Historic Markers in Texas

Gainesville, TX

The colorful two-toned horses celebrated here descend from mounts brought by Spanish conquistadors and became a beloved staple of the western frontier under names like Paint, Pinto, and Piebald. Though largely shut out of North American breed registries in the early 20th century, sixteen dedicated horse enthusiasts met at Gainesville's Curtwood Motel on February 16, 1962, to found a registry of their own. Within a year they had registered 250 horses, and after a 1965 merger the American Paint Horse Association grew into the world's second-largest equine breed association.

Galveston, TX

Within days of the catastrophic 1900 Galveston hurricane — the deadliest natural disaster in American history — Clara Barton herself arrived on the island with Red Cross personnel, supplies, and relief funds, aided by local women who organized distribution centers across the storm-battered region. The Galveston County chapter was formally chartered in 1916 and mobilized again and again: for soldiers in both World Wars, for families during the Great Depression, and for victims of the 1947 Texas City explosion. In 1987 it merged into the Greater Houston Area Chapter.

Corsicana, TX

Founded in Kansas in 1890 by Horace Greeley Johnston and Charles Rittersbacher, this firm began as a water-well drilling business before the partners moved to Corsicana. In 1894, while drilling for water on South 12th Street, they struck crude oil—the accidental discovery of the Corsicana oil field. The company went on to manufacture rotary drilling equipment, converted to munitions work in World War II, and finally closed under Bethlehem Steel in 1959.

Comanche vicinity, TX

When a boy died on the Comanche County frontier in 1878 with no cemetery nearby, his family's farmland became a community burial ground and gathering place, complete with a brush arbor for funerals and camp meetings. That summer local Baptists organized a congregation they named Amity—friendship—and the site grew into a graveyard of nearly 400 souls, still marked each June by a singing and homecoming begun in 1897.

West Columbia, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1810, Ammon Underwood came to Texas in 1834 after a young life of odd jobs, two shipwrecks, and wandering exploration. He fought in the 1835 Siege of Bexar during the Texas Revolution, then settled at West Columbia, where he ran a thriving mercantile business for fifty years and counted Republic of Texas president Anson Jones among his close friends. He lost a cotton fortune during the Civil War but later served in the state legislature.

East Columbia, TX

This house rose in the vanished river port of Marion during the Republic of Texas years, its first hand-hewn cedar rooms built about 1835 by colonist Thomas W. Nibbs. In 1838–39 the merchant, civic leader, and soldier Ammon Underwood bought and enlarged it, and the following year he married into one of Stephen F. Austin's original colonial families. President Anson Jones and other notables of the young republic were guests here.

Fort Worth, TX

Schooling in this bend of the Trinity River dates to about 1876, when a retired physician built a one-room schoolhouse for the settlement then called Trinity Bend. The Pendleton District formed in 1884, took the name Riverside in 1899, and became part of Fort Worth's schools after the community was annexed in 1922. In 1941 the school here was named for Fort Worth businessman and philanthropist Amon G. Carter.

Fort Worth, TX

Amon G. Carter rose from a hardscrabble Wise County boyhood and odd jobs to become the most influential booster Fort Worth ever had. As publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram — the largest-circulation paper in Texas for decades — he wielded the press, the new medium of radio (WBAP), and a fortune in oil to promote his city and all of West Texas. An aviation enthusiast, he helped lure the aircraft industry to the area, and he poured his wealth into philanthropy, notably founding the Amon Carter Museum.

Houston, TX

Recruited in New Orleans for the Army of Texas, Amos B. Edson arrived in Texas on January 28, 1836, in the thick of the revolution. He served in Captain Amasa Turner's company at the Battle of San Jacinto — the decisive fight that won Texas its independence — but did not long survive the victory, dying at Houston in 1837.

