Historic Markers in Texas

Riverside, TX

After the Civil War, freed people around Riverside gathered to build a church of their own, and mine contractor James Broyles donated a site that took his name. Broyles Chapel Missionary Baptist Church opened its doors in 1895 under Reverend Nemon as the first African-American congregation in Riverside. It endures as a living reminder of the determination that carried a community from bondage into self-governed worship.

Wills Point, TX

German-born Oscar Pabst opened an apothecary in Wills Point in 1879, along the busy Dallas–Shreveport road. After fire damaged his store in 1888, the business passed to his son-in-law B.W. Bruce, who joined J.H. Human and other investors to form the Bruce and Human Drug Company in 1898. From a prime downtown building it has served the town ever since, sheltering doctors' offices, the telephone exchange, and even the posting of local election returns.

Commerce, TX

The first American Legion post in Texas was chartered at Commerce in 1919, the very year the veterans' organization was founded nationally. Moved to act by the funeral of a local soldier who had served in the First World War, a town doctor led the effort, and the post was named for the first Commerce man to die in that war. It went on to prominence at the state and national levels.

Athens, TX

Bruce Field grew out of Bruce Academy, a short-lived but influential preparatory school founded in 1898 and named for educator Dr. William Herschel Bruce, later president of what became the University of North Texas. In 1922 Bruce donated land for an athletic field, and in 1935 the Works Progress Administration matched local funds to add lights, fencing, and seating. For a century the field has hosted football and baseball, marching bands, wartime rallies, and community events at the heart of Athens.

Cresson, TX

When Alabama-born Madison Jones platted this Cresson neighborhood in 1889, he sold the lot to Richard Bruce, a stock raiser descended from a pioneer Johnson County family. Bruce built a modest frame house and dressed it with decorative porch trim, beaded walls and beaded ceilings. After his death in 1895 his widow Mary married James F. Davis, and the couple continued to live here, enlarging the home three times over the years.

Bruceville, TX

Organized around 1870-71 as Salem Baptist Church in the town of Mastersville, this congregation first met in a minister's home and a brush arbor. As the railroad reshaped the region, the church followed its people two miles south to the new rail town of Bruceville, building a sanctuary in 1896 that served until a new one replaced it in 1975.

Austin, TX

German stone-and-cement mason Julius Brueggemann, who had worked on the State Capitol, built this molded-concrete-block house around 1907 with his two sons as a home for his son Max. In 1913 it passed to Anders and Anna Sandbo, and it is Anna who gives the house its distinction: a civic leader who became the first woman to graduate from the University of Texas Law School and the first woman attorney in Austin.

Brownsville, TX

In 1925 Louis and Inez Brulay hired prominent Brownsville architect E. Guy Holliday to design this Spanish-Mediterranean home in the city's first suburb, complete with curved archways, white textured stucco, and a red terracotta roof. Louis was the son of George Brulay, a French immigrant whose Brulay Sugar Plantation outside the city was among the region's early agricultural ventures.

Gilmer, TX

Brumley Crossroads Cemetery sits near the old Cherokee Trace and the Jefferson-Quitman Road, routes that carried early settlers into Upshur County. The Mt. Gilead Primitive Baptist Church, organized in 1848, founded the burial ground, whose oldest legible stone marks the infant Muzado Harriss. Weathered fieldstones, ironstone, and later granite markers trace generations of pioneer families and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Bigfoot, TX

Tucked between the old Laredo and Fort Ewell roads, this pioneer burial ground was in use by 1860—its earliest known grave that of two-year-old Elijah Ross—and was formally deeded to the public in 1889 by Kizzie Brummett and her son William. Among its roughly 275 graves lie the family patriarch John T. Brummett and James Washington Winters, a veteran of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, along with many of his descendants. It is recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery.

Hamilton, TX

Brummett Cemetery dates to around 1900 and was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2012, a state designation reserved for burial grounds at least fifty years old with demonstrated historical significance. Country cemeteries like this one preserve the memory of the farming families who settled rural Texas at the turn of the twentieth century.

