Historic Markers in Texas

Columbus, TX

Columbus's old cemetery holds the founders of one of Texas's oldest towns, with its earliest headstone dating to 1853 and the city taking title to the seven acres in 1870. Among the buried are Benjamin Beason and town founder W.B. DeWees, both of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists, early historian Dilue Rose, a War of 1812 and Texas Revolution veteran, and numerous Confederate soldiers and victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic.

Independence, TX

Chartered by the Republic of Texas in 1845 and opened in 1846, Baylor grew from the efforts of Judge R. E. B. Baylor and others to become the oldest university in Texas still operating under its original name. For forty years it stood here at Independence—men on the hill to the south, women at Baylor Female College whose columns still mark this spot—before relocating to Waco and Belton in 1886. Among its early presidents was G. W. Baines, great-grandfather of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Garden Ridge, TX

In the mid-1800s, German families—Schwab, Friesenhahn, Wenzel, Fey, and others—left nearby New Braunfels to carve farms out of the countryside, forming the village that became Comal. Among the first Germans to reach Texas in the 1840s, they built a close-knit farming settlement anchored by a cooperative cotton gin, a grocery, a blacksmith shop, and early church and school institutions. Some of their farms remain in the hands of descendants today.

New Braunfels, TX

Comal County was created and organized in 1846, carved from the Travis and Bexar land districts, and named for the river whose spring-fed islands suggested pancakes to early settlers. Its seat, New Braunfels, had been established a year earlier and honors Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, the German nobleman who led colonists here. The county's very names carry the imprint of its German founding.

New Braunfels, TX

Comal County held its first court in a clerk's home in 1846 and cycled through cramped quarters before commissioning renowned Texas courthouse architect J. Riley Gordon in 1898. Gordon's Romanesque design, built of stone quarried on land owned by statesman Edward Mandell House, features his signature rounded pavilion entrances and richly detailed masonry. A stone jail addition followed around 1930, and the building has been carefully renovated since.

New Braunfels, TX

The Comal County Fair has been a fixture of New Braunfels since the early 1890s, beginning in 1892 as a fundraiser tied to the dedication of the city hospital. A fair association organized in 1893 under president Harry Landa, and the event moved to permanent grounds along the Guadalupe River by the turn of the century. Scaled back during two world wars and the Depression, it endures as one of the largest county fairs in Texas, still closing local schools and businesses.

New Braunfels, TX

During the Civil War, Comal County and its seat of New Braunfels—settled by German immigrants—became a manufacturing and supply center for the Confederacy, its local newspaper pressing the secessionist cause so hard that the 1861 vote favored secession 239 to 86. More than 300 men enlisted, forming companies that fought in the New Mexico campaign, the recapture of Galveston, and the Red River Campaign. Local mills produced gunpowder, cloth, flour, and paper, and one firm even ordered European machinery to make newsprint from corn shucks before wartime losses ended the project.

Comanche, TX

First settled by five families in 1854 and organized in 1856, Comanche County was named for the Comanche people, whose hunting grounds were being overtaken by settlers. Early years were hard — raids on livestock, farmers kept from their fields, and near-starvation in 1861 relieved only by food from Bell County. Railroads arrived in 1880 and 1890, and an oil boom followed in 1918–1920.

Nolanville vicinity, TX

This break in the hills between the Lampasas River and Nolan Creek sat astride one of the Southwest's oldest Indian trails and became an escape route for Comanches after their last raid in Bell County. In March 1859, raiders killed four settlers, including John and Jane Riggs, and carried off their daughters Rhoda and Margaret before abandoning them at the gap while fleeing a pursuing posse. Public outrage helped spur a U.S. Cavalry campaign against the Comanches led by Major Earl Van Dorn.

Austin, TX

When Austin was founded in 1839, this was Comanche country—part of the vast Comancheria the Penateka band had dominated across Central Texas since the mid-1700s. Rising more than 500 feet above the Colorado River, Comanche Peak served as a landmark in a network of trails, fords, and springs the Comanche used for travel, communication, and signaling, some of which survive today as roads like Comanche Trail. Nearby Defeat Hollow recalls a skirmish around 1870 as settlers pressed into the region.

