Historic Markers in Texas

Hallettsville, TX

Stephen Tucker Foley was born in Alabama and came to Texas in 1834, arriving just as the colony's break with Mexico approached. In 1836 he served in the Army of Texas, standing with Captain William Heard's company of citizen-soldiers at the Battle of San Jacinto. The State of Texas honored his service to the revolution with this marker in 1956.

Jasper, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1760, Stephen Williams enlisted repeatedly in the Continental Army and fought in Revolutionary War battles at Briar Creek, Camden, and Eutaw Springs. He volunteered again in the War of 1812 as a fifty-two-year-old sentry, then in 1835 — at seventy-five — shouldered his rifle at the Siege of Bexar alongside a son and four grandsons in the Texas fight for independence. Buried on his Jasper County homesite around 1839, he was reinterred in the State Cemetery during the 1936 Texas Centennial, when this monument was placed at his original grave.

Winchester, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, Stephen Williams left North Carolina and followed the great southern migration through Georgia and Alabama before reaching Texas in 1832. In 1843 he took a land grant in Washington County, where he became a prominent landowner and devoted Baptist. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Texas Baptist Education Society, and his farmstead stayed in the family for over 115 years.

Jasper, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1764, Stephen Williams, Sr. came of age fighting for American independence, seeing action at Camden, Brier Creek, and Eutaw Springs in the hard-fought Southern campaigns of the Revolution. Decades later, as an old man on the far frontier, he took up arms again in the cause of Texas, joining the capture of San Antonio in 1835. His long life of service spanned two revolutions on two frontiers.

Dennis, TX

William Henry Stephens and his wife Elizabeth came from Kentucky to Parker County in the early 1860s and, with their sons, carved out a family farm. When their son Hugh died in 1876, he was buried on the homestead, the earliest documented grave in the family plot. Though only four stones remain legible, as many as twenty-seven family members are believed to rest here, tended still by their descendants.

Breckenridge, TX

Stephens County's first courthouse in 1872 was a plain pine building with officials' desks lining the walls; a three-story red stone structure with a tower replaced it in 1883. The discovery of oil in Breckenridge in the 1920s sent the population soaring and demanded far more space, so voters approved a bond in 1924 and Abilene architect David S. Castle designed the Classical Revival building dedicated on July 4, 1926. Its limestone façade, monumental stairs, and ten-columned entry still anchor the square, and portions of the 1883 courthouse were preserved nearby.

Breckenridge, TX

This ornate doorway is all that remains of the three-story red sandstone courthouse built in Breckenridge in 1883, its columns carved with the names of the architect, the county judge, and three of four commissioners—the fourth left off for protesting the building's cost. When the 1920s oil boom swelled the town, the old courthouse gave way to a larger one in 1926, and the portal was kept as a memento of pioneer days. A cistern behind the building once supplied the town's water.

Marietta, TX

Joseph A. Stephenson established this ferry about 1838 on his own land grant in the country that became Cass County, and it carried travelers and goods across the water for more than seventy years, until roughly 1910. In an era before bridges, such crossings were essential links in the roads that stitched together frontier East Texas.

Stephenville, TX

Built in 1899–1900, this carpenter Gothic church was raised by a Presbyterian congregation under the Rev. John William Everds and designed by local builder William John Wilson, whose fishscale-shingled steeple is its signature. The Presbyterians worshiped here until 1966, and when demolition threatened, the community moved and restored the building at Stephenville's historical museum in 1976.

Stephenville, TX

On the corner of Washington and Belknap, a single 1897 brick building — its bricks hauled from the coal-and-brick company town of Thurber — housed a continuous run of Stephenville drug stores for nearly a century. From founder F. A. Schnabel in 1899 through a string of local pharmacists and finally Eckerd, the corner served as one of the essential gathering points of small-town Texas life until 1994. The soda fountain and prescription counter were as much civic institutions as commercial ones.

Stephenville, TX

On July 23, 1860, twenty-four Masons—including Stephenville's founder John M. Stephen—assembled to organize a Masonic lodge, receiving their charter from the Grand Lodge of Texas in June 1861, on the eve of the Civil War. Members first met in a two-story log building on Belknap Street whose lower floor served as school and church. The lodge helped level the Erath County Courthouse cornerstone in 1891 and has long supported local and statewide charities.

