Historic Markers in Texas

Trinity County, TX

This burial ground began in 1852 when a Georgia-born family, the Durdins, buried two young sons on the East Texas land they had settled the year before, setting the plot aside as a family graveyard when they sold the property. The Taylors, who bought the land in 1857, continued burying their kin here and opened the grounds to community burials around 1890. Neighbors from nearby Pegoda came to use and maintain the cemetery, and a caretaking association formed in the 1950s.

Abilene, TX

Created in 1858, Taylor County honors brothers Edward, James, and George Taylor—Tennesseans aged 18, 20, and 22 who came to Texas in 1833 and died together at the Alamo on March 6, 1836. Organized in 1878 with its first seat at Buffalo Gap, the county saw the Fort Concho–Fort Belknap stagecoach and Kansas-bound longhorn herds pass through before the county seat moved to Abilene in 1883. The marker also surveys how Texas named its 254 counties, most for the heroes of independence, statehood, and the Confederacy.

Cuero, TX

Also called Taylor-Bennett Cemetery, this DeWitt County burial ground began with Josiah Taylor, whose grave from 1830 is its oldest. Taylor first entered Texas in 1812 with the Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition, fighting at La Bahía and in the battles of Rosillo and Alazán Creek, then settled with his family as part of the DeWitt Colony in 1829. His descendants included Texas Rangers, veterans of the Texas Revolution, and participants in the Runaway Scrape, and among those buried here are men killed in the notorious Sutton-Taylor Feud.

Oak Point, TX

Samuel and Martha Taylor and their grown sons were among the first to settle the area known as Sand Town, arriving from North Carolina in 1859 with three enslaved people—Kijeah, Matilda, and James—and friends the Lunn family. The Taylors prospered raising crops and livestock, and folklore still recalls the "race mare" that son Moses sold to the outlaw Sam Bass. Not every grave is marked, but the surviving stones chronicle the pioneers who opened the Little Elm area to settlement.

McKinney, TX

Built in the 1860s, this frame house was bought in 1868 by cabinetmaker Armistead Joshua Taylor, who married into a Collin County pioneer family and opened his home to the traveling salesmen — "drummers" — who crisscrossed North Texas. A night's lodging cost two bits, a quarter, earning it the nickname the Two-Bit Taylor House. It stayed in the family until 1933 and was moved to this site in 1976.

Austin, TX

Scottish immigrant Peter C. Taylor built this kiln in 1871, using his own patented continuous-firing design to turn quarried limestone into high-grade lime. The mortar it produced bound together many of Austin's late-19th-century buildings and found buyers well beyond Texas. Fed by stone hauled from a nearby slough and worked until the 1890s, Taylor's two-kiln complex was a genuine engine of the growing city's economy.

Taylor, TX

Organized in 1888 and completed in 1894, the Taylor National Bank rose in red sandstone from a design by Austin architect A. O. Watson, blending Romanesque and Renaissance Revival detailing in limestone, granite, and pressed metal. Over the years the building also housed a law firm, a Weather Bureau office, and a refining company. After a 1930s merger, the successor bank stayed here until 1967.

Taylor, TX

Taylor grew up around a post office that opened in 1876 as "Taylorsville" and took the town's shorter name when the city incorporated in 1882. After decades in rented quarters, the postal service gave the community this dignified Classical Revival building in 1929-30, its round-arched windows, columned portico, and garlanded parapet typical of the federal architecture that dotted American towns in the 1920s.

Rosenberg, TX

Born in Indiana in 1863, Taylor Ray left home at thirteen and came to Rosenberg in 1894 as a Wells Fargo railroad freight agent, staying the rest of his life. He helped establish the school district in 1898 and led the school board for decades, raising funds for its first schoolhouse and teacher. Notably concerned with education 'for all,' Ray started a school for Black children and championed the inclusion of women on the board, while also serving as alderman and mayor.

Mason, TX

This sandstone house grew in stages, its first rock rooms built around 1870 and a two-story cut-stone section added in 1875 for Mrs. E. B. Taylor, an Irish immigrant and prominent rancher. The Carter family owned it for nearly a century, adding a frame wing in 1928. Symmetrically arranged around a central hall with arched windows and corbelled chimneys, it carries Italianate touches unusual on the Hill Country ranching frontier.

