Historic Markers in Texas

Canyon, TX

In 1876 veteran cattleman Charles Goodnight entered Palo Duro Canyon by an old Comanche trail and founded the first ranch in the region, having learned the canyon's sheltered value as a scout for the Texas Rangers during the Civil War. Partnering with Englishman John Adair in 1877, he laid out the headquarters of the JA Ranch, which grew into one of the world's greatest cattle operations—over a million acres and more than 100,000 head. When the partnership ended in 1887, Adair's heirs kept the JA, still a great Texas ranch today.

San Marcos, TX

This brick-and-rock kiln stands on land once part of an 1834 Mexican grant later owned by Gen. Edward Burleson, a leading figure in early Texas. In 1887 J. J. Belger and James Cahill built the kiln to burn local limestone into lime for farming and construction. The operation ran until about 1910, when cheaper commercial lime made it obsolete.

Plainview, TX

This marker commemorates the trail broken in 1871 by General Ranald Slidell MacKenzie and his 4th U.S. Cavalry as they campaigned across the West Texas plains against roving bands of Indians. Larry Chittenden's mournful verse, quoted on the marker, conjures the wagon trains, soldiers, and lonely prairie graves that once followed its course. Erected in 1936 for the Texas Centennial, it fixes the fading route in public memory.

Montgomery, TX

In January 1839 the Rev. Isaac Strickland organized a Methodist church here, and its members raised a log meetinghouse on land donated by the founders of Montgomery. The churchyard filled with graves through the 1840s, and one dying pastor asked to be buried beneath the altar of the frame church replacing the cabin. Among those laid to rest are a soldier of the American Revolution and veterans of the War of 1812, the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War, alongside pioneers, officials, and travelers who died among strangers.

Sylvester vicinity, TX

In the 1880s cattleman Andy Long assembled the 10,300-acre "OB" Ranch that surrounded the future town of Sylvester. This one-room rock house, built in 1883, served as ranch headquarters and sometimes as the foreman's quarters, while Long kept his family home 25 miles away in Sweetwater. He sold the ranch in 1901 to the Compere brothers for colonization.

Goldthwaite, TX

In August 1887, tragedy struck as the town well of Goldthwaite was being dug: Mr. Peyton was overcome and killed by poisonous fumes, and Ben Cox nearly died beside him. Deed H. Mayer descended into the shaft to pull Cox to safety and recover Peyton's body. The Mills County Historical Society raised this marker in memory of the three men.

Austin, TX

Edward E. Zimmerman left Germany for Texas in 1844 and settled with his wife Regina near Austin a decade later, part of the German immigration that reshaped the Hill Country. In 1861 he built this sturdy farmhouse of local cream-colored stone and Bull Creek lumber, along the Shawnee Trail that carried traders, immigrants, and great cattle drives of the 1850s and 60s. Family lore even recalls Regina shooting a bear at the back door.

Fayette County, TX

In November 1856 a small band of Czech families reached this part of Fayette County from Central Europe and put down roots at Hostyn, in what is remembered as the oldest Czech settlement in Texas. Their arrival opened one of the great immigrant streams of the state, as thousands more Czech-speaking farmers followed to the blackland prairies over the coming decades.

Junction, TX

Young P. Oliver came to Kimble County in 1876 and in 1896 bought a 640-acre section thick with native pecan trees, becoming a pioneer of the Texas pecan industry. One giant tree he called "Old Oliver" yielded hundreds of pounds of soft-shelled nuts a year, and by grafting its buds onto seedlings he developed the well-known Oliver pecan strain. A 1935 flood destroyed the parent tree, but its descendants still bear fruit commercially in a county where nut harvesting remains a major industry.

Orange, TX

The Orange Leader traces its roots to 1875, when merchant A. P. Harris founded The Orange Weekly Tribune in the growing Sabine River lumber town. Through a long succession of owners, mergers, and name changes, the paper kept Orange informed on local and world affairs for well over a century. It stands among the enduring institutions of southeast Texas journalism.

Kerrville, TX

Captain Joseph A. Tivy, a Canadian-born surveyor who settled in Kerr County around 1870, served as Kerrville's first mayor and a state legislator. In 1890 he donated land and a hundred acres to fund a school on this site, and classes began in 1891. Among its early pupils was Chester W. Nimitz, the future Fleet Admiral of World War II; the native-stone building was damaged by fire in 1942 and housed Tivy High School until 1967.

