Historic Markers in Texas

Austin, TX

Robert Potter arrived in Texas after a turbulent political career in North Carolina, where he had served in both the state legislature and the U.S. Congress. In 1836 he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and became the first Secretary of the Navy of the Republic of Texas. He died violently in 1842 at the place now known as Potter's Point.

Round Mountain, TX

Robert Price served in the Texas Revolution, detailed to guard the army's baggage at Harrisburg on April 21, 1836—the very day Sam Houston's forces won independence at nearby San Jacinto. He lived on for another six decades, dying in 1900 at the age of 89. His marker preserves the memory of one of the ordinary men whose service secured the young republic.

Canadian, TX

Born in Canadian, Texas, in 1897 in a house built by Sam Houston's son, Robert R. Young rose from a rancher's grandson to one of America's most daring financiers. After making a stock-market fortune and years on Wall Street, he won national fame in a 1954 proxy battle to seize and modernize the New York Central Railroad, backing his fight with Texas oil money from friends Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson. He kept lifelong ties to his hometown, restoring a local cemetery and endowing the University of Texas with rare papers.

Austin, TX

Born in Virginia in 1753, Robert Rankin served as an officer in the Continental Army's Virginia troops from 1776, in the same company as his kinsman John Marshall, the future Chief Justice. He fought at Brandywine, Germantown, and Stony Point and endured the Siege of Charleston. His sons carried the family's service into the War of 1812, one of them killed in the 1813 massacre at Fort Mims in Alabama, before several of them died in Texas.

Houston County, TX

Robert S. Patton reached Texas in December 1834, received a land grant, and became one of Houston County's earliest Anglo settlers, raising thirteen children with his wife Louisa. This family graveyard holds six of those children, a relative whose 1860 grave is the oldest marked here, and the grave of a person the family enslaved. The last burial took place in 1898.

Austin, TX

Robert S. Stanley, a Travis County-born African-American stonemason, built this Austin home for his wife Francis and their children in 1895, and later raised a stone store building on West Mary Street that his second wife Jennie ran as a general store. His skill shows in the house's rusticated limestone construction, two-foot-thick half-basement walls, and longleaf pine framing—craftsmanship sturdy enough to keep the home in his family for over a century. Stanley rests at Austin's Evergreen Cemetery.

Victoria, TX

Robert S. Weisiger became a Victoria County deputy sheriff at nineteen and went on to serve multiple terms as county sheriff between 1906 and 1936. In the early days he rode horseback to carry out his duties, bringing suspects in the area's major crimes to trial. In 1917 he helped quell a riot involving soldiers from Camp Logan.

Brenham, TX

Robert Starke Armistead and his wife Ann came to Texas from Alabama in 1835, and he served in the Republic of Texas army in 1836 and again defending San Antonio during the Vasquez Invasion of 1842. A charter trustee when Baylor University was founded in 1845, he built a large farm near this site, where the family graveyard began at his death in 1866.

Brenham, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1800, Robert Starke Armistead brought his family to Texas in 1835 on the eve of revolution, served in the Republic's army in 1836, and helped defend San Antonio during the 1842 Vasquez raid. A charter trustee of Baylor University in 1845, he built a large farming enterprise in Washington County, where he and his wife are buried nearby.

Comanche, TX

Born into Nashville comfort in 1858 but orphaned by the Civil War's losses, Robert Thomas Hill came to Comanche County in 1874 to work at the 'Comanche Chief' newspaper — and fell in love with geology while studying nearby Round Mountain. He earned honors in the science at Cornell, identified the Cretaceous deposits that made his name, mapped and named the Balcones Escarpment, led the elite Cosmos Club, and studied aquifers across the Southwest and the Americas before his ashes were scattered over the mountain that started it all.

Marshall, TX

Robert W. Loughery, born in 1820, became one of East Texas' most influential newspapermen through his Harrison County papers, above all Marshall's Texas Republican. A fierce partisan, he used his columns to champion slavery, secession, and the Confederacy while lambasting his critics. After the war he wrote across the state, served briefly as U.S. Consul in Acapulco, and died in Marshall in 1894.

Houston, TX

Robert W. Montgomery served in Captain Henry Teal's company of regular soldiers at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive fight that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He died in Houston in June 1837, in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas.

Sterling City, TX

Kentucky-born Robert West Foster arrived in the Sterling County country in 1881 with his brother, part of the wave of ranchers who settled West Texas as the open range gave way to permanent communities. Before rail lines reached the area, Foster drove his cattle the long distance to market in Fort Worth. He put down roots as a founder of the local Methodist church and a bank director, and gave over part of his own ranch land for community use.