Georgetown, TX

Georgetown became the seat of Williamson County in 1848, and the Taylor family soon arrived, opening one of the town's earliest stores on the courthouse square. After Emzy Taylor returned from Confederate service in the Civil War, he bought this site in 1869 and built an ashlar-limestone, central-passage house in the National Folk style. Later, he and his son-in-law R.T. Cooper enlarged it around 1889 with Greek Revival elements — a wraparound portico, columns, and a formal dining room — creating the layered home that reflects the family's rising fortunes.

Del Rio, TX

Around 1870, James H. Taylor—one of the five founders of Del Rio—and his Mexican-born wife Paula moved from Uvalde and built this one-story adobe home. Taylor prospered as a landowner, merchant, and gristmill operator until his death in 1876. Paula later remarried, ran the house as a boarding home, and became a benefactress to the city's Mexican community, giving land for a school and a cemetery; the house stayed in her family until 1939.

Abilene, TX

This monument honors Edward, James, and George Taylor, three sons of Anson Taylor said to have died in the fall of the Alamo on March 6, 1836. Taylor County was named in their memory, and the marker — erected by the Daughters of 1812 with the county's help — carries the famous line attributed to Alamo commander William Barret Travis: 'I shall never surrender or retreat.'

Georgetown, TX

John McQueen Taylor came to Texas from Tennessee in 1829 as a colonist in Lorenzo de Zavala's empresario grant, arriving while the region was still Mexican territory. He took part in the 1834 Anahuac disturbances and, as a soldier in the Texas Army, fought in the Grass Fight and the Siege of Bexar during the Revolution. He later served as a justice of the peace before settling in Williamson County to raise his family.

Comanche vicinity, TX

This burial ground began beside the Concord Primitive Baptist Church, organized before 1881 in the pioneer country north of Comanche, with its earliest marked grave that of F. M. Warren in that same year. Warren's father, Posey W. Warren, was a deacon and likely founder of the church, and the surrounding land belonged to large settler families like the Browns, one of whom was a Confederate veteran. When a Methodist congregation formed here in 1901 on land from Alabama native James "Hood" Taylor, the site took on the name Taylor's Chapel Cemetery.

Comanche, TX

In 1901 a Methodist circuit preacher gathered area families under a brush arbor near Soda Springs, and the next year Hood Taylor deeded land that gave the congregation its name. For generations the church anchored a scattered rural community, often worshipping outdoors under arbors and tabernacles even after its first sanctuary rose in 1902. A handful of long-serving pastors, two of them together spanning more than thirty years, carried it into its second century.

El Paso, TX

Built under the New Deal's Housing Act of 1937, Tays Place opened in 1941 as one of El Paso's first public housing projects, bringing modern, comfortable apartments to the city's crowded south side. Like much of the era's housing it was segregated — a separate section south of the Franklin Canal held units for African American families, near the city's only Black school. It remains the oldest surviving public housing in El Paso.

Junction, TX

Rising over the Kimble County landscape, distinctively shaped Teacup Mountain served as a natural lookout for both Native peoples and settlers in pioneer days. The rugged country around it saw the frontier violence of the 1870s, including the 1872 killing of settler James Bradberry, Sr. In 1878 Texas Rangers under Lt. N. O. Reynolds captured a wanted man nearby.

Aurora, TX

John Teague, a veteran of the U.S. war with Mexico, brought his family from Missouri to settle this North Texas land in 1858 and later served on the frontier during the Civil War. The burial ground that bears his name holds about thirty graves, its earliest inscribed stone marking the Rev. Jacob Moffett, killed by Indians in September 1865. When Teague moved on to Foard County in 1885, the cemetery fell out of use as other plots opened nearby.

Rosenberg, TX

Businessman Norman P. Teague and his wife Sidney Claire built this two-story home in 1910, its columns and Classical Revival trim in the height of fashion. It stood among the fine houses of what locals called Rosenberg's "Silk Stocking Row," a street of the town's prosperous families. Jake Waddell bought it in 1925, and his family held it for more than forty years.

