Historic Markers in Texas

Snyder, TX

Dermott is a West Texas town that chased the railroads. It began as a crossroads community called Dark, took its later name from storekeeper and postmaster S. P. McDermott, and physically picked up and moved twice — in 1909 to the Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific line and again in 1915 to the Santa Fe. With competing railroads and full loading pens, it became a busy cattle-shipping point, faded when the R.S. & P. tracks were pulled up in 1942, then revived during the county's late-1940s oil boom.

Desdemona, TX

Serving the frontier community of Desdemona since J. S. and Rosa Jones deeded an acre for a public graveyard in 1880, this cemetery holds pioneer settlers, Civil War and world-war veterans, a physician who served the area for fifty years, and children lost young. When oil gushers surrounded the grounds in 1918, the boom brought sudden wealth—and new residents—to the very families buried among its oaks.

Desdemona, TX

Nine charter members organized this Baptist congregation in 1872, beginning with brush-arbor meetings under the Spanish oaks along Hog Creek where the Rev. Johnnie Northcutt preached to settlers who came by wagon, horseback, and foot. First called Rockdale Baptist Church, it built a sanctuary in the village of Desdemona and took the town's name around 1877. When oil was discovered and Desdemona boomed by 1919, the congregation fled the crowded conditions to build a new home at this site in 1921–22.

Austin, TX

Lions Club members opened Austin's first public golf course on leased Brackenridge land in 1924, and "Muny" grew into an 18-hole city facility. Though it sat beside the historically African American Clarksville community whose young men had helped build it, segregation barred Black residents from playing. That barrier fell in 1951 when two Black youths simply walked on and played a round; officials let them finish, ushering in de facto integration years before federal public-accommodation law — a change some scholars call the earliest desegregation of a public golf course in the South.

Austin, TX

For generations Texas ran a segregated school system, its "separate but equal" doctrine cemented by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling began a slow, uneven dismantling of that system; over the following decades districts integrated grade by grade or by "freedom of choice," and beloved African American schools such as Austin's L.C. Anderson High closed their doors.

Cooper, TX

Built before 1850 by landowner Brig DeSpain and his neighbors where the Bonham–Jefferson Road crossed the South Sulphur River, this pioneer bridge of native oak and bois d'arc carried the region's cotton trade for some twenty years. The land traced back to Randolph DeSpain, a Texas Revolutionary soldier killed in the 1836 Goliad massacre. When floods washed the crossing out after 1870, the state replaced it, and the counties kept cotton and corn wagons rolling between the two regions for decades more.

Austin, TX

Established around 1874 in what is now northeast Austin, Dessau Cemetery served a farming community settled in the years after the Civil War, when German and other families worked the blackland prairie of Travis County. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery preserves it as a record of that early rural settlement.

Devine, TX

The earliest graves in this Medina County cemetery belong to settlers killed by Native American raiders in the early 1870s, including seventeen-year-old Isaac Galbreath, whose father — a Texas Ranger and Mexican War veteran — also rests here. The town of Devine grew up in 1881 when the International and Great Northern Railroad reached the area, and landowner P.C. Hattox deeded the original acreage for the cemetery in 1891. A cemetery association has cared for the grounds ever since.

Devine, TX

Chartered by the Grand Lodge of Texas in December 1884, Devine Lodge No. 590 first met above Josh Herring's store, with John Redus serving as its first Worshipful Master. An Eastern Star chapter followed in 1900, and after meeting at various sites the lodge settled at its present home in 1962. Its rolls came to include many of the area's clergy, doctors, merchants, and public officials.

Dew, TX

Families from Alabama settled this Freestone County prairie in the 1850s, calling it Avant and then Sunshine before a postal clerk's misreading of "Drew" fixed the name as Dew in 1885. Land donated in 1869 by settlers W. S. Compton and D. A. Self created this community cemetery, whose earliest graves include victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic and, decades later, the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. A cotton-market town of gins and stores, Dew now gathers each Memorial Day to tend the eleven-acre burial ground of some 1,000 graves.

