Historic Markers in Texas

Houston, TX

Vermont-born Ellis Benson fought in the Black Hawk War before Captain Amasa Turner recruited him in New Orleans for the Texas Army in 1835. Arriving in early 1836, he marched with Sam Houston's army and helped work one of the 'Twin Sisters' cannons that proved decisive at the Battle of San Jacinto. He kept soldiering afterward — wounded on the south Texas frontier in 1839 — before settling in Houston as a carpenter and local officeholder.

Red Oak, TX

Ellis County was created in December 1849 from Navarro County and organized the following August, with Waxahachie as its seat. It honors Richard Ellis (1781–1846), a Virginia-born jurist and Alabama statesman who came to Texas in 1825 and presided over the 1836 Constitutional Convention that declared Texas independence, later serving in the Congress of the Republic. The county's founding reflects the rapid organization of Texas government in the years just after statehood.

Waxahachie, TX

Rising from Texas granite, limestone, and marble between 1895 and 1897, the Ellis County Courthouse is a soaring example of Romanesque Revival design by noted architect J. Riely Gordon. Local legend holds that a sculptor carved the face of a beautiful local woman he admired above the east door — a romantic flourish on one of the era's grandest civic buildings.

Waxahachie, TX

Ellis County went through three modest courthouses — cedar logs in 1850, then buildings in 1853 and 1874 — before commissioning San Antonio architect James Riely Gordon to design this fourth one in 1894. Its cornerstone laid on July 4, 1895, the courthouse was built of Central Texas granite and Pecos River red sandstone, with entrances oriented to the true compass points and faces carved by European stonemasons. Gordon's Richardsonian Romanesque masterpiece set a new standard for public buildings across Texas.

Waxahachie, TX

Sometimes called the Pauper Cemetery, this fenced plot was one of perhaps three burial grounds on old Ellis County farm land set aside for the poor. Officials bought some 450 acres between 1893 and 1895 to create a county farm for the support and employment of the needy. The earliest recorded death there was Albert Estes in 1890 and the last Dave Madison in 1946; iron pipes once marked the graves of the 73 individuals named in county records.

Waxahachie, TX

Built in 1925-26 on land deeded by Quincy Davis Getzendaner, the Ellis County Woman's Building answered a very practical need: a place where rural women who came to town on market days could rest. Funded by the city, county, and local women's clubs, the Tudor Revival building included an auditorium called Davis Hall and stood as a memorial to Mrs. Getzendaner's parents. It gave women a public space of their own in the courthouse town of Waxahachie.

Texarkana, TX

Built in 1893 for realtor and loan agent Gaither Booker Ellis and his wife Mary, this two-story Victorian rose in a Texarkana still riding the growth of a young railroad city. Local builder Charles R. Korn gave it an asymmetrical plan, a tower later removed in the 1920s, and porches trimmed with jigsawn brackets on both stories. It survives as a designed expression of Gilded Age domestic taste.

Alto, TX

Peter Ellis Bean led one of the most improbable lives on the early Southwestern frontier. Arriving with Philip Nolan's mustang hunters in 1800, he was captured by Spanish troops, imprisoned in Mexico, then freed to fight—first for royalists, then for the Mexican rebels under Morelos. He even joined Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans before returning to Mexico, later serving as an Indian agent in Texas and settling near this site.

Gorman vicinity, TX

James Madison Ellison built the first cabin in this part of Eastland County in 1858 and was permanently disabled defending frontier homes in a militia company against Indian raids. He opened this graveyard after his mother—a Georgia-born midwife—died in 1876, and though meant for family, it always welcomed neighbors and strangers, including an unknown child from a westering family who died on his land. Twenty-six graves rest here, and after prospering in the county's 1918 oil boom and moving south, Ellison too was brought back to lie among them.

Gorman vicinity, TX

These springs were used for centuries by Indigenous people before James Madison Ellison built the first cabin nearby in 1858. During the Civil War, frontiersmen formed militia companies for defense, and on August 9, 1864, a dozen scouts were attacked here and took refuge in Ellison's cabin—Captain Singleton Gilbert and "Button" Keith were killed and Ellison was disabled for life. Once the raids ceased, the springs became a gathering place for picnics, camp meetings, and a Baptist church, a social hub for the scattered settlers.

