on the property served triple duty as store, post office, and stagecoach station until 1881. The land still holds traces of an earlier Indian camp and burial mound near a cave formed along the Balcones Fault.

Rocksprings, TX

Built in 1920–21 by merchant G. M. Carson, this was the first stone store in Rocksprings, replacing his 1904 general store on the same spot—long the only place in the county selling caskets. The sturdy building survived the devastating 1927 tornado that killed 72 people in the town. More than a century on, it remains in the Carson family.

Wheelock, TX

The Cavitt homestead began as a log cabin raised in 1836, the year Texas won its independence, and grew into a fine hand-finished house completed in 1854. Standing on the road between Nacogdoches and San Antonio de Béxar, it served through the 1840s and 1850s as a stage stop. The Cavitts were political allies of Sam Houston, who was a frequent guest and gave a desk to Volney Cavitt.

Sherman, TX

Settled in 1848 by Grayson County pioneers who reclaimed land from wilderness amid Indian raids and frontier hardship, Old Cedar quickly needed a cemetery—still holding some 400 graves, including one Union and eighteen Confederate veterans. As the community took root it built Cedar Academy in 1871, where students learned to make ink and split goose-quills alongside their lessons, and organized the Cedar Methodist Church the same year. Camp-ground revivals under brush arbors drew families from miles around each summer.

Celina, TX

Founded near this spot in 1870 by settlers from Celina, Tennessee, the town of Celina left this cemetery behind when the community picked up and moved to the railroad around 1900. W. J. Bounds donated the land as a community burying ground after Elizabeth McWhorter's death in 1885, and its oldest grave holds a child who died in 1884. A cemetery association formed in 1918, and the grounds now hold some 600 graves.

Paris, TX

On land once owned by George Washington Wright, founder of Paris, this was the town's primary burial ground from 1845 to 1865, its oldest grave said to be that of a free Black man who worked for Wright. When the newer Evergreen Cemetery opened in 1866, many graves were moved, yet Wright himself was buried here in 1877, and a granite marker honors soldiers of the 9th Texas Infantry, C.S.A., who died in a measles epidemic in 1862. Of roughly 325 graves, about a hundred stones survive, most from 1870 to 1910.

San Patricio, TX

On a rise above San Patricio lies a burial ground older than the Anglo town, used by Indian peoples and Mexican settlers before empresarios John McMullen and James McGloin planted their Irish colony of San Patricio de Hibernia in 1830. The colonists kept using the old cemetery, and its graves record the turbulence of the Texas Revolution — Lt. Marcelino Garcia, killed at Lipantitlan in 1835, and soldiers who fell in the Battle of San Patricio in 1836. Empresario McGloin himself lies here in an unmarked grave, alongside settlers lost to scarlet fever, duels, and the ordinary attrition of frontier life.

San Patricio, TX

This hilltop cemetery is believed to have served Native peoples and Mexican settlers long before Anglo colonization reached the area. After Irish empresarios John McMullen and James McGloin founded San Patricio de Hibernia in 1830, the colonists kept burying their dead here, beneath wooden crosses and stones inscribed in Spanish and English. Among those laid to rest are Lt. Marcelino García, killed at the 1835 battle of Lipantitlán, and soldiers who fell at the battle of San Patricio in 1836.

Carthage, TX

Old Center Cemetery began in 1856 on land donated by community pioneer James Rowe, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence whose own 1868 grave is among its oldest. The earliest marked burial, that of Arminta C. Cash, dates to 1865, and the grounds hold some 400 marked graves alongside many unmarked ones. Descendants of the original donor have expanded its boundaries over the generations.

Pineland, TX

In one of Texas's oldest settled regions, the farming community of Centerview took root in the 1840s around a stagecoach stop, post office, store, church, and school. Its community cemetery holds a dozen or more unmarked graves alongside the oldest dated burial — an infant, Merle Taylor, laid to rest in 1899 — plus community leaders and veterans of every war from the Civil War through Vietnam. Wooden markers, curbed plots, and an arched entryway survive, tended each year by descendants.

