Historic Markers in Texas

Palestine, TX

Three Fitzgerald families settled Mound Prairie Creek in the 1840s, giving their name to the community that grew there. Fifteen charter members organized Concord Baptist Church at the local schoolhouse in 1871—naming it for a Louisiana community they had left—and worshipped in successive sanctuaries here despite a 1940 fire, with the adjoining cemetery holding early settlers and three Confederate veterans.

Crockett, TX

In 1889 Armistead Albert Aldrich gave three acres to the Concord Presbyterian Church for a sanctuary and graveyard in the piney woods of Houston County. The first burial came in 1895, and over the decades the wooded ground filled with the family names of the surrounding farm community, along with veterans and members of fraternal lodges. In 1963 the church handed the land to a cemetery association that still keeps lots reserved for descendants of those already resting here.

Quitman, TX

Settlers founded the Concord community in the 1870s, and early resident Hubbard Moseley gave land for a burial ground, a school, and a Baptist chapel. Velinda Wood, laid to rest in July 1875, has the oldest marked grave, though unmarked earlier burials lie among the roughly one thousand people from Concord, Hainesville, and nearby settlements interred here. Generations of caretakers and a cemetery association have tended the grounds ever since.

Rosenberg, TX

At the close of the 19th century a community of Mennonites settled these lots of the old Barnabas Wickson league, and their earliest dead—Heinrich Reimer in 1898, Maria Klassen in 1899, and children lost to typhoid in 1900—were laid to rest here. In 1905 a non-Mennonite neighbor, George W. Howell, deeded an acre beside the Concord school for a public cemetery. When the devastating 1900 storm drove many Mennonites away, families of German, Czech, and Polish descent moved in and took over the burial ground, whose earliest marked grave dates to 1913.

Bellmead, TX

The Concord Baptist Church organized in 1866, and the first burials in its adjoining cemetery came in 1869 with Elizabeth Parrish and her triplets. The graveyard is now nearly all that remains of Concord, a vanished town that once had a store, cotton gin, school, and church. Among the many veterans resting here is Elija Goodnight, considered the last U.S.-Mexico War veteran buried in Texas.

Kenney, TX

In the farmland of northern Austin County, Concord Cemetery opened in 1870 as the burial ground of the Concord Christian Church, its earliest grave holding a Confederate veteran and early settler. Around it gathered the pioneer families—Collins, Creath, McNutt and others—who had reached Texas in the 1830s, one of them serving with the baggage guard at San Jacinto. Confederate, Civil War and World War I veterans lie beneath its varied stones, a record of a rural community across a century of life. After decades of neglect, descendants cleared the overgrown grounds in 2010.

Troup, TX

Settlers drawn by cheap land and good water reached this part of East Texas in the 1840s, worshipping first in a brush arbor by Camp Ground Creek before building a church that doubled as a school. The Concord Cemetery grew alongside that congregation, its oldest documented grave dating to 1878, and land was deeded to it by the Martin family across the decades. Buried here are veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, tended each year in a cleaning tradition kept by pioneer families' descendants.

Omaha, TX

Built around 1860 to replace an earlier log church, the Concord Meeting House did the multiple duty typical of a rural East Texas building—serving at once as a place of worship, a schoolhouse, and a polling place. It carries on today as a Baptist church, a thread of continuity running from the eve of the Civil War to the present.

Robbins, TX

Organized in April 1855 by pioneer settlers before the community of Concord even took shape, this Missionary Baptist congregation raised a Greek Revival meetinghouse on land donated by Isaac Burleson, its first pastor the Rev. W. A. Walker. The church anchored its Leon County neighborhood for more than a century and a half. Tragedy struck on Labor Day weekend in 2011, when a wildfire swept through and destroyed the historic sanctuary.

Robbins, TX

For nearly a century, schooling anchored the rural community of Concord in Leon County. From a two-story frame schoolhouse of the early 1880s, the district grew to a brick building in 1920 and a 1927 structure with an auditorium serving the whole community; older buildings were handed down for the primary grades and, tellingly, for a segregated African American school. Consolidations swept in neighboring districts through the 1920s and '30s, peaking above 400 students, and by the 1950s Black schools of the area were gathered at Concord under the Carver name before the district merged into Leon ISD in 1960.

