Historic Markers in Texas

Abbott, TX

Drawn from Fayette County and from Moravia in Austria-Hungary, Czech immigrants became one of Hill County's largest and most influential groups, many fleeing compulsory military service, political limits, and the imposition of German in their schools. Lured by cheap land and rich soil, the first arrivals came in the 1870s and drew others as the railroads opened the region, making Abbott the informal capital of Czech settlement. Neighbors admired their thrift and tidy farms, and for generations they kept their language and old-world customs.

Wimberley, TX

This cabin of hand-hewn cedar logs chinked with clay was built in Comal County around 1850 and, from 1858 to 1951, sheltered the family of Dr. Adolph Schlameus, who taught the area's first school near Fischer for settlers' children alongside his own twelve. Moved from the Canyon Lake area, it was restored in 1960 and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Novice, TX

David Absalom Parker, an Ohio native born in 1849, came to Coleman County in 1876 with his wife Nannie and soon built this two-story stone home. He rose to prominence as a cattleman and, when rail lines reached the area in 1910, helped found the town of Novice. Owner of a general store and cotton gin, he was central to organizing its school, church, and post office.

Fredericksburg, TX

Pioneer David Crockett Riley built this stout stone house in the early 1870s near the Crabapple community, and four generations of his family lived in it. Its 24-inch outer walls were laid up from stone quarried a mile north, its timbers hewn from trees on the farm, and its milled lumber hauled ninety miles from Austin. Lacking store-bought hardware, Riley's shop forged the door locks by hand — and his workmen earned fifty cents and a pint of his home-distilled whiskey for a day's labor.

McAllen, TX

Brothers Enrique and Modesto Guerra opened a grocery in the brand-new town of McAllen in 1908, joined two years later by their father Diódoro to form D. Guerra and Sons. The family moved the business into this handsome brick and concrete building in 1912, where it operated until 1964. Its distinctive façade—recessed doorway, concrete brackets, and a molded-brick cornice with starburst and garland designs—still records the firm's name and construction date.

Dublin, TX

Built in 1901 by D. L. Harris, a partner in a Dublin mercantile store, and his wife Claire, this residence blends the architectural styles fashionable at the turn of the century. Its distinctive gabled roof with ornamental trim, wide veranda, and fishscale shingling mark it as a showpiece of small-town prosperity. Even the foundation stone was quarried locally and shaped on site.

Roby vicinity, TX

The hunt for oil in Fisher County began in 1918 and yielded nothing but dry holes for years. That changed on the 3,100-acre ranch of Dan W. Stephens and Laura Bell Johnson near Royston, where the Texas Company (later Texaco) began drilling in 1927. After an early attempt was plugged, a second hole struck the county's first producing oil in January 1928. Over 66 years the Stephens No. 1 produced nearly half a million barrels, and its revenues helped landowners weather the Great Depression.

Bay City, TX

Dolph Phenias (D.P.) Moore came to Matagorda County in 1869 and rose as a merchant, rancher, and landowner, selling the land on which Bay City was platted in 1894. In 1902 local contractors built this fifteen-room Queen Anne house for Moore and his wife Louise. A civic leader, Moore helped bring railroads to Bay City and develop the area's rice industry, and he donated land for Cedarvale Cemetery and Park.

Loraine, TX

Born to enslaved parents in Victoria County in 1860, Daniel Webster Wallace became a cowboy at fifteen, driving cattle from Mexico to Kansas. Riding for rancher Clay Mann—whose "80" brand gave him his lifelong nickname—he took Mann's advice, bought land, and even returned to school past the age of twenty-five. He built his own ranch in 1891 and prospered on cattle, crops, and oil, and his devotion to education saw a school named in his honor.

D'Hanis, TX

In 1847 empresario Henri Castro planted D'Hanis, his fourth colony, and named it for a company official. Alsatian immigrants endured great hardship to raise a community that lasted more than thirty years—until the railroad bypassed the town in 1881 and the settlement simply picked up and moved to the tracks. The new D'Hanis prospered by shipping cattle, cotton, and brick, and from 1900 a strong Mexican-American community added to its life.

