Historic Markers in Texas

San Antonio, TX

San Antonio was a cradle of American military aviation, and this hangar at Brooks Air Force Base honors astronaut Lt. Col. Edward H. White II, the first American to walk in space, tethered to his Gemini craft in June 1965. White died in the January 1967 Apollo launch-pad fire while training for the first Moon flight; his own father had learned to fly at nearby Hangar 9, as did Charles Lindbergh. That standard WWI-era hangar once sheltered Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" trainers, linking the pioneers of powered flight to the astronauts who followed.

Houston, TX

Born Chen Yuk Chow in San Francisco, Edward K. T. Chen came to Texas in 1932 as a consular official for the Republic of China and settled in Houston, where he earned degrees and became the city's first Chinese American professor. He worked tirelessly to raise the standing of Chinese Texans, helping defeat a 1937 bill that would have barred Chinese from owning land and, during the Korean War, defending the loyalty of Chinese Americans while translating intelligence and teaching Cantonese to FBI agents. In 1954 he founded the Houston lodge of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance to fight the prejudice directed at his community.

Amarillo, TX

Designed by Harold Walsh in 1949 with heavy input from its owners, this Amarillo home was built as a nod to Santa Fe architecture, with an irregular ranch-style plan, exposed beams, stucco fireplaces, and stone floors. Its co-owner, Margaret Seewald Roberts—once a student of Georgia O'Keeffe at Amarillo High School—earned national recognition as an etcher and sculptor and carved much of the home's woodwork herself.

Houston, TX

Born on this Houston site in 1858, Edward Mandell House rose from Texas politics—helping elect four governors—to become one of the most influential figures in American statecraft. As the trusted adviser known as "Colonel House," he was instrumental in Woodrow Wilson's 1912 nomination and later shaped foreign policy during and after World War I. He helped draft Wilson's Fourteen Points and served as a delegate to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, all without ever holding elective office.

Franklin, TX

This marker remembers Edward McMillan, an Irish immigrant born in 1814 who joined the fight for Texas independence and stood among the veterans of the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. His wife, Ann Marjorie McQuiston McMillan, was born in Tennessee. Both are commemorated here in Robertson County, where their lives closed in the decades after the Republic gave way to statehood.

San Augustine, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1801, Edward Oswald LeGrand cast his lot with the Texas independence movement, adding his name to the Texas Declaration of Independence and fighting at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He lived out his years in the new republic and later state, dying in 1870. The State of Texas placed this marker in 1936 during the centennial of independence to honor his role among the republic's founders.

Houston, TX

Edward Ruthven Taylor, born in 1845, came of age in a Houston cotton and education family and returned from schooling in New York to fight for the Confederacy, serving with Waul's Texas Legion at Vicksburg, where he was captured and fell ill. Back home he fell in love with Ann, a young woman his family had enslaved; unable to marry legally, the couple built a farm at Pierce Junction and raised a large family together. Ann died in 1909, and when oil was struck on the family land in 1921, the fortune passed to their children, who later donated the original homestead to the City of Houston.

Giddings, TX

Built around 1890, this American four-square house was home to attorney Edward R. Sinks, Lee County's first state district judge and a founding director of its first bank. His parents, George and Julia Sinks—both friends of Sam Houston—lived out their later years here. George had served as first chief clerk of the Republic of Texas Postal System, while Julia Lee Sinks was a pioneering amateur historian and charter member of the Texas State Historical Association.

Liberty, TX

A Virginia native, Edward Thomas Branch came to Texas in 1835 and settled in Liberty, fighting as a first sergeant at the Battle of San Jacinto the following spring. He went on to a long public career in the young Republic of Texas—congressman, district judge, postmaster—and later served as speaker of the House in the first state legislature after annexation. He married Anne Cleveland Wharton, daughter of statesman William H. Wharton, and helped charter the Liberty Masonic Lodge.

Longview, TX

Settlers began burying their dead on this ground by the mid-1850s, the earliest recorded being the infant Josephine Rucker in 1855. The cemetery took its name from James William Cartwright Edwards, who came to Texas from Tennessee with his parents around 1850 and set aside 1.6 acres as a family burial ground in 1912. His daughter Margie fenced part of it and endowed a trust for its upkeep before her death in 1962.