Calvert, TX

This 11-acre burying ground holds some 400 Texas pioneers on land first granted in 1835 and bought in 1850 by Judge Robert Calvert, a leader of the vanished town of Sterling. Calvert dedicated the cemetery and built an adjoining Cumberland Presbyterian church from his own plantation timber; after his death in 1867 the congregation hauled the church by oxen to the new town of Calvert two miles east. In 1868 his widow and daughters deeded the site to the Cumberland Presbyterians.

Sterling City, TX

The prairie split by the north Concho River was long the hunting ground of the Comanche, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Lipan, and Wichita peoples, and may have been crossed by Spanish expeditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the 1860s and 70s came commercial buffalo hunters, one of whom, Capt. W. S. Sterling, gave his name to the creek; the outlaws Frank and Jesse James reputedly kept horse herds nearby, and the Army held Camp Elizabeth as a Fort Concho outpost. As big cattle outfits and then family homesteaders moved in, the county was created in 1891 and named for its first regular resident.

Sterling City, TX

Built in 1912, two decades after Sterling County was organized, this two-story jail was raised by the Southern Structural Steel Co. on land donated by the Stewart family, its exterior faced in locally quarried stone. The ground floor held living quarters for the sheriff, while seven cells occupied the upper story. A rear addition followed in the 1960s.

Heath, TX

Virginia-born Sterling Rex Barnes brought his family to this area from Mississippi in 1846, settling the community of Black Hill, now Heath. A charter member of a local Masonic lodge and the area's justice of the peace, he operated a toll bridge over the east fork of the Trinity River at a site now beneath Lake Ray Hubbard. Five of his sons and a son-in-law went on to serve the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Jefferson, TX

Jacob and Ernestine Sterne settled in the riverport town of Jefferson before the Civil War and became civic pillars, helping run the post office and shaping its cultural life — part of the outsized role Jewish families played in the town's rise. In 1913 their children honored them by giving the city a cast-iron fountain from New York's J.L. Mott Foundry, crowned with sculptor Giuseppe Moretti's statue of Hebe, Greek goddess of youth. Designed to water people and animals alike, it still marks the family's legacy.

San Antonio, TX

Completed in 1891, the Stevens Building is among the finest survivors of San Antonio's late-19th-century commercial district, designed in the muscular Richardsonian Romanesque style by architect James Riely Gordon. Its ground floor long held dry goods and furniture stores, while the second story served in turn as the city's scientific society headquarters and as the real estate office of owner John Stevens. The building embodies the confident architecture of a booming Gilded Age city.

Hochheim, TX

In 1846 Joseph and Sarah Ann Stevens arrived from Rankin County, Mississippi, with relatives and a number of enslaved people, buying land from members of Green DeWitt's Colony to farm and raise cattle. The family burial ground holds its oldest marker over the 1851 grave of their infant son, and the child's grandfather Elisha Stevens was laid to rest nearby months later. Pioneer family members, veterans, and descendants are honored here.

Junction, TX

Born in Kimble County in 1888 with barely two years of formal schooling, Coke R. Stevenson worked his way from a boyhood ranch job to owning a freight line, then rose through banking, law, and county office. He became the first Texan to hold the state's three highest offices, and as governor from 1941 to 1947 he turned a large deficit into a surplus while championing measures from the first driver's-license law to the Lower Colorado River Authority.

Fairfield, TX

The settlement around Stewards Mill grew up beginning in 1849 around Washington Steward's grist mill, the only one in the area, which drew a post office, brick plant, sawmill, and the county's first telephone exchange. The store dating to 1869 remained in the hands of an early partner's heirs, its doorstep an original millstone and its 1964 interior still fitted with the first counters, bins, and cabinets.

Commerce, TX

John and Ellen Stewart settled here about 1843, and John is credited with building the first pioneer home in eastern Hunt County during the Republic of Texas era. The family later sold land to the founder of nearby Commerce. The earliest legible marker is a child's grave from 1863, and the cemetery holds Confederate veterans — including the Stewart sons — as well as victims of an early-1900s epidemic.