Mont Belvieu, TX

Louisiana-born Amos Barber settled this rise—first called "Big Hill," then "Barber's Hill"—in 1849, hauling logs by ox-drawn sled to build a two-story dog-trot cabin surrounded by orchards and plantation land. Standing on the main road from Huntsville to Lynchburg, the Barber home welcomed travelers including Sam Houston and Ashbel Smith. Barber and his wife lie in the family cemetery still tended by their descendants, and the community that grew here became Mont Belvieu.

Tomball, TX

The Amos family arrived in Texas before the Civil War, and in 1881 Thomas Amos and his son-in-law bought land in what became Kohrville, a self-sufficient African American community. As the family prospered they helped found a school and a Baptist church, and Amos set aside ground for this cemetery. Its graves include World War I veterans, teachers, pastors, and Freemasons—pillars of a community that descendants still work to preserve.

Washington, TX

Amos Gates, born in 1799, was among the settlers of Stephen F. Austin's first colony, the "Old Three Hundred" generation that established Anglo-American settlement in Mexican Texas. This marker also remembers his son William C. Gates, born in 1834, who served in the Confederate army before his death in 1877. Together they span the colony's founding and the Civil War era at Washington, cradle of Texas independence.

Georgetown, TX

Built in 1909 for Southwestern University's German professor Martin C. Amos, this Georgetown house passed to another faculty member, chemistry professor John Campbell Godbey, who made it his home for decades. Its gambrel roof and stone-piered inset porch mark the comfortable domestic architecture of a university town in early-twentieth-century Central Texas. The dwelling ties together two generations of Southwestern's teaching faculty.

Poteet, TX

Amphion grew up around Atascosa County's first courthouse, built near this spot at the county seat of Navatasco in 1857 on land within the vast ranch of Texas Declaration signer José Antonio Navarro. At its height the town bustled with stores, a hotel, cotton gin, tannery, churches, lodges, and a school. But when the railroads bypassed it in the early twentieth century, business drained away, and today only its cemetery—begun around 1870—marks where a thriving community once stood.

Cooper, TX

In 1875 the four Hobbs brothers left Mississippi for the Big Creek Thicket, where a settlement called Hobbs Thicket grew up around a two-room schoolhouse. When storekeeper Robert Nickolson sought a post office in 1894, the Postal Service rejected "Hobbs" and named the town "Amy" instead. Amy flourished into the 1920s with a store, gin, and churches, but the 1924 loss of its cotton gin began a decline that emptied the town, leaving only a homecoming tradition among former residents.

Graham, TX

Irish quarrymen cut the stone for this handsome Victorian bank, raised in 1890 near the home of bank director L. J. Bower. Its fine masonry and woodwork lent dignity to the Graham courthouse square, with an abstract firm and land office upstairs. Drought across its North Texas and Indian Territory trade area helped sink the bank in 1895, after which the building served as a retail store for decades.

Caldwell, TX

After the Civil War, the Chisholm Trail carried Texas longhorns north to the Kansas railheads and eastern markets, and a branch of that famous route swung from Matagorda County up through Burleson County toward the main trail near present McGregor. Stores like James L. Dean's — later the town of Deanville — and the White Inn sprang up to serve the drovers, turning the cattle path into a commercial road. When rail lines reached the area in the late 1870s, the long drives faded.

San Augustine, TX

Founded as the Bethel Presbyterian Church at the Goodlaw School House by the Reverend Hugh Wilson on June 2, 1838, this early Republic-era congregation drew together settler families of San Augustine. Its charter roll named more than two dozen members, including the enslaved couple Jack and Hanna Sharp, recorded among the founders.

Laneville vicinity, TX

In 1868 formerly enslaved people from the Devereaux plantation founded the community of Anadarko and the Anadarko Christian Church, which hosted the area's first Black public school. With $900 from Julius Rosenwald's fund, plus public and family donations, a three-teacher Rosenwald School was built here in 1926, later renamed for principal U. E. Allen. Only the gymnasium's pier-and-beam foundation now remains of the school that served the community until integration.

