Historic Markers in Texas

Dallas, TX

Alfred Horatio Belo, a North Carolina–born Confederate colonel, came to Texas after the Civil War and rose through the Galveston News to build a publishing empire, launching the Dallas Morning News in 1885. Seeking a home worthy of their standing, the Belos settled on Ross Avenue, Dallas's most fashionable street, and by the 1890s raised this Classical Revival residence echoing the family's North Carolina roots. The family lived here until 1922, after which the house served for decades as a funeral home.

Garland, TX

The Bankhead Highway—America's second transcontinental east-west route, born of the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act—ran through Garland and fueled a boom of roadside businesses. A.J. Head opened this filling station in 1947, and over the years it housed a tire shop, auto repair, welding, a bail bond office, and a discount store to serve highway travelers. Designed by Robert Otis Lagrone in the Streamline Moderne style, its curved brick wall and metal canopy captured the sleek, horizontal look popular in the 1930s and 1940s.

Leander, TX

About 1866, in the years just after the Civil War, farmer and veteran Alpheus S. Mason raised this double-galleried home along Bagdad Road, a military and commercial artery threading through central Texas. Mason threw himself into the life of the region—church, business, Masonic lodge, and politics—helping the town of Bagdad grow before it faded into a ghost town and nearby Leander rose in its place. The Victorian-trimmed porch still speaks of a prosperous frontier farmer putting down roots on a well-traveled road.

Amarillo, TX

When locomotive No. 5000 entered Santa Fe service in December 1930, the railroad had long since stopped naming engines for people—but an early engineer nicknamed it "Madam Queen" after a character on the radio hit "Amos and Andy," and it stuck. Built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works as a powerful pilot model, the great steam engine ran more than 1.75 million miles before diesels made it obsolete. Retired in 1953, the "Queen" was presented to the City of Amarillo in 1957.

College Station, TX

When Texas chartered an independent district around the A&M College campus in 1909, there were too few students to fill a school — so college leaders persuaded three neighboring districts to send their children to a new campus school that opened in 1920 with 304 pupils. Bankrolled by the college with buildings, salaries, and equipment, it became a model rural school before overcrowding forced its move off campus in 1940, giving rise to the College Station school district.

Houston County, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1814, Aaron Lowery lived in Tennessee and Louisiana before entering Texas in 1835, where he promptly joined the Texian Army — enlisting in Capt. George English's company at the same time as Sam Houston. He saw action in the Battle of Bexar during the Texas Revolution. He later married Louisa English, moved to Trinity County around 1851, and raised ten children.

Sherman, TX

Aaron Mangum came to Texas from South Carolina with a Georgia battalion in 1835 and served under Colonel James Fannin at Goliad during the Texas Revolution. Falling ill on an expeditionary mission, he was away from the garrison and so survived the massacre of Fannin's men in 1836. He later married Leonora Snively and settled in Grayson County; the town of Mangum, Oklahoma, carries his name.

Abbott, TX

In 1881 the Missouri, Kansas & Texas (Katy) Railroad laid a line through a new Hill County town named for Joseph Abbott, a local lawyer and U.S. congressman. Merchant Winston Treadwell soon opened a general store, and within a decade Abbott boasted a school, a post office, several businesses, and three churches. Devastating fires near the turn of the century failed to break the town, whose residents simply rebuilt.

Abbott, TX

Founded in 1876 as the Liberty Grove Baptist Church by thirteen members meeting in a country schoolhouse, this congregation renamed itself for the town of Abbott and moved there in the 1880s. For its first years the flock worshipped in the local Methodist church until it raised its own sanctuary in 1892. Growing steadily, it expanded its buildings and sustained active outreach and missionary work for well over a century.

Hillsboro, TX

Jo Abbott — a county and district judge, congressman, and local banker — and his wife Rowena bought this Hillsboro property in 1883. The T-plan house standing here was conveyed in 1899 to their banker son James and his wife Nancy at the birth of their first child. Additions in 1907 and 1918 gave the home its transitional classical-bungalow character.

