Historic Markers in Texas

Austin, TX

Austin architect Hal Thomson designed this Spanish Eclectic home in 1931 for Emma Levison Davis, a founding member of a local settlement club and widow of a pioneer Austin grocer. With its stuccoed walls, clay-tile roof, arcaded entry and square tower, the house showcased handmade tile, heavy timber trusses and custom ironwork and furnishings. It passed through the Davis family before the Sibleys acquired it in 1962.

Dublin, TX

Born in Dublin in 1920, George A. Davis, Jr. was one of six brothers who served in the military. He enlisted as an aviation cadet in 1942, flew hundreds of missions as an early P-47 Thunderbolt pilot in World War II, and became a leading jet Ace in Korea with the 334th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. On February 10, 1952, near the Manchurian border, he downed two MiG-15s before his own SabreJet was hit and crashed south of the Yalu River. He received the Medal of Honor posthumously.

Gainesville, TX

William Owen Davis carried the arc of the post-Civil War South into Texas: a Georgia native and Confederate veteran, he was admitted to the Georgia Bar in 1870 before settling in Gainesville near the Red River. There he built a decades-long public career — school board member, city alderman, state senator in the 1880s, and finally mayor at age 81 — while practicing law prominently enough to argue two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. His life traces the Gilded Age reintegration of Southern professionals into civic and legal leadership.

Texas City, TX

Frank and Florence Davison built this sturdy cypress Victorian between 1895 and 1897 in the young town then called Shoal Point, and it became the birthplace of the first child born in Texas City. A pioneer civic leader, Frank Davison opened the town's first store, installed its first telephone, and served as commissioner, postmaster, school trustee, and bank director. The house weathered many storms, suffering most in the 1947 disaster.

Crockett, TX

This park honors the frontier legend Davy Crockett, whose name the town of Crockett carries; the young Republic of Texas incorporated the town in December 1837, the same year it created Houston County in honor of General Sam Houston. Dedicated in 1937 during the state's centennial era, the park roots a modern community in the heroic memory of Texas independence. The marker records the civic leaders who oversaw its founding a century after the Republic took shape.

Hutchins, TX

Illinois-born Alanson Dawdy reached Dallas County in 1847 and, in 1854, was licensed to run a ferry across the Trinity River—then the southernmost crossing in the area. For citizens on both banks it was a vital link, charging a dollar for a fully loaded wagon down to a nickel for a person on foot, and it operated until about 1876, a dozen years before the first permanent bridge went in. Dawdy himself was a veteran of both the Mexican and Civil Wars.

Lamesa, TX

Dawson County honors Nicholas Mosby Dawson, a Texas patriot who fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 and later fell in the 1842 clash known as Dawson's Massacre during the turbulent years of the Republic of Texas. The county was created in 1858, recreated in 1876 from Bexar Territory, and finally organized in 1905, with Lamesa as its seat. Its name carries the memory of the sacrifices that won and defended Texas independence.

Kingsville, TX

Born in Bastrop County in 1887, Dawson Richard Murchison served as a Texas state game warden from 1930 until his death, stationed at Kingsville. In 1938 he was killed in the line of duty in neighboring Jim Wells County when he and fellow wardens confronted men illegally "spotlighting" deer at night. He and his wife, Mattie B. Wright, had five children.

Stephenville, TX

Built in the early-to-mid 1890s on a prominent corner of Stephenville's courthouse square, this limestone building likely first housed the Dawson Saloon. Under owner W. A. 'Billy' Dawson, with beer-barrel seating set out along the sidewalk for cowboys and passersby, it was a popular watering hole until his death in 1901. The building later held a restaurant, a confectionery, and—longest of all—Novit's Department Store, run by Belarusian immigrant Morris Astonovitsky until 1957, and its rebuilt limestone columns still mark the square.

Austin, TX

Around 1900, sisters Mary and Nannie Dawson built this stone house as part of Austin's South Heights development. Both were pioneering teachers in the young free public school system — Mary served as principal of Fulmore School before leaving education to build a career in real estate. Their brother Nick Dawson, a builder of several local stone houses, likely raised this typical middle-class home.

