Historic Markers in Texas

Liberty, TX

When the Mexican government mapped the town of Liberty in 1831, it laid out five public plazas, and this was one of them. Unlike the others, this square was sold early to private owners and never became a true public commons — yet it remained, as its name suggests, at the heart of the town's mercantile district throughout its history.

Liberty, TX

When Liberty was laid out in 1831, the Mexican commissioner J. Francisco Madero set aside this block of the inner town for Catholic use, part of the formal town-planning of Mexican Coahuila-Texas. History proved less orderly than the plat: in 1846 Methodists petitioned for and built a log church on the square's northeast corner, moving to Main Street in 1853, the same year the Catholic Church received the southeast corner and raised the first of four churches here.

Colleyville, TX

Pleasant Glade Baptist Church was organized in September 1923 by fourteen charter members drawn from the older Pleasant Run Baptist Church, settling into a frame building they moved from Cottonwood to this rural site. As a farming community, its members weathered the Great Depression better than their city neighbors and kept growing, building a parsonage by 1947 and a modern facility by 1963. Renamed First Baptist Church of Pleasant Glade in 1956, it even spun off a mission that became Bellevue Baptist Church.

Longview, TX

After emancipation, freedpeople established the community of Pleasant Green, and in December 1871 pastors Henry Moses and Charles Anderson helped local residents organize a Baptist congregation, with the Rev. Henry Mass as its first pastor. From a small farm the church moved to this site in 1884 on land deeded by Simon and Mealy Claiborn, raising a frame sanctuary and later a larger house of worship. It remains a center of the historic African American community.

Howland, TX

This home was raised in 1857 by James Shelby "Sheb" Williams, a settler newly arrived from Kentucky, and his wife Mary. Its builders dressed the lumber on site and hand-hewed sills and studs from heart oak, pegging the frame together with bois d'arc — a hard native wood — while the porch steps and hearth were cut from stone quarried nearby. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark of antebellum frontier craftsmanship.

Houston County, TX

Founded in 1862 by a group that included charter member J.M. Russell, this Baptist congregation hosted regional Baptist association meetings just after the Civil War. Fire twice destroyed its buildings, in 1866 and again in 1907, but the congregation rebuilt each time, raising a church at this location in 1911. It has served the surrounding community continuously, taking its present name in 1945.

Princeton, TX

Pleasant Grove Cemetery took its first burial in 1891 with Malissa Sides, believed to be half Native American and a survivor, with her Cherokee half-sister, of the U.S. government's removal of the tribe. The pair came to Collin County from Indian Territory, and later that year a Methodist family donated the land — including Mrs. Sides' grave — as a public burial ground. Among its thousand-plus graves lie 141 infants, testament to harsh pioneer life, alongside Confederate and other war veterans.

Coryell County, TX

After Fort Gates closed in 1853, soldiers like Irish-born Hugh Sheridan and families such as the Browns and Powells settled the Leon River lowlands and named their community for its groves of post oak. They built a school district, held farmers' union meetings and a Democratic club, and buried their dead in ground Walter Worthington deeded in 1899 "to be used...as a graveyard forever." The graves range from an 1867 burial to veterans of every war from the Civil War through World War II.

Combine, TX

The Mathis family reached the Combine area around 1870, and the 1873 burial of eight-year-old Harriet Mathis became the first in what grew into Pleasant Grove Cemetery. In 1879 the family gave an adjoining acre for a schoolhouse that also hosted early Baptist and Church of Christ congregations, binding graveyard, school, and church into the community's shared ground. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, it remains the resting place of the area's pioneers and their descendants.

Pleasant Grove, TX

Shaded by live oaks along Simms Creek, Pleasant Grove was settled after the Civil War by veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies, who put their old enmities aside to build a community. The cemetery opened in 1876 with the burial of Tom Berry's young daughter, and alongside it stood a Methodist church and a school; today more than 400 graves, many unmarked, hold the area's early settlers.

Bettie, TX

In the 1850s, families from the Deep South pushed into the piney woods of East Texas and founded the Lafayette community, burying their dead in what became Pleasant Grove Cemetery — the first grave, in 1860, that of a one-year-old child of Georgia immigrants. Land was formally set aside for church and cemetery use in 1870, and in a distinctly local touch, iron ore mined commercially nearby in the 1890s was used to mark the graves of the area's earliest settlers.