Abbott, TX

Public schooling in Abbott began in 1885 with a one-story frame schoolhouse crowding 140 pupils and three teachers on the east side of town. A two-story brick building rose on this site in 1911 and served for 55 years, earning full accreditation around 1934 and adding a vocational agriculture program in 1939. As surrounding districts consolidated, the Abbott schools remained a central force in the town's growth.

Corrigan, TX

This pioneer graveyard served the vanished community of Asia, which grew up along Paces Creek after Samuel Crissman received a land headright in 1835. Settlers like the Meadows, Snell, and Standley families made it home, and James Standley's blacksmith and cabinet shops formed its nucleus. When the Trinity and Sabine Railway and a Houston sawmill arrived in the mid-1880s, loggers and mill workers poured in — until the timber was cut out before 1910 and the town faded away. Descendants restored the overgrown burial ground in the 1990s.

Abbott, TX

The first Methodist service in Abbott was held in 1883 by the Rev. G.W. Swofford, and a congregation quickly formed as a stop on the Hillsboro circuit. By 1886 it counted more than 600 members, and the current sanctuary was completed in 1899, succeeding the first frame chapel of 1884. Though the town and congregation both thinned after the 1940s, the church still carries deep ties to Abbott's early heritage.

Hillsboro, TX

Along Hackberry Creek in early Hillsboro grew a shady stand of pecan, hackberry, and elm that townspeople claimed for picnics, concerts, ball games, and reunions. They named it for Joseph "Jo" Abbott (1840–1908) — a nearby resident and a distinguished lawyer, judge, Texas legislator, and U.S. Congressman who often spoke there at anti-prohibition rallies. After his death, banker George Carmichael bought the Abbott home and helped turn the grove into a municipal park, a role it still fills today.

Cooper, TX

Abel Morgan came to Texas as the revolution was igniting, arriving at Bexar in late 1835 and serving under Colonel Fannin's command. He survived the 1836 Goliad Massacre—the mass execution of surrendered Texian prisoners on Santa Anna's orders—spared, in his own words, "for a nurse." His marker, bearing the Star and Wreath, commemorates one of the few men who lived through one of the darkest days of the Texas Revolution.

Victoria, TX

Abel Seymour Cunningham belonged to the generation of settlers who turned Texas from a Mexican province into an independent republic. He took up arms in the 1836 Texas War for Independence, then served the young Republic of Texas as a ranger guarding its raw frontier and as a congressman helping build its government. The State of Texas honored his service with this marker in 1962.

Pittsburg, TX

David Harper Abernathy came to Pittsburg as a boy in 1864 and grew into one of the town's leading merchants and Methodist churchmen, running the family dry goods business he learned in Nashville. In 1896 builder George Barber raised this two-story Queen Anne home for the family, with its wraparound porch, spindle work, and front gable. Much of the interior survives, a physical record of a family that shaped the town for a century.

Ballinger, TX

Welsh-born railroad builder Morgan Jones and his nephews Morgan C. and Percy Jones laid the Abilene and Southern line between Abilene and Ballinger in 1909, and this stone depot rose soon after the first train arrived that September. Its design — with distinctive octagonal twin towers — was unusually elaborate for a depot of the era. The line carried a brisk passenger and freight trade until passenger service ended in 1941 and freight in 1966.

Abilene, TX

Founded in 1906 by preacher-educator A. B. Barret, this West Texas school opened as Childers Classical Institute, named for Colonel J. W. Childers, who donated his homesite for a campus. Under Jesse P. Sewell's twelve-year presidency beginning in 1912 the institution expanded, becoming Abilene Christian College in 1920 and moving to new grounds in 1929. It took its present name in 1976.

Abilene, TX

Abilene Municipal Cemetery grew from five separate burial grounds, the oldest documented grave being that of Florence Phillips, laid to rest in the Masonic section in 1881 as the town was taking shape. Among those interred are Mary Houston Morrow, an Abilene postmistress and daughter of Sam Houston; C.W. Merchant, who donated land and helped found the town; Dr. W.H. Butler, an African American physician; and suffragist Jewel Scarborough. The city gradually took charge of the Masonic, Odd Fellows, and Cedar Hill grounds, which together hold more than 26,000 people.

