Historic Markers in Texas

San Marcos, TX

George Thomas McGehee arrived in the San Marcos area as a boy in 1846, among its earliest settlers. He rode with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War, served three terms in the state legislature, and in 1895 crowned his standing by building this turreted Victorian residence with his wife Sarah. Restored in 1949 by the Thompson family, the house survives as a monument to a pioneer-turned-statesman.

Point Blank, TX

Born in Georgia in 1795, George Tyler Wood came to serve the young Texas nation, sitting in the Congress of the Republic of Texas in 1841–42 before winning the governorship of the new state in 1847. He led Texas through its early statehood years and rests here beneath the simple epitaph, "Here sleeps a just man."

Temple, TX

A Texas native born in 1886, Dr. George Valter Brindley graduated from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1911 and joined the Temple Sanitarium, which became Scott & White Hospital. He grew into a leading surgeon and cancer specialist and helped guide the hospital's development and expansion over a fifty-year career. He retired in 1961 and gave his later years to community service before his death in 1970.

Temple, TX

George Valter Brindley, Sr., born on an Ellis County farm in 1886, graduated from the University of Texas medical department at Galveston in 1911 and joined the staff of the Temple Sanitarium that same year. Over a fifty-year career he became a pioneering cancer surgeon and a central figure at what grew into Scott and White Memorial Hospital, lending his name to its foundation. His life mirrors the rise of Central Texas as a regional center of modern medicine.

Henderson, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1848, George W. Burton served the Confederacy before migrating to Rusk County, Texas, around 1880. He went on to represent the county in the Texas House of Representatives from 1915 to 1921, three eventful terms during which he took part in the impeachment of Governor James Ferguson, the state's mobilization for World War I, and the creation of the Texas State Highway Department. He and his wife, Julia Savannah Palmer, raised six children.

Midland, TX

George H. W. and Barbara Bush came to Texas in 1948 and settled in Midland, buying this modest c.1939 house in 1951. Here young George W. Bush attended Sam Houston Elementary and played baseball, the family mourned the death of daughter Robin, and two more sons were born before the Bushes moved to a larger home in 1955. The house is uniquely tied to two U.S. presidents, two governors and a first lady.

Waco, TX

Baylor University's Carroll Science Hall was named for businessman and philanthropist George Washington Carroll, whose gifts of $60,000 and $15,000 funded its construction. Completed in 1903 to a Beaux Arts design by architect S. Wemyss Smith, its three floors and basement housed laboratories and classrooms for chemistry, physics, biology, geology, and astronomy, along with an early home of Baylor's museum. After new science buildings rose in the 1960s, renovations converted it to classrooms, and it now houses the Department of English while keeping its original name.

Cuero, TX

This state marker honors George W. Davis, a citizen soldier who served Texas during its 1835–1836 struggle for independence from Mexico. It was erected by the State of Texas in 1962 to commemorate his part in the Revolution.

Austin, TX

George W. Sampson, a former Confederate captain turned leading Austin merchant, married Mary Goodwin Hall—niece of Reconstruction governor Edmund J. Davis—in an 1872 ceremony that was the first wedding held in the Governor's Mansion. In 1875 he built this house of native limestone hand-cut on site, fed by a rainwater cistern that supplied what may have been Austin's first complete indoor plumbing. A Corinthian-columned gallery was added in the 1920s.

Waco, TX

George W. Truett followed his family from North Carolina to Texas in 1889 and, though ordained a Baptist minister in 1890, first made his mark as a gifted fundraiser — clearing Baylor University's crushing $92,000 debt in under two years as its financial secretary. He enrolled at Baylor, paid his way as a Waco pastor, and in 1897 took the pulpit of First Baptist Church, Dallas, which he led for 47 years as it grew more than tenfold. His fundraising also helped found the hospital that became Baylor Hospital.

Dialville, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1816, George Washington Slover was a Baptist minister and skilled carpenter said to have built the Atlanta hotel later immortalized in "Gone with the Wind." He moved to Cherokee County in 1848, where he helped found the Rocky Springs Baptist Church and served as its pastor. With his wife Adelia Wood he raised seven children before his death in 1864.