Granbury, TX

Rising 1,229 feet above the Brazos country, Comanche Peak is really a flat-topped mesa long known as a landmark to Native peoples and later settlers. It may have held ceremonial meaning for local tribes or served as a lookout over game and rivals, and a Comanche trail crossed the region nearby. In 1846 a party of pioneers and Native Americans bound for a meeting there nearly missed it because of its flat crown, and later settlers came to dance, picnic, and hunt among its caves and rocks.

Marathon, TX

This route across the Big Bend country is the Comanche Trail, worn by Comanche raiders riding south from the western plains toward Mexico, watering at Comanche Springs near present Fort Stockton before striking for the Rio Grande. The Comanche dominated this vast reach of Texas for generations. Later the same path guided emigrants and soldiers through some of the state's most forbidding terrain.

Graford, TX

In the 18th century, Plains peoples—Comanches, Kiowas, and allies—blazed this trail linking watering holes and provisions between raids in northern New Spain and a Taovaya trading village on the Red River, where French traders brought goods upriver. For generations the route carried Native travelers, Spanish and American expeditions, and early settlers across western Palo Pinto County. Part of the old trail now lies beneath Possum Kingdom Lake.

Colorado City, TX

On the banks of the Colorado River in October 1840, a punitive expedition of ninety volunteers under Colonel John Henry Moore attacked a Comanche village, killing and capturing scores of its people and recovering hundreds of horses. Guided by seventeen Lipan Apache scouts under Chiefs Castro and Flacco, the raid came amid the bitter frontier warfare of the Republic of Texas years. It was one episode in the long, violent contest between settlers and the Comanche over the Texas plains.

Odessa, TX

In the 18th century the Comanches swept onto the southern plains, driving the Wichitas eastward and the Apaches west to become the dominant power of the region. From this heartland they raided across a vast frontier — from Corpus Christi and the Red River deep into Mexico — and the many routes of their raids converged into the great Comanche War Trail, which passed some 20 miles southeast of this marker. It was a corridor of both commerce and conflict for generations.

Littlefield, TX

Across the Llano Estacado ran one of several routes where New Mexican traders — the Comancheros — met the Comanches to barter weapons, whiskey, and goods for cattle, horses, and captives taken in Texas raids. The traffic reached back to the 1760s, when Mexican hunters first ventured onto the 'Staked Plains' after buffalo, and explorers from Zebulon Pike to Randolph Marcy later found the traders' campsites and wagon ruts. The trade finally ended in the mid-1870s as the Comanches' power on the plains was broken.

Pampa, TX

Built in 1931 to house the Combs-Worley ranching and oil interests along with Pampa's professional offices, this building announced the Panhandle's new petroleum wealth in confident Art Deco lines. Metal casement windows and stylish storefronts marked it as thoroughly of its decade, the work of Amarillo architects W. R. Kaufman & Son. It stands among the grand structures of Pampa's "million dollar row."

Comfort, TX

Dedicated in 1892, this Gothic Revival building first housed the German Evangelical Congregation founded a year earlier by the Rev. Frederick Bauer, part of the strong German heritage of the Texas Hill Country. Its bell tower was added around 1898, and for more than fifty years the Lutherans shared the space with other denominations, earning it the name Comfort Community Church. Renamed Immanuel Lutheran in 1947, the congregation still worships here.

Comfort, TX

Seeking a permanent civic center, Comfort's business leaders formed a corporation to fund this hall, designed by Fredericksburg architect Hans Christiansen and opened in 1930. It gave the small Hill Country town a single place for basketball, dances, meetings, plays, and parties, and later thrived as a movie house under Hank Zimmerman from 1947 to 1964. Restored by local benefactors, it still serves as a performing-arts and civic center today.

Comfort, TX

From 1856 until 1910, Comfort's mail was handled inside a succession of mercantile stores. In 1910, with Hermann Ingenhuett serving as postmaster, this dedicated post office was completed to a design by noted San Antonio architect Alfred Giles, whose Renaissance Revival building blended red brick and limestone. It served the town until 1952.

