Historic Markers in Texas

Commerce, TX

Two early congregations, Lebanon and Mt. Zion, served the first settlers around Commerce before local Methodists began gathering in a schoolhouse on Pecan Street. In 1881, four years before the town was incorporated, they joined the Lebanon fellowship in a Union Church, then built their own sanctuary in 1890, followed by larger buildings in 1907 and 1968. For more than a century the church has been a force in the town's growth.

Valera, TX

In 1936 four rural communities—Valera, Bowen, White Chapel and New Central—pooled their resources to build a consolidated high school, naming it Centennial to mark Texas's hundredth year of independence. After fire destroyed the first frame building in 1940, WPA grants funded a new schoolhouse, gymnasium and teacherage, and successive consolidations carried the campus through service as an elementary school before it finally became a community recreation lodge.

Twitty, TX

In 1906, D. M. Pollard bought Panhandle land and lived in a dugout, and near his home the Center School opened in 1909, doubling as a place of worship. The Center Cemetery was dedicated just to the west, its oldest marked grave dating to March 1909, with 34 marked graves and signs of many unmarked ones. Among those interred are a Civil War veteran and a World War II veteran, and Pollard's descendants still own the surrounding land.

Star, TX

As settlers pushed into the rolling country of central Texas after the Civil War, a former blacksmith and Texas Revolution veteran, Noah Turner Byars, gathered a congregation here in 1875 and helped knit it into a new association of frontier Baptist churches. Known first for nearby Bennett Creek, it took the Center City name in a 1901 deed, held summer revivals under a brush arbor into the 1940s, and rebuilt after a 1946 windstorm flattened the frame sanctuary. For generations it doubled as a shared community space and a training ground for deacons and ministers who went on to larger pulpits.

Star, TX

The Center City Cemetery began in 1874 with the burials of a settler's adult and infant daughters, a poignant marker of how fragile frontier life could be in the ranching country of central Texas. In 1905 a local judge bought the ground to serve as a community graveyard, and by the mid-20th century neighbors had organized a committee and endowed a maintenance fund to keep it up. More than 500 graves here hold many of the area's earliest settlers.

Star, TX

Settled in 1854 by the Jenkins and Morris families, this Mills County community was first called "Hughes Store" for the couple who opened a shop here in the 1870s. Hopeful founders platted a townsite in 1876 and dreamed of the railroad and the county seat, gathering beneath an ancient live oak long held by tradition to mark the geographic center of Texas. Renamed Center City, the town bustled with stores until the railroad passed it by in 1885; its post office lingered only until 1920.

Star, TX

In the young settlement of Center City—first known as Hughes Store—a circuit-riding preacher brought Methodism to the area in the early 1870s, and charter members organized a church in 1878. The congregation first gathered in the Masonic lodge before building its own home in 1901, then a new building in 1952. Through mission work and youth ministry, it has remained a spiritual anchor of this small central Texas community.

Cookville, TX

First known as the Yancey Cemetery, this burial ground began in the mid-1860s on land donated by David Yancey, Sr., whose party had traveled from Tennessee to Texas—an orphaned infant from that group being the first laid to rest here. Many of the earliest graves are marked only with rough fieldstones. Renamed Center Grove in 1900 for the nearby Church of Christ, it holds veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Houston County, TX

The scattered families of communities like Corinth, Old Zion, and Randolph built their lives around farming and church, worshiping together at a Methodist building in Corinth that served as both church and school until fire took it in 1881. In 1883 George W. and Loucetta Julian donated three acres here for a new church, and because of its central location it took the name Center Hill. A community school met in the building until it merged into the Kennard district in 1935, but area families still tend the old Corinth cemetery.

Lovelady, TX

The Ellis family came from Mississippi to Texas in 1839, part of the wave of southern settlers pushing into the region in the years before statehood. Charles McHenry Ellis raised a large family here, and in 1876 his son deeded land, including the family burial ground, for use as a church and cemetery. Among its early graves is that of Elizabeth Lovelady Ellis, alongside unmarked graves believed to be those of enslaved people and, later, military veterans.