Salado, TX

This modest Greek Revival frame house was the home of the Rev. George Washington Baines from 1870 until his death in 1883—a pioneer Baptist preacher, missionary, editor, and educator who was the great-grandfather of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Built in the 1860s, it survives with its square-columned front porch, transoms, and delicate ornamentation intact. Baines's ministry and teaching rippled through Texas Baptist life for generations.

Austin, TX

Austin's public library opened in a room over a downtown store in February 1926, then moved into this frame building near Wooldridge Park. In 1933, when a permanent main library was completed, the original building was relocated here to answer the Black community's request for a library of its own. Brick-veneered and named for the Black educator and scientist George Washington Carver, and directed by Hattie Henson from 1933 to 1943, it became the very first branch in the Austin library system.

Houston, TX

In the segregated Jim Crow South, the African American neighborhood of Acres Homes built its own schoolhouse in 1915, beginning as the one-room White Oak (Colored) School. Over the following decades it grew alongside a wave of Black migration into the community, gaining accreditation and a high school under longtime principal A.B. Anderson and taking the name of scientist George Washington Carver. From a single crowded room it evolved into today's magnet campus for applied technology, engineering, and the arts.

Baytown, TX

This site tells the story of Black education in Baytown, beginning in 1921 with the Goose Creek School for Coloreds, whose classes met partly in Mt. Rose Baptist Church. Renamed in 1940 for the scientist and educator George Washington Carver and accredited as a four-year high school in 1941, Carver became one of the state's top segregated schools, winning nine state band titles and eight athletic championships in the Prairie View Interscholastic League. The high school closed in 1967 as desegregation ended the era of separate Black schools, but the Carver name still anchors education in the community.

Navasota, TX

Around 1865, Rev. J.J. Reinhart established the Navasota Colored School to educate African American children just as slavery ended. After repeated fires, a sturdy brick building rose in 1942 and was soon named for the celebrated Black scientist George Washington Carver. When Navasota schools integrated in 1968 the building lived on as an elementary and middle school, and today it serves the community as the Carver Community Center.

Edna, TX

First graduating a class in 1912 as the Edna Colored School, this institution educated Black children in Jackson County through the long decades of segregation. Even after the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional, Edna's schools stayed divided under a "two-race" system until the mid-1960s, and the district was not fully integrated until 1967. Renamed for George Washington Carver, the school remained a valued anchor of the community and today survives as a nonprofit community center.

Groveton, TX

As Groveton grew around the railroad and its timber industry in the 1880s, its African American families built their own schools despite chronic underfunding. In 1900 the Trinity County Lumber Company sold land for a wood-frame school in the Black neighborhood, which served until 1955; by 1956 the growing school was named for botanist and inventor George Washington Carver. Principal T. L. Mathis led the school from 1956 to 1965, tirelessly advocating for its students, while the community itself funded sports, a marching band, and other activities. After integration in 1965, the building became Groveton Junior High.

Galveston, TX

In 1895, in the parlor of Mrs. George Seeligson's Galveston home, a group of women founded the George Washington Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution — the very first DAR chapter in Texas, five years ahead of the state organization. They took Washington's name because charter members Mrs. Sydney Fontaine and her daughter Shirley counted the first president among their ancestors. From the start the chapter devoted itself to historic preservation, youth education, and civic patriotism.

Cuero, TX

Pennsylvania-born George Washington Davis brought his family to Texas in 1831 and claimed a league of land in the Green DeWitt Colony near present-day Cuero. He threw himself into the independence movement, serving as a delegate to the 1833 Convention and to the 1835 Consultation at San Felipe that helped set Texas on the road to revolution. After independence he held a series of local offices in the young republic.

Comanche, TX

A member of Stephen F. Austin's colony, George Washington Gentry came to Texas in 1835 and settled in what became Washington County, working as a farmer and surveyor. He took part in the Texas Revolution, fought in several skirmishes with Native peoples, and helped defend San Antonio during the 1842 Mexican invasions led by Vasquez and Woll before later moving to Comanche County.

