Historic Markers in Texas

Milano, TX

Ervin Westbrook and his wife Rachel, joined by her brother John Walker, left the Deep South in 1858 to build new farms on the Texas prairie near present-day Milano. Their family graveyard opened in 1864 with the burial of John Walker's wife and served the two clans and their neighbors into the 1920s. Among the two to three dozen laid to rest here are three Civil War veterans of the founding families.

Albany, TX

After the Civil War, Texas cattlemen sought new routes to northern railheads, and in 1874 John T. Lytle blazed what became the Western (or Dodge City) Trail, driving 3,500 longhorns from South Texas toward Nebraska. Fort Griffin became a vital watering and supply point as herds crossed the Clear Fork of the Brazos here and at nearby fords. Within a few years the Western Trail carried the bulk of Texas cattle north—three to five million head in all—until the last drive in 1893.

New Waverly, TX

Founded in 1885, Western Grove Baptist Church is the oldest African-American congregation in New Waverly, begun as Eastern Grove Baptist Church before moving to the west side of town. Organized by ministers and deacons in the years after emancipation, it survived being blown down by high winds in 1936 and relocated again in 1958 when Interstate 45 cut through the county. Through each move it rebuilt, remaining a spiritual anchor for its community.

Dallas, TX

Burials on this Dallas ground reach back to the 1850s, and in 1881 pioneers Z.E. Coombes and W.R. Fisher formally set the land aside as a 'graveyard forever.' Early settlers, along with veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, rest here. So do Clyde and Buck Barrow, the Depression-era outlaws of Bonnie-and-Clyde infamy.

Dallas, TX

In 1872, former Confederate brigadier general Richard M. Gano preached at the request of a Civil War comrade and won some fifty converts among settlers from the scattered communities around Dallas. The new Church of Christ met for years in homes and the Mt. Airy Schoolhouse before members raised lumber and land to build a white clapboard meetinghouse in 1890. That early structure survived to serve later congregations.

Brady vicinity, TX

Through this gap in the Brady Mountains ran the Western Trail—also called the Dodge City or Fort Griffin Trail—the last of the great Texas cattle routes after farmers fenced off the eastern trails. From about 1876 to 1886 enormous herds moved north along it, more than 200,000 head in 1881 alone. Starting near Brownsville, the trail wound through San Antonio and the Hill Country, forded the San Saba and Colorado rivers, and pushed on through Doan's Crossing to Dodge City, Kansas, and eventually Wyoming and Montana.

Coleman, TX

This tablet, placed by a local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter, honors the Western Trail that funneled vast herds of longhorns north through Coleman in the decades after the Civil War. For nearly thirty years, cowboys drove cattle "up the trail" along this route, part of the great open-range cattle drives that defined the postwar Texas economy.

Austin, TX

Designed in 1962 by internationally acclaimed architect Edward Durell Stone with the Austin firm Fehr & Granger, the Westgate Tower rose beside the State Capitol grounds as the city's tallest building of the 1960s. Opened in 1965 as Austin's first residential high-rise, the 26-story concrete tower mixed apartments, parking, a restaurant, and a social club, its decorative masonry solar screens a signature of Stone's mid-century Modern style. For decades it housed legislators, lobbyists, and civic leaders drawn to its Capitol views.

Westhoff, TX

This DeWitt County town began in 1906 as "Bello"—Beautiful View—a tent city for crews building the Texas and New Orleans Railroad. Renamed in 1909 for local merchant and political leader William Westhoff, the town at its height supported three cotton gins and thirteen stores. It endures as a farming, ranching, and uranium-leasing center home to many ethnic groups.

Westminster, TX

Founded in 1887 by Rev. J.M. Harder as Seven Points College, this Collin County school passed through a string of names and owners—private proprietors, the Methodist Protestant Church, and Westminster Baptists—while serving as a preparatory academy, college, and theological seminary. In 1907 a three-story, forty-room concrete building replaced the old wooden schoolhouse, but financial troubles closed the doors in 1918. The grand structure stood until its demolition in 1972.

