Historic Markers in Texas

Taylor, TX

David McCurdy Sloan and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Easley, came to Texas from South Carolina and raised this house in 1854, hauling finished lumber all the way from Houston while the rest was hand-hewn in the nearby river bottom by enslaved workers. It stands as one of the older surviving homesteads of Williamson County's Anglo settlement generation. The house was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Houston, TX

One of the oldest Black Methodist churches in Houston, this congregation began in 1880 at an open-air meeting under a tent, led by the Rev. Ed Roscoe. The next year trustees Wash Breed, Robert Swiley, and Dick Thomas bought the property on Sloan Street—later Sydnor—giving the church its first name. Fire destroyed the original sanctuary in 1912, but the congregation rebuilt and, active in community programs, became a lasting force in the surrounding neighborhood.

Arlington, TX

In the spring of 1838, Captains Robert Sloan and Nathaniel T. Journey led some ninety northeast Texas frontiersmen on a punitive raid against Indians who had struck their homes in present-day Fannin County. The trail carried them into what is now Tarrant County, where they attacked a small Native village. The episode was among the earliest recorded Anglo-American incursions into north Texas, part of the violent process that opened the region to white settlement.

New Braunfels, TX

This bend of the Guadalupe River has drawn swimmers and picnickers since the late 1800s, and in the 1930s it was developed into a tourist court whose eleven cabins were built one at a time and advertised as a 'paradise of the hills.' Automobile travelers flocked to it during the boom in car tourism along River Road until drought closed the camp in 1957. The United Church of Christ bought the site and reopened it in 1958 as Slumber Falls Camp, still serving youth and adults today.

Edgewood, TX

By the 1870s farming families had put down roots in this corner of Van Zandt County, and within a generation the settlement called Small had a school, a Baptist church, a cemetery, and even a post office tucked inside William Henry Luster's mercantile store. For a few decades it hummed with the ordinary machinery of a rural East Texas town — a drugstore, a doctor, a barber, a photographer, a gin, a grist mill, a blacksmith, and a woodworking shop. As nearby Edgewood drew off its churches and its schoolchildren in the 1930s and 40s, the town quietly emptied, until by 1999 only the cemetery and the Baptist church remained.

Andice, TX

Bryce M. Smart built this home in 1855, when central Texas was still raw frontier and the great cattle drives were beginning to shape the land. A man of many trades, Smart ran a grist mill, a tannery, and a freight line, and family lore holds that his children rescued newborn calves abandoned along the nearby Chisholm Trail. Five generations later, McCormick descendants still keep the house.

El Paso, TX

Smelter Cemetery, established in 1882, took its name from the great ASARCO smelting works that made El Paso an industrial powerhouse of the Southwest. The surrounding neighborhood, largely Mexican-American, housed the laborers who fed the furnaces that processed ore from across the region. The cemetery, now a Historic Texas Cemetery, is the resting place of that working community.

El Paso, TX

In the late 19th century a smelting operation — bought by ASARCO in 1899 — turned this stretch of the Rio Grande into a center for refining lead, copper, and other ores. Thousands of Mexican immigrant workers and their families built a vibrant community around the smelter called Smeltertown, or La Esmelda, complete with schools, churches, businesses, and the pilgrimage site of Mount Cristo Rey. When dangerous levels of lead contamination were found in the early 1970s, the community's buildings were razed and its families relocated.

Smiley, TX

Methodists near Smiley were worshipping informally by 1879 and formally organized in 1885 as the Bundick Society, meeting first in a two-story schoolhouse that doubled as a Masonic lodge hall. When the railroad arrived in 1906, the whole community relocated toward the tracks, and the congregation built a new sanctuary in the fresh townsite the following year. The present church, dedicated in 1948, has long drawn its members from the area's farming and ranching families.

Brookston, TX

At roughly 2,100 acres, the Smiley-Woodfin meadow is the largest surviving remnant of the vast native grassland that once rolled from Texas to Canada. A lack of fuel and surface water spared it the plow, and owner M. L. Smiley used it for grazing and hay while neighboring fields eroded under cultivation. After his death the land passed to the Woodfin brothers, and it remains the state's largest supplier of native hay.