Dayton, TX

When Dayton was still part of Liberty, its children had few options for schooling until trustees established a school in 1849. This two-room Prairie-style building, built of cypress and topped with a cupola, served students from 1900 to 1910 before being moved and later converted to a residence. Saved from condemnation by the Dayton Historical Society in 2001 and restored, it reopened in 2007 as the Dayton Old School Museum, having survived a century of tornadoes and hurricanes.

DeKalb, TX

De Kalb was named for Revolutionary War hero Maj. Gen. Johann de Kalb at the 1836 suggestion of David Crockett, who passed through on his way to fight in the Texas Revolution, as did James Fannin and William B. Travis. Settled by 1831, the town claimed the first college in Bowie County (1839), an early Masonic lodge, and a brief turn as county seat, and it sat on early stage lines and, later, the Texas & Pacific Railroad. Sawmills and, legend says, the nearby hideouts of outlaws like Sam Bass and Jesse James all figure in its lively frontier story.

Floresville, TX

On a bluff above the San Antonio River, this cemetery served the vanished trading community of Lodi. Its namesake, Nemencio de la Zerda, Sr., born in San Antonio in 1808, was a rancher and former soldier under Tejano leader Juan Seguín who bought the land in 1839. The earliest marked grave dates to 1877, though older unmarked burials are believed to lie here, and Spanish-language headstones and interior fencing reflect its Mexican American heritage.

De Leon, TX

When boll weevils, bad weather, and a national downturn broke Comanche County's long reliance on cotton, farmers turned to peanuts—and in 1912 N.T. Haskins organized the De Leon Peanut Company so growers wouldn't have to ship their crop all the way to Fort Worth. By 1914 peanuts were the county's leading cash crop, and a six-story plant completed in 1917 could process ten railroad carloads a day, helping earn De Leon the nickname "The Peanut Capital of the World."

Victoria, TX

Laid out by Martín De León, the empresario who founded Victoria in the 1820s, this square began life as the Plaza de la Constitución, patterned on the central plazas of traditional Spanish municipalities. His son-in-law José M. Carbajal expanded the plan in an 1830s survey, and over the decades the square gained a brick-lined well, a windmill, a bandstand, and Pompeo Coppini's 1912 Confederate memorial. In 1941 the United Daughters of the Confederacy led a beautification effort that renamed it De León Plaza in honor of the city's founder.

Yorktown, TX

DeWitt County was carved in 1846 from Gonzales, Victoria, and Goliad counties and organized that July with Cameron as its first seat. It honors Green De Witt, the Kentucky-born empresario whose colonization contract helped plant Anglo-American settlement in the region before his death in Mexico in 1835. The marker fixes a moment when the newly annexed state of Texas was drawing its county lines.

Cuero, TX

This ground lay within Green De Witt's 1825 empresario grant and became DeWitt County in 1846, its seat shifting from Cameron to Clinton and finally to Cuero in 1876. Settled first by Anglo-Americans and, by 1860, half by German immigrants, the county sent its men into nearly every fight of the Texas Revolution — the Alamo, Goliad, Gonzales, and San Jacinto among them. The marker rolls out a long honor list of the pioneers and soldiers who founded and defended it.

Cuero, TX

DeWitt County was organized in 1846, and after its seat shifted from Cameron to Clinton and finally to Cuero, a series of courthouses served its citizens. The present Richardsonian Romanesque courthouse rose from 1894 to 1896, a three-story sandstone and granite building crowned by a six-story clock tower and modeled on H. H. Richardson's celebrated Allegheny County Courthouse. Rededicated in 2007 in a ceremony echoing its 1896 original, it remains the county's civic centerpiece.

San Jacinto, TX

This plaza honors Lorenzo de Zavala, the Yucatán-born liberal who was jailed for years for his politics, taught himself English and medicine in prison, and served in the Spanish Cortes and as a Mexican governor before opposing Santa Anna's dictatorship. Loyal to Mexico's 1824 Constitution, he moved to Texas, signed its Declaration of Independence in 1836, and became the Republic's first vice-president; he, his descendants, and neighbors lie in the family cemetery across Buffalo Bayou.