Sulphur Springs, TX

On land first claimed by Hopkins County settler Zacharias Birdwell, this quiet burial ground began as Birdwell's Graveyard, taking its earliest known grave around 1870. When Birdwell's widow Polly deeded the property to her nephew W. A. Stewart in 1882, the cemetery took his name. Its two dozen marked graves—from an infant buried in 1879 to a final interment in 1915—hold the founding families of a corner of northeast Texas.

Bertram, TX

Benjamin Hansford Stewart left Tennessee for Texas in 1851 and made his living as a farmer and rancher, serving a term as Burnet County sheriff in the 1870s. In 1905 he built this frame house for his son Homer and daughter-in-law Viola, a typical Hill Country ranch home of its day set off by a chimney of hand-hewn limestone. Six generations of the Stewart family have lived in and cared for it.

Galveston, TX

This ridge on the west end of Galveston Island holds one of the area's oldest known histories of human use — once a campsite for the seagoing Karankawa people — before it passed through a striking succession of nineteenth- and twentieth-century owners. Texas Revolution veteran Col. Warren D. C. Hall bought it in 1856; later owners named it "Mottexas" and "Isla Ranch," and in 1933 it took the name of Galvestonian Maco Stewart, founder of the Stewart Title Company. The land was eventually deeded to the University of Texas for its Galveston medical branch, layering Indigenous, frontier, and modern uses on a single stretch of shore.

Comfort, TX

German-born stonemason and sheep rancher Herman Stieler designed and built this rock house in 1890–1892 in the Hill Country near Comfort. He had hauled freight for the Schreiner Company and to Camp Verde before making his place a shearing station where fellow ranchers gathered and passing stagecoaches stopped for food and repairs. Its two-rooms-per-floor plan around a central 'dog-trot' hall was typical of the era.

McKinney, TX

Jesse Stiff arrived from Virginia in 1835 and claimed thousands of acres in what became Collin County, and a community called Stiff Chapel grew up around the family's homesteads. When his son James, serving as a Texas Ranger, died in 1847, he was buried near the family house on land that became this two-acre cemetery — most of its graves dating from the 1800s, with the last burial in 1935.

Big Lake, TX

Established around 1903 on the ranchland of settlers G. W. and Lizzie Stiles, this three-acre cemetery reads like a frontier chronicle. Its graves hold cowboys killed in range accidents, a Spanish-American War veteran, and victims of shootings, rattlesnake bites, and a dysentery epidemic—though most, the marker notes, were pioneers of quiet and steady lives. The plot was deeded to the county in 1920 by J. D. Wagner, a wanderer who split his years between Texas and South America.

Big Lake, TX

Built in 1911 from stone quarried just half a mile away at a cost of $20,000, this courthouse served the county until 1925, when the seat of government moved to Big Lake. In the years that followed it found new life as a community center and, for a single year, a school.

Jefferson, TX

Completed for Louisiana cotton broker Frank Stilley and his wife Minerva around their 1860 marriage, this Greek Revival house passed by 1885 to Charlie Young, a formerly enslaved man who became a well-known Jefferson barber. Young wore a Prince Albert suit as his working uniform and gave regular customers personalized shaving mugs lettered in gold. His family kept the home until 1983, a rare thread of continuity through Reconstruction and beyond.

Dayton, TX

Stilson sprang up in the 1890s when the Texas and New Orleans Railroad reached this stretch of Liberty County and out-of-state developers O. H. Stilson and Rodney Hill bought land to lay out a town. They advertised it to farmers in Iowa, and many families answered the call, including Swedish immigrants who came to build homes and farms. At its height the town boasted a fourteen-room hotel, stores, a gin, a rice mill, and a depot, but as people drifted to nearby Dayton it faded away.

San Antonio, TX

Founded by the remarkable Stinson family, this field has seen aviation grow from barnstormers to jets. Katherine Stinson learned to fly in 1912 to fund her music studies and became the fourth licensed woman pilot in the U.S.; she and sister Marjorie soon trained American and Canadian military fliers here. The family leased this land in 1916, and the field served as a civil airport, a WPA-improved terminal, and an Army Air Corps training base through two world wars — Charles Lindbergh himself flew out of it.

