Historic Markers in Texas

Waxahachie, TX

Laid out in 1889 as West End Park, this Waxahachie ground soon became Chautauqua Park, hosting the annual summer assemblies that carried culture, lectures, and music from western New York to towns across the country. For two weeks each year through 1930, thousands camped here amid tents, a barbershop, a post office, and a 1902 auditorium that welcomed speakers from William Jennings Bryan to Will Rogers. The park was renamed in 1914 for Civil War veteran W.H. Getzendaner and remains a civic gathering place.

Gholson, TX

This burial ground began in 1871 with the grave of the infant daughter of pioneer settlers Thomas and Charlotte Rozell, its oldest marked stone belonging to Sarah Kiker, who died in 1877. In 1885 W. F. Umberson, an area settler from before the Civil War, set aside two acres as a public cemetery for the Gholson community. A one-room Kellum School on the grounds doubled as a place of worship, and a cemetery tabernacle followed in 1925.

Saratoga, TX

Ghost Road runs arrow-straight through the Big Thicket along the bed of an old Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe branch line that once carried timber between Bragg and Saratoga. Tales of a mysterious light appeared while the trains still ran and only grew after the line became a county road in the 1930s, fueled by newspaper editor Arthur Fullingim's published sightings. Explained over the years as swamp gas, hidden Spanish gold, or restless spirits, the road drew crowds of the curious and, in the late 1990s, became a protected natural resource prized for its flora and fauna.

Burkburnett, TX

German immigrant Herman Specht amassed some 21,000 acres in northern Wichita County and in 1886 platted the town of Clara, naming it for his wife and its streets for Texas heroes. He recruited German colonists, raised wheat, and kept an experimental nursery, but drought, the 1900 Galveston storm, an inadequate water supply, and the coming of good roads and cars steadily drained the town until only the church, rectory, and cemetery remained.

Teague, TX

Settled before 1848, Cotton Gin took its name from the mule-drawn gin Dr. J. S. Wills built here, and it gained a post office in 1851 as Freestone County organized. Though Wills offered land for a courthouse, voters declined to make it the county seat, and the thriving town — with three churches, a school, a newspaper, and a Masonic Lodge — faded in the 1870s when the Houston & Texas Central Railroad laid its tracks a few miles west. Its businesses drifted toward the rails, leaving Cotton Gin a ghost town.

Hereford, TX

Across the Texas Panhandle, the settlement map is written as much in vanished towns as in surviving ones, and Deaf Smith County is a vivid example. La Plata, once known as Grenada, was a bustling county seat and a key stop on the New Mexico–Amarillo Road in the 1880s and 1890s—until its buildings and county government were simply hauled off to Hereford in 1898. Nearby Ayr, Escarbada on the great XIT Ranch, Dean, Mirage, and Kelso each flickered into existence as post offices before fading away entirely.

Arlington, TX

James Gibbins left Arkansas for Texas in 1857 and bought land near present-day Arlington in 1863, later deeding part of it to his son Thomas Jefferson Gibbins, who enlarged the homestead. The family cemetery opened with the 1877 burial of Thomas's first wife, Amanda, and his second wife Martha kept the land for three decades after his death. The Gibbins family gave much to the growing community, including land for a public school and a local park.

Huntington vicinity, TX

Around 1904, sawmill manager W. M. Gibbs came to the East Texas mill town of Manning to work for the Carter-Kelly Lumber Company, and he and his wife Leannah raised four children in this house. Built as an American foursquare and enlarged in 1927 with Craftsman touches, the home stayed in the family until 1942. Today it stands as one of the last tangible remnants of Manning, a company town that has largely vanished.

Huntsville, TX

This Greek Revival home was built in 1862 for the family of Thomas Gibbs, part of a prominent early Huntsville family. After serving as a rental and student housing in the late 1800s, it was purchased in 1897 by Judge Ben Powell II. Retaining its square porch columns and transom-and-sidelight entry, the house opened as a local history museum in 1984.

Rendon vicinity, TX

In 1853 brothers Garrett and James Gibson and their kin settled 160-acre homesteads in what became the Gibson Community of Tarrant County. Each brother donated land here for a cemetery, first used in 1866 for Garrett's infant grandson, James Truitt. Of the seventy-three marked graves, many bearing only rough fieldstones, all but two hold members of the Gibson family, a lasting record of one of the county's earliest settlements.

