Historic Markers in Texas

Dallas, TX

A South Carolina native, John M. Crockett came to the young settlement of Dallas in 1848 and opened one of its first law offices. He rose to serve as state legislator, mayor of Dallas, and lieutenant governor of Texas in the first years of the Confederacy, and even logged weather observations for the Smithsonian. His public life traces the arc of frontier Dallas from raw settlement toward established city.

Granbury, TX

Frontiersman and former congressman David Crockett came to Texas in early 1836, pledged allegiance to the provisional government, and died with the Alamo's defenders that March. For his sacrifice his heirs were granted nearly 1,300 acres, and in 1853 his widow Elizabeth and their sons arrived to claim the land, building cabins and farming here. Over later generations the tract passed through the hands of cattlemen, a Depression-era dairy, and a quarter-horse operation.

Gilmer, TX

J. F. Croley bought the Croley Hardware Company in Gilmer in 1890 and, as many general merchants of the era did, added an undertaking service to the store's offerings. The enterprise grew into a partnership by 1920 and a burial association by 1933, and Croley's nephew Croley Cook built a dedicated funeral home with a 200-seat chapel in 1946-47. An expanded chapel followed in 1979.

Mason vicinity, TX

This burial ground served the earliest citizens of Mason and nearby Koocksville, with its oldest recorded grave dating to 1856. Among those laid to rest here is the county's first sheriff, Thomas Milligan. The Crosby family bought the surrounding land in 1866, giving the cemetery the name it has carried ever since.

Crosbyton, TX

This state monument honors Henry Clay Smith — "Uncle Hank" — a German-born pioneer who, with his wife Elizabeth, built the famed Rock House in 1877 and became a byword for frontier hospitality on the Texas Plains. The couple settled at Old Emma above the Cap Rock, an escarpment marking the edge of the high plains, and the State of Texas raised this memorial to them in 1936. They lie buried near the home that made their name.

Crosbyton, TX

Crosby County was created in 1876 from the Young and Bexar territories and organized a decade later in 1886, taking its name from Stephen Crosby, a Commissioner of the General Land Office who came to Texas in 1845. Its county seat migrated across the plains from Estacado in 1886 to Emma in 1890 before settling in Crosbyton in 1911. The shifting seat traces the slow settlement of the West Texas high plains.

Crosbyton, TX

After Crosby County voters chose the new town of Crosbyton as their seat in 1910, disputed elections tied up the decision in court until 1912, clearing the way for a proper courthouse. Fort Worth architect M. L. Waller designed the Neo-Classical building—its full-height entry crowned by a pedimented, columned portico—and contractor S. Goodrum completed it in late 1914. It has served as the seat of Crosby County government ever since and is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Crosbyton, TX

Crosby County's seat wandered across the South Plains before settling down. It began in 1879 at Estacado, a Quaker colony where county offices worked out of dugouts, shacks, and wagons until the first courthouse rose in 1888. The seat jumped to Emma in 1890, then to Crosbyton after the Crosbyton-South Plains Railroad bypassed Emma in 1910 — and the present courthouse followed in 1914.

Crosbyton, TX

Crosbyton sprang up in 1908 on the ranch lands of the C.B. Livestock Company, which deliberately built a school, store, railroad, and inn to lure homesteaders onto the West Texas plains. The strategy worked: by 1911 the town claimed a thousand residents and the county seat. Once open range, the surrounding country became rich irrigated farmland.

Crosbyton, TX

Established in 1909, this cemetery was carved from a 90,000-acre spread run by the C. B. Livestock Company on the Texas South Plains. Part-owner Julian Bassett, who also donated the Crosbyton townsite, gave the land when a ranch cowboy named James Boggs was thought to be dying—though the first actual burial was that of 18-month-old Willie Oliver. Bassett and many other early settlers now rest among the graves.

McMullen County, TX

The community of Cross in McMullen County grew from one of the area's earliest permanent settlements, known over the years as Nopal, San Miguel, and Franklin before taking the name of Samuel C. Cross, who opened its store and became postmaster in 1924. The post office closed a decade later, but ranching sustained the area, and in 1953 a nearby gas well—then the largest in the state—tied this quiet ranch country to the Texas energy boom.