Elgin, TX

By 1860 a log building near this site served as both school and church for the farming settlement of Pleasant Grove, and land was formally deeded for a school in 1871 as a cemetery took shape nearby. The community built a two-story Woodmen of the World lodge in 1908, reused its lumber for a later schoolhouse, and saw the school consolidate into Elgin in 1949. The cemetery — its oldest marked grave from 1871 and one gravestone recording an 1799 birth — endures as the settlement's chief remnant.

Dallas, TX

This congregation grew from a rural union church meeting in a cabin as early as 1875. In 1906 its Ladies Aid Society began raising money for a dedicated building, completed in 1908 — the first of several sanctuaries repeatedly struck by fire and rebuilt across the decades. Through it all the church continued to serve descendants of the area's pioneer families.

New Salem, TX

Settled in the 1850s by Southern planters and nicknamed "Shake Rag," the Pleasant Grove community held its first Methodist services on the plantation of Judge Stephen Decatur Morris. A sanctuary rose about 1853 and this cemetery was consecrated in 1873 with the burial of the Morrises' young son. Among those laid to rest here are pioneer settlers and a noted surgeon, marking the graveyard as a record of early East Texas settlement.

Maydelle, TX

Organized in 1854, Pleasant Grove is among Cherokee County's oldest Baptist churches, first led by the Rev. G. W. Slover and meeting in a building on land donated by Green B. Hill. After the Civil War the original structure gave way to a frame sanctuary, and generations of members—including several area civic leaders—rest in the nearby Pleasant Grove Cemetery.

Pleasant Grove, TX

One of three Wise County communities named Pleasant Grove, this settlement's cemetery holds marked graves dating to the late 1870s. In 1879 neighbors built a frame schoolhouse on donated land that doubled as a church and community hall; the school consolidated with Boyd in 1929 and the old building gave way to a rock church in 1942, while the cemetery remains in use.

Winnsboro, TX

When Henry and Mary Robinson gave land for a school and burial ground in the 1870s, they seeded a community that would take its name from the schoolhouse itself. A humble one-room log building gave way to larger structures as families settled the Wood County countryside, and in the 1880s teacher D. Speer christened the place Pleasant Grove. The school served until 1956, when it joined the Winnsboro district, but the cemetery—begun in 1879—remains active and tended by a local association.

Corsicana, TX

In the years before the Civil War, Methodist circuit riders carried their preaching to the scattered farms of the Mercer Colony in Navarro County, gathering pioneer families first in a settler's schoolhouse. By 1870 the congregation had land for weeks-long camp meetings held after harvest, and in 1877 it settled here amid a grove of oaks that likely gave the church its name, raising a frame sanctuary later rebuilt in 1905.

Carbon vicinity, TX

Eight charter members organized the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in the old Pleasant Hill Schoolhouse in 1892, joining the regional Cisco Baptist Association the next year and starting a Sunday school in 1894. Fire destroyed the first sanctuary in 1905, but the congregation rebuilt in 1906 and again in 1945, and several of its pastors went on to hold prominent posts at area colleges. The church has stayed active in community and missionary work.

Hallsville, TX

Within months of learning of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865, newly freed families began settling this Harrison County community. Led by Brother Ned Jacobs, they held prayer meetings in one another's homes, and in 1871 formally organized Pleasant Hill Baptist Church under a brush arbor with the Rev. George Pritchett as pastor. With no other public gathering place, the church doubled as a schoolhouse for reading and writing lessons and a hall for economic and political meetings.

Fulshear, TX

In 1910, land from the Mason Briscoe estate passed to the Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, and by about 1930 the ground behind the sanctuary was serving as a community cemetery. The first marked grave, that of Will Brown, dates to 1933, though unmarked burials may reach back earlier. The site once held a school and church as well, and its many handmade concrete markers and veterans' graves reflect a close-knit rural community.

