Historic Markers in Texas

Cedar Creek, TX

Addison Litton arrived in Texas in 1827, in the years when Anglo colonists were streaming into the Mexican province. When revolution came he served in the Army of Texas in 1836 as a member of Captain Gibson Kuykendall's company at Harrisburg during the campaign that won independence. He lived out his remaining years in Bastrop County, where he died in 1847, and the state later marked his grave with the Republic's star and wreath.

Addison, TX

Completed in 1913, this brick commercial building housed the Addison State Bank, organized the year before to serve a fledgling railroad town. The bank failed in 1926 and the structure became a mercantile store for many years; with its corbeled brick cornice, it is one of the few survivors of Addison's original townsite.

Lexington, TX

After serving in the Civil War, Alabama native R.L. Cain settled in this part of Lee County and in 1867 deeded five acres for a community cemetery, then known as Cain School Community. The settlement was renamed Adina when its post office opened, and the graveyard took the name with it; among its oldest burials is Martha Cane Slaughter, who died in 1871. In 2001 several graves — including that of William B. Craddock, a victim of the lawless violence that plagued the area in the 1870s and 1880s — were reinterred here beside relatives.

San Antonio, TX

Granddaughter of Republic of Texas vice-president Lorenzo de Zavala, Adina de Zavala grew up steeped in stories of the Texas past and made its preservation her life's work. She helped save landmarks including the Alamo, the Spanish Governor's Palace, and San Antonio's missions, and in 1889 formed the De Zavala Daughters, who erected some of Texas's first historical markers. In 1908, convinced the Alamo's long barracks held the mission's original walls, she barricaded herself inside for three days and nights to stop their demolition.

San Antonio, TX

Granddaughter of the Republic of Texas's first vice-president, Adina De Zavala became a teacher, historian, and one of the state's earliest and most determined preservationists. She helped save the Alamo's Long Barracks from demolition — famously barricading herself inside in 1907 — and worked to protect the Spanish missions, the Governor's Palace, and other landmarks. In 1938 she founded an association that installed dozens of historical markers across Texas.

Brackettville, TX

Raised during Fort Clark's 1873–1875 expansion to house a full regiment, this quarters stood apart from the line's duplexes as a single dwelling. Its adobe core followed a three-room hall-and-parlor plan with a symmetrical front and end chimneys, later enlarged in 1904 and 1944. When the Fifth U.S. Cavalry was garrisoned here from 1921 to 1941, the regimental adjutant — the officer handling the commander's essential paperwork — lived within these walls.

Fort Worth, TX

This Texas limestone hall was raised in 1902 for Polytechnic College, a coeducational Methodist school organized in 1890 on land donated by local benefactors. It served through the institution's years as Texas Woman's College from 1914 to 1934 and continued in use after the school became Texas Wesleyan College, receiving a modernization in 1963. The building remains a link to more than a century of Methodist higher education in Fort Worth.

Baird vicinity, TX

Organized in 1881 with nine charter members, this congregation first gathered pioneer settlers of the Admiral community in a log cabin, under brush arbors, and in local schoolhouses before building a sanctuary near the turn of the century. Known first as Shiloh Baptist, it took the community's name in 1905. The church disbanded in 1968, and its historic building was destroyed by arson in 1993, leaving the cemetery to mark a settlement that once had stores, doctors, a gin, a school, and a post office.

Boerne, TX

Born in Boerne in 1869 to Prussian immigrants, Adolph "Ad" Toepperwein learned to shoot from his gunsmith father and could outshoot seasoned marksmen by age ten. After stints as a cartoonist, vaudeville performer, and circus act, he signed with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in 1901 as an exhibition shooter. With his wife Elizabeth—whom he taught to shoot—he toured for over forty years as "The Wonderful Toepperweins," setting records that landed him in Ripley's, the Guinness Book, and the Texas Sports Hall of Fame.

Fredericksburg, TX

At the turn of the twentieth century, Fredericksburg was outgrowing its original town grid, and banker Adolph Gold helped lay out its first subdivision in 1900. The next year he built this limestone-and-block home there for his own family, dressing it up with a five-bay front, jigsawn porchwork, and a centered pediment. The Golds held the house for nearly nine decades, a marker of the town's early move from frontier village toward modern community.