Nacogdoches, TX

Presbyterians shaped Nacogdoches from the 1830s onward, and in 1893 Rev. B. A. Hodges and twelve members founded what became Westminster Presbyterian Church under the Cumberland denomination. An early wood-frame sanctuary by noted architect D. A. W. Rulfs gave way to a 1930 sanctuary and manse, and the congregation grew into a hub of community service, from a World War I savings-stamp drive to helping launch the local Head Start program.

Corsicana, TX

In 1853 the Rev. John Patton and about twenty Cumberland Presbyterians organized Corsicana's first church, in the years when the town was still a young frontier settlement. Over the following decades several distinct Presbyterian bodies took root, split, and realigned, until in 1949 they merged into Westminster Presbyterian Church. The Bethel Mexican congregation joined in 1968, adding another strand to the church's history.

Beaumont, TX

Presbyterian worship in Beaumont began with circuit-riding preachers before the First Presbyterian Church was organized in 1880 by seven charter members meeting in the county courthouse. The congregation built a frame church, grew, and spawned a second congregation, Central Presbyterian; the two reunited in 1921 as Westminster Presbyterian Church with 484 members. Over the decades the fellowship seeded a dozen mission churches across the Beaumont area and sent fourteen ministers into ordained service.

Seymour, TX

Platted in 1910 along the Gulf, Texas and Western Railroad, Westover sprang up as a market center for area farmers and ranchers, taking the maiden name of rancher J. W. Stevens's mother-in-law. A post office, bank, gins, shops, churches, and a school quickly followed. But a 1921 fire and the 1942 abandonment of the rail line drained the town, and many settlers and businesses moved to Seymour.

Fort Worth, TX

Built in 1929–30 as the showpiece of the new Westover Hills development, this Norman-Jacobethan revival mansion by architect Victor Marr Curtis blends brick and rough-cut limestone under a bell-cast tower roof and Tudor chimneys. It was home to John E. Farrell, first mayor of Westover Hills and a co-discoverer of the vast East Texas oil field in 1931, until his death in 1946.

Seymour, TX

Westover School served this corner of Baylor County from 1910 to 1950, beginning in the Church of Christ building before trustees put up a frame schoolhouse in 1911. A two-story brick building with seven classrooms, a library, and an auditorium replaced it in 1917, and enrollment reached 400 by the 1930s. The 1942 loss of the rail line and postwar rural flight thinned the student body until the school closed in 1950.

Westphalia, TX

Soon after German Catholic settlers reached this Falls County community in 1879, they set about founding a school that would serve both parochial and public needs. The Westphalia Little School opened in 1884 in a remodeled former church building, staffed by a succession of early teachers and, from 1899, by the Sisters of Divine Providence from San Antonio. Though the parochial program ended in 1935, the sisters continued teaching in the public school for decades.

San Antonio, TX

San Antonio's Black history reaches back to its earliest days, from presidial soldiers of African ancestry to the North African Berber heritage of the Canary Islanders. By 1885 the city's Second Ward, west of the San Antonio River, was home to a substantial Black community anchored by institutions like St. James AME Church—begun in 1868 in a former soap factory—and the West End Baptist Church. Community leaders such as Ella Austin, who opened an orphans' home nearby in 1890, and gathering places for literary societies and glee clubs gave the neighborhood civic and cultural life before it later transformed into a Latino cultural center.

Center, TX

In the hills of Shelby County, Westview Cemetery became the resting place for African Americans freed after the Civil War, many of whom stayed on as tenant farmers and sharecroppers while building their own businesses, churches, and a school. Long known as the Union Grave Yard and later Center Colored Cemetery, its earliest recorded burial is thought to be Jane Chumley Miller, a former slave, and its oldest surviving marker dates to 1909. Educators, preachers, and business people lie here, including a man said to have cooked for Gen. John J. Pershing during World War I.

Palestine, TX

In November 1883, Harriet McClanahan Holmes gave an acre of land and William M. Holmes donated funds for the Holmes Community School, where area residents organized the Holmes Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, South, that same year. The congregation outgrew its schoolhouse in 1899 and built successive sanctuaries as the Palestine area grew through new industry and postwar population increases. When local districts consolidated into Westwood ISD in the 1960s, the church took the community's new name, Westwood United Methodist.