Nolanville, TX

One of Bell County's oldest cemeteries, Pleasant Hill has received burials since 1855, beginning on the farm of Missouri-born pioneer Fleming Trigg Cox. Cox descendants formally deeded the grounds in 1907, and a cemetery association organized in 1901 has cared for it ever since, gathering each June beneath a tabernacle raised that same year. Its graves hold veterans from the Mexican War through Vietnam alongside the hard-working families who first settled western Bell County.

Nevada, TX

This burial ground, also known as South Church Cemetery, grew up beside Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, formed after a congregation near Lavon and Farmersville split in 1882. The Gooch family sold the land for both church and graveyard, and among those laid to rest are veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. The church disbanded in 1947, and by 1950 the cemetery had ceased active burials.

Rusk County, TX

Founded on land donated in 1845 by Texas Revolution veteran Captain Robert W. Smith, this cemetery began serving a Cumberland Presbyterian congregation, with its earliest marked grave dating to 1850. It became forever tied to tragedy in March 1937, when 112 of the 293 victims of the New London school explosion—one of the deadliest school disasters in American history—were laid to rest here. An annual homecoming still gathers the community each July.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Around 1850, settlers gathered at a spring below this hill for Methodist camp meetings, and a visitor's offhand remark that it was "a pleasant place" reputedly gave the site its name. Landowner Gideon Edwards deeded five acres for a sanctuary and cemetery in 1854, and by 1874 Governor Richard Coke addressed some 1,100 people who came to dedicate an English-cast bell in the belfry. Though the congregation disbanded around 1950, the cemetery — holding veterans from the Civil War through the Korean Conflict — still serves the community.

Whitney, TX

In the decades after emancipation, freedpeople across Hill County built their own houses of worship—at Towash, Lofer's Bend, and near Aquilla. In 1883 those three congregations united as Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, laying a new cornerstone in 1894 and buying their lot in 1901. By 1907 the church counted about 100 members.

New Boston vicinity, TX

Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church has served the Black community north of New Boston since it was organized in February 1872 by the Rev. Forrest Hooks and fourteen charter members, gathering first in a log cabin on land owned by Abram Ellis, a former slave of Texas patriot Richard Ellis. The present building was raised in 1912–13 on land bought from Richard Ellis's descendants, and a school opened here as early as 1903, later housed in its own building until it consolidated with the New Boston district. Though its membership peaked in the 1920s, the small congregation still gathers for worship on the fourth Sunday of each month, as it has since its earliest days.

Rusk County, TX

In 1845, Texas Revolution veteran Captain Robert W. Smith donated this land for a Cumberland Presbyterian church, whose first log chapel doubled as a schoolhouse. In 1856 the property passed to a group of Baptists from the nearby community of London, who organized Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church that year and have worshiped here ever since. The church and its adjacent cemetery were formally separated by court decree in 1953.

Linden, TX

Pleasant Hill is one of Texas's oldest African American communities, its Baptist church organized in 1843 beside the Old Monterey Road. In 1925 residents built this school with help from the Julius Rosenwald program, matching their own contributions to erect a Craftsman-detailed schoolhouse to a standard Rosenwald plan, complete with an industrial room and movable partition. It taught roughly 1,200 students through eighth grade until 1964 and, restored around 2009, is the last of the twenty-three Rosenwald schools once built in Cass County.

Brenham, TX

The community once called Krug grew into Pleasant Hill as settlers filled the southern reaches of Washington County and needed schools for their children. The first Pleasant Hill School was a one-room wood building with a small porch, typical of rural Texas; a second site in 1918 got a new building funded through the state's Rural Aid Fund. Students rode horses to class and pitched in on community projects until the school merged with neighbors in 1954. Parents and teachers gave their summers to keep the little schoolhouse standing, determined that their children would have a fuller education.

Silverton, TX

Civil War veteran Pleasant Lafayette Crawford built this Queen Anne home, with its inviting wraparound porch, in 1904 on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle. He had come from Arkansas in the late 1880s to buy ranch land and open a mercantile store, and his family followed by covered wagon to join him. One of Silverton's founders, Crawford opened the town's first hotel in 1894, and his family kept the house until 1917.