Austin, TX

George Washington Glasscock's life reads like a thread connecting two frontiers: he served beside Abraham Lincoln in the 1832 Black Hawk War and partnered with him flat-boating the Sangamon River before heading to Texas in 1834. He fought alongside Jim Bowie and Ben Milam in the Siege of Bexar during the Texas Revolution, then turned surveyor, built the area's first gristmill, and donated land for the county seat. Georgetown and Glasscock County still carry his name.

Huntsville, TX

An Alabama native who came to Texas in 1831, George Washington Grant built a sprawling enterprise of stagecoaches, sawmills, and nearly 10,000 acres around Huntsville, and helped found Sam Houston Normal Institute and served as sheriff and county judge during Reconstruction. Though he had held people in slavery before the war, after Emancipation he sold and donated land to freedmen and, with the Quakers and the Freedmen's Bureau, created the community he called Harmony Settlement—better known as Grant's Colony—complete with farmhouses, a cotton gin, and a school open to children of any race.

Timpson, TX

George Washington Green came to Texas in 1878 with little more than the labor of his own hands, starting as a sharecropper before buying his first land in 1883. When the Houston East & West Texas Railroad pushed its line through Shelby County, Green shrewdly bought acreage along the tracks and grew into a prominent landowner running a general store and cotton gin. The Bobo community rose on his land, and in 1905 he created Green's Lake, a beloved spot for picnics, swimming, and church baptisms for decades.

Seguin, TX

George Washington Lonis came to Texas in 1830 and joined the Texans' 1835 campaign against Bexar during the opening months of the revolution. The following spring he was wounded at the Battle of San Jacinto, the victory that secured Texas independence. He lived on in Guadalupe County until his death in 1860, and the State of Texas honored his service with this marker in 1962.

Pleasanton, TX

Between 1852 and 1854, George Washington Marion Duck brought his family from Somerset, Kentucky, to the country southwest of San Antonio, in an area that would take the name Somerset. Sworn in as a Bexar County constable in 1854, he became Atascosa County's tax assessor-collector when the county was formed in 1856 and later served multiple terms as sheriff. After smallpox took his wife and daughters in the early 1890s, he buried them on his Pleasanton land and donated part of it to what became the Pleasanton City Cemetery, where he too was laid to rest in 1899.

Brenham, TX

This marker remembers a Tennessee-born veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, the 1836 engagement that secured Texas independence from Mexico. Born in 1812, he was among the fighters of that founding generation and lived on in Texas until his death in 1901.

Malone, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1826, George Washington Savage came to Texas in 1847 and made his mark as a farmer, race-horse breeder and trainer, and Confederate cavalryman. He eased the way for German immigrant families by selling them parcels and helping them start farms, and in 1885 he donated land for Savage School No. 1, the area's first school. At his death in 1899 he left a second wife and ten children.

Corsicana, TX

Born in Virginia and living in Tennessee, George Washington Shelton (1814–1882) joined fifteen other recruits late in 1835 to come to Texas and fight the forces of Santa Anna. He served in the Texas war for independence from January to September 1836 and earned two land bounties for his duty, later settling as a pioneer citizen of Navarro County. His grave marker honors one of the volunteers who made Texas independence possible.

Blue Ridge, TX

George Washington Smith left Tennessee for Texas in 1834, arriving on the eve of revolution. He served as an artillery private in the Texas War for Independence and later as a Texas Ranger sergeant in the Mexican War under the famed Col. John Coffee "Jack" Hays. He settled his family in Collin County in 1852 and was buried near Blue Ridge after his death around 1876.

Paris, TX

Born in Virginia in 1793 and a veteran of the War of 1812, George Washington Stell, Sr. joined the wave of settlers pouring into the young Republic of Texas in the late 1830s. A farmer, surveyor, and builder who was deaf, he raised the first courthouse in Paris after it became the Lamar County seat in 1844. He also charted the Central National Road, a 130-mile artery from the Trinity River to the Red River that helped draw settlers into northeast Texas.