Galveston, TX

The 1900 Galveston hurricane and its storm surge killed roughly 6,000 people and leveled much of the island city. In response, a board of three engineers — including Henry M. Robert, author of "Robert's Rules of Order," Alfred Noble, and H.C. Ripley — designed a defense: raise the entire city's grade and shield the Gulf shore with a solid concrete wall. Begun in October 1902 and finished in July 1904, the original 3.3-mile seawall proved itself in 1915, when a fiercer storm did far less harm.

Austin, TX

Long a corridor for Indigenous peoples and crossed by the El Camino Real de los Tejas, this bend of the Colorado River became the site of Jesse Cornelius Tannehill's ambitious 1838–1839 townsite of Montopolis—its name stitched from Latin "mount" and Greek "city." Tannehill moved his family and an enslaved African American family to a headright of over 4,000 acres and laid out the town before Austin was even chosen as the Republic of Texas capital, and there is evidence Montopolis was itself in the running for that honor. The venture collapsed within two years, but the name endured, and the Montopolis neighborhood thrives today.

Gruver, TX

In 1908 Norwegian native Anders L. Mordt secured the rights to sell a hundred sections of Hansford County land, which he named Oslo and marketed to Norwegian colonies across the Midwest through advertisements in Norwegian-language papers and his own weekly, the Oslo Posten. He staged an annual Syttende Mai celebration of Norwegian Independence Day that drew crowds from across Oklahoma and Texas, and the Oslo Lutheran Church became the settlement's center. Drought ended land sales in 1913 and the railroad bypassed the town, but more than thirty families stayed and the church endures as a monument to their heritage.

Turkey, TX

In 1913 William Hope "Coin" Harvey, an Ozark resort operator, founded the Ozark Trail Association to promote a private auto highway running diagonally from St. Louis to Santa Fe, its routes marked by white obelisks lettered in green with town names, directions, and distances. A southern branch threaded through the Texas Panhandle communities of Childress, Estelline, Tampico, Turkey, and beyond, with Tulia's J.E. Swepston championing the markers after his 1920 election as association president. Federal road-numbering absorbed the private trails by 1924, and the nearby Tampico oilfield's 1929 boom soon faded, but this obelisk — a State Archeological Landmark since 1999 — still stands as a relic of early motoring.

San Antonio, TX

Early in the eighteenth century, the Pajalache Indians helped build this acequia, a hand-dug irrigation canal that carried San Antonio River water from La Villita down to Mission Concepcion. So wide and deep was the channel that, by tradition, padres and Native people paddled canoes between the two places. Part of the Spanish colonial mission system's remarkable network of gravity-fed waterways, the acequia sustained the fields that fed a young frontier community.

Kerrville, TX

Completed as a frame building around 1895, this Kerrville landmark became the property of merchant John L. Pampell in 1901, who turned its second floor into a 450-seat auditorium while making and selling candy, ice cream, and carbonated drinks below. The Pampell Opera House drew plays, concerts, and traveling acts and hosted the town's civic life until movies began crowding out live performance in the 1920s. Traces of the old auditorium still survive inside the walls.

Carthage, TX

Tom M. Bowers printed the first issue of the Panola Watchman in Carthage on July 2, 1873, having earlier run the Carthage Banner before leaving to serve in the Confederate army. In its early years the paper was set by hand, its news drawn from other publications and readers' letters, and it later passed through a series of owners who were state representatives. Over the following century it modernized from linotype to offset printing.

Paris, TX

On the windy afternoon of March 21, 1916, a fire broke out near a warehouse at the southwest edge of Paris, Texas, and 50-mph winds drove it in a funnel-shaped path across town. Before it was checked at dawn the next day, the blaze had destroyed nearly half of Paris — the courthouse, city hall, federal building, churches, and most of the business district — with damage estimated at $11 million. Firefighters came from as far as Oklahoma, and the glow was visible forty miles away.

Calvert, TX

In 1892 the merchant, cotton buyer, and banker L.H. Parish and his wife Mattie built this ornately Victorian carriage house to match their new home in the cotton-boom town of Calvert. Both structures were ordered from the mail-order catalogue of architect George Franklin Barber, whose designs let prosperous small-town families import high style by post. The ground floor sheltered the family's bay horses and elegant carriages, while the driver lived upstairs.