Comfort, TX

Comfort grew from a settlement of German immigrants who arrived in 1854, and within two years they had enough children to warrant a log-cabin schoolhouse with dirt floors and backless benches. After the Civil War the community organized a Schulverein to oversee education, and German-trained teachers like Carl Herbst and Fritz Fischer taught for decades. A three-room limestone schoolhouse with a bell tower rose in 1892–93 and expanded into the 20th century as non-German families arrived and curriculum shifted.

Brackettville, TX

Fort Clark was founded as a U.S. Army post in June 1852 to guard the Texas frontier, and in 1873-74 Army engineers built a row of officers' houses, of which this was the commanding officer's quarters. Its occupants included Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie, the aggressive cavalry commander of the Indian Wars, and Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright, later famed for his stand in the Philippines during World War II. The house keeps its central entry, wood-frame porch, dormers, and four boldly capped chimneys.

Commerce, TX

The U.S. Treasury began this Georgian Revival post office in the summer of 1917, as America entered World War I, and wartime delays pushed its completion into 1918. With its central portico and alternating parapet-and-balustrade roofline, it handled Commerce's mail until 1971 before a second life as the city's public library.

San Antonio, TX

This crossing over the San Antonio River was the main ford between the town of San Fernando de Bexar and the Alamo, and history clustered around it for centuries. At its footbridge on February 23, 1836, Alamo emissary Albert Martin parleyed with Santa Anna's aide Juan Almonte in the opening days of the siege; later the span drew travelers and writers, and bore a famously trilingual sign warning German, Mexican, and Anglo riders—each in their own tongue—not to gallop across. The present structure replaced an 1880 iron bridge, still linking the old city to the new.

Euless, TX

Euless's sandy, well-drained soil made it a natural cradle for commercial horticulture, an industry pioneered here beginning in the 1800s. Kentucky native Ambrose H. Boyd founded Tarrant County Nurseries in 1879, and his son John helped organize the state's nurserymen's association; Arch N. Cannon, trained under Boyd, launched Euless Nurseries in 1897 and bred his own fruit and rose varieties, including the "Cannon's Wonderful" and a rose named "Louise." Shipping stock across the region, these families made nursery growing the area's most profitable enterprise well into the twentieth century.

Floydada, TX

Alabama-born William P. Daily reached Floyd County in 1911, saw that the growing town of Floydada needed lodging, and opened a 21-room hotel in January 1913. Catering mostly to traveling salesmen, he ferried them from the railroad station by horse-drawn buggy and let them show their wares in the lobby; the place was later renamed the Lamplighter Inn.

Beeville, TX

In January 1893 several prominent Beeville citizens gathered to organize a bank, and the Commercial National Bank opened that May with $50,000 in capital stock at the northwest corner of the courthouse square. Profitable from its first quarter, it paid dividends by 1895 and expanded steadily across the twentieth century—adding drive-in windows, a branch at the Chase Field Naval Air Station, and outlets around the region.

San Antonio, TX

When Texas's Secession Convention met in January 1861, it created a fifteen-man Committee on Public Safety to enforce its mandates over the fierce objection of Unionist Governor Sam Houston. On February 18, 1861, minute men acting under the committee's orders surrounded and forced the surrender of the U.S. Army's Texas headquarters in San Antonio, seizing vast stores of arms and supplies. The committee went on to organize military districts guarding the frontier, coast, and Mexican border.

Newcastle, TX

This grave holds three young men — Rice Carlton, Reuben Johnson, and Patrick Euell Proffitt, all in their teens or early twenties — killed together during an Indian raid along Elm Creek on July 17, 1867. A brother of one of the slain, John Proffitt, donated the cemetery land where they were laid to rest. Their common grave marks the deadly reality of frontier settlement in North Texas in the years just after the Civil War.

Dallas, TX

Long-distance communication reached Dallas in 1872, when telegraph lines arrived alongside the Houston & Central Texas Railroad, followed by the city's first telephone line in 1878. Two decades later the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company built a toll relay office on this site in what was then the separate city of East Dallas, switching every long-distance call and linking the growing city to the wider world. By 1905 the little "toll building" had already been outgrown, a sign of how quickly the telephone had woven itself into everyday Dallas life.