Port Arthur, TX

Built in 1900 as a winter home for Isaac L. Ellwood, a principal developer of barbed wire, this classic-revival villa was designed by Chicago architects Nimmons and Fellows with a raised Roman Doric portico. Its nickname, the Pompeiian Villa, came from a planned but never-executed series of Bacchanalian frescoes evoking ancient Pompeii. Port Arthur pioneer G. M. Craig made it his home from 1903 to 1950.

Bardwell, TX

The vanished community of Elm Branch once centered on a school, a Methodist church founded in 1886, and this cemetery, serving the scattered farm families of the area. Its earliest documented burial dates to 1877, and its graves hold veterans spanning from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. Though the church moved to nearby Bardwell in 1909, the cemetery remains active as a link to Ellis County's early settlers.

Granbury, TX

This cemetery began in November 1877 when Thomas and Elizabeth Wells buried two young sons near their family cabin, and it soon served the whole rural community of Elm Flat. Among those laid to rest here is Lucinda Wells, a freed slave who stayed with the family after emancipation and was buried in 1889. Before leaving the area, Elizabeth Wells deeded the land to the county, and the graveyard remains active today.

Denton, TX

Built in 1922 by the Denton Construction Company, the Elm Fork Bridge crossed the Trinity River's Elm Fork to serve the surging automobile traffic of the 1920s. At 250 feet it was then the county's longest bridge, its main span a 100-foot Pratt through-truss flanked by Warren pony-truss approaches — and, unlike the one-lane iron bridges before it, engineered for two-way traffic. It carried the Sherman Highway until 1990 and now serves walkers as part of the Ray Roberts Lake State Park Greenbelt.

Belton, TX

Elm Grove Baptist Church traces its roots to a 1911 revival held at the Elm Grove School near Belton, a building that had hosted several congregations for some twenty years. When the school closed in 1915 the Baptists kept meeting there until 1999, sustaining a ministry marked from the start by outreach — collecting clothing and toys for needy children and supporting a local food pantry and clinic. The congregation has also long served as a training ground for ministerial students.

Mabank, TX

Community leader Anthony Hyde first set aside this land in 1881 for a school and church, but grief redirected its purpose when his own grandchild was buried here in 1883. Hyde added more acreage in 1886, and by 1895 a committee and caretaker were tending the grounds. As the burial place of pioneer families from the Elm Grove and Roddy settlements, the cemetery became a quiet record of the people who built these rural communities.

Westminster, TX

The Roland family, natives of Alabama, settled here in the 1830s on land granted by the Republic of Texas in recognition of John Roland's military service, cut short when he was killed in the Texas Revolution. His brother Ezekial, himself a veteran of the revolution, set aside this parcel as a public cemetery, and its first burial was his own in 1859 at age 35. The graveyard also served the Seven Points community, later renamed Westminster, home to an early Methodist school and a later Baptist academy, and it still holds well over a thousand graves.

Ponta, TX

Elm Grove was a Freedmen's community — settled by formerly enslaved people after emancipation — and by 1884 it had a place in the Cherokee County school system. Classes first met in a local church and in homes until the 1890s, when residents built a one-room schoolhouse on land donated by R.B. and Caroline Wood, raising it with their own donated materials. A 1917 merger swelled enrollment and the interior was divided into three rooms, until the school closed and consolidated with Rusk in 1957.

Mabank, TX

This East Texas congregation traces its roots to a log building raised in 1875 on settler Anthony Gray Hyde's land, where church, school, and community all gathered under one roof. After the school moved and took the name Elm Grove, the church settled here and has since been shared by Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist congregations who worship separately but run a joint Sunday school.

Longview, TX

This East Texas congregation grew out of Sunday School classes that Pine Tree Cumberland Presbyterian Church began holding in the Spring Hill Schoolhouse in the late 1880s. Organized in the 1890s under its first resident pastor, the church took its name from Elmira Castleberry, matriarch of a prominent pioneer family whose sons served as founding elders and donated land and materials for a combined school and church building in 1897-98. The congregation remained active in community and missionary work for generations.

