Historic Markers in Texas

Bastrop, TX

This Bastrop house began about 1840 during the ownership of Dr. L. B. Harris, in the days of the Republic of Texas, and had taken its lasting shape by the turn of the twentieth century with the addition of a jigsawn wraparound porch. Among its residents were James P. Wallace, an early Texas Ranger and soldier of the Republic's army, and brickmason James S. Holme, who supervised Civilian Conservation Corps work at nearby Bastrop State Park in the 1930s.

El Paso, TX

Built in 1903 for owner George E. Wallace, these apartments were designed by Edward Kneezell, one of El Paso's earliest architects. The two-story stucco building shows off the Mission Revival style then in vogue in the Southwest — a sweeping circular two-story arcaded veranda at one end, and small mission parapets crowning its arched entryways — offering a glimpse of comfortable urban living in the booming border city.

Canton, TX

Settled in the 1840s, the Wallace community grew into a rural trading hub with a store and school in Van Zandt County. Its Methodist congregation was organized in 1889 by the Rev. W. D. Wheeler and eight charter members, meeting first in the schoolhouse before local benefactors funded the present sanctuary in 1910. Despite the long decline of the surrounding farm population, the country church has kept up its tradition of service.

Waller, TX

The Houston and Texas Central Railroad reached this area around 1857, giving farmers and ranchers a way to move their products to market and drawing settlers to the line. The town itself was platted in 1884 by K. H. Faulkner and named for Edwin Waller, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the county's namesake judge. A post office, store, and school soon followed, with telephone service in 1912, utilities by 1928, and incorporation in 1947.

Richards, TX

This family burying ground began on land the Wallers bought in 1872, when young Alexander Waller became its first grave shortly after helping choose the site. His father John, a veteran of the 15th Texas Cavalry, and other Confederate veterans of the Sulphur Branch community lie here, alongside two African American families and many neighbors. The cemetery still serves the descendants of those early residents.

Hempstead, TX

Carved from Austin and Grimes counties in 1873, Waller County was named for Edwin Waller, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and first mayor of Austin. Its soil holds a dense history: the rich Groce plantations of 1831–1874, the later home of celebrated sculptor Elisabet Ney, and the railroad town of Hempstead that became the county seat. Since 1876 it has been home to Prairie View A&M, one of Texas's foundational institutions for Black higher education.

Austin County, TX

This burial ground, also called the Protestant Cemetery, has served the Wallis area since the 1890s. The community began as Bovine Bend, founded by Kentucky settlers William and Lydia Guyler in 1859; when the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway ran a spur through in 1880, Guyler sold his land, moved to the new town, and it was renamed for the railroad's chief engineer, Joseph Wallis. Farmers, merchants, railroad workers, a physician-minister, and veterans dating to the Civil War rest here beneath obelisks and interior fencing.

Mont Belvieu, TX

The Wallis family came from Louisiana in 1824 and settled on this hill in 1825, their home a welcome stop for travelers on the early Texas frontier. The graveyard began with the 1830 burial of young Elijah Wallis and grew into a family and community cemetery, holding at least one veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto among its roughly 25 graves. By the 1870s, swarming ant colonies made the ground unusable, and burials shifted to a new cemetery nearby.

Wallis, TX

In 1890 landowner M.L.H. Harry deeded ground to a group of trustees to establish a Methodist congregation in the young town of Wallis. The church counts its founding from 1893, when members took out a loan to build their first sanctuary under their first pastor, A.S. Blackwood. A century later, in 1993, the congregation marked its hundredth anniversary as a fixture of community life.

Wallis, TX

When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway ran a spur through this Austin County settlement in 1880, the community took the name Wallis after a rail executive and quickly grew. In 1906 seven local businessmen pooled a $10,000 investment to charter the Wallis State Bank, which soon outgrew its frame quarters for a two-story brick building whose upper floor housed the justice of the peace and a Masonic lodge. Its ledgers, with loans secured by tractors, cows, and horses, trace more than a century of small-town Texas commerce.

