Historic Markers in Texas

Marshall, TX

For years, schooling for Marshall's Black children happened wherever space allowed — in homes, churches, and lodge halls. In 1894 Professor H. B. Pemberton, Sr., persuaded city officials to back a real school and arranged a loan, repaid by the Black community itself, to build "Central School" on this site. It grew to include a high school by 1906, and after Central High moved in 1925 the campus continued as Hillside School until it closed in 1941.

Daingerfield, TX

Chapel Hill College was chartered in 1850 and opened in 1852 in a brick building on land donated by Republic of Texas surveyor Allen Urquhart. Founded by the Marshall Presbytery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church to train ministers, it also taught medicine, law, and the liberal arts. A shortage of students and funds forced it to close in 1869.

Chappell Hill, TX

Founded in 1852 by the Methodist Church as the Chappel Hill Male and Female Institute, this was one of early Texas's pioneering schools. After a separate boys' college opened nearby in 1856, this campus became a school devoted to educating girls, a rare commitment in its era. It served the community until closing in 1912.

Mullin, TX

Chesser Valley took its name from John Dan Chesser, a Missouri native who came to Texas in 1854 and, after serving in the Texas State Troops during the Civil War, homesteaded 160 acres here with his wife Elizabeth. Their expanding log home doubled as church, hospital, and travelers' hotel, and the valley became a gathering place for camp meetings where families came by wagon to worship under a brush tabernacle. A one-teacher school opened in 1868, but after the Chesser house burned in 1926 the little community all but vanished.

Corpus Christi, TX

What began in 1896 as a one-year experiment to teach Corpus Christi's Mexican American children grew into a thriving school, gaining a permanent building in 1901 and later named for benefactor Cheston L. Heath. Under longtime principal Rose Dunne Shaw—who ran a soup kitchen for her pupils during the Depression—it educated generations of students until 1968, when they were integrated into other district schools; the site later became the Nueces County Courthouse.

Lamesa, TX

Around 1887, Chicago lumberman W.C. Bishop and George N. Fletcher founded the OTO (later Bar TO) ranch in Dawson County, and in 1889 a post office opened at its headquarters — named Chicago partly in wry jest at the empty surrounding plains. A village grew up around it, serving nearby spreads like C.C. Slaughter's Long S, until Lamesa won the county-seat contest in 1905. Within days Chicago's homes, businesses, school, and churches had picked up and moved south, and the community vanished.

Del Rio, TX

The Chihuahua Road was a bustling nineteenth-century trade artery linking the silver and gold country of Chihuahua, Mexico, with the Texas port of Indianola. It carried everything from stagecoaches and ox-carts to California-bound Forty-Niners chasing the gold rush. The road's commercial reign lasted until 1877, when the railroad reached San Antonio and rendered the long overland haul obsolete.

Belton, TX

Robert Childers, a pioneer settler and veteran of the 1836 Army of Texas, built the first water-powered mill in Bell County here in 1847. Sold in 1856 to G. W. Shanklin, who was said to have built the best water race in Texas, the site also served as a stage stand on the Old Military Road and a crossing point for cattle bound up the trail. It was a hub where settlement, commerce, and travel converged on the early Texas frontier.

Riverside, TX

Founded in 1838 by James C. De Witt, Cincinnati was once an important shipping point on the Trinity River, part of the network of riverboat landings that moved goods through early Texas. The town flourished only briefly: a devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1853 emptied it, and Cincinnati was abandoned. Today only a marker recalls the vanished river port.

Clifton, TX

R.G. Grant built a water-powered wooden mill on the Bosque River here in 1857, and during the Civil War the building served as a commissary and storehouse for the Confederate Army. Under later owner William Kemp, a new stone mill supplied flour and cornmeal hauled by ox cart to frontier settlements and forts across West Texas, and former governor and U.S. senator Richard Coke once held an interest in it. Rebuilt with a distinctive mansard roof and cupola, the mill later became an electric power plant before it was demolished in 1915.

