Historic Markers in Texas

Sierra Blanca, TX

In the far-West Texas rail town of Sierra Blanca, settlers organized a Methodist congregation in 1907 — the first Protestant church in Hudspeth County. Services were first held in a schoolhouse until 1909, when the congregation raised a modest adobe sanctuary with Gothic windows and a bell tower. In a sparsely settled corner of the desert, early residents of every faith gathered under its roof.

Silsbee, TX

The Silsbee Ice, Light, and Power Company — absorbed by Gulf States Utilities in 1926 — flourished after moving into this brick building in 1930. A new rail spur of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe let the plant ship ice across the region, making it a major distributor in an age before home refrigeration was common. Designed by D. H. Paulson with Spanish Revival touches like tiled pent roofs, the plant ran until 1981.

Silver, TX

Silver began about 1880 as a pioneer ranching center in Coke County, its earliest landowners running stock and its lone physician, Dr. J. E. Reed, serving the area for half a century. The town took its name from a nearby peak. When oil was discovered in 1946, drilling, refining, and workers' camps transformed the quiet ranch community into a busy oil-and-gas center, until the camps closed in 1966 and the population fell away.

Eola, TX

John A. Loomis of Syracuse, New York, and his brother-in-law Welton B. Ostrander founded this 46,000-acre ranch in 1882, part of the great wave of Eastern and foreign capital that opened West Texas to large-scale ranching. Using rock quarried on the property, German stonemasons raised a distinctive Pennsylvania Dutch-style barn and house in 1883. The enterprise reflects the ambition and outside investment that transformed the Concho country into cattle range.

Azle, TX

The Silver Creek Methodist congregation organized on November 15, 1900, and within a year raised this frame sanctuary on land deeded by farmers Joseph Gillis Steele and Thomas Nelson Clayton. Beyond Sunday worship, the building doubled as a gathering place for the surrounding rural community. Regular services continued here until 1967.

Concan, TX

This rugged pass takes its name from a silver mine the Spanish are said to have opened in the 1700s; the ore proved poor, but fourteen shafts still honeycomb the hills. In the early 1830s James Bowie—later a hero and casualty of the Alamo—built a fortification nearby, and in 1831 his men fought off a daylong Comanche attack. The fight's celebrated hero was Bowie's enslaved companion, remembered as 'Black Jim Bowie,' who braved the open ground to bring water to the besieged.

Silver Valley, TX

The first known grave here belongs to Helen A. Averitt, an early spiritual leader and educator buried in 1881, two decades before the land was formally designated a cemetery. Originally called Robinson's Peak Cemetery, it holds early settlers, veterans of every branch of the U.S. military, and the families of Mexican railroad workers who came to the region in the early 20th century. An association formed in 1958 keeps the still-active grounds.

Victoria, TX

Silvestre De León (1802–1842) was a son of empresario Martín De León, founder of the De León Colony and the city of Victoria. Active in the church and serving as alcalde of Victoria, he was a soldier and Indian fighter who was taken prisoner by the Mexican Army during the Texas War for Independence. He also owned and traded vast herds of horses, mules, and cattle.

San Antonio, TX

The gifted Mexican composer and violinist Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) came to San Antonio in 1926, serving as concertmaster at the Aztec Theatre and teaching at the San Antonio College of Music. While living for a time at this address, he composed his septet 'Batik' and sent it to his friend Carlos Chávez, whose championing brought him wider recognition. In 1928 Chávez drew him back to Mexico City to help lead its symphony orchestra.

Reagan, TX

Silvia King was already a married mother in Morocco when slave traders kidnapped her, carried her to France, and forced her through the Middle Passage to New Orleans. Sold at auction and marched hundreds of miles to a Texas cotton plantation near La Grange, she was placed in a forced marriage and made to cook and weave for her enslaver. In 1937 the WPA's Federal Writers' Project recorded her extensive oral history in Marlin, capturing rare firsthand testimony of slavery and acts of resistance such as the ring shout—she died that same year, reportedly at the astonishing age of 133.