Monroe City, TX

The prolific Anahuac field was brought in on March 3, 1935, when Humble Oil & Refining's A.D. Middleton No. 1 struck oil in a highly faulted salt-dome structure beneath the rice and grazing lands of Chambers County. A company camp housed the crews who developed the field, which reached peak output during World War II — nearly 12 million barrels in 1944 alone. Over its life the field yielded more than 177 million barrels of oil and hundreds of billions of cubic feet of gas.

Anahuac, TX

Established in the early 1830s while Texas was still under Mexican rule, this burial ground—long known as the Old Mexican Cemetery—holds some of the first settlers of the fledgling community of Anahuac. The earliest documented interment is land-office agent and merchant Benjamin Freeman, who died in 1835, on the eve of the Texas Revolution. Many of the pioneers laid to rest here lie in unmarked graves, a common fate on a raw frontier where stone monuments were a luxury.

Poteet, TX

The Stiggins family emigrated from Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1882, among them Mary Jane, who had studied medicine, and her fiancé Thomas Whittet, a former sea captain who named the place Anchorage as the spot where he would "drop anchor." In 1896 the couple deeded land for a church and cemetery, and Mary Jane practiced medicine across the area, delivering many of its babies. A frame church served until 1958, and the cemetery association still tends the burial ground and its chapel.

Nacogdoches, TX

Mound Street in Nacogdoches took its name in the 1700s from a line of earthen mounds that once ran from Main to King Street, built long before by the region's prehistoric Indigenous peoples. Only a single mound now survives. Pottery recovered from one demolished mound — a structure once measuring roughly 150 by 75 feet — is preserved in the Old Stone Fort.

Houston, TX

After the Civil War, African Americans in Houston were routinely denied insurance and loans, so in 1882 Jamaican immigrant and educator Henry Cohen Hardy founded the Ancient Order of Pilgrims to provide burial insurance and real estate credit to the city's Black population. The fraternal order spread through local chapters called sanctuaries, and by 1926 built the four-story Pilgrim Temple, a triangular brick landmark that also housed the Negro Chamber of Commerce, the Houston Defender newspaper, beauty and drug businesses, and a ballroom used by Black clubs and schools. For four decades the temple was a hub of Black Houston's civic and economic life before the order faded and the building was razed.

Anderson, TX

Organized in 1844, Anderson Baptist Church hosted the 1848 gathering that formed the Baptist General Convention of Texas, drawing representatives from most of the state's few Baptist churches. Its rock sanctuary, built by enslaved laborers and finished in 1855, still stands—restored after a 1955 fire using the original walls—and in 1858 the church cradled the first Baptist Woman's Missionary Society in Texas.

Dallas, TX

Anderson Bonner was born enslaved in Alabama around 1839 and brought to Texas as a young man in the 1850s. After emancipation he built a livelihood by tending livestock, farming, and selling cotton and corn, and in 1874 he and his brother bought land along White Rock Creek in what became North Dallas. Though he never learned to read or write, Bonner shrewdly leased land and equipment and steadily acquired acreage across Dallas, Richardson, and Farmers Branch, renting to Black families and anchoring a supportive community.

Frankston, TX

Set on a spring near the Brushy Creek community, this ground was first settled in the 1850s and in 1873 was set aside by local Methodists as a religious campground, bought from a Galveston County owner for sixty dollars in gold. The following year worshippers raised a tabernacle of pine beams and sweet-gum piers fastened with wooden pegs.

Carthage, TX

On a tree-shaded hill southeast of Carthage lies the burial place of many of Panola County's founding settlers, named for Jonathan Anderson (1798–1890), who donated 100 acres for the town itself. A veteran of the Texas Revolution who fought at the Siege of Bexar and the Battle of San Jacinto, Anderson went on to serve as county sheriff. His first wife, Nancy Whetmore, was the first laid to rest here, followed by veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Palestine, TX

Anderson County was created from Houston County on March 24, 1846, and organized that July with Palestine as its seat, just months after Texas joined the Union. It was named to honor Kenneth Lewis Anderson, who had served as vice-president of the Republic of Texas in its final years.

