Historic Markers in Texas

Rocksprings, TX

Joseph and Mary Jane Thurman came to this part of Edwards County in 1882, and in 1885 Mary Jane became the first person laid to rest in what grew into the family cemetery. Its 29 graves record the hard toll of pioneer life, including infant deaths and victims of typhoid and other diseases. Members of the Thurman and more than a dozen allied families rest here, and their descendants still tend the grounds, last used for burial in 1958.

Victoria, TX

C.L. Thurmond, Jr. put up this building in 1898 to hold both a general mercantile store and his residence, in an era when Bridge Street was a thriving commercial heart of Victoria. Distinguished by a three-story central section, it went on to house stores, a grain mill, and the Farmers' Cooperative. The district's fortunes faded once nearby rail lines and roads were rerouted away from it.

Rhome, TX

Early families who called their Wise County home the "Illinois Settlement," later Fairview, put down roots here in the 1880s. When J. F. Thurmond's infant daughter died in 1883, neighbors chose a burial tract beside land he had already given for a church and school—part of six acres he donated to the community. Over the decades a cemetery association formed, the school consolidated and became a community center, and the graveyard, still in use, grew to more than 400 graves sustained by endowments and a gas well.

Martins Mill, TX

Pioneer L. H. Hobbs settled this part of Van Zandt County around 1850 and let a grieving family bury their two-year-old daughter on his land, quietly founding a cemetery. The graveyard took the Tidmore name after John Tidmore—who died in 1866 of afflictions carried home from the Civil War—and his family came to own the ground and were laid to rest there in turn. Around the Tidmore and Hobbs graves gathered generations of a farming community, including a dozen Confederate veterans and later soldiers of both World Wars.

Thornton vicinity, TX

Settlement along Steele Creek began in the 1850s around a Methodist church named for the Rev. David J. Tidwell, who arrived with his family in 1853 and served as the first postmaster. The little community — known variously as Steele Creek, Tidwell, Shady Grove, and Pleasant Grove — gathered two stores, a school, and homes. Its cemetery of some 175 marked graves, deeded to residents by Mary Chisum in 1886, records the harsh toll of frontier life, with many infant deaths and apparent epidemics.

Seguin, TX

Named for Theodore Tiemann, who sold the county an acre of land for five dollars, this Guadalupe County school opened in 1903 as a single room with one teacher. Growing enrollment soon required a second teacher, and the building doubled as a gathering place for community events until it closed in 1943. Along with neighboring schools, it was absorbed into the Seguin district in 1949.

Brownsville, TX

Tomás Tijerina, descended from an 18th-century Spanish settler of the Rio Grande, moved to this Brownsville site in 1904 and built the present brick home in 1912. A longtime deputy sheriff, he designed the house himself while his neighbor Teodoro Perez handled the carpentry. Its brick buttresses were raised deliberately to brace the walls against the hurricanes that regularly menace the Gulf coast.

McMullen County, TX

Settled in 1858 as Rio Frio, this ranching outpost earned the nickname "Dog Town" for the packs of dogs its cowmen used to round up wild cattle. A townsite was platted as Colfax in 1871, made county seat in 1877, and finally renamed for Samuel J. Tilden, who won the popular vote in the disputed 1876 presidential election. It grew into a center of ranching and, later, petroleum.

Austin, TX

Founded in 1875 with the backing of the American Missionary Association, Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute was chartered in 1877 to train teachers and educate African Americans in Austin. Under president Mary Elizabeth Branch, who arrived in 1930, it grew into a full four-year, co-educational college. In 1952 it merged with Samuel Huston College to form Huston-Tillotson, which endures today.

Baytown, TX

Family tradition holds that Charles Nathan Tilton served as a cabin boy for the pirate Jean Laffite before settling in Texas around 1829 and marrying Anna Barber in 1831. He fought in the Texas Revolution, received a large headright land grant, and traded in cattle and shipping—even lending his brand to the famed rancher Samuel Maverick. The family cemetery he established in the 1850s holds veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, chronicling generations of early Texas pioneers.