Harleton, TX

This Baptist congregation began in the 1850s near the Upshur County line, first taking the name County Line Baptist Church, and by 1869 counted 58 members under Pastor W. W. Lee. Early in the twentieth century it gathered in the Simmons School House, and when that school consolidated with Harleton, the community remodeled the building into a sanctuary and adopted the name Simmons Hill in 1944. A new sanctuary followed in 1996.

Sweetwater, TX

The cotton-oil magnate and civic leader Robert Mosby Simmons built this Sweetwater home as a modest one-story house in 1919, then hired Dallas architect Anton Korn in 1934–35 to transform it into a two-story Spanish Colonial Revival showpiece. Its barrel-tile roof, bracketed soffits, bow window and classical doorway reflected the prosperity and tastes of West Texas business leaders between the wars.

Denton, TX

Built in 1915 by civic leader James W. Simmons and his wife Susan—granddaughter of Denton County founder Darius Gregg—this Arts and Crafts Mission-style home reflects the era's taste for open plans, stucco walls, and leaded glass. In 1948 it passed to Colonel F.W. Maxwell, a decorated veteran of both World Wars who was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge, and his wife Louise, honored by the American Red Cross for four decades of volunteer service.

Corpus Christi, TX

Simon Gugenheim arrived in Corpus Christi in 1882 with forty dollars and built a fortune, first through the Gugenheim and Cohn drygoods firm and later as a petroleum investor who helped steady the city's economy in the 1890s. Around 1900 he and his wife Lila Belle built this exuberant Victorian house, crowned by a turret that outlasted every other in the city's domestic architecture. The couple's philanthropy included donating land for a local YMCA.

Muldoon, TX

Simon Peter Ford came to Texas in 1830 as a teenager and, at twenty, fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Captain William Wood's company—the decisive 1836 clash that secured Texas independence. He lived on into the 1890s, a link between the revolutionary generation and the settled state. Texas erected his marker in 1962, its Star and Wreath honoring a veteran of the founding fight.

Burkburnett, TX

Tennessee-born Simon Peter Hawkins brought his family to present Wichita County in 1875 in search of good grass, settling along Gilbert Creek in a colony cowboys nicknamed Nesterville. He signed the petition to organize the county, voted in its first election, sat on its first grand jury, and helped found the area's first Baptist church, Masonic lodge, and school. When the railroad shifted settlement to the new town of Burkburnett, the community he helped build moved with it.

San Antonio, TX

This state marker honors Simona Smith Fisk, born in San Antonio in 1829 as a daughter of Erastus "Deaf" Smith, the celebrated scout whose reconnaissance served Sam Houston's army during the Texas Revolution. She married James Nathaniel Fisk and lived until 1890, her grave marked by the State of Texas in 1936. Her life spanned the era of Texas independence, statehood, and the Civil War.

Simonton, TX

The Simonton Common School District formed in 1893, and by 1911 local landowners had deeded ground for a frame schoolhouse. In 1925 the noted Houston architect Louis Glover designed the two-story Art Deco building that stands here, its stuccoed brick façade dressed with porticoes, grouped windows, and ornamental tiles. Classrooms filled the ground floor while an auditorium and stage sat above—a space that doubled as the community's hall for dances, elections, church services, and Depression-era home canning until Lamar Consolidated ISD absorbed the district in 1950.

Quanah, TX

After managing lumberyards in Quanah and Waco, L. Simpson launched his own lumber company and in 1910 built this three-story commercial block to house his offices. Over the decades it sheltered a corner drugstore, other local businesses, and the Elks Lodge on its top floor, its decorative brickwork and corner entry a proud statement of early boomtown prosperity. It remains a landmark of Quanah's architectural heritage.

Palo Pinto County, TX

Simpson Crawford carried a soldier's life west: a Kentucky native, he fought in the Mexican War at Vera Cruz and Mexico City before marrying and moving to Texas in 1852. By 1854 he had settled in the Keechi Valley of Palo Pinto County, part of the Peters Colony land-grant settlement, where he built a home and grew a ranch of some 3,100 acres. He also rode with the Texas Rangers, patrolling a still-dangerous frontier.