El Paso, TX

On land once known as Concordia—home of Chihuahua trader Hugh Stephenson, whose wife Juana was laid to rest here in 1856—this ground grew into El Paso's great frontier burial place. By the 1880s townsfolk drove three miles out to inter their dead, and by 1890 the grounds had been parceled into Catholic, Masonic, Jewish, Black, Chinese, Military, Jesuit, and other sections, a mosaic of the borderland's peoples. Among the thousands who rest here is the notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, alongside pioneers, civic leaders, and war veterans.

La Vernia, TX

Concrete Cemetery grew out of the land of James Henry Newton, who brought his family from Mississippi about 1851–52 and set aside a burial ground when his brother Joel died in 1856, though an 1855 grave suggests earlier use. The surrounding community—first called Bethesda, then Concrete—took its name from an 1858 concrete building that served as school, church, and Masonic hall. Newton deeded the tract formally in 1875, and the cemetery came to hold both Anglo and Hispanic sections, with more than 800 burials of pioneers, veterans, and children.

Cuero, TX

For sixteen years Concrete College was among the most respected schools in Texas, founded in 1865 by educator-minister John Van Epps Covey to teach everything from Latin and music to bookkeeping and etiquette. Students rose at five, studied by slate, and lived under strict rules barring liquor, gambling, and profanity; enrollment once swelled to 250. Epidemics and a railroad that bypassed the town of Concrete closed the college in 1881, and its stone walls were later crushed to surface roads, leaving only rubble behind.

Hubbard, TX

Built in 1906 for saddle and harness maker E. L. Condor, this cypress and long-leaf pine home showcased the era's small-town prosperity with a wraparound porch, Doric columns, and a pedimented bay. Condor was also an early trustee of Hubbard's Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the house stayed in his family for nearly half a century. It survives as a fine example of an early Texas city home.

Cone vicinity, TX

Cone Cemetery took its first burial in April 1897, when W. G. English was laid to rest on land his son J. P. English patented from the state later that same year. The burial ground gained its name in 1903 from a local post office honoring rancher Stanton J. Cone, and in 1910 the county formally acquired the property for public use. It stands as a record of the ranching families who settled the high plains of Crosby County.

Corpus Christi, TX

In May 1862, with the Union warship Arthur blockading the Texas coast, enlisted men tried to desert the Confederate outpost at Camp Aransas by stealing a launch to reach the blockaders. Two captured men, both said to be from New York, were quickly court-martialed and hanged near Mesquite Street and Upper Broadway, the only military execution in Nueces County during the Civil War. Local Unionists were forced at gunpoint to view the bodies, marked with placards warning "traitors take warning," and many fled with their families to Matamoros, Mexico.

Marshall, TX

During the Civil War, this Marshall site sheltered the exiled Confederate government of Missouri, whose Union-held statehouse left its Confederate officials without a capital. From a modest one-story frame house, Governor Thomas C. Reynolds directed the civil and military affairs of Confederate Missourians from late 1863 until the war's end in 1865. The governor lived in a small cottage that once stood just across the street.

San Antonio, TX

Part of a 40-acre tract the Spanish crown once granted to San Antonio, this ground was carved into City Cemetery Number Four and, after an 1885 purchase by a United Confederate Veterans camp, became the Confederate Cemetery. Among its 900-plus burials lie noted Confederate figures including Texas Ranger and editor John Salmon "Rip" Ford, George Wythe Baylor, and General Hamilton P. Bee. Later graves of World War I and World War II veterans and of veterans' descendants share the same grounds.

Alvin, TX

Founded in the 1890s by a local camp of the United Confederate Veterans, this Alvin cemetery began as a burial ground for Confederate veterans and their families before its grounds were enlarged and opened to the wider public. Among those laid to rest here are veterans of four wars, victims of the deadly 1900 hurricane, and prominent civic leaders. The graveyard gathers the memory of a Brazoria County community across generations of service and loss.

Round Rock, TX

Brothers Edward and John Hudson were Presbyterian ministers and teachers who came to Williamson County from Arkansas in 1856. Both served the Confederacy as chaplains — Edward joining an infantry company in 1862 and being wounded at Corinth and again in Georgia, John enlisting in a Texas cavalry regiment and serving to the war's end. On a private's pay, a chaplain held services, taught illiterate soldiers to read and write, tended the sick, and carried the dead from the field.