El Paso, TX

Where the Rio Grande cuts between the mountains at El Paso lies the Pass of the North, the northernmost Rocky Mountain gap that stays free of snow year-round. Indigenous peoples traveled it for centuries before Spanish explorers arrived, and Juan de Oñate drove the first cattle into what is now the United States through it in 1598. In the 1849 gold rush and after, stage lines and railroads all funneled through this natural gateway.

Tyler, TX

This East Texas house began humbly as a dog-trot cabin raised before 1854, its open central breezeway a hallmark of Southern frontier building. Passing from pioneer settlers to the Patterson family in 1871, it was transformed in 1882 with a second story and fashionable Victorian trim, becoming the heart of a large working farm. For more than a century it sheltered the same family, a living record of how frontier cabins grew into gracious farmhouses as Texas prospered.

Fredericksburg, TX

Business leader Albert Lee Patton and his wife Emma built the first four rooms of this limestone home in the mid-1870s, soon after buying the property in the German-settled town of Fredericksburg. Later additions, including a three-window front bay, expanded the house as the family and the town prospered. It remained in Patton hands for more than a century, passing to a daughter before leaving the family in 1978.

Richmond, TX

Col. P.E. Peareson, a Civil War veteran and lawyer whose firm practiced in Richmond for nearly a century, moved this dignified house to the site in 1869, where his relatives lived until 1931. It then passed to Thomas Blakely Winston, a great-great-grandson of Jane Long, remembered as the "Mother of Texas." Fittingly, the home stands on land granted to Mrs. Long in 1827, tying the property to the earliest days of Anglo settlement in the region.

Pecos, TX

By the 1880s, gardeners in Pecos noticed something about their melons: the fierce West Texas sun and mineral soil gave them a flavor found nowhere else. In 1917 Madison L. Todd and a partner planted eight acres and sold to the dining cars of the Texas & Pacific Railway, where the Pecos cantaloupe became a coast-to-coast sensation—ordered by exclusive clubs and even famous names of the age. Todd stayed a leader of the trade for four decades.

Langtry, TX

Rising in the mountains of northern New Mexico and cutting through some of the harshest country in Texas on its way to the Rio Grande, the Pecos River became a boundary in more ways than one. To 19th-century travelers it marked the edge of the tame world—"west of the Pecos" meant a land of flash floods, mineral-heavy water, and hard-bitten reputations. Writers and folklorists from J. Frank Dobie to Zane Grey turned that reputation into legend, and the country gave rise to figures both real, like Judge Roy Bean, and mythical, like Pecos Bill.

Ozona, TX

This frame house began in 1893 when T. L. Hammonds hauled a three-room dwelling here from the vanished town of Emerald. Merchant Phillip Perner bought and enlarged it a year later, and after his death his widow Mary Ross Perner raised their eleven children beneath its roof. Later owned by county judge Ralph Jones, the house passed through the hands of families who helped shape early Crockett County.

San Antonio, TX

Alphonse W. Perrin, born in New York City in 1848 to French parents, drew the original plans for this home, built in 1875. Seeking a healthier climate, he and his Wisconsin-born bride, Mina Carr, came to Texas, living first at Leon Springs before settling near the banks of Salado Creek. The house survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

San Antonio, TX

When General John J. Pershing chased Pancho Villa into Mexico in 1916, Chinese merchants set up camps to supply his soldiers — and earned the resentment of a hostile local populace. Fearing reprisals, some 527 Chinese fled north with Pershing's returning column in 1917, and because the Chinese Exclusion Act barred their entry, the general had to secure special permission for them. Most settled around San Antonio's military bases as laborers, carpenters, and cooks, and a special act of Congress in 1921 finally granted them permanent residency; many stayed to open businesses.

Tivoli, TX

This cypress, oak, and Florida-pine house rose in 1868 on land first granted in 1834 to Nicholas Fagan, an Irish-born colonist who fought in Texas's war for independence. His son Peter Henry Fagan, a Confederate veteran of campaigns in New Mexico and Galveston, returned home in 1865 and built the home, which soon doubled as a way-station on the road between Refugio and Victoria. Travelers rested here, and visiting priests celebrated neighborhood masses under its roof.