Bacliff, TX

Established in 1910 by landowners G. C. Perkins and W. Y. Fuqua, Clifton-by-the-Sea was a bayside resort that rose as prosperity returned to Galveston County after the catastrophic 1900 storm. Reached by the rail line along Galveston Bay's western shore, it offered a hotel, summer homes, and a pier-mounted bathhouse and pavilion that hosted dances with Houston and Galveston orchestras. Hurricanes repeatedly wrecked the resort until a 1943 storm ended it for good; after World War II the area became home to petrochemical workers and, in 1948, took the name Bacliff.

Mineola, TX

After moving to the railroad town of Mineola in 1897, Dr. Walter Jackson Coleman was persuaded to open a pharmacy, launching the Coleman Family Drug Store in 1902. He earned his patients' trust with house calls and by accepting food as payment, while his son Charlie mastered patent formulas and won a pharmacist's license. Two more sons ran an adjoining clinic in the 1930s, and the family business served Mineola until 1964.

Beaumont, TX

A crossing near this spot on the old Opelousas Trail carried travelers over the Neches as early as 1750, when Spanish, French, and Anglo explorers, priests, and traders followed Indian traces toward Louisiana. Its greatest era came from the 1820s to 1900, when great cattle herds forded here to bypass the streets of Beaumont. Though many operated it, the ferry took its lasting name from the Collier family, who ran it for fifty years.

Anna, TX

Collin McKinney had already helped draft the Texas Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the Republic of Texas when he settled this area around 1846, buying 640 acres for $500. His family helped build the Mantua Road, organize the town of Mantua, and found a church before he divided his land among his heirs and died in 1861. His house stood until it burned in 1980, and both a county and its seat carry his name.

Columbus, TX

Founded on February 3, 1851, by the local Masonic lodge, the Columbus Female Seminary was the first organized school in Columbus, occupying the first floor of the lodge hall. For many years it taught literary subjects, music, and art to the town's young women. The building was destroyed by the great hurricane of September 1909.

St. Stockton, TX

Fed by water rising along geological faults, Comanche Springs gushed as one of the largest and most reliable oases in arid West Texas, drawing Native peoples since pre-Columbian times. Spanish wanderers — possibly Cabeza de Vaca around 1536 and the Mendoza expedition in 1684 — paused at its waters, as later did Comanche raiders on their war trail, gold seekers bound for California, and the Butterfield Overland Mail. Modern irrigation eventually drew down the aquifer until the springs ran dry.

Commerce, TX

On this ground the Missionary Baptist Church built a sanctuary in 1893, beginning a long chain of congregations that passed through the property over the next seventy years. The Commerce Church of Christ acquired and enlarged the building in the early twentieth century, notable for the many East Texas State Teachers College faculty who served as its elders and preachers. Baptist and later Lutheran congregations owned the site into the 1960s.

Westbrook, TX

Settlers C. P. and Mattie Conaway opened this West Texas community in 1891, and by 1896 a one-room school served nine pupils who wrote on slates and drank from a shared water bucket. As farm families arrived the school grew — a brick building with an auditorium replaced the frame one after a 1929 fire, and enrollment peaked at 115 in 1933-34. Consolidation with Westbrook ended its run, and the building was dismantled in 1947.

Rye, TX

Concord Baptist Church was organized on May 24, 1845, with a small band of charter members in the earliest days of Texas statehood. It sent delegates to the Baptist State Convention founded in 1848 at Anderson, marking its place in the state's organized Baptist life. General Sam Houston, whose mother-in-law Nancy Lea and wife Margaret were among the founders, is recorded as having attended services here.

Liberty Hill, TX

In country first settled in the 1850s, a succession of one-room schools — Clear Creek, then Concord — served the scattered families of the Bear Creek settlement. In 1896 the Elliott family donated land on the creek for a schoolhouse that grew as enrollment climbed to 133 by the 1930s. The school faded in the 1940s as young people left for the war effort.

Lancaster, TX

In 1862, with the Confederacy scrambling to arm itself, a partnership of Dallas-area men set up a small factory here to manufacture pistols for the State of Texas. Frontier Texas had little heavy industry, so improvised arms works like this one were vital to supplying troops far from the Southern manufacturing centers of the East.