Boerne, TX

Charles (Carl) Weyrich bought this Boerne lot in 1877 after moving from Gillespie County, working as a tinsmith and commissioning this rubble-limestone building around the time of his 1878 marriage. After he sold it in 1883, a run of grocery stores and later a residence, office, and art studio occupied it. With its stone parapet and hooded lintels, it is among the oldest commercial structures in town.

Frankel City, TX

Two miles south of this spot, one of Andrews County's first schools opened in 1907 on land donated by Mrs. M. B. Dillard, near the edge of Whalen Lake. Built by Joe and Jake Mathis, the one-room school taught the children of homesteaders who were "proving up" their claims by living on the land for three years. It closed in 1910 and the building was moved once most settlers had fulfilled their claims and departed.

Center Point, TX

William Watson Wharton was among the first settlers of Kerr County, arriving in 1857 with his wife Thankful, their three sons, and a claim to 640 acres in the Texas Hill Country. The family cabin stood near this plot, where Wharton's is the oldest marked grave. Among those resting here is his son William G'Laspie Wharton, who served as a county deputy sheriff for more than half a century, alongside members of other pioneer families.

Wharton, TX

When Wharton County was organized in 1846, its seat was laid out on the Mexican land grant of 'Old 300' colonist William Kincheloe, and in 1866 the commissioners formalized a cemetery already in use just blocks from the courthouse. Its oldest marked grave dates to 1843, and among those buried here is Amanda Armstrong Watts, Wharton's first public schoolteacher and its postmistress in 1881. More than 140 veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam rest amid the obelisks, cairns, and decorated ironwork that make the grounds a study in cemetery design.

Wharton, TX

Wharton County was created in 1846 from Matagorda and Jackson counties and organized the same year, in the first months of Texas statehood. It honors the brothers William H. and John A. Wharton, both prominent figures of the Texas Revolution and the Republic. William served as Texas minister to the United States, while John was an adjutant at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto and a member of the Republic's Congress.

Wharton, TX

Attorney William S. "Billie" Brooks founded this abstract firm in 1890, with Daisy Speed penning the original tract-book entries by hand. Over the decades the company drew a roster of notable associates, including members of the Cline family and L. Z. Moreland, who worked here for a half-century. Its secretary Ruth Brazzil went on to serve as a special justice of the Texas Supreme Court in a celebrated Woodmen of the World case.

Wharton, TX

Wharton County was carved in 1846 from Stephen F. Austin's original Mexican land grant, and the Kincheloe family donated a courthouse square on the Colorado River. After early frame and brick courthouses, a contentious fight—Judge Croom for a new building, rancher "Shanghai" Pierce and others against—delayed construction until Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner's Second Empire and Italianate design rose in 1889, its salmon brick fired from local river clay. Mid-20th-century remodelings buried its ornament in Moderne stucco before a sweeping 21st-century restoration brought it back.

Wharton, TX

Across Grove Street from the Wharton Cemetery lies this historic burial ground, the resting place of many of Wharton's early Hispanic families. The site was already in use before D.A. Dickson formally deeded 1.5 acres to the Mexican Cemetery Association in 1925, and from the 1920s to 1973 it was the city's only designated Hispanic cemetery—reflecting the era's segregated burial grounds for Hispanic, African American, and white residents. With more than 500 graves, some marked with Spanish inscriptions and some descended from the Canary Islanders who helped settle San Antonio, it stands as a rich chronicle of family and community.

Wharton, TX

Founded in 1896 as the Wharton Colored School, this institution served as the heart of African American education in Wharton County for nearly eighty years. In 1927 the county won a Rosenwald Fund grant to build a larger school, part of the philanthropic program that helped construct thousands of Black schools across the segregated South. Renamed the Wharton County Training School and steadily expanded with new buildings, science labs, and a full curriculum, it educated generations—many of whom returned as teachers—until it closed with integration in 1968.