Brownwood vicinity, TX

Southern families settling here after the Civil War formed a community first called Cross Out, renamed Cross Cut in 1897 by a clerical error on a post office application. The cemetery began in 1879 with the burial of Caroline Pentecost Elsberry. An oil strike in 1923 briefly swelled the town, but by 1940 the dead outnumbered the living, and after the school consolidated in 1954 only a few buildings and this graveyard remained.

Fredericksburg, TX

Long an Indian signal point rising 1,915 feet, this limestone hill was recorded in 1847 by German geologist Ferdinand Roemer, who arrived as German colonists settled the Fredericksburg area. Settler John Christian Durst, finding an old timber cross on its summit, named it Kreuzberg, or Cross Mountain. Its Easter fires recall both a German folk tradition and the 1847 Meusebach treaty that made peace with the Comanche nation.

Cross Plains, TX

The land holding Cross Plains Cemetery was first granted to James Knight, one of Stephen F. Austin's original colonists, as reward for service in the Mexican-American War, before passing through a string of absentee owners. The first burial came in 1882 — the young son of "Uncle Johnnie" Laird — and in 1905 the Steele family deeded the ground to cemetery trustees. Today it holds the town's founding families, its first mayor, John A. Wagner, many military veterans, and members of its fraternal lodges.

Cross Plains, TX

Belmont L. Shields founded the Cross Plains Review in April 1909, deliberately getting his paper going before the railroad arrived — which it did when the Texas Central reached town in 1912 and most of the community picked up and moved a mile to the new townsite. Passing through a series of owners after 1914, the Review became the town's memory, chronicling everything from local growth to the death of pulp writer Robert E. Howard and the wildfires of 2005. As the oldest business in Cross Plains, it is woven into the town's story.

Grand Prairie, TX

The Eastern Cross Timbers is a narrow ribbon of sandy woodland dividing the Blackland and Grand Prairies, and for centuries its springs, salt licks, grass, and game made it a natural gathering place. Wichita people of Caddoan stock roamed here in the 1700s, while Kiowa and Comanche wintered and traded along routes that carried southern flint northward; French traders arrived by 1720 and Spanish expeditions passed through toward their missions. Anglo-American settlement in the 1840s brought conflict, culminating in the 1841 Battle of Village Creek, after which the tribes withdrew westward.

George West, TX

From Spanish colonial days into statehood, travel across this part of Texas depended on rough dirt tracks, many simply called "ox-cart roads" for the wooden Mexican carts that lumbered along them. This site marked the junction of two such roads — one from Brownsville to San Antonio, the other from Laredo to Goliad and on to the coast at Indianola. Built entirely of wood and rawhide, the carts stood taller than a man, squealed so loudly that drivers greased their hubs with prickly pear, and for two centuries carried nearly all the freight in Texas.

Celina, TX

East of Celina, a Baptist congregation gathered in 1882 on a acre-and-a-half tract that brothers Abiel and Edmond Stelzer had held in common, and the burial ground beside it already held graves reaching back to 1875. When the railroad arrived, the congregation followed it into the new town and became First Baptist Church of Celina, but the cemetery stayed put and remains in use today. Its official 2006 designation preserves one of the quiet fixtures of Collin County's farming country.

McKinney, TX

Built in 1887 for Joe H. and Clara Letson Crouch, this McKinney residence is a fine example of Queen Anne architecture, with an asymmetrical jumble of gables, a turret, a wraparound porch, and richly milled and shingled details. It passed to F. Dudley Perkins in 1906 and to the Martin Moses family in 1920. It stands as one of the town's showpiece Victorian homes.

Stephenville, TX

Tennessee natives Dr. Martin Swan Crow and his wife Mollie Jane Crow settled in Stephenville in 1871, where he built a thriving medical practice and drugstore and both invested heavily in real estate. Remarkably for her era, Mrs. Crow founded the town's first savings and loan and served as a director of a regional railroad. She likely built this Queen Anne cottage around 1893 after her husband's death, its cypress siding and fishscale shingles echoing the family's opera house on the courthouse square.