Cotton Center, TX

West of Hale Center, the Center Plains community grew up around a cemetery and schoolhouse on land donated by homesteader William S. Bolivar in 1890, with a post office opening in 1902. When a proposed railroad bypassed the area in 1907 and the line was abandoned by 1910, the nearby boomtown of Norfleet collapsed and the school moved back. Today only the cemetery remains of what was once the hub of a large rural district.

Center Point, TX

The land around Center Point drew its first settlers in the 1850s, including Dr. Charles Ganahl, who named the early community Zanzenberg after his Austrian hometown before it became Center Point in 1872. That same year land was set aside here for a church and cemetery, which grew over the decades to more than five acres and some 1,452 graves. Among the pioneers and community leaders buried here rest 32 Texas Rangers, an unusually dense gathering of the frontier lawmen.

Saint Jo, TX

Begun in the late 1800s as Fairview Graveyard on a hilltop that also held a Baptist church and school, this cemetery served as a gathering place for the surrounding community. The Armstrong and Dean families deeded the land in 1893, though the earliest marked grave—that of three-year-old Xanthippa Rountree—dates to 1875, and many unmarked graves may be older still. Pioneer settlers, young children, and Civil War veterans rest here together.

Center Point, TX

Founded in 1879 by traveling Kentucky minister Green L. Surber, this Disciples of Christ congregation grew alongside the frontier settlement of Center Point during a broader campaign to strengthen faith across a growing Texas. After the first building burned in 1888, the community rebuilt in 1892 with materials hauled from San Antonio and Kerrville. In the 1920s its members helped establish the Guadalupe River retreat known as Camp Christian, later shared with a Jewish youth camp and other groups.

Greenville, TX

Born amid the violence and upheaval of Reconstruction, Center Point Christian Church grew from the survival of formerly enslaved families who gathered in the thickets of Hunt County on land no one else wanted. Charlie Haley led early religious meetings until, in 1879, he and the ordained elder Andrew Jackson Hurdle organized a congregation in the middle of those thickets, with Hurdle as its first minister. The church became a pillar of its freedom colony — championing education, jobs, and homes, and even helping staff a Black theological and industrial college — and made a point of building its meeting houses debt-free.

Pittsburg, TX

In 1865, newly freed African Americans founded Center Point, building it into a self-reliant community anchored by the Center Point Baptist Church (1873) and the Industrial Union (chartered 1889), a cooperative that helped members buy farms and run a brick kiln, sawmill, and cotton gin. Its school, led by Mr. and Mrs. L. B. Cash, became a notable vocational campus whose 14 acres of buildings were largely erected by the students themselves, complete with a cooperative boarding plan. The school consolidated with Pittsburg in 1950.

Center Point, TX

Schooling in the Center Point area began in shacks and homes in the 1870s, moving through an academy and a plank building before Dr. J. C. Nowlin donated land in 1884. In 1910 renowned San Antonio architect Alfred Giles designed a handsome two-story limestone schoolhouse, which opened its doors in 1911. Remarkably, students still learn in that same building more than a century later.

Pittsburg, TX

Center Point grew up as a Freedmen's community in the years just after emancipation, settled by the Willie Johnson family and other formerly enslaved people around 1865–70. In 1899 G. W. Goulsby opened its first school in a single room, and over the following decades it expanded—aided by the Julius Rosenwald Fund—into a full campus with a library, dormitories, cafeteria, and gymnasium, where students ran a working farm and cannery. The school served the community until it closed in 1952.

Center Point, TX

Methodism reached this Hill Country spot before the town did: in 1852 Mrs. Henrietta Rees arrived from Tennessee and arranged for circuit riders to preach in the area. A congregation bought land in 1872, built an early church house around 1876, and after a storm toppled one building under construction, the men of the congregation completed the present structure in 1911. The church's story runs parallel to the founding of Center Point itself.

Burkburnett, TX

In 1924 fourteen people met at Bradley's Corner Community Center to organize a missionary Baptist church, soon relocating to the nearby oil boomtown of Thrift and building with donated lumber. As members moved into Burkburnett, the congregation carried its building into town in 1952 and, after further growth, renamed itself Central Baptist Church in 1961 to reflect its new role as a city church. It continues to serve the Burkburnett community.