Moulton, TX

Born in Moulton in 1916, Adolph Hofner became a pioneer of Texas western swing, blending country, jazz, blues, pop, and the Czech folk songs of his heritage. With his brother Emil "Bash" Hofner he led a popular band, and in 1941 cut the first recording of "Cotton-Eyed Joe," now a Texas dance-hall standard, alongside his hit "Maria Elena." After signing with Pearl Beer as the Pearl Wranglers, he played San Antonio's dance halls for decades until a 1993 stroke, earning induction into multiple music halls of fame.

Dallas, TX

In 1911–1912, Dallas businessmen convinced brewing magnate Adolphus Busch, co-founder of Anheuser-Busch, to build the first section of this hotel on the site of the old 1880s city hall. Designed by a St. Louis firm in Beaux Arts style with lavish French Renaissance detailing, the Adolphus long dominated the Dallas skyline. For decades it was the stage for the city's most important business and social occasions.

Edom, TX

Adren Anglin came to Texas from Kentucky in 1833 and helped build Fort Parker in present Limestone County, a frontier stronghold against attack. He became a Texas Ranger in 1835 and furnished food and supplies to the revolutionary army during Texas' fight for independence, earning a headright grant in Henderson County. He married Phebe Parker, tying him to one of the era's most storied frontier families.

McCamey, TX

This Western Bungalow was built in 1915 in the town of Girvin by R. F. Mayse, its first merchant, and later moved to the oil boomtown of McCamey in 1946. Given by Mr. and Mrs. Hal Holmes, it became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965. Its journey mirrors the restless mobility of the West Texas oil frontier.

Blanco, TX

Built before 1873 with walls a full sixteen inches thick, this Blanco home was equipped for self-sufficiency with a hand-dug well, a rock-walled cellar, and an underground cistern. Its sturdy stone construction reflects the practical building of the Hill Country's early settlers. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Galveston, TX

Built in 1914 for the family of Galveston businessman John Adriance, this house blends several architectural fashions of its day, from colossal Doric columns to a craftsman gable and wraparound porch. It later became the longtime home of civic leader Oscar Springer and his family. The house stands as a survivor from an era when Galveston was rebuilding after the catastrophic 1900 hurricane.

Washington, TX

Traced to the late 1840s, this settlement is believed to be the oldest African American Catholic community in Texas. When the Spann families migrated from South Carolina in 1848, the enslaved people they brought worshipped alongside them at a log chapel known as Old Spann Chapel, and the Spanns and Sweeds share the still-active Old Catholic Cemetery. Over the following century the community sustained its faith through dedicated missions and churches, culminating in a new sanctuary for the Brenham-area descendants in 1995.

Belton, TX

Public education for Black students in Belton dates to 1882, when Mrs. Aleck McGee was hired "to teach the colored school." In 1890 Fisk University graduate Thomas Breckenridge Harris became the first instructor of the African American high school, and in 1936 a new building rose on this site for students of all grades, named T. W. Harris in his honor. The last class graduated in 1966, and Belton's schools integrated the following year.

College Station, TX

Formal schooling for Black children in Brazos County took root after the Public School Act of 1871, first in scattered community and church schools and later in a district that bused older students to Bryan. Rising numbers led the A&M Consolidated District to open its own high school in 1941, soon renamed Lincoln School, which served the community until a 1966 fire and the closures that followed. The City of College Station preserved what remained, and in 1980 the campus reopened as the Lincoln Center, still a gathering place today.

Gonzales, TX

Education for Black residents of Gonzales began in the 1870s in the home of Myrtle Moses Mathis and grew more formal in the 1890s within a two-story community building. About 1914 a brick schoolhouse rose on donated land, and in 1922 it was named George Edwards High School, serving some 300 students and eight teachers by 1940. The school closed in 1964 as districts desegregated under the federal Civil Rights Act.