Bruni, TX

The town of Bruni grew up around Antonio Mateo Bruni, an orphaned Italian immigrant from Emilia-Romagna who came to Texas in the 1870s and built a mercantile and ranching fortune along the border. A railroad station on one of his ranches around 1881 drew a commissary, a school, and eventually a surveyed townsite. Oil strikes in the 1920s and commercial uranium mining from the 1970s gave the settlement successive economic booms.

Laredo, TX

When Governor Juan Fernando de Palacios elevated Laredo to the status of a villa in 1767, he followed the Spanish colonial tradition of laying out the town around a central plaza. Such plazas were the beating heart of frontier settlements in New Spain, serving as marketplace, gathering place, and civic stage. This square has anchored Laredo's public life since the era of Spanish colonization on the northern edge of the empire.

Columbus, TX

Charles Brunson left Westphalia, Germany, in 1845 as part of the great mid-century German migration to Texas, and by about 1867 had settled in Columbus, where his saloon prospered. In 1891 he erected this Victorian commercial building, adding an adjoining store in 1896; it poured drinks until around 1919 and then took on other uses. Aside from a lowered canopy and altered windows, it still wears its original Victorian dress.

Frost, TX

Born from meetings in a log schoolhouse, this Methodist fellowship organized south of Frost in 1874 with thirty-five members and the name Post Oak. A local family donated land for a permanent building in 1893, and the congregation took the name Brushie Prairie two decades later. It absorbed a neighboring flock in 1952 before finally disbanding in 1964, though former members still return each June for a homecoming that keeps the memory alive.

Edinburg, TX

Brushwood Cemetery opened in 1913 as the municipal burial ground for Chapin, the newly founded town later renamed Edinburg. Older graves reaching back to 1898 were moved here from El Granjeno near Mission, and today more than a thousand people rest here. Their headstones — Anglo, Spanish, German, and Irish — read like a roster of everyone who built the Rio Grande Valley.

Leon County, TX

The Yarborough family left South Carolina by way of Alabama and settled in eastern Leon County in the 1850s, and their five sons all served the Confederacy during the Civil War. Two brothers, Wade Hampton and William Burns Yarborough, bought 186 acres in the Brushy area in 1883, where Wade set aside three acres for a Primitive Baptist church and cemetery that doubled as a one-room school. Fire claimed the sanctuary in the 1920s, but the burial ground endured.

Bowie, TX

Settlers arrived in the 1870s, and by 1880 the community of Brushy had its school, church, and this cemetery on land deeded by the Wilcox family. The earliest documented grave dates to 1877, and among those resting here are Civil War veterans, pioneer families, and children in both marked and unmarked plots. Though the town faded, descendants still live nearby and tend the graveyard through an association formed in 1973.

Bowie, TX

This rise on the North Texas plains gave Kiowa and Comanche riders a commanding view of the country below, and from it they watched the wagons and cabins of newly arrived settlers in the mid-1800s. The mound also served as a burial place for an Indigenous leader, marking it as sacred ground long before Anglo settlement reached Montague County. In an era when the Comanchería still held sway over the southern plains, high ground like this was both lookout and landmark.

Tira, TX

The Brushy Mound community grew up around a Methodist church built in 1891 and took its name from the dogwood brush that once covered the area. A school had already opened in 1885 with Miss Mollie Wood as its first teacher, and a new church went up in 1917. The school was consolidated into the East Delta Independent District in 1949, marking the community's gradual absorption into the larger county.

Montague County, TX

Brushy Mound rises as a natural lookout over the rolling country of Montague County, on the edge of the North Texas frontier. According to this 1936 State of Texas marker, Kiowa and Comanche warriors used its summit to watch the movements of early settlers before striking, and tradition holds that a chief lies buried there. The marker was one of thousands placed during the 1936 Texas Centennial to fix frontier memory onto the land.