Meridian, TX

John Jackson Smith and his wife Margaret migrated from Mississippi to Bosque County in the 1850s and founded the Smith Bend community, giving land for this cemetery after their son Burton died in 1856. Their daughter Ann and her husband Silas McCabe started the nearby settlement of Coon Creek, and the two communities have long shared the care of the burial ground. Enlarged over the years, the site now holds more than 500 graves of pioneers, their descendants, and friends.

Crockett, TX

When Francis Albert and Jim Smith joined forces in Houston County in 1904, they began with livery stables, farms, and real estate, but the automobile changed everything. Betting on the coming age of the car, they moved into road building and in 1923 paved a nearly seven-mile stretch of Old State Highway 21 with their own money, the first paved highway in the area. Their firm grew to lay roads and brick paving across Texas and nine other states before Jim's death in 1930 unwound the partnership.

Canyon, TX

J. Frank Smith raised this commercial building in 1906, the very year Canyon incorporated as a town, and served on its first board of aldermen while running a land company upstairs. The ground floor first held the Canyon Mercantile & Hardware Store, and in 1912 S. B. McClure opened the Palace Hotel here, sharing space over the years with a cafe. Through several owners the Palace Hotel served travelers and townspeople until it finally closed in 1960.

Lampasas County, TX

In the years after the Civil War, settlers pushed into the rolling prairies of central Texas, and the Browning Community took root in the 1870s along the Old Belton Road—a lifeline that carried goods, travelers, and mail between frontier towns. John R. Browning, his wife Julia, and their children were among the first families to put down roots here, farming the land and building the ties that knit a rural neighborhood together. The cemetery that survives is the enduring record of those pioneer households.

Athens, TX

Smith Cemetery was established in 1850 in Henderson County, Texas, in the early decades of the state's Anglo settlement. Such family and community burial grounds were frequently the first lasting institutions on newly settled land. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002.

Tyler, TX

This burial ground grew from land granted to Mary M. "Polly" Long by the State of Texas in 1846, part of which her son preserved as a cemetery when he sold the tract in 1881. In use as early as 1857, it holds the graves of local settlers, many of them Long relatives and neighbors, including early county commissioner William Green and Civil War veterans. Its name honors the many members of the Smith family laid to rest among the pioneers here.

Oakalla, TX

Tennessee-born James Gibson Smith Jr. and his Arkansas-born wife Sarah settled this part of Burnet County in 1850 and set aside ground as a family burial place while raising eight children. Their granddaughter Anita Fay, lost to diphtheria in 1901, was the first laid to rest here, soon followed by a neighbor and by the family patriarch. Descendants formed an association in 1981 to tend the site, which holds veterans of the Civil War and World War II.

Lewisville, TX

This area was known as Holford's Prairie for the pioneer Halford brothers who claimed 640 acres through the Peters Colony, and Basdeal Lewis platted nearby Lewisville in 1853. Thomas and Elizabeth Smith bought farmland here in 1859, and after their 20-year-old son died in 1862 the family began a burial ground that in 1881 became a community cemetery. Its 400-plus graves carry the surnames of Denton County's pioneer families, and oral tradition holds that some unmarked graves are those of people once enslaved by the Fox family—a poignant record of the era's harsh realities.

Palmer, TX

Established in 1852 on a lonely knoll then surrounded by wilderness, Smith Cemetery was founded by Nancy Owen Smith for her family and neighbors. Its first burial was her husband Hans Smith, a former lawmaker in Missouri and Arkansas who moved to Ellis County in 1846, opened the area's first cotton gin, and helped organize the county before being robbed and murdered in Houston. Generations of pioneer descendants followed him into the ground here, and a cemetery association was chartered in 1955.

Mineola, TX

About 1885 members of the Hoard community organized what began as Davis Chapel, meeting in the Democrat Schoolhouse and a brush arbor before the congregation took the name Smith Chapel. In 1915 B.B. Hart sold land for a new church, with 52 members pledging labor and money and sawmill owner W.H. Smith supplying much of the material. A 1957 merger with nearby Crow Methodist Church helped finance the present sanctuary, keeping the congregation at the center of rural Wood County life.

