Historic Markers in Texas

Snyder, TX

The 1948 discovery of the Canyon Reef Formation drew international attention as thousands of wells at 6,500 feet defined a field holding an estimated four billion barrels. The boom brought a flood of contractors, geologists, roughnecks, and $300 million in investment to Scurry County. When engineers realized that competitive drilling would recover only a fraction of the oil, operators pioneered voluntary "unitization" and pressure-injection programs that doubled recovery and set new standards in conservation.

Dallas, TX

Beginning as a buffalo trail, Scyene Road became one of the earliest roads in Dallas County, linking the town of Scyene with Dallas — a full day's wagon journey west — and reaching east toward Jefferson and Shreveport. Settled in the 1840s and 1850s and named for a town in ancient Egypt, Scyene reportedly sheltered outlaws such as Belle Starr and Jesse James along this route in the 1870s. Once a thriving town with a post office, stores, school, and churches, Scyene declined after the Texas & Pacific Railroad bypassed it in 1872.

Jacksonville, TX

Sea Scouting, a branch of the Boy Scouts of America, taught boys seamanship and self-discipline, and in 1936 Jacksonville attorney John C. Box, Jr. organized a local unit that sailed under the name Sea Scouts Ship 400. The group met in one of four red-ironstone buildings raised by the Works Progress Administration — one shaped like the hull and deck of a sailboat, fronted by a small amphitheater — where members learned signaling, knot-tying, and nautical procedure. The ship stayed afloat for fifteen years, through the Depression and World War II, before disbanding in 1951.

Seadrift, TX

Settlement near this spot began in the 1840s when German immigrants landing at Indianola lingered in the area. A post office arrived in 1888, its name drawn from the storm-blown "sea drift" that piled on the shore, and by 1912 A. D. Powers had organized a formal townsite. Within two years Seadrift boasted churches, banks, hotels, and a newspaper, and it survived a punishing 1919 hurricane to remain a coastal resort town.

Seadrift, TX

Seadrift Cemetery was established in 1912 when land promoter A.D. Powers deeded five acres to trustee J.L. Knight for a community burial ground. Among its first interments were infants lost to a measles epidemic in 1912–1913, and the earliest dated adult grave is that of Daisy E. Watkins, who died in 1913. The cemetery holds generations of local leaders and veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, and a 1967 reorganization of its association brought fencing, a water well, and improved care.

Seagoville, TX

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government not only relocated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans but also detained thousands of German, Italian, Japanese, and Latin American "enemy aliens" through the Justice Department and State Department. Originally built in 1941 as a women's reformatory, the Seagoville site was transferred to the immigration service in 1942 and held German and Italian couples and single women, plus Japanese Latin Americans housed in a "colony" of 50 Victory Huts. By 1943 its population peaked at 650 internees before it closed in May 1945 and reverted to a federal prison.

Austin, TX

The Seaholm Power Plant marks a turning point in Austin's growth, when the city harnessed the Colorado River—first dammed for electricity in 1895—to power its future. As a municipally owned generation and distribution system, it made Austin an early example of a city controlling its own utilities. Its striking Art Deco form later became a beloved architectural landmark on the downtown lakefront.

Spring, TX

Seal McDougle Cemetery was established in 1883 in the Spring area of Harris County, a burial ground serving the farming families who settled north of Houston in the late nineteenth century. It was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2005. Like many such grounds, it endures as a quiet record of a rural community as the surrounding countryside gave way to suburban growth.

Sealy, TX

Sealy sprang up in 1879 along the new Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad, taking its name from Galveston businessman and railroad president George Sealy. A depot, roundhouse, turntable, and machine shops made it a busy division point between Galveston and Temple, with the railroad as its chief employer and trains rumbling through daily. When the division point moved to Bellville in 1899, Sealy leaned on cotton, additional rail lines, and diversified business to keep thriving, incorporating in 1949.