Missouri City, TX

In 1845 Thomas Walters Dewalt journeyed from South Carolina to settle along Oyster Creek, where he built a plantation in the coastal plains of what is now Fort Bend County. In 1850 he set aside land for burials, and the graveyard has served his extended family for generations, formally deeded in 1931 and expanded in the 1980s. Still in use, it remains reserved for the interrelated families whose roots reach back to antebellum Texas.

Bullard, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, John Dewberry came to Texas in 1835 and by the mid-1840s had settled near Tyler, becoming a successful cotton farmer and helping to organize newly created Smith County in 1846. He began this Greek Revival house, which he named "Myrtle-Vale," in 1852 as the headquarters of his large cotton plantation. A rare surviving two-story antebellum residence in the county, it stayed in the Dewberry family until 1908.

Deweyville, TX

The site was first bought around 1886 — reportedly for a team of oxen — by Pierre Lavine from Bill Morrison, and was known as "Possum Bluff" before being renamed to honor Admiral George Dewey during the Spanish-American War. Its economy rose on lumber after the Sabine Tram Company built a sawmill in 1897, an operation later run by the Peavy-Moore Lumber Company from 1919 to 1943. The mill made Deweyville a working timber town in the East Texas pine belt.

Jasper, TX

Named for New York governor and Mason DeWitt Clinton, this Jasper lodge dates to the days of the Republic of Texas, holding its first meetings in 1845-46 and receiving a formal charter in 1848. Its members founded the Jasper Collegiate Institute in 1850 and supported it until it closed in 1857, and the lodge has long sponsored scholarships for local students. Many of Jasper's prominent citizens have belonged to it over the generations.

Yorktown, TX

This memorial honors the men and women of DeWitt County, Texas, who served in the Vietnam War. Placed by the local community and tied to the Vietnam Veterans of America, it stands for a generation of small-town Americans who answered the call during one of the nation's most divisive conflicts. It gathers their service into a single place of remembrance close to home.

Nixon, TX

Methodist worship in the Sandies community began in 1842, and Sandies Chapel was formally chartered by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1857. When settlement shifted, the congregation moved a mile in 1897 to the new town of Dewville, building on land donated by Mrs. C. C. Vernor, wife of an early pastor. The church has remained an active center of local life ever since.

McGregor, TX

William Deyerle, a banker, rancher, and miller who came to Central Texas from Virginia, hired master stonemason Henry Wissman to build this limestone home, completed in 1892. Wissman quarried and hauled every stone himself, laying them to his own design beneath a hipped roof trimmed with arched windows and a bracketed cornice. After a family tragedy claimed Deyerle's widow and her second husband in 1926, the house passed to her sister and stayed in the Fall family until 1975.

Honey Grove, TX

This Queen Anne house rose in 1890, less than two decades after Honey Grove was chartered, built for lawyer William H. Gross, the town's first city attorney. In 1905 merchant Samuel M. Dial and his wife Ruby bought the home; Dial hailed from the nearby community of Lane's Academy, later renamed Dial for his family. Passed to their son Harry in 1932, the residence stayed in the family for more than sixty years.

Dialville, TX

After coming to Texas in an 1866 wagon train, John J. Dial settled here and took up farming. When the Kansas and Gulf Short Line Railroad arrived in 1882 he opened a store by the tracks and deeded land for a flag-stop station, and the town platted around it was named Dialville when its post office opened in 1885. The community boomed after 1897 as a shipping point for the region's tomatoes and peaches, thriving through the early twentieth century before declining by the mid-1920s.

Whitesboro, TX

Founded in 1850 by brothers James R. and John Diamond—later joined by George, who started the paper that became the Houston Post—the Diamond Horse Ranch served from 1858 to 1861 as a station on the Butterfield Overland Mail. The Diamonds were political leaders active in frontier defense and Masonry, and James lies buried here.