Fredericksburg, TX

Swiss-born jeweler and watchmaker Alphons Walter raised this two-story building in the heart of Fredericksburg in 1905, then sold it in 1909 to civic leader Robert Striegler, who ran the Central Drugstore on the ground floor. A drugstore would occupy the site for more than 70 years, while the upper floor housed the town's telephone exchange, doctors' offices, and a photographer's studio.

Fredericksburg, TX

German immigrants founded the Cherry Spring community around 1850, teaching their children in private homes until nobleman Wilhelm Marschall von Bieberstein deeded ten acres in 1859 to a group of settlers so they could build a proper schoolhouse. Classes filled the original part of this building from 1860 to 1878, after which it served the community as a place of worship — and in 1905 became the birthplace of Christ Lutheran Church. One modest stone building held the settlement's schooling and its faith.

La Vernia, TX

The Old Chihuahua Road ran from central Mexico to the Texas coast at Indianola, a cart route worn by traders, raiders, and newcomers alike. Alsatian, German, Polish, and Irish immigrants followed it inland seeking a fresh start, even as it doubled as a path for Indian raiding parties. After 1835 it carried gold and silver bound for export, and by the 1850s it served as a route for army travel.

Cuero, TX

On April 1, 1866, some 1,800 longhorns gathered by Crockett Cardwell moved out from near this DeWitt County site on the first great trail drive from the area to northern markets, with local man Thornton Chisholm as trail boss. The route joined the famous Chisholm Trail — marked in part by scout Jesse Chisholm — winding past Austin, Georgetown, and Red River Station into the Indian Territory. In the first postwar year alone, 260,000 Texas cattle went up the trail, and over three decades at least ten million followed, driven north by Texas cowboys in the greatest movement of livestock in history.

Alvin, TX

This was Alvin's first cemetery, acquired by the city in 1892, its oldest legible stone dating to 1889 over the grave of pioneer and Civil War veteran G. W. Durant. Many of the town's earliest settlers rest here, along with several victims of the devastating 1900 hurricane. The burial ground was renamed Oak Park in 1953.

Caldwell, TX

Laid out in 1840, the same year the town of Caldwell was platted, this burial ground was set aside as a "Grave Yard and Church lot" in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas. Town founder Lewis L. Chiles rests here, and its oldest legible stone, from 1843, marks Margarette A. King and her infant daughter. The cemetery is now maintained by the city.

La Grange, TX

In use for burials by 1840, this ground was deeded to trustees and then to La Grange after the city incorporated in 1854. On April 17, 1873, fourteen townswomen formed the Ladies' Cemetery Association of La Grange — probably the first such organization in Texas — with Mrs. L. W. Moore as its first president, and their association has cared for the cemetery ever since. An annual decoration day begun in 1874 still honors those buried here, among them pioneers who fought for Texas freedom.

Livingston, TX

This graveyard opened in 1840 with the burial of a four-year-old child of Moses Livingston Choate, a Kentucky pioneer who had received a Mexican land grant and founded the town he first called Springfield. After Polk County formed in 1846, Choate donated land for the county seat and renamed the town Livingston, setting aside a block that grew from a family plot into the community cemetery. Among its graves lie Republic of Texas citizens, Mexican War veterans, and dozens of Civil War soldiers.

Weatherford, TX

Formally established by Weatherford's town council in 1863, this cemetery gathered earlier burials that had been scattered in the town's unmarked streets. By the 1920s a civic league and cemetery association—led notably by its women members—had beautified and secured the neglected grounds. Among its estimated thousand graves rest Civil War Medal of Honor recipient Chester Bowen, famed trail drivers Oliver Loving and Bose Ikard, and Texas Governor S. W. T. Lanham.

Dallas, TX

The springs on this ground drew Native peoples long before a settler acquired the property in the 1840s, and the same water later helped make Dallas the crossing point of two major railroads in 1871 — the spark for the town's explosive growth. In 1876 the city set aside ten acres near the springs as its first public park, a leafy center of fountains, a zoo, and a wading pool that a heritage society would later reclaim as a museum of restored historic buildings.