Jefferson, TX

Beginning in 1861, J. B. Dunn's meat plant near Jefferson dressed, packed, and shipped beef, pork, and mutton to the Confederate army, salting the meat in 42-gallon barrels and moving it along the Cypress Bayou shipping route. So much food and cotton flowed out of Texas that the state earned the name "breadbasket of the Confederacy," though the army sometimes complained of spoiled, bloody meat in the barrels.

Bonham, TX

During the Civil War this site served as the Confederate commissary for the Northern Sub-district of Texas, issuing uniforms, blankets, harness, saddles, and rations to soldiers guarding the state's northeastern frontier. At least seven brigades drew their supplies from here, and an army mess kitchen furnace cooked beef, pork, and wild game on the spot. To honor an 1861 treaty, the depot also distributed food to Choctaw, Cherokee, and other Indian Territory civilians allied with the South.

Sargent vicinity, TX

In the winter of 1863–64, as Union forces pushed up the Texas coast capturing one port after another, Confederate commander John B. Magruder ordered the mouth of Caney Creek fortified against the advance. Thousands of Confederate troops threw up an earthen fort, redoubts, rifle pits, and trenches near this site, enduring weeks of naval bombardment. No infantry battle ever came—the fortifications did their job as a deterrent, and Banks soon shifted his campaign toward Louisiana.

Rusk, TX

Built in 1862 by John L. Whitescarver and William H. and Benjamin F. Campbell, this East Texas works was meant to manufacture rifles for the Confederacy. Unable to obtain the materials and tooling for rifles, the operators instead produced Colt-model pistols. The inscription notes that a number of enslaved or free Black workers were employed at the factory.

Galveston, TX

Leon Smith went to sea from New England at thirteen and was a steamship captain by twenty before the Civil War carried him to the Texas coast. Commanding the marine department of the Confederate military district, he armored his ships with cotton bales and, with just two days' notice, prepared the waterborne assault that helped win the Battle of Galveston on New Year's Day 1863. Months later he rode through enemy fire to fight alongside Dick Dowling's men at the victory of Sabine Pass. His ships ran the Federal blockade, trading Texas cotton overseas for the guns, medicine, and goods the South could not otherwise obtain.

Columbus, TX

This sturdy brick tower — built by the town of Columbus in 1883 from more than 400,000 handmade bricks, with 32-inch walls — served as the community's water tower and fire house until 1912. Since 1926 it has been owned by the Shropshire-Upton Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which made it the Confederate Memorial Museum. Its dual life joins civic infrastructure with Lost Cause memorial culture.

Austin, TX

In 1884, John B. Hood Camp of United Confederate Veterans launched a home in Austin for aging, disabled, and destitute Confederate soldiers, aided by fundraising from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Opened at 1600 West Sixth Street in 1886, the home grew from sixteen to twenty-six acres and passed to state control by 1891. More than 2,000 veterans lived here until the last resident died in 1954, and the buildings were razed in 1970.

Baytown, TX

Brothers Thomas and John Chubb established a shipyard on Goose Creek before the Civil War, and when the war came they answered the Confederacy's call for Texas manufacturing by turning it into the Confederate Naval Works. There they built and repaired the shallow-draft centerboard schooners—vessels like the Royal Yacht and Bagdad—whose light draft let them slip through the shoals of the Gulf and run the Union blockade. Thomas Chubb rose to captain and superintendent in the Texas Marine Department, and the yard kept building ships for years after the war before the land eventually became part of the Goose Creek oil fields.

Fort Davis, TX

This marker traces Jefferson Davis's ties to Texas: a Mexican War officer in 1847, then U.S. Secretary of War in 1855, when he strengthened frontier forts to open West Texas and famously experimented with imported camels for desert patrols and hauling. After the Civil War and his imprisonment, the former Confederate president returned to visit the state and its veterans. Jeff Davis County was named for him in 1887.

Sulphur Springs, TX

As Union armies pressed into the Deep South, thousands of Confederate families fled to the relative safety of Texas, where only a few coastal towns ever came under fire. Among them was the Louisiana family of Mrs. Amanda Stone, rescued after a road accident by Hopkins County neighbors who shared what little they had — even their last stewing hen. The marker recalls a broader exodus, noting Gen. Stand Watie's family in the Indian Territory and Gen. Kirby Smith's relatives, and the poverty, grief, and dependence on enslaved labor that the refugees carried with them.

