Historic Markers in Texas

McAllen, TX

Built in 1933 for merchant Percy Herman, one of McAllen's most influential early businessmen, this Spanish Eclectic home reflects both his success and the growing Jewish community of South Texas. Born in Iowa, Herman opened stores across the region before settling in McAllen in 1916 to run the Valley Mercantile store. He hired well-traveled architect Edwin W. Byers to design the house, whose stucco walls, clay-tile roof, and wrought-iron details grace a prominent corner lot.

West Columbia, TX

Stephen William Perkins and his wife Anna came to Texas in 1840 and settled near Velasco, where they built a home and started a small family graveyard after the death of a child around 1843. Four of their five children, their mother, and a number of enslaved people were interred here. Perkins served the Republic of Texas Congress and later the state legislature and senate, spent twelve years as Brazoria County's chief justice, and captained a Texas volunteer company during the Civil War.

Chappell Hill, TX

This Victorian home in Chappell Hill was built on land deeded to Permelia Haynie by her sister and brother-in-law, its frame joined from hand-hewn cedar with square nails and wooden pegs in the craftsmanship of 19th-century Texas. Weathering the storms of the early 1900s, the house grew over time with a bay window, kitchen, and added rooms. It stands as a modest record of family life in one of Washington County's oldest communities.

Odessa, TX

Beneath the flat West Texas plains around Odessa lies the buried floor of a prehistoric sea, and within it one of the richest petroleum provinces on earth. Discovery unfolded in a rush through the 1920s — a Mitchell County well in 1920, the Big Lake strike of 1923, the wild Upton County boom of 1925 — spreading across dozens of counties as new wells came in by the dozens each week. Fortunes were made and lost in months, and in the frenzy oil could sell for 50 cents a barrel while drillers paid ten times that for drinking water.

Sherman, TX

Planned in early 1941 as an Army Air Corps basic flight training field, this Grayson County base was still under construction when the attack on Pearl Harbor drew the nation into World War II. Its first class of cadets graduated in February 1942 at ceremonies dedicating the field to Lt. Col. Elmer D. Perrin, a Texas test pilot killed in the line of duty. For three decades pilots trained here flew on to serve in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam before the base closed in 1971.

Decatur, TX

In 1853 William and Charlotte Perrin left Rock Castle, Kentucky, joining the westward stream into the Peters Colony near Dallas before pushing on to Wise County on Christmas Eve 1854. On the banks of Martin's Branch they built a two-room dogtrot log cabin, a classic frontier form, sometime between 1855 and 1861. The Perrin family lived in it continuously until 1990, and a 2007 restoration used the original stones, chinking, and v-notched logs to bring it back.

Cypress, TX

The Perry Cemetery grew up around the graves of the Grant and Perry families in the southern part of Harris County, its first marked burial dating to 1878. When Thomas and Drucilla Perry sold their land in 1886, they insisted the existing graveyard be preserved, and later owners added still more acreage. Family names like Anderson, Franklin, Hargrave, and Williams fill its rows, alongside a "strangers' rest" set aside for those without local kin.

Carrollton, TX

When the Texas prairie town of Carrollton was still finding its footing, the death of Sarah Huffman Perry in 1896 gave the young community its first true burying ground. The next year her husband, A. W. Perry, deeded the land beside the Union Baptist Church, and scattered graves from private plots were gathered here to rest together. Most of its 482 graves belong to the pioneer families who broke this ground in North Texas.

Perry, TX

This Methodist congregation was organized in 1872 in a settler's home by a circuit-riding preacher, one of the itinerant ministers who carried the faith across the Texas frontier. Its Victorian Gothic Revival sanctuary, built in 1884-85 of pine and cypress hauled from Houston by ox-wagon, was dedicated in 1885 and has served the community ever since. In its first century, thirty-seven pastors led the flock.

Jefferson, TX

This French-styled town house dates to the mid-nineteenth century, when the riverport of Jefferson thrived on steamboat trade with New Orleans. Its intact original plan reflects the Creole architectural influence that flowed up the waterways into East Texas during that commercial heyday. Recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965, it survives as the Perry Woods home.

