Historic Markers in Texas

Driftwood, TX

This cemetery began in 1884, when the Driftwood Methodist congregation built a sanctuary on land from David and Mattie Dorrah and set aside a burial ground just south of it. Graves from an older 1870s community cemetery were moved here, and among those at rest are the church's founding trustees and at least eight Civil War veterans. The Driftwood Cemetery Association still cares for it today.

Driftwood, TX

Methodist services in Driftwood began in the nearby Reaves School under the Rev. John Alexander Garison, a circuit-riding minister to several small Hays County communities. The congregation moved into this frame sanctuary in 1884, and when fire destroyed the local Baptist church in 1911 the two congregations began sharing the building and a Union Sunday School. Descendants of the pioneer members worship here still.

Kilgore, TX

On opening day in April 1947, more than 3,100 fans packed Driller Park to watch the Kilgore Drillers—a joyful marker of baseball's return after World War II. Built by the local baseball club on land straddling the Gregg–Rusk county line, the ballpark was an ingenious product of the East Texas oil boom, framed from oil-field pipe and tank steel over an engineered drainage system. Though the Drillers folded in 1950, the field endured as a home for the local game.

Dripping Springs, TX

Founded in 1881 by the Baptist preacher W. M. Jordan, this stone academy passed through a succession of caretakers that mirrors the growth of local institutions: given to the Pedernales Baptist Association in 1883, then to the public school district in 1889, and enlarged with a second floor in 1920. In 1952 the building became home to a Masonic lodge. Its history maps how one structure served the education, worship, and fellowship of a Hill Country town.

Dripping Springs, TX

Methodism came to the Dripping Springs area in 1854, when worshippers first gathered in the one-room log home of Dr. J. W. Pound. Circuit-riding preachers like Andrew J. Potter and Orceneth A. Fisher carried the faith across the Texas Hill Country before the congregation built its first sanctuary in 1880 on donated land. True to frontier custom, the church repeatedly opened its doors to newly forming congregations of other denominations.

Austin, TX

Cattle king Col. Jesse L. Driskill, who drove his fortune up from the open range after moving to Austin in 1869, built this grand hotel in 1885–86 and opened it at Christmas 1886 as the finest in the Southwest. Brick dressed in limestone, it boasted three monumental entrances—one the largest arched doorway in Texas—a separate "Ladies' Entrance," and busts of Driskill and his rancher sons crowning the arches. The colonel personally chose its rich furnishings before leasing the hotel out.

Teague, TX

Julius Driver came from Georgia in 1852, bought frontier headright land in Freestone County, and later set aside 4.5 acres for this burial ground, where his daughter-in-law became the first person interred in 1869. Driver also donated land for a nearby church and school, where Freestone County's Confederate veterans held their first reunion in 1890. A cemetery association has cared for the property since 1915, and hundreds now rest here.

Abilene, TX

Widowed in Jamaica in 1879, Englishwoman Helen Fanny Harris Drummond brought her children first back to England and then, in 1885, to Texas. In 1891 she bought 100 acres in Taylor County and within a few years set aside two of them for a community cemetery, where an infant's 1892 grave is thought to be the earliest. Her own resting place dates to 1896, and her descendants lie alongside pioneer neighbors on ground still maintained by a local association.

Ratcliff, TX

Druso owed its brief life to timber. When the Four-C Company opened a large sawmill at nearby Ratcliff in 1900, a rail line was cut through this Houston County land, and Druso became its only stop between the mill and Lufkin. Almost overnight a farming settlement became a logging boom town with a post office, cotton gin, store, blacksmith, and saloon. When the mill closed in 1920 the rail line was abandoned and the town declined; much of the cutover land joined the Davy Crockett National Forest in 1935.

Terrell, TX

This burial ground first served Turner's Point, a settlement founded by Elisha Turner in 1845 on the stage road running between Shreveport, Louisiana, and Dallas. When the town relocated a mile and a half southeast in the 1870s and took the name Poetry, the cemetery remained behind. Its 279 marked graves—the earliest that of Samuel Key, who died in 1871—carry the English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh names of the area's pioneer settlers.