Weslaco, TX

During the Great Depression, displaced Midwesterners drifted into Weslaco and threw up Hooverville shantytowns, and in 1934 the local Lions Club set out to give them a proper public space. Landowners William Henry Hoge and J.J. Gibson donated the acreage, and the site opened in 1936 as the city's first municipal trailer park, drawing campers and travelers before closing as a camp in 1946 and maturing into a neighborhood park. Today it also hosts the Valley Nature Center, anchoring Weslaco's ecotourism.

Perrin, TX

Settled as New Hope City and later renamed Gibtown for merchant Burdett Levi Gibbins, this North Texas farming community grew up in the decades after the Civil War. Its cemetery, whose first marked grave belongs to Mary C. Stults (d. 1876), gathered the pioneer families, ministers, doctors, and county officials who built the town. Tombstones bearing Woodmen of the World and Masonic emblems record the fraternal life that bound the settlement together.

Brenham, TX

Completed in 1870 for the Brenham banker, lawyer, and landowner Jabez Giddings—namesake of the town of Giddings—this stately house is a late flowering of the Greek Revival style, with a five-bay, two-story porch carried on Doric columns. It passed to his daughter Mary Louise and her husband Heber Stone, son of a Galveston mayor, and gained late-nineteenth-century touches like metal balusters and a rear servants' wing. The home reflects the wealth and ambition of Texas's post–Civil War commercial elite.

Brenham, TX

Jabez Deming Giddings, a Pennsylvania lawyer and civic leader, bought this Brenham land in 1837 and built a home of hand-hewn cypress boards—crowned by an unusual rooftop rainwater reservoir—before his 1843 marriage to Ann Tarver. Remodeled about 1870 and sold to the Wilkin family in 1871, it sheltered them until 1942. Slated for demolition in 1972, the house was rescued and restored by the county's heritage society.

Iraan, TX

When mail, passengers, and freight still moved across West Texas by stagecoach, the San Antonio–El Paso line threaded the desolate Chihuahua Trail, or Lower Road. George H. Giddings took over the run in 1854 and built a string of stations; the one raised near the Pecos River's "S" crossing in 1858 offered adobe-and-limestone shelter, a corral of horses and mules, and water from a hand-dug well. Reported destroyed during Indian raids in 1862, the remote post's exact site stayed uncertain until 21st-century archeology pinpointed its foundations.

Brenham, TX

Gideon Lincecum grew up on the moving edge of the southern frontier, in Georgia and Mississippi, where he absorbed both the natural world around him and the cultures of the Native peoples he lived near. A veteran of the War of 1812, he settled in Texas in 1848 and opened a medical practice built on herbal remedies rather than the harsh medicines of his day. As a self-taught naturalist he won international notice for his patient study of Texas harvester ants and kept weather records for the Smithsonian, working from a cabin later moved here to preserve it.

Burton, TX

Gideon Lincecum (1793–1874) grew up on the southern frontier, absorbing the natural world and Native cultures before settling in Washington County in 1848. A self-taught physician who favored herbal remedies, he became a naturalist of international reputation, celebrated for his long study of a Texas harvester ant and for keeping weather records for the Smithsonian Institution. He completed his autobiography here after a Reconstruction-era sojourn in Mexico.

Snook, TX

Prussian-born Johann Joachim Giesenschlag brought his wife Anna and their children to Texas in 1855, settling first in Washington County before moving to Burleson County in the 1870s, where they bought more than a thousand acres. Giesenschlag set aside this tract as a family cemetery and was the first laid to rest here; in 1883 his family deeded the ground to a nearby Evangelical Lutheran church. For years a schoolhouse stood on adjoining Giesenschlag land beside this pioneer burial ground.

Farmers Branch, TX

Dr. Samuel H. Gilbert reached Texas about 1850 and by 1857 had built this native-limestone house on 275 acres, combining a medical practice with farming and livestock. A community leader, he helped outfit a local militia unit during the Civil War and later drew the railroad through Farmers Branch by selling land to the Dallas & Wichita line in 1874. The vernacular center-passage house, with Greek Revival touches and twin chimneys, is a rare survivor of early Texas homebuilding.

