Historic Markers in Texas

Chalk Hill, TX

Worship at Chalk Hill began about 1917 in the local schoolhouse, and by 1921 the community had built its own church with materials bought through donations from Chalk Hill's citizens. In 1925 the women of the community sold baked goods and quilts to buy a piano, and over the years the building has hosted Baptist, Apostolic, Methodist, and Presbyterian worshipers alike.

Chalk Mountain, TX

Chalk Mountain began as a trading center before the Civil War, and its cemetery — the community's only burial ground — holds a marked grave dating to 1874, with unmarked plots hinting at earlier use. Confederate veteran Hiram Berry Rogers deeded the ground to the county in 1915, and more than 350 people rest here, among them veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and Korea. A cemetery association has cared for the site since 1959.

Stephenville, TX

Fourteen charter members organized the Chalk Mountain Masonic Lodge in December 1904, and by 1908 a member had built a two-story frame building whose ground floor held a grocery store and whose upper floor hosted lodge meetings—held, by tradition, on the Saturday on or after each full moon. The store closed in the 1930s, but Masons continued to meet upstairs until 1989, when the historic second story was lifted and moved a quarter-mile to a new site. The lodge still gathers there today.

Hughes Springs, TX

In 1839 brothers Reece and Robert Hughes, hunting for rumored pirate gold, instead found mineral springs whose iron salts gave them the name 'chalybeate.' Reece Hughes, a planter who later built an iron foundry, started the first town of Hughes Springs at the site in 1847. The springs and the early iron works anchored settlement in this corner of East Texas.

Winnsboro, TX

Originally called Musgrove Springs for the settler who owned the land, these waters were renamed Chalybeate Springs for their heavy iron content and gave rise to a thriving 19th-century resort. After a school was built in 1881, the village added churches, stores, and a post office, and in the 1880s Walker Fore opened a two-story hotel and spa. The hotel closed in 1895, the community faded, and its school shut in the 1950s.

Kingsville, TX

At the turn of the 20th century, King Ranch owner Henrietta King and neighboring ranchers backed the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway to move cattle to market, and the new railroad town of Kingsville rose around its headquarters. In 1908 a cemetery association bought forty acres and opened Chamberlain Cemetery the next year, naming it for Henrietta's father, pioneer minister Hiram Chamberlain. It became the resting place of Henrietta and Captain King, railroad visionary Uriah Lott, and other builders of South Texas.

Anahuac, TX

Chambers County was carved from Jefferson and Liberty counties and organized in 1858, taking its name from General Thomas Jefferson Chambers (1802-1865), the sole superior judge of Texas before the revolution and later a delegate to the 1861 Secession Convention. Its first county seat was Wallisville, and since 1908 the seat has been at Anahuac, near the mouth of the Trinity River on Galveston Bay.

Anahuac, TX

Chambers County, named for Texas pioneer Major General Thomas Jefferson Chambers, was organized in 1858 with its seat at Wallisville. In 1908, after rice canals and wandering hogs helped tip an election, Anahuac won the county seat; its 1912 Renaissance Revival courthouse burned in 1935. The current three-story limestone building, blending Art Deco and Moderne styles, rose in 1937 with funding from the New Deal's Public Works Administration and remains little changed today.

Anahuac, TX

A 1955 Farm Bureau picnic at Fort Anahuac Park brought together families from across a Chambers County long divided by the Trinity River, sparking a sense of countywide unity. Civic and youth leaders channeled that goodwill into an annual noncommercial youth show, first held in 1956 to showcase the talents and skills of area young people. Since 1968 the Chambers County Youth Project Show has been held at this site, donated with the cooperation of the White family, and has grown into a major yearly event.

Marathon, TX

The Chambers Hotel began as an adobe building raised in 1891 in the desert railroad town of Marathon, first run by Mrs. Mary Collins. In 1905 "Gran" Chambers bought it, enlarged it, and framed a wooden structure over the thick original walls, operating it as a hotel until 1930. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Forreston, TX

This creek carries the name of Thomas Jefferson Chambers, who in 1834 received the first land grant within present-day Ellis County from the Mexican government — a reminder that Texas settlement began under Mexican rule. The place was also known as Howe's Settlement for William R. Howe, the region's first settler in 1843. Its early post office and brief turn as the first seat of Navarro County (1846–1848) mark it as one of the area's founding sites.