San Augustine, TX

Founded in 1872 by the Rev. John Patton in a brush arbor, this congregation first built on land donated by Elisha Roberts before moving to its present site in 1918. Its story is one of remarkable continuity: the Rev. Jim Canton and his son Hubert together held the Roberts pulpit for 58 years, and many member families have stayed faithful across generations.

Jacksboro, TX

As settlers pushed into North Texas in the early 1870s, a small ranching and sharecropping community took root along Roberts Branch, a Trinity River tributary named for a visiting Texas jurist who would soon be governor. The oldest graves here cluster around an unknown cowboy who died on a cattle drive, marked at first only by rough sandstone; the earliest dated stone belongs to an infant from 1881. Tended each spring since the 1890s, the ground also holds more than twenty veterans spanning the Civil War through Vietnam.

Hockley, TX

Abraham Roberts, a member of Stephen F. Austin's Colony, came to Texas in the late 1820s and named his settlement New Kentucky; by the 1840s it had become the German-settled Spring Creek community. His own burial around 1850 is thought to be the first here, and the ground grew into a community cemetery holding the Roberts, Schultz, and Montgomery families. A nearby separate burial ground is believed to have been set aside for enslaved people of the Montgomery plantation, and the graveyard remains in use today.

Miami, TX

Carved from earlier Young and Bexar territories, Roberts County was created in 1876 and organized in 1889 on the sparsely settled Texas Panhandle. It carries a double namesake: John S. Roberts, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and Oran Milo Roberts, who served as governor from 1878 to 1882. Its county seat bounced between Miami and Parnell before Miami secured it permanently in 1898.

Miami, TX

Perched atop a grassy slope above Miami, the Roberts County Courthouse was built in 1913 as oil and ranching fueled the Panhandle's growth. One of six Texas courthouses designed by architect Elmer George Withers, it wears a restrained Beaux Arts style with simple Classical details. For over a century it has served as the governmental and social heart of this rural county.

Sherman, TX

Charles Nathan Roberts left Connecticut for Arkansas, served as a Confederate captain, and by 1876 had settled in booming Sherman, where his hardware trade grew from retail into wholesale prosperity. As his fortune rose he took on civic duties, sitting on the school board and the Austin College board of trustees, while he and his wife Emma helped lead the town's Presbyterian church. In 1897 the couple crowned their success with this exuberant Queen Anne-Eastlake home, all asymmetry, milled woodwork, and contrasting color.

Amarillo, TX

Designed by architect Harold Walsh in 1949 with close input from its owners, this Amarillo home is tied to Margaret Roberts, who studied under the celebrated painter Georgia O'Keeffe during O'Keeffe's years teaching in the Texas Panhandle and went on to earn national recognition. The house reflects the postwar confidence of a mid-century American city and the creative life that flourished within it. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 2016.

Cedar Hill, TX

A North Carolina native, Dr. R. A. Roberts (1837–1906) settled in Cedar Hill in 1859 and, after serving as a Confederate Army surgeon, returned to build a prominent medical practice. He helped bring the Grand Central and Santa Fe rail line through town, tying the community into the growing Texas rail network. In 1884 he built this late-Victorian home, notable for its jig-sawn porch work and stick-style gable brackets.

Austin, TX

In the 1860s the Roberts and Teague families settled the rugged Bee Cave country west of Austin, making their living as farmers, ranchers, cedar choppers, and coal-kiln burners. This cemetery is said to have begun in 1898 when Joseph Roberts offered a plot to a grieving family for an infant's burial. Among the veterans buried here is Alfred R. "Buck" Simpson, remembered as one of the most decorated American soldiers of World War I.

Waco, TX

A block south lie two of the Confederacy's rare father-and-son generals — the only such pair besides Robert E. Lee and his son. Jerome B. Robertson led Hood's famed Texas Brigade from 1862 to 1864 before settling in Waco, where he died in 1890; his son Felix, who served in the Army of Tennessee, followed decades later in 1928. Together their graves knit a single Waco family into the larger drama of the Civil War.

Franklin, TX

Robertson County grew from an 1822 colonization contract held by Sterling Clack Robertson, who recruited settlers from Tennessee and later signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. Created in 1837 and organized in 1838, the county shuffled its seat among a half-dozen towns before settling on Franklin in 1879. During the Civil War it sent five companies into Confederate service and turned its mills toward making cloth, flour, and supplies for soldiers' families.