Uvalde, TX

The families of Louis Bohme, Charles Jones, and the Heards came seeking new range land in 1875, giving Dry Frio Canyon its first settlement, post office, and school under the name Heard. In 1885 a well-digger struck mineral water prized for its medicinal qualities, and a promoter soon built a bathhouse and hotel to draw visitors to the springs.

Post, TX

In 1907, cereal magnate C. W. Post—the mind behind Post Foods—launched an ambitious colony on the dry, low-rainfall plains of Garza County that most people thought fit only for grazing. Applying new agricultural methods, he made cotton, milo maize, corn, and oats profitable, and experimented with fruits and vegetables besides. Post sold farms to men of modest means on easy terms, outfitting them with houses, fences, windmills, and electricity, and even built a textile mill so colonists could earn supplemental wages.

Dryden, TX

Aviation came early to remote Terrell County: in 1919 the U.S. government built an airfield near Sanderson for the 90th Aero Squadron, whose biplanes patrolled the Mexican border. When World War II demanded a chain of civilian and emergency military fields across the Southwest, American Airlines and federal aviation authorities built this landing field, finishing its two mile-long rock-asphalt runways in October 1943. Later renamed Terrell County Airport, it went on to host civil air patrol and military training.

Dubina, TX

Named from the Czech word for "oak grove," Dubina was founded in 1856 by Moravian immigrant families who cleared farms in Fayette County. By 1900 the community had grown into a full village with a church, mill, cotton gin, blacksmith, store, and post office. A devastating 1909 storm and a 1912 fire broke its momentum, and the town never fully recovered — but it holds the distinction of being the first Texas settlement founded entirely by Czech-Moravians.

Dublin, TX

In 1891 Sam Houston Prim arrived in Dublin with $680 of bottling equipment and set up shop at Patrick and Elm streets. He began bottling Dr Pepper and, in 1925, formally claimed a 44-mile distribution territory centered on the town. According to the marker, Prim had bottled the drink longer than any other person by the time of his death in 1946, and his works is recognized as the oldest Dr Pepper bottler in the world.

Dublin, TX

As the railroad arrived and cotton money flowed into newly incorporated Dublin, former railroad president John G. Harris and three partners founded the Dublin National Bank in 1893. It weathered the hard years, absorbing the town's only other bank in 1933, and has operated from the same spot ever since. Today it stands as the oldest continuously operating bank in Erath County.

Dublin, TX

Drawn to Erath County in 1936, Madison Square Garden rodeo director Everett Colborn made Dublin a rodeo capital, staging its first "World's Championship Rodeo" in 1940 as a whole-community affair of parades, floats, and volunteers. The 1946 Colborn Bowl was the Southwest's largest outdoor arena, drawing thousands and celebrities like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

Castroville, TX

In 1847, in the newly settled Alsatian colony of Castroville, French priest Father Claude M. Dubuis and Father Chazelle raised the first two rooms of this house; Chazelle soon died of typhus. Dubuis, the colony's first priest, was twice captured by Comanches that same year yet escaped unharmed, and later rose to become Bishop of Texas. The dwelling was the colony's first example of French-Alsatian architecture and was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Lindale, TX

In the depths of the Dust Bowl era, the United States awoke to soil erosion as a national emergency, and in 1929 one of the country's first ten erosion-control research stations was established near here. By 1934 the surrounding Duck Creek watershed became a working demonstration where landowners across 25,000 acres adopted planned conservation—terraces, dams, tree and grass plantings—much of it built by a nearby Civilian Conservation Corps camp. The project drew visitors from across the nation and trained a generation of agronomists, foresters, and engineers who carried its methods to other states.

Willow City, TX

August Duecker, Sr. left his native Germany in 1852 to join the wave of German immigrants who reshaped the Texas Hill Country, marrying Louise Feuge and buying a large farm here in 1878. His son August, Jr. built this two-story house in 1888 from limestone quarried on family land—a handsome example of the rural German Texan homestead. Enlarged over generations, it stands as a record of an immigrant family putting down deep roots.