Grapevine, TX

In 1841 the Republic of Texas contracted with W.S. Peters of Kentucky and his associates to recruit settlers for the empty north-central prairies, launching the largest of the empresario colonies. By 1848 the Peters Colony spread across nearly two million acres, taking in all of Tarrant County, though rampant speculation in land certificates muddied the enterprise. Only about 150 colonist families — mostly American-born farmers of modest means — actually settled in the county, but they opened the door.

Midland, TX

Convinced Midland sat at the heart of the Permian Basin, oilman and rancher T. S. Hogan announced this office building in 1927 as a hub for the region's oil companies, dedicating it on July 4, 1929. Designed by Fort Worth architect Wyatt C. Hedrick, it opened just before the stock-market crash sent oil to fifteen cents a barrel and drove companies away. When Midland finally became a leading oil center in the years that followed, the Petroleum Building played the role Hogan had imagined.

Pharr, TX

On February 6, 1971, a protest against police discrimination and brutality outside the Pharr Police Department swelled into a confrontation that turned deadly when an officer's gunfire killed bystander Alfonso Loredo Flores. In the weeks that followed, groups like Union y Fuerza picketed city hall and boycotted local businesses, drawing national attention to the Rio Grande Valley. The pressure forced the resignation of the mayor, commissioners, and police chief, and in 1972 Pharr elected its first Mexican American mayor.

Saint Jo, TX

J.H. Phillips brought his family from Illinois to Texas by wagon train in 1873 and helped shape early Saint Jo as storekeeper, hotelier, and Baptist preacher. His son G.W. prospered as a livery owner, horse trader, and rancher, buying land on the town's edge and, in 1911, commissioning the grand two-story home that neighbors dubbed "The Big House." A blend of Colonial Revival and Queen Anne styling, the house has stayed in the Phillips family for over a century.

Gonzales, TX

This center-hall home with its double fireplaces and wide pine floors was built in 1883 by Carey J. Pilgrim for his bride, Mary Fleda Boothe. Carey edited the Gonzales Inquirer, and he was the son of T. J. Pilgrim, remembered for founding the first Sunday School in Texas. Recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965, the house links two generations of a family notable in Texas journalism and religious education.

Fredericksburg, TX

Long before wagon wheels cut its ruts, the Pinta Trail began as a path worn by nomadic Plains peoples across the Texas Hill Country, linking San Antonio de Béxar with the San Sabá River country near present Menard. Spanish and Mexican expeditions borrowed its general course, and in 1845 German immigrant surveyors improved part of it into a wagon road. After the 1849 California gold rush, U.S. military companies pressed it into service scouting new routes west, until the railroads of the late 19th and early 20th centuries made the old trace obsolete.

Barksdale, TX

This marker recalls the Coalson family's hard years on the Edwards Plateau frontier. Native raiders attacked Nick Coalson's goat camp in June 1877, killing ten-year-old Arthur and wounding his brother, and a year later a second raid claimed his wife Alice, a daughter, and an infant stepson — losses that Texas Rangers under Captains Dolan and Roberts pursued but could not avenge.

Houston, TX

Opened on Houston's Main Street in 1951, The Playhouse Theatre was among the first buildings in the country designed specifically for "theatre in the round," seating 300 spectators encircling a revolving central stage. Producers Joanna Albus and William Rozan mounted high-quality productions here, and in 1953 the playwright Tennessee Williams himself directed a premiere on its stage. Rising costs forced the original company to close in 1954, but later owners kept the space alive as a theater and cinema until it became the National African American Museum in 2004.

Port Arthur, TX

The 1901 Lucas Gusher at Spindletop made Texas a major oil source, and the new town of Port Arthur reaped the benefit. A group of Pittsburgh investors formed the J. M. Guffey Petroleum Company and in 1901 chartered the Gulf Refining Company, building a refinery here to turn crude into gasoline, kerosene, and engine oil. Merged into the Gulf Oil Corporation in 1907, the plant grew into a petrochemical giant—refining 270,000 barrels a day into 600 products by 1960—and passed through Chevron, Clark, and Premcor ownership.