Marble Falls, TX

First recorded by a naturalist in 1821, this deep natural shaft earned a dark reputation during the Civil War and Reconstruction, when it is believed as many as seventeen bodies were dumped into it. Among the victims were pro-Union Judge John R. Scott, settler Adolph Hoppe, several Reconstruction-era officials, and Ben McKeever, killed amid conflict with local freedmen; an oak that once stood over the hole reportedly bore rope marks from hangings. Poisonous gases kept the shaft unexplored until 1951.

Comstock, TX

This narrow canyon guarded one of the most feared stretches of the San Antonio–El Paso road, the overland lifeline that carried Forty-Niners and freighters toward California after the Gold Rush. Named by 1849 after a deadly ambush on Dr. Lyon's wagon train, it became notorious for raids and killings; freighter August Santleben later tallied nearly 400 deaths along the wider frontier road. The Army built Camp Hudson on the Devils River in 1857 to protect travelers, yet the pass was still considered dangerous into the early 1880s.

Carthage, TX

The community of Deadwood took root in the 1830s with the Adam LaGrone family, and its burial ground began in 1847 when Adam's wife Christeena died; he was laid beside her nine years later. Though not formally recorded as a public cemetery until 1859, it was already serving the settlement, and descendants of those pioneer families maintain it yet.

Laredo, TX

On March 17, 1837, Erastus "Deaf" Smith—the celebrated scout of the Texas Revolution, now a captain of scouts for the young Republic of Texas—led just 21 men against a larger force of Mexican cavalry from the Laredo garrison near this spot. The sharp encounter was one of many border skirmishes that flared along the contested Rio Grande frontier after San Jacinto. Smith, famously hard of hearing, was among the most trusted frontiersmen of the Texas cause.

Hereford, TX

Created in 1876 and organized in 1890, this Panhandle county honors Erastus "Deaf" Smith, the celebrated scout and spy of the Texas Revolution who distinguished himself for bravery at the Battle of San Jacinto. Its county seat began as La Plata — often called Grenada — before Hereford took the role in 1899.

Hereford, TX

Hereford's 1910 courthouse rose in brick faced with marble, inside and out, at a cost of $125,000 and was celebrated as only the second marble courthouse built in the United States. Its approval came only after a bruising bond-issue election, and the victors marked their win by parading down Main Street behind a band led by Judge John Slaton. It stands as a proud statement of civic ambition in the young Texas Panhandle.

Kilgore, TX

In the years after the Civil War, small East Texas towns like Kilgore grew up around cotton and the gins that processed it. This house began about 1876 as a modest one-story dwelling built by S. G. Dean, and it grew with the town: after 1881 L. J. Keener added a two-story wing, and later it passed to cotton-gin man Wiley N. Crim. Its layered additions make it a kind of architectural diary of the community's early decades.

Denaville, TX

Deanville grew up on the Texas prairie in the years after the Civil War, when merchant James L. Dean laid out a town in 1872 beside a branch of the great Chisholm Trail, the dusty highway up which millions of longhorns were driven to northern railheads. A post office followed in 1877, and when the Houston & Texas Central pushed its rails through in 1913 the little community gained a lifeline to wider markets. The Sons of Hermann lodge, organized in 1916, kept the town's social calendar alive with its long-running Fourth of July celebration.

DeBerry, TX

Settled around an 1850 sawmill and grist mill, this East Texas cotton community became a market and ginning center before oil arrived after 1900. It took its name from Col. Alfred W. DeBerry, a Confederate cavalry officer who served in the wartime Texas legislature and later, as secretary of state under Governor Richard Coke, helped return state government to local control after Reconstruction.

DeBerry, TX

This East Texas fellowship traces its origins to the pioneer Bell-Fountain Baptist Church, organized before the Civil War. When fire destroyed the Bell-Fountain chapel in 1880, its members formed two new congregations—Shady Grove and DeBerry—the latter building its first sanctuary on donated land under its first pastor. The church has served the DeBerry community for well over a century.

Decatur, TX

Decatur Baptist College is remembered as the world's first institution planned, in 1898, as a junior college — a new model of two-year higher education. The surviving hall was built in 1892 for an earlier school on the site.

