Historic Markers in Texas

Denton, TX

Beulah A. Harriss arrived in Denton from Nebraska in 1914 to become the first women's physical education teacher at the college that is now the University of North Texas. She coached its earliest women's athletic teams, organized its physical education department in 1918, and helped found the state and women's athletic associations that professionalized the field. She also started Texas's first Girl Scout troop in 1917 and devoted forty-six years to the youth of Denton before retiring in 1960.

Elkhart, TX

Organized in late 1861 with just seven members, this historically African-American congregation first worshipped under a brush arbor before securing property that in 1885 was deeded for use as both a meeting place and a school. It weathered an early-1900s split — when a breakaway group briefly formed a neighboring church — then reconciled and grew, erecting new buildings in the 1920s and again in the 1950s. For more than a century Beulah Baptist has served the Elkhart community as a center of worship and learning.

Lufkin vicinity, TX

Allen Squyres, son of Beulah pioneers, joined the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845 and was licensed to preach in 1868 after returning from the Civil War. In 1883 area Methodists split from the Baptists they had shared a church with to form their own congregation, and by 1892 that fellowship moved to Beulah and joined the Congregational Methodist Conference with Squyres as its first pastor. More than a century later the small church still offered worship and outreach to the Beulah community.

Lufkin vicinity, TX

Beulah School opened in 1903 in buildings that local residents put up and furnished themselves, serving as both schoolhouse and church. State funds paid for the community's first full-time schoolhouse in 1917, which grew to hold 75 students and three teachers before older pupils began transferring to Diboll in 1928. A tornado destroyed the building during classes in 1954 — the students escaped with minor injuries — and after rebuilding, the school consolidated with the Diboll district in 1963 and became a community center.

San Marcos, TX

Designed by German architect Charles S. Sinz and built in 1896 for the Beverly Hutchison family, this San Marcos house passed through several owners before earning its lasting fame. In the late 1920s a young man from the Texas Hill Country boarded here while attending Southwest Texas State Teachers College — Lyndon Baines Johnson, the future thirty-sixth president of the United States. He lived here during part of his college years.

McKinney, TX

Warren Tully Beverly, a Collin County native educated at Spring Creek School and the Plano Institute, read law in the office of Joseph W. Baines — grandfather of the future president Lyndon B. Johnson. He rose to county attorney and district judge, and in 1886 built this Victorian house for his family. After his death it passed to the Harris family, who kept it until 1960.

Jasper, TX

On the Angelina River, Bevilport became the seat of the Bevil municipality in 1834 and a busy inland shipping point, its docks crowded with flatboats and keelboats carrying cotton, hides, and other East Texas goods downriver to New Orleans. It took its name from John Bevil, a Texas Ranger, delegate to the 1835 Consultation on Texas independence, and later chief justice of Jasper County. Like many river towns, it thrived on the rich bottomlands and the water route to market.

San Antonio, TX

Founded under Spanish rule in 1718, Bexar County holds the distinction of having been governed by nine successive regimes—the oldest county government in Texas. Between 1811 and 1813 alone it whipsawed through revolutionary juntas, a short-lived declaration of independence, and restored Spanish control before Mexico won independence in 1821. Imperial and republican Mexico, the Republic of Texas, U.S. statehood, the Confederacy, and finally restored U.S. rule in 1865 each in turn claimed San Antonio.

Bonham, TX

Built in 1857 by hemp-factory owner Z. K. Sims, this Bonham residence later belonged to industrialist Thomas R. Williams, who drew a remarkable circle to town, including a college founder, a U.S. Treasury auditor, and two judges. The Biard family has held it since 1909. Its roster of owners reads like a directory of a striving antebellum and Gilded Age community.

Paris, TX

Schooling in Biardstown began in the log home of William Washington Biard, an early settler, and in 1867 his son John Wilson Biard and wife Lizzie donated land for a dedicated schoolhouse, replaced by a second building in 1885. The rural school joined the Delmar Independent School District in 1949, after which the building was converted into a community center.