Wallisville, TX

In the late 1870s, settler Albert Gallatin Van Pradelles set aside a plot of Chambers County land to bury his three-year-old grandson, and within a month the ground was recorded as a legal cemetery. Sixteen family lots were surveyed in January 1879 and purchased by locally prominent pioneer families, and by 1884 Van Pradelles himself was laid to rest among them. Kept in the family for more than a century, the burial ground passed to the Wallisville Cemetery Association in 1986.

Austin, TX

Organized in a schoolhouse in 1856 with just ten members, this rural congregation reflects the frontier faith of antebellum central Texas. Locally quarried stone and lumber hauled by ox-wagon from Bastrop went into its original building, which did double duty as a schoolhouse in its early years. Such shared church-and-school structures were common where settlements were young and resources scarce.

Azle, TX

Organized in 1867 under the Rev. J. C. Power, this Baptist congregation first met in a log cabin and, in the 1870s, in a larger cabin on Walnut Creek that served as both church and school in the community of Parker's Shop, now Reno. The congregation moved nearby and built a frame sanctuary in the late 1880s, expanding onto adjacent land in 1947. What began as a rural frontier church grew steadily alongside its community.

Diana, TX

Pioneer settlers organized a Baptist congregation at Walnut Creek around 1855, and in 1856 acquired more than seventeen acres for a sanctuary and cemetery, whose oldest marked grave dates to 1870. Over the generations the church added Sunday school facilities and a parsonage, replacing its old sanctuary with a brick building in 1978. It remains an active congregation and steward of its historic frontier cemetery.

Fort Worth, TX

Established around 1881 on the edge of a rapidly growing Fort Worth, Walnut Creek Cemetery holds the graves of the farm and ranch families who settled Tarrant County in the decades after the Civil War. Fort Worth in that era was a booming cattle-drive town at the northern reach of the Chisholm Trail, and burying grounds like this one anchored the rural communities on its outskirts. The state's Historic Texas Cemetery designation in 2009 recognized its enduring role in local memory.

Bremond, TX

The Walnut Creek community took root in the 1850s as farming families settled this stretch of Robertson County. Its cemetery is said to have begun before 1869 with the burial of a horse trader's young daughter beneath a cedar tree, on land given by settler J. Grant Taylor, who later donated acreage for a burial ground, meetinghouse, and school. Church congregations and classes gathered here until the school consolidated with Bremond during World War II.

Athens, TX

Farm families settled along Walnut Creek as early as 1850, raising grains, cotton, cane, and livestock in a community that gradually built the institutions of rural life. Worship began under a brush arbor in 1859; a Methodist sanctuary followed in 1884, an adjoining cemetery soon after, and a schoolhouse in 1899 that scheduled classes around the growing season. As nearby Athens grew and rail bypassed the settlement, Walnut Creek faded, but its cemetery—designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2001—still marks where the community stood.

Walnut Grove, TX

Founded in 1846 by the Rev. J.N. Vance as the Union Congregation, this fellowship took the name Walnut Grove in 1858 and built its first sanctuary on donated land in 1869. Camp meetings — the exuberant open-air revivals characteristic of frontier religion — were often held on its grounds. The plain frame church in use today dates to 1886, a survivor of the country churches that anchored rural Collin County.

Sherman, TX

Completed in 1920, this classical revival sanctuary served the Walnut Street Church of Christ in Sherman, a congregation with roots reaching back to the 1850s. Built as the members' third house of worship, the two-story raised structure boasts a grand portico, central stairway, and 48 stained glass windows. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1986.

Austin, TX

Architect Roger Q. Small designed this 1935 Austin residence for Walter and Mae Simms, whose Simms Fish Market had trucked Gulf Coast seafood to Central Texas hotels and restaurants since 1915. The simplified Classical Revival house tucks a five-bay garage beneath its main floor behind a rough-cut limestone façade—an integration of the automobile into the home that would not become common until after World War II. Its butler brick walls and tall multi-light windows mark it as a refined product of its era.

