Historic Markers in Texas

Glidden, TX

In the railroad town of Glidden, a community congregation gathering as early as 1895 was formally organized in 1906 as the Glidden Missionary Baptist Church in Christ, calling its first pastor the next year. In those early days converts were baptized in the Colorado River or in the water pits at the railroad roundhouse. The fellowship, now simply the Glidden Baptist Church, became a fixture in the town's life.

Corpus Christi, TX

This memorial honors the American service members who fought in the Global War on Terrorism, the campaigns launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks that spanned Afghanistan, Iraq, and operations around the world. Placed among Corpus Christi's cluster of veterans' monuments, it commemorates a generation of men and women called to a new and open-ended kind of conflict. It stands for the sacrifices of those who served in the nation's longest era of continuous combat.

Giddings, TX

George Coleman Truitt founded this predominantly African-American community, building homes for tenant farmers and running its only store, then in 1887 donating land atop a rocky rise for a school that doubled as a church. As families from neighboring settlements sent their children, the school grew and was eventually rebuilt as a four-room Rosenwald school. The Globe Hill Baptist Church, organized in 1912 under the Reverend Frank Ruffin, swelled to hundreds and still draws former residents back each year for its annual celebrations.

Weches, TX

The Glover School opened in 1881 to serve the scattered farm families of the rural Glover Community, beginning as a one-room schoolhouse raised on donated land under teacher James Breeze. Over the decades it grew, burned in 1938, and was rebuilt, finally merging into the Kennard district in 1967. Long after the doors closed, former students kept gathering for reunions—proof of how much a country school could anchor a place.

Lincoln, TX

Founded as Hannes School No. 43 in 1893 when F. Soder deeded two acres, this Lee County school was renamed for Christian Gloyna after he bought the surrounding land in 1900. As Gloyna Common School District No. 17, it spanned nearly 10,000 acres, doubled as a place of worship, and replaced its original one-room building with a larger one in 1923. Falling enrollment led to its annexation by the Dime Box district in 1950 after roughly fifty years of service.

Gober, TX

On a summer day in 1889, the Rev. S.P. Clement and twelve charter members organized a Baptist congregation in the small Fannin County community of Gober. Early worship happened in the one-room schoolhouse and under a brush arbor before the members raised the town's first church building in 1893 on land donated by the Eads family. Larger sanctuaries followed in 1924 and 1953, and the congregation kept up an active missions program at home and abroad.

Bonham, TX

The earliest grave in this Fannin County cemetery belongs to R.M.C. Self, who died in 1865, and a decade later settlers drawn by the beauty of the spot raised a brush tabernacle nearby for gatherings. Community custom went so far as to buy a marble slab for a man who died in 1907 with no family or funds. The Carpenter family gave land in 1909, a caretaker came in 1942, and an association formed in 1977 to tend the hundreds of graves, many of them military veterans.

Gober, TX

Opened by 1933 and rebuilt in sturdier tile and steel in 1956, the Gober Garage kept the cars and farm machinery of this small community running for six decades. More than a repair shop, it doubled as a gathering place where farmers paused from the fields to talk. Its long run and eventual closing trace the rise and thinning of rural Texas towns.

Gober, TX

First settled in the 1840s as Grittersville, the town was platted in 1885 and renamed Gober to honor early settlers. Public schooling began in a one-room building that doubled as church and social hall; after fire destroyed it in 1924, a two-story frame school rose in its place, followed by a brick schoolhouse in 1938-39 and the formation of the Gober Independent School District. Declining enrollment closed the school in 1969.

Paducah, TX

Built in 1896 when many townspeople still lived in dugouts, this ornate late-Victorian house belonged to Joe L. Gober, the first sheriff of newly settled Cottle County. Its lumber and fine gingerbread trim had to be hauled by wagon from the railheads at Childress and Quanah, years before Paducah gained its own rail line in 1909.