Holliday, TX

When oil was struck in Archer County in 1923, a wildcat boomtown erupted at this crossroads almost overnight, complete with a hotel, cafe, school, ice house, and roughly two dozen businesses. It took its homespun name from a food-stand operator known simply as "Dad." As the county's largest oil field drew workers half a mile to the southeast, cowboys traded their saddles for drilling rigs, and residents long remembered a rowdy stretch of lawlessness patrolled by the Texas Rangers. When the wells and the boom played out, Dad's Corner emptied into a ghost town.

Lubbock, TX

On the eve of World War II, the United States realized it would need pilots by the thousands and launched the Civilian Pilot Training Program to turn college students into aviators. At Texas Technological College in Lubbock, roughly 6,500 cadets moved through the program, and half of them took to the air from this dirt-runway field run by local flyer 'Dag' Dagley. When the war's demand for pilots faded, the field closed and its quarter-section became the College Heights neighborhood.

Bay City, TX

One of the oldest newspapers still publishing in Texas, this paper began around 1845 in the coastal town of Matagorda before relocating to Bay City in the 1890s, when Bay City became the new county seat. Over its long run it chronicled the region's defining events, from devastating hurricanes to an 1870s yellow fever epidemic. Bay City Newspapers, Inc. took ownership in 1958.

Daingerfield, TX

Founded about 1830 at a spring where Captain London Daingerfield was killed, this East Texas town became a Confederate hub during the Civil War. Several army units enrolled here, and local tanyards, sawmills, a gristmill, a distillery, and foundries supplied leather, meal, and iron to the war effort—those foundries foreshadowing the later Lone Star Steel Company. The square, laid out in 1841, had already seen frontier drama, including an 1842 trial tied to the killing of Robert Potter of the Regulator-Moderator Feud.

Houston, TX

The community began on an 1861 land grant, developed after 1889 when a railroad right-of-way crossed the property and surveyors named the townsite Dairy in 1894. Its first settlers, Dr. John Magee and his wife Alief Ozelda Magee, arrived that year, and when a post office opened in 1895 it took her name—Alief. Surviving floods on the strength of farms, rice fields, and a determined citizenry, the town formed Harris County's first flood control district in 1909 before Houston annexed much of it in the 1970s.

Santa Fe, TX

The railroad hamlets of Arcadia, Alta Loma, and Algoa sprang up in the 1890s, and by the turn of the century their economy ran on citrus, figs, truck farming, and a fast-growing dairy trade. Creameries shipped butter and milk to Galveston and Houston by rail, and by the 1920s dairying was so common that, as locals told it, nearly everyone kept a cow. Stock laws, consolidation, and the postwar drift of workers to city jobs slowly squeezed the small operators, and the last Santa Fe-area dairy closed in the 1970s.

Matagorda, TX

Built around 1830 on the Gulf Coast at Matagorda, this weathered home has stood through countless hurricanes and served as a cultural and political center for early Texas. Its residents read like a roster of the young republic and state: A.C. Horton, Texas's first lieutenant governor; Caleb Ives, first rector of the state's first Episcopal church; and later pioneers in rice, oil, and land development.

Dalhart, TX

In May 1942, as the U.S. mobilized for World War II, flat, dry-skied Dallam and Hartley Counties made an ideal training ground, and Dalhart Army Air Field opened as a glider school for the new Waco CG-4A "Hadrian." Cadets learned to be snatched aloft on nylon tow ropes behind C-47s and to fight as infantry once they landed. As the war's needs shifted, DAAF retrained to turn out B-17 crews and then B-29 bombardment groups — one of them, the 393rd Bomb Squadron of the 504th Group, becoming the core of the unit Col. Paul Tibbets led to drop the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. The field closed that December.

Dalhart, TX

Dallam County was carved from older territories in 1876 and organized in 1891, taking its name from James W. Dallam, who in 1845 compiled a digest of the Republic of Texas Supreme Court's decisions. The county seat shifted from Texline to Dalhart, on land that had once belonged to the vast XIT Ranch — the three-million-acre spread the state traded for its capitol building.