Franklin, TX

This white limestone courthouse, raised in 1882 for $30,000, was the fourth to serve Robertson County — and it stood in a town that owed both its location and its name to the railroad. When the county seat moved to the International & Great Northern line in 1879, the new town of Morgan had to be renamed Franklin to avoid duplicating an existing Texas post office. Architect F. E. Ruffini drew the plans that same era.

Salado, TX

Built by Col. E. S. C. Robertson and his wife Mary Elizabeth, this rare antebellum plantation complex still includes the home, quarters, cemetery, and stables, and remains a working ranch occupied by later generations of the family. The Classical Revival house shows Palladian influences in its recessed porches and balanced pavilions. The surviving quarters are a reminder that plantations of this era were worked by enslaved labor.

Rosenberg, TX

Fleeing Russia between 1898 and 1910, the Robinowitz family built a new life in Texas the hard way — starting as traveling peddlers before opening stores in Richmond, Beasley, and Rosenberg. As merchants and builders, Cecil, Abe, and Libby Robinowitz put up the early-1920s Avenue G buildings that housed the post office, a dress shop, and a grocery, helping shape downtown Rosenberg during its formative growth.

Azle, TX

When Samuel M. Slover brought his family from Arkansas to Parker County in the mid-1850s, a small community took shape, and a one-room log cabin rose on the Robinson family's land. Over the years it served as a school, a home, and even hay storage before being restored to its original form in 1983. The cabin stands as an example of early frontier craftsmanship and of the one-room schools that first educated the county's settlers.

Strawn vicinity, TX

In 1937 Guy U. Robinson rallied his neighbors to petition for a new common school district — partly in protest of Strawn's high school taxes. Leo Ankenbauer sold two acres, and local craftsmen finished this one-room red brick schoolhouse in time for classes that September, dressing its simple vernacular walls with darker brick at the corners and windows. It served only until 1943, when enrollment dwindled to just two pupils.

Austin, TX

Built in 1876 within the original 1839 town plan Edwin Waller drew for Austin, this two-and-a-half-story farmhouse blends the Second Empire style—its signature mansard roof and dormers—with Italianate detailing. The Robinson family who raised it were closely tied to the prominent Bremonds nearby, and both John Robinson and later owner Joe Macken served the young capital as volunteer fire chief and city alderman. Moved fifty feet in the early 1900s and held by the Macken family until 1983, it later became offices for a Presbyterian children's agency.

Robstown, TX

Completed in 1940 as one of nine New Deal migrant-labor camps in Texas, the Robstown camp housed the workers who picked Nueces County's cotton and vegetables, offering medical care, schooling, and job training. Through wartime labor programs and into county operation it served migrant families until 1968, and in its later years it became a center of Hispanic civil-rights organizing, with the American G.I. Forum building low-income housing on part of the site.

Roby, TX

Roby took shape on land once granted to Texas independence veteran Thomas H. Cosby, first platted in 1885 by D. C. and M. L. Roby of Mississippi. Determined to make their town the seat of Fisher County, the Robys' attorneys donated land for churches, schools, a park, and a cemetery, and offered lots to anyone who would build within ninety days. Roby won the county-seat election in April 1886, holding its first court in a shed and later raising a succession of courthouses.

Roby, TX

When Fisher County was still raw frontier in the 1880s, the brothers D. C. and M. L. Roby bought thousands of acres, platted a townsite, and set aside land—already holding an 1884 grave—as a free public cemetery. For generations it served as the county's principal burial ground, gathering pioneer families, Civil War veterans, and "Aunt" Abbie Alborn, a formerly enslaved woman who reached Texas from Tennessee in 1886. The graveyard grew from seven acres to twenty-one as the community it served took root.

Rochelle vicinity, TX

Cattleman E.E. Willoughby settled near Rochelle in 1883 and, over the following years, donated land for the community's school, church, and — beginning with the 1896 burial plot around his infant son's grave — the Rochelle Cemetery. As the town migrated to follow the Fort Worth & Rio Grande Railroad, the cemetery endured and grew, now holding nearly 500 graves.

Rochelle, TX

Ohio-born J.F. Crew founded Rochelle and, when the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railroad built its Brownwood-to-Brady line in 1902-03, secured its routing through his town. After the first depot burned, this frame structure replaced it around 1912 and was moved in 1956 to serve as a community center.

Texarkana vicinity, TX

The land beneath Rochelle Place was first settled in 1811 and later patented under the Republic of Texas by M. H. Janes. In 1866, just after the Civil War, his son-in-law Charles M. Rochelle built this home, which passed to his son, state legislator William C. Rochelle, and their descendants. Its most telling feature is a fireplace mantel hand-hewn by enslaved people — a quiet record of the labor that built the antebellum and early postwar South.