Nevada, TX

Collin County's late-19th-century settlers founded many small neighborhood schools, which by the 1940s had splintered into six separate districts. In 1947 the county board voted to consolidate them into a single rural high school, and after some hesitation the town of Josephine joined too; Nevada was chosen as the site, and the new school took the deliberately unifying name 'Community.' In 1974 it built a central campus and became the Community Independent School District it remains today.

Clyde, TX

Settlers began arriving here after the Texas and Pacific Railroad reached the area in December 1880, many clustering near the commissary of crew foreman Robert Clyde, whose name the town adopted. A post office opened in 1881, and the schoolhouse doubled as church and courtroom. Boosters once painted Clyde "The California of Texas" on the water tower for its fertile soil, even as tornadoes struck the town in 1895, 1938, and 1950.

Houston County, TX

By the late 1850s Eli Coltharp had settled beside Cochina Bayou, opening a store and post office along the stage route west of Nacogdoches. The little farm community of Coltharp Hill soon boasted a gin, gristmill, and shops, and its school building doubled as a Masonic lodge. When the railroad passed it by and a sawmill opened nearby in 1901, farming faded and the post office closed by 1909.

Comyn, TX

After settlers poured into this part of Comanche County around 1875, a rural community grew up around W. F. Matheney's trading post, whose shortened name—"Theney"—stuck to the town. The Texas Central Railroad arrived in 1881, a depot took the name of railroad official M. T. Comyn, and the settlement blossomed with stores, a gin, and lodge halls. A 1918 oil pipeline tank farm briefly conjured a tent city of hundreds before construction ended and residents drifted away.

Paint Rock vicinity, TX

As settlers filled the land along the Concho River in the late 1800s, a small farming community grew up here, gaining a post office in the home of W.D. Cape in 1905 and a general store opened by J.W. Barr in 1906. It served the surrounding countryside as a business center with a school, two churches, a cotton gin, a blacksmith shop, and a cemetery. Population declined by the 1940s, and the post office closed in 1954.

Egypt, TX

Egypt earned its biblical name during the drought of 1827, when settlers in Stephen F. Austin's colony came to this fertile bottomland for corn, saying they were "going down into Egypt for corn." Among its earliest residents were notable figures of the Texas founding era, including sugar pioneer Eli Mercer and William Menefee, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Dairyman Gail Borden and stagecoach operator Maj. Andrew Northington were also early settlers.

Jermyn, TX

Jermyn sprang up in 1909 on the western edge of Jack County's Lost Valley as a division point for the Gulf, Texas & Western Railroad, named for the line's president. With land donated by a grandson of trail-driving legend Oliver Loving, the town boomed for two decades, filling with a hotel, bank, cotton gin, drugstore, newspaper, and dozens of other businesses. But when the railroad was sold to the Frisco system in 1930 and service was curtailed, Jermyn dwindled as families left for city work—leaving today a post office, two churches, a store, and ranching to sustain what remains.

Weir, TX

Settled in 1851 by a wagon train from Arkansas on land once part of the Nashville Colony grant, this Williamson County community first went by the name Water Valley. After repeated failures to win an acceptable name for its post office, exasperated residents settled on Jonah in 1884. For nearly half a century it was known for a celebrated grist mill that operated from 1865 until 1912.

Little Elm, TX

Little Elm sits on land from the Peters Colony, an empresario grant the Republic of Texas awarded in 1841 to lure settlers to its northern frontier. Among the first were John and Delilah King, who came from North Carolina in 1844; their son "Kit" King helped organize the area's first mail service and became postmaster when the Little Elm post office opened in 1852. Formed from a cluster of small settlements, the town might have faded—but the creation of Lake Dallas in the 1920s and Lake Lewisville in the 1950s, plus nearby Dallas–Fort Worth, drove it to grow and incorporate in 1966.

Austin, TX

Settlers began filling this stretch of the Texas Hill Country after surveys in the 1850s, and by 1880 they wanted a post office. After federal authorities rejected six proposed names, the exasperated citizens shot back, "Let the post office be nameless" — and the name stuck. Nameless grew a store, meat market, and school-cum-church, but the post office closed in 1890 and classes ended in 1945, leaving only a school, cemetery, and ruins.