Sealy, TX

In 1879 railroad agent George Sealy bought nearly 12,000 acres from the old township of San Felipe de Austin to establish a depot, and the town of Sealy quickly grew up around it. The cemetery recorded its first burial—an infant, Annie Fowlkes—in 1883, and families bought plots from the railroad until the company donated the land to trustees in 1887. A ladies' society organized in 1904 rallied community support, even launching a Christmas bazaar that became a beloved local tradition.

Mason, TX

Work on this striking Mason County house began in 1887 under the Rev. Thomas Broad and was expanded after banker E. M. Reynolds acquired it in 1891, with architect Richard E. Grosse adding ornate stonecutting and woodcarving. In 1919 the property passed to Oscar E. Seaquist, a Swedish immigrant who completed the structure and whose family long occupied it. The house shows off fine craftsmanship and materials, right down to a third-floor ballroom.

Temple, TX

Czech Moravian immigrants, heirs to the centuries-old "Unity of the Brethren" tradition rooted in the teachings of reformer Jan Hus, began settling this part of central Texas in 1881, drawn by both religious freedom and farmland. By 1891 the community had a post office and the name Seaton, and in 1906 residents organized the Seaton Czech Moravian Brethren Church, dedicating their first sanctuary the following year. The congregation grew across the decades, built a larger sanctuary in 1924, and remains a spiritual and cultural anchor for the area's Czech heritage.

Temple vicinity, TX

The Lost Prairie–Seaton community was settled in the 1880s by Czech immigrants and once supported a post office, school, store, and saloon. After Tomas Ondrasek died in 1896, Charles Motl Sr. donated two acres for a community cemetery, and a burial association formed the next year. Among its roughly 1,150 graves are veterans of both World Wars and the Korean conflict, and the cemetery still serves the surrounding community.

Sebastian, TX

Carved from the old San Juan de Carricitos land grant and later part of the vast King Ranch, this South Texas townsite was renamed Sebastian in 1906 for a Rock Island Railroad officer and promoted after 1914 as a coming agricultural center. Its early years also caught the violence of the border troubles, when a bandit raid claimed two members of the Austin family.

Seguin, TX

Built in 1854–56 by Joshua W. Young, this Greek Revival house rose from an early form of concrete called limecrete—unreinforced, load-bearing walls cast from lime, sand, and gravel. Joseph Zorn, Jr., who served as mayor of Seguin from 1890 to 1910, bought the house in 1874, and it stayed in his family until 1961. It stands among the town's many concrete structures as a notable survivor of early concrete technology in the Southwest.

Killeen, TX

Organized at Fort Benning in July 1940 as German panzers overran France, the 2nd Armored Division earned the name 'Hell on Wheels' from General George S. Patton Jr. in 1941. As the first U.S. armored force in combat, it fought from the 1942 North Africa landings through Sicily, Normandy, and the Battle of the Bulge, and provided the honor guard for President Truman at Potsdam. Fort Hood has been its permanent home since 1945.

Pleasanton, TX

In 1891 a small group of African American residents of Pleasanton gathered to organize a Baptist congregation, first named Saint James under founding pastor Reverend James Ellis, and soon bought a half-acre on East Adams Street for a church. The congregation weathered a discouraging setback when its first building was demolished in 1950 and the new one delayed, but a determined core held on, worshiping at a mission church until the new facility was dedicated in 1953 under the name Second Baptist. Today it remains a center of faith, scholarship, and community service.

San Antonio, TX

In 1879, the Rev. Charles Augustis and eleven other formerly enslaved men founded this San Antonio congregation, seeking a fellowship where they could worship as equals despite the lingering weight of slavery. Known first as Macedonia Baptist Church, the congregation baptized members in the nearby San Antonio River and raised an ornate Gothic sanctuary in 1910. Over more than a century it grew into a center of evangelism, education, and community service.

Seguin, TX

When the Civil War ended, freedmen in Seguin sought places to worship and to school their children. On November 16, 1865, the Rev. Leonard Ilsley—a Maine native who stayed to aid the freedmen and helped organize churches across the county—gathered a small group to found the Second Baptist Church of Seguin. Under the Rev. Hiram Wilson, once enslaved himself, the congregation bought its present site in 1874 and built both a sanctuary and a school; members included Buffalo Soldiers and educator William Ball, who helped organize the Abraham Lincoln School.