Houston, TX

The Teas Nursery Company grew from humble roots in 1843, when John C. Teas began selling apples out of his Indiana backyard before becoming a nationally known horticulturist in Missouri. In 1908 his son Edward met developer W. W. Baldwin, who hired him to design the plantings for the new town of Bellaire, and by 1910 the family had relocated to Houston to open the nursery here. Its crews shaped the landscapes of Rice Institute and the River Oaks subdivision, and by 1951 the firm had planted more than a million trees across the Houston area.

Matador, TX

In the 1870s, when the southern buffalo herd still darkened the plains of West Texas, traders threw up a rough camp of picket houses and tents where the Middle Pease River meets Tee Pee Creek, naming it for the abandoned tipi poles scattered along the water. Charles Rath and his partners hauled in wagons, cattle, and dance-hall gear to profit from the hide trade before moving on. As the hunters emptied the range, Tee Pee City settled into a hard-drinking outpost of saloons, gambling, and gunplay wild enough to draw the Texas Rangers, until the Matador Land and Cattle Company bought the land and shut the saloon in 1904.

Matador, TX

In the late 1870s, when the southern buffalo herds were being slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, Tee Pee City rose as a hunters' camp on the empty plains — for a few years the only settlement between Henrietta, Fort Griffin, and old Fort Elliott. Captain G.W. Arrington's Texas Rangers used it as a base while policing the raw frontier, and the birth of Nora Cooper here in 1882 marked the first for Motley County. By 1886 the buffalo were gone and the town with them, leaving only graves and memory.

Saratoga, TX

Alabama-born Richard Teel reached East Texas in the 1850s, married Nancy Hart, and settled in what is now the Big Thicket. When their son died in 1893 he was buried beside the family home, and in 1908 Teel formally set the ground aside as a cemetery. Its sixty-odd graves gather the Teels with the relatives, friends, and neighbors who were the area's first permanent settlers.

San Augustine, TX

This burying ground began in 1856 when George W. Teel was laid to rest beneath a pear tree by his home. Teel and his wife Rebecca had come from Arkansas in 1824 as colonists in Stephen F. Austin's 'Old Three Hundred,' later settling here to farm and keep an inn; he also served as a university trustee and fought in the Battle of Nacogdoches and the Texas War for Independence. Kin buried alongside him include a son who served as a Confederate soldier and county officeholder.

Tehuacana, TX

Perched on one of the highest points between Dallas and Houston, Tehuacana was home to the Tehuacana Indians, a Wichita people who farmed here until Cherokee raids destroyed them in the early 1830s. Settler John Boyd secured a Mexican land grant in 1835, and the town he built even vied to become the state capital in 1850. Its Presbyterian academy helped spark the founding of Trinity University in 1869, and later colleges kept the hilltop a seat of learning for generations.

Pearsall, TX

Deeded from the land of James and Amanda Bandy, Tehuacana Cemetery received its first burial in 1875, and the surrounding community soon added acreage for a log church, a school, and a frame parsonage. The graveyard holds the region's early pioneers, including victims of the smallpox epidemics that swept through in 1882–1884 and a dozen Confederate veterans. When the church relocated to Medina County in 1900, the cemetery endured as a record of frontier settlement.

Tehuacana, TX

Tehuacana grew up around John Boyd, a Republic of Texas congressman who moved here in the 1840s and opened the town's first post office in his store in 1847. His gift of land and money brought Trinity University to the hilltop town in 1869, and the cemetery's oldest documented grave belongs to his infant granddaughter, who died in 1850. Among the many small headstones testifying to the frontier's harshness lie college founders, a state comptroller, and Boyd himself, a roll call of the town's rise as an early Texas education center.

Ft. Stockton, TX

On the frontier at Fort Stockton, where the U.S. Army guarded the roads across the Trans-Pecos, a small building did double duty for a growing settlement. The smaller structure served as the first office for the army telegraph line that reached the post in 1876, wiring this remote outpost into the nation's communications network, and by 1883 the site also hosted the area's first school. It marks the moment a military fort began turning into a civilian community.

Montgomery, TX

By 1845 a pioneer trail already linked Montgomery, Houston, and Huntsville, carrying settlers and freight through the young Republic and early state of Texas. When the Texas and Red River Telegraph Company strung its wires along the route in 1854, the path earned the name "Telegraph Road." The wires eventually came down, but stretches of the old road stayed visible for generations as a reminder of an early communications lifeline.

