Historic Markers in Texas

Hochheim, TX

German-born settler V. Hoch built this inn in 1856 from stone quarried nearby, and it served travelers on the Austin-Indianola Stagecoach Road, a key overland route between the Texas capital and the Gulf. Purchased by Valentine Bennet in 1899, it was restored by his grandson Ross Boothe Jr. in 1954 and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark a decade later. The surviving structure recalls the vanished world of horse-drawn travel across antebellum Texas.

Clarksville, TX

During the Civil War the Donoho Hotel and stage stand operated across from the old Clarksville courthouse, a busy hub as soldiers arriving from Arkansas, Indian Territory, and beyond caught coaches for home. Many stopped to share news with the Clarksville "Standard," one of fewer than twenty Texas papers to publish throughout the war and prized by families for its personal notes from the camps. From here stagecoaches ran on grueling schedules to Marshall, Waco, and beyond, part of the 31 stage lines that kept Confederate Texas connected to mail, rail, and steamboat routes.

Rio Hondo, TX

During the Civil War the ferry at Paso Real, on the Arroyo Colorado, sat astride the "cotton road"—the Confederacy's overland lifeline to neutral Matamoros, Mexico. With Union blockades sealing Southern ports, cotton wagons and stagecoaches funneled through here to trade for guns, medicine, cloth, and shoes, drawing diplomats, agents, bandits, and deserters into a corridor of wartime intrigue.

Benchley, TX

Staggers Point was the earliest large community in Robertson's colony, settled by Irish immigrants who reached America in 1821, moved through the Carolinas and Alabama, and sent an emissary west before their ox-wagon train arrived in 1833. They built log cabins and a fort against Indian raids, and their men fought in the Texas Revolution, including the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. The village grew a church, stores, a cotton gin, and a race track that drew gamblers, until the railroad bypassed it in 1868 and its fortunes faded.

Midland, TX

The Staked Plains was the first newspaper published in Midland County, printed in 1885 from a frame building on this site. Each copy was hand-set and hand-printed on an old-style press at a rate of about five per hour, and the paper carried county court proceedings at three-quarters of a cent per square inch. J.C. Rathbun served as its editor and publisher.

Stamford, TX

Stamford was born in 1899 when the Swenson brothers, sons of Swedish immigrant Swante Magnus Swenson of the famed SMS ranches, donated land for a townsite along an extension of the Texas Central Railway. Railroad president Henry McHarg named it for his Connecticut hometown. With a boxcar post office, a bank, gins, a flour mill, and a foundry, the cotton-and-cattle town incorporated in 1901 and thrived through the 20th century, boosted by a 1935 oil strike and a World War II training field nearby.

Temple, TX

Stampede Creek draws its name from a horse stampede that struck Captain John Bird's Ranger force in June 1839, days after they had fought more than 200 Caddo, Kickapoo, and Comanche warriors at the nearby Battle of Bird's Creek. The Rangers had returned to bury their dead before pushing west in pursuit, only to have their mounts bolt while camped along this stream. Decades later, on July 4, 1876, a cattle drive from South Texas stampeded at the same spot, cementing the creek's name.

Graham, TX

The western peak of the twin Belknap Range mountains, Standpipe Mountain lay within land the Graham brothers bought in 1872 as they founded the town that bears their name and set to developing its resources. E. S. Graham even prospected the mountain for silver in the 1890s. It took its name in 1907 when the city built a water tank on its crest, and after World War I it was given to the city as Victory Park.

Snyder, TX

Mrs. W. B. Stanfield, wife of a Snyder rancher, lived in this home for more than fifty years. She sketched out the plans herself and handed them to a wandering architect passing through from Fort Worth. The result featured fine oak woodwork, pine floors, and leaded glass panels at the entry—comforts of settled prosperity on the West Texas ranching frontier.

Waco, TX

In 1862 the Reverend Thomas Stanford, a pioneer Methodist preacher, brought his family from Arkansas to this corner of central Texas and, with the Barcus family, planted the trio that anchored so many frontier settlements: a school, a church, and a cemetery. His daughter and son-in-law gave five acres for the graveyard in 1875, the year of its first recorded burial. After decades of neglect the ground was restored in the 1960s and is still tended by a cemetery association today.