Diboll, TX

Diboll grew up around a sawmill that T. L. L. Temple established in the East Texas pinelands in 1894, and by 1900 the Southern Pine Lumber Company ran its commissary, post office, churches, homes, and schools. The town took its name from the New Orleans family from whom Temple first bought timber rights. It stayed a company town until the 1950s, when residents were finally offered the chance to own their homes and shops, incorporating in 1962.

Forney, TX

This American four-square home was raised in 1910, during the decades-long prosperity that cotton brought the town of Forney between the 1870s and the Great Depression. It was built for Dick Parmenas Moore, a Georgia-born merchant whose fortunes rode on the cotton acreage he owned nearby, and his wife Nancy lived in the house until 1958. Its Classical Revival porch details reflect the confident taste of a rising Texas commercial class.

Columbus, TX

After a 1907 fire destroyed his family home, retired dry goods merchant Leon F. Dick oversaw construction of this Classical Revival house in Columbus in 1908, complete with a full-height portico and Ionic columns. Dick was known for his hospitality, hosting Governor Pat Neff during the city's centennial in 1923. The home passed to his niece Alma Dick Gillette and remained in the family until 1976.

Dickens, TX

Dickens Cemetery opened in 1891, the very year the town was founded, when the wife of pioneer barber C. F. Jones died and was buried at the foot of a hill above the Croton Breaks. The landowner soon donated five acres around her grave for a community burial ground, and it grew to more than eighteen acres, gathering the town's early settlers, officials, and the man many called the "Father of Dickens," attorney W. C. Ballard. Among its graves lie veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Dickens, TX

Carved from Young and Bexar territories, Dickens County was created by the Texas legislature in 1876 as the state organized its vast western reaches for eventual settlement. It was not formally organized until 1903, once enough ranchers and townsfolk had arrived to run a local government, with Dickens City as the county seat. The gap between creation and organization mirrors the slow pace of settlement on the rolling plains.

Dickens, TX

Fed by upland aquifers draining through porous sandstone at the head of a canyon ravine, Dickens Springs has drawn people to its water since the earliest human occupation of the Rolling Plains. Nomadic peoples camped here for millennia, leaving a wealth of stone tools later studied by Texas Tech archaeologists, before pioneer settlers arrived in the 1880s and a town promoter turned the springs into a beloved public park.

San Augustine, TX

William and Lucinda Dickerson, who had come from Florida to settle at Grapevine in 1839, established this burial ground after their son Levi died in 1858. They opened it to neighbors and kin, and additional land was donated over time; a community church joined the site in 1946. Now a community cemetery marked by curbing, grave slabs, and upright stones, it holds veterans of conflicts dating to the Civil War.

Elkhart, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1812, Dickerson Parker fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence, before his death in 1844. His wife, Lucinda Eaton Parker, is remembered with him. Both were part of the earliest Anglo settlement of Anderson County.

Dickinson, TX

Chartered in 1853, the Galveston, Houston, and Henderson Railroad was the first line to reach the Texas coast, its early wood-burning engines "Perseverance" and "Brazos" rattling across a trestle spanning Galveston Bay by 1859. The "Old Reliable Short Line" carried real military weight during the Civil War, aiding the Confederate recapture of Galveston. This 1902 depot, designed by architect George B. Stowe, later served excursion crowds and shipped the region's fruit and vegetables to market before being moved here in 1967 and reborn as a museum.

Gilmer, TX

For three decades, from 1900 to 1929, this was the only home in Texas for Black orphans, founded and led by W. L. Dickson, a Negro Baptist minister who served as its sole superintendent. Children stayed until age 21 unless adopted or indentured to families, and a children's choir toured to raise funds. In 1929 Dickson deeded the home—700 acres and 27 buildings—to the state, which renamed it the Gilmer State Orphanage for Negroes and ran it until 1943, when the roughly 180 children were moved to a state home in Austin.

Moulton, TX

Lavaca County established the Dickson School District in 1886, naming it for pioneer lawman William Dickson, and built a one-room schoolhouse on a nearby farm. As the county's population swelled, the district bought higher ground safe from Ponton Creek's floods in 1912 and moved and enlarged the building over the following years. Enrollment held steady at around fifty to sixty students until improved roads and school buses drew children to larger towns, leading to consolidation with Moulton in 1949.