Decatur, TX

Organized in 1862 amid the upheaval of the Civil War, this was Decatur's first congregation, with early services held in a vacant store on the town square and in the home of pioneer members who had migrated from Missouri. The fellowship built its first sanctuary in 1881 on land deeded by the county, rebuilt after an 1890s fire, and completed its present brick sanctuary by Easter 1914. Its story tracks the settling of Wise County from wartime hardship into a growing community.

Austin, TX

Among the Swedish immigrants who settled Decker in the 1880s were many who had fled the state church of Sweden, and here they built a congregation of their own choosing—the Decker Swedish Evangelical Free Church. On land deeded by Joseph and Charlotta Johnson in 1892 they raised a church and opened the cemetery that still remains, holding services in Swedish for the growing community. Drought and crop failure later scattered the members, and the church disbanded, but the burial ground endures as the resting place of its charter families.

Austin, TX

Swedish immigrants settling along Decker Creek in the years after the Civil War first rode into Austin for worship, then gathered in one another's homes as a circuit preacher came to them. By Pentecost of 1879 they had raised and dedicated their own church, soon adding a school and parsonage, and by the early 1900s a proper sanctuary. The congregation's steady growth mirrored the quiet permanence of Central Texas's Swedish farming settlements.

Boyd, TX

Settled around 1854 by pioneers Sam Woody and Tom McCarroll and soon joined by neighbors from East Texas, Deep Creek grew into a farming community raising cotton, corn, and cattle, with a Baptist church that doubled as a schoolhouse. Its cemetery holds Civil War veterans and the grave of Sally Bowman, killed in an 1868 Indian raid — a reminder of frontier peril. Generations later the community even inspired a nationally performed ballet, "Winter at Deep Creek."

Austin, TX

Swedish immigrant Charles Johnson settled along the Colorado River in the 1850s, and in 1902 his children opened Deep Eddy Resort at a spot where the current swirled around a deep hole in the limestone riverbed. After A. J. Eilers bought the park in 1915 and added a concrete swimming pool, it blossomed into a full carnival ground with a Ferris wheel, diving tower, trapeze, and even a diving horse. The City of Austin bought the park in 1935, and after a devastating flood weeks later, the Works Progress Administration helped rebuild it into the beloved pool that reopened in 1936.

Deer Park, TX

In 1892 an Illinois transplant named Simeon Henry West platted the town of Deer Park near Houston, betting that its mild climate and access to waterways could make it a farming and trading hub. He built a hotel, marketed lots to Northerners, and drew more than ninety settlers hoping to raise fruit and tobacco — until the catastrophic 1900 hurricane scattered nearly every family back north. The town languished until 1928, when Shell Chemical Company arrived and set off the industrial growth that carried Deer Park to incorporation in 1948.

Dallas, TX

Everette Lee DeGolyer struck oil in Mexico while still a college student and went on to become one of the world's foremost petroleum geologists and a celebrated rare-book collector. In 1936 he and his wife Nell moved to Dallas and built this rambling Spanish Colonial Revival home above White Rock Lake, evocative of a Mexican hacienda and finished with fine craftsmanship. After the couple's deaths the estate passed to Southern Methodist University and the City of Dallas.

Austin, TX

Soon after the United States entered World War II, the Army Air Corps established an air base on Del Valle land once part of a Mexican land grant, with the City of Austin buying 3,000 acres to lease to the government. Opened in 1942 as a troop-carrier training center, it was renamed for Capt. John A. E. Bergstrom, Austin's first war casualty, killed at Clark Field in the Philippines in December 1941. Crews trained here flew in the invasions of Normandy and beyond, and over the next half-century the base served through the Berlin Airlift, Korea, and Iraq before closing in 1992 and becoming Austin's international airport in 1999.

Delhi, TX

Orrin and Susannah Winters and their kin were the first known permanent settlers here, and by 1873 the community was large enough to seek a post office. Postal officials rejected the settlers' first choice, Iron Mountain, but accepted Delhi, said locally to honor a wandering patent-medicine salesman who once entertained the pioneers. Churches, a school, cotton gins, and assorted trades followed in the 1880s.