Bryan, TX

Chartered in 1909 by Bryan's mayor and its merchants, the Bryan & College Interurban Railway opened in 1910 to link the town with the growing Texas A&M campus a few miles away. Trolleys and gasoline rail cars ran ten daily round trips, spawning subdivisions and even an amusement spot called Dellwood Park along the route. Beset by the rise of the automobile, the line slipped into receivership in 1922 and made its last run in 1929—but along its path Bryan and College Station grew until they merged into one.

Bryan, TX

Rising from displaced farmland in 1942, Bryan Army Air Field became a key World War II training ground—home to the nation's only instrument-instructor school for a time, more than a thousand Women Airforce Service Pilots, and a segregated corps of African American servicemen. From here Col. Joseph Duckworth made the first intentional flight into a hurricane in 1943. Reactivated for the Korean War as a racially integrated jet-training base, it trained Tuskegee airmen, foreign pilots, and future astronauts before its land became part of Texas A&M University.

Bryan, TX

Bryan City Cemetery was established in June 1868, three years after the townsite of Bryan was laid out along the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. Landowner J. C. Hubert sold the original twenty acres to the city for $100, and the grounds have since grown to some 48 acres. Many of Bryan's prominent early citizens rest here, tended over the years by a city board and a cemetery association organized in 1920.

Freeport, TX

Early in the 20th century, mining engineers found rich sulphur deposits at Bryan Mound, spurring the founding of the Texas Freeport Sulphur Co. in 1912. Their success drove the growth of the Freeport townsite itself. The operation was among Texas's earliest to use the Frasch process—superheated water pumped underground to melt and lift the sulphur—producing five million tons before it closed in 1935.

Houston, TX

In the prosperous Houston of the 1920s, sisters Caroline Bryan Chapman and Johnelle Bryan — figures in the city's growing arts scene — built themselves a fashionable home in the exclusive Courtlandt Place enclave. Its Mediterranean flourishes, arched windows and tile roof captured the era's taste for Old World romance, all designed by a young architect at the very start of his career. The sisters lived there only briefly before an oilman's family made it their home for decades.

Liberty, TX

This family burial ground holds many of Liberty County's founding figures, including Luke Bryan, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto who later served as county sheriff, and his brother Pryor Bryan, who fought in the Texas Revolution and the Civil War. Also resting here are Confederate captain and publisher Watson D. Williams, the businessman Isaiah C. Day for whom Dayton is named, and a remarkable cast of writers, musicians, judges, and benefactors whose lives stretch from the Republic of Texas into the twentieth century.

Buckholts, TX

Bryant Station began as a frontier trading post founded by Major Benjamin F. Bryant, who had commanded a company at the Battle of San Jacinto. Sam Houston, president of the Republic of Texas, appointed Bryant an Indian agent in 1842, and the little village at the Little River crossing sat astride important trail and stage routes. It kept a U.S. post office from 1848 to 1874.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth builder and civic leader William J. Bryce raised this five-sided commercial building in 1910 to house his construction company. Bryce erected many of the city's downtown structures and later served as mayor from 1927 to 1933. Its irregular plan and Classical Revival detailing make it a graceful adaptation of a monumental style to everyday business use.

Bryson, TX

Henry E. Bryson, a Civil War veteran turned farmer and stockman, raised the first log cabin here in 1878, and a post office followed in 1882 to serve a growing cotton- and grain-growing district. The Rock Island Railroad arrived in 1902, but it was oil that made the town's name: the first well came in 1925, and from a gasoline plant in the 1920s to a refinery that ran until 1954, Bryson billed itself as Jack County's petroleum capital.

Liberty Hill, TX

John T. Bryson and his wife Amelia, among the first settlers of Liberty Hill, raised this home in the 1850s from notched and fitted hewn cedar logs with chimneys of native stone. Its open dog-trot plan was classic pioneer Texas construction, built for the heat with a breezeway between two log pens. The house doubled as a stop on the stagecoach line running between Austin and Fort Croghan near present-day Burnet.