Dalhart, TX

Dallam County, created in 1876 and named for Republic of Texas attorney James W. Dallam, first seated its government at the railroad town of Texline. When the Rock Island line crossed the Fort Worth and Denver City tracks in 1901, the new town of Dalhart sprang up at the junction and captured the county seat by 1903. This Classical Revival courthouse, designed by Amarillo's Smith & Townes and completed in 1923, still crowns the townsite with its Ionic columns and curved parapets.

Dallas, TX

In an era when American pediatrics lagged far behind other medicine, Dallas nurse May Forster Smith saw poor infants dying of dehydration and rallied her colleagues to act. In 1913 the Dallas Graduate Nurses Association opened the first baby camp in the Southwest—four Red Cross tents on the Parkland Hospital grounds—to treat sick babies and teach new mothers infant care. The camp grew into a cottage, then a Maple Avenue hospital, and in 1947 merged into what became Children's Medical Center of Dallas, one of the nation's largest pediatric providers.

Dallas, TX

Decatur Baptist College opened in 1898 out of a Texas Baptist effort to consolidate the state's Baptist schools under Baylor and the Baptist General Convention of Texas, at first teaching primary and secondary pupils alongside a junior-college program. Under long-serving president J. L. Ward the college broadened its offerings, and in 1965 financial pressures prompted a move to Dallas and a new name, Dallas Baptist College. It grew into a four-year institution in 1968 and became Dallas Baptist University in 1985, expanding into graduate degrees.

Dallas, TX

By 1910 Dallas had outgrown its old city hall, so officials sold that corner to a brewer who built the Adolphus Hotel and chose this site for a grand new one. Opened in 1914 to coincide with the State Fair, the five-story Beaux-Arts building of Texas gray granite, with its Corinthian columns, served the booming city for decades. In the basement of the adjacent municipal building, on November 24, 1963, Jack Ruby fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

Dallas, TX

The Republic of Texas designated a post office at the unincorporated town of Dallas in 1843, and three years later the first Texas Legislature created Dallas County from parts of Robertson and Nacogdoches counties. Both city and county honor George Mifflin Dallas, the Pennsylvania statesman elected eleventh vice president of the United States on a platform that favored annexing Texas. His name thus binds this North Texas crossroads directly to the national politics that brought Texas into the Union.

Dallas, TX

Completed in 1915 to the Renaissance Revival design of local architect H. A. Overbeck, this steel-framed Dallas building combined a courthouse with a jail for 200 prisoners in its upper floors. Its second-floor courtrooms once suspended summer trials until air conditioning arrived in 1951. In 1964 the east courtroom became the stage for the trial of Jack Ruby, convicted of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of assassinating President Kennedy.

Dallas, TX

In 1917, seventeen doctors' wives met in Dallas to form what is described as the nation's first auxiliary to a county medical society, channeling wartime and civic energy into public health work. The group promoted hygiene, nutrition, and safety, inspired sister organizations across Texas, and grew into a national movement within the American Medical Association. Over the decades it funded nursing scholarships, children's welfare, and medical facilities, and acquired the historic Aldredge House as its home.

Dallas, TX

Designed by the prominent Dallas firm of Lang and Witchell, this Gothic Revival building rose in 1927-28 to hold the growing county's records, offices, and courtrooms. First called the Hall of Records, it took its present name when the facilities were enlarged in the 1950s. Its cut-limestone walls and cast-stone Gothic detailing still serve Dallas County government today.

Frisco, TX

In July 1872 the Houston & Texas Central became the first railroad to reach Dallas, a turning point that helped make the city a commercial hub. This frame depot, built in 1903 when the line ran under the Southern Pacific system, served passengers until 1918 and then railroad staff until 1963. Rescued from demolition and relocated, it survives as a tangible piece of the rail age that reshaped North Texas.

Dallas, TX

When Dallas was chosen in 1911 as the home of a new Methodist university, local citizens pledged land and money, and in gratitude the first building on campus was named Dallas Hall. Designed by the Chicago branch of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge and inspired by Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia, it opened in 1915 holding every classroom, office, chapel, and the library under one roof. It remains the architectural and symbolic heart of Southern Methodist University.

Dallas, TX

The Dallas Morning News began publication on October 1, 1885, as a North Texas extension of A. H. Belo's Galveston News, the two papers linked by telegraph and a statewide network of correspondents. It quickly outgrew its parent, absorbed its Dallas rivals, and under G. B. Dealey's leadership became the state's leading newspaper. It famously took a firm public stand against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and pressed for honest government and better schools.

