Historic Markers in Texas

Eldorado, TX

Verand, the first town in Schleicher County, sprang up around 1890 near the Vermont Ranch headquarters, platted into 86 lots with a stagecoach station, post office, store, hotel, and homes for a few dozen families. But settlers could not secure clear title to their land, and when Eldorado's founder offered free lots five miles south in 1895, the whole town simply picked up and moved. The abandoned site soon returned to open range.

Victoria, TX

Soon after founding Victoria in October 1824, empresario Martín de León erected the town's first church, served in its early years by Catholic priests during the Mexican colonial period of Texas. Restored in 1840 by John Mary Odin, the first Catholic bishop of Texas, the building was moved in 1850 to the site where Nazareth Convent later stood. The marker recalls the religious roots of one of Texas's oldest towns.

Bryan, TX

The Ursuline Sisters — a teaching and nursing order active in North America since seventeenth-century Quebec — opened Villa Maria Ursuline Academy on this Bryan hill in 1901, choosing the inland town partly for refuge after the devastating 1900 Galveston hurricane. Girls studied academics, music, and sports and worked a large farm, while the sisters also taught at nearby St. Joseph's. Burdened by debt and low enrollment, the academy closed in 1929, and its bricks were later reused to build a private home.

Langtry, TX

In 1882 the Southern Pacific faced its last great barrier—the Pecos River canyon—on the transcontinental line linking New Orleans and San Francisco. Beside the excavation of Tunnel No. 2 rose Vinegarroon, a rough camp named for a local scorpion and home to thousands of mostly Chinese laborers. Roy Bean ran a saloon and served as justice of the peace here until the rails were joined in 1883 and the camp was abandoned.

Maple, TX

In 1908, promoters carved the paper town of Virginia City out of the Texas High Plains and sold it as a coming metropolis, luring buyers with staged tours past shops, a courthouse lot, and a graded railroad bed. Named for the wife of an early landowner, the scheme collapsed when the promised rains never came and a ruinous drought settled over the region from 1909 to 1912. A local cowboy had already quipped that the town's biggest crop was 'suckers,' and within a few years the disappointed settlers moved on, leaving nothing but empty ground.

Houston County, TX

Westward-moving pioneers settled here after the Civil War, drawn by good farmland, timber, and water, and named their community High Prairie before it became Volga in 1897 with the opening of a post office in Samuel Knox's store. At its peak the town held homes, stores, a cotton gin, sawmill, school, and church. It began to fade after the post office closed in 1917, a decline hastened as young men left for World War I and the influenza epidemic swept through.

Waco, TX

On a January day in 1890 fifty prominent Wacoans met at the county courthouse to charter a boating and fishing club, buying fifty acres west of town and damming a stream into a lake they christened Fountain Lake. With an artesian well, stocked fish, and a boat house, the retreat became a fashionable social resort, soon better known as the 'Fish Pond Club' — a name that spread to the road and the whole surrounding area. A country club bought the land in 1985, the club dissolved in 1988, and the old pond eventually gave way to a residential subdivision.

Waco, TX

Here once stood a village of the Waco people, who made a treaty with empresario Stephen F. Austin in 1824 during the years of Mexican Texas. Pressed by conflict with other tribes, they gradually dispersed by the late 1830s, and when George B. Erath laid out a new town in 1849 it took their name. A 2014 addition corrected the original 1936 centennial marker, noting that it was the Cherokees, not the Comanches, who had besieged them.

Canyon, TX

From about 1890 to 1921 this Canyon wagon yard was the working headquarters for ranchmen come to town, who slept in their bedrolls or a room above the office and cooked over a campfire in the yard. It cost a dime to stable a horse and fifty cents for a man; feed and coal were for sale, water was free, and hands were hired and horses doctored on the spot.

Cleburne, TX

In 1855 the newly organized Johnson County chose Wardville as its first seat of government, on land donated by settler William O'Neal, and named it for Thomas William Ward, a Republic of Texas soldier and land commissioner. O'Neal built a tiny 16-foot log courthouse for just $49. When officials realized the town violated a constitutional rule requiring the county seat to sit within five miles of the county's center, Wardville was abandoned in 1856 — only for later boundary changes to place it near the very center after all.