Seagraves, TX

When the railroad town of Seagraves was platted in 1917, Alice Jenkins built this two-story lodging as the Hotel Texan. R.P. and Emma Simpson, who first owned it in the early 1920s, bought it back in 1927 and reopened it under their own name. With its stucco exterior and simple detailing, the Simpson Hotel typified the modest hotels that served travelers in early twentieth-century West Texas until it closed in 1974.

Austin, TX

This congregation grew from a Sunday School class organized in 1880 to serve Black residents of far-eastern Austin, taking the name Simpson Mission in honor of Bishop Matthew Simpson — a Methodist leader, abolitionist, and famed orator. Early worship met in a community schoolhouse and then a frame sanctuary before the congregation moved to this site in 1922. For well over a century its missions, service projects, and revivals have shaped Austin's Black community.

Columbus, TX

Friench Simpson came to Colorado County as a young Virginian in the 1860s and rose to become a farmer, banker, Columbus mayor, state senator, and published poet — a portrait of Gilded Age ambition in a small Texas town. In 1882 he built this ornate house, its Italianate and Eastlake milled woodwork and roof cresting advertising the prosperity of the era. After 1916 it passed to physician Dr. C. A. Williamson, whose family kept it until 1968.

Hillsboro, TX

This Hill County house began before 1870 as two rooms with a detached kitchen and grew under Dr. William Thomas Sims, a prominent early Hillsboro dentist and Methodist and civic leader who bought it in 1906. Later it passed to Leroy and Lalia Womack, business and civic figures who purchased it on their 1934 wedding day. It has remained in the family ever since.

Fort Worth, TX

Completed in 1930 at the height of Fort Worth's oil-fueled prosperity, this high-rise was designed by prominent local architect Wiley G. Clarkson for oilman Richard O. Dulaney. It soon took the name of the Sinclair Oil Company, whose offices—and later the headquarters of the billion-dollar Sinclair-Prairie firm—filled its floors. Its Art Deco exterior, rich with zig-zag ornament, Mayan-inspired accents, and terra cotta detailing, captured the confident glamour of the era.

Matagorda, TX

A South Carolinian and a soldier of the War of 1812, Sinclair David Gervais came to Texas with two daughters in 1835, on the eve of the Texas Revolution. Provisional governor Henry Smith named him the first alcalde of the municipality of Mina, later Bastrop, and after moving to Matagorda in 1837 he was appointed the county's second chief justice by President Sam Houston. His career places him among the officeholders who built local government in the earliest days of the Texas Republic.

El Paso, TX

Completed in 1928 for the Singer company, this Spanish Colonial Revival building was designed by the prolific El Paso architect Henry Trost. For more than fifty years its ground floor housed Singer's retail store, while the upper story held a school that trained seamstresses on the company's famous sewing machines. Its corner tower, red tile roof, iron grillwork, and the Singer crest set over an upper window still mark it as a showpiece of 1920s commercial design.

San Marcos, TX

The Sink Springs are part of the artesian spring system that pushes water up through the San Marcos fault to feed the San Marcos River. The land around them once belonged to Republic of Texas figures Thomas Jefferson Chambers and Edward Burleson, and since the late nineteenth century their steady flow has been put to work for homes, farm irrigation, a woolen mill, and a dairy. Their reliable water was central to the growth of San Marcos.

Surfside, TX

The Canadian-owned sidewheel steamer Acadia set out on her maiden voyage in December 1864, running the Federal blockade to carry food, hardware, and clothing to hard-pressed Texans. In heavy fog on February 6, 1865, she grounded in sticky clay just offshore here; her crew and cargo reached the beach safely. When the fog cleared, Union guns shelled the stranded ship, but Confederate cavalry on shore kept the enemy from boarding and burning her, and the wreck became a coastal landmark.

San Saba, TX

Sion Record Bostick lived the whole sweep of early Texas history. As a teenager he was among the party of young Texans who captured the fleeing General Santa Anna after the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He went on to fight Comanches at Plum Creek, serve in the Mexican War, and enlist with Hood's Brigade during the Civil War before becoming a fixture at veterans' reunions.