Forestburg, TX

The oldest marked grave in this Montague County burial ground belongs to an infant who died in 1862, and its early plots read like a chronicle of frontier hardship: a well-digger killed in an 1863 Indian raid, and two former Confederate soldiers who had been captured at Lookout Mountain. In 1883 Levi Perryman — himself a Confederate veteran, Indian fighter, and sheriff — bought the site and deeded it to the county. Still in use, the cemetery keeps the memory of the district's pioneers.

Winnsboro, TX

In June 1884 five Wood County neighbors gathered to organize the County Line Missionary Baptist Church, calling their first pastor a month later. For years they worshiped in the local schoolhouse until a church building was raised, and the congregation took the Perryville name in 1908, revised to Perryville Baptist Church in 1925. Descendants of the charter members remain active in the church today.

Winnsboro, TX

Thirty-eight charter members organized this rural East Texas congregation in 1879 as the Marvin Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, with the Reverend A. K. Hughes as first pastor. A donation of land in 1887 gave it a permanent home, and church buildings rose in 1887 and again in 1915. For generations the church anchored the Perryville area as a place of revivals, Sunday singings, and community gatherings.

San Jacinto, TX

This burial ground near the San Jacinto battlefield holds the remains of Lorenzo de Zavala (1789–1836), the statesman who served as the first vice president of the Republic of Texas, along with generations of his family. It also received figures caught up in the 1836 revolution, including the Mexican general Manuel Fernández Castrillón, who fell at San Jacinto, and other men who died that pivotal year. The recorded roll of names spans from the republic's founding into the early twentieth century.

Groesbeck, TX

Benjamin D. Person, Sr. founded this Limestone County town in 1854, and by 1915 it bustled with a bank, hotel, twelve mercantiles, drugstores, doctors, and a Masonic lodge chartered back in 1861. A fire razed the town in October 1916; it was rebuilt but soon dwindled, and the post office finally closed in 1952. Today only the townsite behind the marker remains.

Austin, TX

In 1925 the celebrated Swiss-born woodcarver Peter Mansbendel reworked an aging 19th-century frame house into a romantic Tudor-style home, its half-timbering and steep gables a nod to the Alpine country he had left. Mansbendel had come to Austin in 1911 after meeting Clotilde Shipe—daughter of Hyde Park developer Monroe Shipe—while she studied voice in New York. From this house he produced architectural carvings, portraits, and furniture for private and public commissions across Texas.

Meyersville, TX

Peter Bluntzer, an Alsatian immigrant, reached Texas around 1843 and settled at Coleto—present-day Meyersville—after his wagon overturned and injured his wife en route to Castroville. Devoted to his new home, he made two return trips to Alsace to recruit families to join him, and in 1859 he donated land for Sts. Peter and Paul Church, the first Catholic church in DeWitt County. The marker also recalls how his young daughter, taken by Indians, was found unharmed months later.

San Marcos, TX

Dr. Peter Cavanaugh Woods, a Kentucky-trained physician, settled near San Marcos in 1854 and won a reputation for a little-known aseptic surgical technique that gave his patients unusually high survival rates. In 1862 he was elected colonel of the 32nd Texas Cavalry, which guarded the Rio Grande and Gulf Coast to protect the cotton trade and later fought in the Louisiana campaigns, where Woods was wounded in the arm. After the war he freed the people he had enslaved, gave them tracts of land, and returned to medicine and farming.

Belton, TX

Peter Hansbrough Bell's life reads like a roll call of the Texas frontier's founding decades. He charged with Sam Houston's army at San Jacinto in 1836, rode with the Texas Rangers and mounted volunteers through the Mexican War, then traded the saddle for the statehouse as Texas's third governor before serving in the U.S. Congress. This granite monument was raised by the state in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence, to honor a man who helped both win and govern the young republic.

Austin, TX

Peter Henry Oberwetter emigrated from Germany around 1849, settling first among the German communities of New Braunfels and Comfort before moving to Austin, where he made his name as a botanist. He pioneered the crossbreeding of amaryllis, imported rare bulbs, published his research, and even served as a landscape artist for the State of Texas. He died in 1915 after a long life in horticulture.