Waco, TX

On December 7, 1879, twenty-one members of New Hope Baptist Church organized this congregation to serve Black residents in southern Waco during the closing days of Reconstruction, an era when many African Americans were leaving the former slave states in search of new lives. First worshiping in a one-room building on Canal Street, the church weathered financial hardship and a 1922 fire that destroyed its sanctuary. Through every setback it kept growing, sustaining outreach and missionary work as an anchor of the community for more than a century.

Fort Worth, TX

The Wayside School began in 1883 on land donated by W. E. Boswell in the Dozier community, one of the small rural schoolhouses that once dotted Tarrant County. From 1898 to 1948 it stood on this second site through two successive buildings, on ground given by A. W. Moore. Its lineage lives on in the Eagle Mountain-Saginaw district, whose W. E. Boswell High School honors the man who gave the school its first home.

Wharton, TX

Security Bank and Trust Company traces its roots to Wharton National Bank, the town's second bank, founded in 1902. After that institution closed in 1915, it reorganized and reopened in 1916 as Security Bank and Trust, earning a state charter in 1918. Led by local businessmen, the bank became a fixture of community life, helping launch the Wharton County Youth Fair and playing a catalytic role in founding Wharton County Junior College.

Brenham, TX

This handsome Victorian residence — with 18-foot-square rooms, 13-inch plastered brick walls, and a copper roof piping rainwater to a cistern — was built around 1879 by W. E. Seelhorst, a German immigrant known for many of Brenham's fine houses. His nephew Adolph and wife Louisa moved in around 1883, and the Seelhorst family held the home until 1944, when the Lehrmanns bought it. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark and a showcase of German-settler craftsmanship.

Austin, TX

These oaks mark where Gideon White built a home in 1839 on the edge of the Texas frontier, only to be killed in 1842 in the violence between settlers and Native peoples that shadowed early Austin. His daughter Louisa married Edward Seiders in 1846, giving the grove its lasting name. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Stephenville vicinity, TX

First called Garrett Springs for settler J. B. Garrett along Sims Creek, this Erath County community was renamed Selden after John Selden arrived in the mid-1850s. It grew into an important local trade center with a grist mill and cotton gin, a school, post office, lodge hall, and stores serving the surrounding farms. Its story is a reminder of the farming hamlets that once dotted the Texas countryside.

Mineola, TX

The Select Theater was the latest in a line of Mineola entertainment venues reaching back to 1886, named by Mattie Hooks in 1920 for a Texas motion-picture franchise. She and her husband ran it for years, and a 1948 remodel added a sloping floor, elevated stage, and a 24-foot neon tower visible for miles. It anchored the town's Main Street entertainment into the late 20th century.

Amarillo, TX

This 1936 monument honors the Franciscan missionary Fray Juan de Padilla, who accompanied Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's expedition into the Texas Panhandle and Palo Duro Canyon in the 1540s in search of the fabled Quivira. Returning to labor among the Wichita and other Native nations, Padilla was killed in 1544—remembered here as the first Christian martyr in what is now the United States.

Matagorda County, TX

William Selkirk came to Texas from New York in 1822 as one of Stephen F. Austin's original 'Old Three Hundred' colonists, working as a surveyor, serving in the militia, and joining a party sent to treat with the Waco and Tawakoni peoples. His 1824 land grant near the mouth of the Colorado River — among the first the Mexican government issued to Austin's settlers — became known as Selkirk Island, a stretch once cut into islands by river channels and long famed in legend for pirate treasure buried by one of Jean Lafitte's men.

Linwood, TX

When surveyor William Roark brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1834, the frontier was still raw and burials came early — his mother and brother were laid to rest here around 1837. As the Linwood community grew, the half-acre plot became a shared resting ground, and marriage into the Selman family gave it the name it still carries. Generations of settlers expanded and tended the grounds across the 19th century.

Seminole, TX

Founded and named county seat in 1905 when Gaines County organized, Seminole took its name from the nearby Seminole Wells watering places and grew slowly around its first store, post office and 1906 courthouse. The arrival of the Midland & Northwestern Railroad in 1918, followed by highways and oil, transformed the sleepy trading point into a farming and petroleum hub.