Austin, TX

Both free and enslaved African Americans supported the Texas cause during the 1835–36 War of Independence, though official recognition of their service was long withheld. Hendrick Arnold scouted and fought at the Siege of Bexar and San Jacinto; the Nacogdoches businessman William Goyens interpreted for Sam Houston in treaty talks with the Cherokee; the freeman Samuel McCullough, Jr. was among the first wounded in the Goliad campaign; and Joe, enslaved by Alamo commander William Travis, survived the fall and carried word of it to Houston. Others died at the Alamo and in the Goliad massacre or gave money and hauled supplies.

Victoria, TX

Agapito De Leon was the fourth son of empresario Don Martín De León, the founder of Victoria and its Mexican colony, and grew up active in the colony's affairs and its cattle and livestock trade. A Texas patriot during the 1836 War for Independence and a noted frontier fighter, he was cut down soon after the war by Mabry 'Mustang' Gray, whose gang preyed systematically on Texans of Mexican descent. He died in 1836 at just twenty-eight.

Fischer, TX

As German farmers and ranchers filled the country around Fischer's Store, they banded together in 1875 to form an agricultural society—part cooperative, part social club—to bargain feed prices, trade surpluses, share know-how, and help one another at harvest. Renamed when the post office was approved in 1876, the society bought land from Otto Fischer for ten dollars and raised a hall that hosted dances, rodeos, oyster fries, and weddings. The 1908 hall, with its laminated pine arches vaulting the ceiling, still anchors community life.

Hebbronville, TX

On land granted by the Spanish crown along the twin lakes of southeastern Jim Hogg County, the Ramírez family worked the range for generations from their base in Ciudad Mier, Tamaulipas. As raiding threats eased in the late 1800s, the vaqueros and their families began staying permanently, and heirs of the Agua Nueva de Arriba and de Abajo land grants settled here. The cemetery's earliest graves — cowboys and children marked with mesquite crosses, and stone bóvedas dated to 1900–1904 — hold six generations of border families.

Dallas, TX

Ahab Bowen came to Dallas in 1861 from Tennessee and made his living as a farmer and feed dealer, buying this land in 1867 when it still lay beyond the young city's limits. Around 1874 he built this modest wood-frame farmhouse for his family, a plain vernacular home of a kind once common across rural Dallas County. As the city swelled around it, the house survived as one of the few reminders of the county's 19th-century agricultural roots.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth's first Jewish congregation, Ahavath Sholom, dedicated this six-acre cemetery in 1909, and a Ladies Cemetery Society formed the same year to tend the grounds. Later generations buried three World War II soldiers side by side here and raised a monument to the millions of Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. The chapel and a maintenance trust reflect a community caring for its own across more than a century.

Hempstead, TX

German immigrant William Ahrenbeck built this two-story galleried Greek Revival home around 1872 in Hempstead, where he became a prominent civic leader, builder, postmaster, and mayor. After his death his daughter Ella Justine Ahrenbeck lived here until she sold the property in 1917 to businessman R. R. Urban, whose family enlarged the house and held it until 1965. The home was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1980.

Corsicana, TX

As war loomed in 1940, the U.S. government turned to civilian flight schools to help train the pilots it would soon need in vast numbers, and Corsicana Field became one of them. Built on a 400-acre tract beginning in 1941, it delivered primary flight training to cadets in ten-week cycles—by 1944 more than 8,000 airmen had passed through in 37 classes, and the school employed over 550 civilians, reshaping the local economy. When peace came the field was no longer needed, and the site went on to house a junior college and later a municipal airport.

Burnet, TX

Kentucky-born Adam Rankin Johnson came to Texas in 1854, rose to Confederate brigadier general during the Civil War, and afterward settled in Burnet County as a businessman and civic leader. In 1882 he gave land for the railroad that hauled Burnet County granite to build the Texas State Capitol, and around the same time raised this sturdy stone barn on his homestead. The barn is a rare surviving piece of his working estate.

Walker County, TX

This hill marked a landmark on the old Colony Road running between Huntsville and Ryan's Ferry on the Trinity River. It takes its name from Thomas Akin, a Mississippi native who came to Texas in 1853 with his wife Ruth and built a cabin at its base in the rural community of McGuire. During the Civil War Akin rode as a courier for Confederate General John B. Hood while his wife moved their family of seven children to safety farther east.