Wheeler, TX

Raised in 1891 from native stone framed with cottonwood, this barn stood among the earliest in Wheeler County, on the rolling ranch country of the Texas Panhandle. Part of its lumber was salvaged from nearby Fort Elliott, a frontier Army post whose abandonment left useful materials for practical ranchers. Bought by the W. G. Stiles family in 1901, it stored the prairie hay and alfalfa that sustained the working ranch.

Tolar, TX

The Rock Church community took root in the 1850s with pioneer families like the Caraways—Jesse Caraway had been a Tennessee neighbor of Davy Crockett—who let settlers raise a two-story cut-stone building on his land and later deeded ground for a church, school, Masonic lodge, and cemetery. The first burial came in 1873, and roughly 700 graves now fill the ground, including many veterans from the Civil War through a decorated Vietnam soldier. Fraternal-order headstones and yearly reunions still draw descendants back.

Rock Creek, TX

In the 1870s a stagecoach stop on the Fort Worth–Fort Belknap Military Road drew the first settlers to what became the community of Rock Creek in Parker County. The Rock Creek Baptist Church was founded nearby in 1884, and as the congregation relocated the cemetery came into use, its earliest marked grave that of young Bertie Ladd (1885–96). Pioneer settlers and community leaders rest among its graves.

McDade, TX

The Rock Front Saloon opened in 1870 in the rough railroad town of McDade, serving as a stagecoach stand, U.S. post office, and general business house. Like many frontier gathering places, it also witnessed violence, the scene of a revenge gunfight in 1883. Its survival earned it recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1963.

Quitman, TX

Rock Hill Baptist Church was organized in 1870 in a schoolhouse on Coke Road, in the Reconstruction-era settlement of Wood County, before building its first sanctuary in 1892. Its charter members and early pastors are remembered by name, and its congregation held a steady membership of around 170 into the twentieth century. The marker preserves the quiet endurance of a rural East Texas congregation.

Brownsboro, TX

Rock Hill Cemetery grew up alongside a farming community that took root in the East Texas woods in the 1850s, when Alexander J. Clayton brought his family west from Alabama to land that clustered around the Rock Hill Baptist Church. The first burial, a settler's young daughter, dates to 1885, and by 1900 two of Clayton's sons had formally set aside acreage for the graveyard. Its sandstone curbing, Woodmen of the World markers, and enclosed graves record the everyday lives of the farmers, veterans, and community leaders who built this corner of Henderson County.

Carthage, TX

Founded in 1887 as a Baptist church at Grand Bluff, this East Texas congregation moved to the new community of Rock Hill and turned Methodist in the 1890s, served in its early years by circuit-riding preachers. A church building rose in 1912 on land donated by a local family, and the congregation relocated again in 1940. Descendants of its original members still worship among its ranks.

Winters, TX

The two-story native-stone Rock Hotel was completed in 1909, the very year the Abilene and Southern Railway reached Winters, and was built to house the travelers and railroad workers the new line brought to town. Long a local landmark, it marks the burst of growth that a rail connection could touch off.

Liberty Hill, TX

First settled in the late 1840s by Tennessee native Uriah H. Anderson on a Texas land grant, this Williamson County community grew up around a stone building known as the Rock House. By the 1870s it had schools, churches, camp meetings, a general store, a grist mill, a blacksmith, and even a string band; a post office briefly operated under the name Draco, said to mean "favorite place." The school closed in the 1940s and the store in 1960, and today only the Rock House Cemetery and building traces remain.

Port Arthur, TX

Rock Island Baptist Church grew out of a small band of worshippers who broke away in 1911 to form their own congregation in Port Arthur, meeting first in a rented house before building on this site. Beyond Sunday services, the church opened the first kindergarten for African American children in Port Arthur and later hosted a WPA program during the Depression. Through radio, bus, and prison ministries it became a lasting spiritual anchor for the Black community.

Madisonville, TX

Pioneers William and Delina Hollis reached Texas in 1837 and settled the land that took their name, joined in 1860 by Joshua and Martha Ford on adjoining property. Oral history holds that an enslaved infant was buried on the Hollis farm before the Civil War, and the first marked graves date to 1861 and 1868. Each family carved out acreage for a shared community cemetery, later formalized under the Rock Prairie Cemetery Association.

College Station, TX

In 1891 German immigrant Adam Royder gave an acre of Brazos County prairie so local children could be schooled, and a one-room schoolhouse rose where students learned through the seventh grade. Nine years later a Baptist congregation organized inside those same walls, and the little building did double duty as school and sanctuary. When the school consolidated away in 1919, the faithful kept the doors open for worship.

