Historic Markers in Texas

Buffalo Gap, TX

Buffalo Gap Cemetery is the oldest public burial ground in Taylor County, in use by the community even before its earliest known headstones appeared around 1877. The older section of the ten-acre tract holds 146 graves, among them many Civil War veterans and pioneer families who first settled this stretch of West Texas. Still active today, it stands as a record of the county's founding generation.

Buffalo Gap, TX

Founded in 1885 by the Presbyterian Church, Buffalo Gap College grew out of an earlier high school and at its peak drew more than 300 students, some from far away. Its two-story red sandstone building housed classrooms, an auditorium, and a belfry, and offered a rigorous classical curriculum of Latin, Greek, physics, calculus, and music. The college enjoyed its greatest success under president J. M. Wagstaff.

Morton, TX

In the summer of 1877, troopers of Company A, 10th Cavalry—the African American Buffalo Soldiers who helped guard the Texas frontier—set out from their posts to pursue a Comanche party across the arid Llano Estacado. The Comanches drew the column away from every water hole, and after days in the heat Capt. Nicholas Nolan led his parched men and animals back toward Double Lakes, having gone 86 hours without water. Four soldiers who wandered off in a desperate search for water never came back.

Tahoka, TX

After the Civil War, African American "Buffalo Soldiers" patrolled the western frontier, and in July 1877 Company A of the 10th Cavalry set out from Double Lake in pursuit of a Comanche party. The Comanche drew the troopers away from water, and the soldiers endured extreme heat and 86 hours without water; horses and mules died and men became lost searching for springs. Four soldiers died on the expedition, including Pvt. John T. Gordon, buried at Double Lakes.

Mobeetie, TX

Fort Elliott was raised in 1875 to help confine Native peoples to Indian Territory reservations, and it was garrisoned in part by African American "buffalo soldiers" of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and 24th and 25th Infantry. They patrolled the Texas–Indian Territory line, guarded mail coaches, and strung telegraph lines. Among them served Lt. Henry O. Flipper—born to enslaved parents in 1856, the first Black graduate of West Point and the Army's first Black commissioned officer—who oversaw building a telegraph line across the Canadian River.

Buffalo Springs, TX

Known as early as 1849 and used by buffalo hunters, Buffalo Springs was briefly chosen in 1867 as the site of a permanent U.S. Army post, only to be abandoned within months for want of water and timber in favor of Fort Richardson. It then served as a stage stand and campground between that fort and Fort Sill. In July 1874 it was the scene of a fight between Indians and a company of Texas Rangers under Captain George W. Stevens.

Texline, TX

Buffalo Springs' permanent water made it a famed hunting ground teeming with buffalo and mustangs, and a cow camp before 1878. From 1882 it served as headquarters of the legendary XIT Ranch—once the largest fenced ranch in the world at three million acres—land the state of Texas traded to a syndicate in exchange for building its granite Capitol in Austin.

Buffalo Springs, TX

During the Civil War, Buffalo Springs stood in a thin line of sentry forts guarding the Red River and the exposed North Texas frontier from 1861 to 1865. Cavalry manned it at intervals — notably when 3,000 Federal troops massed to the north in Indian Territory in 1864 — while enduring chronic shortages of guns, food, and horses. Frontier families "forted up" here in a fortified square of picket houses, posting guards on wood- and water-gathering parties until a water famine forced them out in 1862.

Colorado City, TX

These preserved tracks come from an ancient buffalo trail, one of the deep grooves that thundering herds pounded single-file into the West Texas ground as they moved between grazing grounds and watering holes. Migratory routes ran from the Rio Grande to Canada, and buffalo hunters like the Mooar brothers killed thousands here in the 1870s for hides, tongues, and meat. Native peoples had long followed these paths to the herds, and later explorers and railroad engineers built roads and rail lines along the very same routes.

Goldthwaite, TX

Local tradition holds that this burial ground began when two sheep herders died while camping here, though its oldest marked grave dates to 1882. After Frank and Mary Crowder bought the land in 1889, Mary later gave part of it for a community cemetery serving the Buffalo and Ebony neighborhoods. Pioneers and veterans rest here, joined in the 1940s by three members of the Reynolds family reburied when their original graves fell within a new military camp.