Tyler, TX

Carved from Nacogdoches County and organized in 1846, Smith County took its name from General James Smith, a soldier and statesman who counted Sam Houston, Thomas J. Rusk, and J. Pinckney Henderson among his friends. Tyler was chosen as the county seat, and Smith himself was buried with military honors at Henderson in 1855. The county's creation came just months after Texas joined the United States.

Tyler, TX

Soon after its 1846 founding, Smith County grew into a legal hub of East Texas, its first district court convening in an abandoned log cabin in Tyler in 1846. When the legislature spread the state Supreme Court across the state in 1850, Tyler became one of its three seats and also a U.S. District Court seat, and later hosted the new Court of Criminal Appeals created by the 1876 constitution. These high courts continued to sit in Tyler until they were consolidated permanently in Austin by the early twentieth century.

Tyler, TX

Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner and builder Henry Kane erected this Italianate structure in 1880–81 as Smith County's fourth jail, its stuccoed walls scored to imitate cut stone and dressed with elaborate window molds and classical beltcourses. A second story added in 1894 doubled its cell space. After a new jail replaced it in 1916, the building found a second life as the Lewis Hotel until 1986.

Tyler, TX

Sandy soil, steady rain, and a long growing season made the Tyler area ideal for roses, and commercial growers such as G. A. McKee and Mathew Shamburger began selling bushes there in the 1870s. The trade blossomed in the 1920s with new irrigation methods, gained a promotional showcase in the Texas Rose Festival launched in 1933, and drew scientific research that professionalized the field. By the 1970s the Tyler area supplied about half the rose bushes grown in the United States.

Tyler, TX

During the Civil War, Smith County became a major hub of Confederate activity in East Texas. Near Tyler stood the largest ordnance plant west of the Mississippi, turning out "Tyler Rifles," while Camp Ford held the biggest prisoner-of-war compound in the western Confederacy and salt works produced thousands of pounds of that vital commodity daily. On the home front, women, children, the elderly, and enslaved people raised the cotton and grain that fed the army and improvised clothing, hats, and coffee substitutes from what little they had.

Smith Point, TX

On the isolated Gulf peninsula of Smith Point, worship began in the 1937 schoolhouse-and-community center, where traveling Baptist ministers preached once a month. Officially organized in 1948 as Smith Point Baptist Church, the congregation bought that school building and moved it to this site in 1960, adding classrooms as it grew and calling its first full-time pastor. In 1961 members even built a parsonage from the wreckage of Hurricane Carla, and in 2007 renamed the church to reflect its mission to the wider community.

Stephenville, TX

Established by 1907, this cemetery served the now-vanished Smith Springs community and holds many kin of Swiss-born stonemason Frederick Hook, who helped build the Erath County Courthouse. Among its graves is Milton Brown, remembered as one of the founders of Western swing—the dance music that fused string-band and jazz traditions in 1930s Texas. Woodmen of the World monuments, curbing, and grave slabs mark the pioneer-era plots, tended today by a cemetery association.

Rockport, TX

Built in 1903 in Old Rockport beneath giant oaks, this early frame bungalow blends Cottage and Craftsman styling. It passed in 1920 to W. H. Smith, a grandson of Refugio pioneers, and in 1934 to rancher John Frederick Brundrett, whose family worked thousands of acres on Matagorda Island and Port Bay. The devout Brundretts kept the home for 53 years, until Fred died in 1987 at ninety-nine.

Fort Worth, TX

As Fort Worth blossomed in the early 1900s, this neighborhood became a fashionable address for the city's rising elite. Banker Ben O. Smith bought the site in 1906 and built a home where his wife Frances hosted the town's social set; a decade later it passed to cattleman Tom Burnett, son of the legendary rancher S. Burk Burnett. The house links the worlds of finance and the open range that together built early-twentieth-century Fort Worth.