Dallas, TX

Plans for the Dallas Scottish Rite Temple began in 1902 under prominent Mason and civic leader Samuel P. Cochran, with the cornerstone laid in 1907 and the building dedicated in 1913. Designed in a stately Neo-classical style by lodge members Herb Miller Greene and J. B. Hubble, it became a showcase of fine materials and craftsmanship. It has stood ever since as a landmark of early-twentieth-century Dallas.

Dallas, TX

Efforts to give Dallas a symphony began with an 1899 club, but the city's first professional orchestra took the Dallas Symphony Orchestra name in 1911. Guided by a succession of noted conductors, it grew into one of the nation's premier ensembles and moved into a new Symphony Center in 1989. This marker was placed in 1993.

Dallas, TX

The Dallas Zoo dates to 1888, when the city bought two deer and two mountain lions and penned them in City Park. Public support and City Council funding grew the collection, which moved to Fair Park in 1910 and then to Marsalis Park in Oak Cliff, gaining specimens from famed hunter Frank Buck and improvements from Depression-era WPA labor. By the 1960s it had become a beloved attraction for citizens and tourists alike.

Wills Point, TX

This route began as a trail blazed by Caddoan peoples and later followed by French traders. By the mid-1830s it had become a principal road bringing emigrants and cargo into North Texas from the river port of Shreveport, and Van Zandt County's first courthouse rose along it in 1848. Used heavily for Civil War troop movements, the road carried ox teams and settlers into the 1900s.

Paradise, TX

Amid the 1880s Texas railroad boom, the Dallas, Pacific & Southeastern Railway set out to link Dallas with Albuquerque, grading a roadbed northwest through southern Wise County near Draco and Boonsville. Landowners like former sheriff W. J. Mann deeded rights of way, and local papers eagerly tracked crews, but the line ran short of money, never laid track, and no train ever ran. In 1926 North Texans persuaded the state to pave the ready-made grade, and Highway 114 now follows the phantom railroad's route.

Georgetown, TX

William Cornelius Dalrymple left North Carolina for Texas and served in its revolutionary forces and as a Texas Ranger in the turbulent 1830s. Settling on the San Gabriel River, he helped select the Williamson County seat and rose through public life as tax assessor, state representative, and senator. In 1860 Governor Sam Houston named him aide-de-camp and commander of the Texas Militia.

Longview, TX

On May 23, 1894, outlaw Bill Dalton led his gang into Longview and presented a note demanding money at the First National Bank, triggering a furious gunfight as Sheriff Jack Howard, City Marshal Mat Muckleroy, and armed citizens fought back. Three local men and one outlaw were killed, and the gang fled into Oklahoma with two bank officers briefly held hostage. Forged $20 notes later led lawmen to the surviving raiders.

Dalworthington Gardens, TX

Dalworthington Gardens grew directly out of Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era faith in the "back-to-the-land" movement, authorized by the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act's subsistence homestead program. After First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt saw promise in the Arlington area, a corporation was chartered in December 1933—its name stitched from Dallas, Fort Worth, and Arlington—and Civil Works Administration crews cleared 80 homestead sites. Despite early woes of missing gas and faulty plumbing, residents forged a tight-knit colony that incorporated as a town in 1949.

Houston County, TX

The Daily family and their neighbors founded the Dalys Community in the 1850s, and when Ethalinda Meriwether died in 1876 the Dailey and Hill families donated ground for a burial place. The cemetery served both this settlement and nearby Reynard, gathering generations of East Texas farm families into one hillside. Among its graves lie veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, and in 1981 the name was formally fixed as Dailey Community Cemetery.

Goldthwaite, TX

When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad reached the area in 1885, its officials laid out the town of Goldthwaite and built a reservoir to water their steam locomotives. A 25-foot dam impounded several springs into a pond that doubled as a favorite swimming hole, and in 1906 the railroad drilled a deep spring-fed well for still more water. By 1915 the sources fell short and the dam was breached; today those same springs feed a stream through the county park and the old well still serves the city.