Dallas, TX

Wheatland Cemetery grew out of land donated in the mid-1800s by Ohio-born farmers Tom Branson and H.K. Brotherton, and it became intertwined with the local Methodist congregation of Wesley Chapel, which moved to the renamed community of Wheatland in 1864. Formally established in 1872, the grounds hold earlier burials, some reinterred from the chapel's original yard, along with pioneers, community leaders, and veterans reaching back to the Mexican-American War. Its fraternal gravestones and curbing, and graves of victims of flu, malaria, and diphtheria epidemics, record the joys and hardships of an early Dallas-area farming community.

Dallas, TX

Founded in 1847, just a year after Texas joined the United States, Wheatland Methodist Church claims to be the oldest Methodist congregation west of the Trinity River. The congregation built on this site in 1859 and later enlarged the building in 1912, adding a steeple and stained glass windows. Its long life spans the transformation of the surrounding country from open frontier to greater Dallas.

Naples, TX

Wheatville began in the 1840s as a rest stop and general store on the road to Jefferson, named for pioneer settler William Wheat, and grew through the 1850s to include a cotton gin, grist mill, school, and church. The town faded in the 1880s as businesses moved to the new railroad town of Naples, but its cemetery, first used in 1863, still serves the area and holds the roots of U.S. Senator Morris Sheppard, born there in 1875.

Flatonia, TX

Raised in 1907 for W. H. and Emma Wheeler from locally made brick, this commercial building gave the small town of Flatonia a touch of Romanesque Revival ambition, with corbelled brickwork, paired arched windows, and a recessed corner entry. Over the decades its rooms sheltered a dentist, shops, a nursing home, and even a Boy Scout troop. It stands as a well-preserved example of early-twentieth-century small-town commercial architecture.

Corrigan, TX

This rural graveyard began in 1875 with a family's grief: Alabama-born Jefferson Wheeler and his wife Hannah buried their daughter Vina here after a hunting accident. The Wheelers later gave an acre around her grave to the community as a "neighborhood burying ground," and it remains active today. Among those interred are pioneer families and veterans of conflicts stretching from the Civil War to Korea.

Stockdale, TX

The Wheeler family graveyard was first used in 1863, when David Wheeler's second wife Maniza died in childbirth, soon followed by her infant. David and his brother John ran a grist mill on nearby Cibolo Creek and built a brick-making kiln, small industries on what was then a raw frontier. Neighboring families such as the Butlers, who married into the Wheelers, were also buried here, and in 2008 an association formed to reclaim the long-neglected ground.

Wheeler, TX

Deeded to the community in 1907, Wheeler Cemetery holds more than 2,700 graves, the earliest stone dating to 1904. Its rows include veterans of every American war from the Civil War to Iraq, a Fort Elliott soldier of the 1880s, civic founders, and even local characters remembered by legend.

Wheeler, TX

Carved from earlier territories and created in 1876 as the Panhandle opened to settlement, Wheeler County honors Royal T. Wheeler, a long-serving justice and chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Its early seat at Mobeetie was one of the first towns in the region, born in the rough world of buffalo hunters and cattlemen before the county seat shifted to Wheeler in 1906. The marker distills a young county's founding into a few crisp lines of civic record.

Wheeler, TX

Wheeler County was created in 1876 and named for early Texas jurist Royal T. Wheeler, with Mobeetie serving as the first county seat on the newly opened Panhandle plains. As settlement shifted, the town of Wheeler became the seat in 1908, and after a bond election the present Classical Revival courthouse — with its Palladian windows and Corinthian columns — rose in 1925. Designed by E.H. Eads, it still stands at the center of local government.

Wheeler, TX

Raised in 1909 of concrete and steel after the county seat moved from historic old Mobeetie, this sturdy jail served the Panhandle county for two decades with only a single prisoner ever escaping. Its first sheriff and jailer are named on the marker, a reminder of how small frontier counties organized law and order. Repurposed as a library, museum, and county offices, the building outlived its original grim function.