Midway, TX

In 1774 Spanish authorities resettled East Texas colonists—recently uprooted to San Antonio—at a Trinity River crossing, founding the town of Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Bucareli under leader Gil Ybarbo. The community grew to some 345 people with a church, plaza, and wooden houses, but crop failures, Comanche raids, and floods drove the settlers away by 1779. Led again by Ybarbo, they moved east and rebuilt the old town of Nacogdoches.

Randolph, TX

Alexander Buchanan brought his wife Delilah and their eleven children from Illinois to the Republic of Texas in 1844, settling a 320-acre farm here in January 1846. Alexander died that same year and was buried on his own land, founding the family cemetery. Delilah farmed on until her own death, and their descendants — many of them future Fannin County leaders — joined them in the graveyard.

Burnet, TX

When a private dam project on the Colorado River went bankrupt in 1932, State Senator Alvin Wirtz turned to Washington, winning the backing of Congressman J.P. Buchanan — and the dam's name — to finish it. The 1934 Texas Legislature created the Lower Colorado River Authority to manage the river, and in the depths of the Depression the project put some 1,800 locals to work at 40 cents an hour. Completed in 1937, the dam raised Lake Buchanan behind it, drowning old Bluffton and forcing the relocation of graves, but bringing recreation, business, and steady power to the Hill Country.

Cuero, TX

When Otto Buchel arrived in the brand-new town of Cuero in 1872, he opened a mercantile store—and, owning the only safe in town, soon found neighbors entrusting him with their valuables. Within a year he turned that trust into a private bank, and Buchel's Bank went on to weather financial panics, hurricanes, and droughts, steadying the young town's commerce. Incorporated as a national bank in 1907, it still serves South Texas as Buchel Bank and Trust.

Cuero, TX

Settlers reached this corner of DeWitt County as early as 1839, opening a school and post office within a few years of arrival. In 1894 the Cuero merchant and banker Otto Buchel donated land here for a community school first known as Oak View. When a new building rose in 1921 it took his name, and though the Buchel School closed its doors in 1950, the schoolhouse lived on as a community center. For generations the little school was where a farming neighborhood educated its children and gathered as a community.

Bedias, TX

Buck Foster Cemetery took its name from William Harrison "Buck" Foster, who reserved an acre for burials when he sold his land in 1882 — though eroded sandstone markers show the ground served the Loma community even earlier. Among its hundreds of graves lies Nancy McCulloch Heath, of Choctaw and German descent, who came to Texas in 1845, alongside Civil War veterans and generations of her descendants. Its weathered stones, carved with Masonic, religious, and ranching symbols, form a folk record of southwestern Walker County.

Markham, TX

In the early 1900s land promoters lured northern families to Texas with promises of warm weather and fertile soil, and Buckeye — named for the founders' native Ohio — was one such planned town. Dr. Ambrose Plotner and John Stoddard bought the old Kuykendall pasture in 1902, laid out a vast irrigation canal, secured a railroad right-of-way, and platted streets named for citrus and figs. Despite a school, a post office, and hopes of an oil strike in the 1930s, the town gradually declined, its post office closing in 1971 with only a few houses left today.

Buckholts, TX

Bohemian and Moravian immigrants of the Unity of the Brethren — a faith tracing to the Czech reformer Jan Hus — began arriving in Texas as early as 1848. Buckholts residents held their first Brethren services in the Czech language in 1894 and formally organized in 1907, raising a wooden sanctuary in 1913. Only around 1951, with a new building, did the congregation begin worshiping in English, adopting its present name in 1959.

Buckholts, TX

In 1879 Central Texas Czechs founded the SPJST, a fraternal society offering members both social life and insurance. Members from Cameron, Marak, and Buckholts chartered Lodge No. 15 in 1907 and dedicated their first hall here in 1911; after a storm and a later arson fire, the present octagonal frame dance hall rose in 1936. For generations it has hosted dances, barbecues, and fundraisers — and drew country, polka, and western-swing greats like Bob Wills and Johnny Horton, its shows broadcast on Taylor radio in the 1950s.