Sidney, TX

Bibb sprang up when Anglo cotton farmers settled western Comanche County in the 1870s, and by 1891 seven men platted a proper town of 44 lots. At its height in the 1890s it bustled with cotton gins, general stores, a school, four churches, a broom factory, and Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges. As roads improved and rail bypassed it, the population drained away; today no trace of Bibb remains on the ground.

Colleyville, TX

French immigrant Anthlem Bidault brought Old World winemaking to the Texas prairie, hand-building this house from molded concrete blocks between 1905 and 1911. His farm flourished with orchards, berry fields, and a vineyard, and during World War I he opened his home to French soldiers training at nearby Camp Bowie. In 1920 the Bidaults and their unmarried children sailed back to France.

San Antonio, TX

German immigrant August Biesenbach and his wife Louisa began this stucco-over-brick house with Gothic Revival touches in 1880. For decades it passed through owners tied to the Guenther milling family, then in 1955 became the office of architect O'Neil Ford, restorer of La Villita. From here Ford's firm designed San Antonio's Tower of the Americas and buildings for Trinity University over the next quarter century.

Lueders, TX

In the summer of 1898, Baptist young people from Haskell, Albany, Anson and Abilene gathered on the clear fork of the Brazos for a season of recreation and worship, and voted to make the meeting permanent. Over the decades the West Texas Union became the Lueders Baptist Encampment and finally the Big Country Baptist Assembly, its tents and rope swings giving way to bunkhouses, a pool and a dining hall. At its 1925 peak, some 10,000 campers pitched tents along the river for fellowship and Christian instruction.

Comanche, TX

In 1869, Mississippi transplant George William Montgomery bought 480 acres in Comanche County, where he built a log building that served at once as church, school, and gathering place — a school known as "Big Eye," where Montgomery taught, preached, and practiced medicine. The nearby Big Eye Cemetery was established in 1872 and holds five marked graves, a row of unknown crypts, and roughly sixty unmarked burials, including one Civil War veteran. The last known burial came in 1894, and the cemetery is now all that remains of the vanished community.

Crosbyton, TX

The tiny community of Big Four, named for four houses clustered around a single windmill north of Crosbyton, took shape as settler families arrived in the early 1900s. A one-room schoolhouse went up in 1909, replaced by a two-room building in 1916 and joined by a community auditorium in 1936. As one of the last rural schools in Crosby County, it struggled with scarce funds and teachers before closing, after which its building was moved to serve the district's African American students.

Groesbeck, TX

Big Hill Cemetery was established in 1888 in Limestone County, Texas, during the settlement era that followed the Civil War. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery, it served the farming families of the surrounding rural community. Burial grounds like this often outlast the settlements they once served, standing as quiet records of pioneer life.

Longview, TX

When German U-boats began sinking American oil tankers off the East Coast in early 1942, the nation's fuel lifeline was suddenly in peril—most East Coast crude came by sea from Texas fields. In response the government built the Big Inch, a twenty-four-inch pipeline running 1,476 miles from Longview to Illinois and on to eastern refineries, the largest ever attempted. At its wartime peak it moved over 300,000 barrels a day, keeping oil flowing safely to the Allied war effort.

Dallas, TX

Big Spring bubbled up in the White Rock Creek valley for uncounted generations, drawing Native peoples to its waters long before Anglo settlers arrived. John Beeman claimed the site in 1842 as the first family to settle permanently in the county, and in 1843 Sam Houston camped here with his Indian-treaty delegation en route to Bird's Fort. Over the next 160 years the spring passed through three pioneer Dallas families — Beeman, Bryan, and Pemberton — before the city bought it in 2003 for the Great Trinity Forest.

Big Spring, TX

Public education took root in Howard County soon after its 1882 organization, and in 1901 the Big Spring School District rose with a brick 'Central Ward' school for all ten grades. As Permian Basin oil boomed in the late 1920s and Webb Air Force Base later swelled the town, the district grew — building separate schools for African-American and Mexican-American children, then becoming one of the first in Texas to enforce the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation ruling in 1955.