Claude, TX

In 1909 civic leaders Dr. William A. Warner and Phebe K. Warner built a two-story hub at the heart of the young Panhandle town of Claude. Designed by an Amarillo architectural firm, the Warner Building packed in a doctor's office, the Gate City Drugstore, a barber shop, the Claude News, a public reading room, a lodge hall, and even public rest rooms. A fire destroyed it in 1915, but the Warners simply reopened their drugstore elsewhere.

Greenville, TX

Founded in 1905 by the North Texas Conference of the Methodist Church as a coeducational training school in Terrell, the institution rose to junior-college status in 1909 and moved to Greenville in 1912 with local support. Emphasizing the liberal arts and led by a long line of Methodist ministers and educators, Wesley College schooled thousands of students before closing in 1938. Its alumni raised this marker to the campus they remembered.

Wesley, TX

Wesley took its name from the Czech immigrants who settled here in 1859 and built an early Czech community, where Professor Josef Masik first tutored children in his home. Schooling moved from a reading-club building to the Wesley Brethren Church and through a succession of larger structures as the farming community grew, reaching this site in 1911. Rural decline emptied the classrooms, and the school merged with Brenham in 1961; its last building burned a year later.

San Augustine, TX

Established in 1842 and incorporated by the Methodist Church in 1844, Wesleyan College honored John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. It flourished briefly on the East Texas frontier before merging in 1847 with the University of San Augustine to form the short-lived University of East Texas. The state of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Portland, TX

After the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad reached this area in the 1880s, a 1908 land deal handed 14,000 acres to an Iowa promoter who mounted a huge advertising campaign, drawing trainloads of prospective buyers—mostly from Kansas—to settle West Portland. Mexican migrant workers cleared the mesquite and farmers worked the rich black soil, building a school that doubled as a community center and, in 1922, a cooperative cotton gin that became the heart of the district. The school consolidated with Taft in 1939, but descendants of the original settlers still own much of the land.

Westbrook, TX

When Westbrook was still just a flag-stop on the Texas & Pacific line, settlers in 1890 built a single tiny, one-room structure to serve as both school and church. Pupils recited lessons from memory on a long "recitation bench," while on Sundays the Westbrook Baptist Church — organized that same year — held services and all-day gatherings that doubled as social occasions for scattered families. As the town grew, a separate church rose in 1902 and a two-story schoolhouse in 1905, and the old building was sold off as a barn.

Abilene, TX

From 1876 to 1887 the Western Cattle Trail—also called the Dodge City or Fort Griffin Trail—carried several hundred thousand longhorns north out of South Texas to stock northern ranches, supply Indian reservations, and feed distant beef markets. This branch skirted the western edge of Abilene before turning toward Fort Griffin, where feeder trails converged. The great drives ended when barbed-wire fences closed the open range and the Texas & Pacific Railway made the long walk obsolete.

Crockett, TX

The Wheeler Springs community took shape around a school begun on land donated in 1905 by French Taylor, formally designated Common School District No. 76 in 1906. Millie Denby and Lula Dailey were its first teachers, and over the years added buildings served as a canning kitchen, cafeteria, and space for meetings and quilting. Students shifted to an area high school in 1948, and the county razed the 1925 schoolhouse in 1959 after consolidation.

Portland, TX

On September 13–14, 1919, a massive hurricane with winds up to 110 miles per hour and 16-foot tides destroyed the resort buildings of Corpus Christi's North Beach, and within days bodies and oil-soaked debris washed ashore at White Point. Rescue crews weighed the broken, often unidentifiable remains on a cotton scale and buried them in mass graves dug with slip scrapers along Nueces Bay. Though the official toll was 284, estimates including those lost at sea reach nearly a thousand, and the dead were later reinterred elsewhere.

Iowa Park, TX

Wichita County's first oil refinery rose here at Iowa Park in 1914 and grew fast, running dozens of tank cars and miles of pipeline and processing 2,500 barrels of crude a day by 1918 before changing hands and closing about 1926. In 1928 the county fair moved to this same site, blossoming into the six-day Texas-Oklahoma Fair and Southwest Oil Exposition that celebrated the region's farms, livestock, and booming petroleum trade until it closed in 1962. The grounds later became a retail center.