Post, TX

This schoolhouse grew out of the utopian colony founded by cereal magnate C.W. Post on the West Texas plains. Built in 1908 as a commissary school and named for Post's son-in-law E.B. Close, it was moved to this site in 1910 and grew into an independent school district by 1918, gaining a second story in 1921. It survives as a token of Post's ambitious experiment in planned rural community.

Gilmer, TX

A ferry crossing on Big Cypress Bayou, Coffeeville grew into a bustling 1850s East Texas town with an academy, churches, stores, doctors, a hotel, and a Masonic lodge. During the Civil War it lived up to its name by selling coffee when scarcity emptied other towns' shelves. It also hosted one of Upshur County's three Confederate camps of instruction, established at local citizens' expense after Governor Edward Clark's 1861 call, where infantry and cavalry trained for the fight.

McKinney, TX

Collin County was carved from Fannin County in 1846 and named for Collin McKinney, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. After the county seat moved to a more central site donated by William and Margaret Davis, the growing town of McKinney replaced two wooden courthouses with this substantial stone building, completed in 1876 to a design by Sherman architect Charles Wheeler and celebrated with a grand ball. Enlarged in the 1920s and used as a courthouse until 1979, it endures as a symbol of the county's early growth.

West Columbia, TX

This burial ground was given from the grant of Josiah H. Bell, among the first land deeded to one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists. It holds the graves of many who fought in the Texas Revolution of 1836. Deeded to a Presbyterian congregation in 1852, it has been tended since 1933 by a cemetery association.

Burnet, TX

Built in 1873, this Victorian home boasted a large bay window, a solid walnut staircase, and three fireplaces, and though later remodeled it kept its original floor plan. In 1890 it was bought by Judge J.G. Cook, a noted lawyer, and stayed in the Cook family for generations. It stands as a fine example of the substantial homes prominent citizens built in early Burnet.

Lampasas, TX

Built in 1861 of native white stone with lumber hauled in by wagon, the Old Cook Home stands near the county's first cemetery in early Lampasas. Its sturdy stonework reflects the self-reliant building methods of settlers on the Texas frontier.

Comanche, TX

Soon after Comanche County was created in 1856, the town of Cora was platted as its seat, and a tiny squared-log building barely twelve feet on a side served as its courthouse. When the county seat moved to Comanche in 1859, Cora withered, and the little courthouse was folded into a house around 1880 and shuffled from place to place over the years. It endures as the last trace of a vanished town and of the rough-hewn architecture of early Texas government.

Comanche, TX

Surveyed by Army engineers in 1850, the Corn Trail was the first wagon road to reach this part of central Texas, running fort to fort from San Antonio's district headquarters into the frontier. Its most common cargo was corn for Army horses and mules, which gave the road its name. The traffic drew settlers, and by Christmas 1855 there were enough of them to petition for the creation of Comanche County.

Bastrop, TX

This building began in 1850 as a humble frame cabin raised by John Cornelson in the young town of Bastrop, only a few years after Texas joined the Union. Joe Fehr enlarged it after 1854 using brick fired at the nearby Lottmans' kiln, giving the modest home its more substantial form. Recognized by the Texas Legislature as a historic shrine in 1954, it now houses the Bastrop County Museum.

Winters, TX

Winters got its first industrial plant when Bird, Hall and Mertz of San Angelo built this cottonseed oil mill in 1909-10, its millhouse walls quarried from stone at the Posey farm on Gap Creek. The mill crushed cottonseed into cake, meal, hulls, and oil, and gave the town a payroll, a work whistle that marked the day, and a distinctive aroma. It passed through the hands of Ballinger and Houston owners before closing in 1939 as cotton farming declined.

Callahan County, TX

Old Cottonwood Cemetery grew alongside a Callahan County community founded on land granted to George Washington Glasscock, Sr. for his service to the Republic of Texas. Homesteaders arrived in the 1870s to good farming country, and the town of Cottonwood soon boasted businesses, churches, an academy, and two newspapers. The graveyard — its earliest known burials infants from 1877 — holds veterans dating to the Texas War for Independence and even two friends who killed each other in a frontier gunfight and share a common grave.