Honey Grove, TX

Built between 1852 and 1854 with slave labor, the Wheeler House was the area's first Classic Revival dwelling, its lumber and chimney stones hand-hewn and its joists pegged rather than nailed — the fifth house along the Bonham-to-Paris stagecoach road. Builder Wiley Hulsey sold it in 1884 to Confederate veteran Peyton Wheeler and his wife Martha Jane Hamil, whose descendants later placed this marker.

Richardson, TX

'Uncle Billy' Wheeler helped found Richardson itself, deeding land for the railroad townsite after the Civil War and, in 1880, providing a school for area children. The schoolhouse rebuilt and grew with the town—from a two-story frame building after an 1900 fire, to a red-brick structure in 1914, to added wings for consolidations in the 1920s and 30s—before becoming the district's administration building in 1960.

Crockett, TX

Settlement here began in 1835 when Joshua J. Hall founded a community along the Trinity River. After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people from the Hall family and other freed African Americans put down roots in this area, building a community around springs on land donated by French Taylor. A Baptist church and schoolhouse rose near the springs in 1905, followed by a new school and a cannery in the 1920s; though the school closed in 1959, the church and civic life endured.

Wheelock, TX

Surveyor Eleazar Louis Ripley Wheelock came to Texas from Illinois in 1830 and founded a town on his land along the Old San Antonio Road, named Wheelock in 1837. By the 1840s it boasted some twenty businesses and became a Central Texas transportation hub, serving as Robertson County seat from 1850 to 1856. When the railroad bypassed it in the 1860s, the town declined and many residents drifted to nearby Hearne.

Wheelock, TX

Founded in 1833 by Colonel E. L. R. Wheelock, this settlement bears the name of a man who wore many hats in early Texas: soldier, lawyer, educator, Texas Ranger captain, and one of the organizers of Robertson's colony. Wheelock helped bring Anglo-American settlers into the region during the turbulent years surrounding Texas independence. He died in 1846 in Illinois, in the town where he had been born, having left his name on the Texas map.

Wheelock, TX

Formal schooling in this Robertson County community reached back to the Wheelock Academy of the 1840s, but the landmark building came in 1908, when the Hedrick family set aside a few acres for an unusually large two-story frame schoolhouse. With four classrooms below and a full stage and auditorium above, it served up to 200 pupils and five teachers in the 1930s. Classes ran until 1949-50, after which students transferred to Franklin and the building became a community center.

Marshall, TX

Peter and Dicey Whetstone were among the earliest settlers of Harrison County when Texas was still an independent republic. Peter's headright, granted by the Republic of Texas in 1838, gave him the land from which, in 1843, he and Dicey donated the site for the new town of Marshall. That gift seated a community that would become one of East Texas's most important nineteenth-century towns.

Gunter, TX

This Grayson County burial ground began in 1866 on J. W. Whitaker's farm with the interment of Joseph McLean, serving the Clayton schoolhouse community. Its settlers — farmers and ranchers who had come from Mississippi and other southern states — formally bought the cemetery in 1880 and kept burying their dead there. In 1967 their descendants founded an association that still tends the graves and holds a memorial service each May.

Texarkana, TX

Built before 1891 by Benjamin F. Whitaker — a Texas state senator, lumberman, and railroad partner in what became the Kansas City Southern line — this residence was crafted with materials he handpicked for his own family. By 1904 it had passed to an ex-sheriff's family and was celebrated in a souvenir book as a Texarkana showplace. The home reflects the wealth and civic prominence of the Gilded Age men who built the region's timber and rail fortunes.

Tyler, TX

Built about 1880 for attorney Harrison Moores Whitaker and his wife Mattie—daughter of Texas Supreme Court Justice Micajah H. Bonner—this is one of Tyler's few surviving high Victorian residences. In 1907 it passed to Mattie's sister Annie and her husband Sidney Smith McClendon, remaining in that family until 1979. Its asymmetrical plan and Italianate and Eastlake detailing mark it as a showpiece of the era's domestic architecture.

Bastrop, TX

John W. and Martha L. White built this ornate Victorian home in Bastrop in 1890, in the flush of the late Gilded Age when Eastlake "gingerbread" trim was the height of fashion. After several owners, Nash Turner bought the house in 1901 for his mother, Kate. Turner, an internationally recognized race-horse trainer, lived here with her in the early 1920s, and the house stayed in his family until 1937.

