Historic Markers in Texas

Calvert, TX

A meat market opened on this Calvert corner in 1868 and was rebuilt a decade later as a handsome Victorian storefront of handmade brick. Remarkably, its 19th-century working fixtures survived in use — a cast-iron wood-burning stove, marble-topped counters, and the old meat saw rack. The building was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Midway, TX

In 1883 a small group gathered near Cobbs Creek to organize a Missionary Baptist church, calling the Rev. E.W. Mitchell as their first pastor. The congregation acquired land at this site in 1901 and pooled its labor and funds to build a sanctuary, adding facilities over the decades as it grew. Renamed Elwood Baptist Church in 1962, it has continued to anchor the surrounding community through worship and educational programs.

Waco, TX

Begun in 1853 with the burial of an infant daughter of county judge John Allen Cobbs, this small family plot grew into a private cemetery in the years when central Texas was still a young frontier of the recently annexed state. Such family burial grounds were common where settlers put down roots far from established churchyards, marking both loss and permanence on newly claimed land.

Dallas, TX

Cochran Chapel Cemetery began in 1853 with the burials of Nancy Jane Hughes Cochran's infant daughter and husband. Among those laid to rest here are many Dallas County pioneers, including four of Nancy Jane's sisters and their husbands who had come from Tennessee in the 1840s and 1850s. The cemetery preserves the memory of the interlinked families who first settled the area.

Dallas, TX

In 1856 the widow Nancy Jane Cochran deeded the first land in Dallas County set aside for a Methodist church; two years later the men of the congregation raised a modest frame sanctuary from lumber hauled 150 miles by wagon from Jefferson. Rebuilt across the generations, the congregation traces its Sunday School to 1879.

Morton, TX

Cochran County was created in 1876 and named for Robert Cochran, a New Jersey native who died defending the Alamo in 1836. Settlement came slowly on this remote plain — the 1900 census counted just 25 cowboys — until the county finally organized in 1924 with Morton as its seat. Oil discovery and irrigated farming then drove rapid growth, and its Silver Lake had been known to early Spanish explorers as Laguna Quemado.

Belton, TX

The store that became Cochran, Blair and Potts began in 1869 when Henry Mansfield Cook opened a business in Centerville, later partnering with son-in-law Thomas W. Cochran. After moves to Buffalo and, in 1883, to Belton, the firm settled at this site and passed through generations of the Cook, Cochran, Blair, and Potts families. Surviving a devastating 1928 fire, the business carried on under family ownership for well over a century.

Buda, TX

Established in 1883, Cocke Cemetery is a rural burial ground in the Buda area of Hays County, dating to the settlement era of Central Texas. It was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016, a state designation that documents and protects burial places at least fifty years old.

Eustace, TX

In 1929 Dr. Lonnie Lee Cockerell bought second-story space on Eustace's city square, and the following year opened the first hospital in Henderson County. From vaccinations to dental work to surgery, he treated both acute and chronic cases and accepted every patient regardless of ability to pay. When he built a new hospital in Athens in 1937 the Eustace facility closed, though the physician kept caring for his local patients.

Rockdale, TX

In the 1930s Rockdale businessman H. H. Coffield clad this rental home in petrified wood, part of a construction fad that swept Texas and the Southwest after the National Park Service popularized rustic buildings made of natural materials. The "stone tree house" combined a cross-gable plan with petrified-wood walls, brick-trimmed openings, and decorative bargeboard. Since 1995 it has served as the Rockdale Chamber of Commerce.

Denison, TX

While David Harman Coffman served in the Confederate army during the Civil War, his wife Harriet and their four sons made their way from Missouri to North Texas. After the war he rejoined them and bought this land, and in 1878 the Coffmans deeded a one-acre plot to the county for a public cemetery and an adjoining acre for a school and Baptist meetinghouse. Among those buried here is J.K. Miller, the pioneer on whose land the city of Denison was laid out.

Anna, TX

This burial ground grew up around the mid-nineteenth-century community of Coffman, on land given by early settler John Coffman, whose son George farmed nearby. The oldest marked grave dates to 1876, and for more than a century the cemetery served as the community's primary resting place. Descendants of many families buried here still live in this corner of Collin County.

Brownwood, TX

Completed in 1876, this two-story commercial building rose from a partnership between prominent ranchers and philanthropists Samuel R. and Moses "Mody" Coggin and businessman W.C. "Clay" Parks. Sitting on a prime downtown corner, it housed a grocery, hardware store, business college, and restaurant, and figured prominently in Brownwood's early growth. Though its exterior was later heavily altered, the building endures as a landmark of the town's frontier commercial beginnings.