Bowie, TX

Settler James W. Stallings donated the first land for this cemetery in 1880, two years before the town of Bowie was platted nearby along the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad. Willie B. Nelson, a settler's young son, was the first burial, and Stallings would soon lay several of his own family here. Over the decades the grounds grew, gained a native-stone wall built by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s, and became the resting place of veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Mineral Wells, TX

When Mineral Wells needed a proper burial ground, landowners donated acreage to the city in 1883, and the graves from an earlier spot known as The Cove were carefully relocated here the next year. Among those laid to rest are the town's founder, James A. Lynch, his wife Arminda, and a generation of pioneer citizens who built the young West Texas town. First simply the City Cemetery, it took the softer name Elmwood after the ladies of the civic league planted elm trees across the grounds in 1913.

Elroy, TX

Swedish and German immigrants began putting down roots in this stretch of Travis County in the 1890s, drawn by land suited to cotton. By 1918 some seventy families supported a school, four cotton gins, a blacksmith, a general store, and three Swedish churches with their own cemeteries. Decline set in during the 1930s as the school consolidated and congregations disbanded, but renewed settlement began breathing life back into the area in the 1970s.

Austin, TX

Elvira Davis grew up in rural east Travis County and married into a family whose quarry helped supply stone for the 1853 Texas Capitol. Widowed and raising six children, she bought this lot in 1896 and had a home built by 1904 whose porch columns, balustrade, and bay windows capture the moment when Victorian taste gave way to classical revival. She lived here until her death in 1918.

Midway, TX

This Methodist congregation traces its roots to the 1840s, when the settlement was known as French and worshippers gathered in a log cabin raised by James Blair Durham. They later met in a frame building near the cemetery before completing the present sanctuary around the turn of the century. The adjacent cemetery, with its lone grave of a young girl, keeps the memory of the rural community's earliest families.

Ector vicinity, TX

Civil War veteran Levi Wells Ely and his wife Laura came from Georgia in 1882 and farmed land that soon drew other settlers to this fertile, rail-served cotton country. The little community of Ely grew up around their farm, gaining a general store, cotton gin, blacksmith, barber, churches, and a post office. As often happened, the town faded: the post office closed in 1905 and the school consolidated away in 1949.

Huntsville, TX

The first Juneteenth celebrations—marking the June 19, 1865 emancipation of enslaved Texans—began quietly in homes and churches before moving outdoors. By 1915 Huntsville's Black community, led by former slave Jane Ward, had made this ground their gathering place, and Dave Williams, also formerly enslaved, organized a band and park association to buy it. In 1933 white businessman R. A. Josey completed the purchase for the community's use, and the site became a city park in 1963.

Mobeetie, TX

Ohio-born Emanuel Dubbs (1843–1929) first came to know Texas as a buffalo hunter and fought in the famous 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls between hunters and Plains Indian warriors. He went on to become the first county judge in the Texas Panhandle and in Wheeler County, earning wide respect when he had a lawless U.S. marshal arrested. Serving on the bench in 1879–80 and 1885–90, he helped establish the rule of law in a region barely emerged from the frontier.

Fort Worth, TX

In 1879 Fort Worth civic leader John Peter Smith donated this land for a cemetery to serve the city's early Jewish residents, its grounds first tended by the Emanuel Hebrew Association formed by local families. The earliest marked grave belongs to a child, Leah Kaiser, who died that same year. Now under the care of Congregation Beth-El, the cemetery holds many of the business, professional, and civic leaders of Fort Worth's Jewish community.

Ozona, TX

Emerald, the first platted town in Crockett County, was founded in 1889 by a railway immigration agent who advertised its mild climate and fertile land from Maine to Minnesota, hoping it would sit on a rail extension and become the county seat. It gained a post office, held the county's first school in a tent, and survived a prairie fire in 1890. When it lost the 1891 county-seat election to the site of present Ozona, residents drifted away and the post office closed, leaving Emerald one of West Texas's many failed colonization schemes.