Livingston, TX

As the Civil War opened in 1861, an Indian agent trained Alabama and Coushatta men of Polk County as cavalry, and in 1862 nineteen of them, including Chief John Scott, enlisted in the 24th Texas Cavalry. Reassigned as infantry and then briefly to naval duty, the company eventually numbered well over a hundred and spent much of the war building and running flat-bottomed scows to move Confederate supplies down the Trinity River. Wartime governors' correspondence recorded their service.

San Antonio, TX

Established in 1863 just beyond San Antonio's limits, this Confederate tannery answered the South's desperate need for shoes, harness, and saddlery once the Union blockade choked off manufactured goods. Its tanners used a distinctive mesquite-based liquor that soaked deep into the hides, letting the works run through the Texas summer when other tanneries spoiled. Alongside it stood a river-powered cotton and woolen mill, part of a wartime scramble to make salt, hats, and cloth at home.

Austin, TX

When Texas seceded on February 1, 1861, its 8th, 9th, and 10th Legislatures found themselves consumed by the machinery of the Civil War—raising, equipping, and supplying some 90,000 soldiers while defending a 2,000-mile expanse of coast and frontier. As the Union blockade choked imports, lawmakers built plants to make guns, powder, cloth, and salt, taxed produce in tithes, and financed cotton-for-goods barter through Mexico. Poor pay and worthless Confederate money left many legislators camping in tents and wagons on the capitol grounds.

Rusk, TX

During the Civil War, the open field along the road from Rusk to Crockett became Camp Rusk, a Confederate training ground chosen for its water supply from nearby Pryor Branch. Here new recruits drilled and veteran units were reorganized and re-equipped before heading to war; some went on to fight at Mansfield and Glorieta Pass. After the Confederacy fell, Union troops occupied the camp until the end of the occupation, when it was abandoned.

Hillsboro, TX

Formed in 1901, the Confederate Veterans and Old Settlers Association of Hill County bought 73 wooded acres for its summer reunion, held annually from 1902 to 1924. The three-to-five-day encampments drew several thousand people who arrived by wagon, special train, or auto, gathering around a spring-fed lake, pavilion, and ballpark for speeches, music, and baseball. As the ranks of veterans thinned after World War I, attendance fell, and the association deeded the grounds to the state in 1924 for a Jefferson Davis State Park that was never built.

Bryan, TX

When the Civil War halted the Houston & Texas Central Railway and turned nearby Millican into a boomtown, the railroad afterward created Bryan City—and at least 161 Confederate veterans settled there to help build it. Buried in the Bryan City Cemetery, these men became bankers, ranchers, school superintendents, and early faculty of the Agricultural & Mechanical College of Texas, binding wartime comrades into the civic life of a new town.

Goldthwaite, TX

This memorial names a roster of Mills County men who served the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865, listing their ranks and units across Texas and Arkansas regiments. Several, like the three Trent brothers, marched off together from the same company. The stone gathers ordinary local soldiers into a single act of remembrance.

Edna, TX

When the Civil War came, this small Texas county of just 2,612 people sent more than a hundred men to Confederate service — among them a Mexican War amputee who marched on a crutch and a Texas Revolution veteran killed at Shiloh. Their names filled companies of the 1st and 2nd Texas and Whitfield's Legion, while others rode with Terry's Texas Rangers or served as Confederate marines. From this thinly settled corner of Texas, local men reached some of the war's bloodiest fields.

Waco, TX

In 1870 only about fifty of Waco's residents were Jewish, but the Hebrew Benevolent Association, incorporated in 1873, gave the small community its first foothold. As political unrest drove heavy Eastern European Jewish migration in the 1880s, Waco's Jewish population grew rapidly, and in 1888 fifteen Orthodox families chartered Agudath Jacob, the city's first Orthodox congregation. From a rented room over a grocery store it grew through a series of synagogues, a religious school, and — by 1966 — a shift toward the Conservative movement, led for 62 years by the Rev. Samuel Levy.