Stockdale, TX

Before the 1870s, Stockdale-area families buried their dead in small private plots, until an unrelated young man thrown from his horse needed a resting place and Dr. T. M. Batte donated an acre for a community burial ground. The cemetery grew through further gifts of land, including a 1938 acre set aside for anyone lacking a family plot. Among those interred are town founder John R. King, first schoolteacher Martin West, war veterans, and victims of the post–World War I flu epidemic.

Monte Alto, TX

Between 1912 and 1914 Swedish immigrants recruited by a Minnesota land company settled this stretch of the Rio Grande Valley, drawn by cheap, fertile farmland. They built churches, a school, a store, and a cotton gin, and pooled knowledge through a farm club while raising cotton, grain, corn, and dairy. Today little remains of Stockholm but its cemetery, a quiet marker of a vanished immigrant town.

Granbury, TX

In 1854 Thomas "Uncle Tommy" Lambert and Amon Bond led settlers, mostly from Tennessee, across the Brazos River to found Stockton Bend, whose riverside location offered protection and crossings at Abe's Crossing and Landers Ferry. The community gained a saloon, blacksmith, stores, and a school, and its residents shaped the new Hood County after 1866—a county-seat dispute here even led to the creation of Somervell County. By the early twentieth century the town had faded, its school closing in 1911.

Bartlett, TX

Founded on land first granted to a veteran of the Siege of Bexar, this cemetery began in 1890 with the burial of the Stocktons' fifteen-year-old son and grew alongside a family that settled Bell County in 1870. Among the more than eighty graves is Ead White, a formerly enslaved man who stayed with the family after the Civil War, and members lost to the deadly 1919 Corpus Christi hurricane.

Clarendon, TX

Stockton P. Donley came to Texas from Kentucky in 1846 and built a legal career before the Civil War. He enlisted as a private in 1861, was captured with his regiment after the hard fight at Fort Donelson, and endured months as a prisoner at Camp Douglas; his broken health afterward kept him from the front. Elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1866, he was removed the next year by federal military authority for his Confederate service, and the county later erected here bears his name.

Goliad, TX

One of Goliad's oldest buildings, this house may date to the 1820s and was certainly standing before pioneer settler Jessie W. Stoddard bought the property in 1847. Sold in 1879 to the wife of a local cattle rancher, it stayed in that family into the next century and still shows the layered additions of successive owners.

Temple vicinity, TX

Peter and Mary Isabella Stokes came to Bell County from Virginia in the late 1850s with their children and Mrs. Stokes's parents, Nathaniel and Mary Nelson. Begun in 1858 with the burial of a relative, this small graveyard on the Stokes farm holds about ten graves, including those of both couples. Restored in the 1980s, it stands as a quiet emblem of the county's pioneer beginnings.

Nacogdoches, TX

The original Old Stone Fort, built in the late 1700s under Spanish rule, was a fixture through decades of upheaval in East Texas before its demolition in 1902 sparked statewide dismay and helped galvanize the historic-preservation movement. A local women's club opened a memorial building in 1908, and as the 1936 Texas Centennial approached, historical organizations pressed for a truer replica. Designed by Hal B. Tucker on the campus of what is now Stephen F. Austin State University, the Stone Fort Museum opened in 1936 and has since interpreted the Spanish and Mexican eras of Texas history.

Clarksville, TX

Parson Amos M. Stone, a New York–born Cumberland Presbyterian minister, moved his large family from Tennessee to the Clarksville area in 1857 and soon founded a church on ground near this cemetery. During the Civil War he served in a Confederate home guard while at least three of his sons joined the Confederate cause, and his 1862 death made his the first known grave here. His church later merged away and the nearby Cherry School faded, but the cemetery endures as a record of the settlers he served.