Abilene, TX

Abilene's first public school for African American children opened in 1890 as a one-room building with a single teacher and twenty-two students. Over the decades it grew and moved repeatedly—holding its first graduation, of one student, at Macedonia Baptist Church in 1923 and rising to a ten-room brick campus by 1936. Renamed for historian Carter G. Woodson in 1951, the school served until 1968, when integration finally came to the Abilene district.

Abilene, TX

Abilene's oldest business institution began just three months after the town was founded, when C. E. Gilbert printed its first newspaper on June 17, 1881. When fire soon destroyed his office, Gilbert rode the train to Baird, borrowed a press, and rushed out an 'extra' about the blaze—one of many colorful episodes, including a duel between rival editors that both survived. Through mergers the paper became the Reporter-News, and publisher Marshall Hanks later joined Houston Harte to form the national Harte-Hanks communications firm.

Abilene, TX

Authorized by the Texas Legislature in 1899 and opened in 1904, this Abilene institution began as a center devoted to the study and treatment of epilepsy. Largely self-sufficient, it raised its own crops and livestock on surrounding land, and under long-serving superintendent Dr. T. B. Bass it became a site of notable medical research. By the mid-twentieth century it had evolved into a residential facility caring for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Abiliene, TX

Founded in 1928, the Abilene Woman's Club met in a series of homes before commissioning noted architect David S. Castle to design a purpose-built clubhouse on what was then the town's edge. Completed in 1955, its post-World War II Colonial Revival design and its great hall drew civic and cultural groups and helped spur the growth of south Abilene.

Terrell, TX

Settled in 1853 by James and Eliza Ables on a Republic-era land grant, this cluster of natural springs in northeast Kaufman County grew into a quiet Methodist farming community. In 1878 the Ables family deeded nearly nine acres for a church, a camp-meeting tabernacle, a public school, and this cemetery, whose oldest marked grave dates to 1880. Church of Christ and Baptist fellowships and a Woodmen of the World lodge followed, but Ables Springs never became a commercial hub—it endured as a rural settlement whose school served the area until consolidation.

Austin, TX

Arriving in the raw new capital of Austin in 1839, North Carolina native Abner Cook brought skills in design and building that earned him the title of master builder. Working as architect, engineer, and contractor, he raised some of the finest Greek Revival buildings in Texas, including the Governor's Mansion and the Neill-Cochran House. A founding member of Austin's First Presbyterian Church, he died in 1884 soon after completing the University of Texas's Old Main.

Dallas, TX

This half-acre family burial ground holds twenty-one graves and six generations of the Carver family. The patriarch, Abraham Carver (1806–1883), came to Texas in 1844 with his brothers Solomon and Daniel, and the cemetery sits on part of his original 320-acre land grant. Burials continued into the 20th century, the last in 1946.

Damon, TX

Abraham Darst came to Mexican Texas from Missouri in 1827 as one of Stephen F. Austin's colonists, part of the first wave of Anglo-American settlement on the Brazos. He took up arms in the 1832 Battle of Velasco, an early clash with Mexican authority, and though he died in 1833, five of his sons served in the Army of Texas during the revolution of 1836.

Victoria, TX

Built before the Civil War with eight fireplaces and ten rooms, this Victoria home was owned from 1861 to 1881 by banker-merchant Abraham Levi, known for his charitable giving. In 1865 the U.S. Army of Occupation took it over as a Reconstruction headquarters, with a prison in the rear. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Tomball, TX

Abraham Roberts (1773–1850), a Georgia native, settled on Spring Creek about 1829 at a crossroads in the thinly settled community of New Kentucky. On April 16, 1836, Sam Houston's retreating army paused here, uncertain whether their general would keep withdrawing east. When soldiers asked Roberts—standing at his gate—the way to Harrisburg, he pointed southeast, a great shout went up, and Houston took that road, leading to the decisive victory at San Jacinto five days later.

