Historic Markers in Texas

Cleburne, TX

This reliable spring drew explorers, soldiers of the Confederate Camp Henderson, and early settlers who traveled many miles to wash, haul water, and visit. Enterprising boys "toted" buckets to town merchants at a nickel apiece, and though the brick-lined pool was often dipped dry, the spring always refilled it. It supplied Cleburne until the town's first city well finally tapped the same source.

Edna, TX

Founded in 1834 by Dr. F. F. Wells, a friend of empresario Stephen F. Austin, Texana served as the seat of Jackson County from 1835 to 1883 and cradled the county's first Methodist and Presbyterian churches and Masonic lodge. When the railroad bypassed it, the once-thriving town faded away, leaving only this site to mark where it stood.

Houston, TX

On November 14, 1899, ten organizing members met in the western parlor of the Capitol Hotel — later the Rice Hotel — to found the Lady Washington Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, named for Martha Washington. It was the first DAR chapter in Houston and the fifth in Texas. Its founders went on to help build the city's civic life, from the City Federation of Women's Clubs to the Houston Public School Art League and the Carnegie Library board.

Temple, TX

W. Goodrich Jones came to the prairie town of Temple as a banker in 1888 and, missing the trees of greener country, led planting drives and pushed Texas to establish a statewide Arbor Day in 1889. Asked by the chief U.S. forester to survey the state's woodlands, Jones gathered some twenty allies at Temple's Carnegie Library on November 1, 1914, and founded the Texas Forestry Association. Within a year the group won its first goal—a state forestry department, created by law in 1915—and went on to help restore millions of acres of commercial forest.

Forreston, TX

War of 1812 veteran and Republic of Texas frontier commander Edward H. Tarrant built his home on this Ellis County land in 1845 and raised the county's first mill nearby. A statesman and campaigner against Native peoples, he lived here until his death in August 1858. The State of Texas marked the plantation site in 1936.

Throckmorton, TX

Established in 1854, the Comanche Indian Reserve on the Brazos was a federal experiment to settle Comanche people on farmland under government oversight. Here, in April 1856, Colonel Robert E. Lee — then commanding nearby Camp Cooper — held a peace parley with Chief Catumseh. Within a few years the reserve failed, and its residents were removed to Indian Territory in 1859.

Somerville, TX

Fred Harvey, an English immigrant, launched his famous Santa Fe Railroad dining rooms in 1876, bringing tablecloth elegance to travelers along the western rails. In 1900 a Harvey House opened at Somerville, the Santa Fe's divisional headquarters—a 260-foot, two-story galleried building with a dining room, guest rooms, and a library that quickly became the social center of town. It served travelers and railroad workers until 1940 and was dismantled in 1943, though part of its structure survives in the present depot.

New Boston, TX

Virginia-born jurist Richard Ellis practiced law and served on the bench in Alabama before coming to Texas in 1825. In March 1836 he presided as president of the Convention that declared Texas independent from Mexico, then served in the Congress of the new Republic. He lived out his years at this Bowie County home, dying here in 1846.

Austonio, TX

Before the Civil War the town of Alabama was an important shipping point in Houston County, and it claimed a notable distinction: Trinity College, the county's first institution of higher learning, chartered on January 30, 1841, by the Congress of the Republic of Texas. The town has since faded from the map, leaving only this 1936 state marker to record what once stood here.

Bon Weir, TX

Founded in 1839 in the piney woods of what became Newton County, Belgrade grew into a thriving settlement in the years before the Civil War. Like many East Texas river-country towns of the Republic era, it prospered briefly and then faded, leaving little but its remembered site along the Sabine.

Jasper vicinity, TX

Established by John Bevil, Bevilport was an important river navigation point from 1830 to 1860 and gave its name to the municipality first organized in 1834. It served as a mail station in 1835, was county seat of Jasper County from 1836 to 1837, and was incorporated in 1837. A business and social center on the Angelina River trade, the town thrived until the Civil War.