Stoneham, TX

Organized in 1885 by a dozen members from the Plantersville church, Stoneham Methodist served its new railroad-era community first in a schoolhouse under circuit-riding ministers, then in a frame sanctuary built in 1893 with its first full-time pastor. The congregation flourished in the 1920s, closed twice as area population declined, and was revived in 1973 to continue serving the area. Its ebb and flow mirrors the fortunes of small rural Texas towns.

Center Point, TX

George L. Leigh, a Missouri native, moved to Kerr County in 1878 for his health and opened a store in Center Point before serving a term as county tax assessor. In 1883 he bought a 640-acre tract and, with his brother Edward's help, expanded it past three thousand acres, running a dairy and raising racing horses. Named for the family's ancestral home in England, Stoneleigh Ranch later operated as a guest ranch from 1936 to 1943 and stayed in the Leigh family until 1960.

Stonewall, TX

This cemetery first served Millville, a settlement laid out after the Civil War by Israel Nuñez, who ran a nearby stage stop. Though Nuñez set aside the ground early, it was not formally deeded until 1934, and its earliest marked grave dates to 1879. Millville became Stonewall in 1875, and after a pause the cemetery saw burials resume in 1966.

Aspermont, TX

The rolling country of Stonewall County holds a deep frontier history: Spanish explorer Francisco de Coronado passed through in 1541, and U.S. Army mapmakers followed in 1849. Its salt springs supplied settlers, and from 1876 to 1879 the rough buffalo-hunters' town of Rath City reigned as a hide-trade capital. The county, created in 1876 and organized in 1888, honors Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and its seat shifted from Rayner to higher-set Aspermont in 1898.

San Benito, TX

Barely two decades after San Benito's founding, a 1920s boom left the young Rio Grande Valley town short of places for its many visitors to stay. In a burst of civic ambition, local businessmen sold stock door-to-door in December 1925, raising the capital to build a three-story Spanish Revival hotel that opened with a gala in October 1927. Named for the Civil War general and hung with a commissioned portrait of him, the 83-room hotel became the town's social heart, hosting weddings, dances, and banquets for decades.

Saint Jo, TX

Built of native stone in 1873, the Stonewall Saloon was Saint Jo's first permanent building and a welcome rest stop for cowboys driving cattle up the trail through North Texas. After county prohibition arrived in 1897 it traded whiskey for ledgers, housing offices and a bank, and it was named for Confederate general "Stonewall" Jackson. Stuccoed in the 1930s and given a wooden facade in 1964, it still anchors the town square.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Instruction at Stonewall began in a Methodist chapel around 1867, and tradition holds that a young teacher urged the community to "stand together like a stone wall" — giving the school its name when a proper building went up about 1884. A larger schoolhouse followed in 1898 and was enlarged around 1916, then replaced by a two-room structure in 1953. Falling enrollment led Stonewall to join the Mount Pleasant district and close in 1957.

Melissa, TX

In the 1870s and 1880s Stony Point was a bustling farm community with a cotton gin, gristmill, molasses mill, store, and school. Residents organized the Stony Point Baptist Church in 1878, and it grew into a spiritual hub—ordaining ministers and helping plant congregations in neighboring settlements—before declining population closed its doors in the late 1950s. Its cemetery, older than the church itself, still hosts funerals and an annual decoration day.

Rocksprings, TX

This route was one of many military roads built to link the frontier cavalry posts of Texas, running south to Fort Clark and north to Fort McKavett, both established in 1852. Paint Rock Springs, at the head of the South Llano River, made a natural midway rest stop, and in 1877 Major John B. Jones gathered his Texas Rangers here to launch a campaign against frontier outlaws. Beyond its military purpose, the road carried immigrants, cattle drovers, ranchers, mail riders, and freighters into the open country.

Robstown, TX

Born in North Texas in 1890, Thomas Jefferson "Stout" Jackson toured the Americas as a professional strongman before noticing how little Spanish-language entertainment reached South Texas's large Tejano population. In 1935 he and his wife Beatrice opened the Teatros Carpas—tent theaters—in Robstown, drawing crowds with Spanish-language films and touring Mexican performers across Robstown, Kingsville, Falfurrias, and Alice. As segregation ended, the last Carpa closed in 1963.