Orangefield, TX

A Louisiana native, Abraham Winfree brought his family to the Texas frontier in the early 1830s, settling on Cow Bayou near the old Opelousas Trail while Texas was still winning its independence. He made his living as rancher, cattle drover, shingle maker, and logger, and in 1836 his home hosted the election of a delegate to the Congress of the young Republic of Texas. The community that grew up around him still bears his name, though he asked to be buried without a stone in an unmarked grave.

Columbus, TX

Abram Alley came from Missouri in the 1820s to join his brothers among the first colonists of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, settling near the Colorado River. During the Texas war for independence he helped settlers flee the advancing army in the panicked Runaway Scrape, and his own home was burned. He returned late in 1836 to build this oak-log cabin, where he and his wife raised five children and welcomed travelers.

Groesbeck, TX

Born in 1817, Abram Anglin served as an early Ranger during the Texas War for Independence, riding with Captain Seale's company in 1835–36 under authority of the provisional Council of Texas. He lived on into the frontier era of the Republic and statehood, dying in 1875. His grave marker, crowned with the star and wreath, commemorates the volunteer soldiers who fought to sever Texas from Mexico.

Bastrop, TX

Abram Wiley Hill served as a soldier in the Texas War for Independence in 1836 and stood among the victors at San Jacinto, where Sam Houston's army routed Santa Anna and secured the Republic. The State of Texas placed this 'Star and Wreath' marker in 1962 to commemorate his service.

Southlake, TX

When Absalom H. Chivers left Mississippi for the Texas frontier around 1852, he brought the plantation economy with him, working a farm along Dove Creek with five enslaved people until his death in 1856. His grave is believed to be the first in this family burial ground, formally set aside as a cemetery in 1889 by his widow Eleanor. The native sandstone cairns marking the graves preserve the improvised burial customs of pioneer North Texas.

Orange, TX

Born in Louisiana in 1812, Absalom Jett came to Texas as a boy in 1824, during the Mexican colonial era, and grew up to serve in the Army of Texas during the 1836 revolution under Captain Benjamin J. Harper. He lived on in the young republic and state until his death in 1878. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1957.

Hankamer, TX

When the Abshier and Weed families came from Louisiana in 1843 to farm this corner of Liberty County, they could not have known the family plot begun with Lucinda Abshier Higginbotham's burial in 1852 would grow into a community graveyard spanning generations. Those laid to rest here served in nearly every American conflict from the War of 1812 through Korea, and their graves include striking tree-trunk monuments of the Woodmen of the World. A cemetery association has tended the grounds since 1896.

Lavon, TX

John Abston, a Virginia-born veteran of the American Revolution, followed his family west across a lifetime — to Missouri in the 1830s and finally to Collin County, Texas, in 1853, when he was already past ninety. After his son Jesse died, the family set aside a small burial ground here, and Abston's own interment in 1856 was the first. By family tradition, Abston's daughter-in-law Sarah later gave a house and land to a former slave, Elias Bellew, in exchange for tending the graves — giving the site its other name, the Old Bellew Cemetery.

Borger, TX

Asa P. "Ace" Borger, a Missouri-born townsite promoter, platted this Panhandle boomtown in 1926 and worked to tame a rowdy oil camp into a lasting community. In 1928–29 he and his wife Elizabeth built this two-story house—the first brick residence in Borger. It stayed in the family for three generations. Ace earned a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark designation in 1976.

San Antonio, TX

An acequia is a communal gravity-fed irrigation ditch, a system Spanish colonists brought to Texas and the greater Southwest and adapted from centuries of Iberian and North African practice. San Antonio's Spanish missions, founded in the early 1700s, depended on a network of these ditches — the acequias madre and their branches — to water fields and sustain settlement in the semi-arid landscape. The "acequia de arriba," or upper ditch, was one strand of that lifeline, and the community associations that governed water-sharing were among the region's earliest civic institutions.