Fort Davis, TX

In 1873, a former Buffalo Soldier of the 24th U.S. Infantry named Archie Smith claimed 160 acres near Dolores Mountain in the Trans-Pecos country and raised an adobe home with native oak beams. Its vaulted room served as a family chapel open to neighbors of every denomination before the town's first Catholic church was built. Later owners, the Carltons, preserved and eventually restored the structure, which survives as the oldest home still lived in at Fort Davis.

Austin, TX

After the Texas State Capitol burned in 1881, Scottish-born James Baird Smith cleared the site and built a temporary statehouse nearby, then used salvaged bricks and stone to construct this rent house around 1886. Its first tenant was banker John G. Palm, and later owner Lucille Clark, of a prominent Austin family, occupied it before it was sold and restored in 1959. It became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1975.

Azle, TX

In 1886, Fort Worth businessman and philanthropist J. J. Jarvis — a benefactor of the area's Black institutions — deeded this ground to Charles Young and Allen Prince as a burial place for Azle's Black community, though several graves already lay here. Over time it passed to descendants of the pioneer Smith and Frazier families and still serves as an active cemetery. This quiet plot preserves the memory of African American settlers on the Tarrant County frontier.

Corsicana, TX

Built in 1880, this house was first home to Dr. John R. Smith, mayor of Corsicana in the mid-1880s, who organized the town's volunteer fire department and set up a county poor farm where the fineless could work off their debts. In 1898 the widowed Mrs. A. W. McCrery bought the home and filled it with her ten daughters and her mother-in-law. The McCrery family kept the house until 1967.

Amarillo, TX

Built around 1904 for early Amarillo settlers James Bynum and Marie Lowery Smith, this house first stood on South Taylor Street. In 1945 auto dealer Jesse A. Rogers bought it and, rather than raze it for his dealership, moved it to a new site as his family home. In the relocation, architect C.W. Brott reworked the design, so the Classical Revival house today blends 1900s leaded glass, roof cresting, and woodwork with 1940s brick veneer, balustrades, and full-height columns.

Granbury, TX

Hood County tax assessor Samuel Hancock Smith built this Granbury home soon after taking office in 1883, adding much of its decorative trim during an 1892 expansion. From 1920 to 1956 it belonged to the Savage family, local merchants, and it still shows off its Eastlake porch and Italianate bay window.

Ozona, TX

A Louisiana-born Confederate cavalry veteran, Samuel Theodore Smith came to Texas in 1872 and settled in Ozona in 1891, where he became a builder of the young town's institutions — its first school, first courthouse, and Baptist church among them. He married Alice Crimm in 1876 and raised three children. His hammer and saw quite literally framed the civic life of frontier Crockett County.

Albany, TX

For a few years before the Civil War, this spot on Chimney Creek was a relay station on the Butterfield Overland Mail, the great stagecoach line that stitched Missouri to California. Coaches changed teams and pressed on, covering the run in under 25 days, a speed that seemed miraculous to a young and expanding nation. It was the only Butterfield stop in what is now Shackelford County, a lonely link in a chain that reached across a still-wild frontier.

North Richland Hills, TX

Twelve charter members organized this congregation in 1895 under the Rev. G. W. Green, building a sanctuary in 1902 on lots donated by G. W. Gunter. Over the following decades it launched missions, youth and women's groups, and even a daughter church at Shady Grove. Renamed First Baptist Church of Smithfield in 1958, it built a new sanctuary in 1962 and grew alongside the community now called North Richland Hills.

North Richland Hills, TX

This cemetery began in the early 1870s when Eli Smith — the namesake of Smithfield, who came from Missouri to Texas around 1859 — gave part of his farm for a burying ground. Its oldest marked grave, an infant's, dates to 1872, and more than seventy-five graves come from that first decade, including Smith's own. Among those laid to rest here are pioneer physician Lilburn Howard Colley, for whom Colleyville is named, and Civil War veterans from both Union and Confederate armies.

North Richland Hills, TX

This congregation traces its roots to 1888, when a local couple deeded two lots in the new railroad town of Smithfield to Christian Church trustees, who raised a one-room house of worship. After an early-1900s doctrinal split, it became the Smithfield Church of Christ. In 1956 the congregation bought land across the street and dedicated a new building in 1960.