Emhouse, TX

This congregation began in 1893 in the rural Kelm community as the Tinkle Baptist Church, gathered by pioneer missionary Rev. B. N. Price and worshiping first in a schoolhouse on land given by settler Nathan Tinkle. In 1908 the members voted to move to nearby Emhouse, a town just two years old and built along the Trinity & Brazos Valley rail line, relocating their frame building to serve for three more decades. A community tabernacle raised in 1914 hosted the revivals that fueled the church's growth into a center of local life.

Odessa, TX

When gold fever swept the nation in 1849, wagon trains of families crossed into Texas at Preston on the Red River and pushed southwest toward the California fields, carrying the old, the young, and all they owned. Their route ran past desert springs to Emigrants' Crossing on the Pecos and on through Guadalupe Pass to El Paso, a punishing passage marked by the broken wagon parts left behind. Army officers Randolph B. Marcy in 1849 and John Pope in 1854 surveyed the trail, which passed near this spot.

Pecos, TX

Where the treacherous Pecos River spreads thin over exposed rock, Emigrants' Crossing offered one of only three fords along a 60-mile stretch. Gold-seekers bound for California in 1849 favored this passage, giving it the name California Emigrants' Crossing, and in 1858 the Butterfield Overland Mail built an adobe station and walled corral here for its coaches. For a generation it was a vital gateway across a river that few could otherwise cross.

San Antonio, TX

Hardware merchant and civic leader Emil Elmendorf built this San Antonio residence in 1884, at the height of his success as part owner of the firm Elmendorf and Co. The noted architect Alfred Giles blended Greek Revival and Victorian styling into the design, and it survives as one of the city's few remaining raised cottages, with a partly above-ground basement beneath a main floor lifted to the second level. It stands as a reminder of the Gilded Age businessmen who shaped booming post–Civil War San Antonio.

Cuero, TX

Emil Reiffert immigrated to Texas at 15, served as a Confederate veteran, and rose to become a merchant, rancher, and president of H. Runge & Co., known as the first real bank in Texas. He built this sturdy, storm-anchored house at Indianola in 1868, and it twice withstood Gulf hurricanes—during the 1886 storm it sheltered a hundred refugees. After Indianola was destroyed, the house was carefully dismantled, its planks numbered, and rebuilt in Cuero in 1887.

Fredericksburg, TX

In 1902 the stonemason Emil Weber, with the help of local craftsmen, raised this late Victorian house of hand-hewn limestone and Texas yellow pine as a wedding gift for his future bride. His account book records that the home—with its lofty ceilings—cost $1,338 to build. The Weber family lived here until 1961, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1982.

Edinburg, TX

Hidalgo County native Emilia Schunior Ramirez graduated from Edinburg High in 1919, raised a family, and earned her degrees while building a career as a teacher and principal across Rio Grande Valley schools. Her 1950 master's thesis studied the children of Mexican immigrants in South Texas, and she went on to teach Spanish at Pan American College and to represent Edinburg at an inter-American meeting in Guatemala. She became a respected educator and historian.

Mont Belvieu, TX

In 1870 Elizabeth Barrow deeded a house and 198 acres to Thompson and Emily Brown in return for her care in old age—an arrangement that gave the formerly enslaved couple land of their own just years after emancipation. Emily served as a midwife to families across the area, and in 1881 the Browns donated ground to the Old River Methodist Episcopal Church, from which this cemetery grew. The congregation later renamed itself St. Emily in her honor and still tends the graves of the Brown family.

Jones Creek, TX

Emily Austin was the sister of Stephen F. Austin, the empresario who led the first Anglo-American colonization of Texas. Raised in the lead-mining town of Potosi, Missouri, that her father Moses Austin helped found, she twice married and raised a large family before bringing her household to Texas in 1831 to join her bachelor brother. From the family's Peach Point Plantation she offered Stephen a home and counsel during the crucial years of colonization and the Texas Revolution, and her descendants went on to help build the new republic and state.

Ralls vicinity, TX

In the spring of 1891, merchants R. L. Stringfellow and H. E. Hume laid out the town of Emma, named for Stringfellow's future wife, opening it with a picnic and a sale of town lots. That fall it won the Crosby County seat, and residents dismantled the courthouse at Estacado and hauled it piece by piece to Emma's square. The town boomed for two decades until the South Plains Railroad bypassed it by five miles in 1910; the county seat moved to Crosbyton, buildings were carted off, and Emma faded into a ghost town whose only surviving link is its cemetery.