Rocksprings, TX

Spread across the Edwards Plateau and dipping into the scenic Nueces Valley, Edwards County was created in 1858 and organized in 1883 from the old Bexar district, taking its name from early Texas colonizer Haden Edwards. Ranching built its economy, and it once styled itself the Angora goat capital of the world. The county seat moved to Rocksprings in 1891, whose courthouse survived a fire in 1897 and, in 1927, a devastating tornado that killed 72 people.

Rocksprings, TX

Created in 1858 from Bexar County and organized in 1883, Edwards County was named for Haden Edwards, the empresario who led the short-lived Fredonian War of 1827 in an early revolt against Mexican authority. The county seat began at Leakey in 1883 and moved to Rocksprings in 1890. The marker records the frontier origins of this rugged Hill Country county.

Rocksprings, TX

Rising from rusticated limestone quarried in the Southwest Texas hill country, the Edwards County Courthouse was raised in 1891 by the Kerrville contracting firm of Davey and Schott, a stout Late Victorian statement of civic permanence in a sparsely settled frontier county. In 1927 a catastrophic storm—one of the deadliest tornadoes in Texas history, claiming some 70 lives at Rocksprings—tore at its roof, and the community rebuilt rather than abandon it. Named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1973, it still anchors the county seat.

Houston, TX

This two-and-a-half-story brick Tudor Revival residence was designed in 1914 by Houston architect Birdsall P. Briscoe, and it still keeps its original floor plan, half-timbered gables, steep hipped roof, and one-story brick loggias. It was home to Edwin L. Neville, a partner at Dorrance & Company, and his wife Daphne Palmer, both active in Houston civic life through the Community Chest, the Junior League, and area hospitals and chapels. The house stayed in the Neville family until 1949.

Houston, TX

Edwin Fairfax Gray, born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1829, served as a midshipman in the Navy of the Republic of Texas in 1841 and later as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy in 1857. When the Civil War came, he joined the Confederacy as a lieutenant colonel in the 4th Texas Infantry, serving from 1862 to 1865. His career carried him across three different navies and armies over four turbulent decades.

Plainview, TX

Edwin Lowden Lowe, born in Mississippi, studied law and served in the Arkansas legislature before heading to Texas in the 1880s, losing his wife along the way as the wagon train halted at Buffalo Gap. Joining his friend Z. T. Maxwell at Hackberry Groves, each man donated land to establish the county seat that became Plainview. Lowe served as the town's first postmaster and helped set it on its feet.

Egypt, TX

In 1838, during the Republic of Texas, William Jones Elliot Heard bought more than 2,000 acres in what became Wharton County and founded the Egypt Plantation, setting aside three acres for a family burying ground. Its oldest marked grave, covered like others by a brick crypt, belongs to Heard's young son George, who died in 1854, and his wife America was laid to rest here the following year. Still tended by Heard's descendants, including the Northington family, the cemetery holds many of his heirs and a number of unmarked graves.

Columbus, TX

Henry M. Ehrenwerth raised this two-story commercial building in 1873-75 using bricks fired at a local kiln, opening it as a mercantile store. In the 1880s it rang with the noise of L.G. Smith's Red Elk Saloon and Gambling Hall, then settled into respectability when James Ramsey bought it in 1896 for a hardware, implement, and undertaking business. In 1925 it passed to the Untermeyer hardware firm.

New Braunfels, TX

A general store opened at the corner of Castell and San Antonio Streets in 1846, just a year after New Braunfels was founded, and passed through a succession of German-connected owners over the next century. Growing into one of the region's most successful mercantiles, Eiband & Fischer sold everything from groceries and china to farm machinery, and also served as cotton buyers and short-term bankers. A 1947 fire finally consumed the store, though its surviving annex still stands.

Temple, TX

Just after the railroad gave birth to the town of Temple in 1882, the Rev. L.J. Mackey organized a Baptist congregation to serve the African American railroad workers who helped build and run the new junction. Known first as Saint Love All Baptist Church and later as the First Baptist Church (Colored), the congregation relocated to this site in 1905 and adopted the Eighth Street Baptist name in 1911. It has remained a pillar of its community through generations of youth, senior, and outreach ministries.