Bryan, TX

In 1841, a handful of Texas pioneers laid out Boonville on the Brazos frontier and made it the seat of what was first called Navasota County—renamed Brazos the following year. For a quarter century the little town served as the county's civic hub, taking its name from settler Mordecai Boon. Its fortunes collapsed in 1866 when the railroad arrived a few miles away and gave rise to Bryan, which drew away Boonville's people and purpose.

Bayside, TX

Copano took its name from the Native people of this coast and served as an important Texas port from the early 1700s into the 1870s. Colonists bound for the interior came ashore here, and in 1835 it sheltered the winter quarters of the army of the Texas Revolution. The town is gone now, its marker moved from the original site on Copano Bay in 1978.

Liberty, TX

General Sam Houston built a home here in 1843 and lived in it until 1845, and by 1846 a post office had opened to serve the little settlement. The town's fortunes flickered over the following decades, its post office closing and reopening before the community was renamed Ironwood in 1869. By 1900 the post office was shuttered for good, and the town faded from the map.

Lufkin, TX

Once known as Angelina, the town of Homer served as the third seat of Angelina County from 1858 to 1890 before losing that role and fading from the map. Like many nineteenth-century county seats, its fortunes rose and fell with courthouse politics and the routes of new roads and railroads. Today only a marker southeast of Lufkin recalls the vanished town.

Indianola, TX

Founded by German immigrants in 1844 as Karlshaven, Indianola grew into one of Texas's most important ports, its docks funneling goods to and from the interior of Texas and Mexico. Rail links to Victoria arrived by 1860, and the bustling town seemed destined for greatness. Then a devastating hurricane in 1875 killed many residents; the town rebuilt, only to be wiped out entirely by a second storm in 1886.

Huntington vicinity, TX

For a brief four years in the 1850s, Jonesville served as the second county seat of Angelina County in the pine woods of East Texas. County seats were the beating heart of frontier governance, and their locations shifted as populations moved and rivalries flared. When the seat moved on in 1858, Jonesville faded, leaving little but this marker.

Fulton, TX

Founded in 1838 and named for Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, this coastal town on the Aransas Bay was made a port of entry in 1839 during the heady early days of Texan independence. Its fortunes never rose far, and Union troops sacked the settlement in February 1864 during the Civil War. Though it clung to life until 1914, Lamar quietly faded into one of the Gulf Coast's many vanished towns.

Port Lavaca, TX

Around 1831 pioneer Victoria merchant John Joseph Linn located a warehouse on this stretch of the Texas coast, and a small port settlement grew up around it. On August 8, 1840, a massive Comanche raiding party swept down to the Gulf and burned Linnville to the ground, part of the famous Great Raid of 1840. The town was never rebuilt, and the State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Margaret, TX

First called Pease, this settlement was renamed for Margaret Wesley, remembered as the first Anglo-American child born in Hardeman County. From 1884 to 1890 Margaret served as the county's first seat of government before the honor — and much of the town's reason for being — moved elsewhere. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936, during the state's centennial wave of historical markers.

Douglass, TX

John Durst founded Mount Sterling in 1837 near the ruins of an old Spanish mission, building a saw and grist mill and a large warehouse along the Angelina River, where boats moored at its wharves. For a brief moment it promised to be a thriving river town of the young Republic of Texas. But the Córdova Rebellion of 1838—an uprising involving disaffected Tejanos and Native allies against the Republic—unsettled the region, and Durst abandoned the place, leaving Mount Sterling to fade into a ghost town.

Gause, TX

Surveyed in the fall of 1835 as the capital of Sterling C. Robertson's colony, Nashville, Texas, took its name from Nashville, Tennessee, home of many of its settlers. It served as an early seat of justice for the Milam municipality and county and was the first Texas home of George C. Childress, who chaired the committee that drafted the Texas Declaration of Independence. The town has since vanished from the map.