Anahuac, TX

Built in 1845, Chambersea was the home of Thomas Jefferson Chambers, an early Texas civic and business leader who proclaimed his devotion to the state with a "Star" window in the west gable. The modest board-and-batten house featured a distinctive spiral exterior stairway and sat at the center of a plantation with barns, outbuildings, and a lattice summer house. The home's story turned dark in 1863, when Chambers was assassinated here.

McKinney, TX

Elisha and Peggy Ann Chambers brought their seven children to Texas in 1847, claiming headrights in Collin and Dallas Counties and donating land for a cemetery and school that seeded the community named in their honor. By the turn of the century Chambersville thrived with a sawmill, cotton gin, blacksmith, post office, and stores, while its school doubled as auditorium, dance hall, and even a roller rink. During World War I the Red Cross worked out of the school as local women rolled bandages for the troops.

McKinney, TX

Elisha and Margaret Ann Chambers came to Texas from Indiana in 1847, and when their infant son died in 1853 they gave the land where he was buried for a cemetery and school. The site once stood at the crossroads of a busy farm community of homes, a cotton gin, stores, and a post office, and those buried here were its storekeepers, teachers, blacksmiths, farmers, and soldiers. By 1999 some 950 graves recorded the community's long history.

McKinney, TX

Though Chambersville dates to 1847, its residents worshiped in non-denominational services at scattered locations until the Methodist congregation formally organized in 1905. J. M. Bryan deeded land across from the community school, where members first met in a white frame building and later built anew in 1948. Its Harvest Festival, begun in 1945, grew into a lasting Chambersville tradition.

Cedar Park, TX

John "Jack" Champion left York County, South Carolina, and had reached Texas by 1850, when he and Naomi Jane Standefer were licensed to marry in Williamson County. In 1854 he bought more than 200 acres at the headwaters of Brushy Creek, later serving in the Civil War and briefly as county sheriff. Naomi, who died in 1862 as mother to seven of his nineteen children, lies in the oldest of the family plot's marked graves, among several more that are unmarked.

Smithville, TX

Land developer and merchant J. H. Chancellor built this handsome residence around 1909 in the heart of Smithville's bustling business district, near the railroad depot and hotels that made the town tick. Its blend of Classical Revival columns and balustrades with a Romanesque arched porch reflected the confident prosperity of a railroad town in the early 1900s. It stayed in the Chancellor family until 1938, then passed to Dr. J. D. Stephens, a Katy Railroad surgeon who turned part of the ground floor into a clinic.

Fairfield, TX

When Reuben and Mary Chancellor came to the Brown's Creek settlement of Freestone County in the 1850s, they brought a large family, enslaved laborers, and the ambitions of Deep South planters transplanted to the Texas frontier. The land they gave for a church, school, and burying ground became the heart of a rural community, and the Predestinarian Primitive Baptist congregation organized here in 1854 doubled as schoolhouse and gathering place. The cemetery that grew up around it holds four generations of settlers, many infant graves, and veterans of the Civil War and World War II. A separate section set aside for the formerly enslaved records, in stone, the tangled histories that bound these families together.

Heath, TX

Kentucky natives Henry and Martha Chandler were among the earliest Anglo settlers of the Rockwall County area, established here by 1860. Their small family burial ground opened in sorrow in 1869 with the death of their nine-year-old daughter Mary, and grew to seven marked graves — six of them Chandlers, plus a neighbor's daughter, Hattie Harvey. Henry was laid to rest in 1904 and Martha in 1908, the last known burial.

Weatherford, TX

The British-born portrait painter Douglas Chandor began designing this home and garden in 1934, carving seven interlocking gardens — blending Oriental and English styles, with fountains and ponds — from a caliche hillside that had been his in-laws' cow pasture. Originally called White Shadows, it was renamed Chandor Gardens by his wife, Ina, after his death in 1953. Chandor hoped his creation would inspire Texas men to take up gardening, and it drew admiring newspaper attention as early as 1938.