Ben Wheeler, TX

Founded in 1875 with 27 charter members out of the Cumberland Presbyterian tradition, this rural church began in a simple building of pine and sweetgum planks on land owned by the Stanger family, who also hosted a nearby school. Around the turn of the century local Methodists began worshiping here too, and the two denominations shared resources so fully that many families claimed members of both for over a century. A new brick church rose in 1956, and the congregation continues today as a non-denominational community church.

Austin, TX

This colonial revival home was built in 1927–28 for University of Texas civil engineering professor Stanley Finch and his wife Emily, designed by Finch's faculty colleague, architect Raymond Everett. Over the following decades it was shaped by notable Austin designers — landscape architect C. Coatsworth Pinkney, and architects Hugo Kuehne and J. Roy White, who added bay windows and enclosed the side porch. The result is an unusually well-documented record of a house touched by the city's leading design minds.

Corpus Christi, TX

Stanislav (Stanley) Kostoryz, born in 1866 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, immigrated through New York in 1886 and became a teacher, journalist, and land developer. In 1902 he founded the Bohemian Colony Lands southwest of Corpus Christi, buying thousands of acres and advertising 80-acre tracts in Czech-language newspapers to draw settlers from Texas, Nebraska, and the Midwest. His vision turned roughly 10,000 acres of South Texas brush into a thriving Czech farming community complete with school, church, and mutual-aid societies.

Houston County, TX

This burial ground opened in grief in 1861, when a diphtheria epidemic took the young daughter and infant son of William and Nancy Stanton within days of each other, and they were laid to rest on family land. Their surviving son later left written instructions to protect the plot, and members of the Hill, Beavers, and Stanton families were buried here into the 1960s. A family association founded in 1975 keeps the cemetery today.

Industry, TX

Bryan Daughtrey, a veteran of the War of 1812, came to Texas in 1822 as part of Stephen F. Austin's Second Colony and settled here in present Austin County. When his wife Anna died in 1847 he buried her on this spot, beginning a cemetery later used by the German Sternenberg family who bought the land. The community, its burial ground, and a school that ran until 1928 all took the name Star Hill—the English translation of Sternenberg—and descendants of those pioneer families still tend the graves.

Kerrville, TX

This Hill Country burial ground began as a family plot for James Monroe and Martha Adeline Starkey, whose son Jones was the first laid to rest here in 1868. J.M. Starkey, arriving in 1854, was Kerr County's first assessor-collector and later its chief justice, central to organizing the frontier county. Though only a handful of pioneer families rest here, they counted civic leaders, mill builders, ranchers, Texas Rangers, and Civil War veterans among them.

Nocona, TX

As settlers poured into north Texas after 1850, B. L. Starkey and his sons arrived from Ellis County around the Civil War. The cemetery began in the 1860s when a newly arrived Wells family, having lost a daughter over the winter, asked their nearest neighbor for a place to bury her. The Starkeys organized a Methodist church here in the 1870s and funded a community school; "Grandmother Sloss," born in 1850, later preserved much of the area's oral history.

Elkhart, TX

This hillside graveyard is the resting place of the family of Texas pioneer John Starr and his descendants. Starr, who died in 1872, lies beside his wife Susannah, with six of their eight children interred nearby — including two sons who served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The family's ancestral home still stands on nearby Starr Hill.

Canton, TX

In 1886 James F. Starr, acting for landowner Sarah F. Clapp, deeded two acres here for a community school, and within a few years the ground was also serving as a burial place — the earliest marked grave being the infant son of B. A. and Ora Monroe, who died in 1889. A formal cemetery followed in 1911 when A. C. White and his wife sold the adjoining land. The school and cemetery knit together the scattered Starr, Todd Hill, and Wentworth communities, and among those laid to rest here is Civil War soldier Joseph Staley.

Rio Grande City, TX

Starr County was carved from Nueces County and created on February 10, 1848 — just as the Mexican-American War closed and the Rio Grande became the international boundary. It was named for Dr. James Harper Starr, a pioneer surgeon who served as Secretary of the Treasury of the Republic of Texas and later as an official of the Confederacy. Rio Grande City became and remains the county seat.