Sherman, TX

James Nelson Dickson spent nearly a half-century in Grayson County government, beginning in 1914 as a deputy tax assessor and rising to county judge from 1945 to 1962. After a 1930 courthouse fire destroyed public records, he painstakingly reconstructed them, including vital school bond papers. In retirement he turned to preserving local heritage through museums and a history of the county's schools.

Dido, TX

Settlement here began in 1848, and by 1887 landowner Dempsey S. Holt had donated three acres for a school, church, and cemetery, with a Confederate veteran and pioneer physician later adding more. The little village took the whimsical name Dido, after the mythological Queen of Carthage, and thrived with a post office and stores until the railroad passed it by in the 1890s. Around a thousand graves remain, holding many of the area's founding families.

Avondale, TX

Dido was among the first communities in Tarrant County, homesteaded in 1848 within the Peters Colony along the stage road from Fort Worth to Decatur. Its school opened in 1854 under a Missouri-born teacher, and when he left to serve in the Confederate Army his wife carried on the classes. Railroads, a new lake, and a wartime Marine base later reshaped the area, drawing families away until the school closed in 1947.

Nacogdoches, TX

Trained in the building guild of Oldenburg, German architect Diedrich Rulfs emigrated with his family in 1880 and settled in Nacogdoches, where he reshaped the town's skyline for four decades. His commercial buildings—the Opera House, Cotton Exchange, and Redland Hotel among them—dominated downtown, while his churches and houses carried Northern German motifs, including a corner tower modeled on Oldenburg's ducal palace. Blending Gothic, Greek Revival, and Italianate styles, Rulfs left an eclectic architectural legacy until his death in 1926.

Fredericksburg, TX

German-born Diedrich Rode built this cluster of buildings in the Cherry Spring community, completing a three-story limestone residence in 1880 with a top floor for storing wool and cotton from his land. A Lutheran, Rode served as an early minister and held services in a prayer chapel built into the second floor, and he taught school besides tending his ranch. The homestead passed to the Kothe family in 1929 and stayed with them for more than half a century.

Gonzales, TX

Miles G. Dikes emigrated from Georgia in 1829 to become an original member of Green DeWitt's colony, one of the earliest Anglo-American settlements in Mexican Texas. Around 1850 he established this family cemetery on his Gonzales County land, where the first known burial, his son Lovic, came in 1859. The graveyard holds about twenty marked graves and is still used by his descendants.

Peaster, TX

The earliest recorded grave here dates to 1883, and the burial ground soon anchored the Peaster community's Baptist families as they settled the Parker County countryside. Among those laid to rest was Sarah A. Dodson, who reached the Republic of Texas in 1839 and worked as a midwife while raising six children alone after her husband's death. Farmers, merchants, teachers, ministers, and veterans of many wars fill its acres, including two dozen anonymous graves marked only with rough stones.

Llano, 1400 Hickory Street, Llano Street Cemetery, TX

South Carolinian Dillard Cooper reached Texas in January 1836 with Captain Shackelford's Red Rovers and joined Colonel Fannin's command. Captured after the defeat at Coleto Creek, he was among the prisoners held at Goliad when Mexican troops massacred more than 300 men — and one of the few who escaped, traveling two weeks by night through enemy lines to reach Texian forces. Cooper lived out his long life farming in the Texas Hill Country, dying in 1896.

Columbus, TX

Dilue Rose and Ira Albert Harris moved from Houston to Columbus in 1845, where Ira served as county sheriff and city marshal. Dilue drew on her girlhood during the Texas Revolution to write vivid reminiscences that were later published and became a treasured eyewitness account. In 1858 the couple built this unusual concrete house—with a rare basement—where they raised their nine children.