Groesbeck, TX

Sion Roberts fought in the Texas War for Independence and stood among the victors at San Jacinto, the April 1836 battle that won Texas its freedom from Mexico. The State of Texas placed this marker at his Limestone County resting place in 1962 to honor his service. He was one of the ordinary settlers-turned-soldiers whose ranks made the young republic possible.

Sipe Springs vicinity, TX

Settlers found seeping spring water here about 1870 and built a milling and ginning town whose very name—pronounced 'seep'—stirred spelling disputes from the start. John C. Smith donated five acres for this cemetery in 1873, and residents added a tabernacle in 1890 that still hosts an annual July homecoming. When an oil boom struck in the winter of 1918, sleepy Sipe Springs swelled toward 10,000 people, complete with an opera house and a pro baseball team, before the boom passed.

Sisterdale, TX

Sisterdale sits along the old Pinto Trail, an ancient Native American route linking San Antonio's missions to lands north, at a crossing of the Guadalupe's tributaries. German settlers of the Adelsverein began arriving in the 1840s, and engineer Nicolaus Zink built the first home here in 1847; Ottmar von Behr, who named the village and became its first postmaster, drew the name from nearby Sister Hills. Populated by educated free-thinkers—many refugees of the failed 1848 German revolution—it became one of the Hill Country's 'Latin settlements,' impressing even the traveler Frederick Law Olmsted in 1854.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1871 four Sisters of the Incarnate Word came from Brownsville at a bishop's request and settled into a run-down adobe building in Corpus Christi, quickly opening a convent and school. Recognizing the need for Spanish-speaking instruction, they expanded, earned state accreditation in 1885, and grew to 220 pupils by 1890. Over the following century the order built a network of schools across South Texas, from a junior college to elementary schools.

Melrose, TX

In 1782 the Spanish official Antonio Gil Y'Barbo granted a league of land at El Atascoso to Nacogdoches citizen Miguel de Cordova for a ranch and farming. Straddling El Camino Real between the Mexican border and Louisiana, the rancho was a typical outpost of Spanish Texas and a busy site of trade—both legal and illegal—until it faded in the 1820s and gave way to a small settlement that lingered into the days of the Texas Republic.

Nacogdoches, TX

Before 1800, this spot was known across East Texas as "Old Soledad," the headquarters of William Barr and Samuel Davenport, licensed traders who did business with the region's Native nations. In the Spanish borderlands, such traders were the crucial go-betweens, exchanging manufactured goods for hides and deerskins and knitting frontier economies together. A 1936 state marker fixes the site's place in that vanished world.

West Columbia, TX

Orozimbo was the plantation home of Dr. James Aeneas Phelps, one of the "Old Three Hundred" families of Stephen F. Austin's colony and a surgeon for the Texas Army at San Jacinto. Following that decisive 1836 battle, the captured Mexican general and president Antonio López de Santa Anna was held here as a prisoner from July to November of that year. The site marks where the defeated commander was detained during the fragile first months of Texas independence.

Canton, TX

Approved in 1894, this brick courthouse replaced a plain frame building that had served Van Zandt County since just after the Civil War. Designed by the celebrated San Antonio architect J. Riely Gordon in his signature Richardsonian Romanesque style, it rose on a Greek-cross plan with a soaring six-story tower crowned by a copper eagle. The grand structure stood only into the 1930s before being demolished.

Temple, TX

In 1927 engineer George W. Williams joined Roy Sanderford, George Carroll, and his brother E.K. Williams to form the Texas Aero Corporation, and in 1928 the firm won federal Approved Type Certificate No. 45 to build and sell the Temple Monoplane. Designed chiefly for airmail and equipped for night flight — a genuine innovation for its day — the aircraft showed real promise. But the 1929 stock market crash and Williams's death in a 1930 training accident closed the plant for good.

Leander, TX

In 1836, as the Republic of Texas was born, Texas Rangers under Captain John J. Tumlinson raised a blockhouse here—the first Anglo post in what became Williamson County. It stood only briefly, destroyed by Native raiders in 1837. Its short life captures the precariousness of the earliest frontier defense.