Ralls vicinity, TX

Emma Cemetery was established in 1891 on land donated by J. W. Holt for the grave of his brother-in-law, Levi Jones, and grew to hold Crosby County's first settlers, including H. C. and Elizabeth Smith. Twelve Civil War veterans rest here as well, a reminder that the men who opened the West Texas plains had often first marched in the nation's great war. Deeded to the county in 1917, the cemetery remains a cornerstone of local pioneer history.

Santa Anna, TX

Emma Daugherty came west with her family to Coleman County as a girl, left home at fourteen to earn a teaching certificate, and in 1894 married lawman John R. Banister, with whom she raised nine children. When her husband died in office as county sheriff in 1918, Emma was chosen to finish his term, making her among the earliest women to hold a sheriff's office in the United States. She served out the year in a role almost unheard of for a woman of her day.

Orange, TX

Widowed young, Emma George Latchem came to Orange in 1871 and began teaching two years later in a private school, joining the public system when it opened in 1884. Over forty-two years in the classroom she also helped found a mothers and teachers club in 1908 to improve conditions for her students, retiring only in 1915.

Plainview, TX

Born in Tennessee and brought to Texas as a child, Emma Grigsby Meharg became a teacher and, with her educator husband, a fixture of Plainview civic and church life after 1902. In 1925 she won lasting renown as the first woman to serve as Texas Secretary of State, appointed by Miriam A. Ferguson, the state's first woman governor. Her rise came just five years after American women won the vote, placing two women at the top of Texas government in a single stroke.

Orange, TX

Born in Waxahachie in 1876 and trained at Prairie View College, Emma Henderson Wallace came to Orange in 1901 as one of four teachers at the Orange Colored School, which met inside local Black churches. She joined the public school faculty in 1914 and in 1933 became principal of Moton High School, building up its library, athletic courts, band, choir, and student clubs over thirteen years. In 1946 the school was renamed Emma H. Wallace High School in her honor, a lasting tribute to a career devoted to educating Orange's African American youth.

San Antonio, TX

This monument commemorates Emma Tenayuca (1916–1999), a San Antonio–born organizer who by her early twenties was rallying the city's mostly Mexican American working poor against brutal wages and conditions. She is best remembered for helping lead the 1938 pecan shellers' strike, one of the largest labor actions of Depression-era Texas. A fearless voice for immigrants, women, and laborers, she paid for her activism with blacklisting and exile from the city she fought for.

Austin, TX

After the attorney Robert G. West died in 1904, his widow Emma Grant West had this brick apartment building erected the next year to earn rental income to support their four children. Built by the contractors Fischer & Lambie, it held one apartment on each floor with servants' quarters in the basement. West later sold the property to an Austin schoolteacher, Katie Gannaway, and the building was restored by a later owner in 1973.

Houston, TX

Emmanuel Baptist Church grew out of shared worship among Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists before eighteen charter members organized it in 1907 under the wing of Houston's First Baptist Church. Over the decades it planted missions, poured energy into youth ministry, and sent members into foreign missionary work. In 1993 the Hispanic congregation of Jezreel Baptist Church disbanded to join Emmanuel, reflecting the church's turn toward serving Houston's growing Latino community.

Arlington, TX

In Arlington's historic African American neighborhood known as "The Hill," residents gathered as early as 1895 to form a Church of God in Christ congregation. Rooted in the Holiness tradition, the church emphasized Bible-based education and the twin leadership of pastor and church mother, and it grew alongside the grocers, restaurants, and homes of a thriving Black commercial district. Though the congregation did not formally own the land until 1937, members built the sanctuary that still stands within two years and have worshipped there ever since.

San Angelo, TX

Episcopal worship in the San Angelo area began at frontier Fort Concho in 1871, and the first parish church rose in 1888 with help from Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Baltimore. The present 1929 building incorporates stones and a bell from the 1884 Tom Green County Courthouse and garden-wall stones from the 1884 Ragsdale Building. In this way the church physically preserves fragments of the town's earliest civic architecture.