Pilgrim, TX

This community carries the name of Thomas J. Pilgrim, a Connecticut-born educator who arrived in Stephen F. Austin's colony in 1828 and opened a school at San Felipe the next year, along with what is remembered as Texas's first Sunday School. An 1838 land grant from the young Republic of Texas brought him to this area, and he settled in nearby Gonzales in 1840. By the 1870s the little trading post here had also gained a rougher reputation as a hideout of the notorious gunman John Wesley Hardin.

Sidney, TX

Sidney took shape around 1870 when early settlers located along Jimmie's Creek, building a log schoolhouse by a spring in 1877 that also hosted the town's Methodist, Baptist, and Church of Christ congregations in turn. A store, post office (named for a storekeeper's son), and Holstein dairy herds followed, and by the early 1900s the town had doctors, drug stores, and a telephone exchange. It also basked in the fame of nearby Round Mountain, the first field laboratory of world-renowned geologist Dr. Robert T. Hill.

Houston County, TX

Settlement in this stretch of dense East Texas pine forest began in the 1830s on land within the Mexican-era Joseph Vehlein Colony, and settlers named their community Tadmor after the biblical 'Tadmor in the Wilderness.' A post office ran from 1885 to 1914 and a school opened in 1889, while most early residents farmed until the timber industry became a major employer by the century's end. The Tadmor Baptist Church has anchored the site since 1900.

Georgetown, TX

In the 1880s and 90s, immigrants from Austria, Bohemia, Germany, Moravia, and Silesia were drawn to Williamson County's rich blackland farm soil, forming a community that gathered around a cotton gin built about 1883. The 1890 post office took the name Theon, from the Greek for "to God," and social life revolved around a rifle club's dances and contests and a cooperative beef club that butchered and shared meat each month. When the post office and school closed, the gin kept the little farming settlement alive.

Valley Spring, TX

O.C.J. Phillips arrived as the first settler in 1853, and the crossroads communities of Whistleville and Bugscuffle eventually merged into Valley Spring, which gained a post office in 1878. The little Hill Country settlement's proudest native son was James Field Smathers (1888–1967), credited as an inventor of the electric typewriter. It is a place where frontier origins and modern invention meet.

Weches, TX

Set near ground once touched by 17th-century Spanish missionary efforts, this East Texas farming settlement took shape as families like the McLeans, Conners, Pattons, and Greggs arrived by 1840. First called Neches for the nearby river, it became 'Weches' after the Post Office reported the original name already taken. Alfred Monroe Gregg soon set aside land for a church, school, and cemetery — the familiar anchors of a rural community — though the post office finally closed in 1939.

Wrightsboro, TX

Wrightsboro was founded in 1851 by L. C. "Jack" Wright, an Alabama-born marksman and stock raiser, and gained its name from neighbors amused by his free-roaming burro. Wright served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, then returned to ranching and spent a decade as a county commissioner. At its height the town boasted numerous stores and a solid grain- and cotton-based economy, becoming a trade and social center whose Masonic lodge has met, off and on, since 1869.

Port Arthur, TX

In 1944, citizens of Port Arthur — many of them Federated Mission Society members from several churches — came together to found the Community Retirement Home. Incorporated that August, the nonprofit bought a former model apartment building for its first residents and expanded over the decades with donated buildings and new facilities. It has operated without state or federal funding, sustained by fees, gifts, and community fund drives.

Canyon, TX

When the 36th Division mobilized for World War II, Company F of its 142nd Infantry was filled largely with Randall County men — including ten sets of brothers and a father with his son. The unit shipped to Italy in 1943, waded ashore at Salerno, and spent some 400 days in combat across the European theater, earning seven campaign streamers. Eight local men were killed and two received the Distinguished Service Cross; from 1951 until it disbanded in 1968 the company drilled at a National Guard armory here.