Taylor, TX

Merchant Albert Eikel raised this three-story brick commercial block in 1893 to house his hardware company, hiring noted Williamson County architect Henry Struve for the design. Its cast-iron pilasters and paired rounded windows marked the confident face of a prospering railroad-era downtown. The Ira A. Prewitt Company bought the building in 1923 and traded here until 1981.

Palestine, TX

At the turn of the 20th century, waves of German immigrants brought Old World baking traditions to Texas towns, and F. H. Eilenberger was one of them—apprenticing in Galveston and Fort Worth before opening his own shop in Palestine in 1898. Moved to this site in 1918, the bakery became an East Texas institution, its bread carried across the region for decades. Today it endures for its fruit and pecan cakes, still made from the founder's family recipe and shipped worldwide.

Laredo, TX

El Barrio Azteca grew from land first platted into lots in the 1870s and 1880s, making it one of Laredo's earliest residential neighborhoods. Its residents worshiped at San Augustin Catholic Church and, after 1895, at the Presbyterian 'La Iglesia Presbiteriana Sinai,' reflecting a community of deep Mexican-American roots and varied faiths. The barrio grew alongside the border city during its late-nineteenth-century expansion.

Houston, TX

As Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans poured into Houston's Second Ward between 1910 and 1920, the cheap housing of the old Frost Town and Schrimpf's Field neighborhoods drew industrial workers seeking a foothold. By the 1930s residents had given their barrio a defiant nickname—El Alacrán, The Scorpion—anchored by churches, the Rusk Settlement House, a school, and sandlot sports leagues. Highway construction and urban renewal erased the neighborhood in the 1950s.

Overton, TX

Local tradition holds that the Rev. J.D. James arrived around 1840 with his family and about 300 enslaved people, and the community around his plantation became known as Jamestown. His church seated white worshipers in the morning and enslaved Black worshipers later in the day; from that congregation, called El Bethel, several Black churches later sprang. After the Civil War, members formed El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church No. 1 and built their first sanctuary here around 1872, gradually raising up African American pastors and a rich array of church auxiliaries even as the surrounding town faded.

Sanderson, TX

El Buen Pastor Methodist Church was founded in 1901 by Juan Zepeda, Sr., and Vicente Rodriguez, who met in members' homes until 1908, when the congregation built this church from locally made adobe bricks. A member crafted the pulpit and benches, and a bell tower was added in the 1940s, creating a fine vernacular example of Gothic Revival style. The little adobe church served its Mexican-American congregation until 1968.

Brazos County, TX

El Camino Real, the 'Royal Road,' ran roughly a thousand miles from Saltillo in Mexico into present-day Louisiana, following ancient Indian and buffalo trails. Its oldest marked segment was blazed in 1691 under Domingo Terán de los Ríos to link the provincial capital with the Spanish missions of East Texas, and in 1820 Moses Austin traveled it to San Antonio to request the land grant that opened Texas to Anglo-American settlement. In 1918 the state and the Daughters of the American Revolution set granite markers every five miles along the Texas route.

Normangee, TX

The Camino Real—the Old San Antonio Road—was first blazed in 1691 by Domingo Terán de los Ríos, first provincial governor of Texas, guiding a mission expedition with Father Damián Massanet from the Rio Grande across a chain of rivers to the missions of East Texas. Generations of explorers, soldiers, and settlers followed the same route, among them Moses Austin in 1820, and the Republic of Texas later made the road a boundary for its land grants. This 1936 centennial marker honors that ancient highway of empires.

Benchley, TX

El Camino Real — the King's Highway, also called the Old San Antonio Road — was the great overland route by which Spanish colonization reached into Texas, formally marked by the first Texas governor in 1691 but following far older paths worn by buffalo, Native peoples, and traders. Over the centuries it carried explorers like La Salle and St. Denis, mission-founders such as De León and Massanet, and finally Moses Austin and the thousands of American settlers who followed him in 1820. Soldiers and supply trains moved along it through the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War.

El Paso, TX

El Camino Real, the 'King's Highway,' was the great royal road linking Mexico City to the far northern Kingdom of New Mexico across the vast Spanish empire. From 1581 onward, conquistadors, priests, merchants, and settlers passed this way, their ox-carts and mule-trains carrying the traffic of a new realm. For centuries the road was the artery of Spanish colonial life in the Southwest.