Caldwell, TX

In the 1880s Rudolph and Anna Duewall carved a family farm out of Burleson County, and their son Edward and his wife Lizzie raised six children on the land. In 1928 the family replaced the original farmhouse with this vernacular home, whose carpenter thriftily reused timber from the old house and from the county's second courthouse. Its exposed rafters and cross-gabled roof are hallmarks of practical Texas farm building.

Clairette vicinity, TX

On a Sunday in October 1878, elders A. W. Elledge, O. W. Hughart, and D. Shipman gathered seventeen charter members to found the Duffau Baptist Church. Members soon built a sanctuary here, holding services one weekend each month, and after fire destroyed the first building in 1935 they raised the present one. Membership peaked near 125 before the local school consolidated with Hico in 1960 and the settlement declined, leaving this as the community's only active church.

Clairette vicinity, TX

Duffau grew from the late-1850s arrival of settlers like Francis T. Duffau, taking its name and gaining a post office by 1860; it became a busy trade center before fires and a railroad bypass sent it into decline. Nearby mineral wells drew health-seekers to a small resort, and churches, a school, and a cemetery anchored community life for over a century. The graveyard's oldest recorded burial dates to 1865, and among its 950-plus graves lie veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and the Korean War.

Stephenville, TX

When the Duffau community's school burned, residents rebuilt in 1936 with a $4,700 insurance settlement, hiring Stephenville architect-contractor George Coleman to raise a modest brick-veneered schoolhouse with a hipped metal roof. Heated by wood stoves and lit by oil lamps, it taught local children until 1958, when Duffau consolidated with the schools in nearby Hico. Rather than let it stand empty, neighbors converted the building into a community center they have maintained ever since.

Post, TX

So prominent it became Garza County's earliest benchmark, this sandstone height was fixed in 1877–78 by the peg-legged surveyor Jasper Hays as he mapped the bounds of the Llano Ranch, the first property settlers occupied in the county. Tradition holds that a crew member who died was buried near the peak, giving it his name. Hays's original notes, recovered from Mason jars he buried on the summit, later anchored the surveys that laid out C. W. Post's farm colony—one landmark among a landscape of colorfully named local formations.

Seguin, TX

First called Cottonwood Cemetery, this burial ground served the pioneers of the Cottonwood community before it was renamed for H. A. Dugger, who with his wife Nancy gave land for both the cemetery and a school. Its earliest graves are those of Lee Dora Southern and her uncle Asa, killed by robbers while traveling through in 1872; Henry A. Seay added land in 1935. Curbing, grave slabs, and fraternal markers still mark the ground an association has tended since 1959.

Armstrong County, TX

William Miles Dye, born in Kentucky in 1864, came to Texas as a boy and put down roots in newly organized Armstrong County in 1891. He hauled rock from Palo Duro Canyon to help build the county's first jail and raised his family in a dugout, the lower portion of which is still visible. Such earthen dwellings were a practical necessity on the treeless Texas Panhandle, where lumber and stone were scarce.

Alvarado, TX

Dr. John Duke and his wife Martha moved to Johnson County in 1854 and established a farm in what became the Willow Springs Community. When their ten-year-old daughter Zilla died in 1870 they buried her on the family farm, and she was soon joined by siblings and a young relative. In 1879 Dr. Duke deeded the burial ground to the community, and it became the resting place of Willow Springs ranchers, farmers, teachers, merchants, ministers and soldiers.

Arcola, TX

The Duke Community grew from land granted in 1824 to three of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists—David Fitzgerald, who fought at Anahuac, Thomas Barnett, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, and Moses Shipman. Perched on a high bluff above Clear Lake with ample water for steam engines, the site drew railroads by mid-century and became the terminus of the Sugar Land Railway, loading sugarcane at a bustling depot named for storekeeper Duke Hessey. With its store, hotel, and sugar mills, Duke thrived until its post office closed in 1922; today only its cemetery remains.