Telegraph, TX

Named for a canyon whose trees supplied telegraph poles in the mid-1800s, this remote Hill Country crossroads gained a store and post office around 1890–1900, when Ruth Holmes became its first commissioned postmistress. For generations it served as a stopover for travelers and vacationers along the South Llano River, and it even functioned as the local mailing address of Texas Governor Coke Stevenson. The rustic building has anchored this small Kimble County community for more than a century.

Ennis, TX

The first grave here belonged to the Rev. William J. Kirkpatrick, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister who died in 1867; a congregation soon organized in his honor and built a church nearby. The surrounding land came from the plantation of Confederate veteran Major Henry Pannill, who buried his own son here in 1867 before deeding the ground to the church's trustees. The village of Telico grew up around the site, then withered after 1900 as families drifted to the railroad town of Ennis, and the cemetery—holding more than 300 graves, nearly half of them children—fell into neglect until a caretaking association formed in 1937.

Corpus Christi, TX

Jewish settlers arrived in Corpus Christi soon after its 1852 founding, forming a Hebrew Benevolent Society in the 1870s and a congregation in 1912 that drew both Orthodox and Reform families. In 1936 the Temple Beth El congregation hired architect Dexter Hamon, who designed this rare Spanish Colonial Revival synagogue with domed towers, red-tile roofs, and a Star of David above the arched stone entry. The building served as a house of worship for generations before passing to new congregations.

Mercedes, TX

During the 1910s, Jewish families across Hidalgo and Cameron Counties gathered to form a small congregation in the Rio Grande Valley, worshipping in rented rooms with lay readers and a visiting student rabbi for the high holy days. In 1935 they built Temple Beth Israel, designed by Weslaco architect Newell Waters, its members serving the region as merchants, jewelers, and newspaper publishers. As nearby McAllen and Harlingen grew, the congregation dwindled and voted to dissolve in 1948, its members joining neighboring temples.

Houston, TX

Congregation Beth Israel is the oldest Jewish congregation in Texas, tracing its roots to the Hebrew Benevolent Society of 1844 and formally organized by 1854 under a state charter in 1859. Waves of immigration, the oil boom, and the deepening ship channel swelled its ranks, driving the congregation from one synagogue to the next. In 1925 architect and member Joseph Finger designed a monumental brick-and-limestone temple blending classical and Near Eastern forms, hailed as the finest of its kind in the South.

Corsicana, TX

Corsicana's first Jewish settlers arrived in 1871, the year the railroad reached town, and by 1898 a group of Reform Jews had established Temple Beth-El. Two years later they raised this striking sanctuary, crowned with two octagonal towers and onion-shaped domes. The building stands as a monument to a community whose members helped drive the city's growth.

Temple, TX

After two earlier failed attempts, Temple's civic, business, and school leaders joined forces in 1926 to found Temple Junior College, run at first by the public school system in the city's high school building. As enrollment grew, a separate college district formed in 1955 and the campus moved to South Temple in 1957. Long a springboard to four-year degrees in medicine, law, and engineering, it became a regional leader in health-professions training and was renamed Temple College in 1996.

Temple, TX

The Temple Daily Telegram, dating to 1907, traces its lineage to the Weekly Times launched in 1881, the year the railroad town of Temple was founded. Under publisher Frank W. Mayborn, who took sole ownership in 1930, the paper became a powerful civic force, championing the reservoirs that became Belton and Stillhouse Hollow dams. Its advocacy also helped bring Camp Hood, a general hospital, and federal facilities to the region.

Longview, TX

The early-1900s oil boom drew Jewish families to the towns of northeast Texas, and by 1936 those scattered across the region gathered for worship in Kilgore's Temple Beth Sholom. Two decades later the community built its own sanctuary in Longview, shaped architecturally to evoke a menorah, and named it Temple Emanu-El, 'God is with us.' As the surrounding Jewish population thinned, the congregation became the keeper of the area's Jewish memory, education, and outreach.

Longview, TX

In 1957 Jewish families in Longview broke away from Kilgore's Temple Beth Sholom to found their own synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, and set aside this burial ground within Memory Park Cemetery. It became only the second dedicated Jewish cemetery in Harrison County. Among those laid to rest here is Rabbi Charles Mantinband, a nationally known civil rights advocate who led the congregation in the turbulent 1960s.