San Antonio, TX

Dedicated in 1930 as the Army Air Corps' 'West Point of the Air,' Randolph Field consolidated flight training near San Antonio, and its 1931 administration building—Building 100—became instantly famous. Cadets nicknamed the tower-topped structure 'The Taj Mahal' for its exotic silhouette, which hides a 500,000-gallon water tank and an 1,100-seat theater. Designed by architect Atlee B. Ayres, it starred in aviation films and came to symbolize the rise of American air power.

Marfa, TX

Built in 1920, Building 98 served as the Officers Club and Bachelor Officers Quarters for Fort D.A. Russell near Marfa. In the final years of World War II, from 1943 to 1945, the fort held German prisoners of war from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps — and their ornate murals, depicting West Texas scenes, still survive on the building's interior walls. Its adobe-and-concrete construction and distinctive A-shaped footprint earned it recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

San Marcos, TX

Raised in the 1850s by Edward Burleson, Jr., a noted frontier fighter, this San Marcos home later gained fame as the birthplace of Albert Sidney Burleson, who served in President Woodrow Wilson's cabinet as Postmaster General. The house thus bridges two eras—the rough frontier of early statehood and the national politics of the Progressive age. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Goliad, TX

When the railroad reached Goliad in 1889, cheap brick, stone, and lumber fueled a building boom around the courthouse square. On the side of the Stout-Pettus block, painted sometime between 1894 and 1900, a traveling sign crew left an enormous Bull Durham tobacco advertisement — an eight-by-twelve-foot bull and the boast that the brand "has no equal." Hidden for decades behind an interior wall, the mural was rediscovered in 2012 and restored, a rare survivor of the era's hand-painted "wall dog" advertising.

Lorena, TX

Erected in 1914 over Bull Hide Creek at Winan's Crossing, this 69-foot Warren pony truss bridge was built by the El Paso Bridge and Iron Company with a timber deck and concrete piers. For most of the twentieth century it linked the rural Mabel, Levi, and Cottonwood communities. It stands as a fine surviving example of early metal-truss road engineering.

Cedar Springs vicinity, TX

One of the oldest cemeteries in Falls County, Bull Hill served for more than a century as a burial ground for African Americans, first for people enslaved on Churchill Jones's vast plantation and later for the freedpeople of the China Grove community. After emancipation, families such as the Baileys, Currys, and Taylors built a church, a school, and a vibrant freedmen's settlement, with some acquiring land and starting businesses. Archaeology and oral history have since confirmed more than 100 burials at this hallowed site, where the last interment took place in 1961.

Bullard, TX

Bullard Cemetery was established around 1870, in the years after the Civil War when the community that became the town of Bullard was taking shape. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2001, it holds the graves of the area's early settlers. Such burial grounds are often the oldest surviving record of a community's founding families.

Bullard, TX

This marks the site of Bullard's historic town well, the reliable water source around which the community grew. When the Kansas and Gulf Short Line railroad pushed south from Tyler in 1883, the new town of Bullard—named for postmaster John Henry Bullard—supplanted the older settlements of Etna and Hewsville. Drawing on the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, the well watered people and animals alike and served as an early social gathering place.

Ranger vicinity, TX

When infant Georgia A. Barnes was buried on William Nolen's land in 1878, a one-room schoolhouse already stood on the site. In 1886 Nolen donated two of his 160 acres to formally establish a school and cemetery for the settlement that became the Bullock community. The grounds were even leased for oil drilling in 1918, though the well came up dry. A cemetery association formed in the 1960s, and the burial ground still serves the area.

Gladewater, TX

Built around the turn of the twentieth century, this Gladewater house blends Colonial Revival dormers and gable ends with Craftsman touches like tapered box supports on brick piers. Sawmill owner and road builder William E. Bumpus and his wife Catherine bought the property in 1927, and it stayed in the family until 1987. It survives as a well-preserved local landmark of early East Texas domestic architecture.