Nursery, TX

Pioneer horticulturist Gilbert Onderdonk (1829–1920) left New York for the warmer Texas coast in 1851 for his health, and after the Civil War built a renowned nursery business in Victoria County. When the railroad reached the area, his family opened a branch nursery in 1883 around which the town of Nursery grew, complete with a post office where Onderdonk served as postmaster and shipping agent for his mail-order trade. He earned a national reputation developing new varieties of peach and other fruit trees.

Dimmitt, TX

Tennessee native and local merchant Jeff T. Gilbreath brought his family to the newly settled Castro County in 1905 and built this house in 1909, soon selling it to county attorney Mark Cowsert. A fine example of early 20th-century vernacular architecture with its bay window and hipped, gabled roof, the house was preserved when the Castro County Museum acquired it in 1976.

Ben Franklin, TX

Settlers from Giles County, Tennessee founded this academy in 1859 and named it for the homeland they had left, hiring fellow Tennessean Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday as its first teacher. Parents paid the bills, and a small community with a store, blacksmith, and church grew up around the log schoolhouse. Hockaday's daughter Ela, born here, would go on to found the celebrated Hockaday School for Girls in Dallas in 1913.

Pecan Gap, TX

Established in 1877, Giles Cemetery is among the older burial grounds of Delta County, in the blackland-prairie country of Northeast Texas. Its founding in the decades after the Civil War reflects the wave of farming families who settled this fertile region during Reconstruction. The state recognized it as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016.

Austin, TX

This two-story brick residence was built in 1905 for William L. Gilfillan, a founder and director of the Austin National Bank. Designed by prominent local architect Charles H. Page, Jr., it blends the Mission Revival and Prairie School styles fashionable before World War I. In 1931 it passed to Julius G. Knape, a Swedish stonemason and contractor.

Gilmer, TX

Founded in 1865 as the Civil War ended, this Black Baptist congregation began under a brush arbor and took the biblical name "Gilgal," the Israelites' first camp in the Promised Land — a fitting choice for a people newly freed. Over the following decades its members raised a frame church, ran a Black school on donated land, and, under Rev. W. L. Dickson, opened the Dickson Colored Orphans Home. The brick-veneered sanctuary and educational annex trace a congregation that steadily built institutions of faith, learning, and care.

Liberty, TX

Dr. E. J. Gillard moved his family from Louisiana to Texas in 1845 and about 1848 raised this home of native woods on his plantation east of Liberty. Its Greek Revival lines carry Creole touches from his Louisiana background, along with unusual features like a traveler's room and an upstairs schoolroom. The house passed down through the Duncan and Welder descendants and was relocated to its present spot in 1980.

Fredericksburg, TX

Once crossed by the trails of roving Indian peoples, these Hill Country lands were settled by German immigrant pioneers in 1846, with a group of Mormons founding Zodiac the next year. The county was created and organized in 1848 and named for Richard Addison Gillespie, a Texas frontier defender and Mexican War captain who was killed at the Battle of Monterrey in 1846. Fredericksburg became its seat.

Oakalla, TX

Absalom Barton Gillum and his wife Hannah Emmaline came to Texas from Alabama in 1872, and by 1880 he had bought the land that became this cemetery. A Civil War veteran, Master Mason, cotton-gin owner, and postmaster of Oakalla, Gillum first buried his four-year-old son Willie here in 1882. The grounds went on to hold Woodmen of the World members and veterans from the Civil War to the present, tended today by a family association.

Gilmer, TX

Founded in 1846 and named for Thomas W. Gilmer — U.S. Secretary of the Navy and a fervent champion of Texas annexation — this East Texas town came of age just as Texas joined the Union. During the Civil War it served as a supply, training, production, and educational center for the Confederacy, and later thrived as a hub of farming, lumbering, and oil. Today it is perhaps best known for its long-running Yamboree sweet-potato festival.

Rocksprings, TX

When Jesse Walter Gilmer raised his two-story frame hotel in 1916, Rocksprings was a remote ranching center where traveling salesmen, cattlemen, and visitors needed lodging and a hot meal. Its dining room fed townspeople and even the county jail's prisoners, and in hard moments the hotel became a refuge — sheltering influenza patients during the World War I epidemic and, in 1927, survivors of a devastating tornado.