Marshall, TX

Dr. James Harper Starr served as a government official under both the Republic of Texas and the Confederacy while building a career as a physician and businessman. In 1870 he and his son James Franklin Starr moved their land and banking agency from Nacogdoches to Marshall, buying this land for their homes. Frank Starr and his wife Clara built "Maplecroft," a Greek Revival house that stayed in the family until 1976, when it was deeded to the State of Texas.

Hemphill, TX

In 1946 a Jasper county judge opened a funeral home in Hemphill and hired Tennessee-born John Byron Starr to run it. When the owner closed the branch three years later, Starr bought it outright with help from his brother, and his wife Margaret opened a flower shop in a side room. From those modest beginnings grew a family enterprise that built the first purpose-designed funeral facility in East Texas and still serves the region across three generations.

Winona, TX

In 1852 the Rev. Joshua Starr, a Methodist minister from Alabama, bought a square mile of land on the Dallas-Shreveport Road and laid out Starrville, selling lots with covenants forbidding gambling and liquor. It grew into one of Smith County's earliest and liveliest towns, with mills, foundries, a wagon factory, and a remarkable cluster of schools — a female high school, a Baptist female academy, and a male college — all before the Civil War. Then the Tyler Tap Railroad bypassed it in the 1870s, and the town slowly emptied as post office, lodge, and schools moved away to Winona.

Winona, TX

Starrville grew up along the Dallas–Shreveport road, becoming a stop by 1849 and taking its name from Reverend Joshua Starr, who bought the land and sold town lots in 1852. During the summer of 1862 it served as the encampment of Confederate General Henry McCulloch's army before its march toward Little Rock. When townspeople blocked the railroad in the 1870s, the community drifted toward Winona, but its 1927 schoolhouse endured—hosting classes, plays, reunions, and elections—and survives today as a community center kept up by local volunteers.

Canyon Lake, TX

This crossroads community grew up around a cedar yard and store opened in 1940 and later run by Curt Startz, grandson of German immigrants who had settled the area in the 1850s. Named in 1950 for an artist's painting of the storefront, Startzville did a brisk trade in ice through the building of Canyon Dam and Lake. A café added in 1963 kept the little community's gathering place alive.

Austin, TX

In 1882 a group of Texas attorneys founded the volunteer Texas Bar Association in Galveston under Judge Thomas J. Devine, meeting yearly to press for uniform law and standards of professional conduct. In 1939 the legislature created the State Bar of Texas to bring everyone practicing law under common rules, and the older association merged into it the following year. Housed at this Austin site since 1953, the State Bar has for well over a century shaped the state's legal life.

Austin, TX

Founded in 1851 when Texas Revolution hero Gen. Edward Burleson was buried here, this ground became the resting place for the honored dead of Texas, including Stephen F. Austin, nine governors, and figures from every era of state history. Confederate officers were interred here beginning in the 1860s, and small white headstones now mark some 1,583 soldiers and their families. Through the efforts of state official Louis W. Kemp, the remains of more than a hundred prominent Texans were reinterred here after 1930, among statuary by sculptors Elisabet Ney and Pompeo Coppini.

Dallas, TX

Founded in 1886 by Captain W.H. Gaston and fellow Dallas civic leaders, the State Fair of Texas grew into the most heavily attended state fair in the nation. The city has owned the grounds since 1904, keeping them as a public park except during the annual two-week run, and briefly yielded them to the 1936 Texas Centennial and 1937 Pan American expositions. Its stages and midways hosted the likes of Buffalo Bill, Harry Houdini, William Jennings Bryan, and Comanche chief Quanah Parker.

Sterling City, TX

Directors of the First State Bank, Sterling City's earliest financial institution, put up this two-story brick building in 1910 to house both the bank and the State Hotel. Over the decades its rooms served a rotating cast of the town's life: doctors' offices, the telephone company, post office, city hall, and E. B. Butler's long-running drugstore. Many of the community's prominent early leaders had business ties to the address.