Floydada, TX

Della Plain sprang up in 1887 when a Baylor County rancher, driven by drought, founded a settlement here on the South Plains and named it for a benefactor's daughter. It quickly gained a school, church, post office, stores, and even a newspaper, hoping to become the county seat—but a poor water supply and the rise of nearby Lockney and Floydada doomed it, and by 1894 only the cemetery remained.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Long before Mount Pleasant existed, Caddo Indians camped around the mineral springs here, where waters were said to flow red, white, and blue. Benjamin Gooch built the area's first home in the 1830s, and by 1895 the springs had become a health and recreation resort, crowned from 1909 to 1916 by the lavish Dellwood Hotel. A favorite spot for Confederate reunions and political rallies, the site later burned and was acquired by the city in 1951 as Dellwood Park.

Cooper, TX

Carved from parts of Lamar and Hopkins counties, Delta County was created on July 29, 1870, and organized that October during the Reconstruction era. Its name reflects its triangular shape, wedged between the forks of the Sulphur River, with the town of Cooper chosen as county seat.

Longview, TX

Delta Drilling Company was born in 1931 amid the frenzy of the East Texas oil boom—the largest field then known in the world—founded by Bob Stacy, Sam Dorfman, and Joseph Zeppa in an apartment on this very site. From those cramped beginnings it drilled many of the wells that flooded the region with wealth before moving to Tyler and expanding across the hemisphere and beyond. The firm grew into a technological leader in land-based drilling.

Blessing, TX

A wooden bridge built across the Tres Palacios River in 1857 for landowner Edward A. Deming gave rise to a gathering place for the settlers of western Matagorda County, complete with a Baptist church, post office, and Masonic hall. When the railroad drew people to nearby Blessing around the turn of the century, the community's institutions followed and the old crossing faded. Its cemetery endures, holding the graves of famed cattlemen Abel Head "Shanghai" Pierce and his brother Jonathan Edwards Pierce.

Goldthwaite vicinity, TX

Though families settled this Mills County area in 1878, the Democrat community's graveyard began only at the turn of the 20th century, its earliest documented grave a one-year-old girl who died in 1904. In 1905 J. L. Chancellor deeded three acres to the Democrat and Rock Springs communities for a public burial ground. Among its graves are children lost to the worldwide influenza epidemic and veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

Houston, TX

In 1928 Houston hosted the Democratic National Convention inside Sam Houston Hall, a 20,000-seat auditorium raised in just 64 days thanks to businessman Jesse H. Jones. Meeting June 26–29, the delegates wrangled over Prohibition and the struggles of American farmers before nominating New York Governor Alfred E. Smith—the first Roman Catholic ever placed atop a major party's presidential ticket—with Arkansas's Joseph T. Robinson as his running mate. Smith lost decisively that November to Herbert Hoover and failed even to carry Texas.

Dallas, TX

For decades, engineers struggled to interconnect the growing tangle of transistors and components that made up modern electronics — a "tyranny of numbers" that threatened progress. In 1958, Texas Instruments engineer Jack St. Clair Kilby solved it by forming all the components of a circuit within a single piece of semiconductor material. On September 12, 1958, he demonstrated the first working integrated circuit to colleagues on this site.

Yoakum, TX

Mississippi-born D. B. Cain came to Texas as a boy and reached the railroad town of Yoakum in 1894, where he built D. B. Cain & Co. into one of the city's largest mercantile houses. In 1913 he crowned his success with an $8,000 Classical Revival home on Grand Avenue, complete with a two-story porch and distinctive green slag-glass windows. A devout Baptist honored as Texas Baptist Father of the Year at ninety-four, Cain saw his family occupy the house until 1976.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

Augustus "Gus" Dennard came to Texas from Missouri with his family in 1883 and became a leader in the Concord community as a merchant, farmer, and blacksmith. He bought land in 1901, operated a forge, and completed this home the following year — a fine example of East Texas vernacular architecture with paired gables and turned porch posts.

Rosevine, TX

Established before 1836, when Texas was still part of Mexico, this ground began as a burial place for enslaved people of the Sulphur Spring community. Among those interred are men and women who arrived enslaved in the 1830s and, after Emancipation in 1865, became prominent builders of the area's Black community — including sons who took the name Dennis. With more than 100 graves, it remains a place of pride tended by descendants who still live nearby.