Panhandle, TX

From 1938 to 1957, a bright red "Library Bus" rolled out of the Carson County library—Texas's first bookmobile and its first to offer "inside service," letting readers browse the shelves aboard. Visible for miles across the flat Panhandle, it stopped at ranches, schools, and oil camps, circulating some 2,000 books a month through years of sparse settlement, wartime growth, and industrial boom. Most Texas county libraries began, as this one did, from local citizens' initiative.

Palo Pinto, TX

Raised in 1880 from locally quarried sandstone, this jail replaced a crude log lockup and reflected the ambitions of a young frontier county. Its lower floor first held county offices and later a jailer's family, while the upper story confined killers, cattle rustlers, and rowdy cowboys—a snapshot of a still-lawless West. A hanging trap door installed in 1907 was never used, and after the building was vacated it was rescued as a county museum.

San Elizario, TX

Built around 1850 of adobe brick and cottonwood logs wrapped around steel cell blocks, this structure served as county jail while San Elizario was first, and later third, seat of El Paso County. Under one roof it held both the carcel and the juzgado—jail and courtroom together. Legend has it that Billy the Kid engineered the only successful escape from its cells, freeing his companion Melquiades Seguro.

Dallas, TX

One of the first brick schools in the Dallas system, this Victorian building rose in 1888 on the site of a pre–Civil War school begun by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. In its early years some pupils arrived by carriage, but as the city grew it drew children of so many backgrounds that it earned the nickname the 'Melting Pot School.' From 1963 to 1969 it housed a vocational center teaching the building trades.

Kyle, TX

David Alexander Young came to Texas from Tennessee in 1857 and was among 179 Hays County men who fought in the Civil War, wounded while serving in Woods' 32nd Cavalry. When the International & Great Northern Railway reached Kyle, Young moved from Mountain City and in 1881 raised the town's first permanent store. The surviving building was given to the city of Kyle in 1936 by rancher M. G. Michaelis, Sr.

Colorado City, TX

This ornate Victorian house, with spool-trimmed porch columns and decorative wooden window "awnings," was built in 1899 by rancher F.E. McKenzie in the West Texas ranching town of Colorado City. It passed among cattlemen before D.N. Arnett, retired manager of the great Spade-Renderbrook Ranch, bought it in 1912, and four generations of his family have since called it home.

Concan, TX

On the Dry Frio in Uvalde County, a one-room log cabin rose in an era of Lipan-Apache raids and roving outlaws, when a house doubled as a refuge. About 1884 cattleman L. C. "Clabe" Davenport enlarged it for his family of twelve, adding a second log room, a hall, and stone rooms at the rear. When he later prospered and built a frame home, the old cabin lived on as kitchen, dining room, and guest quarters.

Del Rio, TX

In the desert town of Del Rio, near the Rio Grande, schooling began in the 1870s in an adobe room used whenever a teacher could be found. As the community organized a school district in 1884 and became the seat of new Val Verde County, it built a proper school at this site, adding grades over the decades until a twelfth grade came with the 1930 building. Constructed by Phil Garoni, that structure served as the high school until 1968 and remains in use for district programs.

Crosbyton, TX

Old Dewey Lake served as a key landmark for early surveyors of the South Plains, reportedly named for a land-office employee, Miss Dewey, after crews realized they had forgotten to name the site. Its shores hosted Texas Ranger Camp Roberts from 1879 to 1882 and the "Stag House" bunkhouse for cowboys of the Two Buckle Ranch. The lake itself vanished in the 1880s when eroding creeks cut a new channel and drained the basin.

Diboll, TX

Around 1908, lumber magnate T. L. L. Temple built this hall for the workers of his Southern Pine Lumber Company, pairing a downstairs reading room and recreation space with upstairs living quarters for family, single men, and schoolteachers. Over the decades it doubled as a Red Cross sewing room during World War I and a food distribution point for struggling families during the Depression. It is a rare survivor of the company-town institutions that once organized life in East Texas.