Dallas, TX

Founded in 1884 by the Temple Emanu-El congregation, this was Dallas's second Jewish cemetery, its first burials belonging to two Russian immigrants who died the same day. Older graves were carried here in 1956 from the city's first Jewish burial ground on Akard Street, established in 1872. Among its thousands of monuments rest early Dallas business and civic leaders, veterans of both world wars, and survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.

Temple, TX

Temple sprang from bare blackland prairie into a railroad boomtown in the 1880s, and within a generation its merchants organized civic clubs to promote the growing city. In 1917 two local businessmen launched the Temple Lions Club, which sold Liberty Bonds during World War I and went on to champion public health, beautification, and its signature 100-acre Lions Park.

Granbury, TX

Organized in 1854 as the Methodist Protestant Church, this is among Hood County's oldest institutions, rooted in the pioneer community of Center Mill. Early worshippers gathered under a brush arbor and sometimes cut services short when Native Americans were reported nearby, before building a log structure around 1870 that doubled as school and lodge hall. Frame buildings followed, and the congregation has endured into the present.

Mobeetie, TX

A son of Texas hero Sam Houston, Temple Lea Houston became a brilliant courtroom attorney and served this Panhandle county in the state senate in the 1880s. Known for his eloquence, he delivered the dedicatory address for the new Texas Capitol in 1888. He practiced in the old courthouse near this spot and made his home nearby with his wife and three sons.

Panhandle, TX

Born in the Governor's Mansion as the last child of Sam Houston, Temple Lea Houston came to the Texas Panhandle in 1881 as a young district attorney and won a state senate seat in 1884 before he was even of legal age. Tall, handsome, and famed as an orator, he championed frontier interests and delivered the keynote at the 1888 dedication of the new Austin capitol, proudly noting that Panhandle lands had paid for it. He later moved to Oklahoma, where his courtroom eloquence made him a legend in his own lifetime.

Houston, TX

Chartered on May 10, 1838, Temple Lodge was the fourth Masonic organization in Texas and the first established in the young Republic, whose seat of government then sat in newly founded Houston. Its founders read like a roll of Texas statesmen—George Fisher as first worshipful master, San Jacinto veteran Richard Bache, and future governor Francis R. Lubbock. The lodge met in the Senate Chamber of the Houston capitol and conducted the Republic's first Masonic burial in July 1838.

Temple, TX

In 1900 Temple's Women's Literary Club and Self Culture Club joined forces to found a public library, opening it first in a corner of the post office. A grant from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie's library program funded a permanent building that opened in 1904, run for years by volunteer women until the city assumed support. After fire, moves, and a 1963 relocation into a former post office, the Renaissance Revival library endured as a civic fixture.

Navasota, TX

Built in the mid-1890s for newlyweds Ward B. and Annie Foster Templeman, this Navasota home rose during the town's cotton-boom prosperity. Originally a Queen Anne design, it was later bricked and reworked in the Prairie School style, keeping its wraparound porch, multi-light windows, and a copper-clad dome atop a corner turret. It stands as a showpiece of a cotton economy flush enough to build in the latest fashions.

Rockwall, TX

This modest cabin, built around 1920 and moved here from the Pullen Farm on Highway 205, once housed a tenant farming family in Rockwall County. In the decades after Reconstruction, tenant farming and sharecropping shaped rural Texas life, with families working land they did not own in exchange for a share of the crop. The preserved dwelling offers a rare, tangible look at that hardscrabble agricultural world.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Founded in 1838 by settlers who rolled in by wagon from the Old South, Tennessee Colony chased fertile, well-watered farmland — and found wealth in cotton shipped down the Trinity from Magnolia Ferry. The town grew into a trade center reaching as far as Dallas, with stores, craftsmen, a Masonic lodge, and a two-story church-school-lodge hall finished in 1860. Its schools were famous enough to draw students from surrounding towns, including the Clark brothers who would later help found the forerunner of Texas Christian University.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Settlers from the southern states founded Tennessee Colony in 1838, a decade before Anderson County existed, and one of their first acts was to raise a log church on a nearby hill. The burial ground beside it holds graves reaching back to the 1840s and 1850s, though most were marked only by fieldstones long since scattered; the oldest legible stone belongs to Mrs. Manurva E. Shelton, who died in 1862. Deeded to a cemetery association in 1974, it still serves the community it has held for well over a century.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Founded in 1902 as the Redbud Chapter, this was the first Order of the Eastern Star chapter chartered in Anderson County, organized for the wives and female relatives of the Tyre Masonic Lodge. It took the Tennessee Colony name in 1936 and met monthly, then twice monthly, in the Masonic hall. Membership grew sharply after World War II as the chapter's fellowship and charitable work became part of the community's fabric.