Canton, TX

George Washington Tull arrived in Canton in 1858 after a stint chasing gold in California, and built a mercantile business that anchored the courthouse square for more than half a century. He served as a Confederate private during the Civil War, then returned to grow one of the town's most enduring stores, even constructing the county courthouse in 1872 under contract. Known as the wealthiest man in town yet remembered as the poor man's friend, he helped shape Canton's commercial district.

Palo Pinto, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1811, George Webb Slaughter came to Texas in 1830 and threw himself into the young republic's making—serving as a courier for Sam Houston and carrying a dispatch to William B. Travis at the Alamo. His 1836 wedding was the first marriage sanctioned under Republic of Texas law. Ordained a Baptist minister in 1844, he rode a frontier circuit preaching and practicing 'saddlebag' medicine, survived Indian raids, and drove thousands of cattle up the trail to Kansas railheads, fathering the noted cattlemen C.C. and John B. Slaughter.

Jefferson, TX

George Webster Smith, a New York–born Union veteran, settled in Jefferson after the Civil War and became an ardent Republican, sitting on the board that disenfranchised former Confederates and serving as a delegate to the 1868 Constitutional Convention. After a shooting dispute in 1868, he was jailed in the city calaboose under a promise of protection—only to be dragged out and assassinated with two freedmen by some seventy disguised men, many tied to the Knights of the Rising Sun. The outrage brought martial law, and of twenty-three men tried, three were convicted of murder.

Austin, TX

This marker honors George Weedon, who was permanently wounded at the Battle of San Jacinto while serving in Captain William S. Fisher's company. That short, decisive fight in April 1836 won Texas its independence from Mexico. Weedon carried his injuries until his death in early 1842 near old Cincinnati in Walker County.

George West, TX

This cemetery began as part of the sprawling George West Ranch, founded in the 1880s when George Washington West and his wife Kitty bought 140,000 acres in Live Oak County. In 1916 West set aside six acres as a community and county burial ground, and after his death his estate gave it to the county's citizens as a free cemetery. Its graves—the earliest legible one inscribed in Spanish—hold ranchers, veterans, café owners, educators, and laborers who together built the town and county.

George West, TX

Protestant worship in George West began in 1914 with Methodist circuit riders, and by 1916 a small band of charter members organized formally on land donated by town founder George W. West. Through droughts, floods, and the ups and downs of a South Texas ranching economy, the congregation raised money in inventive ways—running a tea room and even growing and selling cotton—to build and expand its church. Over the decades national mergers reshaped its name and reach, from a rural Methodist mission to a congregation supporting causes as far away as Korea and Africa.

Burnet, TX

George Whitaker, an early settler of Burnet, built this sturdy home in 1870 out of hand-hewn native rock, complete with an interior cistern to secure water in the Hill Country. When the community expanded the house in 1939, builders reused stone salvaged from the old county courthouse, folding one piece of local history into another. The result is a modest but enduring monument to frontier self-reliance.

Boerne, TX

A New Hampshire native and journalist by trade, George Wilkins Kendall co-founded the New Orleans Picayune in 1837 and won fame writing vivid accounts of the 1841 Texan Santa Fe Expedition and the Mexican War—work that helped pioneer American war correspondence. In 1857 he settled in the Texas Hill Country and turned sheep rancher, promoting the region so energetically that the county was named for him in 1862. He lived out his days here until his death in 1867.

Glen Rose, TX

The George's Creek community grew from land acquired by George Barnard and Thomas Torrey, veterans of an 1841 expedition from the Republic of Texas toward Santa Fe, near the trading post that became Fort Spunky. By the 1880s farming families had filled the area with churches, and the George's Creek Baptist Church, founded in 1885, shared pastors and buildings with neighboring congregations before settling into a sanctuary built by the Holiness Church in 1915. Through lean years without regular pastors, its Sunday School kept the congregation alive.

Georgetown, TX

By the 1890s Georgetown had grown enough to need a proper seat of government, and in 1892 it gathered its civic functions under one roof. This building held the mayor's office, council chambers, jail, fire department, and even the water company, a compact expression of a maturing frontier town. It survives as one of the few 19th-century combined city hall–fire stations left in Texas.