Kyle, TX

The Bunton Branch Bridge, built in 1915 by J.N. George & Sons, carried the Austin–San Antonio post road across an intermittent creek named for John W. Bunton, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Part of the first federal-aid highway projects in Texas, its single 40-foot reinforced-concrete arch was the only one of its kind among thirty-five bridges along the route. The improved road became one of the state's busiest by the 1920s before a later realignment left this span behind.

Chester, TX

In 1835, on the eve of the Texas Revolution, early settler Peter Cauble raised this house in the pine woods of present-day Tyler County. His son-in-law Valentine Burch, a veteran of the decisive 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, later enlarged it. Named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964, the home survives as a tangible link to the first families who put down roots on this stretch of the East Texas frontier.

Georgetown, TX

Designed by noted Austin architect Charles H. Page, this Dutch Colonial Revival home was built in 1908–09 for Georgetown dentist William Joseph Burcham and his wife Mayme, both civic and cultural leaders in the community. Its cross gambrel roof, square brick piers, wraparound porch, and shingled gables reflect the fashionable revival styles of the early 20th century. The house stayed in the Burcham family until 1981.

Bastrop, TX

Richard Burger left Germany around 1859 and, after riding with Terry's Texas Rangers during the Civil War, settled into life as a Bastrop tailor and merchant. He bought this newly built Greek Revival house and raised a family here with his wife Clara, whose skill in German 'hair art' reflected the community's Old World traditions. Burger helped anchor local culture as an original stockholder in a town gathering place called 'The Casino.'

El Paso, TX

Built in 1912 for prominent attorney Richard Fenner Burges, this El Paso house took its present classical look — a portico of fluted columns — in a 1927 remodeling by architect Otto Thorman. Burges lost his wife, Ethel, during the home's original construction, then went on to serve as city attorney and state legislator while raising his family here. The house stayed in the Burges family until 1986.

Alpine, TX

This desert spring carried a layered history: named San Lorenzo by the Spanish explorer Juan Dominguez de Mendoza in 1684, later called Charco Alzate for an Apache chieftain, and finally honoring pioneer freighter John W. Burgess, who reportedly outwitted Apache raiders here. Along its banks ran the emigrant road to California by way of Chihuahua. In the arid Big Bend country, reliable water dictated where travelers, traders, and armies could go.

Galveston, TX

David G. Burnet led an eventful life long before he served as provisional president of the Republic of Texas in 1836 — joining youthful expeditions to free Venezuela from Spain, running a Louisiana trading post, and, while ailing with tuberculosis, living some eighteen months among the Comanches of west Texas. Elected the republic's interim president by a margin of six votes, he guided a chaotic government that was often fleeing Mexican troops by minutes even as it pressed for military victory. A man said to carry a gun in one pocket and a Bible in the other, he held office through the republic and statehood before his death in 1870.

Paris, TX

John S. Chisum came from Tennessee to Paris as a boy in 1837 and grew into one of the West's greatest cattle barons, driving herds numbering in the tens of thousands from Texas into New Mexico. During the Civil War he supplied beef to Confederate forces west of the Mississippi while his cowboys guarded the frontier, and he later built a vast spread near Roswell. His fortunes ultimately soured amid a bad packing-house deal and the violent Lincoln County War that also entangled Billy the Kid.

Prairie Lea, TX

Born in Pennsylvania in 1805 and schooled at Princeton, John McCullough was ordained a missionary in 1835 and reached Texas in 1838, at the height of the young Republic. He served as chaplain to the Third Congress, founded Galveston's First Presbyterian Church, and famously hauled a Conestoga wagon dubbed the "Little Church in the Wilderness" to San Antonio, where he helped raise the city's first Protestant sanctuary. He kept preaching and teaching across the frontier until his death at Prairie Lea in 1870.

Loving, TX

This marker names seven teamsters hauling forage between Jacksboro and Fort Griffin who were killed on May 18, 1871, in a raid led by the Kiowa chiefs Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree along with Comanche warriors. The attack on Henry Warren's contract wagon train was one of the most notorious episodes of the Southern Plains wars, and it led directly to the arrest and trial of the Kiowa leaders. Texas erected the memorial in 1936.