Timpson, TX

This East Texas congregation began in 1857 as a Union church serving Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian families, many of whom had migrated from Tennessee. First called Mount Carmel, its one-room frame building — with log seats — doubled as the community schoolhouse, and the name changed to Tennessee Church by 1871. The three denominations shared quarters, including a two-story building whose upper floor housed a Woodmen of the World lodge, until they finally divided in 1913.

Timpson, TX

Organized in 1857 as Mount Carmel, this was the first Presbyterian congregation in Shelby County. A one-room log cabin gave way to a two-story frame building in 1877 that also served the Methodist and Baptist congregations, the public school, and a fraternal lodge. The church built its own sanctuary here in 1914, and its rolls, dating to 1858, name many of the community's early settlers.

Belton vicinity, TX

In 1851, eight families from Tennessee came to this curve of the Leon River looking for good, affordable farmland, and named their new home Tennessee Valley. Sheltered by the Sparta Mountains, its fields gave grain, cotton, nuts, and peaches for nearly a century, though the Leon River's floods were a recurring threat. In 1954 that same river was dammed to create Belton Lake, deliberately flooding Tennessee Valley and two neighboring communities to protect the wider region.

Tennyson, TX

The rolling country around Mt. Margaret in Coke County was long ranged by Native peoples before open-range cattlemen moved in during the late 1870s. Permanent settlers followed in the 1880s, and in 1894 a post office opened under the unlikely name of the British poet Alfred Tennyson, with Sarah E. Kiser as its first postmaster. Schools came and went, but the community's ties endured through an annual homecoming and Easter sunrise services held near the old landmark hill.

Burkburnett, TX

Cowboys and settlers renamed this stream when they found, near where it meets the Red River, the ruins of a military post held by the U.S. Tenth Cavalry from 1873 to 1875. Its Black troopers and white officers — Buffalo Soldiers, many of them Civil War veterans who had also served at Fort Sill — guarded the frontier during the Indian Wars. Legend holds that after an Indian attack on the timber outpost, the men and horses lost in the fighting were buried together in a single grave somewhere along the creek.

Dallas, TX

The Tenth Street District grew from the enslaved people first brought to Oak Cliff in the 1840s into a thriving African American enclave after the Civil War. By 1900 hundreds of Black residents lived here, building a segregated commercial district, churches, and schools that nurtured talents the marker credits, including blues artist T-Bone Walker and Olympian Rafer Johnson. Highway construction in the 1950s and integration reshaped the neighborhood, yet its historic homes remain among the best-preserved of their kind in Dallas.

Terlingua, TX

In the Chihuahuan Desert near the Big Bend, Terlingua boomed after an 1890 strike of cinnabar—the ore that yields mercury, or "quicksilver." For a few decades it ranked among the nation's leading sources of the metal, and Howard E. Perry's Chisos Mining Company drew some 2,000 workers to a company town complete with a hilltop mansion, jail, church, and theater. When the mines flooded and mercury prices fell after World War II, the town emptied, leaving the desert ruins that make it one of Texas's most famous ghost towns.

Aransas Pass, TX

The original Aransas Harbor Terminal Railroad, built in 1892, hauled rock from mainland quarries to build the jetties guarding the pass. When a deep-water channel was dredged to Harbor Island, the displaced sediment formed a roadbed, and a new terminal railroad opened in 1912 along eight trestles, becoming an important cotton-shipping link. During World War I its "Toonerville Trolley"—coaches pulled by a converted Model T truck—carried workers to a Harbor Island shipyard. Business faded after Corpus Christi became a deep-water port in 1922.