Fort Worth, TX

Timothy Brian Cole, an Army veteran and Texas Tech student, was wrongly convicted of assault in 1986 and sentenced to 25 years, refusing every offer of freedom that required a false confession. He died in prison in 1999, still maintaining his innocence, and only years later did DNA evidence and another man's confession clear his name. In 2009 a Texas court declared him innocent, the state enacted the Tim Cole Act to compensate the wrongly convicted, and in 2010 the governor issued Texas's first posthumous pardon.

Wichita Falls, TX

When Ed Howard acquired a Wichita Falls newspaper in 1898, the North Texas town was on the cusp of a boom that railroads, cattle, and the discovery of oil would soon fuel. His weekly grew into a daily afternoon paper in 1907, backed by local businessmen who formed the Times Publishing Company, and the paper chronicled the young city's rise. Under Howard, his son Rhea, and the Donnell family, the firm also came to publish the morning Record News and became a fixture of civic life for generations.

Seguin, TX

Timothy Pickering Jones entered Texas on his twenty-first birthday in 1835 and promptly took up arms as an officer in the Texas War for Independence. His long soldiering life spanned three conflicts: he captained a company in the Mexican War and later commanded the Sixth Tennessee Regiment as a Confederate colonel in 1861. He died in Texas in 1904, and the state erected this Confederate-style marker over his grave in 1962.

Palestine, TX

Born in 1902 to a father who had escaped slavery, Timothy Stephen Smith earned a degree from Prairie View A&M and taught school for forty-two years. Convinced that Anderson County's voting boundaries diluted Black political strength, he and others sued in 1973; Judge William Wayne Justice agreed, striking down a "racially motivated gerrymander" and forcing a switch to single-member districts. Similar success against the City of Palestine soon followed, opening the way for the county's first Black officeholders.

Timpson, TX

Timpson was born of the railroad in 1885, laid out along the new Houston, East and West Texas narrow-gauge line and named for the official who platted it. The first passenger train arrived that August, and within a year two stores separated by a pine thicket had grown into a town of a thousand, complete with a school, churches, a newspaper, banks, and factories. It thrived as an East Texas lumber, cotton, and rail hub until state highways eroded the railroads' dominance in the 1940s.

Tioga, TX

Settlers founded Tioga on the edge of the East Cross Timbers in 1881, and after years of burying their dead in scattered family plots, the community got a formal cemetery in 1906 when W.R. and Sally Gillespie deeded five acres to the local Woodmen of the World camp — whose distinctive tree-stump headstones still mark many early graves. The burial ground holds Civil War veterans from both sides, Texas Senator Olin R. Van Zandt, and the Rev. H.G. Ball, who preached the funeral of U.S. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. An association keeps the grounds for future generations.

Tioga, TX

This congregation began with services in the homes of the Shiloh community, two miles east, and organized as the Shiloh Methodist Church in 1887 under the Rev. Mr. Allen. After the town of Tioga was founded, the worshipers moved and built their sanctuary on this site in 1893, expanding it over the years. Among its members was Olan R. Van Zandt, who served sixteen years in the Texas Legislature as both representative and senator from 1926 to 1942.

Freeport vicinity, TX

During the Civil War, the tangled willow-lined waterways around this coastal island gave Confederate blockade-runners a place to hide. Captains like the shipbuilder H. C. Wedemeyer slipped cotton-laden vessels out on dark or stormy nights, sometimes towed to open water by men working from shore, evading the Federal ships watching from offshore. The cotton they carried overseas bought guns, powder, medicine, and cloth for a Confederacy short on manufacturing of its own.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Titus County was carved from Red River and Bowie counties and organized in 1846, the same year Texas joined the Union. It was named for Andrew J. Titus, a pioneer of northwest Texas, a soldier in the Mexican War, and a member of the state legislature. Mount Pleasant became the county seat.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Organized in 1846 and named for pioneer road-builder Andrew Jackson Titus, this Northeast Texas county threw itself into the Confederate cause, voting 411 to 275 for secession and sending ten military companies to war. Its farms and mills supplied the Confederate commissary with beef, corn, leather, and lumber, while a transportation depot at Mount Pleasant kept blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and harness makers busy outfitting wagons and teams. The county's home front fed both its own tables of wild game and the armies in the field.