Ballinger, TX

Established in 1880 as Runnels City, this settlement served as the first seat of Runnels County during the early years of West Texas ranching and settlement. When the county government moved to Ballinger in 1888, the town lost its reason for being and faded away.

Trinity County, TX

In the late 1850s, as steamboats and flatboats still carried cotton and goods along East Texas waterways, the town of Sebastopol rose as a busy shipping point in what is now Trinity County. Its name echoed the Russian naval station made famous during the Crimean War, then fresh in the world's headlines. Like many antebellum river landings, Sebastopol thrived only until the railroads arrived and rerouted commerce, leaving the town to fade.

Trinity County, TX

Sumpter was the first county seat of Trinity County, established on land granted in 1850 and formally laid out in November 1855. Incorporated in 1862, the young town served as the county's seat of government until fire destroyed its courthouse and records in 1872. The following year the county seat moved to Trinity, and Sumpter faded from the map. The State of Texas marked the vanished town's site in 1936.

Groveton, TX

Sumpter was the first county seat of Trinity County, laid out on November 20, 1855, on land granted in 1850 and made the seat of government in 1854. Incorporated in 1862, the town lost its courthouse and public records to fire in 1872. The next year the county seat was moved to Trinity, and Sumpter dwindled away. Little but the marker now recalls the once-important town.

Goodrich, TX

Laid out in 1838 with 86 blocks and two public squares, the town of Swartwout was platted along the Trinity River during the days of the Republic of Texas. It honored Samuel Swartwout, a New York speculator and politician who had advanced funds to the Texas government in 1836. A busy steamboat landing before the Civil War, the site kept a ferry crossing running until 1930 before fading away entirely.

Jasper, TX

Zavala grew up on land within the 1829 empresario grant to Lorenzo de Zavala, the Mexican statesman who would later help found the Republic of Texas, and it took his name. Set along a river, the town served as an early boat landing and a mail and stage stop, and it incorporated in 1838. Its post office lasted until the Civil War before the community faded into memory.

Perryton, TX

C. E. Jones opened this trading post in 1874 along the Jones and Plummer Trail, the freight and cattle route running from Dodge City, Kansas, down to Mobeetie in the Texas Panhandle. At first it dealt food and cloth to Native peoples in exchange for hides; as ranching took hold, it became a supply stop for cattlemen hauling goods up from Dodge City. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Pottsboro, TX

Around 1837, on the eve of Texas independence, Holland Coffee opened a trading post here on the Red River to deal with the Indigenous peoples of the region and the western plains. Captives held among the tribes were sometimes ransomed and freed at this spot, and in 1843 the controversial Snively Expedition set out from nearby to raid the Santa Fe trade. The post was abandoned after Coffee's death in 1846.

Rusk, TX

From 1849 a succession of hotels stood on this Rusk site, beginning with the wood-frame Union Hotel, later renamed Bracken House. Its front steps saw Confederate General Joseph L. Hogg—father of future governor James Stephen Hogg—deliver a fiery patriotic speech in 1861, and the notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin was jailed here for two weeks in 1872. In 1889 the old building gave way to the 65-room brick Acme Hotel, which burned in 1905.

Sulphur Springs, TX

During the turbulent Reconstruction years after the Civil War, a gang of outlaws in this area terrorized and murdered Black residents and harassed other citizens. In August 1868, Captain T. M. Tolman led Federal troops here to restore order, moved the county seat to Sulphur Springs, and, after an arson attack, built a fortified stockade that served as quarters, hospital, and jail. The troops withdrew and the post was abandoned in 1870.

Graham, TX

Young County's early history swung with the fortunes of the frontier: organized in 1856 at Belknap, it saw its records flee to Jacksboro amid renewed Indian conflict during the Civil War before being reorganized around Graham in 1874. In 1884 workers quarried native sandstone east of town to raise a two-story courthouse laid out as a Greek cross, built by Swedish-born mason N. J. Rosenquist. Razed in 1932, the building survives only in a single preserved archway rescued during 1936 street work.