Snyder, TX

Deep Creek was once a spring-fed tributary of the Colorado River that both began and ended within Scurry County. In the 1870s it watered buffalo hunters camped in hide-covered dugouts, and W. H. "Pete" Snyder's trading post on its bank grew into the town of Snyder. Though official surveyors named it Culvers Creek, the famed hunters John and J. Wright Mooar called it Deep Creek in 1876 and that name stuck, as the stream became the stage for the young town's picnics, horse races, and baptisms.

Channing, TX

Channing rose in 1890 as the headquarters and supply point for the vast XIT Ranch, one of the largest ranches in the world. The Methodist congregation organized here is said to have been the first Methodist church north of the Canadian River, and its earliest members read like a roster of the frontier town — the XIT's ranch manager and his family, a hotel keeper, a plumber, and Hereford cattle breeders. Trustees bought this site in 1901 and finished the building the next year.

Fort Worth, TX

This burial ground began with the mid-1850s settlement of the Fanning and Raibourn pioneer families, and, by family tradition, with the 1856 grave of Eliny Raibourn on land her brother-in-law John Fanning then donated as a cemetery. A one-room school — Horse Creek or Lone Star School — was the area's only communal building until a chapel rose beside the graves, giving the place its later name of Sweet Chapel. As families moved on and the chapel vanished, it became known simply as Chapel Cemetery, tended for years by neighbors before a cemetery association took it in hand in 1985.

San Augustine, TX

Chapel Hill Cemetery near San Augustine holds burials reaching back to 1838, beginning with a veteran of the American Revolution whose widow is said to have given land along the old El Camino Real for a public graveyard. Its oldest graves face north-south beneath slabs of hewn native rock, and among those interred is a Cumberland Presbyterian minister who served as chaplain and courier for Sam Houston during the Texas Revolution. The surrounding community lived and worshipped here through the cotton era until World War II drew its people to combat and coastal shipyards.

Fort Worth, TX

The Chapin School served the rural Mary's Creek community west of Fort Worth from a humble log cabin begun in the late 1870s on land donated by pioneer Ivory H. Chapin. Over the decades it grew and relocated more than once — from log cabin to frame house to a rock building — before the Fort Worth school district absorbed its common school district in 1961. It kept teaching local children until it finally closed in 1968.

Chapman Ranch, TX

In 1919 Philip Chapman bought nearly 35,000 acres of the King Ranch's Laureles Division and sent his son to carve it into tenant farms. The venture grew into a company town with schools, a hospital, and its own power plant, and by the late 1920s Chapman Ranch was billed as the world's largest mechanized farm, testing new equipment and breeding a prized long-staple cotton. The town faded by 1941, though the family still ranches the land.

Cherokee, TX

Chappel, one of San Saba County's earliest settlements, dates to the 1850s, and this burial ground grew from land donated by Joab B. Harrell, the county's first Chief Justice, who had buried his own son here around 1871 before formally deeding the tract to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1886. A church, school, and store once made Chappel a community center. The graves chronicle the pioneers and families who settled this frontier corner of Central Texas.

Chappell Hill, TX

Founded in 1847 and named for early settler Robert Chappell, this Washington County town quickly became an education center, home to the Chappell Hill Male and Female Institute and Soule University. When war came in 1861, its male students marched off to the Confederate army, and the town served as a C.S.A. quartermaster depot.

Chappell Hill, TX

The Chappell Hill Male and Female Institute, founded in 1850, was a pioneer of higher learning in early Texas and came under Methodist control after 1854. Its women's branch was chartered separately in 1856, and the campus was rebuilt after an 1871 fire. This bell, cast in 1873, is the sole surviving relic of the college, which closed its doors in 1912.

Chappell Hill, TX

This burial ground opened in 1853 as a Masonic cemetery, with Chappell Hill's founder Jacob Haller its first interment. It became the resting place of the pioneers, soldiers, and statesmen who shaped early Texas, tended for over a century by Hubert Lodge No. 67 until a cemetery association formed in 1965.