Post, TX

Cereal magnate Charles W. Post founded the town of Post as a model community, and this native-stone cottage — quarried by hand from the nearby Caprock and built by his Double U Company in 1907 — served as his residence during frequent visits. The design came from a staffer at his Battle Creek, Michigan headquarters. Later families preserved the structure through the twentieth century.

Powell, TX

Discovered in 1905, the Powell field near Corsicana became one of the world's most famous oil fields when, after years of disappointment, the J. H. Burke No. 1 blew in as a gusher in January 1923 and touched off a frenzied drilling boom. Derricks sprouted by the dozens, a deadly gusher that ignited claimed fifteen lives, and on its peak day the field produced nearly 355,000 barrels, briefly outproducing Pennsylvania and nine other states combined.

Snyder, TX

Once numbering in the billions across the Texas plains, the prairie dog was as much a fixture of the Old West as the longhorn, its yipping colonies riddling the range with elaborate branching burrows. Branded a pest by ranchers and farmers, the little rodent was poisoned nearly out of existence — which is why in 1964 a town was set aside expressly to keep a remnant of the vanishing species alive.

Gonzales, TX

The Presbyterian Church of Gonzales was constituted on February 29, 1852, with eight charter members under the Rev. Joel T. Case, at first borrowing the local Baptist church for monthly worship. The congregation built its own sanctuary in 1875, opened a Sunday school of 62 pupils in 1881, and replaced its building with a new worship facility in 1925 as it continued to grow.

Snyder, TX

Newspapers came early and often to Snyder, where eight different nameplates passed through some three dozen owners over the decades, from the pioneering "Scurry County Citizen" of the 1880s through a string of weeklies with names like the "Signal" and the "Times." A major newspaper chain launched the "Snyder Daily News" in 1950, and a local family soon took the reins, giving the plains town a lasting daily voice.

Austin, TX

Built around 1870 just two blocks from the State Capitol, this cypress-wood dwelling was a typical post-Civil War Austin home, raised for merchant and metalsmith Bernard Radkey and his wife Mary. Radkey served as a city alderman until shortly before his early death in 1883. His heirs enlarged and lived in the house until 1973, after which it was moved and restored in 1974.

Austin, TX

Created in 1891 after years of political struggle, the Railroad Commission of Texas was born to regulate the rates and practices of the powerful railroads. Its importance was such that Governor James S. Hogg persuaded John H. Reagan to resign from the U.S. Senate to lead it. Over the following decades the commission became the pivotal regulator of Texas oil and gas — setting drilling rules, pioneering proration, and famously calling in the Texas Rangers to shut down the flooded East Texas field until conservation rules could be revised.

Beeville, TX

On June 14, 1886, the first San Antonio and Aransas Pass train steamed into Beeville to a cheering crowd — the payoff of a campaign by rail promoter Uriah Lott, cattleman Captain A.C. Jones, and rancher Frank Skidmore, who donated land and money to bend the line through Bee County. When a second line arrived in 1889, Beeville became a rail center shipping cattle and cotton far and wide, with passenger service peaking around 1918 at eighteen trains a day on one line. Highways eventually undid it all: passenger service ended in 1952, the depot fell in 1958, and the last train left the county in 1994.

Montgomery, TX

Frustrated by the difficulty of hauling crops to market, Montgomery businessmen organized the Central and Montgomery Railroad in 1877, and by 1880 a 25-mile line linked the town to the Houston & Texas Central at Navasota. The combined depot became a hub of local life—even the county jail was parked in the rail yard after the county seat moved away in 1889. The Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe bought the line in 1882 to reach East Texas timber, extending the rails until a spot west of town became known simply as 'The Junction.' Passenger service ended in 1951, and the track into town was eventually pulled up.

Henderson, TX

Though a rail line was envisioned as early as 1852, tracks did not reach this East Texas county until after the Civil War, when the International & Great Northern arrived in the 1870s and made nearby Overton a railroad hub. The Henderson-Overton branch opened in 1877, and while several small lines rose and fell by the 1920s, freight rail endured as passenger service declined across Texas after World War II.

El Paso, TX

Drought was a constant threat on the arid plains of West Texas, and in 1891 the U.S. Department of Agriculture tested a bold theory: that the concussions of battle explained why rain so often followed war, and that explosives might therefore coax storms from a clear sky. After trials near Midland, desperate El Paso leaders brought the experiment here, firing hundreds of dynamite charges from the heights of Mt. Franklin on September 18. The sky answered with nothing more than a heavy dew.