San Antonio, TX

When the Spanish founded San Antonio in 1718, they and the mission Indians in their charge began digging a network of acequias—hand-dug irrigation ditches lined with dressed limestone—to carry river water to the fields. This one, the Acequia Madre, served the fields of Mission San Antonio de Valero, better known as the Alamo, making irrigation the lifeblood of the growing mission and town. The ditch became part of the modern waterworks after 1877, and this section was restored in 1968.

Llano, TX

Raised in 1892 by Llano stonemason John Goodman, this brick commercial row housed a parade of merchants — milliners, dry goods dealers, and clothiers — before the Acme Dry Goods Company bought it in 1919 and gave it its lasting name. Its round-arch transoms, keystones, and paired storefront windows are hallmarks of turn-of-the-century Main Street commerce. It became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1997.

Stephenville vicinity, TX

According to oral tradition, a traveler named John Wright died here around 1857-58 on his way west, and landowner Clayborn Oxford donated ground for his burial. The earliest marked grave is that of Oxford's infant grandson William, buried in 1859, and the family deeded the graveyard to Erath County in 1888 for the growing community, which lent it the name Acrea. Descendants of the pioneer families still tend it today.

Houston, TX

Beginning in 1910, developer Alfred A. Wright platted the subdivisions that became Acres Homes, drawing Black families with cheap land, low taxes, and freedom from building restrictions. Lacking city utilities, the community built itself — churches, schools, Masonic halls, businesses, and even the South's first Black-owned bus line. By the 1950s it was celebrated as one of the largest all-Black communities in the United States, retaining its identity even after Houston annexed it in the 1960s and 70s.

Acton, TX

In 1855, a preacher known as "Fighting Joe" Robinson gathered about twenty charter members to organize a Baptist congregation on the North Texas frontier at Acton. He was succeeded by the Rev. James Halford, a son-in-law of frontiersman David Crockett, whose family had settled nearby. For years the Baptists shared a communal building called the Long House before raising their own sanctuary in 1894, a structure still in use today.

Acton, TX

Acton Cemetery holds the grave of Elizabeth Patton Crockett (1788–1860), widow of Alamo hero David Crockett, along with two of his children; a monument and statue were raised in her memory in 1911. The surrounding grounds form the smallest state park in Texas. The community — first called Comanche Peak — was renamed Acton in 1855 by merchant C. P. Hollis, and pioneers set aside this plot as a burial ground after building a shared church and school.

Acton, TX

The settlement once called Comanche Peak Post Office took shape in the early 1850s, and its Methodists first worshipped in a shared union church and the local Masonic hall before establishing themselves on their own. In 1874 the trustees bought land here for church, school, and burials, raised their first sanctuary in 1899, and grew steadily—especially after the nearby de Cordova Bend Reservoir revived the area in the 1960s. From a handful of frontier worshippers the congregation swelled into the hundreds by the 1990s.

Acton, TX

The oldest community in present-day Hood County, Acton was settled in the 1850s and first called "Comanche Peak" when its post office opened in 1856. Renamed Acton by 1868, the town centered on this public square, donated by pioneer merchant Clarence P. Hollis, which once buzzed with commerce before fires and decline set in. The square was resurveyed and restored in 1974 as the heart of the rural community.

Sylvester vicinity, TX

Discovered in 1969 near the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, the Adair-Steadman Site preserves traces of some of the earliest people to live in Texas. Between about nine and eleven thousand years ago, hunters of the Folsom culture made this a large base camp, drawn by fresh water and a nearby source of toolmaking stone. Excavations have recovered fluted-point fragments, preforms, channel flakes, scrapers, and other stone tools that speak to their daily craft.

Spring Branch, TX

German native Adam Becker came to Texas in 1845 to join Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels and the Adelsverein colonization effort, helping build Fredericksburg before establishing his own homestead here by 1852. He raised cattle and built a house of locally quarried stone and hand-hewn cypress cut from the nearby Guadalupe River. Becker became a U.S. citizen in 1860 and, at his death in 1901, was buried in the cemetery on his own land.