Hughes Springs, TX

Allen and Eliza Ann Dennis were among the first families to settle this corner of Cass County, buying the surrounding land in 1856. When Eliza Ann died in 1873 she was buried on the family farm, her husband laid beside her in 1880, and the plot grew — enlarged by a gift from the Smith family — into a community graveyard. More than three hundred people rest here, including pioneers of families like the Smiths, Masons, and Nelsons, many in unmarked graves, with the burial ground still tended by an association formed in 1976.

Cresson, TX

N.M. Dennis left Boston for Parker County in the 1890s and founded a small community on the Brazos, where in 1907 this sanctuary rose on land he donated. Church life was community life: summer revivals in an adjacent tabernacle, "dinner on the grounds" and afternoon singing after Sunday services, and "poundings" that welcomed new pastors with gifts of food by the pound. As the population thinned in the 1960s the congregation dwindled and disbanded in 1970, and the building was moved here and renamed Founder's Chapel in 1976.

Austin, TX

Charles Denny built this one-story limestone dwelling between 1869 and 1871, and the widowed Mrs. N. L. Holliday bought it in 1898, adding a second floor in 1906 to house her six children. Her daughter Margaret, a local physician, later lived here with her husband Dr. Simon J. Clark, and the couple renovated the home around 1920 with a stuccoed exterior and an elaborate new entryway. The house records the layered growth of an Austin family home across half a century.

Houston County, TX

Joseph Denson came to Texas from Alabama in the 1830s among the Predestination Baptists who followed Elder Daniel Parker to Houston County. Around 1851 he married Caroline Houston, a niece of Sam Houston, and the couple raised eleven children on their farm. From that land he set aside a burial ground, becoming its first marked interment, and the family still gathers there for an annual homecoming.

Grapeland vicinity, TX

John Denson arrived in this area in 1835 with his parents, hardshell Predestination Baptists who had traveled with the noted frontier preacher Elder Daniel Parker. In 1837 John added his name to the petition that created Houston County, and he raised his family in a log house on Bennett Creek beside his wife, whose first husband was said to be kin to Sam Houston. As relatives died they were buried near the home, with the last of some eighteen graves filled in 1890.

Slocum, TX

Settlers reached this area—known as Ioni after a nearby Indian village—in the early 1830s, and the land was granted to James Bradshaw in 1835. The cemetery began in 1851 with the burial of the infant son of Kindred and Diana (Bradshaw) Watkins near the family home, growing from a family plot into a community graveyard renamed Denson Springs in 1878. Set in a grove of trees, it holds marked and unmarked pioneer graves and the resting places of veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

Denton, TX

Denton County was carved from Fannin County in April 1846 and organized that July, both town and county named for John B. Denton — a pioneer preacher, lawyer, and Indian fighter who died in 1841. The county seat wandered from Pinckneyville to Alton before settling permanently at Denton in 1850. The marker records the restless early years of a North Texas frontier county finding its footing.

Denton, TX

Completed in 1896–97, this is Denton County's fifth courthouse, following earlier seats at Alton and Pinckneyville and a Denton predecessor burned in a crime blamed on the Sam Bass gang. Architect W.C. Dodson designed it in a free mix of Victorian styles, with French Second Empire pavilions and ogival domes, using native limestone walls and Burnet County marble columns. It remains a landmark of frontier-era Texas civic architecture.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1893, the DePelchin Faith Home honored Kezia Payne DePelchin, a social worker, teacher, and nurse who spent the late nineteenth century tending Houston's most vulnerable. The orphanage moved into this Renaissance Revival building — designed by the architects Mauran and Russell, with an open arcade and a Doric-flanked entry — upon its completion in 1913, and remained until 1938.

Lufkin, TX

On a March evening in 1913, an explosion tore apart the Houston, East & West Texas Railroad depot at Lufkin, severing the town's lifeline of trade and travel. A railroad employee was presumed killed, declared legally dead, and his insurance paid to his stepmother. Three years later the very much alive man was hauled back to town to stand trial for insurance fraud, a charge on which he was ultimately acquitted.