Groom, TX

State National Bank opened in 1904 as a private bank founded by John Walter Knorpp, of an established Missouri and Southwestern banking family, together with regional oil and grain developer Eugene S. Blasdel. Chartered by the state in 1908 and nationally from 1926, it drew its strength from the thrifty settlers and pioneer families of the Panhandle. The bank weathered the Panic of 1907, the Dust Bowl, and two world wars while backing the region's cattle, grain, and oil economy.

Corsicana, TX

Organized in 1917 by a group of local businessmen with B. B. Munsey as its first president, the State National Bank served the growing city of Corsicana from a downtown corner before moving to this site in 1926. Isaac N. Cerf, a well-known Corsicana civic leader, took over its leadership that same year. In 1933, amid the Depression, it absorbed the accounts of the First State Bank of Corsicana.

Huntsville, TX

During the Civil War, the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville ran a textile factory where inmates, enslaved people, and free men together wove millions of yards of cloth and yarn. Its osnaburgs and uniforms became a main source of cloth for the Confederate Southwest, clothing state troops, the Confederate army, and needy soldiers' families as the Union blockade tightened. Worn machinery and financial strain eventually slowed the plant's wartime output.

San Antonio, TX

As World War II strained the Allies' ability to keep American-built aircraft flying, more than a thousand civilian specialists from the San Antonio Air Depot volunteered in 1942 for a secret overseas assignment they knew only as Station "X." Crossing the U-boat-infested Atlantic in four groups, these mostly Texan mechanics reached the Burtonwood Repair Depot near Warrington, England, where they worked alongside British and American crews. By war's end the depot had overhauled thousands of engines and aircraft, including B-17s, P-47s, and P-38s, under the motto "Keep 'Em Flying!"

Oglesby, TX

Established in 1856 beside a Methodist Episcopal church, Station Creek Cemetery opened with the burial of 28-year-old Robert Morris, whose mother would join him twenty years later. Most of its forty headstones predate 1890, and among the graves are numerous Confederate soldiers and two brothers, W.R. and J.M. Green, hanged by a vigilante mob as accused horse thieves. When the congregation moved to McGregor in the 1880s, the cemetery was left to the wider community.

Freeport, TX

This statue honors Stephen F. Austin, remembered as the "Father of Texas" for leading the first organized Anglo-American colonization of the region in the 1820s under Mexican authority. When tensions boiled over into revolution in 1835, Austin briefly commanded Texian forces before turning to diplomacy, seeking support for the fledgling republic. The monument stands near the Gulf coast in Brazoria County, close to where his colonists first settled.

Temple, TX

Built in 1874 along an old stagecoach road, this house predates the town of Temple itself by seven years and still rests on its original bois d'arc stump foundation. Its builder was F. L. Wright, an Alabama man and Confederate veteran who settled in Bell County in 1867 as the region filled with newcomers after the Civil War. The original chimneys and roofline survive as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Huntsville, TX

Dr. Rufus Bailey, president of Austin College, built this oddly steamboat-shaped house in 1858 as a wedding gift—so mocked by neighbors that the newlyweds refused to live in it. Its fame instead comes from its most famous tenant: Sam Houston, who rented it after leaving the Texas governorship over secession, and who died in an upstairs room in 1863 with his funeral held in the parlor above. Saved and restored for the 1936 Texas Centennial, the house was moved to its present site as a shrine to the state's towering founder.

Cameron, TX

In the winter of 1850–1851, Captain Basil M. Hatfield guided the Steamboat Washington up the shallow Little River to deliver merchandise from Washington-on-the-Brazos to Cameron's merchants. It was a singular feat: the first, last, and only steamboat ever to navigate that river. The voyage marks a fleeting moment when Texans hoped their inland rivers might become commercial highways.

Dallas, TX

Brought to the Republic of Texas as a colt in 1844, the horse called Steel Dust became the frontier's most celebrated sprinter—so fast his jockey reportedly coated his back with molasses to stay aboard. He outran famous rivals in match races across North Texas in the 1850s until an injury at a starting gate ended his racing days and left him blind, though he lived on for years at stud. His bloodline, later cultivated at the King Ranch, helped found the modern American Quarter Horse.