Laredo, TX

The Ramón family's roots in Laredo reach back to the closing years of Spanish rule, when patriarch Ildefonso Ramón had settled in the area by 1800 and went on to serve repeated terms as alcalde, the town's chief magistrate. By 1869 the family held residential property on this site, having lived through the transitions from Spanish to Mexican to Texan and American governance. Their long tenure threads through much of Laredo's early civic history.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1859 circus-promoter-turned-civic-leader Henry Alonzo Maltby launched a four-page weekly newspaper in Corpus Christi that mixed editorials, poetry, recipes, and a register of local cattle brands. When war came, the Maltby brothers threw the paper behind the Confederacy; William was captured defending Mustang Island while Henry fled with his press to Mexico and then Brownsville, where a Union colonel briefly suppressed it. After the war the Ranchero kept up its defiant opposition to federal military rule until Maltby sold it in 1870, the year Reconstruction-era occupation of Texas ended.

Columbus, TX

By 1822 Stephen F. Austin had drawn some 150 families to his colony on the Colorado and Brazos rivers, where fear of Indian raids was constant. After the Mexican governor Trespalacios organized local defense, colonists in 1823 raised a small company under Moses Morrison, and Austin pledged ten more men at his own expense to serve as "Rangers." Though the Texas Rangers were not formally organized until 1835, these earliest ranging companies became the model for the force that followed.

Burkburnett, TX

Named for the red soil it carries, the Red River runs 1,360 miles and forms 440 miles of the Texas-Oklahoma line — once an international boundary set by the 1819 treaty with Spain dividing the United States from New Spain. It served as a Spanish-colonial gateway into Texas and drew steamer traffic and Captain Randolph Marcy's 1852 exploring expedition into Native-held lands upriver. The 1921 Burkburnett oil boom sparked a Texas–Oklahoma fight over the riverbed that the Supreme Court settled at the south bank.

Wellington vicinity, TX

On June 10, 1933, the Pritchard family watched from their bluff as a car plunged into the Red River below. They rescued the injured occupants — not knowing they were the outlaws Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow, and Buck Barrow — and sent for help. When the sheriff and police chief arrived, the gang disarmed them, shot the Pritchards' daughter, kidnapped the officers, and fled; the pair would be killed less than a year later.

Goldthwaite, TX

At the near-vanished town of Regency on the Mills–San Saba county line, the area's first Colorado River bridge went up in 1903, only to collapse in 1924, killing a boy and several animals; its replacement fell to a 1936 flood. In 1939, with ninety percent of the work done by hand, the Regency Suspension Bridge was raised, becoming a beloved local gathering place where young people picnicked and danced in the 1940s. Bypassed by paved farm roads, it endures as one of the last suspension bridges in Texas.

Carthage, TX

In the 1870s Richard Ormand Respess and his wife Nannie Lois Williams settled here from Harrison County. Respess gave the land for—and taught at—the first school in the Frog Pond community, later known as Liberty Chapel, while his son Charlie ran a nearby general store. The family's open invitation to fish the stream gave "Respess Creek" its enduring name.

Woodville, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1823, the Rev. Acton Young settled in the East Texas piney woods and married into a family tied to one of the region's earliest Protestant congregations. Licensed as a Methodist minister, he rode a wide circuit from the 1840s until his death in 1873, serving Woodville and many other communities from a family home that also housed a store. His son-in-law Bronson Cooper later went on to the United States Congress.

Brownwood, TX

John David Robnett, a Missouri-born Baptist minister, came to Brownwood in 1883 and took up a fellow pastor's dream of a Baptist college in central Texas. Working through the Pecan Valley Baptist Association, he helped found the school in 1889 and raised the funds—much of it from his Missouri hometown—that gave Howard Payne its name and its start. He served as the college's first board president and later its president before returning to the pulpit.

Mount Pleasant, TX

Born in Alabama in 1827 and educated at Centre College and New Albany Theological Seminary, Edward Hollister Green preached in Tennessee before coming to Texas and founding a church here on September 23, 1860. He held the pastorate until his death in Titus County in 1863. He and his wife, Catherine Hall, raised a son and two daughters.