San Jacinto, TX

Peter Jefferson Duncan, born in New York in 1799, took part in the capture of San Antonio in 1835 and served in the army during the 1836 campaign for Texas independence. He lived out his life in Harris County, where he died in 1870. His marker commemorates one of the volunteers who fought to establish the Republic of Texas.

Comfort, TX

German immigrant Peter Joseph Ingenhuett (1833–1923) settled on a farm near Comfort in the 1850s, part of the wave of German settlers who gave the Texas Hill Country its distinctive character. After marrying Marie Karger in 1861, he moved into town and opened businesses along High Street—a hotel, saloon, and livery stable—and served nearly 25 years as postmaster. The small cottage behind the property was the family's first home until a larger house was built in 1888.

Burnet, TX

A Pennsylvania native and one of Stephen F. Austin's 'Old 300' original colonists, Peter Kerr took part in the 1836 war for Texas independence and made and lost several fortunes before buying a league of Burnet County land in 1851 that included Fort Croghan. Grown wealthy as an army beef contractor, he gave 100 acres and the town square for the county seat and willed a fortune in land and cash to found a college — a bequest later broken in court, leaving the town only a small school site. Neighbors said 'he never refused to help when he observed its need.'

Galveston, TX

Peter Leroy Colombo was born in Galveston in 1905 and, at age seven, lost his hearing, speech, and the use of his legs to meningitis. Swimming in the Gulf surf helped him walk again, and after training at the Texas School for the Deaf he returned home to become one of the island's most celebrated lifeguards. Over a roughly 50-year career he officially saved more than 900 people—regardless of race, in an era of strict segregation—set long-distance swimming records, and pioneered surfing on Galveston's beaches. When he died in 1974, the Texas Legislature paused for a moment of silence.

Tivoli, TX

Tennessee-born Peter Teal (1812–1854) took up arms in the fight for Texas independence, serving in the Army of the Republic in 1835 and 1836. The State of Texas placed this marker at his grave in 1936 as part of its centennial remembrance of the men who won the Republic.

Victoria, TX

Peter Underhay Pridham was one of the Atlantic-world adventurers swept into the Texas Revolution: born on Guernsey, schooled in London, and drawn through Montreal to a homestead on the San Jacinto River by 1834. He fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 that won Texas its independence, later stood against Comanche raiders at Plum Creek in 1840, and settled into civic life in Victoria as its county tax assessor.

Pampa, TX

Virginia-born Peter W. Gray came to Texas in 1838 and became a leading figure of the Republic and state, serving as district attorney, judge, Texas Supreme Court justice, and legislator. A delegate to the Secession Convention, he later served the Confederacy, and in 1864 became Treasury Agent for the Trans-Mississippi region, in effect running Confederate finances for a war-torn territory dependent on smuggled currency, blockade-runners, and couriers. Gray County was named in his honor, and the state erected this memorial to him in 1963.

Sherman, TX

Peter Wagener Grayson, born in 1788 into a prominent Kentucky family, served in the War of 1812 and practiced law in Louisville before coming to Texas in the early 1830s, where he became a friend and advisor to Stephen F. Austin. He helped secure Austin's release from a Mexican prison, outlined plans for an independent government, and after San Jacinto served as Attorney General, signing the Treaties of Velasco. A gifted but troubled man, he took his own life in 1838 while a candidate for the Texas presidency, and the legislature later named Grayson County in his honor.

Mason, TX

The community of Peter's Prairie took its name from "Major" Joshua Peters, who in the 1850s and 1860s cut prairie grass here to supply nearby Fort Mason's horses. Neighbors petitioned for a school in 1877, raising local funds for a picket schoolhouse that opened with 59 students, and citizens later hiked their own taxes to sustain it. Through consolidations and new buildings the school endured until 1946, even launching Mason County's celebrated tennis tradition, and its schoolhouse still serves as a community center.

Lewisville, TX

In 1841 the Republic of Texas granted W. S. Peters and his partners an empresario contract to plant hundreds of colonist families across this stretch of the frontier, promising each a cabin, seed, and hundreds of free acres. Despite internal upheavals and settlers' resentment over the company's land share — which boiled over into the 1852 "Hedgcoxe War" that drove out the company agent — some 1,800 colonists had arrived by 1848. The colony's reach eventually spread over five counties encompassing what became one of the state's largest metropolitan regions.