Houston, TX

Built in 1905, this stately, pillared home is an early Houston example of the Classical Revival style, its four Ionic columns and elliptical balcony announcing a fashionable respect for antiquity. Its owners read like a roster of the city's rising business class: Brian Brewster Gilmer, a drug-industry leader and Chamber of Commerce president; attorney Elliott Cage of the Cage Cotton Company; and finally Harry Cohn, a dry-goods and furniture merchant born in Latvia whose family lived here for 64 years. Each family left its mark on a house that shows both Neoclassical and Arts and Crafts influences.

Chireno, TX

Raised around 1895 in the small East Texas community of Chireno, the "Gingerbread House" is a showpiece of late Victorian craftsmanship. Its builders used heart pine and other fine materials, including brass hardware, and lavished the exterior with carved skirt boards, fascia, cornices, and ornate trim across its many porches. Later carefully restored by the C. V. Lindsey family, it survives as a testament to small-town Victorian taste.

Marshall, TX

Italian immigrant Charles Ginocchio arrived in Marshall in 1871 and built up holdings near the Texas & Pacific depot—including the ground where a notorious 1879 shooting left actor Maurice Barrymore wounded and Ben Porter dead. In 1893–96 he raised this three-story brick hotel with stores, a café, a ballroom, dining room, and forty guest rooms, finished with rare hand-carved curly pine. Threatened with demolition, it was rescued and restored in the late 1960s.

Marshall, TX

Italian immigrant Charles Ginocchio, a rising Marshall businessman, settled in the East Texas town with his wife Roxana in 1871 and built this home in 1886. It was designed by C. G. Lancaster, architect of the county courthouse. Passing through the related Cook and Signaigo families and, from 1945, the Greek-American Pedisons who had run the dining room at Ginocchio's own hotel, the house traces an unbroken line of immigrant entrepreneurs.

Borger, TX

Borger boomed on Panhandle oil in the 1920s and '30s, and civic-minded newcomers like Hudson and Ruby Davis helped knit the young town together. Ruby organized a Girl Scout troop that drew more than a hundred girls, and after wartime shortages delayed construction, the Lions Club rallied a community-wide effort to build this rock headquarters—faced in dolostone from the local Alibates formation—completed in the years after World War II.

Marshall, TX

Lucy Holcombe Pickens (1832–1899) grew up at Wyalucing, her family's East Texas plantation home that was a hub of social and cultural life among the surrounding plantations. Celebrated for her beauty and charm, she became the only nineteenth-century Texas woman honored with a portrait on currency—the Confederate $100 bill. Her husband served as the Civil War governor of South Carolina, and from 1863 to 1865 Wyalucing housed the Confederate Post Office Department west of the Mississippi.

Houston County, TX

Solomon George Givens and his wife Lula, both born in Houston County in 1871 to formerly enslaved parents, married in Crockett in 1891 and bought 34 acres here the following year. Their farm prospered, and in 1893 they built a large eight-room house on this site. Known for their charity and their leadership in founding a local school and Baptist church — with baptisms held in a tank on their land — the Givenses made their home the heart of an African-American farming community remembered as "Givens Hill."

Dallas, TX

This marker traces the tradition of public thanksgiving in Texas, from Native peoples and a 1541 service by a friar of Coronado's expedition to Sam Houston's 1842 call for the Republic to give thanks. In Dallas, a rabbi, a priest, and Protestant ministers launched a shared community thanksgiving service in 1907, an early act of interfaith goodwill that led eventually to the 1968 founding of downtown Thanks-Giving Square.

Gladewater, TX

Founded in 1827 as St. Clair a few miles east, the settlement moved to Glade Creek and the Texas & Pacific Railway in 1872 and took the name Gladewater. Its population exploded from 500 to 7,000 after oil was discovered in 1931, turning the farming and dairy town into a production and refining hub. The town became known for its East Texas Quarter Horse Show and a nationally known rodeo held in a converted salt-water disposal pit.

Gladewater, TX

On the eve of the twentieth century, twenty master masons — many from the Longview lodge — petitioned to form their own fraternal lodge, chartered in December 1901 with Daniel Washington Wood as first Worshipful Master. For three decades members met above James Ponder's general store, and their ranks included leading Gladewater businessmen, clergy, and civic figures, among them Dr. Earl McLaughlin, who won national notice for a remedy devised during the 1918 influenza epidemic. In 1940 the lodge dedicated its own hall, long a fixture of the town's civic life through scholarships and community programs.