Azle, TX

Settlers began reaching this part of North Texas around 1849, among them James and Sarah Hoggard, whose daughter Nancy Jane married cabinetmaker and teacher John "Coho" Smith in 1861. The couple built a one-room cabin here that grew with their family and reportedly doubled as a school. Later digs uncovered a hand-dug well, root cellar, spring house, and rock walls hinting at a fortified structure.

Robert Lee, TX

Coke County was carved from Tom Green County and created in March 1889, part of the wave of county organization that followed the settlement of West Texas. It honors Richard Coke, the Democrat who served as governor from 1874 to 1876 and then two decades in the U.S. Senate. The county seat moved from short-lived Hayrick to Robert Lee in 1890.

Robert Lee, TX

Built in 1907 by the Southern Structural Steel Company of San Antonio, this jail replaced Coke County's original one-room lumber lockup of about 1891. At least seven early sheriffs lived on the ground floor and doubled as jailkeepers, tending an average of only about four short-term prisoners a month. The gallows built on the second floor were never used—the county never sentenced anyone to death.

San Antonio, TX

South Carolinian John "Jack" Coker came to Texas in 1834 and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, earning a large land grant along Salado Creek north of San Antonio, where he summoned his brothers to help settle. The cemetery began in 1857 with the burial of a six-year-old killed by a rattlesnake, his limestone headstone still the most prominent stone on the knoll. In 1873 the family set aside three acres for a church, school, and graveyard, and the church still stands beside the cemetery today.

Colorado City, TX

Opened in 1924 to process Mitchell County crude, this refinery was soon acquired by Standard Oil of California and renamed Col-Tex, running at a full 12,000 barrels a day from the 1930s into the 1950s. It was woven into Colorado City's daily rhythm—employing scores of residents who set their clocks by the refinery whistle—before changing hands through Cosden, American Petrofina, and Fina, which closed operations in 1969 and later began environmental cleanup. The site charts the whole arc of a West Texas oil-town industry from boom to shutdown.

Corsicana, TX

Clinton McKamey Winkler settled in the Republic of Texas in 1840, was admitted to the bar in 1843, and served in the Second Texas Legislature before the Civil War. He raised 150 men for Hood's Brigade and served four years in the Confederate army, suffering a wound at Gettysburg. After the war he returned to the legislature and became one of the three original justices of the Texas Court of Appeals, and a Texas county was named in his honor.

Palestine, TX

Col. G.R. Howard, a merchant and public official, built this Palestine residence in 1851, in the years when East Texas was filling with new arrivals and commerce. His family held the house for well over a century before selling it to the city in 1965 for use as a museum. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark the following year.

Hamilton, TX

George Freeman left Kentucky for Texas in the 1840s and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Afterward he captained the treasury guards—about thirty former Confederates who repelled an 1865 raid on the state treasury, saving most of Texas's funds. Moving to Hamilton in the mid-1870s, he built a legal career capped by arguing the Greer County boundary dispute for Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Palestine, TX

Born in Anderson County in 1901, Homer Garrison, Jr. took his first lawman's job at nineteen as a deputy sheriff, against his father's advice. He was among the first thirty Texas Highway Patrol troopers in 1930 and, when the Department of Public Safety was created in 1935 by merging the patrol with the Texas Rangers, rose to become its director and chief of the Rangers in 1938. Over thirty years he built the agency to more than 3,400 employees and pioneered training, licensing, and safety programs.

Quitman, TX

Col. James A. Stinson came to Texas from Georgia in 1868, a widowed Confederate veteran who built this pine-and-oak home the next year and made himself a force in Wood County — running a large sawmill, championing scientific farming, and leading the Grange movement to protect rural interests. In his parlor in 1874, his daughter Sallie married James Stephen Hogg, who would become the first native-born governor of Texas, and Stinson's ideas on good government are said to have shaped the young reformer.

Bonham, TX

In late 1835 James Tarleton raised a company of 36 riflemen in his native Kentucky and set out for Texas, arriving to find San Antonio already liberated. Though an officer, he fought in the ranks at the victory of San Jacinto in April 1836. Having lost his wife Nancy in Kentucky that same year, he settled afterward in Fannin County with his son Robert.

Coffeeville, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1804 and seasoned in Tennessee, Col. John Hamilton McNairy came to the young Republic of Texas in 1837, settling first in Shelby County and reaching Upshur County in 1847. A year later his neighbors elected him the county's first representative. Father of eleven children, he died at Old Coffeeville in 1853, one of the founding figures of a frontier community.