Columbus, TX

Dilue Rose Harris came to Texas as a child in 1833 and lived through the turmoil of the Texas Revolution, later setting her memories down in a 30,000-word "Reminiscences" published by the Texas State Historical Association. Married young to Ira Harris, she moved to Columbus in 1845 and raised nine children in the house built here in 1858. Her firsthand account remains one of the most valuable windows into everyday life during the birth of the Texas Republic.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Created by the Texas legislature in 1858 but not formally organized until 1880, Dimmit County honors Philip Dimmitt, a trader and captain in the army of the Republic of Texas who died in 1841. The long gap between creation and organization reflects how sparsely populated this stretch of South Texas remained through the mid-nineteenth century. Carrizo Springs became the county seat.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Named for one of the framers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Dimmit County was carved from four counties in 1858 and organized in 1880 with Carrizo Springs as its seat. Its courthouse, commissioned in 1883 and built by J. C. Breeding & Sons on plans likely drawn from architect Alfred Giles, wore an Italianate look until the booming county hired Henry T. Phelps to enlarge and recast it in restrained Classical Revival style in the 1920s. The transformation left a single building embodying two eras of Texas civic architecture.

Glen Rose, TX

In the limestone bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose lie fossilized footprints left by three kinds of dinosaurs roughly a hundred million years ago — a giant meat-eater, a three-toed plant-eater, and a huge five-toed sauropod. Discovered around 1910, the tracks were long a local curiosity; farmers even scooped stranded catfish out of the water-filled prints in dry seasons. Excavations by a major museum and several universities in 1938 finally brought the site worldwide scientific attention.

Austin, TX

In 1947 the Catholic dioceses of San Antonio, Galveston, and Dallas ceded counties to form the new Diocese of Austin, elevating St. Mary Church to a cathedral and naming Louis J. Reicher its first bishop. Reicher built or remodeled some 260 buildings and founded councils on women's leadership and human rights; his successors pressed social justice and drew Mexican Americans into religious vocations. By 2008 the diocese spanned 125 parishes across 25 Central Texas counties.

Mirando City vicinity, TX

This small family burial ground was established around 1878 by the Guerra family in the ranching country of Webb County, in the Spanish- and Mexican-descended borderlands of South Texas. Family cemeteries like this one dotted the region's ranches, marking where generations of settlers lived, worked the land, and were laid to rest. It was formally recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2000.

Canton, TX

For decades the American cattle industry bled tens of millions of dollars a year to Texas tick fever, until a dip and a vaccine developed in the 1890s offered a defense. Beginning in 1918, East Texas mounted a tick-eradication campaign, herding cattle through chemical dipping vats every two weeks in a ritual known as 'dipping days.' The compulsory program was so unpopular that some citizens dynamited vats or met inspectors with gunfire; this surviving vat, one of about fifty in Van Zandt County, stood on rancher G. M. Hilliard's land.

Plainview, TX

On the West Texas plains near Running Water Draw, a teenager's 1941 find led archaeologists to a bone bed where ancient hunters had killed scores of giant bison thousands of years ago. Excavations in the 1940s uncovered stone dart points among the remains of an extinct bison twice the size of modern species, and the distinctive point was named for this site. Radiocarbon dating places the kill some 8,000 to 9,000 years in the past, a window into the lives of Paleo-Indian hunters of the Great Plains.

Denver City, TX

Ranchers L.P. and Ruth Bennett, facing foreclosure amid Depression-era drought, saw their fortunes reversed on October 10, 1935, when wildcatter Red Davidson and Honolulu Oil crews struck oil on their Yoakum County land. The discovery well opened the vast Wasson Field and sparked a boom that gave birth to nearby Denver City in 1939. Petroleum remains the region's economic engine, and the family later donated this ground for a county park.

Richmond, TX

In Civil War Texas, cavalry was king: horsemen accustomed to the saddle flocked to mounted units for the mobility and dash of scouting and raiding. But the Confederacy needed infantry, and by mid-1862 whole Texas cavalry regiments were dismounted "under strong protest." At Richmond in 1863, an order stripping men of A. W. Terrell's regiment of their prized horses sparked a mutiny, with dozens riding off before most returned to fight in the 1864 Red River campaign.