Sealy, TX

Peters Hall was built for the Peters-Hacienda Schuetzenverein, a German shooting and sportsmen's club organized in 1897 in an area flooded with German immigrants after Friedrich Ernst's celebrated letters home drew them to Texas beginning in 1831. Rooted in a medieval European tradition of marksmanship contests, the club soon found dancing to be its main draw, and immigrant builder Joachim Hintz raised an eight-sided hall with a great dance floor and ventilating cupola. Monthly dances, May Fests, and holiday balls filled it — women once reportedly paid admission with scraps of their calico dresses — and though the surrounding town of Peters has vanished, the hall still stands.

Hallettsville, TX

Petersburg served as the seat of Lavaca County from 1846 to 1852, laid out on a townsite donated by Arthur Sherill just after Texas joined the Union. The Commissioners Court named it in 1846 and installed its first slate of officers, from chief justice to tax assessor. Its brief tenure as county seat ended within a few years, and the state marked the vanished town in 1936.

Petersburg, TX

Petersburg began in 1891 as a rural post office run by Margaret Peters out of her home, five miles from the present townsite. Ed M. White built the first house here around 1895, took over the mail, and opened the settlement's first store in 1902. The town incorporated in 1927, and the arrival of the Fort Worth & Denver Railroad the next year turned it into an agricultural marketing hub.

Fort Worth, TX

Swedish immigrant John Peterson crossed the Atlantic in 1868, followed two years later by his wife Thilda, and after a spell in Nebraska the couple reached Tarrant County in 1872. Peterson farmed several hundred acres, and when his infant granddaughter Grace died in 1903 she became the first laid to rest in a family plot that now holds ten graves. The small cemetery stands as a marker of the area's early Swedish settlement.

Goliad, TX

John Freeman Pettus left Virginia as a young man to join Stephen F. Austin's first colony in the 1820s, the vanguard of Anglo-American settlement in Mexican Texas. When revolution came he fought with Ben Milam at the Siege of Bexar and stood in the ranks at San Jacinto, the battle that won Texas its independence. Late in life he moved his family to Goliad County and set aside this ground as a family burying place, becoming its first occupant in 1878.

San Antonio, TX

As San Antonio surged from frontier town toward the largest city in Texas, this bend of the San Antonio River filled with the ambitious homes of a rising middle class. Mary Frances Drake, a widow who arrived in 1890 and began buying up river lots, completed a turreted Queen Anne house here in 1895. Lumber executive Van Alvin Petty bought it in 1901 and, in a 1910–11 remodel by noted architect Atlee B. Ayres, recast it in symmetrical Neoclassical dress with two-story Corinthian columns. In 1947 it passed to a Veterans of Foreign Wars post.

Corsicana, TX

This corner of Navarro County took shape around the hardbottom creek crossings of an early route known as the Military Road, which carried travelers toward Corsicana, founded in 1848. Families like the Hamiltons and Braggs settled the sandy uplands, and in 1893 local Baptists raised the Petty's Chapel church that still holds services more than a century later. The community was reshaped by the discovery of the Corsicana oilfield in the late 19th century and by the county poor farm, established here in 1890 and closed in 1944.

Orange, TX

Born in Louisiana in 1815, Peyton Bland enrolled at Orange in 1835 to fight in the Texas Revolution, taking part in the Grass Fight and the siege of San Antonio before later standing guard duty during the San Jacinto campaign. He settled on a farm along Cow Bayou, raised thirteen children, ran a store, and drove cattle to market in New Orleans, cutting a physically imposing figure remembered for the pistols on his hips. When the Civil War came he enlisted again, in the Orange County Coast Guard, and afterward briefly served as a county commissioner.

Blanco, TX

In 1865 a group of newly freed people led by Peyton Roberts—born into slavery in Virginia and brought to Texas in the 1820s—founded a community of their own here, known to white settlers as Freedman's Colony. The families farmed and built a lime kiln, and life centered on Mt. Horeb Baptist Church, organized in 1874, whose log cabin doubled as a school. A post office, a cemetery on land deeded by Roberts, and generations of descendants sustained the settlement well into the 20th century.