Stephenville, TX

Built before 1892, this limestone building housed the Erath County National Bank on its ground floor under president Dr. M. S. Crow. At the suggestion of his wife, Mollie Jane Crow, the upper floor became an opera house seating about 400 that hosted plays, dances, and community gatherings until the rise of motion pictures dimmed it by 1920. Its Romanesque style later sheltered other businesses.

Salt Flat, TX

Named for the birds that flocked to its water, Crow Springs was an oasis in the far West Texas desert used by Indigenous peoples for centuries. The Butterfield Overland Mail built a stage relay station here in 1858, though the route soon shifted south toward Fort Davis, and during the Apache wars of the early 1880s Texas Rangers and Buffalo Soldiers of the U.S. 10th Cavalry camped at the springs to keep New Mexico's Apaches from joining the leaders Victorio and Nana. Today the springs have gone dry, the station has crumbled to dust, and the crows are gone.

Crowell, TX

Crowell's schools grew up alongside the town itself, which took root on the West Texas plains in 1891 when Foard County commissioners carved the area into nine school districts. Early settlers pooled resources—Benjamin R. Blankenship helped fund the first schoolhouse—and rebuilt after fire destroyed the original in 1897, earning state accreditation and holding the first graduation by 1908. Depression-era federal programs like the Public Works and Civil Works Administrations helped raise new buildings in the 1930s, and the district produced standout figures like football star Dick Todd, who set state scoring records before playing for Texas A&M and the Washington Redskins.

Crowley, TX

This burial ground began serving the settlers of the Deer Creek area soon after they arrived around 1848, its earliest marked grave that of an eight-year-old boy who died in 1857. Sarah "Sallie" Dunn deeded the land as a public cemetery in 1879, and when the town of Crowley organized along the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad about 1880, the old Deer Creek Cemetery took the new town's name. The grounds hold the pioneers who settled this corner of Tarrant County.

Pasadena, TX

As permanent settlers arrived near Buffalo Bayou in the 1890s, the new town of Pasadena needed a place to bury its dead, and this knoll overlooking Vince's Bayou became its community graveyard in 1906. Renamed Crown Hill after World War I, likely for the nearby Crown Central Refinery, it holds veterans of four American wars and generations of early settlers and community leaders. It also became a resting place for Mexican-American farm families beginning in the 1920s, earning it the name the Mexican Cemetery.

Marble Falls, TX

Backbone Valley's first public building rose slowly between 1859 and 1870 on land donated by the heirs of settler Jefferson Barton, and was named for the Rev. Arter Crownover, whose Methodist preaching opened its doors. The chapel soon doubled as a school, and a cemetery came into use nearby by 1872. Restored to its original appearance, it still serves as a church and community center.

Austin, TX

Built in 1917 as one of the first homes in Austin's Enfield subdivision, this house rose on land tied to the estate of Texas Governor E.M. Pease, whose granddaughter Carrie Crusemann was a silent partner in the neighborhood's development company. In 1924 newspaper publisher Charles Marsh more than doubled the home's size and reoriented its entrance, giving it its Jacobean Revival character. Its half-timbered gables carry woodcarvings by Peter Mansbendel and ironwork by Fortunat Weigl, both noted Austin craftsmen.

Crystal City, TX

After the United States entered World War II, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ran a lesser-known internment system alongside the mass removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. At Crystal City, a former migratory-labor camp became the nation's largest internment facility and the only one built exclusively for families, holding Japanese, German, and Italian nationals seized in the U.S., Hawaii, and Latin America for possible prisoner exchange. Ringed by a ten-foot barbed-wire fence and guard towers, the compound functioned like a small town of some 700 buildings and averaged 2,800 residents; it did not close until 1948.

Cuero, TX

Cuero sprang up in 1873 when the railroad arrived in the DeWitt County coastal plain, and it took the county seat from Clinton three years later. Its population swelled after the great coastal storms of 1875 and 1886 destroyed the port of Indianola, sending refugees inland to start over here. A farming, ranching, and later oil-and-gas center, Cuero also became famous for its Turkey Trot, begun in 1912.

Hochheim, TX

Stretching forty-five miles along the Guadalupe River, the Cuero I Archeological District was defined in the early 1970s to study and preserve sites threatened by a proposed reservoir. Excavations in 1972-73 uncovered 352 significant sites spanning some 9,000 years of human occupation — from the camps of prehistoric nomads to those of historic Tonkawas and Comanches. Later sites mark the arrival of Anglo-American settlers under Green DeWitt's colony in the 1820s and 1830s.