Bastrop, TX

In 1862, as the Confederacy scrambled to arm itself, N. B. Tanner established a factory at Bastrop to manufacture guns and bayonets for the war effort. It operated until the Confederacy's collapse in 1865. Such small, improvised arms works reflected the South's chronic struggle to supply its armies.

Lakeside, TX

As Civil War veterans aged into the twentieth century, communities across the South built spaces to honor and care for them. Fort Worth businessman Khleber Van Zandt organized a large United Confederate Veterans camp in 1889, and by 1901 it had chartered a 373-acre park for the "recreation, refuge and relief" of old soldiers and their families. The grounds hosted picnics and statewide reunions for two decades before the dwindling ranks of survivors led the association to dissolve in the 1920s.

Houston, TX

A Buffalo Bayou shipping warehouse on this site was pressed into service during the Civil War as a compound for Union prisoners of war, holding some 350 Federals captured in early 1863 by General John B. Magruder's Confederate forces. Houston was a vital Confederate center, home to training fields, hospitals, foundries, and rail lines, and served as headquarters for the Military District of Texas. The city's several prison compounds were part of that wartime machinery.

Canyon, TX

On land he claimed on Christmas Day of 1887, L. G. Conner dug a half-dugout—a dwelling cut partly into the earth with windows at ground level—that became the first home in what would grow into Canyon, Texas. The little dugout doubled as the town's first post office and hosted the 1889 election that organized Randall County. It was also the birthplace of Mamie Conner, recorded as the first white child born in the county.

Burkburnett, TX

Arkansas natives J. D. and Dora Cooper established a farmstead here around 1900, and in 1910 J. D. persuaded the county to create a school district for the growing community that bore their name. Cooper School opened about 1910, and Cooper Methodist Church, organized in 1913, met in the schoolhouse until a chapel was built a few years later. Both institutions eventually merged with neighbors — the school in the late 1920s and the church in 1947.

San Marcos, TX

Founded in 1868 by educator O. N. Hollingsworth, the Coronal Institute crowned a San Marcos hilltop—hence its name—as a private, coeducational school that also drilled its boys in military training. It changed hands from Rev. R. H. Belvin to the Methodist Church, weathered an 1890 fire that destroyed its limestone hall, and rose again as a handsome three-story building. Hundreds of students passed through before the Methodists closed it in 1918 and the San Marcos district bought the site in 1925.

Rio Grande City, TX

On the eve of the Civil War, the lower Rio Grande Valley was thrown into turmoil by partisan leader Juan Cortina. On December 27, 1859, his band was surprised at daybreak here by U.S. Army troops under Major Heintzelman, joined by Texas Rangers, and scattered in defeat, with Cortina fleeing across the river. Regarrisoning of nearby Ringgold Barracks calmed the border, but raids flared again during and after the war until Cortina's power finally waned.

Cost, TX

The rural community of Cost—once known as Oso—patched together its schooling from scattered district schools until, in 1915, trustees hired noted architect Henry T. Phelps to design a proper schoolhouse. The two-story brick building opened in 1916 to 125 students, and over the years its curriculum grew from the basics to music, homemaking, shop, and athletics. After the district was folded into Gonzales in 1949, the school closed in 1959 and its very bricks were carried off to build a house across the road.

Olney, TX

A lone cottonwood and a dependable spring made this spot a vital oasis on the nineteenth-century Texas frontier, its ground still scarred by wagon ruts. In 1849 Captain Randolph B. Marcy camped here while mapping a road for California gold-seekers, and over the next decade the spring watered soldiers establishing Fort Belknap, surveyors scouting Indian reservations, and the Butterfield Overland Mail. Rangers and cavalry under "Rip" Ford and Earl Van Dorn also staged here before riding north to fight Comanche raiders.