Fort Worth, TX

Founded in 1892 as Fort Worth's first Jewish congregation—its name means "Love of Peace"—Ahavath Sholom raised a modest wooden synagogue in 1893 and, as its membership grew, moved and rebuilt repeatedly over the following century. A Hebrew Institute added in 1914 became a community hub, and its facilities served military personnel through both World Wars, while auxiliary and men's groups nurtured charitable and cultural life. Though the synagogue's location has shifted again and again, the congregation has remained the center of the community's religious observance.

Galveston, TX

Erected in 1870, Congregation B'nai Israel served as a cultural and religious center for Galveston's Jewish community for eighty-five years and was the second oldest temple in Texas. Its most famous leader, Rabbi Henry Cohen — who served from 1888 to 1950 — became one of the city's most beloved figures, a tireless humanitarian and adviser to people of every faith. The building was converted to a Masonic Temple in 1953.

Austin, TX

Congregation Beth Israel was organized in 1876 by about thirty charter members, led by the businessman Henry Hirschfeld and newspaper publisher Phineas de Cordova. The congregation bought a lot at 11th and San Jacinto and built its first synagogue in 1884, and Joe Koen began a remarkable 45-year term as president in 1889. In the 1950s and '60s it moved to a new campus on Shoal Creek Boulevard, where it remains a center of Austin's Jewish life.

San Angelo, TX

Jewish families had settled the Concho Valley by the 1880s, and by the 1920s some three dozen households in San Angelo set out to build a synagogue, dedicating Congregation Beth Israel in 1929. Many were immigrants or the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe who ran the city's retail trade. Fiercely independent, the congregation never joined a national branch of Judaism and served Jews across a wide stretch of West Texas before other towns built their own synagogues.

Waco, TX

Waco's Jewish community organized a benevolent association in 1869 and a B'nai B'rith lodge in 1873, holding Reform services in homes and rented rooms before formally founding Congregation Rodef Sholom—"pursuing peace"—in 1879. Led by figures such as Louis Migel and Sam Sanger, the forty founding families built their first synagogue on Washington Avenue in 1881 and a second on the same site in 1910. The congregation, with its Temple Sisterhood and later synagogue on North New Road, has continued a long tradition of service and philanthropy.

Beaumont, TX

Beaumont's Jewish community traces its formal worship to Yom Kippur services held in September 1887, during the East Texas boom years. The congregation built its first synagogue in 1901 and, under Rabbi Samuel Rosinger, dedicated this larger temple in 1923 — a design by Chicago architect Albert S. Gottlieb that quickly became a local landmark. Temple Emanuel has served the region's Jewish families ever since.

Austin, TX

When Edwin Waller laid out Austin in 1839 as capital of the Republic of Texas, he made Congress Avenue the city's grand central street, and "The Avenue" soon filled with government buildings, hotels, saloons, and shops. It witnessed gaslights and mule-drawn streetcars in the 1870s, the rise of the great 1888 Capitol at its head, and brick paving and trolleys in the twentieth century. Recognized for its history and architecture, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

Lubbock, TX

George Herman Mahon grew up on a West Texas cotton farm, practiced law in Colorado City, and in 1935 won election to Congress from the newly created Nineteenth District, a seat he held for 44 years. Trusted with knowledge of the atomic bomb during World War II, he chaired the defense appropriations subcommittee and eventually the powerful House Appropriations Committee, steering federal projects to West Texas. He rode in President Kennedy's Dallas motorcade in 1963 and retired in 1978 as the longest-serving member of the House.

Crockett, TX

Born in Houston County in 1881, Nat Patton was a schoolteacher turned lawyer whose folksy habit of calling everyone "cousin" carried him from county judge to the U.S. Congress. He represented East Texas in Washington from 1935 to 1945, the New Deal and World War II years when a rural district's voice reached the national stage. His decade in Congress bridged the world of the country schoolhouse and the machinery of modern federal government.

Bonham, TX

Sam Rayburn came to North Texas as a boy in 1887 and rose from the state legislature to become one of the most powerful figures in American government. Elected to Congress in 1912, he served 25 consecutive terms and, as Speaker of the House for longer than anyone in the nation's history, shepherded much of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal into law. His 1961 funeral in Bonham drew Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy alongside Lyndon Johnson.