Highlands, TX

Reuben White was one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old 300" colonists, taking a Mexican land grant here in 1824 as part of a large family that settled the area later called White Settlement. Though his 1848 burial is the earliest recorded, older graves are thought to exist nearby. Formally set aside as a family cemetery in 1850, it grew into a community burial ground holding pioneers and veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution to Vietnam.

Coleman, TX

After Coleman County was organized in 1867, pioneer families pushed past the county seat to settle this grassy, game-filled locality and founded the village of White Chapel. When land was deeded for a school in 1884, a cemetery took root on the same ground, and school, church, and burial place all shared the community's name. Consolidation eventually drew the schoolchildren away, but the cemetery still records the families who first broke this land.

White Deer, TX

White Deer took its name from a creek and an Indian legend of white deer that fed there. The county's first water well was drilled at the N Bar N Ranch in 1887, and the site served as headquarters for the White Deer Land Co., successor to a British syndicate that held 630,000 Panhandle acres before selling them off for farms in 1902. The arrival of the railroad and, later, a 1920s oil boom turned it into a shipping town for grain and cattle.

White Deer, TX

On the Texas Panhandle plains, where the International & Great Northern Railroad had laid out its survey blocks, a burial ground took shape in the early 1900s—perhaps beginning with a railroad worker killed in an accident around 1905. A cemetery association formed in 1923, buying its five acres for a single dollar, and after years of neglect was revived by local citizens in 1991. Those interred here include early pioneers and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

White Deer, TX

In 1909 Henry Czerner and Ben Urbanczyk, both from the Polish colony of Panna Maria, came north to secure land near White Deer, and by 1913 a dozen Polish families had settled the area. Lacking a church, they prayed in one another's homes until they raised Sacred Heart, completed in May 1913 while women and children worked the fields. The parish weathered oil booms, a 1951 tornado, and the world wars — even reviving its Polish Sausage Festival — before building the present church in 1962.

White Deer, TX

A Methodist congregation formed in White Deer in 1911 when the Rev. W.B. McKeown gathered seven charter members, worshipping first in the shared town school and a Presbyterian building before buying lots for its own sanctuary, completed in 1922. When a 1951 tornado destroyed the town's schools, the church opened its doors as a temporary classroom, and by 1960 the growing congregation built a new debt-free building. Community outreach—from a women's missionary society founded in 1916 to a food pantry begun in 2004—has marked its ministry throughout.

Albany, TX

On a corner of frontier Albany's original town plat, Alabama businessman Max Blach—who helped bring running water to the town—built this native-stone building in 1884. Leased to J.R. Davis, it opened that May as the raucous White Elephant Saloon, complete with a rooftop white elephant that disapproving citizens soon tore down. After the saloon closed in 1886, the building housed furniture stores, a newspaper, and even a pipe-organ maker's workshop across nearly a century.

Woodway, TX

White Hall Cemetery is all that remains of a once-thriving farming community in McLennan County. Its earliest marked graves date to 1877 on land deeded by Civil War veteran Capt. Burl Jones Kendrick, who owned 320 acres nearby and in 1899 gave an additional acre to the graveyard's trustees for a single dollar. As the first Baptist cemetery in the area, it holds the pioneers who built and buried a vanished community.

Mabank, TX

Built in 1888 on land donated by the Albert T. Rice family, the first White Hall School was a single-room building first called Caney Creek School, renamed in 1910. Growth brought a four-room building in 1928 and a faculty of four, until the school was consolidated into the Mabank district around 1949. The building lived on afterward as a church and community center, and many former students' descendants remain in the area.

Navasota vicinity, TX

White Hall School opened in 1913 after three earlier rural schools — East Academy, West Academy, and Retreat — consolidated, its first building a two-story frame structure that doubled as a community hall. Serving farm families, it brought together the children of pioneer Anglo and German immigrant households, even amid the tensions of World War I. It carried the community through the Depression and two world wars before closing in 1949.