Cottonwood, TX

After the U.S. Army's campaigns of 1874 broke the power of the Plains tribes, settlers rushed into this corner of Callahan County, drawn by game, water, and good ranching and farming land. Cottonwood Springs, founded in 1875 at the head of Green Briar Creek, quickly grew into a trading center with stores, two churches, and a school—though it saw its share of gunfights. When a post office opened in 1883, the name was trimmed simply to Cottonwood.

Mertzon, TX

This site marked a stopping point on the Southern Overland route that carried mail and passengers between St. Louis and San Francisco from 1858 to 1861, the great stagecoach line better known as the Butterfield Overland Mail. The spot was later used as an Army camp called Camp Charlotte. The state of Texas set the marker here in 1936.

Point Comfort, TX

This point on the Texas coast served as an early landing where supplies were unloaded for the interior. During the Texas Revolution, Captain Jack Shackelford's Alabama volunteers, the "Red Rovers," came ashore here on their way to the fighting. A town founded at the site in 1836 was short-lived, burned in an Indian raid in 1840, and the state marked the spot in 1936.

Segovia, TX

Creed Taylor built a two-story native-stone ranch house here in 1869–71, reputed to be the finest home west of San Antonio before fire destroyed it in 1926. Taylor's own life reads like a chronicle of frontier Texas: he fought at Gonzales, Concepción, and the Siege of Bexar in the revolution, rode with Jack Hays's Texas Rangers through the Bandera Pass and Plum Creek fights, and served in the Mexican War of 1846. A rebuilt house on the site burned again in 1956.

Freeport, TX

Thomas Phillip Crosby came from New York in 1830 and built a landing on the Brazos to serve the lower river's plantations, understanding that access to water was the key to commerce. Wounded at the 1832 Battle of Velasco, he returned to run docks, a store, a post office, a ferry, and even a voting precinct. When Stephen F. Austin died in 1836, the steamboat Yellowstone carried his body to Crosby's Landing on its way to burial at Peach Point Plantation.

Huntsville, TX

On this ground stood the first church building in Huntsville, erected soon after trustees bought the land in 1849 for the town's Cumberland Presbyterians. The sanctuary opened its doors to other denominations as well, and it embodied a frontier faith carried across Texas by itinerant preachers such as Sumner Bacon; from here Andrew Jackson McGown published the denomination's newspaper, the Texas Presbyterian. Battered by the Civil War and the deadly 1867 yellow fever epidemic, the congregation disbanded, and the building was later moved and eventually collapsed.

Abilene, TX

Beginning in 1885, Abilene police chief John J. Clinton (1848–1922) fired his revolver into the air each New Year's Eve at midnight—first to signal that saloons must close and that rowdy cowboys and townsmen observe the curfew, and later, once the saloon days had passed, simply as a beloved tradition he kept for thirty-seven years. Irish-born, Clinton had been a Confederate soldier and later an Army scout wounded at "The Fight for the Water Hole," and had policed Dodge City before Abilene.

Weches, TX

Daniel McLean first came to Texas in 1813 with the Gutierrez-Magee expedition and survived the disastrous Battle of the Medina. He returned as a member of Austin's original colony, settling this league in 1821 as the first permanent resident of the area now in Houston County. He and his brother-in-law were killed in a raid in 1837, and he lies buried near this marker.

Laredo, TX

Coal mining along this stretch of the Rio Grande above Laredo reached back to Spanish times, but it boomed after Welsh engineer David Darwin Davis found coal veins in Webb County and became superintendent of the Cannel Coal Company in 1888. The company town—renamed Darwin around 1900—swelled with miners, many from Mexico, and gained stores, restaurants, and boardinghouses during the 1900–1910 boom. As petroleum replaced coal, Darwin declined, and by 1930 it was all but abandoned, leaving a mine dump and cemetery behind.

San Antonio, TX

Built in 1734 for prominent Bexar citizens Geronimo and Javiera Cantu de la Garza, this block-long Spanish colonial compound had limestone walls three feet thick and lush gardens. Generations later, José Antonio de la Garza used its vault to safeguard merchants' valuables and, granted royal permission in 1818, minted the small coins called 'jolas'—making the home likely the first mint in Texas. During the 1835 Siege of Bexar, Ben Milam's troops battled two days to seize the fortress-like compound as their headquarters, and Milam died taking the city.