Snyder, TX

Drawn from the National Guardsmen of Scurry County, Company G first organized and fought in France during World War I. Reorganized in 1924 and mobilized in 1940, it joined the 142nd Infantry of the famed 36th Division in World War II, fighting through some of the war's fiercest actions—Salerno, Cassino, North Africa, southern France, and Austria—as a heavily decorated unit.

Abilene, TX

On July 16, 1917, Company I of the 7th Texas Infantry was mustered into World War I service at Abilene under Captain R.M. Wagstaff, with 139 enlisted men drawn from the surrounding area. They trained at the West Texas Fair Grounds — now Rose Park — before transferring to Camp Bowie at Fort Worth and becoming part of the 142nd Infantry, 36th Division. The unit saw action in France with the French Fourth Army in October 1918 and mustered out in June 1919.

Anson vicinity, TX

Compere Cemetery is the last trace of a farming community established in the 1880s on ranch land sold by the Compere brothers. When Daniel and Callie Palmer settled here around 1900, they deeded two acres for a burial ground, first used in 1904 for the infant daughter of the Ashby family. Its weathered stones record ordinary lives, community leaders, veterans, and a victim of the 1918 influenza epidemic that swept the nation.

Dew, TX

William Scott Compton, an Alabama attorney, banker, judge, and state senator, purchased more than 3,000 acres in the Avant Prairie settlement in 1852 and built a log home, barns, and quarters for the people he enslaved. The cemetery began in 1855 with the burial of his eldest daughter and holds two sons who served as Confederate veterans, along with descendant George Walton White, a Texas legislator and Baptist minister. Family descendants formed an association in 1983 to maintain the well-preserved grounds.

Fayetteville, TX

This central-hall home reflects the plain, practical style Texans favored in the 19th century. It passed among a series of Fayetteville families—including a charter member of the local Masonic lodge and the prominent merchant Hugo Zapp—and remained in the Zapp family from 1865 until 1945.

Comstock, TX

Comstock sprang up in the early 1880s as a watering stop on the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway, taking advantage of a natural lake in the arid country west of the Pecos. Named for a railroad dispatcher, it replaced the earlier settlement of Sotol City and grew into a busy hub of the wool and lamb trade, even sheltering Texas Rangers for a time. After World War II, new technology and shifting economies thinned its population.

Ozona, TX

In the early 1900s these flagstone ruins were a working stage stand, the first stop on the mail-and-passenger run linking Ozona to the Southern Pacific railhead 80 miles away at Comstock. A stage leaving Ozona at 5:00 a.m. arrived here about 8:30 to find fresh horses already harnessed, while the agent's family lived in a tent floored with flagstone beside rock pens for livestock. The automobile made the whole operation obsolete around 1914, though the old wagon ruts still scar the land.

Paint Rock, TX

Concho County was created on the map in 1858 but not formally organized until 1879, a two-decade gap that reflects how thinly settled this stretch of West Texas long remained. Its name comes from the river the Spanish called the Concho — 'shell' — for the freshwater mussels they found in its waters. The name is a small survival of the era of Spanish exploration in the region.

Paint Rock, TX

Concho County's first permanent courthouse rose in Paint Rock in 1886, replacing a crude early structure, and was designed by the noted Ruffini brothers, F.E. and Oscar — the same architects behind the University of Texas's first main building. F.E. lived only long enough to draw the plans, leaving Oscar to complete it. Built in the French Second Empire style from rusticated stone quarried just miles away, its rough-faced masonry is unusual for that elegant style.

Sterling City, TX

When the Concho, San Saba and Llano Valley Railroad pushed a line into Sterling City in 1909, it was chasing the wealth of West Texas ranch country—livestock that needed a way to distant markets. A boxcar served as the first depot until this mission revival station rose to take its place, becoming the hub of a young ranching town. Highways and pipelines eventually siphoned away the freight, and the line went quiet in 1958, leaving the depot as the last witness to the rail era that built the area.

Greenville, TX

Concord Baptist Church was organized in 1844 by the Rev. Ben Watson beneath a tree near Shady Grove, making it, by the marker's account, the oldest institution in Hunt County. The congregation raised its first building near that spot and, after several moves, settled on this site in 1885. Along the way it helped organize the Texas Baptist Convention in 1848.