Victoria, TX

The Camino Real, or King's Highway, was a network of routes linking Spanish missions and presidios across Texas and Louisiana. Beginning in 1725 a lower branch passed through present-day Victoria County, serving Presidio La Bahía—built atop the ruins of La Salle's Fort St. Louis—and the mission of Espíritu Santo as they repeatedly relocated along the Guadalupe and San Antonio rivers. The road remained a vital link between Béxar and East Texas for another century.

El Campo, TX

El Campo began in 1882 as "Prairie Switch," a camp on the New York, Texas, and Mexican Railroad that shipped cattle and supplies for area ranchers. By the 1890s it had grown into a full town of homes, businesses, schools, and churches, its character shaped by an influx of European immigrants. Fires in 1896 and 1901 leveled much of downtown, but the city rebuilt, and oil and gas strikes in the 1930s brought a boom atop its enduring agricultural base.

El Campo, TX

El Campo's schooling began around 1891 in a simple wooden building, and the independent school district was organized in 1895, its early classrooms scattered among a church, a restaurant, a store, and a Swedish school. Brick schoolhouses rose and were replaced across the decades as the district consolidated rural schools and, in 1961, merged with the Crescent district. Integration was completed by 1968, and by 1994 the district served more than 3,500 students of varied backgrounds.

El Campo, TX

El Campo's reading life began with a library association in 1902, grew into a public library at the downtown fire station in 1927, and found a permanent home in this crisp Moderne building completed in 1940 after a Wharton County Library branch opened in town. Its streamlined entryway, light fixtures, and signage marked it as a proud product of its era's design. When the library outgrew the space in 1965 it found new purpose, becoming a community art center in 1983.

Seguin, TX

El Capote Ranch traces to Jose De La Baume, a French officer who came to North America with Lafayette, fought in the American Revolution, and later won a 27,000-acre Spanish land grant in 1806 that Mexico reaffirmed after independence. Virginia's Michael Erskine acquired it in 1840, raising cattle he drove to California and New Orleans and hosting notable travelers along the San Antonio–Gonzales road. Part of the land later passed to Edith Kermit Carow, Theodore Roosevelt's wife, and Roosevelt reportedly rode a ranch-bred horse at San Juan Hill in 1898.

San Antonio, TX

This San Antonio cemetery traces its origin to the Battle of Medina of August 18, 1813, when a Republican Army of the North — Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians seeking to free Mexico from Spanish rule — was crushed by the Royalist army, and hundreds of the dead were interred here. A chapel built over the soldiers' burial crypt grew into the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen, and the site became a community cemetery for the surrounding land-grant families. Among those later buried here are Alamo survivor Enrique Esparza and French immigrant naturalist Gustave Toudouze.

Encino, TX

A magnificent live oak once spread its canopy over this stretch of the South Texas plains, growing in a hollow scooped out by sheltering livestock and eroding winds. "The Oak in the Hole" guided early trails and land grants, sheltered a stagecoach station, and gave the nearby town of Encino its name. An extended drought killed the great tree in the 1890s.

Shafter, TX

In the mid-19th century rancher Milton Faver built El Fortin de la Cienega, a fortified adobe compound on defensible ground along Cienega Creek, as the second headquarters of the vast Presidio County ranching empire he began in the 1850s. Natural springs watered the cattle, gardens, corrals and workers' dwellings, and Faver employed Mexican vaquero families to run the operation. After his death in 1889 the property passed to his son Juan and later to neighboring ranchers, remaining in their families until the 1980s.

Presidio vicinity, TX

Around 1773 the Spanish garrison across the Rio Grande at Presidio del Norte set up El Fortín de San José on this side to shield local farmers, and the settlement kept the name even after the post was abandoned about 1810. When Ben Leaton acquired extensive property here in 1848, the place became known as Fort Leaton, and his adobe fortress is all that survives of the old community. The marker pointedly corrects earlier signs: this is neither the original Presidio del Norte nor the Spanish mission Apóstol Santiago.