Forest, TX

Wildhurst was one of many East Texas sawmill towns, founded by the Chronister Lumber Company in 1895 with sawmills, mill ponds, drying kilns, a commissary, and a logging tram. At its peak in 1918 it cut 75,000 board feet of yellow pine a day, and by the 1920s some 400 people lived there—records show about three-quarters of the workforce was African American, housed in segregated sections with their own schools and churches. Labor shortages during World War II and dwindling timber ended operations by December 1944.

Edna, TX

Here stood the first cotton gin in Jackson County, and here, on July 17, 1835, colonists gathered for the "Lavaca-Navidad Meeting." Chaired by James Kerr, the assembly adopted resolutions protesting the Mexican government's treatment of Texas settlers. The gathering was among the first formal public protests that foreshadowed the Texas Declaration of Independence the following March.

Willis, TX

In the decades after the Civil War, Montgomery County farmers discovered their soil and climate were superb for tobacco, and the leaf grown around Willis earned prizes as far away as Chicago and Paris. At its peak the small town supported eight cigar-making operations, an unlikely industrial boom for rural East Texas. The Willis Cigar Factory on this spot was one of them, run by Kentucky-born Civil War veteran and former sheriff Capt. Thomas Wesley Smith until the trade faded in the early 1900s.

Manor, TX

In 1894 the Travis County landowner Peter Carr Wells gave a plot of his ranch to the Willow Ranch School District, and four years later a schoolhouse opened on this site. Most of its pupils were the children of Swedish immigrant farmers, some of whom sharecropped the Wells land, and they studied not only basic skills but Texas history, geography, and art. A second room was added in 1906 for classes and community gatherings before the school closed in 1938 and its students moved to Kimbro.

McKinney, TX

When J.B. and Nancy Wilmeth staked out 320 acres of untouched Collin County prairie in 1846, Texas had been a U.S. state for less than a year and the frontier was still raw. Their two-story home became a hub of pioneer life—a place of worship for the First Christian Church congregation J.B. organized, and a free school he and his children taught for nearly four decades. J.B. helped choose the county seat and served as district clerk and county judge, while marriages knit his family to that of Collin McKinney, the county's namesake and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence.

Rosebud, TX

The Wilson School grew from an acre of land deeded in the 1890s by entrepreneur William Anderson Barclay. Typical of rural Texas schoolhouses, it was a plain three-room clapboard building where one teacher took grades one through four and another grades five through eight. During the Depression, pay for its two teachers often came late—sometimes in barter—yet its small graduating classes sent many students on to serve in World War II. In 1950 the district was folded into Rosebud's under the Gilmer-Aikin school reforms, and the building was dismantled in 1955.

Decatur, TX

From 1885 to 1962, Wise County ran a 320-acre poor farm here to shelter and put to work its dependent and needy citizens, while county convicts labored off their fines on the same land. Its first superintendent managed the farm as his wife cooked, washed, and sewed for inmates and guards alike. The now-leveled cemetery at a bend of Center Creek held the poorest of the poor, most of them remembered by only a first name or none at all.

West Point, TX

From 1828 to 1842 the fortified residence of Zadock Woods served the colonists of this vicinity as a refuge against Indian attacks during the turbulent years of Mexican Texas and the Republic. Woods, a veteran of the War of 1812 and one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old Three Hundred" colonists, was by then an old man. He was killed at the Dawson Massacre on September 18, 1842, remembered as the oldest man to fall in that fight against invading Mexican forces.

Tucker, TX

Woodhouse School was born in the 1930s from the consolidation of three tiny rural schools, opening in 1938 on land deeded by W. P. B. Woodhouse. It grew a grade at a time until its first senior class graduated in 1942, and Depression-era Work Projects Administration crews added an agriculture building, cafeteria, and home economics cottage. The school built a strong basketball tradition before consolidation ended its run with the class of 1960.