Garden City, TX

Glasscock County, created in 1887 and organized in 1893 with Garden City as its seat, honors George W. Glasscock (1810–68), a onetime flatboating partner of Abraham Lincoln in Illinois who came to Texas in 1834. He fought in the Texas War for Independence, built central Texas's first flour mill, and lent his name to Georgetown before serving in the state legislature. The marker also surveys how Texas's 254 counties were named — for patriots, revolutionaries, frontiersmen, statesmen, and Confederate figures.

Garden City, TX

Barely a month after Glasscock County organized in 1893, its first commissioners' court issued bonds for a combination courthouse and jail, completed in 1894 with the ground floor for court and the upper floor for the jail. As the county grew, a grander 2½-story Classical Revival courthouse rose in 1910, built of three-foot-thick native stone quarried from a local ranch and crowned with colossal Doric columns. That 1910 courthouse has served continuously ever since, while the original building continued as a jail into 1980.

Glazier, TX

Glazier sprang up in 1887 when the Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway reached the site, becoming a handy cattle-shipping point north of the flood-prone Canadian River. The Glazier Cemetery Association bought its ground in 1910, though the earliest burials date to 1906. The town endured hard blows—a 1916 fire that leveled its business district and a 1947 tornado that killed twelve—yet the cemetery still marks the community's history.

Glen Flora, TX

Glen Flora took root on the east bank of the Colorado River in land that traced back to Robert H. Kuykendall, one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old Three Hundred" colonists. Around 1890 C.H. Waterhouse brought Pennsylvania German families to the west bank and built a sugar mill, cotton gin, and pumping plant, and when the Cane Belt Railroad reached the area in 1898 a townsite sprang up beside the tracks. Hotels, a bank, cotton gins, and a movie theater followed, until the 1913 flood and crop blights sent families toward the cities. A commercial fruit orchard in the 1980s revived the town's old agricultural bond.

Glen Flora, TX

This house was built by a Mr. Sanford between 1860 and 1866, spanning the Civil War years in the plantation country of Wharton County. By 1881 it was home to W. H. Hood, who went on to found the town of Glen Flora in the 1890s. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Kerrville, TX

On October 15, 1894, a group of Kerrville citizens set aside a ten-acre tract near the Guadalupe River as Glen Rest, a community burial ground. Its directors and the thousands laid to rest here — some families reaching five generations deep, bearing names like Schreiner, Dietert, and Butt — read like a roll call of the Hill Country's founding families. A low native-limestone wall from the 1920s is said to reuse stone from the demolished 1886 Kerr County courthouse, binding one landmark's remains into another.

Brenham, TX

Scottish-born Thomas Affleck (1812–1868) was among the 19th century's most influential writers on agriculture, and from 1858 he ran a 3,500-acre plantation near here with celebrated nurseries and experimental fields. An early champion of conservation farming, he surrounded his Glenblythe mansion with gardens, greenhouses, mills, and workshops, and during the Civil War his workshops built wagons and ambulances and fed a Confederate legion training nearby. After the war he worked to rebuild Texas farming and even traveled to Europe to recruit new settlers.

Trinity, TX

Glendale grew up near the antebellum Tullos Plantation, and by the time its post office opened in 1887 a small settlement had taken root. The cemetery's earliest graves—a four-year-old girl and an infant, both from 1884—speak to the hard mortality of frontier childhood. Fueled by the J. I. Cameron Lumber Company and the Glendale Orchard Company, the town boomed to some 1,200 residents by 1899, only to fade to about 75 by 1914 as local industry collapsed. Area families have tended the burial ground ever since.

Houston, TX

Glendale Cemetery began as a private family plot of John R. Harris, founder of Harrisburg (now part of Houston), with its first burial in 1839 — Judge John Birdsall, a former attorney general of the Republic of Texas. Growing without formal management, the grounds were tended for years by local women who formed the Glen Dale Cemetery Company in 1897, and after later neglect were restored beginning in 1952. Today it holds the graves of Texas heroes and pioneers of the Republic era.