Canyon, TX

After the Civil War, waves of settlers pushed west onto the Great Plains and clashed with the Native nations who lived there, prompting Army campaigns against the Southern Plains tribes. In 1872 Colonel John I. Gregg led Eighth Cavalry troops from New Mexico into West Texas hunting raiders, and on August 16 they skirmished with Kiowas near this spot. That fight, with the later Red River War of 1874-75, drove the subjugation of the Plains tribes and their confinement to reservations.

San Antonio, TX

Born in San Antonio in 1783, José Francisco Ruiz served as an officer in the Mexican army before casting his lot with the Texas cause, becoming one of the few native Tejanos to sign the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence. He went on to represent his people as a senator in the first Congress of the Republic of Texas. He died in 1840, honored in the city of his birth.

Mt. Calm, TX

Leonard Williams lived the turbulent frontier of Republic-era Texas, where relations with the Comanche shaped daily survival. Once a Comanche captive himself, he later served as a diplomat and Indian agent, earning a colonel's rank from his friend President Sam Houston. He settled near here in 1845 and built the area's first stock tank, scraping it out with a rawhide sled.

Austin, TX

Georgia native Lewis Washington came to Texas around 1835 and joined the revolutionary forces at San Antonio, serving on Colonel Fannin's staff with the Georgia Battalion at Refugio and Goliad. He held an office in Sam Houston's administration during the days of the Republic of Texas. Years later he was killed in Nicaragua while working as a news reporter in Central America; his body was never recovered, though his wife Rebecca is buried here.

Crockett, TX

Steward Alexander Miller came to Texas from Virginia in 1839, during the days of the Republic. In 1843 he joined the Snively Expedition, a Republic of Texas venture aimed at Mexican trade caravans on the Santa Fe Trail, and in 1846 he served in the first state legislature after Texas joined the Union.

Schulenburg, TX

Arriving in Texas in 1853, W. F. Upton settled near High Hill and, when war came in 1861, organized and led Texas state troops guarding the frontier and coastline as a lieutenant colonel. After the war he became a leading state legislator who worked to rebuild Texas, while keeping a store in Schulenburg for many years. A West Texas county bears his name and that of his brother John, a colonel killed at the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862.

Denison, TX

Established around 1853 by Benjamin F. Colbert, this Red River ferry carried thousands of immigrants into Texas during the 1850s. From 1858 to 1861 it served the Southern Overland Mail Line, whose stagecoaches linked St. Louis and San Francisco with mail and passengers. The crossing endured until 1931, when a highway bridge finally spanned the river.

Denison, TX

About 1855, pioneers camped near a spring on William S. Reeves's land while awaiting their land grants built this one-room log schoolhouse. Their leader, William L. Holder, had migrated to Grayson County from Missouri, and his son Clinton later lived in the cabin as a home. In 1974 the structure was moved to Old Settlers Village and restored.

Alto, TX

In 1876 land here was deeded to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and to the county school superintendent for a church and public school. The Cold Springs Methodist Church, named for a large nearby spring, was served over the years by circuit-riding ministers. The public school began with a single teacher, added more after about 1900, and closed in 1944; together the sanctuary and schoolhouse long served as the heart of this rural community.

Coldspring, TX

This Methodist congregation traces to 1848, when Mr. and Mrs. F. H. Rankin gave land from an Austin Colony grant for a church built just to the north. The building was moved to a new site in 1917, and its bell has now tolled for well over a century. It is a living link to the frontier settlers who planted churches alongside their homesteads in the Republic-era Texas backcountry.

Hico, TX

Built in 1901-1902 by a real estate investor, this two-story frame house in the small town of Hico soon belonged to druggist John Baldwin Cole and his wife Minnie. Cole ran the Cole and Grace Drugstore alongside his father-in-law, Dr. J. W. Grace, a common family-business pairing in turn-of-the-century Texas towns. Its offset gable, wraparound porch with Chippendale screen, and steep hipped roof reflect the comfortable domestic architecture of a prospering merchant class.

Rosenberg, TX

Czech immigrants Fred Felcman and Miles Podlipny opened the Liberty Theatre here in 1919, showing silent and Czech-language films. Renamed the Cole Theatre in 1935 and refaced in art deco, it drew crowds with Saturday cowboy matinees, live acts from The Ink Spots to Shirley Temple, and Depression-era 'Bank Nights.' Yet like theaters across the South, it seated patrons by race—floor and balcony—until 1968, and after 63 years it closed in 1982.