Dallas, TX

This burial ground lies within the 1,640-acre survey of James Jackson Beeman, who came from Illinois in 1840 and, as uncle by marriage to Dallas founder John Neely Bryan, helped cut the first road through the Trinity bottoms, named Turtle Creek, and plat the city of Dallas in 1842. In March 1848 Beeman buried his wife Sarah Crawford Beeman at the northeast corner of his land and later opened the plot to his neighbors. Formally organized under trustees in 1887, it remains a resting place of the region's earliest pioneers.

Dallas, TX

Set where two well-traveled pioneer roads crossed, this cemetery saw its first burials as early as 1869, with the earliest marked grave dating to 1881. That year Newton and Catherine (Beeman) Hustead deeded the land to the Pleasant Mound Methodist Church for use as a cemetery. A cemetery association has cared for the grounds since 1906.

Dallas, TX

This congregation grew from a shared frontier meeting house in the farming hamlet of Scyene, a two-story building that doubled as store, Masonic lodge, and school where several denominations worshiped side by side. The Methodists built a log sanctuary in 1876 and relocated to the Pleasant Mound community in 1878, replacing their buildings repeatedly as membership grew. The tradition of shared worship gave way to separate congregations after 1900, but neighbors still gathered for annual homecomings for decades.

Tyler, TX

Organized as early as 1854 on land deeded to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, this congregation first met in a log cabin that doubled as a school. Known first as Black Fork Church and then as Pleasant Retreat, it counted African Americans among its membership from its earliest days and held popular August camp meetings on donated land. After fire damaged its 1897 frame building, the members raised a brick church in 1928 and the congregation continues today amid Tyler's rose fields.

Lancaster, TX

Madison Moultrie Miller came west from Alabama and rode with 'Bigfoot' Wallace as a Texas Ranger before settling near present Lancaster in 1846. He built up a sprawling frontier enterprise — a home-store stocked with New York silks and hardware, a grist mill, stage stand, hotel, blacksmith and tin shops — and became the first postmaster of Pleasant Run in 1848. He laid out a town and worked to bring river navigation and railroads to Dallas County, but his death at 46 stalled the community's growth.

Colleyville, TX

In the spring of 1877, just as Reconstruction was winding down, a small presbytery gathered the scattered farm families of the Bransford community into a Baptist congregation. They worshiped first in a one-room Grange hall, then a schoolhouse, before landowners deeded an acre for a proper church house in 1904. The steady accretion of Sunday School rooms and a sanctuary traces the growth of a rural North Texas settlement into a rooted community.

Colleyville, TX

A log school reportedly stood near this Colleyville site as early as 1870, and by 1877 it had 45 pupils. After A.J. Colwell deeded two acres for a public school and church in 1884, the campus grew through a wooden schoolhouse — where one teacher, Emma Dixon, taught 93 children — a brick building around 1913, and a WPA structure in 1939. Classes ended in 1962 after consolidation with Grapevine.

Thorp Spring, TX

Blacksmith Pleasant Thorp came to Texas in 1840 and, after passing through this country on the Morehouse Expedition, resolved to settle here, eventually amassing nearly 18,000 acres. Discovering sulphur springs, he set aside land for the town of Thorp Spring, and in 1871 he and Sam Milliken founded Thorp College. That early school gave way in 1873 to Add-Ran College, which moved to Waco and then Fort Worth and grew into Texas Christian University. In 1888 Thorp deeded the land around the spring to Hood County for a public park, leaving a legacy of education and community.

May, TX

In 1875 Robert Morrison English and his wife Clarabelle moved from Missouri to Brown County, establishing a 160-acre farm and helping build the Pleasant Valley community. The family donated land for a Missionary Baptist church that doubled as a school and for a cemetery that grew to more than eight acres, its first burial their own young daughter in 1877. Generations of pioneers, veterans reaching back to the Civil War, pastors, and educators rest here, their many interconnected family plots a testament to deep community ties.

Buffalo Springs vicinity, TX

The community of Pleasant Valley grew up in the years after the Civil War, its one-room schoolhouse doubling as a church for scattered Clay County settlers. This cemetery was established in 1883 on land donated by pioneer Jim Draer, near the school site, though its earliest burial dates to 1873. Among the graves are veterans of conflicts spanning the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Korea, tended today by a cemetery association.