Desdemona vicinity, TX

This burial ground began when pioneer William Mansker set aside part of his land for a school and community cemetery in the mid-19th century, serving Anglo settlers drawn together by the hardships of frontier Texas. Family clusters like the four Bell children who died in 1877, graves marked only by fieldstones, and the interment of veterans of several wars all testify to the precarious lives of those who built the Alameda community.

San Antonio, TX

This soaring cenotaph honors the defenders who died at the Alamo on March 6, 1836, in the fight for Texas independence. Rather than marking a grave, it stands as an empty tomb, a symbol raised so that the sacrifice made in that mission-turned-fortress would not be forgotten. Its inscription casts the fallen as men who chose neither surrender nor retreat.

Van Zandt County, TX

In 1890, when Van Zandt County had scores of common schools but no institution of higher learning, community leaders met and agreed to found Alamo Institute, taking over control of an existing school for the purpose. Its main building was ready for the fall term, and within a few years the campus grew to a pair of two-story buildings offering history, Latin, science, music, and voice. Though the institute closed before 1911, its graduates included a man who went on to serve as a state and U.S. legislator.

Pecos, TX

This courthouse statue in Pecos honors the famous 'Alamo letter,' William Barret Travis's 1836 appeal from the besieged mission at San Antonio de Béxar, signed 'Victory or Death.' Written during the Texas Revolution as a small garrison faced the Mexican army, the letter became one of the most stirring documents in Texas history. Its placement before a West Texas courthouse reflects how deeply the Alamo's defiance entered the state's civic identity.

San Antonio, TX

Mission San Antonio de Valero, founded in 1718 and relocated to this area in 1724, was ringed by thick stone and adobe walls by the 1760s, with its main gateway set in the south wall. After Spanish cavalry occupied the secularized mission in the early 1800s, the complex became known as the Alamo. During the famous 1836 siege, couriers slipped out through this gateway before Santa Anna's troops breached it on March 6, and some accounts place James Bowie's death in the adjacent low barracks.

San Antonio, TX

Chartered in 1848, San Antonio's Alamo Lodge No. 44 of the Masons bought this ground in the early 1850s to give its members a proper burial place. The oldest marked grave belongs to S. Fredericca Hummel, a German native who reached San Antonio in 1847, and the first Masonic burial came in 1855. Among Texas's earliest Masonic cemeteries, it holds many of the immigrants who poured into the city through the 19th and early 20th centuries.

San Antonio, TX

In 1879 an Englishman named William Loyd found a blue limestone near San Antonio, and chemist George Kalteyer confirmed it held the right balance of lime and clay to make portland cement. The partners chartered their company in 1880 and built what became the first portland cement plant west of the Mississippi, its early pot kilns later joined by a tall Schoefer-type kiln. Cement from the works went into landmarks like the Texas State Capitol and Austin's Driskill Hotel before the plant relocated in 1908.

Jasper, TX

Jasper's Bulldog Stadium opened around 1922 and, as high-school football grew into a Friday-night institution, quickly outgrew its bleachers. Beginning in 1936 the Works Progress Administration renovated the grounds—adding pole-mounted stadium lights for the town's first night game and, in a second phase, steel bleachers, ticket booths, and a new field. Architect W.C. Meador crowned the entrance with a rustic stone wall shaped like the Alamo, a design that has greeted fans and players since 1941.

Alanreed, TX

Spread over ten acres on a rise above town, Alanreed Cemetery grew alongside the community's rise as a supply point on the Choctaw, Oklahoma & Gulf Railroad. The town itself took shape in 1902 when the post office moved and was renamed for a Philadelphia railroad trustee, Alan H. Reed. The oldest marked grave dates to 1899, and family plot fences, Woodmen of the World markers, and the graves of veterans and local leaders record the area's heritage.

Marshall, TX

Built around 1880 as a wedding gift for Katie Allen and Albert Van Hook, this Marshall home was designed by Katie's father, N. S. Allen, a prolific architect who shaped many of nearby Shreveport's finest buildings. Its original Italianate flourishes—a widow's walk, double chimneys, and gingerbread trim—marked it as a showpiece of Gilded Age East Texas. The house stayed in the family into the 1950s and was carefully restored in the 1990s.