Crosbyton, TX

Handy P. Cole — foreman of the sprawling Spur Ranch and later sheriff of Dickens County — bought this West Texas property in 1897 and built the original house around 1900. In 1904 rancher James Calvin McNeill, Jr. acquired it and moved over from his father's adjoining spread, enlarging the home in 1917. It later passed to the estate of West Texas business leader Morgan Jones, with the McNeill family staying on.

Coleman, TX

Coleman County occupies land where Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa people once camped and kept lookouts from its hills. White settlement began in 1857 around Camp Colorado, a U.S. 2nd Cavalry post on Jim Ned Creek; the county was created in 1858 and named for Robert M. Coleman, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and San Jacinto veteran. In 1862 cattleman John Chisum arrived to raise beef for Confederate troops, and the county formally organized in 1864.

Coleman, TX

Erected in 1890 to replace a small 1879 structure on the courthouse lawn, this was Coleman County's second jail — a sturdy example of Victorian jail design with Romanesque Revival touches and decorative belt courses between its floors. The jailer and family lived on the ground level while maximum- and minimum-security cells filled the upper story. In all its years, only one man, a convicted murderer, was ever hanged here.

Westbrook, TX

The 1920 Westbrook discovery well opened commercial oil production in the vast Permian Basin, and in the frenzy that followed, local physician Preston C. Coleman promoted drilling on his own Mitchell County land. His P.C. Coleman No. 1, completed in 1923, was never a gusher — coaxed along with nitroglycerine, capped with a cedar stump, and finally abandoned in 1940 — yet it proved that oil lay beneath the Eastern Shelf. That promise paid off in 1946, when large finds nearby confirmed the region's petroleum wealth.

Taft, TX

Organized in 1879 from an earlier cattle partnership, the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company ran 167,000 acres of South Texas range and pioneered fencing the open range and shipping cattle by boat from its own wharves. Financial troubles passed control to Ohio investor David Sinton, whose son-in-law Charles P. Taft lent the ranch its name; under manager Joseph F. Green it became one of the state's largest and most innovative operations. The company town of Taft, platted in 1904, outlived the ranch, whose enterprises were sold off by 1928.

Victoria, TX

When diphtheria swept the German settlement of Steinerville in 1872, August and Thekla Spitzer buried two young sons on this ground and soon deeded the land to trustees of the community's new German church and school. Renamed Coletoville for nearby Coleto Creek, the settlement grew a cemetery whose oldest residents were born as early as 1812 and whose graves are laid out in rows by date rather than family plots. A 1997 survey counted more than seven hundred graves, including several veterans.

Colfax, TX

A. L. Kellam donated five acres in 1883 to help establish this cemetery, whose first burial in 1884 was Elisha Tunnell, founder of the chapel and community that became Colfax. The surrounding land held three schoolhouses and two churches over the years and hosted revivals and summer camp meetings. Today the cemetery holds roughly a thousand graves of the area's pioneers and their descendants.

Fort Worth, TX

Built in 1907–08 with money from the Swift and Armour packing companies and the Fort Worth Stock Yards, this hall finally gave the traveling Fat Stock Show a permanent home. Within its walls the indoor rodeo was born, and in 1923 WBAP carried the first live radio broadcast of a rodeo from this very floor. Over the decades the Coliseum also welcomed former President Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke here in 1911, and the great tenor Enrico Caruso, who sang here in 1920—all while the ground beneath it passed through three different cities.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1896, College Memorial Park is among Houston's three oldest African American cemeteries, taking its name from the nearby Houston College and serving the freedmen's town that grew in the Fourth Ward after the Civil War. Here rest many of the community's founders—including the Rev. Jack Yates, who championed Black property ownership and was reinterred here from Olivewood—along with educators, veterans of both world wars, and participants in the 1917 Houston riot. Neglect and vandalism scarred the grounds before late-century efforts revived it as a site of heritage.

College Station, TX

The commissioners who chose this spot for Texas A&M in 1871 did so largely because the Houston and Texas Central rail line already ran past it. Though no depot yet stood here when the college opened in 1876, conductors calling out the stop as "College Station" gave the surrounding town its name. Depots built by the H&TC and the International & Great Northern carried generations of cadets to and from campus until passenger service ended in 1959.

Junction, TX

In 1880, as the Hill Country town of Junction City took shape, A.J. Bush led seventeen men and women in forming a Church of Christ, meeting first in the county courthouse. Members raised their first sanctuary in 1882, and in 1883 John S. Durst began a 42-year ministry that spanned the congregation's growth. Successive buildings rose on this site in 1890 and 1929 as the church became a fixture of frontier Junction's religious life.