Cuero, TX

Chartered in early 1872, the Cuero Land and Immigration Company set out to develop more than 4,000 acres carved from an 1833 Mexican land grant. Its founders were men of standing — among them civil engineer and congressman Gustav Schleicher and Fletcher S. Stockdale, who had briefly served as governor of Texas in 1865. By donating land to lure the Gulf, Western Texas and Pacific Railway, the company brought the first train in March 1873, touching off a land boom that made Cuero a thriving railroad terminus and civic center.

Brownsville, TX

Built in 1893, this handsome brick building housed 'La Nueva Libertad,' the growing grocery and mercantile business of Don Andrés Cueto, a Spanish immigrant, complete with retail store, storerooms, a carriage house, and domed bakery ovens. Its corbelled brick cornice and parapet make it a fine surviving example of late nineteenth-century South Texas commercial architecture.

Van Horn, TX

Carved from El Paso County and organized in 1911, Culberson County took its name from David B. Culberson (1830–1903), a celebrated constitutional lawyer who served as a Confederate officer, a Texas legislator, and a longtime member of the United States Congress. The dusty town of Van Horn became its county seat. Its creation extended orderly government across the vast, arid reaches of far West Texas.

San Augustine, TX

Built in 1839, this Greek Revival home with Doric columns and a garret ballroom belonged to Ezekiel Wimberly Cullen, a Georgia settler who fought in the Texas Revolution and served in the Third Congress of the Republic of Texas. A friend of President Mirabeau Lamar, Cullen authored legislation setting aside public lands to fund public schools and a state university. The house survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

El Campo, TX

On September 8, 1962, El Campo took a symbolic turn as the honorary capital of Texas under the "Operation Home Town" booster campaign, with local figure Culp Krueger playing the role of governor for the day. Such civic promotions were a mid-century staple of small Texas towns competing for attention and investment. The marker commemorates that day of hometown pride and community spirit.

Temple, TX

Founded in 1958 amid a postwar boom in both Temple's population and national interest in the arts, the Cultural Activities Center grew from a "festival of the arts" envisioned by clubwoman and violinist Nora Lee Wendland. Seven founding groups—from a community chorus and civic orchestra to a camera club and theater players—came together under one banner. It became a model for arts centers elsewhere and spun off Temple's civic theater and heritage museum.

Mansfield, TX

This burial ground was first used shortly after the Civil War, its earliest legible stone marking Julia Alice Man, who died in 1868. Her husband Ralph S. Man and his brother-in-law Julian Feild founded the town of Mansfield, and in 1874 the site was deeded to the local Cumberland Presbyterian congregation. Among its graves are Civil War veterans and victims of the 1918-19 influenza epidemic, making it the oldest section of Mansfield Cemetery.

Daingerfield, TX

This congregation reaches back to 1849, when Presbyterian settlers in the young state of Texas first gathered for worship in one another's parlors. For decades beginning in 1852 they met in the Chapel Hill College building on this spot, and for a time the sanctuary was shared with Baptists and known as the "Union Church." A shrinking population forced the church to close its doors in 1925, but the faithful reorganized in 1950 and returned to their historic ground.

San Marcos, TX

Built by at least 1901, this San Marcos church blends the pointed Gothic Revival arches of a house of worship with the fish-scale shingling and octagonal towers of the Queen Anne style. Raised by the Cumberland Presbyterians and later renamed Fort Street Presbyterian, it passed through Lutheran and Pentecostal congregations before being rehabilitated for office and residential use in the 1990s.

Marshall, TX

The Cumberland Presbyterian presence in Harrison County began in 1848 when the Rev. James Sampson and 22 charter members organized a Marshall congregation, dedicating a sanctuary in 1853. Over the next sixty years the denomination spread into rural communities like Ewing Chapel, Hope, Nesbitt, and Fairview, its members active in education and politics. As better roads let worshippers travel to town churches, the country congregations faded, until Fairview and Marshall merged in 1984.