Salado, TX

In 1890 Dr. Samuel J. Jones and his wife Charlotte founded Thomas Arnold High School in Salado, a private academy housed in the stone buildings left behind by Salado College. They named it for Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of England's Rugby School, and offered rigorous schooling at a time when public high schools were scarce. After the academy closed in 1913, the buildings served again as Salado College and then a public school until fire destroyed them in 1924.

Walker County, TX

John Richard Thomas left Alabama for Texas in 1854 and carved a 1,060-acre plantation along the Trinity River, raising cotton, corn, and molasses. He built wharves here so steamboats could carry his crops to market, and Thomas' Landing became a busy port of call. The Civil War and Thomas's death in 1863 broke the enterprise, and when the railroad reached Walker County in 1872 the riverboats fell silent; today only the cemetery marks the spot.

Richmond, TX

On April 14, 1836, part of the Mexican Army under General Antonio López de Santa Anna crossed the Brazos River here at Thompson's Ferry as it pursued the Texan forces during the Texas Revolution. Just one week later, that campaign ended in stunning fashion at the Battle of San Jacinto, where the Texans won their independence. The State of Texas placed this marker in 1936 for the revolution's centennial.

Abilene, TX

Known across West Texas as "a city within itself," Thornton's Store grew from a 1919 fruit stand opened by World War I veteran E. L. Thornton into one of Abilene's leading businesses for nearly seven decades. With his brothers he added groceries, dry goods, a drugstore, radio and refrigeration departments, a cafe, and even a Studebaker franchise, until by 1937 the store filled an entire block of Oak Street. Famous for its Christmas displays, it was gutted by Abilene's largest fire in 1959, rebuilt at once, and stayed in business under new owners until 1985.

Three Rivers, TX

In 1922 Charles R. Tips, founder of the town of Three Rivers, opened a glass factory that fed on the region's own resources — local natural gas for power and area-mined quartzose sand for raw material — to turn out milk bottles, beverage containers, and jars for food and cosmetics. At its peak it grossed a million dollars a year before being sold to Ball Glass in 1937 and closed the next year. Its short run proved Texas could compete in the industry, and bottles bearing the Three Rivers cipher are now collectors' prizes.

Thurber, TX

To slake the thirst of the booming company town of Thurber, the Texas and Pacific Coal Company built a 20-acre "Little Lake" in 1891, then a far larger 150-acre "Big Lake" here five years later when the first proved too small. Company president R. D. Hunter turned the Big Lake into a hunting and fishing club for executives, while its water irrigated company farmland and supplied the nearby Thurber Dairy, whose twin silos stood as landmarks for decades.

Thurber, TX

In the coal-and-clay company town of Thurber, general manager W. K. Gordon spotted opportunity in the local shale and convinced Texas and Pacific Coal Company to open a brick plant in 1897. Powered by a Corliss steam engine crews called "Old Hunter," the five-acre works employed some 800 men at its peak. Its bricks paved marquee stretches of Texas—Congress Avenue in Austin, Camp Bowie Boulevard in Fort Worth, and even the Galveston Seawall—before the plant fell silent in 1931.

Thurber, TX

Just southeast of this spot, brothers William and Harvey Johnson sank the first coal mine in the area, tapping seams 65 feet down. After Harvey's death and mounting financial trouble, the operation passed to R. D. Hunter's Texas and Pacific Coal Company, which grew the surrounding company town of Thurber into a fully unionized settlement employing some 2,500 miners of eighteen nationalities. Railroads hungry for fuel made the coal valuable, and a landmark 1903 strike cemented the union's hold.

Socorro, TX

On the old San Elizario road along the Rio Grande valley near Socorro stood a walled hacienda that appears on an 1852 map beside the crossing of the Acequia Madre, the region's ancient mother irrigation ditch. By 1873 part of the building had been torn down, but the surviving rooms housed the store of Juan Carbajal and served as local municipal offices. The site preserves a trace of the Spanish-Mexican settlement that long predated Anglo Texas in the El Paso district.