Brownwood, TX

During World War II, Camp Bowie near Brownwood was a sprawling training base capable of holding 45,000 soldiers and home to the Texas 36th Division along with armored, cavalry, and headquarters units. Operating from 1940 to 1946, it helped prepare countless troops for the fighting overseas. The camp took its name from Alamo hero James Bowie.

Orange, TX

During World War II more than 50,000 German prisoners of war were held in over 70 camps across Texas, and in 1944 about 140 of them were housed in an Army tent camp near this site, branching off the base camp at Huntsville. Trucked out each day to the rice fields, the prisoners helped bring in harvests for farmers whose own workers had gone to war, often forming good relations with their employers. Their labor proved crucial to wartime food production, and prisoners returned to work Orange County farms again in 1945.

Wharton, TX

This Wharton County land began as part of an 1824 grant to Martin Allen, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists, and later belonged to Albert Clinton Horton, Texas's first lieutenant governor. During World War II, when more than 50,000 German prisoners of war were interned across Texas, Camp Wharton was established here in 1943 as a branch of Camp Swift. Converted from old county-fair buildings, it housed prisoners who worked as farm laborers throughout the surrounding counties.

Princeton, TX

Dedicated in 1941 with House Speaker Sam Rayburn in attendance, this began as a camp for migratory farm laborers. Once World War II arrived, federal officials converted it to hold German prisoners of war, who worked the surrounding Princeton-area farms and helped fill a wartime labor shortage. After the prisoners were released in 1946, the grounds returned to their original purpose, sheltering migrant workers for years afterward.

China, TX

As World War II drained America's labor force, the government put prisoners of war to work on the home front. This site held a branch of the huge Huntsville base camp, opened in September 1944 on land leased from an oil company and coordinated through the Texas A&M extension service. German soldiers—many first captured from Rommel's Afrika Korps—were picked up each morning by local farmers to harvest rice, log, and do general farm labor for a few cents an hour; at its August 1945 peak the camp held 403 prisoners before closing that December.

Donie, TX

In 1906 Alabama native Dillard Monroe Worthy opened a general merchandise store here, later joined by his son Roy as D.M. Worthy & Son. It supplied the surrounding countryside with everything from farm goods and lumber to butcher, blacksmith, and funeral services. Worthy's reach extended beyond the counter—he helped found a local bank and worked to bring a railway spur near Donie—and after his death in 1930 the store reopened under Roy until it eventually burned.

Center Point, TX

Dr. Charles De Ganahl built this home in 1856 and named it Zanzenberg after his family's ancestral seat in the Austrian Tyrol. A signer of the Texas Articles of Secession in 1861, he went on to serve as a surgeon for the Confederacy. The house also held Kerr County's first post office, established in 1857 with his wife Virginia serving as the county's first postmaster.

Fredericksburg, TX

In 1847, about 150 Mormons led by Lyman Wight founded the settlement of Zodiac near Fredericksburg, building a community and a mill along the river. Wight had led his followers to Texas as one branch of the fractured Latter-day Saint movement after the death of Joseph Smith. When floods destroyed their mill, the settlers abandoned Zodiac in 1851, leaving only a memory on the land.

Wichita Falls, TX

On a December night in 1929, flames tore through the three-story Antlers Hotel — built in 1920 as the Argonne — and lit up the whole of Wichita Falls. As crowds gathered, the west wall gave way just half an hour after the first alarm, killing assistant fire chief Smiley Turner, fireman Guno Anderson, and hotel guest Kenneth Brice. The disaster shamed the city into modernizing its department, funding new equipment, training, and finally enforcing its fire code.

Three Rivers, TX

In 1900 Dr. C. F. Simmons, a wealthy St. Louis patent-medicine manufacturer, bought this South Texas ranch land with grand ambitions, even building an all-faiths church here in 1908. When his son and heir died of a snakebite, Simmons changed course, breaking up the 60,000-acre ranch among some 4,200 small farmers and furnishing buildings for the rural community he hoped would rise.