Waxahachie, TX

Erected in 1862 by William Rowen, this Confederate powder mill was part of the South's scramble to manufacture its own munitions after war cut it off from Northern industry. On April 29, 1863, the volatile works blew up, killing Rowen and a man named Joshua G. Phillips. The blast is a stark reminder of the dangers borne by those who supplied the Confederate war effort far from any battlefield.

Anderson, TX

On this spot from 1861 to 1865 stood a Confederate munitions factory, turning out cannon, cannonballs, guns, pistols, swords, sabers, bayonets, and gunpowder for the Southern war effort. Marked by the State of Texas in 1936, it recalls the improvised industrial base the Confederacy raised far from the front lines.

La Grange, TX

Built around 1828 as a fortified place of defense, this twin blockhouse—known as Moore's Fort—took its name from frontiersman John Henry Moore, a noted Indian fighter who commanded the Texans at the Battle of Gonzales in October 1835. The city of La Grange itself was established on Moore's land in 1831.

Abilene, TX

When newspaperman Stoddard Johnston platted the town of Abilene in the early 1880s, he set aside this site for a school. While the first schoolhouse was under construction in the spring of 1881, classes met in a tent pitched between Hickory and Cedar streets, and—as was typical on the frontier—the finished building doubled as a community center and church. By 1884 the growing student body had outgrown it and a new school was built elsewhere.

Lampasas, TX

In 1902 Lampasas businessmen hired a drilling company to hunt for oil on W.B. Abney's land but struck sulphur water instead, prized at the time for its supposed medicinal virtues. Abney and his son turned the flowing well into a swimming pool in 1927, and "Abney's Plunge" became a beloved local attraction until the school district bought the site and converted it to a play area in the 1950s.

Houston, TX

Houston's first permanent Catholic school opened here in 1873, when Mother M. Gabriel Dillon and two Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament came at a local priest's request to teach young girls. Within months they had a three-story building, and a state charter soon empowered the academy to grant diplomas, educating hundreds of pupils a year as Houston grew from a muddy town into a city.

Marfa vicinity, TX

Alamito Creek had been a corridor of human activity since prehistoric times when Spanish explorers first passed through in 1535 and Mexican families began raising rancheros here around 1715 despite Apache pressure. In the 1850s the storied Chihuahua Trail brought freight wagons rumbling past, and by 1870 Alamito was a farming community led by North Carolina pioneer John Davis, who married into the founding Herrera family and served peach brandy to travelers. A railroad reached the site in 1930 and renamed it Plata, but today only ruins of the homes, chapel, school, and canal remain, with wagon ruts still cut into the bedrock.

Kilgore, TX

Before Texas had public schools, private academies filled the gap, and the Alexander Institute — successor to an 1854 Masonic female academy — was among the most respected in East Texas. Named for educator Isaac Alexander, it moved to newly founded Kilgore in 1873 and soon came under the Methodist Episcopal Church, offering studies from primary grades through college and drawing students from across the region. When the school relocated in 1894 it became Lon Morris College, one of the oldest junior colleges in Texas.

Alvarado, TX

In 1854 William Balch gave this site for a shared school, church and union meeting-house, the same year E. M. Heath petitioned to form Johnson County. Residents raised a one-room log building that served as a school and worship space for Baptist, Methodist, Disciples of Christ and Cumberland Presbyterian congregations alike, as well as a hall for county officials and community events. Here settlers debated the creation of Johnson County and the incorporation of Alvarado, and officials kept meeting even after a family home was built on the site in 1871.

Canyon, TX

In the treeless Texas Panhandle of the 1880s, fencing meant barbed wire — the practical version perfected by Illinois inventor Joseph F. Glidden by 1876 and marketed in Texas through agent H. B. Sanborn. In 1881 real-estate investors Jot Gunter and William B. Munson strung a line fence on this site to enclose a 240,000-acre horse pasture, part of a transformation that ranchers resisted, cowboys resented, and merchants welcomed. Barbed wire ended the open range, cut off the old cattle trails, and ultimately saved the industry by allowing controlled breeding and feeding.