Brackettville, TX

Established on the Fort Clark reservation in 1872, this cemetery holds the graves of the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts and their families. Descendants of Seminoles and formerly enslaved people who had come from Florida around 1850 and lived in Mexico and Texas, these scouts served under Lieutenant John L. Bullis and Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie in the frontier campaigns of the 1870s, and four of them earned the Medal of Honor.

Brackettville, TX

For decades the descendants of Africans who had fled slavery for Spanish Florida — where they joined the Seminole people and forged the distinct Black Seminole community — carried their hard-won freedom across the continent. After removal to Indian Territory and a sojourn in Mexico, one group crossed back into Texas in 1870 to serve the U.S. Army as the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts. They made their home at 'the camp' on Fort Clark, building jacal houses and digging irrigation ditches along Las Moras Creek while scouting the border country until their disbandment in 1914.

Del Rio, TX

From 1870 to 1881, roughly a hundred Seminole-Negro Scouts served the U.S. Army along the Texas border at Forts Duncan and Clark and Camp Del Rio. Mostly descendants of runaway slaves who had intermarried with Florida Seminoles before removal to Indian Territory, they were prized for extraordinary tracking skill, courage, and endurance on the trail. Under Lieutenant John L. Bullis they fought for eight years without losing a single scout, and four earned the Medal of Honor.

Corsicana, TX

Built in 1900 of longleaf pine, with leaded plate-glass entry panels and a children's skating rink in the attic, this was the home of James H. Woods, who arrived in Corsicana from Tennessee as a teenager in 1873. He became a lawyer and a fixture of civic life — councilman, mayor, fire commissioner, library director, school trustee — before serving in the Texas House and Senate. His family occupied the house for nearly four decades.

Lometa, TX

Pioneer Reuben S. Senterfitt arrived in the 1860s, and a town bearing his name grew up around him—at its height boasting hotels, mills, stores, saloons, a school, churches, and a stage stop. When the railroad bypassed the town in the 1890s, it withered away, leaving this cemetery as one of its few surviving traces. Among the graves are early settlers and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam, the oldest being three-year-old Joseph C. Howell, who died in 1877.

Menard, TX

Built in 1852 by soldiers of the 8th Infantry, this cypress-and-limestone structure served as an officer-of-the-day station and sentry post along the road toward Fort Concho. It was part of the network of frontier posts—anchored here by nearby Fort McKavett—that the U.S. Army maintained to shield settlers pressing into the Texas Hill Country. The building is a rare survivor of the everyday military architecture that guarded the mid-19th-century frontier.

Serbin, TX

In 1854, some 588 Wends—Slavic Lutherans from what is now eastern Germany—sailed to Texas under the Rev. John Kilian and founded this trilingual settlement, naming it Serbin for their Serbian ancestry. Perched on the Smithville-Houston oxcart road, the town boomed from 1865 to 1890 with stores, tradesmen's shops, doctors, dentists, and a busy trade sending out cotton and hauling in staples. When the railroads passed several miles away around 1890, the little Wendish capital began its slow decline.

Serbin, TX

In 1854, some 600 Wends—a Slavic people from the borderlands of Germany—crossed the Atlantic under the leadership of the Reverend John Kilian and founded Serbin, the first Wendish settlement in Texas. Like so many who came before, they were seeking the freedom to worship as they chose. Their colony became the heart of Wendish culture in America, anchored by the Lutheran faith that had drawn them across the ocean.

Kirvin, TX

The largest of three slave graveyards said to have been established in this part of Freestone County in the early 1850s, this cemetery was named for G. A. Sessions, a prominent local citizen and delegate to Texas's 1875 Constitutional Convention, who donated the land. Its oldest burial is believed to be that of Anderson Carter, who died in the 1850s. Closely tied to the nearby Shiloh Primitive Baptist Church, it holds the graves of many enslaved people and their descendants.