McKinney, TX

Dr. Joseph E. Dulaney (d. 1877), a Confederate Army surgeon, came to McKinney after the Civil War and married Lucy Ann Field (1844–1941), daughter of Collin County pioneers. In 1875 he built this Victorian cottage, notable for its many gables and fine porch detailing. Lucy lived here until 1910 with children including Joseph Field Dulaney, a pharmacist who later donated land across the street for a public library.

McKinney, TX

Built in 1916 by Dallas banker John Field for his sister, this McKinney home stayed in the Dulaney family for more than half a century. Her son Joseph Field Dulaney, a local philanthropist, lived here until 1968 and donated the land across the street for the town's public library. With its Prairie School influences and wraparound veranda, the house reflects the comfortable domestic architecture of early-20th-century Texas.

Athens, TX

Dulcinea Ann Holland came from Athens, Georgia, to Henderson County as a girl in 1847, and local tradition credits her with naming the new town of Athens for her birthplace. Widowed during the 1860s and remarried in 1867, she raised a family, helped found the local Methodist church, and became a respected civic leader. Her life spans the pioneer settlement and maturing of a East Texas community.

Livingston, TX

Formal education for Livingston's African American children began in a West Street building in the late 1800s, in a segregated system so under-resourced that a former white schoolhouse was once rolled across town on logs by mule teams to serve Black students. In 1936 the community opened Dunbar High School—named for poet Paul Laurence Dunbar—the largest African American school in Polk County, with twelve grades and vocational training. Its Leopards won state football titles in 1953, 1954, and 1958, until the Freedom of Choice integration program led to Dunbar's closing in 1968; residents later saved the campus for continued public use.

Forney, TX

Duncan Graham McKellar and his wife Emma built this two-story frame house in 1886, when the couple stood at the center of Forney and Kaufman County's economic, social, and religious life. Its Queen Anne and Eastlake detailing made it one of the town's first high-style residences, and it remains the oldest surviving example of the style there. The McKellar family owned and lived in the home until 2010.

Corpus Christi, TX

Also called Flour Bluff Cemetery, this public burial ground was established in 1908 on land purchased by Edward and Minerva Duncan near Corpus Christi. Its oldest documented grave dates to 1909, and among those buried here are veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, alongside generations of families who helped build up Nueces County. It carries the state's Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

Gonzales, TX

Scotsman Benjamin Duncan began his ferry across the San Marcos River around 1834, on the eve of the Texas Revolution. Tradition says Susanna Dickinson, a survivor of the Alamo, stopped at Duncan's home while carrying word of the fort's fall to Gonzales, whose men had died in the battle. On hearing the news, Sam Houston ordered the Texas army's retreat and had the town and ferry burned in March 1836; Duncan later rebuilt and ran the crossing until 1866.

Duncanville, TX

First settled by farmers and ranchers in the 1840s and 1850s, this area became "Duncan Switch" in 1881 when the Chicago, Texas & Mexican Central Railroad built a switching station, with local resident John Duncan securing the right-of-way. When a post office application under the name Duncan was denied, the town became Duncanville, opening its post office in 1882. Growth stayed gradual — barely 300 residents by the 1930s — until postwar suburban expansion from nearby Dallas transformed it into a fast-growing commercial center.

Longview, TX

Raised on the eve of the Civil War, this ranch home was the work of Dr. J. N. Allison, a pioneer physician who hauled building materials all the way from Virginia and had its bricks fired on site from local clay by enslaved laborers. The house stood on land that would later prove to sit atop the vast East Texas oil field, with the nearby Lathrop Discovery Well extending that famous strike. It marks the layering of Old South settlement and 20th-century petroleum wealth on a single patch of Gregg County ground.

Waxahachie, TX

Built in 1890-91, this exuberant Queen Anne Revival house—complete with hexagonal and octagonal rooms—was the home of Judge Oscar E. Dunlap, a Waxahachie banker, industrialist, and civic leader. Dunlap founded the Sims Library and championed the Good Roads movement, and the home later passed through a succession of prominent local families. It stands as a showpiece of late-nineteenth-century architectural ambition.

La Feria, TX

Valley developer W. E. Stewart began this adobe-brick and stucco house in 1912 but sold it before completion to his employee Bailey H. Dunlap, an Illinois native. Dunlap founded La Feria's first bank, dealt in real estate across the Rio Grande Valley, and served as the town's first mayor in 1915, and the home was enlarged over the following decades.