Trinity, TX

Glendale Congregational Methodist Church organized in 1917 to keep worship alive after the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, discontinued services in the community. Meeting first in the old Methodist building and then in the Baptist church, the congregation erected its own home in the 1930s almost entirely through donations and volunteer labor. Pastors from Westminster College served the flock over the years as the campus grew with classrooms and a fellowship hall. Through local outreach and mission work, the church has remained a fixture of community life.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

This burial ground began in the 1850s with the death of planter Julien Sidney Devereux, whose father and infant son were soon reinterred beside him. Known first as Devereux and Sand Field, it served the nearby Forest Hill community, home to an academy Devereux founded in 1850. When a post office opened in 1872 the settlement took the name Glenfawn, growing to include stores, a school, church, and Masonic lodge before fading away.

McGregor, TX

Glenn Crain came to McGregor with his family before 1886, the year his father became the city's first mayor, and went into the insurance business. After marrying Mary E. Gulledge in 1890, he hired builder Charles Walsh to raise this home in 1892 in the Shingle Style, a design rarely seen in Texas, with a cross-gable plan and a distinctive semicircular belvedere. Active in the local Methodist church, the couple raised their family here, and their descendants held the house for more than a century.

Granbury, TX

Attorney and town builder James Farr raised this store in 1885, and by 1888 it belonged to the four Glenn brothers, civic leaders who ran the family grocery here. After an 1891 fire swept the block, contractors rebuilt with heavy iron-clad timbers supporting a handsome Victorian brick front—an example of the sturdy commercial architecture that lined a booming Texas courthouse square.

Tolar, TX

Though it sits in Hood County, Glenn Cemetery grew up to serve the Erath County community of Bluff Dale to the west. Andrew Jackson Glenn, its namesake, donated the land in 1897, but graves already dotted the property, the earliest dating to 1867. Many of Bluff Dale's leading early residents—and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War—rest here.

Del Rio, TX

Local contractor Daniel Glenn built this brick residence in 1900–01, working a band of decorative brickwork into its design, and sold it in 1901 to the widow Bessie Chisum. In 1906 she married Luke Dowe, a border peace officer who served first with the Texas Rangers' Frontier Battalion and later with U.S. Customs. The Dowes made the house their home for fifty years.

Groveton, TX

Groveton sprang up almost overnight in 1882 when the Trinity County Lumber Company platted a town in the East Texas pineywoods, and within months it became the county seat. As families poured in, the company deeded ten acres in 1896 for a cemetery, though the first burial had already taken place in 1885. Fittingly for a timber town, virgin pine felled on this very ground helped build the Texas State Capitol in Austin during the 1880s.

Beeville, TX

When Beeville's Evergreen Cemetery began to fill, local undertaker Christopher Rotzien bought adjoining land in 1901, and Margaret Ann Eeds became the first burial that April. Taken over by the Beeville Cemetery Association the next year and expanded over the decades, Glenwood grew into a landscaped resting place for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish citizens, including war veterans and the sister of Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie.

Crockett, TX

Glenwood Cemetery opened soon after Houston County was carved out and Crockett was named county seat in 1837, during the days of the Republic of Texas. As the town's oldest burial ground, it holds early Texas heroes and statesmen, a man who is said to have been visited by David Crockett on his way to the Alamo, a grandnephew of President Monroe, and the town's first elected mayor. Its weathered stones map the founding generation of this East Texas community.

Crockett, TX

This northern section belongs to Glenwood Cemetery, opened in the original townsite of Crockett soon after Houston County and its county seat were established in 1837. Among its burials are early Texas heroes and statesmen, a man said to have been visited by David Crockett en route to the Alamo, a grandnephew of President Monroe, and the town's first elected mayor. The grounds hold the founding generation of this East Texas community.

Glidden, TX

Before the rails arrived, this stretch of Colorado County launched cattle drives north to distant markets, and early settlers ranched, contracted, and built the mercantile houses that would last a century. The railroad changed everything: in 1882 T. J. Oakes sold land to the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio, which raised a depot, roundhouse, and turntable, and the townsite—named for railroad engineer F. G. Glidden—was platted in 1885. Scotch-Irish and English rail workers poured in, and Glidden grew into a busy rail center.