Houston, TX

Built in 1911 by a prominent architectural firm, this Courtlandt Place house was home to civic and Episcopal Church leader Alexander Sessums Cleveland and his wife Virginia. "Sess" Cleveland led the Houston public school board and served as a trustee of the new Rice Institute, helping shape the city's schools in a formative era. The eclectic house blended Classical, Italianate, and Prairie styles and stayed in the family for six decades.

Groesbeck, TX

Born in 1811, Seth H. Bates served as an early Texas Ranger during the struggle for Texas independence, enrolling in Captain Seale's Company in 1835–1836 — a unit raised, as his marker notes, by order of the provisional Council of Texas. He lived on until 1886, his gravestone erected by the State of Texas in 1962. His service placed him among the volunteer fighters who secured the young republic.

Matagorda County, TX

Seth Ingram, born in Vermont in 1790, served as a sergeant in the 11th U.S. Infantry during the War of 1812 before heading to Mexican Texas. As one of Stephen F. Austin's surveyors, he helped lay out San Felipe de Austin, the capital of Austin's colony and the administrative heart of Anglo settlement. He died in 1857, his grave marked in Matagorda County.

Texas City, TX

During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved people founded a community on land that Judge William J. Jones platted for sale to freedmen near the Gulf Coast. Many had been brought to the area by cattlemen, and after the war some stayed on as cowboys for the Butler Ranch while building their own settlement, a church and a school by 1871. Proud of owning land and their freedom, residents called the place "Our Settlement"; it prospered into the early 1900s with an unusually high literacy rate before industry, integration and incorporation into Texas City gradually dispersed it.

Big Spring, TX

When oil was struck on the Settles ranch in 1927, Will and Lillian Settles poured their new fortune into this fifteen-story hotel, which opened in grand style on October 1, 1930. Designed by David Castle, it was for years the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso, with 150 rooms, ballrooms, restaurants, and a private club crowning the top floor. Though the family ran it for only two years, the skyscraper stood as a bold emblem of West Texas oil-boom optimism.

Liberty, TX

The town of Liberty has governed this corner of Texas across seven courthouses and two nations. The first, a building of hewn logs, went up in 1831 when Liberty was a municipality of Mexican Texas; independence in 1836 turned the municipality into a county. From frame structures of split cypress to brick halls lost to fire and condemnation, each courthouse rose and fell until the Cordova-limestone building of 1931, enlarged in 1957, finally endured.

Palestine, TX

Built in 1848 as the home of Judge John B. Mallard, Palestine's first lawyer, this house later became the residence of Judge William Alexander, who served as Chief Justice of Anderson County from 1860 to 1865 and helped found the town's first school. The dwelling has stood since the early days of the county seat and was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Liberty, TX

Benjamin Franklin Hardin arrived in the Atascosito District of Mexican Texas in 1826 and became surveyor of the district in 1834. As a member of the Liberty Volunteers he fought at Concepcion, the Siege of Bexar, and the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that won Texas independence, then built a home on this site in 1839. The place, later known as Seven Pines, stayed in the Hardin family for four generations, and in 1858 the legislature created Hardin County in the family's honor.

Temple, TX

Established in the 1860s along the MKT rail line near Temple, this burial ground has gone by many names but is remembered today as Seven Star Cemetery — a reference to the North Star and the constellation traditions said to have guided people escaping slavery toward freedom. Though fewer than 100 of its roughly 500 graves keep their original markers, those buried here include formerly enslaved people and veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. The local Juneteenth Association tends the site.

Colorado City, TX

The springs once here — now beneath Lake Champion — bubbled up in seven basins so round they looked man-made, earning the name Seven Wells. Fed by the same underground water that supplied Champion Creek, they drew great herds of buffalo whose tracks cut deep into the soft sandstone banks, and at least four trails converged where the creeks met. Native peoples camped at this watering place for centuries, and in the 1880s a small settlement called Artesia briefly rose at the site.

Waco, TX

A group of Waco Baptists formed the Third Street Baptist Church in the summer of 1898 under the Rev. William Bowen, dedicating their first building a year later. Relocating in 1903, they took the name Seventh and James Baptist Church and soon built a larger sanctuary. Its close ties to Baylor University — drawing students and religion professors alike — have long given the congregation a scholarly character.