Big Spring, TX

For more than a century, from about 1750 to 1875, the Big Spring was a vital oasis where Comanche paths from across the southern plains braided into a single War Trail running down to San Antonio and into Mexico. War parties watered and rested horses here, moving with families, pack animals, and captives taken in raids on frontier settlements. Comanche power ran high through the Civil War years, and only after most bands were forced onto reservations in 1875 did the old trails pass to settlers, railroad crews, and hunters.

Lefors, TX

For generations, the springs near this spot were a rare oasis on the Texas Panhandle plains, drawing Native peoples and, later, U.S. military expeditions. Captain Randolph B. Marcy camped here in 1852 while searching for the headwaters of the Red River, and the springs figured in the campaigns of Ranald S. MacKenzie and Nelson Miles. Archeology has confirmed that an 1874 clash between troops under Lt. Frank Baldwin and Cheyenne chief Grey Beard occurred nearby, during the Red River War that ended free Native life on the Southern Plains.

Richland Springs, TX

Established in 1859, Big Uncle Cemetery lies in the rolling San Saba County country of central Texas, settled in the years just before the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2000, it marks one of the earliest burial grounds of a frontier farming and ranching district. Its graves record the pioneers who ventured into a still-remote corner of the young state.

Dodd City, TX

In 1854 the Jackson and Biggerstaff families left Missouri and settled adjoining farms in Fannin County, quickly building the twin institutions of frontier community — a schoolhouse on one farm and a family burial ground on the other. The cemetery's first recorded burial came in 1864, and roughly fifty graves accumulated before the last interment in 1935. It remains the resting place of two pioneer clans and their descendants.

Laredo, TX

Chester C. Biggio — a railroad official and Laredo's first fire chief — had this American foursquare home built for his family in 1909. After his death it passed through a succession of the city's families, from the Kowalskis and their six children to the de La Garza sisters, whose names trace the layered Italian, Polish, and Mexican heritage of this border city. The house was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1996.

El Paso, TX

El Paso's military aviation story began around 1913 at Fort Bliss and matured through the 1st Aero Squadron's support of the 1916–17 Punitive Expedition into Mexico. In 1925 the War Department named the field for James B. "Buster" Biggs, a local World War I fighter pilot killed in France in 1918. Expanded into a major World War II bomber training base and later a Strategic Air Command post, it became Biggs Army Airfield in 1966 and has since supported operations including NASA space shuttle ferry flights.

Dallas, TX

Before Dallas had public transit on its west side, Victor Bilbo filled the gap with a fleet of Model T Fords. Beginning in 1915, his jitney line carried nickel-a-ride passengers — packed three deep, some clinging to the running boards — from downtown out to Cement City, Irving, and other fringe communities, and he often ferried people to hospitals and funerals free of charge. New state franchise laws finally replaced his jitneys with buses in 1927.

Farmers Branch, TX

Bill Dodson, a World War I veteran of the Meuse-Argonne, and his wife Maude built this Colonial Revival home in Farmers Branch around 1937, tailored to Maude's own specifications. When Dallas moved in 1946 to annex the community, Dodson and his neighbors organized an incorporation election—and voters made him Farmers Branch's first mayor. The new city council met in this very house while the young municipality hired its first employees and stood up a fire department and water system.

Taylor, TX

Born around 1870 to a former slave and raised in Taylor, Bill Pickett revolutionized the rodeo by inventing "bulldogging," leaping from his horse to wrestle a steer to the ground by its horns. One of the very few Black cowboys on the circuit, he became an international sensation, performing across North America and Europe before a riding accident took his life in 1932. In 1971 he became the first African American inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

Prairie Hill, TX

Tennessee native E. J. Billington settled here with his family in 1854 and in 1890 sold a half-acre for a church and cemetery, with John Sanders the first recorded burial that year. The nearby town named for him once bustled with a school, post office, and several stores. Additional land was added in 1900, and the cemetery — with more than a hundred marked graves — still serves the area even as the community around it has faded.

Andrews, TX

When oil first flowed from the C. E. Ogden No. 1 discovery well in December 1929, Andrews County was a sparse ranching country of about 400 people. By May 25, 1965, the county's billionth barrel of crude rose from one of thousands of wells across nearly 200 oil fields, and Andrews had become one of the nation's top petroleum producers. The transformation brought paved streets, new schools, and a wealth measured in reserves rather than livestock.