Palestine, TX

Anderson County was carved out by the Texas Legislature in 1846 and named for Kenneth L. Anderson, the last vice president of the Republic of Texas. Justice was first dispensed in a log house at Fort Houston, and the county worked through four courthouses — a frame building, two brick ones, and finally the grand Beaux-Arts structure completed in 1913-14 after fire claimed its predecessor. With giant Ionic columns and a dome crowned by a statue of Justice, the present courthouse still anchors the Palestine square.

Palestine, TX

Settled largely by families from the Deep South, Anderson County voted overwhelmingly—870 to 15—for secession in 1861, even as Governor Sam Houston pleaded against it on the steps of Palestine's Osceola Hotel. More than 1,100 local men filled a dozen Confederate companies, over 300 dying on battlefields from New Mexico to Pennsylvania. On the home front, factories and salt works supplied the war effort while a hotel served as a makeshift hospital; among the county's leaders was John H. Reagan, the Confederacy's postmaster general.

Palestine, TX

Long before public welfare systems, counties cared for their destitute on "poor farms," where residents worked the land in exchange for shelter. Anderson County bought property for one in 1884, building housing, storage barns, a cotton gin, and a canning operation, plus a jail for convict laborers who worked the farm and county roads. Today only the ruins of wells and a cemetery of 75 to 100 graves mark the site.

Garland, TX

This cemetery opened in 1858 with the burial of William and Celia Anderson, Kentuckians who had lived on the Missouri frontier before joining their son in the raw new settlements of Dallas County. That son, John Lair Anderson, arrived in 1846 as a settler of the Peters Colony, one of the empresario grants that populated North Texas. Their family home once stood just southwest of these graves.

Houston, TX

Founded in Oklahoma City in 1904 by the Anderson brothers and their Clayton in-laws, this cotton firm moved to Houston in 1916 and built a sprawling shipping complex on the new Houston Ship Channel. From its perch in the Houston Cotton Exchange, the company grew into a global cotton trader with more than 24,000 employees before diversifying into foods and textiles and finally being absorbed by Quaker Oats in 1986. Its partners left an outsized mark: the M.D. Anderson Foundation seeded the Texas Medical Center, and Will Clayton helped shape the postwar Marshall Plan.

Leander, TX

Thomas Anderson, a Pennsylvania native, built this mill in 1863 in the Texas Hill Country, and during the Civil War it produced gunpowder for the Confederate armies. Small backcountry works like this one helped a South cut off from imported munitions supply its troops from local resources. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Andice, TX

The Rev. Freeman Smalley, one of Texas's earliest Baptists, preached in this area around 1850, and the congregation organized about 1851 in a log schoolhouse. Known over the years as Stapp, White House, and Pilot Knob Baptist Church, it moved to Andice in 1936—carrying the memory of a first pastor who is said to have hung his pistol on the oak-stump Bible stand while he preached.

Stonewall, TX

German immigrants Andreas and Frederike Lindig reached Texas in 1869 and by 1874 had established a 448-acre farmstead of house, summer kitchen, barn, well, and commercial lime kiln in the Hill Country near Stonewall. Andreas built a log farmhouse from native post oak, added limestone shed rooms, and raised cash crops of peanuts, sweet potatoes, and cotton while his sons built homes nearby. The family held the land until 1980, and the founders rest in a nearby family cemetery.

Calvert, TX

Born in Calvert in 1879, Andrew "Rube" Foster rose from pitching for the Waco Yellow Jackets to become the dominant hurler of Black baseball, famed for his fastball and screwball. As a player-manager he built dynasties like the Chicago American Giants, and in 1920 he gathered eight club owners in Kansas City to found the Negro National League—the first lasting African American professional circuit—serving as its president. Honored as the "Father of Black Baseball," he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981.