Blanco, TX

In the years after emancipation, freedpeople across Texas built their own settlements from the ground up, and Peyton Colony was one of them—founded in the 1860s by formerly enslaved Peyton Roberts and his neighbors in the Blanco County hills. Alongside their homes, a school, and Mt. Horeb Baptist Church, the community fired this lime kiln to make mortar strong enough to raise buildings that still stand today. The kiln's later restoration turned a working piece of frontier industry into a monument to self-reliance.

Bastrop, TX

A native of Bastrop and a busy local builder, Joseph R. Pfeiffer put up many of the town's homes and buildings around the turn of the twentieth century. In 1901 he built this fine residence for his bride, Freda, deliberately making it a showcase of quality materials and craftsmanship to advertise his skills and win new business. As his family grew to six children, Pfeiffer, who ran a lumber company and mill, enlarged the house to fit them.

Pflugerville, TX

Henry Pfluger, born in Germany in 1803, brought his large family to Texas in 1850 as part of the German immigration that reshaped central Texas. Buried on his own land in 1867, he was joined here by his wife Christina, who formally set aside the acre as a family cemetery in 1880. The nearby town of Pflugerville took its name from the family, whose descendants still gather for reunions begun in 1934.

Pflugerville, TX

German immigrant Henry Pfluger brought his large family to this Blackland Prairie farmland in 1853, and other settlers followed, founding a school and Immanuel Lutheran Church within two decades. The village stayed purely agricultural until an 1890 general store and the 1904 arrival of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad spurred a proper townsite, banks, a newspaper, and mutual-aid and shooting-and-bowling clubs that reflected its German character. Decades later the town even earned a footnote in football lore with 55 straight high-school wins.

Pflugerville, TX

German immigrants who settled northeast Travis County in 1849 prized education, opening a one-room school on a farm in 1872 with lessons in both English and German. A brick school rose in Pflugerville in 1907 on land donated by George Pfluger, and the community's district was chartered in 1919. Through consolidations, a WPA-built rock gym, and a record-setting football team, the schools grew into a district serving more than 23,000 students, integrating in 1965.

Freeport vicinity, TX

This burial ground sits on land originally granted to empresario Stephen F. Austin by Mexico, in one of the earliest Anglo colonies in Texas. Devout Methodists E.B. and Mollie Thomas gave the site, where the first grave was dug in 1853 and many early Texans came to rest. A church built by William Hoskins served the settlement, which took its name from the Rev. George Phair, its pastor across two stints in the 1870s and 1880s.

Phalba, TX

First called Snider Springs for John Snider, who bought the spring-fed land in 1853, this community grew after a road from Canton opened in 1858 and soon supported several businesses. To avoid confusion with another Snider Springs postal station, residents renamed the town Phalba after the daughter of a local gin owner. During the Depression, the Works Progress Administration built a cannery here, using spring water to run five steam canners for local and charitable food supply, and the farming and ranching community endures today.

Lometa, TX

In 1851–52 the U.S. Army reorganized its frontier defenses, building a line of seven forts from the Red River to the Rio Grande to guard remote settlements and the roads west to California. Fort Phantom Hill, established in 1851, was tied to headquarters in Austin by the Phantom Hill Road—the first road in Lampasas County—along which mule and ox trains of up to twenty-four wagons hauled supplies. Used by the military until the fort's 1854 abandonment, the road later served settlers before traffic shifted to a stage station around 1870.

Pharr, TX

In July 1916, the same year Pharr incorporated, a fire destroyed an entire downtown block, wiping out the town's lumber yard, mercantile, hardware store, and theater. When National Guard troops — stationed nearby to guard against raids from revolutionary Mexico — pulled out at the start of World War I, they left behind hose reels that became the community's first firefighting gear. Volunteers organized loosely at first, formed an official department in 1921, and built their first fire station in 1928, with a jail cell tucked in the back.

La Grange, TX

In the years just after the Civil War, German and Swiss Lutheran settlers were putting down deep roots in the rolling farmland of Fayette County. This congregation took shape in 1867 under the Rev. C. C. Rudi, newly arrived in the Swiss Alp community, and by 1869 worshippers had raised a simple log church on ten acres donated by John and Christina Knippa. A cemetery followed in 1877, and the handsome frame sanctuary that still anchors the site went up in 1889–90.