Nursery, TX

W. H. "Uncle Billy" Kyle—trail driver, cattleman, and Civil War veteran—built this Texas colonial ranch home in 1872 as the cattle frontier boomed across the South Texas coastal plains. The plain, sturdy house reflects the working life of a man who moved herds up the trails in the great era of the Texas cattle drives. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Fort Worth, TX

Billy Muth, born in Pennsylvania in 1902, was playing church organ by age nine and grew into one of Texas's most celebrated performers, billed nationally as 'the master of the keyboard.' Settling in Fort Worth in 1926, he was organist at Casa Mañana during the 1936 Texas Centennial, played the grand theaters and the Fort Worth symphony, and taught organ and music seminars across the state.

Bleakwood, TX

Settlement of the Biloxi area began in the early 19th century as families moved into Texas from the southern states, and a post office opened in 1849. After the Civil War, many formerly enslaved people established homes here, forming a lasting community. Congregations including Biloxi C.M.E. Church, organized in 1870, and Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church, begun in 1921, along with a cemetery dating to the 1880s, anchored the settlement.

Pilot Grove, TX

Georgia natives Thomas and Pauline Binion moved to Grayson County after the Civil War, buying this 107-acre farm in 1871 and raising four children on it. Their son "Eddie" ran a syrup mill here from around 1900 into the 1940s, crushing sugar cane with mules and cooking molasses over wood fires — later swapping mule and wood for a piston engine and coal as fuel became available. Hard times during the Depression reversed those improvements, and the failing mill was finally dismantled, its iron and steel sold as scrap for World War II.

Alvin, TX

A. J. Birchfield, first editor of the Alvin "Sun," built this twelve-room Victorian house in 1894, and it soon proved its worth: during the catastrophic 1900 coastal hurricane it sheltered more than a hundred people. Passed down through leading local families—the Greers, Carletons, Fingers, and McCowns—the sturdy structure became a fixture of the town. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1972.

Temple, TX

On May 26, 1839, Captain John Bird and a company of just 34 Texas Rangers clashed here with a far larger force of some 240 Native fighters during the Republic of Texas era. Bird was killed in the fight, but his outnumbered command reportedly drove off their opponents. The engagement was one of many bloody frontier skirmishes as Anglo settlement pushed into Central Texas.

Temple, TX

On May 26, 1839, a small Ranger force of 34 men under Captain John Bird clashed with a far larger body of Native warriors near this site during the Republic of Texas's violent frontier era. Bird and several of his men were killed in the fighting, an episode the State of Texas marked in 1936 to honor the fallen. The engagement was one of countless bloody encounters as the young republic pushed its settlement line into Comanche and allied territory.

Streetman, TX

Birdston grew up around the general store V. I. Bird opened in the 1860s, and because cotton ruled the local economy, a gin soon followed. Sited at the halfway point on the Fairfield–Corsicana road, the community gained a post office in 1866, a school by 1867, and a shared church by 1872, while its cemetery began with the grave of a child who fell ill while her family was traveling through. When the railroad bypassed the town in 1909, its businesses and post office faded, though the cemetery endures.

Birdston, TX

Birdston Valley took shape after the Civil War as a community of formerly enslaved people farming the rich bottomlands of Richland Creek. Its cemetery holds burials perhaps as early as the 1850s and many of the settlement's founders, and by the 1870s and 1880s residents had organized the Goodwill Baptist Church under its first pastor, Isom J. Collins. In 1907 they founded a Masonic lodge whose two-story hall also served as the community's schoolhouse.

Haltom City, TX

Organized in late 1853 by five founding members, this Tarrant County congregation went dormant during the turbulent Civil War years of 1856-64 before ten members revived it as the United Baptist Church at Fossil Creek. It took its present name, Birdville Baptist Church, in 1917. The marker records the resilience of a frontier faith community through war and reorganization.