Forney, TX

The corner drugstore was once the beating heart of small-town American life, and few embodied it longer than Walter Dickson Adams of Forney. Arriving as a teenager in 1887, he bought the local drugstore in 1893 and ran it for an astonishing sixty-eight years, moving it to Main Street in 1901 and serving a term as mayor in 1912. The business, tracing its roots to an 1878 predecessor, remained a going concern that relocated to this site in 1976.

Richmond, TX

Born into slavery in North Carolina in 1840 and brought to Texas around 1860, Walter Moses Burton learned to read and write from his enslaver and, after emancipation, bought land from that same man. He became a successful farmer and in 1869 was elected sheriff of Fort Bend County; in 1873 he won a seat in the Texas Senate, serving four terms for a multi-county district before returning to farming and local politics.

Lampasas, TX

Walter Acker joined the Confederate Army at sixteen in Paulding, Mississippi, then came to Lampasas in 1875 as a young attorney. He built a long public career in Texas — district attorney, state representative, and mayor — before moving to Harris County and serving three more terms in the legislature. In 1930 he was honored as the last Confederate veteran to sit in the Texas Legislature, and he died at the Confederate Home in Austin.

Terrell, TX

Walter Payne Allen, a banker who helped organize and later led Terrell's American National Bank, married America "Meck" Cartwright in 1893 and became a leading civic figure—serving as alderman and commissioner and helping bring a Royal Air Force training center to town during World War II. In 1928 the couple built this Tudor Revival house, designed by the Dallas firm Fooshee and Cheek, with half-timbering, decorative masonry, and an overhanging jettied second floor. It stands as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Marshall, TX

Walter Paye Lane's life traced the whole arc of nineteenth-century Texas at war. He fought as a soldier in the Texas War for Independence, rose to major in the Mexican War, and served as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. The State of Texas erected this marker in his honor in 1962.

Carthage, TX

Historian Walter Prescott Webb was born near this site in 1888 before his family moved to the edge of West Texas, where the stark new country set him thinking about how the frontier shaped America. He earned all his degrees at the University of Texas and taught there for 45 years, producing landmark works like "The Great Plains" and "The Texas Rangers." He became the first southwesterner to preside over the American Historical Association.

Breckenridge, TX

The historian Walter Prescott Webb arrived in Stephens County at age four and spent seventeen formative years absorbing the frontier life that would shape his landmark theories on the Great Plains in American history. His father's moves between rural teaching posts exposed the boy to the region's varied geography, while neighbors supplied a wealth of frontier lore. Encouraged by a New York benefactor, Webb left in 1909 to attend the University of Texas, launching a distinguished scholarly career.

Austin, TX

This two-story Victorian was built in 1876 for prosperous hardware merchant Walter Tips, a German immigrant and Confederate veteran who later served in the Texas Senate. Remodeled to its present look in 1909, it was long home to another Austin businessman, Theo P. Meyer. Originally standing near the historic Bremond Block, the house was slated for demolition in 1975 until Franklin Savings Association rescued and relocated it here for restoration.

Early, TX

Walter Urie Early left Kentucky for Brownwood in 1893 and built a long career in the law, serving as city, county, and finally district attorney across three decades. Active in civic life, in 1929 he donated land east of town to the local rural school district; the school built there took his name in 1930, and so did the community that incorporated as Early in 1951. He died in 1939, well before the town that bears his name officially existed.

Big Sandy, TX

Before bridges spanned the Sabine, travelers crossed by ferry, and this one—started before 1849 by Texas Revolution veteran Robert Walters—carried settlers between Upshur and Smith counties for decades. Its posted 1860 rates, from fifty cents for an ox-drawn wagon to a nickel a head for loose livestock, sketch a vivid picture of frontier travel. The nearby town of Florence has since disappeared, and the ferry gave way to a bridge in 1903.