Lindale, TX

Twelve charter members organized this congregation in 1890, worshiping in the nearby Nebo community schoolhouse until a revival in 1895 swelled their ranks and spurred plans for a permanent church. Amy Wells donated three acres for the sanctuary and cemetery, and the first church building was finished in 1896 — she is said to have named it Damascus after the biblical account of the Apostle Paul's conversion. Baptisms in a nearby creek gave way to an indoor baptistry only in 1956, as the church steadily added space for its educational and fellowship programs.

Houston, TX

Damascus Missionary Baptist Church was born in 1866, in the raw aftermath of the Civil War, when the National Baptist Convention sent the Rev. I. S. Campbell to organize African American churches across Texas. Founded to serve freedpeople in Houston's West End and Chaneyville neighborhoods, it met first in a member's home before building a series of sanctuaries, each rebuilt after storms flattened them in 1900 and 1915. Through generations of missionary, educational, and civic outreach, the congregation has served its community for more than a century and a half.

Corrigan, TX

Organized in 1863 amid the upheaval of the Civil War, Damascus Missionary Baptist Church began in a humble log building with split-log benches resting on peg legs. A frame structure replaced it in 1892, and the present church rose in 1950. A charter member of the Angelina Missionary Baptist Association, the congregation has served its rural East Texas community for well over a century.

Fredericksburg, TX

This rock house was probably built by F. Dambach, who bought the lot for $70 in 1867 and sold it two years later for a handsome $450. Unlike Fredericksburg's famous weekend "Sunday Houses," it was a full-time home. Widow Anna Besier acquired it in 1881, added the porch, and moved into town so her four children could reach school—keeping cows across the street and selling milk, butter, and cheese.

Damon, TX

One of Brazoria County's oldest burial grounds, Damon Cemetery began on December 13, 1837, with the interment of Sylvester Winn Damon on land Abraham Darst had received in an 1829 Mexican grant. That first grave was dug within a year of the county's founding. In 1908 a 2.5-acre tract was formally dedicated and deeded to the public.

Seminole, TX

A Tennessee native, Dan Cobb was the builder who gave early Gaines County much of its shape, constructing both the first county courthouse in 1906 and its 1922 successor, along with a Baptist sanctuary, a schoolhouse, and other landmark buildings. He and his wife Aurelia raised six children in the home they built here in 1906, and he held civic roles and even a federal mail contract spanning three counties. His work and leadership were central to the young county's growth.

New Boston, TX

Dan LaFayette McDuffie came from a line of lawmen and pinned on his first badge at eighteen, learning the trade from an uncle who was Texarkana's police chief. Over three decades he served as county officer, railroad special agent, and Texas Ranger, winning fame in a 1923 amnesty that brought in 82 liquor stills. In 1931 he was cut down by gunfire in a kidnapping case — the last Ranger killed on duty during East Texas's lawless oil-boom years.

Jefferson, TX

This house was built by Dan N. Alley, one of the founders of Jefferson, and given as a wedding gift to his son during the era when the town was a bustling riverport and gateway into Texas. It has stayed in the family's line, later home to a descendant.

Danevang, TX

Founded in 1894 on land secured by the Danish Folk Society, Danevang became the first successful Danish community in Texas. Most of its settlers had first lived among fellow Danes in the northern states before moving south to preserve their language, faith, and culture, raising a Lutheran church in 1895. Despite disease, insects, and poorly drained land, their hard work and cooperation turned the prairie into productive farms.

Danevang, TX

In 1894, at the crest of Danish emigration to America, the Dansk Folkesamfund arranged Texas land for a colony meant to keep Danish faith, language, and culture alive far from the homeland. The settlers named it Danevang — "Danish Field" — and by 1895 had raised a community hall that doubled as church, schoolhouse, and pastor's residence. For generations the Forsamlingshus hosted every sacred and secular festival of the colony, surviving even a 1945 hurricane that tore it from its foundation.

Fredericksburg, TX

The Rev. Gottlieb Burchard Dangers, who emigrated from Germany in 1849 and became Fredericksburg's second Protestant minister, built this stone house in 1851 on a lot bought from a fellow settler. About 1857 he added two rear rooms and a cellar. Its half-timbered fachwerk walls reflect the pioneer German building traditions that immigrants carried to the Texas Hill Country.