North Richland Hills, TX

This marker records the founding of a Masonic lodge whose organizational meeting was held on July 13, 1875, first known as the Grand Prairie Lodge. In its earliest days the fraternal group met inside the Zion Church until members raised their own lodge building in 1876. The account reflects how frontier-era Texas communities built civic and social institutions almost as soon as they took root.

North Richland Hills, TX

The roots of this congregation reach back to 1856, when William Turner built split-log benches at his farm so neighbors could gather to study and worship as the 'Willow Springs Class.' Through changing community names — Zion, then Smithfield after Eli Smith donated a townsite — the Methodist church grew, dedicating sanctuaries in 1912, 1935, and 1974. Descendants of the founding Turner family helped rebuild it across the generations.

New Braunfels, TX

In the Texas Hill Country, this cemetery is the resting place of the German immigrants who settled the Smithson Valley community, once home to a store, post office, schoolhouse, dancehall, and saloon. It began in 1876 as a family burial ground and was formally deeded for a cemetery in 1898 by Heinrich Pantermuehl. Its east-facing rows, curbed plots, and German-language gravestones carry on customs brought from Germany.

Smithville, TX

The Smithville area was noted as early as 1691, when a Spanish expedition sighted an Indian-named lagoon still known today as Shipp's Lake. A ferry crossed the Colorado here in 1836 and steamboats plied the river until the 1860s, but the town's fate was sealed by the railroad: when the Taylor, Bastrop & Houston line arrived in 1887, "Old Smithville" picked up and moved to the tracks. Legend says a coin toss kept the name Smithville over "Burlesonville" before the town incorporated in 1895.

Marble Falls vicinity, TX

The Smithwick Cemetery began with a single wish: in 1854, eighteen-year-old Rebecca Chambers, gravely ill while traveling through, asked to be buried on this flowered hillside. Over the following decades the site grew into the shared burial ground of the Hickory Creek, Elm Grove, and Smithwick's Mill communities, its roughly 65 earliest graves marked only by stones. Today some 600 burials rest here, including veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Korea.

Smyrna, TX

On a August day in 1882, ten pioneer settlers of the rural Smyrna community organized this Baptist fellowship, guided by the Georgia-born missionary Elder Nelson Porterfield, who had carried the faith across Texas and Arkansas. Early worshippers met in a log schoolhouse before raising their first sanctuary in 1885 and later acquiring the tract and cemetery where many area pioneers now rest. Over a century the church has hosted civic and school functions and remained the hub of its farming community.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

Smyrna Baptist Church grew out of the pioneer Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, organized in 1858. After Mt. Carmel dissolved, former members and area residents gathered at Chinquapin Spring in August 1873 and formed this new congregation, at first sharing meeting places at Chinquapin Spring and Redland with local Methodists. The church built its own sanctuary in 1907 and has belonged to the Mt. Zion Association throughout its life.

Winnsboro, TX

On the first Sunday of June 1869, eighteen charter members gathered under a pine tree in Wood County to organize Smyrna Baptist Church, led by the Rev. Jacob Ziegler and a group of elders. A Sabbath school followed in 1878. The congregation's original two-story building did triple duty, housing the church, a fraternal lodge, and a school.

Harleton, TX

Pioneer physician John Chadd received an 1845 land grant here and the following year donated ground for a church, school, and cemetery, choosing the biblical name Smyrna for the community. The burial ground dates to 1850, with its earliest surviving headstone from 1859, and grew alongside the Methodist congregation Chadd later helped endow. Among its 675-plus graves rest early settlers and veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Emory, TX

On this spot in 1902 stood the schoolhouse where ten local farmers founded the first local of the Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union of America, better known as the National Farmers Union. Vowing to "secure equity, establish justice and apply the Golden Rule," the organization grew from this rural Texas meeting into a national force in American agriculture. A church later rose on the site, and a tablet honors the founders by name.