Lockhart, TX

Organized in 1853 by the Rev. Joseph Wood Dunn, this Lockhart parish built its own church in 1855-56, and Bishop G.W. Freeman praised its fine acoustics at the 1857 dedication. Remarkably, it was made of an early concrete fashioned from caliche, gravel, and sand, an inventive local answer to scarce building materials on the antebellum frontier. Though an 1879 tornado took the belfry, the original stone floor and Gothic detailing survive, restored in 1976.

Knippa, TX

Emmanuel Lutheran Church began in 1904 when nine charter members led by the Rev. Gottlieb Langner organized a congregation in Knippa, worshipping in members' homes until a wooden church with a 67-foot bell tower rose in 1910. The town's namesake, George Knippa, was a charter member whose bequest helped secure the church's land. During World War I a county resolution barred the use of German; the congregation's dispute over it went to court, and German-language services continued until 1942.

New Summerfield, TX

The rural community of Emmaus took shape in the 1860s, with a Baptist church organized by the 1870s and a public school established after Dr. J. M. Brittain donated land in 1881. At its peak it held farms, two general stores, two churches, a school, and a cotton gin. Its cemetery, dating to 1886, is among the few physical traces left of the settlement.

Odessa, TX

Emmet V. Headlee was a fourth-generation physician who, at thirteen, earned a Carnegie Hero Fund stipend for saving a friend from drowning — money that helped pay for college. After medical school he and his wife Marie, a nurse-anesthetist, arrived in Odessa in 1926, when he became the only doctor in a town of about 450 people, operating from rooms in their home and a back office of a drugstore. During the Depression he accepted livestock in lieu of cash, opened a seven-bed hospital in 1934, and helped make Odessa a major West Texas medical center before his death in 1965.

New Braunfels, TX

The New Braunfels Library Association formed in 1928 and ran a public library from shifting downtown quarters for a decade. In 1937 Emmie Seele Faust, daughter of the town's first teacher, led a joint effort by the city, the Sophienburg Museum, and the association to give the library a permanent home, and the native-rock building opened in 1938. It served as the public library until 1969, then became museum storage before being restored in 2010 as a meeting hall and classroom.

Grandview, TX

Maryland native John Samuel Emory and his wife Mary Elizabeth built this two-story residence in Grandview in 1907, blending Queen Anne and classical touches. A successful farmer and stockman, Emory became one of the town's leading civic figures. The house stayed in family hands until 1961 and was among the few early homes to survive Grandview's destructive fire of 1920.

Emory, TX

Emory Rains was a Texas pioneer whose public life spanned three governments: he served as an alcalde under Mexican rule, helped mediate the violent Regulator–Moderator feud of the 1840s, and sat as a senator in the Congress of the Republic of Texas, where he helped pass an early Homestead Act. He was a delegate to the 1845 convention that brought Texas into the Union and later worked in the legislature to create the county that bears his name. Its seat, Emory, honors him as well.

Emory, TX

This Methodist congregation traces its roots to 1867 in the community then called Springville, which was renamed Emory in 1870 when Rains County was formed. Early worshippers met in a Masonic hall that also housed the town's first school. A frame church built in 1889 was destroyed by a tornado in 1894 — only its bell survived, and it still rings in the present belfry — and successive buildings carried the congregation through the twentieth century.

Nevada, TX

The Empire community once had a school, post office, churches, stores, and a cotton gin, and in 1884 twenty-five master masons chartered a lodge there, meeting on the Saturdays before full moons. As Empire faded in the 1880s the lodge followed the people to Nevada, endured the deadly 1927 tornado that leveled its building, and rebuilt with help from fellow lodges. Long after the Empire settlement vanished, the lodge adopted its last surviving remnant, Bear Creek Cemetery, and remained the oldest institution in Nevada.

Diboll, TX

In 1893 the Emporia Lumber Company's owners S.F. Carter and M.T. Jones bought more than 5,000 acres in south Angelina County and built a company town around a sawmill, complete with a railroad spur, logging camps, company houses, schools, churches, stores, and a cemetery. When the mill burned in 1906 it was never rebuilt, yet residents lingered even as the company folded. In time the town was swallowed by the growing city of Diboll.