Liberty, TX

In the spring of 1818, French generals Charles Lallemand and Antoine Rigaud led a band of Napoleonic veterans and other exiles to the banks of the Trinity River to found the Champ d'Asile—the "Field of Asylum"—a colony meant to be a refuge for peace and liberty. The settlers, defeated soldiers of a fallen empire, hoped to build new lives free of the political turmoil of Restoration Europe. The venture was short-lived, but its idealistic motto endured: "We want to live as free men through our labor, and in peace."

Austin, TX

This marker remembers rangers killed in the dangerous early years of the Republic. John Williams and Howell Haggett died in a May 1836 encounter with Indians while detailed from Captain John J. Tumlinson's company to protect the Hornsby settlement's families returning from the panicked flight known as the "Runaway Scrape." Pioneer ranger William Atkinson fell in a similar clash in 1845. The State of Texas placed the monument in 1936.

Austin, TX

Josephus Hornsby, son of pioneer Reuben Hornsby, grew up on the exposed Colorado River frontier east of Austin, settling in 1832. As a young Ranger he fought in the Indian and Mexican clashes of the Republic era — the Flores and Brush fights, Plum Creek in 1840, and the Vasquez and Woll campaigns — and in 1842 rescued two captives from an Indian raid in Austin.

Marshall, TX

Walter Paye Lane's long fighting life spanned nearly every armed struggle of nineteenth-century Texas. He won distinction as a young man at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, later rode as a commander of Texas Rangers during the Mexican War, and served as a Confederate brigadier general in the Civil War. Born in 1817 and dying in 1892, he was honored with this state marker in Marshall in 1936.

Houston, TX

John Grant Tod, a Kentuckian who went to sea at seventeen, came to Texas in 1837 and served the Republic's second navy as naval agent, Galveston yard commander, and commodore; in January 1846 he carried the official notice of annexation to President Anson Jones. He later served in the U.S. Navy during the Mexican War and helped organize Texas's first railroad, the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado. He bought a cottage here in 1866, and his son-in-law C.H. Milby's additions turned it into the brick "Milby House," a landmark until its 1959 demolition.

Mason vicinity, TX

In late December 1864, the family of George W. Todd, Mason County's first clerk, was attacked here while traveling to Mason. A twelve-year-old Black servant girl was killed, thirteen-year-old Alice Todd was carried off, and Todd's wife Dizenia was gravely wounded, dying about three weeks later. Alice's half-brother James Smith returned from the Civil War and searched for months, but she was never found.

Marshall, TX

This Marshall house grew in layers from before the Civil War through the early 20th century. Mary Britt bought the land in 1856 and married Judge William S. Todd, a signer of Texas's 1861 secession ordinance; a later owner, Gilchrist McKay, also signed the ordinance and died fighting for the Confederacy at the 1864 Battle of Mansfield. Victorian-era owners added the ornate two-story porch in the 1880s, and a railroad engineer expanded the house again in 1909.

Jefferson, TX

Built in the late 1850s in the Greek Revival style with a broad central hallway, this house was soon sold to District Judge William S. Todd, who took part in the 1861 Secession Convention. From 1869 to 1912 it was home to the family of Dr. Archibald A. Terhune, a popular local physician who added a small room for his office, while his wife Mary Frances earned a reputation as a noted gardener. The dwelling reflects the prosperity and social standing of Jefferson's leading families in the Civil War era.

Brownfield, TX

Schooling in the Tokio area began around the turn of the century in the ranch house of the J Cross Ranch, before a dedicated schoolhouse went up near the town center in 1911. Larger buildings followed — one to replace a fire, others to meet growing needs — and the school served not only as a classroom but as a hub for the community's religious and civic life. In 1941 it consolidated with the Brownfield Independent School District.

Nacogdoches, TX

Built by the founder of nearby Melrose and later home to the Hardeman family, this East Texas farmhouse passed in the 1860s to Lyne Taliaferro "Tol" Barret and his wife Angelina. In 1866 Barret drilled the first producing oil well in Texas, near Oil Springs, decades before the great Spindletop gusher. His descendants occupied the house until 1956, and it was moved to its present site in 1975.