Camp Wood, TX

Before he was the most famous man in the world, Charles Lindbergh was a barnstormer called "Slim" who flew a surplus World War I biplane to Texas so he could say he'd flown there. In March 1924 he landed near Camp Wood and, attempting to take off the next day, harmlessly crashed into Warren Puett's store—an incident the townsfolk forgave and remembered fondly. Weeks later he entered Army flight training at San Antonio, and in 1927 made his history-making solo flight from New York to Paris.

Lorena, TX

Charles Alexander Westbrook came from Mississippi to Texas in 1859 and, after Confederate service in the Civil War, settled his large family in McLennan County to establish a cotton plantation along Cow Bayou. In the 1870s he built a three-story stone home with square Doric columns beside the Waco-to-San Antonio stage road, often lodging travelers there. When the railroad arrived in 1881, the new town nearby was named Lorena for his daughter.

George West, TX

Charles "Mr. Charlie" Tullis and his wife Emma carried deep Texas roots: his forebears walked from Tennessee in 1834 and gave sons and supplies to the San Jacinto campaign, while her ancestor John McGloin died in the Goliad Massacre. Born in 1873, Charlie served as Live Oak County sheriff from 1909 — known for delivering tax notices without a gun — through the county seat's move from Oakville to George West, and later spent thirty-eight years as founding president of the First National Bank of George West. He and Emma married in 1913 and are buried among the Irish Catholic pioneers at Gussettville.

San Angelo, TX

Charles B. Metcalfe came to Texas from Tennessee in 1872 and helped build up Tom Green County, growing its first bale of cotton, installing its first cotton gin, and mapping the early county seat at Ben Ficklin. Serving in the Texas Legislature from 1915 to 1919, he authored the 1918 amendment that gave the state's women the right to vote in primary elections—three years before national suffrage was adopted.

Montgomery, TX

Charles Bellinger Stewart (1806–1885) came to Texas in 1830 and served as the young republic's first Secretary of State. A signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, he helped draft both the 1836 Republic constitution and the 1845 state constitution, and later served Montgomery County as district attorney and state representative.

Saint Paul, TX

A Maryland native, Charles C. Stibbens came to Texas around 1835 and fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto during the Texas Revolution. He settled afterward as a farmer and shoemaker, raised eleven children, and moved to Saint Paul in 1870. He is the only known San Jacinto veteran buried in Collin County.

Port Isabel, TX

Charles Champion, son of an Italian immigrant who settled in Texas in 1855, was born at Old Point Isabel in 1870 and bought the local general store in 1894, renaming it "The Champion Store." In 1899 he raised a two-story brick building he called "The Key of the Gulf," housing the store, the U.S. Customs House, and the post office, where he served as the town's second postmaster. In the early 1900s he helped launch the fishing industry that became a mainstay of the local economy, and he championed a deep-water port that opened in 1933, seven years after his death.

San Marcos, TX

Charles S. Cock built this limestone house in 1867, in the years when San Marcos was still a young frontier town finding its feet after the Civil War. A farmer who later served as mayor in the early 1880s, Cock raised his home from a mix of local materials—limestone, elm, pine, and cedar—the kind of hand-gathered construction typical of the Texas Hill Country.

High Island, TX

Born in Marseilles in 1805, Charles Cronea shipped to America as a cabin boy at thirteen and soon fell in with the privateers of Jean Laffite, cruising the Gulf off Spanish Mexico. Settling in Texas, he joined the fight for independence at the Siege of Bexar and, by some accounts, guarded prisoners near the Battle of San Jacinto; a decade later he marched under General Zachary Taylor in the war with Mexico. Awarded 1,280 acres as a surviving veteran of the Texas Revolution, the old adventurer farmed near Sabine Pass and finally settled his family at High Island, where he is buried.