Liberty Hill, TX

Alabama native Sampson Connell, Jr. came to Texas as a boy in 1834 and, with his father and brother, fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, earning a land grant for his service to the young republic. He helped found a church in Milam County before settling in Williamson County as a farmer and stockman, and served in the Confederate army and local Home Guard during the Civil War. This family burial ground, also called Bear Creek, was part of his homestead, its oldest known grave his own 1873 cairn.

Brownwood vicinity, TX

William Connell brought his family to Texas in 1834 and lived through its most formative decades, serving in the Republic of Texas Army, the Texas Rangers, and later the Confederate Army. The cemetery that bears his name—thought to be among the oldest in Brown County—was likely in use before 1861, and when the Connells buried their son in 1866 they set what is believed to be its first headstone. Sixteen families and more than twenty unmarked graves lie here, a quiet record of the pioneers who settled this frontier.

Stanton, TX

Put up in 1882 as a two-room dwelling for Carmelite priests, this was the very first building in Stanton. After their 1902 marriage, Dennis and Mary Connell made it their family home, and it grew room by room as their eight children arrived, gaining porches, gables, and additions through the 1920s and 30s. When the last Connell daughter died in 1990, the much-expanded house passed to the local museum.

Eastland, TX

Built in 1920 by C. U. Connellee, the 'Father of Eastland,' this theatre hosted road shows, musical performances, and plays as a regional showplace for years. Interstate Theatres bought it in 1946 and remodeled it into the Majestic movie house, adding a marquee to a stuccoed, Art Moderne facade fronted by a bank of six entry doors.

Corsicana, TX

Thomas Conner brought his family from Illinois to this part of Navarro County in 1856, and his son Edward bought 164 acres here in 1873. Family tradition holds that burials predate the first recorded interment of 1882, the year Edward formally set the cemetery aside. It has chiefly served the extended Conner family and holds the graves of at least four Confederate veterans, cared for today by the family's descendants.

Round Top, TX

African American residents of Fayette County founded Connersville Primitive Baptist Church in the mid-1880s on land where Thomas Cooper let the Black community build. The adjoining cemetery holds many of the enslaved and their descendants, with a tradition that burials here predate emancipation; its stones — the earliest dated 1904, one for a woman said to have lived a century — bear epitaphs like "In the back woods we lay." The relocated sanctuary now serves as a museum honoring the county's African American pioneers.

Rockport, TX

Born Conger Neblett in Corsicana, Connie Hagar trained as a musician before turning her attention to birds. After moving to Rockport in 1935 she became a self-taught authority on the Texas coast's migratory birds, sought out by ornithologists worldwide. In 1945 the Texas Legislature named this waterfront the Connie Hagar Wildlife Sanctuary.

Horseshoe Bay, TX

Conrad Fuchs, born in Germany in 1834, came to Texas in 1845 with his family and moved into Burnet County in 1853, receiving a state land grant in 1862. He left to serve in a Confederate artillery unit during the Civil War, then returned to build a steam grist and saw mill on Tiger Creek and to run the "Tiger Mill" post office. The fieldstone house he raised in the German pioneer style—with a central hall where his wife taught local children—became the heart of the settlement.

Conroe, TX

Conroe began in 1881 as Isaac Conroe's sawmill in the East Texas pine forest, at a spot where two railroads met and where the town was first known simply as Conroe's Switch. Lumbering brought early prosperity, and the settlement — still wild enough that a deer was once shot on the courthouse square — became county seat in 1889 and incorporated in 1904. The 1931 Strake oil discovery transformed the timber town into a booming petroleum center.

Conroe, TX

This burial ground holds generations of early African American Conroe, active from 1892 to 1966 and most heavily used in the first decades of the 20th century. Left overgrown for years, restoration efforts identified 47 headstones — including those of infants only days old — while surveys suggest more than 150 unmarked graves. Among those buried here is Sergeant Luther James Dorsey of the 10th Cavalry, perhaps the first Buffalo Soldier's grave found in Montgomery County.

Conroe, TX

In the early morning of February 21, 1911, a fire broke out in the Capitol Drug Store on Chambers Street and, driven by a north wind, swept through downtown Conroe toward the railroad tracks. The volunteer fire company, armed with a single hand-pulled hose cart and too little water pressure, could not stop it, and sixty-five buildings, businesses, and homes were lost at a cost of some $150,000. In response the city council quickly required fireproof construction, then mandated brick and stone, and downtown rose again in the stately masonry buildings that still stand.