Woodville, TX

Robert Tolar built this log dwelling south of Woodville in 1866, its timbers cut, squared, and notched on the spot and topped with hand-rived shakes above a mud-and-stick chimney. Over the years it became the family's "cook house," where three meals a day were prepared over the open fireplace, with pots kept full for any traveler who happened to drop in — a routine that continued until 1960.

Tolar, TX

Before air conditioning, open-air tabernacles gave Texas communities a shaded place to gather through the brutal summer heat, hosting revivals, weddings, reunions, fairs, and picnics. Built about 1897 with contributions from Tolar's churches, this tabernacle was community-owned and managed by trustees drawn from local congregations, who bought its ground outright in 1904 for $75. A sturdy improvement on the temporary brush arbor, its timber frame and corrugated-metal hip roof still shelter fish fries and the annual Tolar School homecoming held there since 1954.

Burkeville, TX

For centuries the great curve of the Sabine River known as Toledo Bend was a crossroads of the East Texas borderlands—a landmark for Spanish explorers and missionaries, and later a contested edge of the Neutral Territory disputed by the United States and Spain in the early 1800s. Just off El Camino Real, the King's Highway, it drew steamboat landings, ferries, and Anglo-American settlers who knew it as Bevil's Crossing and then Hadden's Ferry. In time it even became a cradle of the region's pecan industry before its modern life as a resort lake.

Lamkin vicinity, TX

This cemetery holds some of the earliest settlers of what became Comanche County, among them James H. Neel, one of the first seven men to bring their families to the area in 1852—four years before the county was even organized. Neel later served as postmaster of the nearby Resley's Creek village during the Civil War years. The graves mark the toehold of Anglo settlement on the central Texas frontier.

Waco, TX

This congregation grew from a Sunday school class led by the Rev. I. Toliver, a respected Baptist minister and civic leader in Waco's African American community, who organized the church in his own name in 1895. After buying land in east Waco, the congregation built a sanctuary near the interurban rail line and grew to more than 1,100 members by the early 1940s. A new church rose on this site in 1948, and the congregation continues its outreach and youth work today.

Columbus, TX

Native Texan and Civil War veteran James A. Toliver, a civic and political leader in Columbus, is said to have built this house around 1870 using the finest pine and cypress from his own lumber yard. Its two-story wrap-around porch and jig-sawn woodwork mark it as a showpiece of the era; Sallie Cone bought it in 1916, and it stayed in her family until 1974.

Bridgeport, TX

When Butterfield's Overland Mail crossed this stretch of the West Fork of the Trinity around 1860, a reliable river crossing was essential, and Colonel W. H. Hunt built a chartered toll bridge just to the west. The mail line collapsed with the coming of the Civil War, but a settlement had taken root; a Decatur merchant spanned the river again with an iron bridge in 1873, and the town shifted when the railroad arrived in 1893.

San Antonio, TX

Rising three stories of concrete and masonry in 1913, the Toltec was built for Dr. Augustus Maverick, who was murdered before it was finished. The Maverick family, long central to San Antonio's downtown growth, retained ownership until 1996. With its U-shaped plan, white stone detailing over red brick, and a cast-iron staircase climbing from basement to top floor, the building preserves its early twentieth-century classical revival design almost intact.

San Angelo, TX

Carved from the old Miller and Fisher land grant, Tom Green County was created in 1874 and organized the following year, taking its name from General Thomas Green, a San Jacinto veteran and Confederate officer killed in 1864. The first transcontinental mail routes had already converged nearby in 1858. The county seat began at Ben Ficklin in 1875 before shifting to San Angelo in 1882.

San Angelo, TX

Thomas Green came to Texas from Tennessee in 1833 and fought at San Jacinto in 1836, helping man the celebrated "Twin Sisters" cannons that won Texas independence. He built a long public career as a court clerk and legislator, served in frontier Indian campaigns and the Mexican War, then rose to prominence as a Confederate cavalry commander. Leading the 5th Texas Cavalry and later his own division, he fought at Val Verde and in the campaigns to hold Louisiana before he was killed in 1864 at Blair's Landing during the Red River Campaign. The West Texas county where this marker stands bears his name.