Cedar Hill, TX

In 1848 the Holland, Boydstun, Lowe, and Ground families made their way from Illinois to this part of North Texas, and when the Boydstuns' young son Henry died that same year he was buried on the family farm. In 1870 the family deeded acreage around his grave for a cemetery, school, and church, and the burial ground grew from there. Still active today, it holds generations of the area's pioneer families.

Lampasas, TX

In 1877, in a rough-hewn schoolhouse on Donaldson Creek, John R. Allen gathered struggling farmers into what became the first chapter of the Farmers' Alliance in Texas. What began as a self-help group—even tracing stolen livestock through secret officers nicknamed 'Grand Smokies'—swelled into one of the nation's most powerful agrarian reform movements. By the 1890s its thousands of sub-alliances had helped ignite the Populist Party before fading by 1900.

Huntsville, TX

Dr. Pleasant Williams Kittrell arrived in Huntsville in 1850 already a seasoned statesman from North Carolina and Alabama, and he made his mark on Texas from the legislature. There he authored the bill establishing the University of Texas — signed in 1858, though the school would not open until 1883. A friend and physician to Sam Houston, Kittrell died tending patients during the 1867 yellow fever epidemic that took him too.

Pleasanton, TX

Founded in 1858 and named for early settler John Pleasants, this town became the seat of Atascosa County at the junction of the Atascosa River and Bonita Creek. During the Civil War local men mustered here to form a Confederate cavalry company, but the town's lasting fame came from cattle: set amid Longhorn country, it grew into a cattlemen's capital where drovers gathered before pushing huge herds north to Kansas railheads. In the spring of 1873 alone, cowboys drove 43,000 county cattle up the trail.

Pleasanton, TX

A Church of Christ presence in Atascosa County reaches back to at least 1858, but the Pleasanton congregation grew from home services begun around 1910 by a group of women led by Texana Brite. Women bought the land in 1914 and drove the church's early life, though custom barred them from preaching, so men came out from San Antonio on Sundays to lead worship. A frame building went up in 1924, and later decades brought a radio ministry, foreign missions, and the church's first full-time preacher.

Pleasanton, TX

The Pleasanton City Cemetery began in 1865 as a family plot when Jonathan and Mary Doak buried their three-year-old son on the western edge of town, and friends and neighbors soon began using the ground as well. The many infant and child graves in its oldest section speak to the harshness of frontier life, while later burials include a Mexican War veteran who twice served as San Antonio's mayor and Graves Peeler, credited with helping save the Longhorn breed in the 1930s. Once called the Doak or Sandhill Cemetery, it remains a record of the community's founding generations.

Pleasanton, TX

Organized in 1857, a year before Pleasanton itself was founded, this Methodist congregation grew from the work of circuit-riding preachers who held early services outdoors, in homes, and in the log courthouse. It built a succession of sanctuaries over the following century. In 1969 it merged with Jacob's Chapel, a Black congregation organized in the 1870s, uniting two communities of worshippers.

Pleasanton, TX

Pleasanton had educated its African American children at the Abraham Lincoln School since 1913, and by the mid-1950s Black and white students were already practicing and playing sports together. When the Lincoln School proved inadequate and Texas's House Bill 65 required a community petition and vote before integration, Pleasanton's residents supplied both, approving the measure 343 to 88 on October 26, 1957. Days later nine Black students entered the new high school before assembled press, welcomed by their classmates in a transition that recorded no violence.

Houston, TX

After World War II, restrictive covenants and quiet discrimination shut African American families—including returning veterans—out of much of Houston's housing. In response, Jewish developers Melvin Silverman and Bernard Paul partnered with Black realtor Judson Robinson, Sr. to build Pleasantville, a master-planned community of some 1,500 homes where owners could customize their houses. First occupied in 1949–1950, it grew its own businesses, schools, library, and churches, and produced leaders like Judson W. Robinson, Jr., Houston's first Black city councilmember elected after Reconstruction.

Borger, TX

When oil struck Hutchinson County in 1926 and the boomtown of Borger sprang up overnight, the county needed a way across the wide, quicksand-laced Canadian River. Commissioners hired a Dallas firm to build a toll bridge at Dixon Point, charging a dime for pedestrians and a dollar for automobiles until its cost was repaid. Nearly half a mile of steel Warren pony trusses made it a distinctive span, and it stands as a relic of the county's oil-boom birth.