Dallas, TX

Architect Charles Stevens Dilbeck, son of an Arkansas builder, moved to Dallas in 1932 and over the next decades designed at least 630 houses plus landmarks like the Belmont Hotel, working closely with local brickmakers and ironworkers. Between 1936 and 1940 he laid out roughly sixty small, whimsical bungalows on a former pecan orchard in Cochran Heights—today the greatest concentration of his work in Dallas, showcasing all five of his signature styles. His designs favored dramatic scale, aged materials, and homes meant, in his words, to "say welcome."

San Antonio, TX

In the decades after the Civil War, San Antonio's prosperous German community left a lasting mark on the city's streets and skyline. Charles F.A. Hummel, orphaned young and raised in the family gun-and-ammunition trade, rose to serve as city treasurer and auditor while remaining a pillar of that German world. In 1884 he and his wife Emilie commissioned architects Wahrenberger and Beckmann to build this ornate two-story limestone house, its Italianate pavilion, full-height gallery, and carved quoins announcing a family that had arrived.

Industry, TX

Charles Fordtran, a German of Huguenot descent, joined Stephen F. Austin's colony in January 1831 and earned a league of land surveying for Austin's partner Samuel May Williams. He fought in frontier clashes, rode with the "Spy Rangers" protecting fleeing families during the Texas Revolution, and raised fourteen children on his land near Industry. Arriving well before the great wave of German immigration, he was among the first Teutonic settlers in Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Born in New Hampshire in 1811, Charles Frederick King came to Texas and served in the Texas Army in 1836, the year of the revolution that won independence from Mexico. He later served two terms as mayor of San Antonio, in 1847–1849 and again in 1852–1853, guiding the frontier town through its early years as part of the new state of Texas. He died in San Antonio in 1869.

Oran, TX

In 1857 a twenty-one-year-old Charles Goodnight set up his first ranch at Black Springs on the very edge of the Comanche frontier, where cattle and danger ran together. He scouted for the Texas Rangers during the Civil War, blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail in 1866, and famously hauled his dying partner Oliver Loving's body home for burial. Later he founded the panhandle's first ranch, the JA, and even bred buffalo with cattle—the "cattalo."

Goodnight, TX

Charles Goodnight glimpsed the promise of ranching at nineteen while crossing Texas bound for the California gold fields, and turned back to build a cattle empire. During the Civil War he scouted for the Frontier Regiment of Texas cavalry, guarding settlers against raids, and afterward he and partner Oliver Loving blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail across the arid, Comanche-dominated lands of West Texas and New Mexico to supply distant forts. A legendary cattleman and Indian fighter, he also founded Goodnight College before his death in 1929.

Cuero, TX

Charles G. Breeden came to Cuero from Victoria at just fifteen to work on the "Weekly Star" newspaper and never left, rising to become one of south Texas's prominent merchants. He was a partner in the Breeden Brothers Company and the Breeden-Runge Wholesale Company and a leading figure in the town's business and civic life. In 1915 he married Mabel Claire Hall, and the couple raised two daughters.

Ballinger, TX

When 21-year-old Charles H. Noyes was killed in 1919 by a fall from his horse while working cattle on his family's ranch, his grieving parents commissioned a monument not only to their son but to all Texas cowboys. Sculptor Pompeo Coppini studied horses for two years before creating the bronze, producing a work that memorializes the vanishing world of the open-range cowhand.

Armstrong County, TX

Charles H. Roan (1923–1944) earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism during the Allied invasion of Peleliu in the western Pacific during World War II. His medal was presented posthumously in 1945 to his mother, Armstrong County Treasurer Lillabel Roan, in Claude. A Navy destroyer was christened in his name in 1946, and he lies in the Marine Cemetery on Peleliu Island.

Rosenberg, TX

Arkansas-born Charles Harvey Waddell came to Texas as a child and grew into a driving force behind Rosenberg's development. He opened an automobile dealership in 1910, founded the Fort Bend Telephone Company in 1914, served as county tax collector and state legislator, and spread his energies across cotton gins, real estate, lumber, and a savings and loan. His ventures helped modernize a small Fort Bend County town in the early automobile age.