Mineral Wells, TX

When Mineral Wells needed its first public school in 1886, teacher Robert E. Hendry led the effort to build one from the land itself—stones hauled from nearby Rock Creek in mule-drawn wagons and hand-cut on site. The sturdy one-story building, with its flat roof, segmental-arched entry, and enclosed belfry, served generations of students for nearly nine decades until 1972. It remains the oldest surviving school building in town.

Nacogdoches, TX

Land here was deeded for burials in 1853, though graves may date to the 1840s, and for decades the historic Cumberland Presbyterian Church oversaw the ground. Families of the deceased tended it until a cemetery association formed in 1965. Among the interred are Rock Springs pioneers and veterans of conflicts from the Texas War for Independence through the Civil War, resting beneath vertical stones, Masonic markers, and interior fencing.

Peaster, TX

This cemetery holds the pioneers of Rock Springs, a vanished village that once served as a social center for area farmers. Thirty-one graves are marked only with native stones; the earliest identifiable burial, from 1867, is that of Mary L. Sullivan. The last marked grave dates to 1882, the very year nearby Peaster was founded and Rock Springs began to fade.

Valley Mills, TX

The Rev. James B. Sadler, a self-educated former slave, gathered this Black congregation in 1870 and helped organize a separate Black Presbytery in 1876, worshiping in a brush arbor and homes until the present church was built in 1890. The building doubled for a time as a community school, and Sadler and his wife Susan owned the property until 1909. The congregation still tends the church and its cemetery and gathers each November for homecoming.

Gladewater, TX

Raised in 1849 with donated lumber and neighborly labor, the Rock Springs Schoolhouse served East Texas pioneers — many of them Tennessee transplants — for the better part of a century. A single teacher held class here into the 1930s, but the building was really the community's beating heart, doubling as church, Grange hall, lodge, and stage for socials and political rallies. It stands as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Rockett, TX

Growing out of worship services begun around 1853, the Rockett Christian Church was formally organized in 1894 and raised this Carpenter Gothic sanctuary in 1900–01. Its lancet windows, octagonal porch, beaded-board wainscoting, and original pews survive, and the building reopened for services after a quiet stretch in the 1960s.

Biardstown, TX

On the eve of the Civil War's final year, Cumberland Presbyterians gathered in rural Lamar County to found the Rockford church under the Rev. W. W. Havanaugh. The congregation later joined the larger Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., before dissolving in 1958, but its cemetery—opened by the mid-1870s—endured and grew to more than a thousand graves. The burial ground remains the community's lasting mark on the North Texas prairie.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Rockhill Cemetery is the enduring trace of a farming community that took root after the Civil War. Its many small graves reflect the high childhood mortality of the era, with the earliest known burial around 1875. A cemetery committee purchased the ground in 1919, and though the settlement's churches and school faded during the Depression of the 1930s, the burial ground remains.

Collingsworth County, TX

The Rocking Chair Ranch was a grand experiment in absentee ownership: financed by the Scottish Earls of Aberdeen and Tweedmouth, it ran from 1883 to 1893 out of a headquarters called Aberdeen. Beginning with nearly 15,000 cattle, it turned a profit for a few years before faltering, and the town of Wellington was named at the owners' wish to honor a kinsman who died as an aide to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. W. E. Hughes bought the land in 1893, folding it into the Mill Iron Ranch before it was eventually broken into farms and smaller ranches.

Lovelady vicinity, TX

Benjamin Thomas Ellis, born in Alabama in 1825, came to Texas as a boy and by mid-century was farming the land around this site, where his family began burying its dead. Two of the men laid here—John Milliken and Ellis himself—served in the Texas militia during the Confederacy. In 1890 the family deeded the ground to a new Rockland Church, and by 1892 a combined church and school stood before the cemetery, serving as a community center until the school consolidated with Lovelady in the 1940s.

Rockne, TX

Rockne grew from farms broken by German immigrants who reached this Bastrop County creek country beginning in the 1840s, families like the Lehmans and Meuths arriving from Prussia and central Germany. A Catholic parish anchored the community, which cycled through names—Walnut Creek, Lehman, Hilbigville—as stores and post offices came and went. In 1931 schoolchildren renamed it for Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, killed that year in a plane crash.

Rockport, TX

Cattlemen J. M. and T. H. Mathis founded Rockport on the Gulf coast in 1867, and by 1871 it was the seat of newly formed Aransas County. Shipping and fishing drove its early economy until the railroad arrived in 1888 and drew commerce inland, though its shipyards revived to build vessels through both World Wars. In the decades since, the town's mild coast and abundant fishing have made tourism its enduring livelihood.