Borger, TX

Plemons rose about 1898 when rancher James Whittenburg dug in above a bend of the Canadian River, and it briefly thrived—chosen county seat in 1901, with a brick courthouse, a scatter of shops, and even a hotel run for a time by former buffalo hunter and county sheriff Billy Dixon. Its cemetery began around 1902 with the burial of Mrs. E.E. Akers. But when the railroad bypassed the town for Stinnett in 1926, voters moved the county seat and Plemons faded; an oil boom stretched its life another two decades before the last burial in 1953.

La Grange, TX

When the Plum Grove and Pleasant Retreat Baptist congregations joined forces in 1869, they built a sanctuary the following year and worshiped here through monthly services and annual revivals until the community faded around 1900. The first burial, in 1872, was four-year-old William A. Routh, and the churchyard filled until interments ceased in 1945, resuming only when a new section opened in 1985. Today the cemetery is the enduring physical trace of a vanished rural congregation.

New Braunfels, TX

On a New Braunfels corner that had already hosted two drugstores and a bakery, Kathinka Clemens built this brick commercial building in 1913 for A.C. and Helen Plumeyer, who ran their bakery — also called City Bakery — downstairs and lived above it until 1926. Later tenants ranged from a shoe store to physicians' offices, and the structure's Craftsman-influenced design earned it a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark designation in 2005.

Groesbeck, TX

L. T. M. Plummer and his wife Rachel, born a Parker, reached this part of Limestone County in 1834 and received a Mexican land grant of over 3,000 acres. In the 1836 raid on Fort Parker, Rachel, her son James, and her cousin Cynthia Ann Parker were taken captive by Comanches; Rachel was ransomed in 1838 but died within a year, as did her infant son Wilson. Grieving, L. T. M. set aside an acre as a family burial ground, where more than a hundred Plummer descendants now rest.

Stinton, TX

Founded in 1923 by Pennsylvania oilman M.L. "Mike" Benedum, the Plymouth Oil Company remade Sinton, Texas, drilling major discoveries on the Welder Ranch in 1935 and near Taft in 1937 while building company housing and offering health and retirement benefits rare for the era. In 1949 executive Mike Griffith organized the Plymouth Oilers, a semi-pro baseball team stocked with paid players and summer college athletes whose games at company-built Oiler Park drew the whole community. The Oilers captured state, national, and world semi-pro championships in 1951 before the team folded in 1957 and the company was sold to Ohio Oil, later Marathon, in 1962.

Round Top, TX

German immigrant Zoellistin Pochmann came to Texas around 1856–57 and worked as a cabinetmaker in La Grange, marrying Karoline Wandke in 1857. The couple settled on a small three-room house, improved it, and relocated the whole structure to this site about 1861, only for Zoellistin to die of a snakebite in 1862. His son Heinrich carried on the cabinetmaking trade and served four years as mayor of Round Top, raising his own family in the house.

Winters, TX

William Wyatt Poe left Alabama for Texas in 1870, married Jerusha Evaline Cline, and in 1904 moved his large family to Runnels County. A committed community builder, he donated land for school and church buildings and served as a school trustee, roles later carried on by three of his sons. The family shaped local farming, too—son Howard brought four-row tractor cultivation to the area in 1930—and land Poe left to his children is still worked by his descendants.

Millsap, TX

Poe Prairie grew up as a community of farm families in Parker County, taking its name from James William Poe, a Baptist minister who settled here in the mid-1870s. Its cemetery began sorrowfully in 1879 with the burial of a one-year-old child, and the McCasland family later donated land for a cemetery, school, and church—the trio of institutions around which rural Texas communities organized their lives. The school served the neighborhood until it merged into the Millsap district in 1928.

Terrell, TX

Organized in 1855 as Salem Baptist Church when the surrounding settlement was still called Turner's Point, this is the oldest Baptist congregation in Kaufman County. It helped found the eleven-church East Fork Baptist Association in 1870 and hosted its conferences, before adopting the evocative name "Poetry Baptist Church" around the turn of the century. The present sanctuary, built in 1912, carries forward a fellowship that took root in frontier Texas.