Georgetown, TX

Rising in 1923–24 on ground that once held Southwestern University, this building served Georgetown's high school students for more than half a century. Austin architect Charles H. Page gave it a Spanish Colonial Revival face, crowned by a Baroque entryway whose cast-stone shells, flowers, urns, and garlands announced the community's pride in its schools. A gymnasium joined the rear in the 1940s as the school grew.

Houston County, TX

Both this congregation and its community take their name from early settlers who came from Georgia and camped along a nearby creek. Founded before 1880, the fellowship shared a building with local Methodists before raising its own sanctuary, and during the 1880s it sent out two of its own members, Z. C. and Joe Taylor, as missionaries. Music has long been a hallmark of the church's life.

Canyon, TX

Before she became one of America's most celebrated artists, Georgia O'Keeffe taught in the Texas Panhandle, drawn by what she called "the openness. The dry landscape." From 1916 to 1918 she taught at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, where the sweep of Palo Duro Canyon pushed her toward the bold abstraction that would define her work. She exhibited her Texas pieces in New York in 1917 and carried the region's influence for the rest of her life.

Waco, TX

In November 1897 a feud over the printed word turned deadly near this Waco intersection. Newspaper editor James W. Harris and Judge George Bruce Gerald clashed over Gerald's defense of William Cowper Brann's fiery magazine The Iconoclast, which attacked Baptists and Baylor University. After a fistfight and a handbill branding Harris a coward, a challenge led to a street pistol battle that killed the Harris brothers and wounded the judge, who was reelected three years later.

Holliday, TX

In 1901 an Indianapolis colonization company, unable to find land in Oklahoma, bought over 59,000 acres here to plant a farming settlement of Northern families. Geraldine sprang up almost overnight — surveyed, drilled for water, and lined with 75 buildings and 125 farm families by its May 1902 grand opening. But severe drought and scarce groundwater emptied it within months, and by 1905 the town was vacated and its land sold back to a former owner.

Austin, TX

Merchant Philip Henry Gerhard and his wife Lena had this house built in 1887 by contractor Herman S. Love, and it was said to be the first two-story brick veneer home in Austin, enlarged in 1891. Their daughter Clara and her husband, pioneering University of Texas chemical engineering professor Dr. Eugene Paul Schoch, inherited and moved in during 1912. Since 1955 three later generations of the family have lived in and preserved the home.

Austin, TX

German immigrants pouring into Texas in the 1840s and 1850s prized education even before the state had public schools, funding private academies through a mix of subsidies, donations, and tuition. In 1857 Austin's German-Texans met to found a school, and volunteers raised a rammed-earth building that opened in 1858 as the first Austin school chartered by the legislature. It served until 1881, when the city's new public schools superseded it, and it later housed a German-language newspaperman before becoming a home.

Indianola, TX

In 1842 a group of German noblemen formed the Adelsverein, a society pledged to resettle their countrymen in far-off Texas. Amid the hunger and unrest of 1840s Europe, its slogan "geh mit ins Texas" drew thousands to the shell beach of Indian Point at Karlshafen, the debarkation point that fed the new colonies of New Braunfels and Fredericksburg. Many died in the hard early years, but the survivors left a German imprint on Texas culture that endures.

Boerne, TX

Karl Dienger, a German music professor who settled in Boerne in 1855, founded a singing club (Gesangverein) and band there in 1860, drawing musicians from across the Hill Country. Known as the Boerne Village Band, the group carried traditional German music and heritage into local festivals and celebrations. Its example inspired a lasting run of similar ensembles, and Boerne's German-style bands went on to earn statewide recognition.

Sattler vicinity, TX

Between 1844 and 1847 a society of German nobles, the Mainzer Adelsverein, sponsored the emigration of thousands of Germans to Texas, who founded New Braunfels in 1845 and Fredericksburg in 1846. Pushing west, these farmers, artisans, scholars, and scientists endured epidemic and privation, and a treaty with the Comanche opened millions of acres between the Llano and Colorado rivers to settlement. Much of the land they first settled now lies beneath Canyon Lake.