Livingston, TX

The Baptists of Livingston founded Ariel Baptist Church around 1852, and the congregation has carried several names since — Livingston Baptist after the Civil War, and Central Baptist from 1917. In 1887 two women, Susan Hunt and Patience Watts, helped buy the church its first lot, and its first permanent building rose the next year. Across the decades the church built ministries in missions, education, publishing, and eventually radio and television.

Groves, TX

Central Baptist Church was organized in 1912 when fifteen members left Port Arthur's First Baptist Church, meeting first in the Singleton home and soon building a wood-frame church. Over the following century it moved and grew through the Gulf Coast boom region, pioneering the area's first Vacation Bible School in 1925, broadcasting services on radio and television, and opening its doors to volunteers after Hurricanes Rita and Ike.

Carthage, TX

Central Baptist Church was organized with seventeen members on September 26, 1901, under the Rev. H. E. Harris, drawing on founding families like the Harrises, Butlers, and Comers. The young congregation quickly formed a Sunday school and Ladies Aid Society, worshiped in rented rooms until its first sanctuary opened in 1911, and grew through the mid-century to build ever-larger buildings. Over time it launched a mission that became Southside Baptist Church and sustained programs of education, music, and outreach.

Jacksonville, TX

In 1906, twenty-two charter members met at the Rev. E.G. Musgrove's home to organize Central Baptist Church, named for its location at the heart of Jacksonville. A revival led by the famed preacher George W. Truett quickly swelled its ranks, and though fire gutted its new building in 1919, members voted to rebuild without outside aid and did so within five years. Over the following decades the congregation added educational space, sponsored mission churches and a Boy Scout troop, and eventually relocated in 2003.

San Antonio, TX

When San Antonio had no boys' school at all, Bishop Jean-Marie Odin recruited teachers from the Society of Mary in France, and on August 26, 1852, they opened a school in two rooms over a livery stable near San Fernando Cathedral. Relocated to a riverside campus as "St. Mary's Institute" in 1853, it finished the year with a hundred pupils of Anglo, French, German, and Mexican descent, day students and ranch-boy boarders alike. From that pioneer effort grew St. Mary's University, and in 1932 Central Catholic High School became the successor, now the oldest and largest private boys' school in Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Evangelist David Pennington organized this Disciples of Christ congregation in 1883 and built its first sanctuary here in 1884, just as the arrival of the railroad set San Antonio booming. The church grew with the city, helped found the Mexican Christian Institute to minister to refugees fleeing Mexico's revolution, and organized a Spanish-speaking Disciples congregation. A pioneer of religious broadcasting, it aired the city's first radio worship in 1924 and its first televised services in 1954.

Austin, TX

In 1847, only eight years after Austin was platted, ten members of the Disciples of Christ gathered to organize this congregation on the young Texas capital's frontier. By 1852 they were worshiping in a local schoolhouse, later building at Eighth and Colorado before moving to this site in 1929, and weathering a theological split in 1888 that left the church led by its laity until a pastor was appointed in 1896. As one of Austin's oldest congregations, Central Christian took its current name early in the 20th century and helped establish several other churches in the growing city.

Texarkana, TX

Organized in 1883 under the Rev. J. C. Mason, the Central Christian Church congregation raised this Tudor Gothic Revival sanctuary in 1932 under the supervision of architect and church member E. C. Seibert, who set the brick in a distinctive decorative pattern. Cast-stone details, pointed-arch windows, and a pointed-arch arcade linking sanctuary and education wing mark its careful design. It remains a landmark of Texarkana's ecclesiastical architecture.

Weatherford, TX

In 1894 sixty-five former members of Weatherford's First Christian Church broke away to found this Disciples of Christ congregation, dedicating a stone church near the courthouse square that May. It served for seventy years, and when a neighboring congregation disbanded in the 1950s, Central became the only Disciples of Christ church in Parker County. A new sanctuary followed in 1964, while the original building became a museum.