Cumby, TX

Named for a grove of black jack trees atop the highest point in the county—once beside an Indian camping ground and trail—this settlement grew from a frontier crossroads into a thriving trading center. A post office opened in a settler's home in 1848, and by 1860 the town had stores, physicians, blacksmiths, and a log schoolhouse. Renamed in 1896 for a Confederate veteran and legislator, the town later faded as improved highways drew commerce elsewhere.

Bellville, TX

Rebecca Cumings and her three brothers came to Texas from Virginia in 1821 as members of Stephen F. Austin's famous "Old 300," earning a 20,000-acre grant by building and running a creekside mill. After deaths in the family in 1885, a descendant designed this stuccoed-brick vault for their reinterment, and fifteen Cumings now rest inside. It stands as a rare architectural relic of Texas's first Anglo colony.

Alvin, TX

When the catastrophic 1900 Galveston hurricane destroyed his home, banker-investor Oscar Smith Cummings had contractors salvage the wreckage and build this Victorian residence in 1900–01. Meat-market owner Oscar Smith bought the house after Cummings moved to Houston in 1904. Slated for demolition in 1972, it was rescued and restored, earning designation as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1977.

Cuney, TX

This community began in 1870 when Andrew "Andy" Bragg and Nelson Sneed, former slaves turned farmers, settled here and were joined by other freedmen landowners and tradesmen. Promoted after 1916 by banker H. L. Price as a commercial and agricultural center for Black Texans, the town was renamed Cuney to honor the prominent leader Norris Wright Cuney and grew quickly with churches, stores, gins, sawmills, and a rail station. Falling farm prices after World War I sent residents elsewhere, leaving Cuney a quiet reminder of its founders' ambitions.

Comanche, TX

James and Susannah Cunningham arrived in the Republic of Texas about 1839–40 and put down roots in Comanche County in 1855, becoming a leading family that took part in frontier defense against Indian raids. In 1889 the couple and their twelve children held a first reunion; the gatherings grew into an annual summer tradition, with neighboring land later bought to keep them going. The marker commemorates a family celebration that has endured for generations.

Three Rivers, TX

When newspaperman Jim Cunningham's town of Oakville was bypassed by the railroad, he moved his family and the Live Oak County Leader seven miles west to the raw new settlement that became Three Rivers, where in 1913 he contracted the town's first permanent home. The five-room frame house blended Prairie, Foursquare, and Victorian touches, its long central hall and twelve-foot ceilings channeling coastal breezes through the rooms. From here the Cunninghams shaped the young town — publishing its paper, sitting on its first school board, and founding its first Baptist church.

Walker County, TX

A native of Walker County, Minnie Fisher Cunningham earned a pharmacy degree in 1901 before becoming one of Texas's most influential political women. As president of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association and a co-founder of the National League of Women Voters, she helped win the vote for women, then in 1928 became the first Texas woman to run for the U.S. Senate. She later ran for governor in 1944, placing second in a nine-candidate primary, and remained a force in Democratic politics — a friend of Franklin Roosevelt known fondly as "Minnie Fish" — until her death in 1964.

Crane, TX

Born in the East Texas town of Troup, C. B. Curry entered law enforcement young and joined the Texas Rangers in 1933, serving stints in Falfurrias and San Angelo. In 1935 he came to Crane as a special investigator, helping keep order through the raucous days of the West Texas oil boom. He later served as deputy sheriff and chief of police before turning to private business.

Brady, TX

When World War II demanded thousands of new pilots, Brady mayor Harry Lamar Curtis secured his town's airfield as a national defense airport and won federal money to enlarge and pave it. A contract flight school relocated from Dallas's Love Field in 1941 and became Brady Aviation School, training more than 10,000 cadets under West Texas's clear, uncrowded skies before it closed in August 1944. The cost was not only financial: twenty-one cadets, six instructors, and a personnel officer died in training accidents here.

Fort Worth, TX

Tennessee native A. C. "Clayton" Luther began developing this part of Fort Worth in the early 1930s with homes and commercial buildings. In the 1940s he built the Luther Apartments on Highland Street, later renamed Curzon Place when the avenue itself was renamed. Drawing on his travels through Florida, California, and Europe, Luther favored a distinctive blend of Spanish, Moorish, and Mediterranean styling for the property.