Jacksboro, TX

Dan Roland Sewell wore many hats in early Jacksboro — teacher, lumberman, rancher, and mayor — and it was during his term that the town got its first waterworks. In 1921 he gave the city a tract on Lost Creek that became Jacksboro's first public park. The gift capped a life of civic service to a young North Texas frontier town.

Port Lavaca, TX

William Henry Barnes enlisted in the Union Army in early 1864, joining the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War. That September he was wounded storming the Confederate works at the Battle of New Market Heights in Virginia—valor that earned him the Medal of Honor. Promoted to sergeant and posted to the Texas border, he died of consumption in 1866 and was ultimately reinterred in the San Antonio National Cemetery.

Albany, TX

Created in 1858 on land roamed by nomadic Indian tribes, Shackelford County took its name from a physician of the Texas Revolution. Its first Anglo settlers arrived on the eve of the Civil War, sheltering during the fighting in 'family forts' until the U.S. Army built Fort Griffin in 1867. The rough town of Griffin that grew around the post drew buffalo hunters and trail drivers on the Western Cattle Trail before the railroad arrived in 1881 and, later, an oil boom transformed the county's economy.

Albany, TX

Created in 1858 and organized in 1874, Shackelford County was named for Dr. Jack Shackelford, captain of the 'Red Rovers,' an Alabama company that joined Fannin's command in the Texas Revolution. Shackelford was among the few spared in the Goliad Massacre of 1836. Albany serves as the county seat.

Albany, TX

Completed in 1883–84 to designs by Dallas architect J. E. Flanders, this courthouse rose from local stone quarried just outside town and laid up by kilted Scottish masons, its foundations sunk into the caliche hardpan. Budgeted at $27,000, it ended up costing nearly $50,000, and a clock tower was added at the public's request. It has anchored the county seat of Albany ever since.

Albany, TX

Built in 1877–78 by the Fort Worth firm of Thomas & Woerner with ironwork shipped from St. Louis, this native limestone jail served frontier Shackelford County when Albany was a raw cattle town. The masons' initials still cut into the blocks are a rare record of stonemasons claiming payment for their labor. Among its early inmates was John Selman, who years later would gun down the infamous John Wesley Hardin in El Paso. Superseded by a new jail in 1929, the building later safeguarded the archives of playwright Robert Nail.

Lampasas, TX

This house was raised during the Civil War era by Shadrick T. Denson, who served in Forney's Brigade of the Confederate Army. He later became sheriff of Lampasas County from 1870 to 1874, a lawman's post in a hard-fought frontier county wracked by deadly feuds, and he died from a wound suffered in the line of duty.

DeBerry, TX

Shady Grove Baptist Church was serving the rural residents of northeast Panola County by 1880, with the Rev. J. R. Alexander leading the congregation for nearly three decades. Its original one-room wooden building did double duty as church and school before a brick facility replaced it in 1954, and the adjacent cemetery holds burials dating to 1892. The church remained a fixture of country community life.

Center, TX

Shady Grove Cemetery began in September 1878 with the burial of Anna Sparks Ramsey, laid to rest here when impassable roads kept her from the family plot at nearby Bobo. Within a year, landowners deeded two acres for a shared burial ground, school, and Methodist church, whose sanctuary later moved beneath the oaks near a spring after fire. Generations of families — the Cammacks, Bakers, Ramseys, and others — have fenced and tended it, and its headstones record the veterans, farmers, teachers, and preachers of the community.

Winnsboro, TX

One of the oldest burial grounds in Wood County, Shady Grove served the pioneer community of the same name, whose leading settler Reuben Elledge arrived around 1845 and helped organize the county as a commissioner and judge. In 1850 he donated land for a school and Methodist church, and an acre was later set aside for this cemetery, where young Bobby Scoggins—drowned in 1855—may be the earliest burial. Rock cairns, obelisks, Woodmen of the World stones, and graves of Civil War veterans mark the site of early settlement.