Shafter, TX

Built in 1857, El Fortin del Cibolo was the fortified heart of Milton "Don Meliton" Faver's ranching empire in the Big Bend country. Guided to the area's dependable springs, Faver seized control of the region's only steady water, irrigating vast gardens and a peach orchard whose crops fed soldiers at Fort Davis and the miners of nearby Shafter. Its thick adobe walls, corner towers, and gun ports made it the first major outpost between Fort Davis and the Rio Grande.

Cestohowa, TX

In the 1700s the Spanish crown planted forts across its northern frontier to guard ranches and missions, and El Fuerte del Cibolo stood watch over the ranch country between San Antonio and La Bahía. Manned in two stretches between 1734 and 1782, its small garrison protected herds and settlers on land the King of Spain had granted to private ranchers. Remarkably, soldiers from this outpost helped drive cattle to the Gulf Coast to supply Bernardo de Gálvez's forces fighting the British — a Spanish contribution to American independence.

Brownsville, TX

El Globo Nuevo pairs a one-story 'border brick' storehouse built in 1897 with a free-standing folk Victorian cottage, the Garza House, built about 1894. The complex was raised and operated until 1920 by Mexican immigrant brothers Adolfo and Manuel Garza-Galvan, its one-room-deep L-plan an early example of Mexican vernacular building on the Texas side of the river. Adolfo and his wife Virginia lived in the cottage until her death in 1952, and the property has remained with the family's descendants.

Mission, TX

El Granjeno Cemetery began in 1872 with the burial of Don Antonio Garza, on land his brother Don Juan Garza Escheverria donated for the villages of El Granjeno and Madero. A native of Reynosa, Mexico, Don Juan lies here among many of his descendants, alongside veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and the Vietnam War. The graveyard has long served families on both banks of the Rio Grande.

Mercedes, TX

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo fixed the Rio Grande's main channel as the U.S.–Mexico line, but the river's wandering course bred endless disputes. In 1906 an unauthorized canal shifted the Rio Grande and stranded the 419-acre El Horcon tract—home to the freewheeling resort of Rio Rico—on the Mexican side, where it drifted under Mexican control. After the U.S. ceded the tract to Mexico in 1970, a Rio Rico native's lawsuit secured U.S. citizenship for some 200 people born there before the transfer.

Geneva, TX

Near here stood El Lobanillo, a Spanish rancho and pueblo tied to Gil Ybarbo, who left his ailing mother and other refugees here in 1773 when Spain forced colonists out of East Texas and western Louisiana. The land was formally granted in 1794 and passed in the early 1800s to John Maximillian, and the site is remembered as the oldest continuously occupied place in East Texas.

Marfa, TX

Completed in 1930 and named for the nearby Paisano pass, this Marfa landmark was built by the Gateway Hotel Company in hopeful anticipation of an oil boom that never came. Designed by the noted El Paso firm Trost and Trost around a central courtyard in Spanish Baroque style, it was reckoned the finest hotel between El Paso and San Antonio. Its grandeur outlasted the boom that inspired it.

Anthony, TX

Named for the mountain pass that gave it life, El Paso has long been a gateway—first for Indigenous peoples, then for Spanish priests, gold-seekers, traders, and stagecoaches funneling through the Rio Grande corridor. Federal troops occupied this borderland longer than any other part of Texas during the Civil War, and the city grew into an agricultural, industrial, and military center dotted with Spanish missions.

El Paso, TX

El Paso's story runs four centuries deep, from the Indian peoples who lived here before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s through Spanish colonization, Mexican rule, and Anglo industrialization. The Rio Grande became an international border, splitting the old El Paso del Norte into what became Ciudad Juárez to the south and El Paso to the north. Fort Bliss in 1854, the Butterfield Overland Mail in 1858, and the railroads of the 1880s brought booming growth to this crossroads at the pass.

El Paso, TX

Built in 1857 as a 4-4-0 "Classic American" locomotive, this engine began life hauling freight and passengers across the upper Midwest before a second career in the Southwest. By 1889 the line that became the El Paso & Southwestern Railroad had acquired it, converted it from wood to coal, and put it to work opening the mining country around Bisbee, Arizona. Dubbed "Old Number One," it served more than fifty years before retirement, later starring briefly on film and finding a permanent home in El Paso.