Ballinger, TX

This quiet burial ground is all that remains of Walthall, the first stable settlement in Runnels County. The community grew up around a stagecoach stop on the Camp Colorado–Fort Concho road in the 1870s, on land the John W. Guest family had claimed the decade before. Its oldest marked grave is that of infant Penny Cotten, who died in 1878; a stone hauled from the Colorado River marks the grave of Mrs. Guest, who died the same year.

New Braunfels, TX

German immigrants drawn to Texas by the Adelsverein settled the remote Mission Valley area near New Braunfels in the 1850s, among them the stonemason Johann Joseph Walzem and his family. Walzem and his sons quarried and cut local limestone to build this small Catholic chapel, completed in 1870, reportedly in thanksgiving for a safe voyage home and back. He gave the land and chapel to the Catholic Church in 1871; today only the stone walls remain.

Round Top, TX

Johann Traugott Wandke left Prussia in 1855, settling near La Grange with his wife and daughters before moving to Round Top around 1860. About 1863 he built this native-stone home and workshop, where his skills as a mechanic and cabinetmaker found their finest expression in the pipe organs he crafted from local cedar. His instruments served several area churches, including Round Top's Bethlehem Lutheran Church.

Houston County, TX

The Waneta community took root in 1852 when Charles W. Butler bought land and began farming; by the 1870s a cluster of families had gathered around a general store, blacksmith, and cotton gin. A post office opened in 1899, and the Waneta School served local children from 1914 until it consolidated with Grapeland in 1949. Though the town faded after the 1940s, descendants of its founding families still live nearby.

Denison, TX

When the newly established railroad town of Denison counted forty Methodists in 1873, the North Texas conference sent the Rev. Alexander Jamison to organize them, and the little frame mission church was chartered in 1881. It took the name of E.B. Waples, a benefactor who cleared its debt for a single dollar and funded a larger building shortly before his death in 1898. Today it is remembered as the oldest continuing Methodist congregation in Denison.

Denison, TX

Founded in 1871 to feed the crews building the Katy railroad, this firm grew into Denison's first wholesale grocery house and, as Waples-Platter, one of the region's commercial giants. From its ornate 1885 headquarters on East Main—terra cotta lions' heads and cast-iron pilasters advertising its prominence—the company shipped its White Swan line across Texas. Its canning plant gave the nation Ranch Style Beans, the company's most enduring legacy.

Pyote, TX

Carved from Tom Green County in 1887 and organized in 1892, Ward County took its name from Thomas William Ward, a soldier of the 1835 storming of Bexar during the Texas Revolution who later ran the Republic's General Land Office and served as a U.S. consul. The marker anchors the county's origins in the sprawling reorganization of West Texas that followed the arrival of the railroads. Barstow was designated the original county seat.

Corpus Christi, TX

Named for developer John C. Ward, who acquired the 258-acre peninsula in 1892, Ward Island saw its resort dreams dashed by the 1893 depression and became instead a popular hunting and fishing ground. In 1942 the Navy turned it into an electronics and radar training base—the service's only such school—graduating more than 10,000 technicians before the site became the University of Corpus Christi and, eventually, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi.

Austin, TX

A Methodist mission organized in east Austin's tenth ward in 1885 grew into the First Street Methodist Church, renamed Ward Memorial in 1909 for Texas-born bishop Seth Ward. As the city spread southward its members followed, and the congregation bought land here in 1959 and built anew the following year.

Fairfield, TX

On Ward Prairie, named for an early pioneer family, a Methodist chapel stood by the 1860s and welcomed worshippers of many denominations. Ward Prairie Baptist Church organized there in 1869 and met in the borrowed chapel until 1893, when it received land of its own — and, by local tradition, moved the old Methodist building to serve as its new home. Through shifting membership and economic hardship, the congregation has endured for over a century.