Wheeler, TX

The banks of Sweetwater Creek lay in the heart of the Comancheria, where Plains peoples wintered in country rich with buffalo. In the winter campaign of 1868-69, George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Cavalry and Kansas volunteers to recover two Anglo women captured from Kansas settlements. Rather than open fire on a large Cheyenne village and risk the captives' lives, Custer detained several chiefs, opened tense negotiations with the Cheyenne leadership, and by ultimatum won the women's release in March 1869.

Paducah, TX

The CV cattle brand dates to 1850, and the herd it marked passed through the hands of famed cattlemen — including Charles Goodnight — before reaching Cottle County. Established in the 1880s across 47,000 acres, the CV Ranch was later broken up and sold as small farms in the late 1920s, giving rise to the community of Cee Vee with its stores, churches, school, and cotton gin. Drought, the Depression, and World War II thinned the population until only a handful of families remained by the 1990s.

Cypress, TX

The Cypress region of northwest Harris County took shape after Attakapas and Akokisa peoples gave way to Anglo settlers like the Burnetts and Simmonses in the 1830s, with Matthew Burnett running an inn and serving as first postmaster at Big Cypress. German immigrants seeking land and religious freedom arrived in the late 1840s, and the Houston and Texas Central Railway reaching Cypress Top in 1856 turned scattered farms into a thriving depot community of stores, hotels, and dance halls.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Founded in 1851, the Associated Cypress Baptist Church built its meetinghouse on land later deeded to the congregation by Spencer Shearer, whose gift also created a burial ground called to service by the tolling of the bell tower. Local tradition holds that Confederate troops drilled on the church grounds during the Civil War. The congregation helped seed other area churches, and descendants of its founders remain active today.

Leakey, TX

Begun in the 1870s, Cypress Creek Cemetery served a scattered community of pioneers along Cypress Creek before the town of Leakey existed, on land belonging to settler John Bunyan Stidham, Sr. Its earliest graves reach back to the late 1870s, and its markers tell hard stories, including Laura Stidham and her young son Alonzo, killed when a tornado destroyed their home in 1927 and buried together beneath plain stones. More than seventy-five marked graves, many unmarked ones, and ten veterans lie among the descendants of the region's first families.

Center Point, TX

Cypress Creek Cemetery holds the nineteenth-century heritage of a German settler community in the Texas Hill Country. Its oldest documented grave, from 1861, belongs to Laura Steves Boerner, whose husband Wilhelm was killed at the Battle of the Nueces in August 1862—a deadly clash in which Confederate forces attacked German Unionists fleeing Texas. Pioneers, children, a respected physician, and even two strangers who died of tuberculosis while passing through rest here.

Cedar Park, TX

In the 1860s, families scattered along Cypress Creek pooled their effort to give their children a school, first a small log cabin on a hilltop above the water. As the settlement grew they replaced it in 1877 with a wood-frame building, still a one-room, one-teacher schoolhouse, which taught local children until 1937. A modern Cypress school rose on the site half a century later, carrying the old name forward.

DeLeon, TX

A blacksmith by trade, Cyrus Campbell migrated to Texas in 1828 and did various work for the young Republic—including forging leg irons for the captured Mexican general Santa Anna after the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto. Active in the Methodist Church and remembered for choosing the site of the De Leon Cemetery, he moved to De Leon in 1883, where his became the first grave in the burial ground he had helped locate.

Temple, TX

Raised near Travis in Austin County, Cyrus Maxwell Campbell enlisted in the Confederate army at 21 and rose to captain in the 16th Texas Infantry. After the war he farmed with the help of Freedmen, then turned to lumber, opening Campbell & Lovitt Lumber in Temple in 1888 and expanding across Central Texas until the Depression closed the family enterprise in the 1930s.

La Grange, TX

On March 24, 1889, Czech immigrants gathered in La Grange to form the Katolicka Jednota Texaska (KJT), the Czech Catholic Union of Texas, chartered that July with six lodges. As a fraternal benefit society it offered life insurance, financial aid, and educational scholarships, eventually growing to more than a hundred lodges statewide. It remains a pillar of Texas's Czech-Catholic community.