Sterling City, TX

Cummins grew up around 1890 beside the saddle-and-harness shop of its first permanent settler, Robert Benjamin Cummins. When Sterling County was created in 1891, it and nearby Sterling City became bitter rivals for the county seat, their newspaper editors trading barbs in print. A contested first election ended in a tie after voting boxes were thrown out; a second vote gave Sterling City the seat by 13 votes, and Cummins soon emptied — today nothing remains of the town.

Westbrook, TX

Teacher and merchant D.T. Bozeman founded Cuthbert in 1890 on a main wagon road northwest of Colorado City, naming it for a neighbor and installing his wife as first postmaster. A good well by his general store drew freighters, a school opened in 1893, and in 1898 the county's first rural telephone line ran from Bozeman's home to Colorado City. By 1907 the little town had two stores, a gin, church, school, and trades, but the post office closed in 1959 and Cuthbert faded away.

New Ulm, TX

This site marks the town of New Ulm, first known as Duff's Settlement after James C. Duff, who received the land grant in 1841. German immigrants began arriving after 1845 and renamed the community in honor of the city of Ulm in their homeland. It became one of the many German settlements that reshaped the cultural map of central Texas.

Freeport, TX

Long before Freeport rose nearby, the town of Velasco stood at the mouth of the Brazos River as one of the earliest gateways into Anglo Texas, funneling more than 25,000 settlers into Stephen F. Austin's colonies between 1821 and 1835. In 1832 it became the scene of an early armed clash between colonists and Mexican forces, an ember of the coming Texas Revolution. By the mid-1800s the same coastline had reinvented itself as a breezy resort for wealthy plantation families, before the Civil War and an 1875 hurricane hollowed the town out for good.

Paxton, TX

Founded by Civil War veteran James Jackson Spivey, the town of Spivey grew up around a station on the Houston East & West Texas Railroad built across his land in 1886. A lumber mill, post office, and Baptist church followed, but after 1900 the community drifted over to nearby Paxton Switch, leaving only the Friendship Cemetery and its thirty-three graves to mark the site.

Bertram, TX

Strickling grew up in the 1850s as a rural crossroads on the Central Texas frontier, named for Martha Webster Strickling, who settled here in 1853. As a child she had survived the infamous Webster Massacre near Leander and months of Indian captivity—a harrowing frontier ordeal. With a post office established in 1857, the town became a mail terminal and stage stop where lumber and buffalo hides moved through, supporting a school, churches, a doctor, and stores until the railroad bypassed it in 1882.

Midway, TX

On this bluff above the Trinity River stood the Spanish fort and town of Trinidad, later called Spanish Bluff, established as early as 1805. In October 1812 the Magee-Gutiérrez Expedition—an early filibuster to wrest Texas from Spain—captured the post, and nearby the survivors of the 1813 Battle of Medina were executed. Spanish forces then butchered the town's inhabitants and left it desolate.

Anson, TX

Schooling in this corner of what became Jones County reaches back to the 1870s, before the county was even organized in 1881. The rural community of Truby made up School District No. 14 until it consolidated with Bitter Creek in 1916, when a new building rose on this site. Truby School taught children through the ninth grade, sending older students to Anson for high school, before consolidating with Anson entirely after World War II; the schoolhouse then served as a community center to the century's end.

Joaquin, TX

Also called Willow Grove, this community grew around a store opened around 1840 by pioneer James Truitt, a Republic of Texas congressman and leader in the Regulator-Moderator War. Sitting on an early trade route, the store became a stopping place for settlers moving west out of Louisiana, and churches, schools, and a Masonic lodge soon followed. When the railroad laid its tracks just north through the new town of Joaquin in the mid-1880s, residents and businesses drifted away, leaving a church and cemetery to mark the site.