Corpus Christi, TX

During World War II Texas held some 50,000 prisoners of war across roughly 70 camps, and in August 1945—months after Germany's surrender—the first German POWs arrived by train at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi. They built their own compound of wood-and-canvas 'hutments' and worked repairing runways, digging drainage, and clearing hurricane debris until the camp was dismantled and closed in March 1946.

Lufkin, TX

During World War II the U.S. Army held roughly 425,000 Axis prisoners in camps across the country, and Texas alone housed about 50,000, mostly Germans, to fill wartime labor shortages. Lufkin became the only Texas town with two POW camps, put to work salvaging pulpwood and timber wrecked by a severe January 1944 ice storm. German prisoners at Southland Paper Mills' Camp Number 1 produced pulpwood until 1946, while a second camp at the fairgrounds ran briefly to clear ice-damaged forest.

Castell, TX

In 1847 the German Emigration Company, led by Commissioner General John O. Meusebach, founded three settlements on the Fisher-Miller land grant. Castell, settled by Fredericksburg pioneers, became Llano County's first permanent town and the only lasting community the company established on the grant. Its neighbors did not survive: Leiningen vanished entirely, and Bettina — the first communal settlement in Texas — was abandoned within a year when supplies ran out.

Malone, TX

Germans had been coming to Texas since the 1820s, but they began moving into Hill County in the 1880s, buying land opened up by earlier settlers. Fritz Lentz and Alex Radke arrived first in 1882, followed by dozens of families whose names still fill the marker. They gathered for worship in one another's homes until Salem Lutheran Congregation was organized in 1886 and quickly built a church, with St. Peter's Lutheran following in 1906, turning hard-worked farms into a lasting community bound by faith, family, and music.

Brenham, TX

Texas farmers in the 1890s had little protection when fire, lightning, or storms destroyed their crops and buildings. In 1896, merchant L. A. Niebuhr and attorney E. W. Hander gathered 34 members in a Perry, Texas schoolhouse to form the Germania Mutual Aid Association, a cooperative that let farmers insure one another. From those beginnings it grew into a major insurer, adding coverage for hail, explosions, theft, and more as it spread across the state.

Germany, TX

After the Civil War, families of formerly enslaved people settled this East Texas community, which locals say took the name "Germany" from a German immigrant family that had arrived in the 1830s. Freedmen such as George Smith, John Burt, Lewis Hall, and Van Benton secured pre-emption land grants in the 1870s and 1880s and built a close-knit settlement anchored by New Pleasant Hill Baptist Church and a public school, the latter possibly aided by the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Never incorporated, Germany today is a quiet rural place whose 1880s cemetery still draws descendants home for burial.

Greenville, TX

Merchant and civic leader Joseph P. Germany built this Second Empire home in 1886 for himself and his young wife Polly, its straight mansard roof and tower announcing his rising status in Greenville. Germany went on to help found Burleson College, serve as city councilman and treasurer, and manage the municipal electric plant. His family filled the house—at one point ten relatives lived here together—and occupied it for more than ninety years.

Austin, TX

Gethsemane was the first Lutheran church in Travis County, organized in 1868 by Swedish immigrants under the leadership of Swante Palm. The congregation raised this 1883 building using stone hauled by wheelbarrow from the Texas Capitol that had burned in 1881, and later fitted it with ornate doors salvaged from the University of Texas's Old Main. Its form echoes the rural churches of the Swedish homeland its founders had left behind.

San Benito, TX

As Mexican immigrants settled the new town of San Benito in the early 1900s, Presbyterian families among them organized the Mexican Presbyterian Church of San Benito in 1911, led by missionary and teacher Anne E. Dysart, who had fled the Mexican Revolution and opened a school. The congregation built its first church in 1912 and joined the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. in 1919. Renamed 2nd Presbyterian in 1961 and Getsemani Presbyterian in 1979, it has long run food banks, clothing closets, English classes, and outreach missions.