Spring, TX

The Strack brothers emigrated from Feudingen, Germany, beginning with Herman and Heinrich in 1848 and followed by their kin over the next decade. In 1863 Herman bought land here that already held a burial ground, and the plot came to be known as Strack Cemetery, with veterans' graves reaching back to the Civil War. Today the family's descendants care for the site through an association.

Marlin, TX

Settled as Blue Ridge before 1850, this community reorganized on land donated by David Barclay and grandsons of Thomas Garrett after Garrett's estate closed the original site. A visiting Frenchman suggested the name Stranger around 1870, and by 1869 a Methodist-Presbyterian Union Church and a Baptist church were holding services that doubled as the first schools. Once home to a cotton gin, stores, a stagecoach inn, and mills, Stranger today keeps only its cemetery and churches, used for biannual homecomings.

Lufkin, TX

Trustees of an Angelina County African American cemetery group bought this acre in 1905, though recorded burials reach back to 1901. First called Frost Cemetery, it became known as Stranger's Rest around 1915 for the many drifters laid to rest here, with the last recorded burial in 1946. After falling into neglect, it was reclaimed by community members and county volunteers in 1991–92.

Stratton, TX

Established before the Civil War as the hub of a large farming district, Stratton took its name from John Stratton, a Cuero saddler with land interests nearby. At its height it had a post office (1887–1905), general store, school, cotton gin, drugstore, and blacksmith shops, and in 1914 the Primitive Baptist congregation relocated there. Pioneer settlers and two Civil War veterans rest in the community's Alexander Cemetery.

Waco, TX

In 1922 partners Golladay Stratton, Sr. and Henry J. Stricker bought this Waco lot for their growing furniture company, and the following year architect Henry L. Spencer designed a five-story neoclassical revival building of red brick over riveted steel. That sturdy frame carried it through the devastating 1953 tornado, and inside it kept a grand staircase, pressed-tin ceilings, and a winged mezzanine. Stratton's three sons ran the business here until the 1980s.

Strawn, TX

When Strawn incorporated in 1917, this stretch of Palo Pinto County was riding a fossil-fuel boom—oil, gas, and coal all pulling workers into North Texas—and by 1920 the town's population had swelled to around 5,000. Flush with confidence, the young city issued bonds in 1921 for a proper seat of government, and in 1923 it got one: a handsome, classically inspired hall by Abilene architect David S. Castle. Its cast-stone quoins, arched entry, and decorative brick cornice gave a rough-and-tumble boomtown a touch of civic dignity that still stands today.

Calvert, TX

Jeweler Herman Stricker and his wife Katy—daughter of Confederate General William H. Hamman—built this Victorian house in 1900 and stood among Calvert's business, civic, and social leaders. Katy Stricker helped lead the drive to erect a women's meeting house, now the Calvert Library. In 1913 banker H. Marvin Sneed and his wife Cara bought the home, which passed through their heirs before its sale in 1970.

Waxahachie, TX

This turreted Victorian in Waxahachie began in 1888 as a widow's cottage and was rebuilt around it in 1897 for J.F. Strickland, a cofounder of Texas Power and Light and a builder of the interurban electric rail lines that once knit North Texas towns together. A druggist, J.W. Sawyer, bought the home in 1914, and his family lived here into the mid-1940s. Its three-story turret hides the interior staircase, a flourish typical of the confident cotton-boom architecture of the era.

Hitchcock, TX

In 1883, horticulturist Henry Martyn Stringfellow established an experimental garden and orchard here on the Texas coastal plain. His 1890 treatise on innovative organic growing methods drew a wide following among fruit and vegetable growers in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Silver medals at two world's fairs and further publications cemented his standing as one of his era's leading experimental horticulturists.

Freeport, TX

Robert Edward Lee Stringfellow started on a Brazoria County cattle ranch at fourteen and soon had a herd of his own, opening a Velasco meat market in 1890 that fed the crews building jetties at the mouth of the Brazos. His holdings grew to 20,000 acres and he became an early investor in the new town of Freeport. After a 1932 hurricane injured him, his wife Nannie ran the ranch and the family's Freeport interests for decades more.