Burkburnett, TX

Burkburnett got its name at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt after a 1905 wolf hunt with rancher Burk Burnett, and the townsite was laid out in 1907 along a new railroad. But it was oil that made it famous: after a 2,200-barrel gusher came in on the Fowler farm in July 1918, some 200 wells sprouted in the townsite within three months and the population leapt from 1,500 to 15,000 in a single year. The frenzy inspired the 1940 film "Boom Town," cementing the town's "Boomtown USA" legend.

Burkburnett, TX

The Burkburnett Masonic Lodge No. 1027 was chartered in 1910, just three years after the town's founding, with an Eastern Star chapter added in 1921. During the oil-boom 1930s it claimed 400 members in a town of only 3,200 and produced eight District Deputy Grand Masters. The lodge laid cornerstones for landmark buildings including the First United Methodist Church, the library and local schools.

Fort Worth, TX

The first known burial in this graveyard was Mary Overton Burke, who came in 1851 with her children and widowed mother to settle land her late husband had chosen. She died in December 1867, and her mother followed just two days later. In 1900 the half-acre was formally deeded as a family burial ground, and more than a hundred graves of the Burkes and allied families have since been recorded here.

Burke, TX

Burke Methodist Church was founded in 1889 by a small band of Methodists and quickly became a center of community life. H. and Nannie Belote donated land in 1894, and the first sanctuary was finished in 1901, later moved, remodeled, and eventually replaced by a brick church and educational building in 1957. Through worship, education, and outreach, the congregation has served the town of Burke for well over a century.

Burke, TX

When the Houston, East and West Texas Railroad reached this piney-woods country in 1882, the new community of Burke needed a school, and the Arringtons deeded an acre for one. A single room grew into three, then into a 1910 brick schoolhouse, and finally into a larger building raised with Works Progress Administration labor during the Depression. Even after Burke's district merged with Diboll's in 1964, the schoolhouse kept serving its neighbors as a senior center and polling place.

Eastland, TX

Joe Burkett — who with his father and brother discovered and propagated the original Burkett pecan tree in 1900 — was also a schoolteacher, county official, and state legislator. He and his wife Fannye built this home in 1919–1920 on a working farm lot with outbuildings. New owners reworked it in the 1930s in the popular period-revival taste, and its stucco walls, low hipped tile roof, and porte cochere give it a Spanish Colonial Revival look.

Putnam, TX

In 1900, near Putnam, J. H. Burkett selected and propagated a superior nut from a native pecan tree — the beginning of the Burkett pecan, a variety that would help turn Texas's wild groves into a commercial industry. Burkett, who lived from 1861 to 1945, became a leading champion of pecan growing across the state. The tree honored here stands as the source of that enduring cultivar.

Burkeville, TX

The Church of God reformation began in Indiana in 1881 as a movement for Christian unity, and word of it reached deep East Texas through Alice McAlfin, a schoolteacher who had learned of it in Louisiana. The congregation she helped gather in 1901 is thought to be the oldest Church of God fellowship in Texas. For years it worshiped in a schoolhouse and held weeks-long summer camp meetings and creekside baptisms before building its own tabernacles.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Among the first families to settle what became Dimmit County, the Burlesons arrived near Carrizo Springs between 1865 and 1870. In 1895 tragedy struck fast: three young Burleson men died suddenly, probably of food poisoning, and that July another brother succumbed to heat stroke and was buried alongside them and a Burleson child. Over the decades the graves faded into local mystery until a Texas Department of Transportation investigation in the late twentieth century identified the family resting here.

Greenville, TX

Founded by the Hunt County Baptist Association in 1895, Burleson College rode the late-19th-century wave of church-sponsored schools meant to bring extended education to rural children. Named for former Baylor president Dr. Rufus C. Burleson, it offered preparatory and college programs—free to men preparing to preach—from a hilltop west of the courthouse. Chronic debt, a dormitory fire, and the Depression finally closed it in 1930, but more than 8,000 students had passed through by then.