Collegeport, TX

In 1908 the Pierce brothers hired developer Burton D. Hurd to carve a town from 9,000 acres of ranch land, promising a college and a port on Trespalacios Bay. Advertised in northern newspapers for its mild climate and rich farmland, Collegeport drew settlers, and by 1912 it boasted a bank, churches, the county's first free public library, its first Boy Scout troop, and a women's club. But a hard freeze in 1914, then drought and livestock disease, drove families away, and the venture faded—its old rail depot later rebuilt as the town library.

Collegeport, TX

Founded alongside the town of Collegeport in 1908, this cemetery served area residents from its earliest days, with some graves marked simply by Roman numerals set in shell concrete. The King's Daughters, a women's charitable organization, tended it from 1921 until a cemetery association formed in 1958. Hurricane Carla destroyed most of the records in 1961, but the community has always cared for the grounds.

Austonio, TX

Collin Aldrich, born in 1801, fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in the war that won Texas its independence, then served as the first chief justice of Houston County from 1837 to 1841 under the Republic of Texas. He died in 1842, and the State of Texas erected this memorial to him in 1936, the centennial of independence. His life bridged the battlefield and the founding of civil government on the Texas frontier.

McKinney, TX

Carved from Fannin County and created in April 1846, Collin County was named for Collin McKinney — land surveyor, signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and member of the Congress of the Republic of Texas. The county seat began at Buckner in 1846 before moving to the town of McKinney, also named for him, two years later. The county was organized in the same summer it was created, just as Texas was joining the United States.

McKinney, TX

As early as 1858 Collin County had a system for relieving its poorest citizens, and in 1886 it acquired this property as the County Farm, where residents helped work the land in exchange for care. In the 1920s the county added guarded quarters to hold prisoners here, and a paupers' cemetery on the grounds is still maintained. The farm ceased operations in the 1950s.

McKinney, TX

Completed in 1880 to a design by F.E. Ruffini — architect of many Texas public buildings of the era — this High Victorian Italianate structure served as the Collin County prison for 99 years. Its bracketed cornice and arched windows mark it as one of the few surviving Ruffini works in the state, and federal Public Works Administration funds modernized it in 1938.

McKinney, TX

Born in New Jersey in 1766, Collin McKinney lived to the remarkable age of 95, dying in this very house in 1861. In between he became a fixture of Texas's fight for nationhood: one of the five men who drafted the Texas Declaration of Independence and among its fifty-nine signers on March 2, 1836, before serving in the House of Representatives of the young Republic. In gratitude both the county and its seat carry his name.

Corsicana, TX

Collin Street Bakery opened in Corsicana in 1896 when German immigrant baker August Weidmann partnered with local cotton buyer W. T. McElwee, pairing baking skill with showmanship. Weidmann's secret recipe became the famous "DeLuxe" fruitcake, eventually shipped worldwide. McElwee's rooming house above the bakery drew visiting ballplayers, circus troupes, and celebrities—from Will Rogers to John Ringling—who mailed the cakes to friends far and wide.

Wellington, TX

Collingsworth County was carved from the sprawling Young and Bexar territories in 1876 and formally organized in 1890 with Wellington as its seat. It honors James Collinsworth, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, a soldier at San Jacinto, secretary of state under President Burnet, and the Republic's first chief justice. The county thus links the far Texas Panhandle to the founding figures of the Republic.

Welllington, TX

The county's first hospital rose on this site in 1917, and in 1924 surgeon Dr. Elmer Wood Jones bought the facility. He built a new fieldstone hospital here in 1935 and the next year gave it to the Dominican Sisters of Springfield, Illinois, who renamed it St. Joseph's. The sisters won accreditation in 1950, doubled its size in 1951, and served the community until selling it back to the people of Collingsworth County in 1972.

Austin, TX

This family burial ground was established by Newton Isaac Collins, Sr., who came out of slavery in Alabama and, after the Civil War, acquired land across eastern Travis County and founded the thriving community of Pilot Knob. The first known burial here was his son-in-law in 1894, and generations of the Collins and Bremond families followed, gathered around a monument to the community's founder. A small iron fence still encloses his memorial.

Quitman, TX

Erected in 1859–1860 by Mississippi settlers James and Harriet Collins, this was Wood County's first brick structure, its bricks molded and burned nearby and its furniture crafted in a plantation shop by Collins and enslaved workers. In the war years of 1861–1865, Confederate units marched past on their way to the front. The home has belonged to the Haines family since 1870.