Dunn, TX

Dunn began about 1881 as a change station where freighters resting their teams hauled goods north after the Texas & Pacific Railway reached Colorado City. A blacksmith shop and store sprang up to serve the wagon traffic, mail was dropped at the Dunn family home, and a post office named for them opened in 1890 with the first school built the same year. A community well, windmill, and trough once stood in the middle of the road—covered over only when the highway was paved in 1938.

Wheelock vicinity, TX

This burial ground grew from the homestead of James and Isabella Dunn, part of a group of Irish families who sailed to America in 1821 and, after stints in Charleston and Alabama, made the ox-wagon trek to Sterling C. Robertson's Texas colony in the winter of 1833. The cemetery opened in 1836 with the burial of the Dunns' infant child and has served the pioneer families' descendants ever since.

Eureka, TX

James and Isabella Dunn brought their family to Texas in 1832, and their son James Dunn, Jr., moved to Navarro County in 1850 with his wife and his cousin David J. Johnston. A log building known as Dunn's Schoolhouse rose nearby in that decade, and the cemetery began with the 1865 burial of James Jr. on his own property. His wife and members of the Johnston family, several in unmarked graves, joined him here among the area's earliest settlers.

Corsicana, TX

Kentucky-born Ewing Eric Dunn came to Texas in 1850, served as a county deputy sheriff, then fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War before building the first part of this frame house in 1866. He went on to serve as Navarro County sheriff from 1876 to 1884. Grocer S. M. Ransom enlarged the home in 1890, adding the wraparound porch, fish-scale shingling, and stained glass that five generations of the Ransom family enjoyed.

Jones Creek, TX

Carved from Stephen F. Austin's 1828 Mexican land grant, Durazno—Spanish for "peach"—passed on Austin's death in 1836 to his sister Emily Austin Bryan Perry and then to her son William Joel Bryan, who built it into a cotton and sugar plantation. Its grounds held a main house, offices, barns, and a number of slave cabins, and it stayed in the family until 1928. The plantation's wealth, like so much of the antebellum South, rested on the labor of the enslaved.

Mullin, TX

Philip David Duren bought 390 acres here in 1876 and raised a log home, bringing his family from Houston County. His infant daughter Willie Lee, buried in 1878, was the first laid to rest in what became the community cemetery. Duren deeded land for a school that ran until 1947 and, in 1912, guaranteed free burial plots and a church open to all denominations; Pompey Mountain Church still serves the area.

Tool, TX

Durham Avant left North Carolina for Texas in 1834, arriving with his wife Susan during the restless years just before the Texas Revolution. Serving as a Texas Ranger, he helped survey and site the seat of newly formed Henderson County and later opened a hotel in the county seat of Athens. Late in life he enlisted in the Confederate army alongside his son, and died in 1862 not long after joining up.

Hamilton, TX

John Jefferson Durham built this two-story rock residence in 1873, a substantial home on a landholding of several thousand acres in Hamilton County. A Civil War veteran, Durham was the first to teach school in Hamilton and made his mark as a merchant, builder, and community leader. The colonial-style stone house reflects the standing of one of the area's most influential early settlers.

Nacogdoches, TX

This East Texas dwelling sits on land held since the days of Spanish Nacogdoches, owned by the family of a 1779 settler and sold in 1827 to Joseph Durst, then the town's alcalde. Its gable-end chimneys, tapered columns, and paneled shutters mark it as a traditional Anglo settler house, likely built during Durst's tenure in the Mexican-Texas years. Its later owners read like a roll call of Texas history — a San Jacinto veteran, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a Confederate congressman — before a Civil War veteran's family held it for over a century.

Fredericksburg, TX

Carl Durst arrived in the German settlement country of the Texas Hill Country in 1873 and started with a single-room cabin, adding on as his family and fortunes grew. The house expanded room by room over the decades—including an 1896 stone addition that sometimes housed teachers for the nearby Cherry Mountain School, on land the Dursts had donated. What survives is less a single building than a family's life told in wood and stone.