Dial, TX

From 1840 a log cabin here served as school, church, and community hall, while the Dial family's cotton gin and grist mill drew settlers. By 1880 the community had a post office and an academy that won renown under Confederate veteran and educator Robert W. Lane. Among the later teachers, in 1903–05, was a young Sam Rayburn, who went on to serve nearly half a century in Congress and set a record as Speaker of the House.

Seguin, TX

In 1851 the Jamaica-born land agent Jacob De Cordova settled beside good springs on the San Antonio Road, building a home that doubled as a stage stop and mail station. The land passed through a cluster of German bachelors—earning it names like "Nine Men's House"—before the Dietz brothers gave it their name and Johann Stautzenberger anchored it with a store, post office, and school. A singing society, the Frohsinn Maennerchor, and Friedens Church grew out of the little schoolhouse before consolidation, better roads, and the automobile quietly erased the town.

Weesatche, TX

Prussian immigrants Fredrick and Auguste Wilhelmine Dobsky settled here in 1847, and their descendants built a community around Henry Dobsky's general store—expanded over the years to include a post office, gristmill, blacksmith, saloon, and the area's only telephone exchange. A 1909 dance pavilion made Dobskyville a social hub until a 1942 storm destroyed it. The town declined after the Depression and World War II, its school closing in 1948 and its founding home dismantled in 1969.

South Bend, TX

After repeated failures, the Donnell family completed a dam and mill on the Clear Fork in 1876, and for nearly half a century it ground meal and flour for a vast frontier region. The mill yard became a community gathering place beside a river crossing once traveled by the 2nd U.S. Cavalry under Albert Sidney Johnston and Robert E. Lee. From this hard-won settlement grew Eliasville and a lineage that produced two University of Texas presidents.

Dozier, TX

In 1893 the men of the newly settled Dozier community built a one-room schoolhouse for the children of the surrounding Panhandle farms and ranches, with Seigniora Russell as its first teacher. Like many frontier schools it served triple duty for church and community gatherings and was moved three times before being rebuilt in 1913. The school consolidated with Samnorwood in 1934, and an elementary grade lingered until 1941.

Paradise, TX

First called Tylewater, this Wise County settlement gained the name Draco when it won a post office in 1883 under postmaster W. J. Mann. For a brief while it bustled with two churches, a school, a general store, a blacksmith, a cotton gin, and even a horse-racing track. But when the post office closed in 1889 the community began to wither; the school held on until 1933, and the last building was hauled away in 1937.

Matagorda County, TX

In 1832, when Texas was still Mexican territory, Jane McManus hoped to plant a colony of thrifty European settlers on a Mexican land grant she ultimately never received. A New York congressman's daughter and friend of Stephen F. Austin, she remained devoted to Texas even after her colonial plans collapsed, later living at Eagle Pass and building a career as a journalist and author. She was, the marker notes, the only known woman among the era's empresarios.

Belton vicinity, TX

John Thornton Dulaney left Virginia in 1849 to chase the California gold rush, then settled in Bell County, Texas, where after the Civil War he built a bustling farm complex around a grist mill, cotton gin, store, and blacksmith shop. A tinkerer by nature, he machined his own mill parts and often fed 35 people a day, including his millhands. His enterprise anchored the neighborhood—complete with a church and school he built—until it wound down around 1912.

Mexia, TX

Public schooling for African American children in Mexia began in 1883, and after fire destroyed the first building, this site received a two-story brick schoolhouse in 1915. It was named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, the celebrated Black poet and author from Ohio, and held ten classrooms and an auditorium under principal T. K. Price. A larger school replaced it in 1948 and served until integration in 1968, after which the buildings were eventually demolished—leaving the site as a landmark of the community's educational history.