Gilmer, TX

Early in the nineteenth century a band of Cherokees established a village on this East Texas ground, part of the tribes that had migrated westward ahead of American expansion. They lived here until 1839, when the Cherokee and their allied peoples were forcibly driven from the young Republic of Texas.

Spur, TX

Behind earthen breastworks at this spot, Major Thomas M. Anderson of the Tenth U.S. Infantry maintained a supply camp during the Army's campaigns on the Southern Plains. From here he provisioned the Fourth U.S. Cavalry under General Ranald S. Mackenzie, whose 1874–1875 operations broke the resistance of the region's Native peoples. Those campaigns forced Indigenous nations onto reservations and opened the plains to Anglo settlement.

Huntsville, TX

Chartered in 1853 and named for Methodist Bishop James Osgood Andrew, Andrew Female College was one of the earliest institutions of higher learning for women in Texas. Founded by the Methodist Church in Huntsville, it educated young women for roughly a quarter century before closing. Only the site remains to mark its work.

Huntsville, TX

Andrew Female College was founded in 1852 and chartered in 1853, sponsored by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, though its charter barred religious tests. At a time of scarce schooling for women, it opened in Huntsville's old "Brick Academy" and soon needed a larger building, teaching a classical curriculum alongside music, drawing, and painting. It survived the Civil War and an 1867 yellow fever epidemic that killed its president and others, but declining enrollment closed it in 1880, after which the property became Huntsville's first public school and later a school for African American children.

Kerrville, TX

In the late 1930s Dr. Edward F. Knipling advanced a daring idea: that the screwworm, a parasite whose larvae destroyed livestock and wildlife, might be wiped out by releasing sterilized male flies to break its chain of reproduction. In 1950–51, at a laboratory moved to the Kerrville area, Dr. R. C. Bushland and D. E. Hopkins sterilized male screwworms using irradiation. The technique worked, leading to the eradication of the screwworm and saving countless domestic and wild animals across the United States.

Rockport, TX

Civic leader and politician John H. Traylor built the sprawling Aransas Hotel across a full city block in 1889, giving the coastal town of Rockport a grand tourist draw. Its three stories held roughly 100 rooms and a dining hall seating 200, and guests enjoyed orchestras, plays, a mounted-bird display, beach facilities, yacht cruises, and surrey tours. Renamed the Del Mar in the 1890s and sold in 1910, it had fallen idle by World War I and burned in 1919.

Arlington, TX

Wealthy rancher and oilman W. T. Waggoner assembled a stable of fine Thoroughbreds and quarter horses in the 1920s and built Arlington Downs, a mile-and-a-quarter track with a 6,000-seat grandstand that drew thousands, celebrities among them. Waggoner and his sons campaigned to legalize pari-mutuel wagering, which Texas permitted only briefly, from 1934 to 1937. After the betting ban returned, the grounds hosted rodeos and other events until the buildings were razed in 1958.

Hillsboro, TX

Named for landowner Albert M. Arnot, this rural school opened in a schoolhouse built on his property in the late 1870s and served the surrounding community for both classes and church gatherings. A two-room building erected in 1915 taught children from an estimated 80 families and hosted stage plays and community events through the 1920s and 1930s. The school merged into the Hillsboro district in 1945, and its building was later moved into town as a residence.

Texas City, TX

As early as 1825, empresario Stephen F. Austin pressed Mexico to develop ports around Galveston Bay to boost foreign trade, and by the 1830s the small village of Austinia had taken shape on his coastal land. After Austin's death in 1836 the property passed to his sister Emily Austin Bryan Perry, and in 1837 George L. Hammeken and partners sought a Republic of Texas charter to run a railroad from Austinia to the Brazos to capture the river valley's trade. The ambitious plans for houses, public buildings, and a rail line never materialized once Hammeken chose a different route, and Austinia faded away.

Mineola, TX

Built in 1906 by builder J. J. McLeod for the attorney Barney B. Hart, this Queen Anne home stood in Mineola nearly unchanged for a century, with its asymmetrical façade, complex roofline, and classically inspired columns. Hart family members lived there until 1982, and the house was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. Soon after that honor, in 2009, the home was destroyed by fire, leaving only the site.