Jefferson, TX

Schoolteacher Margaret Godfrey bought this Jefferson lot in 1892 and built a Folk Victorian house trimmed with Queen Anne spindlework, though she moved away and died only a few years later. Dr. Robert Moseley acquired it in 1901, and from 1910 to 1987 the family of attorney John Singleton lived in and enlarged the home. Its decorative detailing on a simple folk form typifies the modest but ornamented houses of turn-of-the-century Texas towns.

Godley, TX

Godley began in 1886 when rancher and lumber merchant B. B. Godley donated land for a townsite and a Santa Fe railroad right-of-way, though the school district predated the town by two years. Godley College opened in 1899, became a high school, and grew through rural consolidation and New Deal aid in the late 1930s. A WPA-funded main building of 1940, joined to a 1937 gymnasium and 1939 auditorium built with National Youth Administration help, created an unusually large rural campus clad in distinctive giraffe-pattern native stone.

Cypress Mill, TX

German immigrant Carl A. Goeth settled near the well-known Indian Spring in 1865 and, in 1882, raised this two-story limestone house in the sturdy building tradition of his homeland. Patriarch of a large and prominent family, Goeth also served in the Texas Legislature in 1887-88.

Buda, TX

Established in the 1870s by James Taylor Goforth, who ran a general store that served as social hub and informal bank, Goforth became a center of Hays County's cotton economy. At its height between 1880 and 1906 it boasted a drugstore, doctor's office, meat market, stable, and blacksmith, and Goforth later ran one of the area's largest cotton gins. But rail lines bypassed the town, and soil erosion, crop failure, and a 1926 worm infestation emptied it into a ghost town.

Aledo, TX

On land the Goforth family settled in 1857, a small family burial ground holds four graves, among them a two-year-old boy laid to rest in 1863 while his father was away serving in the 18th Texas Cavalry. Neighbors from the Chadwick family shared the plot as well. It is a quiet record of how sparse frontier settlement and Civil War service shaped early Parker County life.

Cuero, TX

Built in 1895 for Louis Gohmert and his wife Martha, this late Victorian home shows the confidence of a prospering Texas town, with imported leaded-glass windows, metal "lace" trim, and Italian tile. Gohmert had come from Germany as a boy and rose to become secretary-treasurer of a wholesale firm. Designed by Austin architect A. O. Watson, the house has been carefully preserved since 1952.

Corpus Christi, TX

Dedicated in 1931 in Corpus Christi's Spohn Park, this memorial honored the mothers of Nueces County servicemen who died in World War I. Championed by the Daughters of the American Revolution and designed by Mrs. Frank de Garmo, it was the first Gold Star Court of Honor in Texas, complete with a lighted three-foot gold star and, later, a captured British field piece. Listed in the National Register in 1988, it was restored by volunteers beginning in 2000.

Frisco, TX

The Gold Star Families Memorial Monument is part of a national network of monuments conceived by Hershel 'Woody' Williams, the last surviving Medal of Honor recipient from the Battle of Iwo Jima, to honor the families of American service members killed in the line of duty. The term 'Gold Star' dates to World War I, when families hung service flags with a blue star for each member serving and replaced it with a gold star if that person died. This Frisco monument continues a century-old American tradition of publicly honoring military sacrifice across every war.

Fredericksburg, TX

Built in 1902 as a modest one-story limestone house, this Fredericksburg home was doubled in size by Friedrich William Grobe, who added a second floor in 1916 using concrete blocks from the local Basse Brothers Cement Yard. Grobe embodied the many-handed self-reliance of the Hill Country's German settlers—blacksmith, surveyor, farmer, and postmaster of nearby Rheingold. The mix of hand-cut stone and machine-made block captures a community moving into the industrial century.

Victoria, TX

Adolph Goldman, a German immigrant who reached Texas in 1859 and served in the Civil War, settled in Victoria in 1865 and built a wide-ranging business empire. From the late 1880s he ran a cotton gin at this site, expanding it with rail access, warehouses, and new equipment until it averaged 3,000 bales a season. His sons carried the operation forward until fire destroyed the facilities in the early 1940s.