Sherman, TX

This Sherman congregation dates to the late 1850s, when pioneer minister Benjamin Franklin Hall arrived to preach and organize a church, gathering worshippers in a brush arbor and a Masonic-hall meeting house. A first sanctuary rose in 1875, and after acquiring a new site in 1895 the congregation built a larger church in 1905. It has served the people of Sherman for well over a century.

Nocona, TX

Built in 1894, six years after the Rev. M. F. Smith gathered the congregation, this sanctuary rose as one of the first Gothic Revival churches on the North Texas frontier. Its steeply pitched gables, pointed lancet windows, and fine interior woodwork brought a touch of old-world architecture to a young prairie town. The building earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1962.

Greenville, TX

Organized in 1879 as First Christian Church under an Alabama minister, this Disciples of Christ congregation built its present sanctuary in 1898–99 and took the name Central Christian Church. Costing $23,000, the robust Gothic Revival building — with its towers, art-glass windows, and ornate brickwork — is the oldest church structure still standing in Greenville and was carefully restored beginning in 1986.

Hillsboro, TX

Disciples of Christ in Hillsboro first gathered for worship in 1881 and formally chartered their fellowship in 1887 with 35 members, meeting in homes, the courthouse, and the schoolhouse before building a sanctuary. A fire destroyed that first structure in 1892, and the members rebuilt on this site. Long active in missions and benevolent work, the congregation counted missionaries Nona Boegman and the Rev. Allan Eubank among its members.

Winnsboro, TX

Organized in 1893 with twenty charter members, the Central Christian Church of Winnsboro built this sanctuary the following year as the Disciples of Christ movement spread across rural East Texas. A tornado toppled its original steeples in 1895, and a 1914 remodeling gave the building the prairie and classical revival lines it carries today. Its rolls long included many of the area's civic leaders.

Comanche, TX

The roots of this Comanche County congregation reach back to 1855, when Dr. G. W. Montgomery arrived from Mississippi and held frontier religious services in a log cabin that doubled as a church and school. The Central Christian Church itself was organized in 1894 by a visiting evangelist and 31 charter members, sharing services with the Presbyterians in the small-town Texas fashion of the Gilded Age. Its first pastor, Addison Clark, went on to lead Texas Christian University, and the congregation's women were the backbone that retired the debts on two church buildings.

Lampasas, TX

This Disciples of Christ congregation organized as early as 1879, with V. R. Stapp as its first full-time pastor. In 1905 it replaced an earlier sanctuary with the present building of hand-quarried native limestone, whose Romanesque-revival masonry and corner tower still stand out. The stonework reflects the craftsmanship of central Texas's limestone country.

Waco, TX

As early as 1867 a handful of Disciples of Christ believers in Waco met to worship in one another's homes, and in 1870 they formally organized a congregation under Rev. B.F. Hall — who came at the invitation of Phoebe Moore and Sallie Skidmore. Early converts were baptized in the Brazos River, a Sunday school followed in 1874, and a church building rose the next year.

Pollok, TX

Facing the chronic underfunding of tiny rural schoolhouses, five small East Texas schools around Pollok merged in 1929 to form the Central Consolidated Common School District. A new brick building opened that September to about 200 students, with nine teachers and eight in the first graduating class. Over decades it grew into the community's hub, adding gyms, a cafetorium, and technology and agricultural buildings before becoming an independent district in 1955.

Beaumont, TX

When Beaumont's fire department, organized in 1881, needed a proper home, the city built this station in 1927 on ground that had already held two earlier fire houses. The architects Livesay and Wiedemann dressed it in the Spanish Renaissance Revival fashion then in vogue, with ornamental red brickwork and geometric tile set beneath the eaves. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1983.

Dallas, TX

In 1844 the Congress of the Republic of Texas commissioned a road to link the U.S. military highway crossing on the Red River with the Trinity River in Dallas County. Surveyed by George W. Stell, the 130-mile Central National Road ran thirty feet wide through five counties and met the Preston Road, which Col. William G. Cooke's soldiers had opened in 1840 toward Austin. Together these routes joined north and south Texas, easing the way for pioneers to settle the young republic.