Navasota, TX

In the late 1800s two Steele brothers ran large cotton operations near Navasota and built homes across the corner from one another. A. G. Steele and his wife Etta had this late Victorian residence, rich with Eastlake detailing on its porches and entries, built in 1896 by contractor J. E. Watkins. Steele descendants lived here until 1970, and the house was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1974.

Georgetown, TX

Built around 1870 by M.E. Steele on the site of an early log hotel, this is one of Georgetown's oldest commercial buildings. Under Steele it held a mercantile store and a bank, and in the early 1900s Emma Dickman Makemson ran a hotel here until 1924. Its Italianate touches—a truncated roof, corner entry, and finely worked stone—mark the ambition of the growing town square.

Pennington, TX

Steele's Academy at Pennington drew students from many surrounding counties, taking its name from its founder and principal, D. W. Steele of New Hampshire. In an era before Texas had a robust public school system, private academies like this one were often the only path to advanced education for rural families. The State of Texas erected this marker honoring the school in 1936, during the state's centennial commemorations.

Mooring, TX

Anglo settlers reached this stretch of the flood-prone Brazos bottomlands in 1851, and Henry B. Steele's 1855 general store gave the muddy little community—first nicknamed Mudville—its anchor and, by 1878, its post office and name. Beginning in the 1870s, Sicilian immigrants from Trapani and Palermo poured in, built large farms, and grew into one of the largest Italian communities in the entire United States. They raised a schoolhouse, built San Salvador Catholic Church in 1903, and kept up traditional St. Joseph's Day celebrations each March.

Gonzales, TX

The Steen family's long push west carried them from a Tennessee friendship with the Crockett family to the Texas frontier, where John Rumley Steen bought this land in 1849 on ground that came to be called Steen Flat. He married Mahala Burkett, whose people had reached Texas in 1830 with DeWitt's Colony, and when their young son James died in 1863 the family honored his wish to rest beneath the shading trees that still stand here.

Columbus, TX

Merchant Edward Stein and his wife Angalla built this Columbus home in 1897, hiring the local Wirtz family of builders who raised several of the town's houses. After Edward's death the home passed to relatives, the Girndts, who kept the place as a working household — H.H. tending bees and dabbling in animal folk medicine, Annie running cows, chickens, and a milk route. The family held it into the 1970s, and it still wears its original Queen Anne finery of spindlework and fishscale shingles.

Burton, TX

Built by 1875 to house the Burton Farmers Co-op, this commercial building took on new life in 1903 when German immigrants William Dallmeyer and Joe Steiner opened a mercantile store that ran for more than fifty years. It held the town's first telephone and served as a cotton-marketing hub, its double-gable roof, wooden balustrade, and 1913 false-front addition still marking Burton's main street.

Lakeside Village, TX

Founded in 1891 as Fowler Baptist Church, this Bosque County congregation rebuilt after a 1907 fire and took the name Steiner when its town was renamed in 1916. Its most dramatic chapter came in 1950, when the creation of Lake Whitney forced the town of Steiner to evacuate and the church was hauled off on mule teams and wagons. Unable to clear a nearby bridge, the building simply stopped where it stood — and there it has remained at the roadside ever since.

Anderson, TX

Raised before 1860 in the plantation country of Grimes County, this log cabin was built with unspliced log walls whose timbers, stones, doors, and shutters were hand-hewn by enslaved laborers. The plain record of its construction is a stark reminder that the craftsmanship of antebellum Texas homes rested on forced Black labor.

Lamar, TX

Irish immigrant and Texas Revolution veteran James W. Byrne founded the port town of Lamar on Aransas Bay, and in the late 1850s he and his wife Harriet sold land for a Catholic chapel. Completed in 1858 and christened Stella Maris — 'Star of the Sea' — the little church was built of shellcrete, a local masonry of crushed shell, tying it to the Gulf coast that surrounded it.

Alto, TX

Stella Salmon came to Texas from Arkansas in 1908 and taught in the East Texas towns of Rusk and Alto before marrying Dr. James C. Hill in 1919. In an era when teaching was one of the few professions open to women, she became a respected teacher and a civic, social, and religious leader devoted to her adopted region. Her community remembered her by giving her name to the Stella Hill Memorial Library.