Bay City, TX

In 1901 this block was a strawberry field and stand of trees just outside Bay City, until the school district bought it for $300 and put up a two-story, eight-room frame schoolhouse. A string of buildings followed on the site over the next half-century, including a 1930 Spanish Colonial Revival high school, and generations of Bay City children passed through — taught by figures like Tenie Holmes, whose decades of teaching earned her a school named in her honor. The last structure came down in 1986.

Belton, TX

In 1850 the widow Sarah Lawler, Tennessee-born and in Texas since 1837, put up a large shed-like building here to board the workmen surveying and building Nolanville—soon renamed Belton—as seat of the newly created Bell County. Amid tents, brush arbors, and log shanties, settlers moved in before the town was even fully laid out. After her husband Eli's death in 1838, Sarah had supported her family by taking in boarders, helping pioneer the county's growth.

Holliday, TX

Northern settlers organized this congregation as the "Wichita Class" in the community of Stringtown, holding services in both German and English by 1888. Renamed "Bowman" in 1893 for Bishop Thomas Bowman, it raised a church in 1897 and moved the building south to this site in 1901. For two decades it hosted annual conferences before merging with a Wichita Falls church in 1932.

Blum, TX

This trail, often called the Chisholm Trail because it fed into that famous route to the north, entered Hill County at Kimball Crossing. Drovers pushing cattle up from South Texas rested and reshod their horses at Towash and Fort Graham before fording the Nolan River into Johnson County. It was one strand in the great web of cattle trails that carried Texas beef to distant railheads.

Commerce, TX

By 1883 Commerce had outgrown the public school opened a decade earlier, so the local Educational Association bought this ground for a new two-story frame schoolhouse that became Commerce High School. Fire took that building in 1898, a brick successor followed, and a third school completed in 1937 was later renamed to honor longtime superintendent A. L. Day.

Tom Bean, TX

Named for two great white outcrops of rock nearby, Whitemound was settled in 1849 when Henry Lackey brought his nine children south from Missouri. A town blossomed around A. S. Lackey's grist mill, complete with a post office, churches, doctors, and the Bosworth Academy. When the Cotton Belt Railroad bypassed the site in 1888, residents drifted away, and Whitemound faded into memory.

Midland, TX

Before 1884, the young town of Midland had to ship its drinking water fifty miles by rail from Monahans — a costly, precarious lifeline on the arid Staked Plains. That year residents dug this well by hand, six feet across and fifty feet deep, and fitted it with a pump and a trough that watered both townspeople and their cattle. For a spell it supplied the entire community, turning a rail-dependent camp into a place that could stand on its own.

Longview, TX

Earpville was settled in the late 1840s by James Earp and his relatives from Alabama, growing along a stagecoach line into a hub with a post office, stage stop, Methodist church, and stores that served the region's farmers. When part of Earp's homesite was sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1870, the new town of Longview rose beside the tracks and Earpville faded away. Its disappearance is a classic case of the railroad choosing a town's fate.

Hemphill, TX

East Mayfield sprang up here in 1912 around a large sawmill built by Hiram Knox of the Knox Lumber Company, and was named for Texas Railroad Commissioner Earle B. Mayfield. Incorporated in 1914, the company town swelled to roughly 1,200 people with homes, businesses, churches, a school, a movie theater, and a hospital. But once the surrounding timber was cut out and the mill burned in 1937, there was nothing to rebuild for, and the town emptied out.

Austin, TX

Edward Mandell House came to Austin in 1885 drawn by the pull of state politics, and he became one of the most influential operators of his era, managing the campaigns of four Texas governors. In 1912 he steered Woodrow Wilson to the Democratic presidential nomination, moving onto the national and world stage. The rambling shingle-style home built for him on this site in 1890 hosted many political meetings before it was sold in 1914 and finally razed in 1967.

McKinney, TX

The Elm Saloon opened around 1883 in a two-story frame building beside McKinney's only railroad passenger depot, taking its name from a large elm near the entrance. According to an 1884 newspaper account, the gunfighter Frank James was arrested over a fight at the saloon, adding a note of frontier notoriety to its history. Rebuilt in stone by the 1890s and known variously as the Rock Front or Old Rock Saloon, it remained a local landmark until it closed in 1902.