Harleton, TX

In 1846, Dr. John Chadd led a party of settlers from Indiana into the piney woods of Harrison County, and the Methodist congregation he helped found first met in his own home, served every three weeks by the circuit riders who stitched frontier Texas together. For decades the little Smyrna church shared a log building with a Masonic lodge and the community school, rebuilding after fire, a second fire, and a 1905 cyclone. Its fifth sanctuary still anchors the Smyrna community today.

Needville, TX

The headstones here read like a roster of the Snake Creek community that farmed this stretch of Fort Bend County from the mid-1800s. Among them lie two veterans of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, Emory H. Darst and John P. Gill, alongside several Confederate soldiers, binding the site to both Texas independence and the Civil War. Land for the graveyard was granted in the 1850s by William Cole and Peter L. West, and a nearby community church served residents until a 1932 hurricane destroyed it.

Corpus Christi, TX

After serving in World War II, Method Snapka and his brother Rudy opened their first drive-in in Robstown in 1948, serving hamburgers and Mexican dishes to a booming postwar coast. A second Corpus Christi location near Roy Miller High School became a popular hangout for students after football games and for neighborhood families, and the Snapka family still runs two of the restaurants today.

Austin, TX

In 1934, Austin construction and development figure Edwin Brazelton Snead built this Tudor Revival house from an unusual source: holding the demolition contract for the University of Texas's Old Main building, he salvaged its light yellow-buff bricks and other materials for the new home. With steep roofs, half-timbering, gables, and a high chimney, the house shows the inventive vernacular architecture Texans improvised during the Great Depression. Kimble County ranching family the Riecks bought it in 1939 and lived there for decades.

Calvert, TX

Organized in 1869 as the Calvert Methodist Church, this congregation built its first sanctuary in 1872 in a booming railroad-and-cotton town. Its pulpit drew notable figures — Seth Ward, who became the first native Texan named a Methodist bishop, and Dr. James Kilgore, a founder of Southern Methodist University. In 1923 a new building rose and the church was renamed for pioneer circuit rider Joseph P. Sneed, who had carried Methodism across central Texas since 1838.

Snook, TX

In the 1880s, Czech immigrants put down roots in the Burleson County blackland prairie at a spot first known as "Sebesta's Corner." By 1895 the settlement had a name of its own—Snook, for John Snook, who helped win it a post office—and soon the familiar institutions of Central Texas Czech life followed: a one-room school, a community slaughterhouse, a cooperative store, and a hall for the Czechoslovak Benevolent Society (SPJST).

Snook, TX

In the late 1800s, waves of Czech and Moravian families left Bohemia and Moravia for the farmland of central Texas, carrying with them the Protestant Brethren faith rooted in the teachings of the reformer Jan Hus. Settlers founded the community of Sebesta — later Snook — in the 1870s, and by 1886 traveling ministers were baptizing the faithful who first met in one another's homes. A permanent sanctuary followed in 1913, anchoring a Czech-Moravian congregation that endures today.

Snook, TX

Czech immigrants settled this Burleson County area in the 1880s, first calling it Sebesta's Corners before renaming it Snook for a postmaster in nearby Caldwell. They chose a swath of sandy ground for their cemetery — easier to dig than the surrounding Blackland clay — where the first burial came in 1885. Though founded for the Czech community, the grounds soon welcomed German and other immigrant families, and today hold veterans of American wars reaching back to the Civil War.

Daingerfield, TX

Settlers reached the area they called Snow Hill by the early 1840s, and in 1852 residents organized a Baptist congregation under the Rev. Samuel Morris. The first sanctuary, doubling as a community schoolhouse, was moved to this site around 1871 on land — including the adjacent cemetery — donated by J. W. and Thurza Cason. The church has anchored the surrounding rural community since before the Civil War.

Plainview, TX

Mennonite minister and farmer Peter B. Snyder, hunting cheap land, bought property in Hale County in 1906 and urged fellow Mennonites to join him, and by 1907–08 families were arriving by train and raising houses after first camping in tents. They built a one-room schoolhouse open to all faiths for lessons, worship, and socials. But dust storms, prairie fires, hail, and the brutal droughts of 1915–16 broke the colony, and most—including Snyder—had left by the mid-1920s.