Moscow, TX

This burial ground, now named for a former county commissioner, began as a family graveyard for the Lotts, who moved from Mississippi to the Republic of Texas in 1843. Their son Calvin farmed the land and served as a Confederate soldier and in the Texas State Troops during the Civil War; his 1884 grave is the oldest marked burial, though earlier unmarked graves are believed to lie here. Known over the years by several names, the cemetery preserves the memory of Polk County's pioneer families.

Logan, TX

After the Civil War, Lorenzo H. Adams (1849–1912) came from Arkansas to this corner of Panola County, serving over the years as constable, justice of the peace, and deputy sheriff. When his young daughter Georgia Anne died in 1884, Adams donated an acre around her grave as a public cemetery. Its stones—Baker, Goodwin, Kilburn, McNeese and others—record pioneer families and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Marshall, TX

Attorney and plantation owner Chesley Meredith Adams bought this Harrison County land in the 1850s and raised a log house on it. After his death, his widow Martha and her second husband, the Rev. J. F. Riggs, replaced the cabin with this frame residence in 1880, and here Adams's son — a lawyer and educator — raised eight children. The home traces three generations of one family's life across the antebellum, wartime, and Gilded Age South.

Brownwood, TX

Around 1876, rancher and former Texas Ranger George H. Adams—who had his cattle brand carved into the front step—built this sandstone house from local Willis Creek stone, laid up by English-born mason William Frederick Morton. The Shaw family bought it in 1908, and their descendants restored and enlarged it after 1945.

Hearne, TX

Erected in 1896 by Horatio "Rashe" Adams, a Hearne citizen who worked as a public relations man in Washington, D.C., this Victorian house passed through a succession of owners over the following decades. Contractor A. A. White built it complete with a detached kitchen and a backyard artesian well that once supplied its water. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Austin, TX

Augusta Adams was a German widow who immigrated to Texas and bought this Austin lot in 1857, part of a wave of German settlers reshaping central Texas in the mid-19th century. The modest buff-brick house here rose around 1868, and through her daughters' marriages it passed into the Ziller family, descendants of one of Austin's earliest settlers. The home stayed in the family until 1955 and was rescued from demolition in the 1990s.

Adamsville, TX

Settlement of this Lampasas County community began just before the county organized in 1856, and it grew around Oliver Hazzard Perry Townsen's flour mill on the Lampasas River. By the 1880s the crossroads had steam mills, churches, a school, and a general store whose partners, John T. Adams and Rev. McCall Smith, gave rise to the platted town of Adamsville in 1908. Over the following century it evolved from a frontier milling settlement into a close-knit rural community of fiddling jams and community barbecues.

Thorp Springs, TX

In 1873, J. A. Clark and his sons Addison and Randolph opened a private school at Thorp Springs, chartering it as Add-Ran Christian College and blending their sons' names into its title. The college moved to Waco in 1895 and was reestablished at Fort Worth in 1909, where it grew into Texas Christian University. Its humble beginnings in a small Hood County community launched one of the state's major universities.

Austin, TX

Built in 1935 and later owned by University of Texas electrician Charles Addcox and his wife Addie Lee, this Austin house earned the nickname the “Red Rock House on the Corner” for its exuberant mix of stone and brick. Its walls are studded with petrified wood, limestone, honeycomb and volcanic rock, quartz crystal, fossilized shells and flint — a one-of-a-kind display of vernacular craftsmanship wrapped by an arched brick porch.

Graham, TX

Born in Indiana in 1843, Agnes Mary "Addie" Kinter married Edwin Smith Graham, who with his brother founded this North Texas town in 1872. After her husband's death, Addie returned to Graham and poured her fortune into it — endowing schools, building a home for the aged poor, and in 1910 funding the water-filtering plant that stood on this spot for 75 years. Her giving shaped the town's civic life for decades after her death in 1929.