Colorado City, TX

Rail service reached Colorado City on April 16, 1881, when a Texas & Pacific supply train arrived to build the town's first depot, and cattle pens soon rose on donated land nearby. The railroad and stockyards made the town the great shipping and supply hub for the vast ranching country of West Texas and eastern New Mexico — sending out cattle, hides, wool, salt, and buffalo bones — until passenger service finally ended in 1967.

Sivells Bend, TX

This Methodist congregation formed in 1868 as Sivells Bend Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and by 1880 had land for a church that also housed a school and Masonic lodge until fire destroyed the two-story building in 1893. A new site deeded in 1910 gave rise to the present frame church, in continuous service since 1912. Through hard times—including World War II, when families kept Sunday school going without a pastor—the congregation held fast to its worship.

Llano, TX

Six Mile Cemetery has served this farming and ranching community since the early 1880s, on land donated by early residents in 1883. The earliest marked grave belongs to an infant who died that December, and the ground has since gathered generations of area families. Among those buried here are veterans of the Civil War, frontier battles with Native Americans, and both World Wars.

Port Lavaca, TX

This five-acre burial ground served the Czech-German farming settlement first known as Marekville, with its earliest grave dating to 1897. Formally deeded to a cemetery association in 1899, it took the Six Mile name as the community renamed itself around 1907. Among those resting here is Anton Machacek, who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army before immigrating, alongside veterans of American and world conflicts.

Port Lavaca, TX

Worship in the Six Mile community began around 1894, when traveling ministers held monthly services in the local schoolhouse. Presbyterian services took root by 1909, and in 1911 the Rev. H. E. Beseda, Sr., formally organized a Czech Presbyterian church here. A 1923 building lost to a 1942 hurricane was quickly rebuilt, and services were held mostly in Czech until 1956, keeping the immigrants' mother tongue alive at the altar.

Llano, TX

The Six Mile community grew up in the 1880s around farming, ranching, and granite quarrying, and in 1883 a local couple donated land here for a school and cemetery. The Union School opened in 1884 and was renamed Six Mile School in 1898, running only a few months each year so children could help with farm labor. After the nearby Methodist church closed, the schoolhouse also hosted services and revivals until classes ended in 1945.

Port Lavaca, TX

In December 1894 the Phillips Investment Company deeded land here to Josef Marek and John Drgac, and the settlement—soon called Marekville—drew Czech and German farmers with a bumper first cotton crop. A school rose in 1895 and a post office named Royal opened in 1905, while the enduring "Six Mile" name recalled that it was six miles to water from Port Lavaca. Though the post office closed in 1910, the farming community kept growing for generations.

Belton, TX

In November 1836, some twenty Rangers under Lt. George B. Erath built this Republic of Texas outpost, raising seven or eight cabins, a blockhouse, and a picket stockade around a half-acre near a spring. Rations were spare — an ear of corn a day, plus game, honey, and a little coffee. The Rangers withdrew by mid-1837, and settlers and hunters later used the site before its remains were cleared in the 1840s.

Austin, TX

Laid out as Pecan Street on Edwin Waller's 1839 plan for the new capital, this thoroughfare drew a diverse population and grew into a commercial heart of nineteenth-century Austin. Its flat ground and safe distance from the flood-prone Colorado River made it ideal for shops, saloons, stables, and lumber yards, often with owners living above their businesses. Renamed Sixth Street in 1884, it accumulated Austin's largest concentration of Victorian commercial architecture, and restoration efforts begun in the 1960s revived the district.

Weslaco, TX

In the 1920s the Rio Grande Valley was booming as irrigation turned raw brushland into profitable citrus groves, and Weslaco rose almost overnight as a planned railroad town. Bankers and citrus growers C. Lester and Florence Richardson Skaggs bought fifteen acres here in 1924 and, in 1927, had prolific local architect R. Newell Waters design them a Spanish Colonial Revival home amid their orchard. The house, its native landscape, and adjoining grove survived in the family until 1992 and became an early preservation cause.

Pilot Point, TX

In Pilot Point's early days, Lucinda and Richard Skinner set aside two and a half acres for a cemetery, and the first recorded burial—five-year-old Josiah Taylor—came in 1858. Most of those laid to rest were Protestant families from Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee who had followed the frontier westward to farm and ranch. The stones record the hazards of the age, including sisters lost to the yellow fever epidemic of 1872–73, and by 1900 the ground held perhaps 200 graves.