Caldwell, TX

The land here was farmed as early as 1744 by Native people under Spanish missionaries, and in 1830 Fort Tenoxtitlan guarded the Brazos crossing on the old San Antonio Road, drawing Anglo-Texans who lived off wild game. The county was organized in 1846 and named for Gen. Edward Burleson — a hero of San Jacinto, Indian fighter, and Republic of Texas vice-president — with its seat at Caldwell. During the Civil War it sent troops, cotton, and food to the Confederacy.

Caldwell, TX

Burleson County sits in the rich Brazos River basin, settled as early as 1825 along El Camino Real, the old King's Highway. Here in 1830 Mexico built the fort of Tenoxtitlan, between Sterling Robertson's colony to the north and Stephen F. Austin's to the south. Surveyor George B. Erath platted Caldwell in 1840 and later authored the 1846 bill creating the county, named for Gen. Edward Burleson — soldier of Texas independence, congressman, and vice president of the Republic. Plantation agriculture gave way after the Civil War, and railroads arrived in the 1880s.

Caldwell, TX

On February 23, 1861, Burleson County voters chose secession by 422 to 84, and within days the "Burleson Guards" organized and offered themselves to the state. Most joined Company G of the 2nd Texas Infantry, while others served in Walker's Texas Division, Waul's Legion, Terry's Rangers, and Hood's Brigade. At home, a state-troop regiment guarded local citizens and the county court funded food and supplies for soldiers' families.

Caldwell, TX

When the United States entered World War II, rural Burleson County answered far above its size: roughly 1,300 of its 18,000 residents put on a uniform, many leaving the county for the first time in their lives. Their war reached from the deck of the U.S.S. California at Pearl Harbor—where Somerville's Thomas J. Gary died saving his crewmates and earned the Navy Cross—to the bloody landings at Salerno, the Ploesti oil-field raids over Romania, the Bataan Death March, and the beaches of Normandy. At home, families ran short-handed farms, joined recycling drives, and sent their nurses and defense workers to the effort.

San Marcos, TX

This restored log house honors Gen. Edward Burleson (1793–1851), an officer in the Texas War for Independence, a leader in frontier defense, vice president of the Republic of Texas, and a state legislator. The original dwelling, built in 1848 of hewn elm and oak with a rock chimney, had fallen into ruin by 1917 before being rebuilt in 1964 using the old chimney stones and period logs. It stands for the generation that fought to establish and defend the young Republic.

Waco, TX

Named for Rufus C. Burleson, the first president of Baylor's Waco campus, Burleson Quadrangle took its enduring shape as the university's four original buildings rose between 1886 and 1903. For generations it has been the setting of Baylor traditions, from the spring "Ring Out" ivy-chain ceremony to the passing of the key to a 1945 centennial time capsule. Its bronze statue of Burleson, unveiled in 1905, is the work of the noted sculptor Pompeo Coppini.

Flower Mound, TX

This native post oak in Flower Mound predates 1820, meaning it was already a mature tree when the region was still open blackland prairie on the edge of Anglo-American settlement in Texas. The Town designated it a Historical Tree in 1992 and tied it to the Burleson Staton family, who farmed the surrounding 70 acres from about 1926 to 1966. It is a living witness to the shift from open range and homestead farming to the suburban growth of the Dallas–Fort Worth corridor.

Burlington, TX

Members of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church of Burlington established this cemetery in 1917 on land once owned by town founders Michael and John Jones. With the Catholic St. Michael's Cemetery already nearby, the Lutherans and other non-Catholics needed a burial place of their own. Passed through a series of church mergers to the United Church of Christ and now cared for by a local association, it still serves the Burlington community and the descendants of those who left it.

Ennis, TX

In 1856 William R. and Edeline House bought this land in a bargain paid with an enslaved man named John, and after her husband's death Edeline laid out a 25-block town and donated an acre for a graveyard in 1861. When the Houston and Texas Central Railroad bypassed Burnam Square in 1871 and founded Ennis instead, residents and businesses drifted away. Today a small burial ground of some forty graves is all that survives of the vanished community.