La Ward, TX

Lafayette Ward, Sr., came from Missouri to Texas in 1836 — the very year of the fight for independence — and made his way as a pioneer rancher in Jackson County. In the 1860s he built this home, a substantial mark of a family that had put down deep roots on the coastal plain. It stands today as a recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Utopia, TX

The Waresville Cemetery is nearly all that remains of the Old Waresville Settlement on the Sabinal River, founded by Captain William Ware, a San Jacinto veteran who brought his family to the Sabinal Canyon in 1852. Ware fell ill and died within months, and his 1853 burial started the graveyard. By 1880 Waresville had grown into a thriving village of mills, gins, churches, and a school before being renamed Utopia in 1886. Among those buried here are the Ware family, Henry Fuller—a former slave of Captain Ware—early settlers, and victims of conflicts with local Indians.

Waring, TX

In 1891, Anglo settlers in this heavily German-settled area built the west wing of Waring's first public school on land donated by the town's Irish-born namesake, Robert Percival Maxwell Waring. Neighbors volunteered the labor and materials, and families paid a dollar or so a month in tuition for each child. The building grew with an east wing in 1903 and served until the school closed in 1954.

New Berlin, TX

Heinrich and Elisabeth Warncke left Germany in 1868, first settling in Ohio before joining the wave of German immigrants who put down roots in New Berlin, Texas. Out of the nearly 400 acres they assembled in the 1870s and 1880s, they set aside this burial ground, where the earliest known grave belongs to one-year-old Anna Helmke, who died in 1880. Among those honored here is a grandson lost as a World War II casualty, tying a pioneer German-Texan family to the wider American story.

Carrollton, TX

In 1852, Robert and Sarah Dean Warner emigrated from Ireland to Texas, joining the Peters Colony and establishing a farm in this area. The family graveyard began with the 1873 death of Robert Warner, Jr., and holds ten marked graves—most of them Warner kin—along with at least one unmarked burial. The Warners and their descendants went on to become leaders in the Carrollton community.

Claude, TX

Built around 1912 as the Llano School and vacated in 1930, this frame building was moved in 1939 to land donated by the Christian family to serve as a rural community center. Volunteers stuccoed and remodeled it with funds raised by the Armstrong County Federation of Women's Clubs, and it was named to honor Dr. and Mrs. William A. Warner, local leaders in social and cultural life. It became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1962.

Dallas, TX

Warren Angus Ferris spent six years trapping and chronicling the Rocky Mountain fur trade before coming to the Republic of Texas in 1836. As surveyor for Nacogdoches County he mapped the Three Forks of the Trinity and helped fix the boundaries of Dallas and its neighbors. This family cemetery, begun in 1847 on his farm, holds Ferris kin alongside many of the county's earliest settlers.

Galveston, TX

North Carolina-born Warren DeWitt Clinton Hall came to Texas early and threw himself into the military expeditions that challenged Spanish and Mexican rule. At the time of the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 he was serving as acting secretary of war for the young Republic of Texas. He later practiced law and lived in Galveston until his death, and a Panhandle county bears his name.

Bandera, TX

Artist John Warren Hunter (1903–93), son of Texas historian J. Marvin Hunter, was a Bandera High School graduate who printed the Harper Herald with his wife Lora before studying at the Chicago Art Institute. After serving in cartographic services during World War II, he opened the Hunter School of Art in San Antonio and became dean of the San Antonio Art Institute in 1950. His woodblock prints, etchings, and paintings of Texas scenes were collected by institutions from the Smithsonian to the White House.

Caldwell, TX

Freemasonry took root in Caldwell soon after Burleson County's creation in 1846, when nine Masons petitioned for a lodge and met in the county courthouse to install their first officers in 1849. Chartered in 1850 as Warren Lodge No. 56—by local tradition honoring the Revolutionary patriot Dr. Joseph Warren—the lodge counted among its early members a future sheriff, the courthouse contractor, and surveyor George B. Erath, who platted Caldwell and later served in the Texas Senate. The Masons built their hall in 1854, laid the courthouse cornerstone in 1889, and founded a public cemetery in 1890.