Pearl, TX

The Slater Cemetery is nearly all that survives of a once-thriving farming and ranching community that took root in Coryell County in the late 1800s. By the early 1900s Slater supported two churches, a post office, a school, and businesses. In 1907 James and Ellen Martin donated land for a free burial ground, and their son Curry, buried that year, lies in its oldest marked grave.

Slaton, TX

Slaton owes its very existence to the Santa Fe Railroad. When the Pecos and Northern Texas branch reached the South Plains in 1911, banker O. L. Slaton — who had helped secure the right-of-way — lent his name to the brand-new townsite, which opened for business only a month after its first lots sold. As a railroad division point complete with a Harvey House, roundhouse, and machine shops, Slaton boomed almost overnight into a farming and ranching hub.

Slaton, TX

When two young bakeries in the West Texas railroad town of Slaton merged in 1923, they set in motion one of the state's most enduring family businesses, taken over by the Wilson family in 1943. Through wartime rationing the bakery kept its ovens going, introduced the area to sliced hamburger and hot dog buns, and later added homemade flour tortillas to reflect its community. Still operating today, it ranks among the oldest continuously running bakeries in Texas.

Slaton, TX

Slaton was born of the railroad: the Santa Fe bought this ranchland in 1911 for a division point and, a year later, built both a depot and a Harvey House. Part of the chain founded by Scottish immigrant Fred Harvey, the Slaton house served elegant meals to travelers around a horseshoe counter, staffed by the famed 'Harvey Girls' who roomed upstairs. A commercial and social hub for thirty years, it briefly reopened to feed troops during World War II before the building lived on as a depot into the 1980s, later rescued by local preservationists.

Slaton, TX

The Santa Fe Railroad laid out Slaton on the West Texas plains in 1911, and by 1919 residents had organized a bucket brigade to fight fires, drawing water from wells to fill chemical tanks and pails. Chief Alex DeLong led the early volunteers until the city built a water system and fire mains and bought its first fire truck in 1922. The department grew from a corner of City Hall into its own station by 1928.

Plainview, TX

After Plainview boosters saw irrigated wells in New Mexico in 1910, banker-farmer J. H. Slaton agreed to fund a test well on his land if it worked. Completed in January 1911, it drew 1,700 gallons a minute from just 130 feet—proof that the Ogallala water beneath the plains could be tapped.

Morton, TX

This was the working heart of the pioneering C.C. Slaughter Ranch, a 246,669-acre spread across Cochran and Hockley counties assembled by Col. C.C. Slaughter—a Texas leader in ranching, banking, and religion—between 1898 and 1901. The first headquarters was a humble half-dugout, but in 1915 the Slaughter cattle company brought workers from Mexico to build this adobe-and-concrete quadrangle in the form of a Spanish hacienda. It stood among the finest Texas ranch buildings of its day.

Edgewood, TX

As settlement thickened along the Dallas–Shreveport Road in the late 1800s, this part of Van Zandt County needed a school. Slaughter School existed by 1883, and in 1888 Elizabeth Slaughter conveyed a one-acre site to trustees for its construction southwest of Edgewood. By 1891 it shared its building with the Edgewood school and enrolled forty-six pupils, before eventually consolidating into the Edgewood district.

Round Rock, TX

In a corner of Old Round Rock Cemetery, near the grave of outlaw Sam Bass, half an acre was set aside for the burial of enslaved people and, later, freedmen. Enclosed by cedar posts and barbed wire, the graves are marked at head and foot with limestone rocks, some hand-grooved with names and dates. The earliest known grave of a freed slave dates to 1880, and although dozens of freedmen rest here, no former slaves were interred after the turn of the century.

Slidell, TX

This Wise County community took its name from John Slidell, a Confederate diplomat at the center of the 1861 "Trent Affair," and grew up to supply the surrounding farmers. A post office opened in 1884, and as merchants moved in, a young doctor set up his office and drugstore while local donors gave land for a cemetery, church, public square, and school. Others strung the first telephone line, knitting the little town together.