Cleveland, TX

Completed in 1923, this front-gabled Craftsman bungalow was the home of Thomas Coleman Hill (1883–1976) and his wife Aileene. Tom Hill was a respected Cleveland businessman who ran a general store and insurance agency, served three terms on the city council, directed the Farmers State Bank, and led his Methodist congregation. Its deep overhanging porch, triangular and curved brackets, and tongue-and-groove siding are hallmarks of the Craftsman style popular in the era.

Iowa Park, TX

Son of the noted rancher Burk Burnett, Tom L. Burnett was raised on the famous 6666 Ranch and became a leading cattleman in his own right, running the Triangle Ranch and range land across several North Texas counties. A civic leader and philanthropist, he was known for his friendship with Native people, including the celebrated Comanche chief Quanah Parker, and for his backing of area rodeos, which earned him the nickname the "Rodeo King." He died at his residence on this site in 1938.

Iowa Park, TX

Cattleman and civic leader Tom Lloyd Burnett, heir to one of North Texas's great ranching names, built this stately Colonial Revival home in 1924, hiring the Wichita Falls firm of Voelcker and Dixon to design it. Its Dutch gambrel roof and clipped gable made it a landmark in Iowa Park. After Burnett's death in 1938 it passed to his cousin Will Burnett, another rancher and civic figure, keeping the house within the family that helped shape the region's cattle economy.

San Juan, TX

Tom Mayfield's life reads like the closing chapter of the Texas frontier turning into the modern Rio Grande Valley. Leaving his parents' Gonzales County farm in 1898, he helped buy horses for Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, then spent decades as a city marshal, Texas Ranger, and deputy sheriff along the border. His role in exposing a wartime German-Mexican intrigue and a legendary escape from a Mexican firing squad in 1921 made him a beloved local figure right through his final years in the San Juan Hotel.

Sherman, TX

Thomas Randolph arrived in Grayson County as a boy in 1859 and, groomed for business, joined the Merchants and Planters Bank at nineteen. Rising to president in 1886, he led the bank for more than three decades, using its influence to draw new industry to Sherman and to help found the city's first hospital. Though he also chaired a St. Louis bank's board, Sherman remained his home until his death in 1918.

Canadian, TX

Tom T. McGee came to the Panhandle around 1884 and was working as a ranch foreman when he was elected the first sheriff of Hemphill County in 1887, the year Canadian was founded. In November 1894 he was mortally wounded in a gunfight defending a large money shipment against six armed men at the Wells, Fargo & Co. office. In a poignant coda, his widow later volunteered in England during World War I and died there, her ashes returned home for burial.

Tyler, TX

Tomas G. Pollard was a Tyler attorney and lawmaker whose career reshaped life for East Texans. Elected a state representative while still in college and a state senator in 1921, he sponsored legislation on education, small business, oil and gas, and consumer protection, chairing the Senate Finance Committee and serving as president pro tem in 1927. After leaving office in 1935 he returned to law practice, and in 1970 his family donated land for a park in his honor.

Devine, TX

Washington Allen Tomerlin set aside this ground for family and neighbors when this corner of Medina County was still remote and thinly settled, the earliest marked grave dating to 1875. Beneath its stones rest veterans of four American wars, three brothers said to have ridden as Texas Rangers, and the Brackens family, freed slaves who made their home nearby. Many older markers bear only initials, their stories now half-remembered.

Arlington, TX

First used in the 1870s by the pioneer Wilkinson family, whose graves are marked by clusters of rock, this burial ground also holds members of the Angel and Tomlin families. Its oldest dated stone belongs to Virginia native Solomon Tomlin, a horseman and farmer who brought his family to Texas in the 1860s and died in 1884. His son James Tives "Buck" Tomlin, a noted breeder of racing horses, bought the property in 1888.

Victoria, TX

News of a French colony on the Gulf Coast sent New Spain scrambling, launching eleven expeditions to hunt down and destroy La Salle's ill-fated settlement, which Governor Alonso de León found deserted in 1689. Over the following decades the Spanish planted Presidio La Bahía and Mission Espíritu Santo in the region, and by 1725 missionaries settled at this spot—later called Tonkawa Bank—for its reliable spring water, stone, and timber. The repeated moves of mission and presidio along the Guadalupe and Garcitas Creek trace the restless, difficult birth of Spanish colonial Texas.