Bellville, TX

Established in 1880, Buckhorn Cemetery is among the rural burial grounds of Austin County that trace the settlement of central Texas after the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2001, it preserves the resting place of an early farming community. Such graveyards are often the last physical record of the families who first worked the surrounding land.

Dallas, TX

In 1879 the Rev. Robert Cooke Buckner opened a home in Dallas for orphaned and dependent children, beginning with a single building in 1880 that sheltered just six youngsters. Demand grew astonishingly fast—by 1910 the institution cared for some 600 children—and in 1914 it came under the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Renamed the Buckner Baptist Children's Home, it grew over more than a century into a leader in Texas child care.

Pinehill, TX

John S. Buckner brought his family from Georgia to settle this Rusk County area before 1850, and was among the first laid to rest in the family burial ground in 1870. Both his sons served the Confederacy — Arthur Washington Buckner was at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered, then returned to run a sawmill, store, and cotton gin at Pinehill. His daughter May Buckner Hillin later led the women of Pinehill to smash the whiskey containers of a drugstore after an 1892 stabbing, an axe-wielding echo of the temperance crusade.

McKinney, TX

When John McGarrah arrived with the Peters Colony in 1843 and set up a trading post, the Fort Buckner settlement grew around it and briefly served as Collin County's first seat. This burial ground on land later owned by the O'Brien family holds many of the county's earliest pioneers, including victims of a smallpox epidemic that swept through in the 1870s, and by local tradition a Kiowa man remembered as Spotted Tail. It is the last physical trace of a frontier community that has otherwise vanished into the North Texas prairie.

Dallas, TX

Dr. Robert Cooke Buckner was born in this rough-hewn two-story log cabin in Madisonville, Tennessee, in 1833, and moved to Texas in 1859. In 1879 he founded the Buckner Home for orphaned children, work that continued after his 1919 death under his sons and grandson. In 1912 staff and friends moved the cabin itself to this site, where children at play nicknamed it the "Tennessee House."

Marlin, TX

First settled in 1837 by the Marlin and Menefee families, this Falls County spot grew into a lively frontier village once known as Jarett Menefee's Supply Station. By the 1840s it boasted a school, store, blacksmith, racetrack, saloon, stagecoach stop, and post office, and — as local legend has it — earned the colorful name Bucksnort from a tipsy saloon patron. By the 1850s, as settlers dispersed to other parts of the county, the community faded away.

Albany, TX

In 1900 the Texas Central Railway pushed a line northwest from Albany across the cattle ranch of Rose Ella 'Ella' Conrad, and she and her brother John A. 'Bud' Matthews quickly built cattle pens and a loading chute at the spot named for him. Surrounding ranchers soon shipped their herds — as many as 105,000 head a year — from this switch to the Fort Worth markets. Even after the railroad quit in 1967, ranchers kept loading cattle here onto trucks.

Buda, TX

Originally called Du Pre, this Hays County town was born in 1881 along the International and Great Northern Railroad after Cornelia A. Trimble donated the townsite land. The name "Buda," adopted late in the decade, has a murky origin — local legend ties it either to Budapest or to "viuda," the Spanish word for widow, honoring the women who cooked at a railroad hotel. In its heyday Buda boasted a theater, skating rink, newspaper, and two banks.

Buda, TX

Organized in 1893, the Buda Christian Church first shared the local Methodist building before raising its own sanctuary on this site in 1903. A storm leveled that structure in 1909, and the congregation rebuilt in 1912 in a modest frame design blending Italianate and classical revival touches. Membership faded after the 1940s and the congregation eventually disbanded, though the building found new life housing civic groups and, later, another church.

Buda, TX

The Buda school system grew from the consolidation of several nineteenth-century country schools, beginning with Mary Adams's 1881 classroom beside the railroad tracks. Successive buildings rose and burned, and the present Mission-style schoolhouse of 1928 was built around the surviving walls of its predecessor, still visible in the auditorium. Over the twentieth century the school integrated its Mexican American and African American students and eventually merged into the Hays Consolidated district.