Corsicana, TX

When oil gushed from a Corsicana water well in 1894, it launched the Texas oil boom, and boomtowns soon sprang up over the rich Powell field to the southeast. Tuckertown, the largest, exploded from a single grocery into a settlement of 3,000 people in tents and shanties within two months of its 1923 founding—a freewheeling mix of roughnecks, businessmen, gamblers, and bootleggers. Fires, the field's rapid depletion, and the end of new drilling emptied it just as fast, and by 1931 most of the town was gone, its site later lost beneath pasture.

Sweetwater, TX

At dawn on April 20, 1945, a C-47 transport carrying 25 Army Air Corps officers and enlisted men left Midland Army Air Field bound for Nashville, Tennessee. Sweetwater cab drivers spotted the plane afire in mid-air, and it disintegrated and crashed 0.6 miles east of this spot, scattering wreckage along a two-mile line and killing all aboard — men aged 20 to 37 from across the nation. Investigators concluded the aircraft, worn from 4,000 hours of glider-towing duty, had broken apart in a thunderstorm's severe turbulence while flying on a single engine.

Blooming Grove, TX

In 1899 the Methodist Church's Corsicana District opened a college preparatory school on this site, and the following year the University Training School began teaching under the Rev. J. W. Adkisson. A junior-college curriculum was added in 1909, and the renamed Central Texas College served students from an ornate three-story Victorian building until it closed in 1912. Though short-lived, the school helped lay the groundwork for public education in Blooming Grove.

Zapata vicinity, TX

Uribeño traces its origin to 1803, when a stretch of the Rio Grande known as Porción 41 was granted to José Nicolás Clemente Gutiérrez de Lara for his service in the Spanish army. Despite Indian raids, drought, and flooding, his family established a ranch, and after Mexico won independence in 1821 the growing community took the family's name, numbering 152 people by 1860 with a cemetery, schoolhouse, and store. In the 1950s the federal government's Falcon Dam flooded Uribeño and four neighboring settlements; only its cemetery was relocated to mark where the town had stood.

Galveston, TX

In January 1847, seven Ursuline nuns arrived from New Orleans at a bishop's request and opened a convent and girls' academy in a former judge's home in Galveston, beginning with twenty-five students. Through hurricanes and repeated yellow fever epidemics the sisters sheltered orphans and, during the Civil War, nursed wounded soldiers from both sides. Later generations knew the towering Gothic academy designed by architect Nicholas Clayton, which stood as a place of refuge in storms until Hurricane Carla forced its end in 1961.

Colorado City, TX

In 1905 nine men of the Lone Wolf Valley agreed to build a community school, naming it Valley View and hiring an eighteen-year-old, Aury Williams, as its first teacher. Neighbors donated the land and raised the one-room schoolhouse by hand, using it as a community center as well. It served the surrounding ranch country until 1942, when consolidation into the Loraine District ended the era of the rural one-room school.

Kamay, TX

Valley View School grew out of two 1897 country schools that merged in 1918, just as the 1918 discovery of the Kemp-Munger-Allen oil field and new irrigation lakes flooded rural Wichita County with families. Enrollment swelled to nearly 600 by the late 1930s, and the district built and rebuilt to keep pace. As farm mechanization and the oil industry's decline thinned the population, the district consolidated with Iowa Park in 1970 and its buildings were eventually dismantled.

Daingerfield vicinity, TX

When Morris County drew up its school districts in 1893, this corner fell within the Valley View District, and the Fomby family donated 3.5 acres for a schoolhouse moved here from nearby Snow Hill. It grew from one room to two as enrollment rose, teaching local children through the eighth grade before they went on to Daingerfield High School. The school closed in 1935 and its district was folded into Daingerfield in 1952.

Hallettsville, TX

Czech immigrants settling this area in the 1850s named their community Velehrad, "Big Castle," after a city in their homeland, and taught their children in Czech in private homes from the very start. Around 1879 they built a one-room schoolhouse on the low ground near a water source and shifted lessons into English, expanding to a two-room school with a stage as the population grew into the early 20th century. Enrollment eventually declined, and the school closed and consolidated, its students absorbed first by Moravia and finally by Hallettsville.