Port O'Connor, TX

A Danish teenager who crossed the Atlantic at thirteen, Andrew Rasmussen spent sixty years at sea along the Texas coast. After his own schooner wrecked in 1885, he joined the very Saluria life-saving crew that had rescued him, rising by 1889 to command the station that later folded into the U.S. Coast Guard. In 1911 he and his wife Theresa built their home on this spot near the Gulf.

Crockett, TX

Andrew Edwards Gossett (1812–1890) donated the townsite that became Crockett, the seat of Houston County, which was carved from Nacogdoches territory in 1837. Giving land from his own colonist's grant, he provided the young Republic of Texas county a central place to conduct its government. His gift literally put the town on the map.

Crockett, TX

Andrew Edwards Gossett (1812–1890) moved from Tennessee to Texas in 1833 with his wife Rhoda and a large Mexican land grant. He helped defend the frontier in the unsettled years after the revolution by serving in the Texas Army, and in 1836 he donated land for a townsite, naming it Crockett for his old family friend David Crockett—soon to die at the Alamo. Gossett went on to serve as a peace officer and county judge and raised eleven children by two marriages.

Beaumont, TX

This marker honors Andrew F. Smyth, who served as an officer in the Jasper Volunteers during the Texas War for Independence. The 1835–36 revolution pitted Anglo and Tejano settlers against the government of Mexico and produced the short-lived Republic of Texas. Local volunteer companies like the one Smyth helped lead were the backbone of the rebel forces.

Jasper, TX

Andrew F. Smyth, a riverman and farmer, built this Jasper home in 1849, milling its lumber on site and bringing glass and hardware upriver from Galveston. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark from the era of the young state.

Sherman, TX

Andrew Hanson, born in Schleswig-Holstein and emigrating to America in 1872, reached Texas in 1878 and the next year opened Sherman's first bakery. Over 35 years he built the Star Bakery into a local institution, introducing the town's first delivery service and its first commercially made ice cream. His parents and brothers followed him from Denmark, and the family settled permanently in Sherman.

Arlington, TX

A Tennessee-born Cumberland Presbyterian preacher, Andrew Shannon Hayter came to Texas around 1850 and eventually settled in Tarrant County, where he founded churches, a school and a Masonic lodge and earned his living as a surveyor. His frontier knowledge made him the natural choice in 1876 to help route the railroad and lay out a small town between Dallas and Fort Worth. Offered the honor of naming it for himself, he instead chose 'Arlington,' after Robert E. Lee's Virginia estate.

Round Rock, TX

Andrew J. Palm sailed from Sweden in 1853 with his mother and brothers and settled at Palm Valley, a Swedish community north of Round Rock, on land bought from immigration agent S. M. Swenson. About 1873 he hauled cypress and pine down from Austin to build this house, where he and his wife Carolina raised their eight children. The home was relocated to Round Rock in 1976 and recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Richmond, TX

Andrew Jackson Beard fought at San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive battle that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He and his wife Sallie are buried in Big Creek Cemetery, among the early settlers of what became Fort Bend County.

Austin, TX

Alabama-born Andrew Jackson Hamilton moved to Texas in the 1840s and rose through its politics, serving as state attorney general, legislator, and U.S. congressman by 1859. A staunch opponent of secession, he left Texas during the Civil War, then returned when President Andrew Johnson named him provisional governor in 1865. He later sat on the Texas Supreme Court and ran twice, unsuccessfully, for governor before his death in 1875.

Cleveland, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1817, Andrew Jackson Isaacks came to Texas and fought in the Texas Revolution in 1835 before settling into the civic life of a young frontier region. He served as sheriff of Jasper County, raised a large family, farmed and ranched, and became the first postmaster at Tarkington Prairie in the 1850s. Buried where he died in 1864, his remains were reinterred at this site in 1970.

Crockett, TX

A Tennessee native, Andrew Jackson McGown came to Texas in 1835 and fought in the revolution against Mexico, taking part in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He went on to help plant the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Texas, serving as a pioneer circuit-riding minister until his death. McGown also founded the newspaper "The Texas Presbyterian" and helped establish Andrew Female College in Huntsville.