Buda, TX

Established in 1880 under the pioneer circuit rider Rev. Thomas Garrett, this congregation was the first church in the new railroad town of DuPre, later renamed Buda. Its first sanctuary went up on this site in 1882, just as rail lines reached the fledgling community. Over the generations its members included many of the area's founding settlers and civic leaders.

Austin, TX

Albert and Rebecca Buddington raised the first part of this Austin compound as their home around 1860. In 1921 it became the residence of Dr. Harry Y. Benedict, a mathematician who rose to be a professor and later president of the University of Texas. Later owners reshaped the property with a rustic cottage, a carved fireplace mantel, an enclosing wall, and fine ironwork, layering decades of craftsmanship into a single walled compound.

Lubbock, TX

Charles Hardin "Buddy" Holley was born in Lubbock in 1936 into a musical family and grew up playing guitar with local country "pickers." After seeing Elvis Presley in 1955, he fused country and rhythm into a new sound; recording "That'll Be the Day" with The Crickets in 1957 launched a string of hits and a 1958 tour of England that shaped British rock. His career was cut short on February 3, 1959, when his chartered plane crashed after takeoff; he was 22.

Windcrest, TX

Swiss immigrants Abram Louis and Anna Barbara Bueche settled the area known as Fratt in 1854, and their infant granddaughter, buried in 1892, is said to be the first laid to rest at this site. When a son-in-law bought the family farm in 1902, he set aside this tract as a cemetery, where a Bexar County deputy killed in the line of duty also rests. Descendants still tend the grounds.

Pharr, TX

Built in 1927-28, this school served Mexican-American children in the segregated Pharr-San Juan district, replacing an earlier facility on the site. It was named for educator Helen W. Buell, principal of the Pharr Mexican Ward School, and designed by noted San Antonio architect Harvey Smith with restrained Classical Revival touches. Its very existence reflects the separate schooling long imposed on Mexican-American students in South Texas.

Austin, TX

Austin financier Louis Nicholas Goldbeck built this Colonial Revival mansion in 1902, and in 1908 it was sold to the Texas association of Phi Gamma Delta, a fraternity first chartered in the state in 1856. As the home of the Tau Deuteron chapter, it has housed generations of University of Texas men who went on to careers in statecraft, culture, and business, aided by gifts from supporters including the family of regent H.J. Lutcher Stark.

Timpson, TX

This burial ground has served the Buena Vista community since it organized in 1848, on land donated by South Carolina native Joseph Penn Burns. Its earliest marked grave dates to 1851, and those interred include early merchants and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the War of 1812. When the railroad bypassed Buena Vista in the 1880s and the town faded, the cemetery endured as the community's lasting landmark.

Seven Points, TX

Before Henderson County even existed, the little settlement of Buffalo grew up around a Trinity River ferry crossing in the 1840s, briefly serving as the county's first seat of government from 1847 to 1850. Among its early figures was John H. Reagan, who went on to serve in the U.S. Congress and as Postmaster General of the Confederacy. When Athens won the county seat in 1850, Buffalo faded away, leaving little but the roads that once radiated from it in all directions.

Stafford, TX

Planned in 1840 to move sugar and cotton from the plantation country of the young Republic of Texas, this venture was chartered in 1841 and, after early failure, revived by San Jacinto hero Gen. Sidney Sherman with backing from leading Texans including Rice University benefactor William Marsh Rice. The first locomotive, the 'General Sherman,' arrived in 1852, and by 1853 the line ran twenty miles from Harrisburg to Stafford's Point, celebrated with a barbecue-jubilee. By 1860 the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado stretched eighty miles inland, becoming the first operating railroad in Texas.

Canyon, TX

During the Great Depression, students, townspeople, and government funding combined to build a striking recreation complex at West Texas State Teachers College. Begun in 1933 using student labor and stone quarried in Texas and New Mexico—including limestone and petrified wood—the project produced a fieldhouse, dormitories, an outdoor pool, and stadium bleachers. Most was later razed, but the two-story recreation hall of 1941 survives, with a petrified-wood exterior, great stone fireplaces, and a second-story dance floor.