Haltom City, TX

Birdville grew up as one of Tarrant County's earliest settlements, and its community burial ground took shape around the 1852 grave of pioneer Wiley Wilda Potts. Legally set aside for burials before 1860 out of the George Akers Grant, the one-acre plot expanded with later donations, was formally organized under a burial association in 1917, and had gathered hundreds of graves by the mid-twentieth century. Several families here rest four generations deep in a single plot, a quiet record of the people who put down roots on the North Texas frontier.

Haltom City, TX

Just after Birdville became the Tarrant County seat, twelve charter members gathered for this congregation's first worship service in 1852. Reorganizing in 1882, they met in the Birdville school building and in 1900 hosted a revival led by Richard M. Gano, a noted evangelist and former Confederate general. The congregation built a frame church in 1906 and rebuilt in brick after fires in 1950 and 1970.

Nacogdoches, TX

When Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College was funded in 1921, the legislature paid for only one building—the Austin Building, or "Old Main." President Alton W. Birdwell, convinced the young college needed more, arranged its first athletic field in 1923, even before the campus moved to North Street. Over the following decades the college added Aikman Gymnasium, a 3,500-seat multipurpose hall given by philanthropist Frank Aikman, and a Women's Recreation Center built in 1935 with Public Works Administration help, which doubled as a WAAC post exchange during World War II. Memorial Stadium later replaced Birdwell Field, honoring the college's WWII dead.

Henderson, TX

Raised in the early 1840s for Allen Birdwell—a county commissioner and Texas legislator—this hand-hewn log dwelling is a fine surviving example of "saddlebag" architecture, a story-and-a-half double house with squared, morticed corners later boarded over. Its four rooms and exposed-beam ceilings speak to the craft of frontier East Texas building in the days of the young Republic and early statehood. Moved to the Monte Verdi plantation and restored in the mid-1960s, it carries the memory of the region's first political families.

Birome, TX

Founded in 1910 as one of five International and Great Northern Railway stops in southern Hill County, Birome grew up as a shipping point for the surrounding farms. Its unusual name honors Bickham and Jerome Cartwright, descendants of the settler Matthew Cartwright, whose 1856 land patent had taken in the future townsite. The little community shows how the railroad, more than anything, decided where Texas towns would rise.

Lufkin, TX

Allan Shivers was born in Lufkin in 1907 into a pioneer East Texas family, and rose through the state Senate and the lieutenant governorship to become one of the most powerful governors in Texas history. Serving the longest gubernatorial term the state had known, he pressed reforms in state hospitals, special schools, prisons, and highways, and expanded protections for natural resources and historic sites. In private life he became one of Texas's leading businessmen.

Kingston, TX

On a farm near Kingston in 1925, Audie Murphy was born into the hardscrabble life of a Texas sharecropping family. He enlisted in the army on his seventeenth birthday in 1942 and became the most decorated American soldier of World War II, honored with the Medal of Honor and a string of American and European awards for valor. He turned his fame into a Hollywood career, even portraying himself in the film of his memoir "To Hell and Back," before dying in a plane crash in 1971 and being buried at Arlington.

Port Arthur, TX

In a modest frame house at this Port Arthur location, Mildred Ella 'Babe' Didrikson, daughter of Norwegian immigrants, spent the first years of her life before the family moved to Beaumont. Nicknamed for Babe Ruth, she became a basketball star, then won two gold medals in track and field at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, and went on to excel at baseball, tennis, bowling, and above all golf. The Associated Press named her the Woman Athlete of the First Half of the 20th Century, and she won lasting admiration for her courage during a public battle with cancer.

Kaufman, TX

In 1840, when this land still belonged to the Republic of Texas, William P. King led forty pioneers here from Holly Springs, Mississippi, and threw up a stockade for protection. Caddo, Cherokee, Delaware, and Kickapoo peoples moved through the region, and settlers clustered their log cabins inside the fort's walls. As tensions eased the settlement of Kingsboro—later Kaufman—took root, its supplies hauled in on grueling yearly wagon trips from San Antonio.