Bay City, TX

Chartered in 1940, this Bay City VFW post first met under a World War I veteran, Col. Wyatt O. Selkirk, and gathered in courthouses, halls, and USO buildings before finding a home in 1948. It took the name of Army Air Forces Capt. Philip Hackley Parker, killed in action in 1945 while piloting his P-51D Mustang over China. Through fire and rebuilding, the post and its ladies auxiliary have aided needy veterans, sponsored student contests, and helped identify the graves of more than 3,000 Matagorda County veterans.

Lampasas, TX

Philip Smith, who had served as a teamster during Texas's war for independence from Mexico, built this rugged home in 1856 on the central Texas frontier. Its two-foot-thick walls of native rock and cedar framework were made to endure, and endure they have—the house earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Austin, TX

Philip Walker was one of the soldiers who reached San Jacinto in April 1836, the decisive battle that secured Texas independence. Born in South Carolina in 1815, he lived out his life in Texas and died in Johnson County in 1897.

Fredericksburg, TX

Philipp Hartmann and Elisabeth Crenwelge married in Bruchweiler, Prussia, in 1853 and sailed for Texas in 1855, settling to farm and butcher near Fredericksburg. They opened this family graveyard in 1859, and its stones tell a hard story: of thirteen children between Philipp's two marriages, several died in infancy. Well kept for well over a century, it remains a fine example of a German immigrant family cemetery.

DeKalb vicinity, TX

The Dalby homestead has stayed in one family since 1841, built on land the Republic of Texas granted to Phillip A. Dalby. Its oldest room is hand-hewn oak logs pegged together, the floorboards worked by hand; by 1856 Dalby was raising eight children under its enlarged roof. The house rang with singings, quiltings, and logrollings, boarded the local teachers, and gave passing freighters a yard to camp in, passing down through son, grandson, and beyond.

Fayetteville, TX

North Carolina native Phillip J. Shaver settled in the Fayette County community of Rutersville around 1840 and, two years later, joined the Texas Army to defend area settlers, earning a 320-acre grant from the young Republic. After marrying in 1847, he bought 525 acres, surveyed a townsite he named for a former home, laid out its streets, and donated lots for a school, church, Masonic lodge, and cemetery. He supported the community he founded, Fayetteville, until his death in 1875, and his descendants remain in the area.

Ennis, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1813, Phillip R. Pierce came to Texas and took up arms in the war for independence as a member of the Madisonville Cavalry, Texas Volunteers. He lived out his days in Ellis County, dying in 1891. The state erected this marker to his service in 1962.

Lampasas, TX

After an August 1884 fire gutted much of downtown Lampasas, developer John B. Higdon sold a lot to legislator David W. Phillips, who raised the eastern half of this adjoining pair of buildings; grocers J. M. and A. L. Trosper built the other half about the same time. With their limestone construction, four-bay facades, and round-arched transoms, the buildings became a fixture of the town square. Over the years they housed cafes, saloons, a newspaper, a bootmaker's shop, a bowling alley, and much else.

Travis, TX

Ezekial Thomas Phillips, a Civil War veteran, moved his family to Falls County in 1869. When his son Robert died in a shooting accident in 1883 shortly before his wedding, he was buried on the very tract meant to be his wedding gift. So many neighbors asked to bury their dead there that Phillips deeded the land as a public cemetery in 1903, and it now holds some 350 graves.

Dripping Springs, TX

In 1880 settlers John and Nancy Phillips deeded this land to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, where a small sanctuary was dedicated that March. Following frontier custom, the community buried its dead beside the church, and the graves came to include sixteen Civil War veterans and many of Dripping Springs' earliest families. When a new church rose on the San Marcos road in 1901, the old site endured as a cemetery, tended by families and, by 1962, a formal association.

West Columbia vicinity, TX

Zeno Phillips was one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred," the first legal Anglo-American colonists in Texas, and he and his brothers took up land here and served in the Republic of Texas Army. The cemetery began in 1835 with the burials of Zeno and his brother John. Later generations of the family were laid to rest at Waverly Place before the land passed out of Phillips hands in 1887.