El Paso, TX

The El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, begun in Arizona in 1888, reached El Paso in 1902 and made the border city the headquarters of its far-flung operations. This seven-story office building went up for the line in 1906, presiding over rail shops that served the Southwest. By the time the Southern Pacific absorbed the company in 1924, it was running more than 1,200 miles of track.

El Paso, TX

When the Civil War came, El Paso County voted overwhelmingly—871 to 2—for secession, and local Confederates organized companies for frontier defense. From this far western outpost the South launched its 1861–62 campaign to seize New Mexico and Arizona and win a Pacific outlet, but by mid-1862 the last Confederate troops had withdrawn. Union forces then held El Paso under martial law for the rest of the war—the longest military occupation anywhere in Texas—while sympathizers like the scout Henry Skillman ran couriers and spies from across the border.

Laredo, TX

Long before Spanish colonizers arrived, Indigenous travelers used a natural ford across the Rio Grande here, and around 1746 Jacinto de León marked the crossing that would bear his name. When José de Escandón's colonization push reached the region, Tomás Sánchez de la Barrera founded a ranching settlement nearby in 1755 that grew into Laredo. Maps later relabeled the ford "Paso de los Indios," a memory of its far older use, as cattle, sheep, and the salt trade moved across the river.

Laredo, TX

Long before roads and bridges, travelers depended on natural fords to cross rivers safely, and around 1746 Jacinto de León identified such a crossing near this spot on the Rio Grande. Indigenous peoples had almost certainly used the ford for centuries before him, threading a route that later carried Spanish colonists, traders, and settlers. The crossing helped fix the location of what would become Laredo.

El Paso, TX

El Paso del Río del Norte — the Pass of the North — is the lowest snow-free route through the Rocky Mountains between the Atlantic and Pacific, and for that reason it became a great artery of continental travel. Through it run the trunk lines of telegraph and railroad that knit the modern nation together, and the city of El Paso grew up to mark the spot and carry on its name. This marker was placed in 1936 during the Texas Centennial.

El Paso, TX

The first ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in all of Texas was organized in El Paso in 1918, its members meeting in homes and later the Odd Fellows Hall until they could raise a building of their own. Completed in 1931, this Mission Revival chapel announced their permanence with a rose window, a Renaissance-style arcade, and an arcaded tower. It marks the church's earliest institutional foothold in the state.

El Paso, TX

Completed in 1916, El Paso High School was the city's first purpose-built high school and remains its oldest surviving one. The noted firm Trost and Trost designed a classical-revival landmark in the foothills of the Franklin Mountains, folding the athletic field into the academic plan and adding then-novel touches like a rooftop garden, a cadet armory, and skylit laboratories.

Odessa, TX

This 800-horsepower Cooper-Bessemer compressor engine went to work in Culberson County in 1931 as the first machine of its kind at El Paso Natural Gas Company's original transmission station. Founded in 1928 by Houston attorney Paul Kayser, the company was among the earliest gas transmitters in the Permian Basin. Over 38 years of service the engine ran more than 152,000 hours and moved over 144 billion cubic feet of gas toward El Paso and the Southwest.

El Paso, TX

Built in 1904–05, the El Paso Union Passenger Station rose as the hub of the city's busy international railroad traffic on the U.S.–Mexico border. It was designed by the celebrated Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham — the same firm behind Washington, D.C.'s Union Station — and stands today as a monument to the railroads that drove El Paso's early growth.

El Paso, TX

Chinese immigrants reached El Paso just as the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived in 1881, opening a rooming house and grocery even as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 slammed the door on newcomers nationwide. Those who stayed built the largest Chinese community in Texas, growing produce and running laundries and restaurants while sending earnings home. Later waves came under unusual circumstances—hundreds escorted north by General Pershing during the Mexican Revolution, then refugees from the Great Depression and the Communist victory in China—each generation weaving Chinese life more deeply into the border city.

El Paso, TX

Between 1880 and 1924, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants — many from Christian Mount Lebanon — left the fading Ottoman Empire for economic opportunity in America, and a notable number entered through Mexico rather than Ellis Island. El Paso became a gateway to the Southwest, and the earliest settlers arrived by the 1890s, clustering along El Paso Street and running grocery and dry-goods stores in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. By 1953 the city counted some 450 Syrian families whose businesses and professions had become woven into its life.