Ladonia, TX

Authorized in 1844, the Central National Road was meant to link the young Republic of Texas with the United States, running from Dallas toward a Red River crossing. Surveyor George W. Stell laid out a thirty-foot roadway cleared of stumps, and a small trace of it could still be seen near Lyday Cemetery in the 1970s.

Paris, TX

Created by the Republic of Texas in 1844, the Central National Road was conceived as a military highway to link with a U.S. Army road north of the Red River and to knit the young republic together. Major George W. Stell surveyed its 130-mile route from the mouth of Elm Fork on the Trinity to the Kiomatia Crossing, running through the newly founded town of Paris and past John Neely Bryan's cabin, the seed of Dallas. Builders earned 160-acre land grants for each mile cleared to a road 30 feet wide.

Rockwall, TX

Seeking to knit its scattered settlements together, the Republic of Texas Congress authorized the Central National Road in February 1844 — a 30-foot roadway to be cleared of stumps taller than a foot. Surveyor George W. Stell platted the route from the Trinity River near present-day Dallas northeast to the Red River, connecting a southern road toward Austin and San Antonio with a U.S. military highway running north to St. Louis. Pioneers soon settled along it, founding the towns of Heath and Rockwall.

Josephine, TX

In the mid-1840s the fledgling Republic of Texas, hungry to draw settlers into its northeastern reaches, chartered the Central National Road to link the Red River with the military roads along the Trinity. A five-man commission set the project in motion in 1844, and surveyor George Stell laid out a route from present-day Dallas northeast through seven counties, hugging open prairie and natural stream crossings. Though the road may never have been fully built and was soon eclipsed by the Preston Road and the railroads, it helped pry open a swath of frontier Texas to farms and towns.

Austin, TX

Central Presbyterian traces its origins to October 1839, when Austin's first Presbyterian service was held in Bullock's Hotel—the city itself barely a year old as the Republic's capital. Builder Abner Cook, an elder of that first church, helped secure this property after a post–Civil War split within Presbyterianism, and a sanctuary rose here in 1874. Its rolls read like an Austin who's-who, including Gov. Francis Lubbock, the writer O. Henry, and U.S. Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory, and its ministers helped found the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Paris, TX

Organized in 1844 during the Republic of Texas as the First Cumberland Presbyterian Church, this Paris congregation was founded by circuit-riding minister Samuel J. Corley. It grew through the long pastorate of Dr. Charles Manton, whose 1908 funeral drew flags to half-mast across town. After the devastating 1916 Paris fire destroyed its 1891 sanctuary, the congregation raised this Gothic Revival church in 1917, rich with stained glass and known for its music and education programs.

Waco, TX

Eighteen charter members founded this congregation as the Cumberland Presbyterian Church of Waco in 1869, with the Rev. William Dillard as its first pastor. The two-story brick sanctuary they built in 1873 doubled as Waco's public school, binding church and civic life together. Renamed Central Presbyterian Church in 1906, the congregation later worshiped beneath elaborate stained glass before moving to its present site in 2004.

Waxahachie, TX

Founded in 1853 as a Cumberland Presbyterian church with just twelve members, this Waxahachie congregation met in donated and shared spaces before building its own sanctuary at the close of the 1860s. In the 1890s its members helped bring Trinity University to town, a partnership that swelled the church's ranks. Though the university eventually decamped to San Antonio, the congregation kept growing through its programs and community service.

Gonzales, TX

In 1825, while Texas was still part of Mexico, the surveyor James Kerr laid out this town as the capital of Green DeWitt's empresario colony and named it for the governor of Coahuila and Texas. The plan set an inner town of forty-nine blocks, with this Central Square at its heart. It was one of the earliest Anglo-American colonial settlements in what would soon become a contested borderland.

Waco, TX

Authorized by the Waco Baptist Association in 1910 with broad ecumenical support, the Central Texas Baptist Sanitarium was planned for McArthur Hill, the county's highest point. World War I delayed construction, but the hospital opened in 1920 within reach of seven rail lines and quickly became a community institution — kept afloat by neighborhood fundraisers during the Depression. It trained cadet nurses in World War II, treated victims of the deadly 1953 Waco tornado, and grew into today's Hillcrest medical center.