Fulshear, TX

Albert Herzstein, born in 1907 to a Jewish immigrant family in Colorado, came to Houston in 1925 and built a career that carried him to the top of what became Big Three Industries. He and his wife Ethel, from a pioneer Fulshear family, turned their success into a charitable foundation established in 1965, beginning with the gift of a church sanctuary in memory of their parents. Together they funded education, the arts, and support for the underprivileged, and Albert — who never finished high school — was later honored as a philanthropist and given honorary degrees.

New Braunfels, TX

German-born Albert Kopplin and his wife, Marie Caroline Hitzfelder Kopplin, built this folk Victorian house in 1892 as a retirement home after years of ranching, its porches trimmed with chamfered posts and intricately carved gingerbread. For a time their granddaughters boarded here to attend school and social life in New Braunfels, returning to the ranch on weekends. The Kopplin family kept the home until the 1940s.

Dallas, TX

Illinois native Albert Carver (1827–1911) bought land here in 1856, settled with his family, and became a farmer and noted breeder of Durham cattle. He set aside this plot as a family graveyard, where he, his wife Mary, four sons, and their families are buried; the oldest marked grave, from 1885, belongs to an infant grandson. The cemetery remains a quiet reminder of a pioneer family and the settlement of the area.

Wharton, TX

Albert Clinton Horton came to Texas in 1834, raised volunteers in Alabama for the revolution, and served as a cavalry colonel before helping launch the Republic of Texas — chairing the commission that chose Austin as its capital in 1839. When Texas joined the Union in 1845 he became its first lieutenant governor and served as acting governor while Governor Henderson fought in the Mexican War. A planter and a founder of Baylor University, he lived at "Sycamore Grove" near this site.

Matagorda, TX

Georgia-born Albert Clinton Horton came to Texas from Alabama in 1834, established a plantation on Caney Creek, and returned east to recruit volunteers for the Texas army, serving as a cavalry colonel in the Revolution. Elected to the Republic's congress, he chaired the commission that helped select a permanent capital, and at statehood in 1845 he became Texas's first lieutenant governor — acting as governor for over a year while Governor Henderson led troops in the Mexican War. A charter Baylor trustee, he also gave land for the first Episcopal church in Texas.

Houston County, TX

In 1857 Albert Holley left Alabama for Houston County, bringing the family's supplies overland by wagon along with 137 enslaved people while his relatives traveled by boat. He began homesteading this land with his wife Julia, served in the Civil War and endured captivity as a prisoner of war, then returned to farm and build a family home here in 1867. The property stayed in Holley hands until 1976.

Fredericksburg, TX

Missouri-born tinsmith Albert Lee Patton settled in Fredericksburg in the early 1870s and in 1897 built this two-story native limestone building beside his mercantile and hardware store. Its ground floor housed the Citizens Bank until the institution closed in 1932, while Patton, his wife Emma, and their five children lived above. The building is a durable emblem of Hill Country commerce.

Stonewall, TX

A native Texan and son of German immigrants, Albert Nebgen had this two-story I-plan farmhouse built around 1918 as the centerpiece of a Gillespie County farmstead typical of the area's early German settlers. The originally open front porch was partly enclosed in 1921 to make room for his growing family. The home stayed in Nebgen hands until 1945 and was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1988.

Mexia, TX

Albert R. Mace pinned on a badge at twenty-one as a Texas Ranger and spent forty-five years in law enforcement, rising to county sheriff, president of the state sheriffs' association, and chief of police in some of the roughest oil-boom towns of the 1920s. He commanded a Ranger company during the martial-law days of the East Texas oil fields and, true to a lifetime in harness, died still in service.

Bonney, TX

Albert Sidney Johnston, a West Point graduate born in Kentucky in 1803, made Texas his home during the Republic era, rising to command its army and serving as secretary of war under President Mirabeau B. Lamar. He and his second wife settled at China Grove, his plantation on this site, in the 1840s, and he later fought in the Mexican War and patrolled the Texas frontier as a U.S. Army officer. When the Civil War came he resigned to become a Confederate general, and he was killed leading his troops at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.