Rockdale, TX

Daniel and Precilla Gilleland were among Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, the first Anglo-American families legally colonizing Texas, arriving from Arkansas Territory with their infant daughter in December 1821. Over the next decades they farmed their way across a half-dozen counties, Daniel helping plant Methodist congregations as they went, before settling in present Milam County. Parents of thirteen children — six sons of whom served in the Confederate army — the couple both died in 1873 after more than fifty years as Texas pioneers.

Brownwood, TX

Founded in 1888 and chartered in 1889, Daniel Baker College took its name from an early Texas circuit-riding Presbyterian minister and was led first by the Rev. Brainard Taylor McClelland, who had founded Brownwood's First Presbyterian Church. On land given by the Coggin brothers, it graduated its first class of eight in 1895 and fielded football, baseball, track, and basketball teams. Long troubled by finances, it was consolidated with Howard Payne College in 1953.

Houston, TX

D.D. Cooley, born in upstate New York in 1850, came to Texas in 1892 to oversee a land company's tract northwest of Houston and helped shape what became the Houston Heights community. As general manager of the Omaha and South Texas Land Company, he laid out its main artery, Heights Boulevard, and built his own home on this site in 1892–93, earning the title 'Father of the Houston Heights.' A civic leader with interests in banking, insurance, railroads, and oil, he served as an alderman after the Heights incorporated in 1896; his home was razed in 1965.

University Park, TX

When Frances Sims Daniel brought her family to the young farmlands of Dallas County in 1849, she could not have known that the orchard beside her home would become one of the county's earliest burying grounds. The cemetery began in 1850 with the grave of a man the family called "Old Frank," enslaved by the household for decades, and grew to hold Daniel kin, the people they enslaved, and descendants who served in four American wars. An 1851 headstone for young Isabella Harwood is thought to be among the oldest surviving in the county.

Austin, TX

Daniel H. Caswell arrived in Austin from Nashville about 1895 and made his fortune in cotton — buying a cotton-oil company, trading the crop, and building a cotton gin in 1899. In 1900 he completed this exuberant house on what was then the city's far northwest edge, blending late Victorian, Colonial Revival, and Chateauesque touches beneath a corner turret. Its rusticated porches and lavish detailing announced the prosperity a booming cotton economy could bring.

Jarrell, TX

Daniel Harrison came to Texas from Tennessee in 1835 and served with Texan forces during the Revolution, later fighting in the 1839 Battle of the Neches as a militia volunteer for the young Republic. Settling in what became the Corn Hill community, he worked as a blacksmith on the stage route from Austin to Fort Gates—vital labor for a military road—while also farming and raising livestock. He later served in Central Texas' 27th Brigade during the Civil War, and he and his wife Nancy were eventually reinterred at Corn Hill Cemetery.

Granbury, TX

William B. Daniel came to Granbury as a boy of ten in 1867 and grew into one of the city's leading grocers, building this ornate Victorian home in the early 1890s. Trimmed with intricate Eastlake detailing, it was a hub of social life and even hosted early funeral services for family and friends. The house stayed in the Daniel family after his death in 1940.

Midway, TX

A Pennsylvania-born fur trapper who had served under Zachary Taylor in the War of 1812, Daniel Larrison became one of the earliest Anglo settlers of what is now Madison County, receiving a Mexican land grant in 1833. He and his wife Sarah settled around 1828 near the junction of the La Bahia Trail and El Camino Real—a natural waystation for travelers—and raised twelve children while hunting, trapping, and farming corn and cotton. Larrison Creek still carries the family name.

Bartlett vicinity, TX

Born in Maine in 1814, Daniel McKay came to Texas in 1834 with Sterling C. Robertson's colony and settled near Nashville, on the edge of a dangerous frontier. In 1836 he fought at the Battle of San Jacinto that won Texas its independence, and in 1845 he married Jane Bryant, daughter of a government Indian agent and fellow San Jacinto veteran. The family lived at fortified "Bryant's Station" until moving to a Bell County land grant in 1853, and McKay later served the Confederacy during the Civil War.