Texarkana, TX

Joseph Cervini emigrated from Genoa, Italy, to Texarkana in 1884 and opened a restaurant, parlaying profits from downtown land into this family home in 1914. Blending bungalow and Prairie School influences, it features a two-story wraparound gallery, brick piers, heavy cast-stone balusters, and a low tile hipped roof, and it remained in the Cervini family until 1981.

Needville, TX

Frederick and Anna Cesinger, German settlers, brought their family to this corner of Fort Bend County in 1891 and soon deeded part of their land to their son George. When George's young sister Philipina died in 1894, he set aside an acre as a family burying ground, which grew to hold relatives and neighbors. For nearly two decades a German Evangelical church in Needville tended the plot before it returned to Cesinger heirs.

Ellinger, TX

In 1884 Czech immigrants in Ellinger formed a lodge of the C.S.P.S., a national fraternal society that offered mutual aid and benefits to newcomers from the Czech lands. In 1897 the lodge joined Texas counterparts to found the S.P.J.S.T., the Slavonic Benevolent Order of the State of Texas, and the community's Czech National Cemetery became the resting place of early settlers, including a charter member of the order's first lodge. The burial ground preserves the fraternal and communal bonds that sustained Czech families in a new land.

San Antonio, TX

George Chabot came from England to San Antonio as a commission merchant trading in cotton, wool, and hides, and in 1876 he and his wife Mary built this two-story stone house with its carved galleries. The family held the home until 1940, and among its members was grandson Frederick Charles Chabot, a noted historian of Texas and San Antonio. The house reflects the mercantile prosperity of a frontier city becoming a commercial hub.

Lometa, TX

Built in 1874 by Henry Chadwick and his son Milam, this sandstone sawmill, flour mill, and cotton gin harnessed an oak dam and a millrace chiseled into rock. Customers sometimes waited days for their turn, fishing the millrace to pass the time, and by about 1900 the scenic spot had grown into a resort with a hotel and dance platform — until a shift in the river's course forced its abandonment in 1915.

Grapeland, TX

Chaffin Cemetery was established in the 1840s, in the earliest years of Anglo settlement in Houston County, Texas. Burial grounds like this were often among the first permanent marks a frontier community left on the land. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002.

Paducah, TX

Born of the drought years of the early 1900s, rancher W.Q. Richards carved his land into small irrigated farms, and a settlement known as Richards or Dutch Colony sprang up. A post office named Chalk opened in 1906, and by the early 1920s some 54 farms, a cotton gin, churches, and a school made it the business center of southern Cottle County. World War II drew people away, and one by one the school, churches, gin, and post office closed, leaving Chalk a fading memory by the late 1980s.

Waco, TX

Founded in 1870 as White Rock Baptist Church by settlers who wanted a Baptist congregation nearby, this church was received into the Waco Baptist Association in 1871 and worshipped at the Union Grove School until it built its own home in 1878. A move to dissolve in 1907 was rescinded the next year, and the congregation carried its old building's materials to a new home at Chalk Bluff. That structure burned in 1934 and was rebuilt, and the church still serves the Waco area today.

Uvalde, TX

On May 29, 1861, two of southwest Texas's most noted frontiersmen were ambushed here by a band of some twenty Native warriors. Henry Robinson, a tall, red-bearded man so well known that his likeness had been painted on a rock near the Llano River, was traveling to Camp Wood with his companion Henry Adams when the attack came. Both men were killed and scalped, after which the raiders struck Robinson's home—only to be driven off by his family.

Riverside, TX

Founded in the 1870s on land owned by Lacy Harrington and named for the area's chalky geology, this graveyard's earliest documented burial is that of Civil War veteran Barney Carroll, who died in 1880. For more than a century it has served the Kittrell community, which once supported a post office, school, church, blacksmith, general store, cotton gin, and grist mill. A cemetery association formed in 1971 continues to tend the historic grounds.