Columbus, TX

In 1837, when logs meant for the courthouse floated past on the swollen Colorado River and left the building unfinished, this oak stood in as a shade for Texas jurors. Presiding over the open-air court was Robert M. Williamson, famously nicknamed "Three-Legged Willie" for the wooden leg he wore beneath a drawn-up crippled one.

Robert Lee, TX

In 1896 the Smith and Chapman families set aside four acres on the divide between the Colorado and North Concho watersheds for a cemetery and an all-faiths sanctuary serving the scattered ranches around them. Callie Chapman, buried in 1897, was the first laid to rest here. Its roughly one hundred graves hold the region's earliest settlers and veterans of both World Wars and Korea, and descendants of those pioneers keep it in use today.

Mountain Home, TX

Schooling on this remote Kerr County ridge began in 1882 in a hired teacher's home, paid for by the only two families with children. In 1893 the Whartons gave land for a one-room schoolhouse that was later moved to follow the ranching families' children, and in 1909 residents organized the Divide Common School District — named for the ridge separating the Llano and Guadalupe watersheds. A new schoolhouse rose on the Klein Ranch in 1936, and the district still serves western Kerr County's ranch families.

Jasper, TX

Around 1850, an enslaved preacher known and loved as Rev. Richard "Uncle Dick" Seale gathered a congregation beneath the beech trees at this spot. In 1853 his enslaver, Joshua Seale—himself an American Revolution veteran and early settler—built the church a permanent home. That a Black minister led worship here in the antebellum South makes this ground quietly remarkable.

Jasper, TX

After Emancipation in 1865, formerly enslaved African Americans across the South built their own independent "freedom colonies" where they could own land and govern their own community life. The Dixie colony near Bevilport grew from the 1853 founding of Dixie Missionary Baptist Church — built jointly by planter Joshua Seale and the man he enslaved, Richard "Uncle Dick" Seale. After the war, Richard Seale became a community leader, establishing the Dixie School so the colony's children could be educated. The church, school, and nearby Indian Creek Cemetery anchored a life organized around faith, learning, and self-reliance.

Canton, TX

Announced in 1915 and named for the Dixie Highway that ran past it, this Canton hotel became a regional landmark for its lodging and generous meals. Under manager Mamie Maume it thrived through the oil boom of the 1920s and 1930s, when cots on the porches handled the overflow, and its cooks drew diners from across the region. Politicians, businessmen, and travelers, including a young Lyndon B. Johnson, passed through its two dining rooms.

Forney, TX

In the early automobile age, before the interstate system, private road associations promoted coast-to-coast routes that states and towns then paved piecemeal. The Dixie Overland Highway, launched by Savannah, Georgia, boosters in 1914 as an 'all-seasons' route, ran through 75 counties — including Kaufman — on its way west, though travelers here battled the notorious muddy, flood-prone 'Forney Gap.' Much of the route became U.S. Highway 80 in 1926 and was later superseded by Interstate 20.

Barksdale, TX

Dixie Settlement took its name from Camp Dixie, a Texas Ranger post along the military road to Fort Inge, and grew up in a hard frontier where Indian raids were still a living danger. Its first settler was the widowed midwife Jerusha Sanchez, followed by pioneer families and by Lewis Barksdale, a veteran of the Republic of Texas wars who claimed a land grant here in 1876. When a post office opened in 1882 under Barksdale's name, the old name Dixie quietly disappeared.

Mason vicinity, TX

Dizenia Peters Todd came to Texas as a child in the 1830s and, with her husband George W. Todd's family, was among the earliest settlers and officials of Mason County in the 1850s. She was killed in an Indian raid near this site around January 1865, a period when frontier defenses had thinned during the Civil War, and was buried with a young Black servant in adjacent unmarked graves.

Taylor, TX

Built in the 1860s in an early ranch-style form, this Williamson County house has belonged to the Doak family since 1878. Its longtime owner, A. V. Doak, was Taylor's first physician and a civic force who helped organize the town's mule-drawn streetcar line. The home passed down through three generations of Doak doctors.