Newcastle, TX

During the Civil War the Tonkawa people allied themselves with Texans, serving as scouts along the frontier defense line from the Red River to the Rio Grande and watching for both hostile raiders and Federal incursion. Commanders prized their skill so highly they sometimes fed the scouts at personal expense. The Tonkawa paid dearly for that loyalty: in October 1862 a devastating attack on their camp near present Anadarko killed 137 of about 300 people, and the survivors were later resettled near Fort Griffin before removal to Oklahoma in 1884.

Arlington, TX

Perched above the Bankhead Highway between Dallas and Fort Worth, Top O' Hill Terrace began as a genteel 1920s tea garden before Fred and Mary Browning turned it into one of Texas's most notorious gambling dens, complete with an escape tunnel and a hidden room to foil raids. It drew high rollers, a brothel, and the fury of crusading Prohibitionist pastor J. Frank Norris, who vowed to one day own the place. A 1947 Texas Ranger raid helped bring it down, and in the 1950s a Baptist seminary bought the grounds—fulfilling Norris's promise—where Arlington Baptist College stands today.

Grapevine, TX

This hand-hewn log cabin was raised along a creek at the edge of the Cross Timbers near the pioneer settlement of Dove, on a headright taken up in 1845 by Francis Throop, a Peters colonist from Missouri. J. C. Wiley bought the land in 1868 and sold it in 1886 to Kentucky farmer John R. Torian, whose family lived in the cabin into the 1940s. It was moved about four miles to this site in 1976.

Jefferson, TX

William P. Torrans built this Greek Revival home in Jefferson during the 1860s, when the town was a bustling riverport in East Texas. It later passed to a former mayor and druggist and to the family of Dr. Albert Clopton before Confederate veteran Solomon Spellings moved the residence to this site after 1882. Successive owners, including a local grocer, added to it into the mid-twentieth century.

Waco, TX

Established in 1844 during the days of the Republic of Texas, Torrey's Trading Post No. 2 sat on a bluff above Trading House Creek as a meeting ground between settlers and Native nations. Here President Sam Houston delivered his celebrated peace talks to assembled chiefs, and the post served as a "listening post" that helped keep an uneasy frontier calm. Run by George Barnard for the Torrey brothers, it was later moved to the growing town of Waco.

Tours, TX

In 1872 a group of settlers rolled in by wagon from Teutopolis, Illinois, arriving on St. Martin's Day and first calling their new home Martinsville. They soon renamed it Tours for the French city where St. Martin had been bishop, and built a log Catholic church dedicated in 1874. A school, shops, saloons, and even a brass band followed, but the community faded as Depression-era farm income fell and young people left for the cities.

Tow, TX

The 1850 grave of eight-year-old Margaret Thorp, said to have died of a snakebite, marks the age of this burial ground in the community that grew around the Bluffton-Tow Saltworks. A successful fur hatmaker arrived in 1853, the same year William Tow and his family settled Tow Valley, and generations of area families have tended the graves ever since. An association formed in the 1950s continues that long tradition of care.

Whitney, TX

Named for a chief of the Hainai (a Caddoan people), Towash was one of Hill County's first settlements. A grist mill and carding machine built by S. C. Dyer in 1850 turned it into a trade center that boasted 15 businesses by 1879, until the railroad passed it by and sent it into decline. Its ruins now lie beneath the waters of Lake Whitney.

Shamrock, TX

The distinctive Tower Building rose in 1936 along the newly bustling U.S. Route 66, one of many roadside businesses built to serve a nation newly on wheels. Designed by Pampa architect J. C. Berry and built by local entrepreneur J. M. Tindall, it combined a gas station and diner in curvilinear Art Deco lines, once trimmed with glowing neon. It remains a polished example of the Mother Road's golden age.

Snyder, TX

Dr. H. G. Towle and his wife Mary came to Snyder soon after marrying in 1905 to open a jewelry and optical store, and in 1912 they built this two-story brick home with a full basement, blending colonial revival and craftsman touches. Beyond his practice, Dr. Towle helped organize the town's volunteer fire department, served two decades as mayor, and presided over the Texas Board of Optometry. The home stayed in the family until 1956.