Waco, TX

Built in 1921 for prominent Waco businessman and civic leader Albert Turner Clifton, this house is a polished example of the Tudor Revival style then fashionable in prospering American cities. Its steeply pitched roof, decorative half-timbering, ornamental vergeboard, and Tudor-arched brick-and-wood porch reflect the period's romantic taste for storybook English forms. The home stayed in the Clifton family until 1950.

Galveston, TX

Built in 1870 by cotton buyer Charles Albertson in Galveston's Lost Bayou section, this two-story house is a classic example of post–Civil War Southern town architecture, with octagonal columns and bracketed eaves. The 1900 Great Storm left it badly damaged but standing. In 1903 Ben Blum bought and remodeled it, moving one wing closer to the street and renting rooms to newcomers during the island's population boom.

Marathon, TX

When the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway pushed across West Texas in the 1880s, retired sea captain Albion E. Shepard came as a surveyor and stayed to build an empire of ranchland. He founded the townsite of Marathon — named, tradition holds, for the Greek valley its hills recalled — served as its first postmaster, and ran sheep by the tens of thousands on his Iron Mountain Ranch. Before 1887 he raised a two-story adobe Colonial Revival house facing the town square.

Nixon, TX

Named by veterans of Sibley's Confederate campaign in New Mexico, the community of Albuquerque grew up near an 1857 ranch, gaining a post office in 1869 along with businesses and a school. Its blacksmith shop was the scene of a famous frontier killing in 1873, when the gunman John Wesley Hardin shot DeWitt County Sheriff Jack Helm; the post office closed a decade later.

El Paso, TX

Likely raised in the 1870s for Benigno Alderete—a Ysleta-born Texas Ranger, county commissioner, and mayor—this L-shaped adobe house was built with the help of the neighboring Tigua Indians, whose construction techniques are visible throughout. Later known as the Candelaria House through marriage, it served over the decades as a courthouse, gristmill, school, dance hall, movie house, and county office. Its very fabric blends Spanish, Indigenous, and American ways of building and living.

Houston, TX

The railroad reached this spot — first called Prairie Switch — in 1873, and a post office followed in 1896 as some two dozen mostly Swedish families settled to grow Satsuma oranges, pears, and figs. Land speculation, a church, a school, and a large fig cannery briefly made Aldine flourish, but freezes, blight, and the sugar shortages of World War I killed the fig industry around 1918–1920. Dairy farms and a Magnolia Oil pumping station replaced the orchards; the depot and post office closed in the 1930s, and Aldine faded into the growing metropolis of Houston.

Dallas, TX

West Texas rancher William J. Lewis, a Maryland native, and his Dallas-born wife Willie built this residence in 1915–17, its design blending English Georgian and French Renaissance influences by architects Hal Thompson and Marion Fooshee. In 1921 the home passed to prominent banker George N. Aldredge and his wife Rena, active civic leaders and generous patrons of the arts. The house carries the name of the family that made it a center of Dallas cultural life.

Plano, TX

Built in 1918 in Plano's first residential neighborhood, the Aldridge House is the district's lone example of Prairie-style architecture, with Mission-style detailing, a low-pitched roof, wide eaves, and ribbon windows. It was the home of Charles "C.C." Aldridge, son of early Plano pioneers, who built businesses in the cotton trade and pioneered improved cotton-seed strains that helped local farmers through the hard early 1930s. C.C. and his wife Elizabeth were civic leaders — she led the town's first PTA, and he served on the school board and city council while championing road improvements.

Bastrop, TX

This Bastrop County home rose in stages on land the Mexican government granted in 1831 to a colonist of Stephen F. Austin's second colony — a reminder that Anglo Texas began as Mexican Texas. Farmer John Aldridge built the first portion in 1852, and after the Civil War a Confederate captain and plantation owner, J. W. Fitzwilliam, added the two-story section around 1872, naming the place 'Wexford' for his Irish birthplace.

East Columbia, TX

Raised between 1837 and 1841 for farmer and landholder William Aldridge, this East Columbia house passed through several owners, including J. H. Dance and Co., a firm that manufactured arms for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Businessman Thomas Masterson Smith and his wife Mary leased the home from 1908 and bought it in 1917, keeping it in the Smith family for generations. The dwelling survives as a local landmark from the earliest years of Anglo settlement in Brazoria County.