Graham, TX

On May 18, 1871, Kiowa and Comanche warriors leaving the Fort Sill reservation struck Henry Warren's wagon train hauling army supplies across this raw frontier, killing seven teamsters. The chiefs who led the raid were arrested; Satank died resisting, while Satanta pleaded eloquently for his people at a closely watched trial in Jacksboro. Governor E. J. Davis later commuted the resulting death sentences.

Gilmer, TX

Built in 1912 for Gilmer civic leaders Daisie Lee and James R. Warren, this house reflects the Prairie School and Arts and Crafts sensibilities then reshaping American design, with overhanging eaves, exposed rafter ends, and short Ionic porch columns. It passed through several owners before the Futrell family, who held it from 1934 until 1989. Its careful detailing makes it a landmark of Gilmer's early-20th-century architectural history.

Annona, TX

George Washington Warthan came from Tuscaloosa, Alabama with his brothers in 1852 and, after marrying Amanda Johnson, settled in the Red River Valley in 1855. In 1861 he mustered into Company E of the 32nd Texas Cavalry, seeing action in more than thirty Civil War battles before being captured and held prisoner until 1865. Returning home, he expanded his landholdings and in 1881 set aside this cemetery, whose graves are believed to predate even the Republic of Texas.

Longview, TX

On this site from 1861 to 1865, settler Joseph M. Sparkman ran a shop making shoes for the Confederate Army, directing the work from his cot because arthritis had left him unable to stand. The actual shoemaking was supervised and taught by "Uncle Ben," an enslaved craftsman who had come with him from Georgia and who trained the boys and old men left behind by the war. Both men are buried in the family plot nearby.

Bells, TX

Samuel and Mary Washburn brought their family from Missouri to Texas in 1836 and received a large land grant two years later. As settlers filled the area, a corner of the Washburn survey was set aside for burials; the oldest marked grave dates to 1867, though rough graves marked only with stones or bois d'arc posts likely reach back to the 1850s. Roughly 300 graves now rest on the 2.5-acre site.

Taylor, TX

Built in 1853 on an 1838 Republic of Texas land grant, the "Washington Bower" is remembered as the area's first frame house, raised by farmer and mason Henry Inlo Layne. The home hosted Robert E. Lee in 1857, and Layne went on to serve in the Civil War. A veteran of the Texas Revolution, Adam Lawrence, died here in 1878.

Houston, TX

Founded by the Deutsche Gesellschaft von Houston, the German Society Cemetery was established in 1887 on land then outside the city, selling family lots to members and the public. Anti-German feeling during World War I prompted its 1918 renaming as Washington Cemetery, and its more than 7,600 graves include Republic of Texas citizens, immigrants from over 20 nations, and 300-plus veterans of nine wars — among them Sarah Emma Edmonds Seelye, who served in the Union Army disguised as a man.

Giddings, TX

After the Civil War, landowner Henry Wenke Sr. deeded this ground to Charlie Washington, a formerly enslaved man, giving rise to a cemetery, two churches, and the growing Center Union Community of freed people seeking to buy their own farmland. Burials here span from 1882 to 1954. In 1975 nearby development damaged much of the cemetery and many of its headstones, but a preservation project has since reclaimed and protected the site.

Washington, TX

On this ground at Washington-on-the-Brazos, delegates gathered from March 1 to 17, 1836, to declare Texas independent, organize a republic, and frame its constitution—even as Santa Anna's army closed in on the Alamo. The marker inscribes the names of all the signers, from Sam Houston and Lorenzo de Zavala to Tejano leaders José Antonio Navarro and Francisco Ruiz, calling on Texans to keep their memory engraved on their hearts.

Brenham, TX

Completed in 1940 with Public Works Administration funds, this is the fourth courthouse to serve Washington County since the county's formation in 1835. Built during County Judge Sam Low's tenure, the massive white limestone building is a striking example of the art moderne style, down to its light fixtures and cast-aluminum eagles at the entries. It remains the symbolic seat of county government.