Bayside, TX

The port town of St. Mary's was thriving in 1881 when Clara Driscoll was born there to a wealthy ranching and banking family descended from Irish revolutionary settlers. Educated in Texas, New York, and France, she returned home with a passion for preservation and joined the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. In 1903 she bought the crumbling Alamo grounds with her own money, earning the title 'Savior of the Alamo,' and went on to write, give the Laguna Gloria estate to the arts, and fund care for needy children.

Denison, TX

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth president of the United States, was born in this Denison house on October 14, 1890, the third son of David and Ida Eisenhower. A 1915 graduate of West Point, he rose to command the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, later served as president of Columbia University, and won the presidency in 1952. The modest frame home marks the beginning of one of the 20th century's most consequential American lives.

Fredericksburg, TX

Carl Basse built this typical early Fredericksburg house in 1866, and the Henke family—who ran a butcher business from its front porch and back yard—expanded it for their twelve children. In a small back room on February 24, 1885, Anna Henke Nimitz gave birth to Chester W. Nimitz. He rose from the U.S. Naval Academy to command the Pacific Fleet after Pearl Harbor, was made Fleet Admiral in 1944, and signed the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945.

Taylor, TX

Dan Moody was born in this Williamson County town and rose fast: law school at sixteen, service in World War I, and a reputation as a reformer who won national attention prosecuting Ku Klux Klan floggers. Elected attorney general and then, at thirty-three, the youngest governor in Texas history, he served 1927–1931 and made his name cleaning up highway contracts and state institutions in an era shadowed by corruption.

Anahuac, TX

Ross Shaw Sterling rose from a Chambers County farm boy to one of Texas's great oil-and-industry figures, building two wells into the Humble Oil & Refining Company and later shaping Houston through real estate and the newspaper that became the Houston Post. As governor from 1931 to 1933 he steered the state through the depths of the Great Depression, pushing agricultural relief and famously placing oil counties under martial law to enforce production limits. He lost his fortune, then rebuilt it, dying in 1949 as head of new enterprises and a noted philanthropist.

Teague, TX

Harvey Means began at eighteen as a shoe-shine boy in a West Texas barber shop and, pressed one day by rowdy cowboys, picked up the shears and launched a fifty-four-year career. Settling in Fort Worth, he became a respected civic leader among Black Texans, helping to establish a hospital and a city park for the Black community and working steadily to improve race relations. He raised ten children, all of whom went on to college.

Brenham, TX

Hedwig Thusnelda Kniker was born in the tiny community of Gay Hill in 1891, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, and went on to earn a University of Texas degree in 1916 in an unusual mix of German, psychology, and geology. She built a career in the oil and geophysical industry from Houston to San Angelo to Chile, working for firms like Texaco and Phillips Petroleum at a time when the science of the earth was almost entirely a man's world. A respected paleontologist and geologist, she remained active as a consultant and writer well after retiring to Seguin in 1950.

Celeste, TX

Mack Harrell was born in this small Hunt County town in 1909 and began as a violinist before discovering the baritone voice that would make his name. After training at Oklahoma City University and the Juilliard School, he sang with the Metropolitan Opera and won international acclaim, then gave much of his later life to teaching — on the Juilliard faculty, at the Aspen Music Festival, and at Southern Methodist University. He died in Dallas in 1960.

Commerce, TX

This marker honors the birthplace of Claire L. Chennault (1890–1958), the Louisiana-born aviator who became one of World War II's most inventive air commanders. Retired from a pioneering flying career, he was recruited in 1937 to help China build an air force against Japanese raids, and by 1941 he had assembled the American Volunteer Group—the legendary "Flying Tigers," their shark-toothed noses mistaken for tiger stripes. His band of pilots studied Japanese tactics so closely that they downed hundreds of enemy planes while losing only a fraction of their own, helping check Japan's invasion of China.

Livingston, TX

Livingston was the birthplace of Margo Jones (1911–1955), a visionary who reshaped American theater. After winning acclaim directing the Broadway premiere of "The Glass Menagerie," she founded in Dallas the nation's first professional resident theater-in-the-round and championed regional theater beyond New York. She premiered dozens of new plays and helped launch the careers of Tennessee Williams and William Inge.