La Grange vicinity, TX

In the mid-1820s, as Stephen F. Austin's colonists were spreading across the lower Colorado River country, Jesse Burnam set up a ferry where the old La Bahia Road met the water — the first in what is now Fayette County. It became a vital link on a route that carried settlers, traders, and travelers deep into Mexican Texas. During the frantic retreat of the 'Runaway Scrape' in March 1836, the Army of the Republic of Texas crossed here, and Sam Houston ordered the ferry destroyed so the pursuing Mexican army could not follow.

Burnet, TX

Built in 1884 of hand-hewn rock, the Burnet County Jail combined a lockup with living quarters for the sheriff, who also served as jailer in the frontier custom of the day. Its second floor became the unlikely birthplace of the county library, so that justice and learning shared a single stone building. It survives as a solid example of nineteenth-century civic architecture in the Texas Hill Country.

Burkburnett, TX

In the 1870s cattleman Samuel Burk Burnett launched his famous 6666 (Four Sixes) ranch in Wichita County. When drought struck the 1880s, Burnett and neighboring ranchers leased vast grazing lands from the Comanche and Kiowa across the Red River in Indian Territory, and he acquired land for a dedicated horse ranch during the outfit's greatest years of expansion and selective breeding. His son Tom kept ranching in the county after headquarters moved to King County; the family sold the horse ranch in 1906.

Bullard, TX

From 1913 to 1919 a 400-member religious commune worked the former Douglas Plantation near Bullard, founded by the Chicago-born Metropolitan Church Association, popularly called the Burning Bush Society. The colony aimed at self-sufficiency, running its own school, sawmill, power plant, water system, and sewage works. Crushed by debt, it disbanded soon after World War I ended.

Trenton, TX

Tennessee native William Boyd Burns donated the land for this cemetery in 1876, next to the log cabin where he lived as a pioneer settler of the Trenton community. He also gave ground for a union church and schoolhouse, tying the burial ground to the area's earliest institutions. Its graves include Civil War veterans — among them a physician who fought at Shiloh — and generations of the settlers who built up Trenton.

Cuero, TX

When Arthur Burns reached DeWitt's colony in 1826 and built a two-story log home, he planted the seed of Irish Creek, one of the county's earliest settlements—a house that sheltered families during raids and once hosted Sam Houston in 1836. A grist mill, store, blacksmith, and stage stop clustered nearby along the Victoria–Gonzales road, and the settlement came to be called Burns Station. The cemetery, its land donated in 1853, holds an Ireland-born pioneer among its oldest graves.

Millard's Crossing, TX

Elijah M. Burrows, a Confederate veteran, built the back rooms of this Nacogdoches County farmhouse before marrying Molly Millard in 1867, then added the front rooms and porch over the next several years. His family lived in the house for more than a century, until a descendant of the original builder moved and restored it in the 1970s. It stands as a well-preserved example of a Reconstruction-era Texas pioneer home.

Junction, TX

Founded in May 1919, this American Legion post honored a local man killed in France during the First World War and quickly became one of Kimble County's best-known organizations. In 1938 members built a native-rock home on this site, lining its walls with wartime keepsakes, and added a memorial hall after the Second World War. In 1966 the old "Legion hut" passed to the county historical museum.

Cleveland, TX

Burton B. Tarkington and his wife Sarah left Indiana in the mid-1820s for the Mexican state of Coahuila, settling west of the Trinity River and building a ranch and farm on land that came to bear their name. Family tradition holds they fled in 1836 as Santa Anna's army advanced toward San Jacinto. After independence, the new Republic granted Tarkington more than 4,600 acres, and he later served in the Texas Militia and as a county commissioner.

Burton, TX

Built in 1937 by Edward Whitener and Quintus Zwernemann, the Burton Cafe has anchored this small town's main street for generations, serving as both an eatery and a social gathering place — and for a time a liquor store. Its simple false-front stepped parapet is sheathed in metal stamped to imitate brick.

Burton, TX

Georgia-born John M. Burton reached this area in 1834 and sold land for a townsite when the Houston & Texas Central Railroad arrived in 1869; a post office opened the next year. Stores, a cotton gin, an oil mill, and other trades soon followed. The town also counted among its residents the famed Texas Ranger Captain L. H. McNelly, who raised two Ranger units here in the 1870s.