Edna, TX

Built around 1860 in the town of Texana and later moved to Edna, this home sheltered many of the area's first families and typifies the modest frame dwellings of antebellum Jackson County. Its relocation echoes the fate of Texana itself, a river town that faded when the railroad passed it by. The house endures as a recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

San Diego, TX

This marker records the founding of Duval County, created in 1858 and organized in 1876 with San Diego as its seat. The county honors Burr H. Duval, a young captain in James Fannin's command during the Texas Revolution. Taken prisoner after the surrender at Goliad, Duval was among the hundreds executed in the massacre of March 27, 1836.

San Diego, TX

Created by the legislature in 1858 and organized in 1879, Duval County took shape as settlers arrived — first from Mexico in the mid-19th century, then Anglo pioneers in the 1860s — building an economy on ranching and farming. The railroad's arrival in the late 1870s swelled population and employment, and the early-1900s discovery of oil, gas, and uranium brought a fresh wave of settlement. Its layered history reflects the blended cultures and resource booms of South Texas.

Saint Jo, TX

The Dye Mound community took shape in the late 1850s, named for a trapper who kept a trading post at the foot of the hills. Cemetery trustees bought more than three acres in 1889, and the growing cotton town raised its first church by 1890. Decline set in by the late 1920s, and by 1956 only a ghost town remained—though the cemetery still serves the area.

Abilene, TX

On January 21, 1963, Dyess Elementary became the first school in the Abilene Independent School District to integrate, enrolling 38 African American children — most from military families at Dyess Air Force Base who had been bused past this closer school to the segregated Woodson School. Texas had tried to stall desegregation with House Bill 65, but after the state attorney general declared it unconstitutional in 1962 and the Defense Department threatened to cut funding, the district's board voted unanimously to begin. Full integration of Abilene's schools followed step by step, completed only in 1970.

Granbury, TX

Born in England, raised in Ohio, and a Union Army veteran, E. A. "Doc" Hannaford came to Granbury in 1871 and opened his drugstore in a tent before prospering. In 1886 he and merchant J. D. Baker put up a two-part Italianate commercial building — among the first stone structures in town — known as the "Arch Block," its cornice advertising Hannaford's Drug and Book Store. He became a leading civic figure, and the upper floor housed the local newspaper, doctors' offices, and a beauty parlor.

Granbury, TX

Edwin Augustus Hannaford, a native of England, came to Granbury in 1871 and opened the town's first drugstore, becoming a respected civic leader alongside his wife Nettie. In 1881–82 he built this home as a reflection of his standing, giving it fashionable Italianate touches — a central entry flanked by bay windows, bracketed eaves, and pedimented window surrounds. The house remains a handsome emblem of Granbury's Gilded Age prosperity.

McKinney, TX

In 1895, at the height of the Victorian building boom that reshaped North Texas county seats, financier and philanthropist Edward A. Newsome raised this grand two-and-a-half-story home for his wife Laura and their family. With its high ceilings, ornate woodwork, majestic stair landing and panels of cocoa (solar) glass, the house became a center of McKinney's social life. It passed through several owners—including the Murphy family in 1966—yet survives as a distinctive architectural landmark.

Moscow, TX

Built in 1856 by a craftsman known as "Daddy Poe," the E. C. Matthews Home is a striking survivor of early Texas building ingenuity. Its columns were fashioned from hollowed pine trees and it features an unusual swinging upstairs porch—vernacular solutions born of local materials and frontier resourcefulness. The home was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Eagle Lake, TX

Before Eagle Lake had a school for Black children, they were taught at home, in churches, and even a blacksmith shop. In the late 1920s professor Eugene H. Henry—a Prairie View and Howard graduate and World War I veteran—rallied the community to seek a Rosenwald grant, the matching-fund program launched by Sears president Julius Rosenwald to build African-American schools across the segregated South. Parents, churches, and businesses raised money, and the school opened in 1930 as Colorado County's only Rosenwald school, becoming a hub of Black community life until integration in the 1960s.