Stoneham, TX

Andrew Jackson Montgomery came to Texas around 1830 and took his place in the fight for its independence, serving in Captain James Gillaspie's company at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive victory that won the Republic of Texas its freedom. The marker, erected by the state in 1957, carries a supplemental plate offering differing dates for his birth and arrival, a reminder of how uncertain early frontier records could be.

Stoneham, TX

Andrew Jackson Montgomery came to Texas in 1819 with the ill-fated James Long Expedition and, by 1823, opened a trading post where two Indian trails crossed — becoming the first known settler in what is now Montgomery County. The town and county both grew from that post and took his family name. He later fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, married Mary Mahulda Farris, and raised nine children.

Seguin, TX

Andrew Jackson Sowell came to Texas as a teenager and joined the fight for its independence. As one of the couriers sent out from the Alamo, he slipped away before the fortress fell in March 1836, carrying pleas for the reinforcements and supplies that never came in time. He lived on for decades afterward, and the State of Texas placed this Star-and-Wreath marker at his grave in 1956.

Austin, TX

Andrew Jackson Zilker arrived in Austin penniless in 1876 and rose to become a businessman and bank director in the booming capital of a young state. Shaped by watching laborers toil along the Ohio River, he championed "practical" education, and when he sold 366 acres including Barton Springs to the city, he steered the payments to the local schools. His gifts of parkland became Zilker Park, still Austin's most beloved green space.

Hallettsville, TX

Andrew Kent, a Kentucky-born carpenter, brought his large family to Green DeWitt's Colony in 1830, settling a league of land on the Lavaca River. As tensions with Santa Anna's government mounted, Kent and his son David took up arms at the Battle of Gonzales in 1835, the opening clash of the Texas Revolution. In February 1836 the two argued over who would answer the Alamo's call for help; Andrew sent David home and rode to San Antonio with "The Immortal 32" from Gonzales, dying in the Alamo's fall. Kent County was later named in his honor.

Sherman, TX

Andrew L. Randell, a Denison native and graduate of Princeton and the University of Texas, built a law practice in Sherman and threw himself into civic and church life. His lasting mark came through Freemasonry: he served as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Texas and as executive secretary of the Masonic Service Association of the U.S., leading national disaster-relief efforts and championing Masonic education. He died in 1931 at the age of fifty.

Lockhart, TX

A Tennessee-born settler, Andrew Lee Brock came to Caldwell County in 1848 and started married life on a Boggy Creek parcel gifted by his father-in-law, raising a log cabin and working cotton, grain, and a cotton gin. As his family and fortunes grew, he turned to shaping Lockhart itself, raising livestock and financing a dozen commercial buildings in the town's business district — many still standing today.

Gentrys Mill, TX

Andrew Miller left the Virginia mountains as a young man and pushed onto the Texas frontier, settling near the Hamilton–Comanche county line in 1856. He rode with the frontier Rangers who guarded scattered settlements against Comanche raids. A founder of churches and a donor of land for a church, school, and cemetery, he helped plant the roots of permanent community.

Gonzales, TX

Andrew Ponton came to Texas in 1829, settled in Green DeWitt's colony, and by 1834 served as alcalde—mayor—of Gonzales. When Mexican forces demanded the town's cannon in 1835, his delay in surrendering it helped spark the "Come and Take It" fight now remembered as the opening battle of the Texas Revolution. He also helped rally the Gonzales men, the "Immortal 32," who answered Travis's call and died at the Alamo, and he later served the Republic of Texas as a legislator and judge.

Gonzales, TX

As alcalde of Gonzales, Andrew Ponton wrote the defiant letter of September 26, 1835, refusing Mexico's demand that the colonists surrender their small cannon. Days later, on October 2, he stood among the defenders when Texans faced Mexican troops in the skirmish remembered by the 'Come and Take It' banner. That confrontation is widely regarded as the opening shot of the Texas Revolution.