Horseshoe Bay, TX

Born in Vermont in 1814, Charles Haynes came to Texas in 1836 with Ohio's "Buckeye Rangers" to fight for independence, then settled at Lockhart, where he ran a blacksmith shop and served in early county government. Around 1859 he moved his family to Llano County, and in 1860 he organized a Masonic lodge at the Comanche schoolhouse. Twice married and father of eight, he was a builder of frontier civic and fraternal life.

Bonham, TX

Born in Bonham in 1916 to musical parents, Charlie Christian developed a distinctive single-string guitar style that helped pioneer the electric guitar as a lead instrument. He joined Benny Goodman's band in 1939 and played with jazz greats and at Carnegie Hall before tuberculosis took his life at just twenty-five.

Orange, TX

Born in Mississippi around 1820, Charles Holmes Saxon came to Texas in 1842 and, after serving in the Mexican War, helped organize Orange County in 1852, sitting on its first commissioners court and later serving as sheriff. He farmed, made shingles, and rode into the Civil War, seeing action across Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana before dying in 1919 at nearly a century old.

Claude, TX

A Claude native, Charles H. Roan (1923–1944) volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps in December 1942 and shipped out to the Pacific in World War II. On Peleliu Island he threw himself on a Japanese grenade, saving four fellow Marines and giving his own life, an act that earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor. The medal was presented to his mother, county treasurer Lillabel Roan, at the courthouse in July 1945, and a Navy destroyer, the USS Charles H. Roan, was christened in his honor in 1946.

San Marcos, TX

In 1847 the McGehee family left Alabama for the fresh farmland of newly annexed Texas, and by 1859 Charles Lewis McGehee, Jr. had claimed a stretch of the San Marcos River. The cabin he raised for his wife Sarah Jane and their children — with its hand-hewn stone fireplace and chimney — remains one of the oldest structures in this corner of Hays County, a survivor of the era when settlers turned river bottoms into homesteads before drifting into town life.

Gonzales, TX

This state marker honors Charles Mason, who took up arms in the Texas struggle for independence and fought both at Gonzales, where the revolt first flared, and at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. Erected by the State of Texas in 1962, it is one of many grave markers placed to remember the volunteer soldiers of 1836. His service links a single citizen to the founding of the Texas Republic.

Trinity, TX

Born in Trinity in 1933, Charlie Wilson graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and served as a naval officer before entering Texas politics, winning his first legislative seat in 1961 and election to the U.S. House in 1973. Over a dozen terms in Congress he is best remembered for leading support for a major covert program aiding Afghan fighters during the Soviet-Afghan War. He also championed the rights of minorities and women and helped make the Big Thicket a national preserve.

McKinney, TX

In the cotton-rich Blackland Prairie of North Texas, merchant and cotton broker Charles Heard and his wife Sallie built this ornate residence at the height of the Victorian era. Completed in 1893 to a design by architect John Martin, its Queen Anne and Eastlake flourishes—the elaborate porch and intricate woodwork—advertised the prosperity that cotton brought to McKinney. Known locally as philanthropists, the Heards kept the house in the family into the 1970s.

Kosse, TX

This marker honors Charles Q. Haley, who took up arms as a volunteer soldier in the Texas War for Independence of 1835–36. Ordinary colonists like him filled the ranks of the improvised army that won Texas its freedom from Mexico. The State of Texas placed the memorial in 1962 to keep his service remembered.

Nacogdoches, TX

Born in London and later joined by his German-born wife Anna Maria Ruoff, Charles Standfield Taylor became a public servant of the Republic and State of Texas over three decades. He served as a land commissioner in 1833, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, and went on to be chief justice of Nacogdoches County and a district attorney. His career shows how European immigrants helped build the institutions of frontier Texas.

Decatur, TX

Charles Vernon Terrell rose from a Wise County law practice to become one of Texas's most consequential public servants across four decades. As a state senator he sponsored the act that created what became North Texas State University, and as a member of the Texas Railroad Commission he helped steer the agency during the wild East Texas oil boom of the 1930s. His generation of regulators pioneered oil and gas conservation rules just as Texas was becoming a global energy power.