Burkeville vicinity, TX

Born into slavery in Texas in 1834, Stephen McBride helped found Shankleville after emancipation, buying land in northern Newton County with Jim Shankle to build a self-sustaining African-American community of homes, churches, and businesses. McBride himself ran a cotton gin, store, blacksmith shop, and several mills. His most lasting gift was McBride College, opened in 1883 by a man who could neither read nor write yet prized education above all for the young.

Corsicana, TX

Stephen Augustus Pace came to Texas in 1868 and settled in Corsicana in 1871, where he built a wholesale grocery business and threw himself into civic life. He served as a city alderman and commissioner, helped found the forerunner of the Chamber of Commerce, and sat on the committee that established the town's public library. From 1887 until his death in 1921 he lived in the house this marker commemorates.

San Felipe, TX

This monument honors Stephen F. Austin, the 'Father of Texas,' who between 1823 and 1828 effectively governed the young colony and planted the famed 'Old Three Hundred,' settling more than a thousand families across his colonies. Erected by the State of Texas in 1936 with federal centennial funds, it marks the San Felipe region where his colonizing effort took root. His own words—calling the prosperity of Texas 'the idol of my existence'—serve as his epitaph.

Austin, TX

Rising in 1924 on the site of the earlier Keystone Hotel, this Beaux Arts landmark was built by hotelier T.B. Baker to serve a growing capital city. Locals persuaded him to name it for Stephen F. Austin, the empresario known as the "Father of Texas," rather than the planned "The Texas." Designed by the noted Fort Worth firm Sanguinet, Staats and Hedrick, it gained five stories in 1938 and kept its classical detailing through a 2000 restoration.

Nacogdoches, TX

When the United States entered World War II after Pearl Harbor, the president of Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College gathered students and faculty to meet the national emergency—and the campus emptied into the war. Enrollment fell by sixty percent, football was suspended, and a campus flag bore more than a thousand blue stars for those serving and twenty-four gold ones for those who died. In a notable distinction, the Army chose SFA in 1943 as the first college in the nation to host a Women's Army Corps training school. After the war, returning veterans on the G.I. Bill swelled the college and its recreation grounds were rededicated as Memorial Park and Memorial Stadium.

Nacogdoches, TX

Stephen Fuller Austin inherited a colossal task when his father Moses died in 1821: settling hundreds of families in Spanish—then Mexican—Texas. Born on the Virginia frontier and schooled across the young United States, Austin proved a shrewd administrator, guiding the original "Old Three Hundred" families and hundreds more into southeast Texas. Imprisoned in Mexico after pressing for Texas statehood, he returned to help win independence and served as the new Republic's first secretary of state.

Dallas, TX

This campus honors Stephen J. Hay (1864–1916), a Georgia native who rose from paper-company executive to become, in 1907, the first mayor under Dallas's new commission-style government. During his tenure the city adopted its first plan by George Kessler, funded the founding of Southern Methodist University, and built White Rock Dam, the Houston Street Viaduct, and a new city hall. The elementary school named for him opened here in 1921 and gained its handsome Tudor Revival brick building in 1926.

Sour Lake, TX

Born in South Carolina, Stephen Jackson joined Lorenzo de Zavala's colony in 1831, part of the wave of Anglo settlers who took Mexican land grants in Texas. He earned a farm, then a full league of land encompassing the future community of Sour Lake, and in 1836 marched with the Texas army in its war for independence. He and his wife Susan raised a family here and lie with their children in the cemetery near this spot.

New Braunfels, TX

Built in 1846 by Stephen Klein, one of Comal County's first commissioners, this house used the German fachwerk method of timber framing filled with masonry—a signature of the immigrants who settled New Braunfels. In 1868 it passed to Edward Naegelin, Sr. The state recognized it as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Smithville, TX

Stephen Scallorn was one of the ordinary families whose migration built the Republic of Texas. A Maryland-born frontier physician who had preached and doctored across Kentucky and Tennessee, he followed his son's glowing accounts of Texas after San Jacinto and settled near Plum Creek in the late 1830s, helping plant one of the region's early Baptist congregations. His long life spanned the whole arc of the Republic and early statehood — and cost him two sons, killed with Dawson's men in the border fighting of 1842.