Dime Box, TX

The county's second-oldest community, Dime Box lay within Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colony and began as Browne's Mills. Its curious name came from the practice of leaving dimes in a box at Joseph S. Browne's mill so the postman could fetch goods from Giddings for local families.

Georgetown, TX

Erected in 1901 as a hotel, the Dimmitt Building rose just as Georgetown settled into a prosperous county-seat town. Over the decades it reinvented itself again and again, serving as mercantile stores, the town's first movie house, an auto dealership, a drugstore, a dental office, and a bus depot. A 1960 remodeling preserved its native-stone Spanish arches, columns, and turrets.

Georgetown, TX

John Jones Dimmitt built this limestone house in 1866, hauling the stone by ox-drawn wagon in the hard years just after the Civil War. A surveyor, lawyer, and railroad partner, Dimmitt was a civic force who helped bring Southwestern University to Georgetown. The home sheltered prominent citizens for more than a century and was preserved beginning in 1948.

Teague, TX

Chartered as the Trinity & Brazos Valley Railway and built between 1902 and 1907, this line earned the affectionate nickname "Boll Weevil" from the special trains that carried men to conferences about the pest then devastating Texas cotton. Founded by Col. Edward M. House—later President Woodrow Wilson's famous confidant—it became a shortcut hauler linking Galveston to Fort Worth and Dallas and even introduced diesel streamliners to Texas. Teague served as its division point, and this office anchored the road's operations.

Lagarto, TX

On this brush-country ranch in 1888 was born J. Frank Dobie, the folklorist who became one of the great chroniclers of the Southwest. A fierce individualist, he gathered and published more than thirty volumes of folk tales and legends, preserving the voices of the rancher, the miner, and the cowboy. His work gave the everyday people of South Texas a place in American literature.

San Patricio, TX

Robert Dougherty, a refugee from the Irish famine of the 1840s, built this house on Round Lake in 1876 to open St. Paul's Academy for Boys. Educated in Kentucky and seasoned as a journalist, merchant, and seminary principal in Corpus Christi, he taught an unusually broad curriculum for the era—geography, history, mathematics, Latin, Greek, classical literature, and even Gaelic. His commitment to learning ran so deep that all seven of his children began their working lives as teachers.

Willis, TX

In the young timber town of Willis, a carpenter named Sid Inglet raised a thirteen-room house in 1872 for Dr. William P. Powell, a Confederate veteran who had married Mary Eugenia Thompson in Waverly nine years earlier. Powell was the country doctor of the old school, making his rounds by horse and buggy and turning his own home into an office and makeshift hospital until he died in 1915. Six of his twelve children were born beneath its roof, and later owners even hosted more than a hundred weddings there.

Dublin, TX

This burial ground began in 1864 with the death of Ellen, daughter of J. H. Keith, and was donated by William "Big Bill" Keith in his aunt's memory with the condition that it serve for free public burials. Known simply as the Old Dublin Cemetery until an endowment renamed it in 1961, it holds roughly 1,400 graves. Nearly 300 of them are unnamed, marked only by field stones or funeral-home plates.

Kermit, TX

Winkler County's first post office opened near here in 1908 on the John Howe ranch, serving 300 people with mail twice a week. The Pueblo Investment Company promoted the Duval townsite nationwide, opening it in March 1910 with free lots, a picnic, and a cowboy tournament—but when Kermit won the county seat, Duval withered. After oil was struck in 1928 its townsite rights were canceled, leaving the ownership of many 1910 lots tangled to this day.

Missouri City, TX

Builder J. T. Dyer raised this Victorian house of heart pine and cypress, fastened with square nails, in Richmond, Texas, around 1890. His work was interrupted when his crew deserted him amid the violence of the Jaybird-Woodpecker feud, a bitter and bloody struggle over political power in Fort Bend County. The house survived the turmoil and was moved to its present site in Missouri City in 1963.