Goldsmith, TX

Goldsmith sprang to life as an oil field on June 14, 1935, when the discovery well gushed 1,140 barrels of crude a day and shacks and tents soon housed 350 people. First platted as Ector City by Harry L. Tucker in 1937 and later renamed for landowner C. A. Goldsmith, the boomtown quickly gained cafes, a hospital, movie theater, hotels, and a newspaper—though its lone bath was a 25-cent shower from an overhead tank. It endures today as a gas processing and distribution center.

Goldthwaite, TX

Central Texas newspaperman William H. Thompson launched a weekly called The Mountaineer in 1885; after it lapsed and revived, his nephew renamed it The Goldthwaite Eagle in 1896—when eagles still nested in the hills of Mills County. The paper passed among the Wilson and Thompson families for decades and, through a merger with a rival, became the county's sole newspaper. It has served the community continuously into the modern era.

Goldthwaite, TX

Three local men bought this ground for a cemetery in 1888, with Houston Roberts the first laid to rest. The Odd Fellows Lodge acquired and expanded it in 1894; among its stories is that of Watson Whittaker, killed in an 1898 train robbery and carried home by a funeral train that made headlines. The city took ownership in 1943, and community groups later added memorials honoring the area's veterans.

Goliad, TX

Goliad ranks among the three oldest municipalities in Texas, rooted in the Aranama Indian village the Spanish called Santa Dorotea and anchored by the Presidio La Bahía and Mission Espíritu Santo, established in 1749. Renamed Goliad in 1829—an anagram honoring the Mexican patriot Hidalgo—it became a crucible of the Texas Revolution. In March 1836, Colonel James Fannin and his men, taken prisoner after the Battle of Coleto, were marched from the La Bahía presidio and executed on Palm Sunday in the notorious Goliad Massacre.

Goliad, TX

The Goliad Advance-Guard grew from two earlier papers: the Guard, which began in 1867 when Richard Wayne Davis renamed the old Intelligencer, and the Advance, started in 1905 by a young Mississippi editor. In 1913 the two weeklies merged under the name it still carries. Generation after generation, correspondents from across the county fed it the local news that bound the community together.

Goliad, TX

First known to Spanish settlers as a mission and presidio in 1749, this place — La Bahía del Espíritu Santo — became a strategic fort under Spanish, Mexican, and Texan control before its name was changed to Goliad in 1829. In 1836 it was the scene of the massacre of Fannin and his command, a rallying cry of the Texas Revolution. Organized as a county that same year, it later sent several companies to the Confederate army.

Goliad, TX

Completed in 1894 for just under $68,000, Goliad's fourth courthouse reused limestone and brick from an 1870 predecessor, standing as the seat of a county born with the Republic of Texas in 1836. It sheltered the injured after a devastating 1902 cyclone, lost its central clock tower to a 1942 storm, and was enlarged in 1964 with its carved staircases and walnut wainscoting preserved.

Goliad, TX

Freemasons first met in Goliad in 1851 and won their charter the next year, and since 1854 the lodge has gathered in this rubble-stone building—one of the town's oldest. Its ground floor long did double duty as the local post office and city hall, making the modest structure a hub of civic as well as fraternal life in a community steeped in Texas Revolution history.

Goliad, TX

Built in 1937 as part of the statewide Texas Centennial commemorations, the Goliad Memorial Auditorium rose from a special legislative appropriation and matching federal and state Centennial grants championed by County Judge James Arthur White. Architects Raiford Stripling and Samuel Vosper blended beaux-arts and Spanish mission styles, with sculptors adding plaster moldings depicting pioneer life and the region's many ethnic groups. Completed in just seven months and dedicated with a turkey show honoring local farms, it went on to host big-band dances and remains a community cultural venue.

San Antonio, TX

Laid out by Spain around 1720 as El Camino Real a La Bahía—the King's Highway to Goliad—this road served for a century and a half as a major route for emigrants, armies, and traders, later becoming part of the Chihuahua Road linking the Gulf Coast to Mexico. Soldiers of Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederacy marched along it, as did Native peoples, and near this spot it crossed Salado Creek on the approach to San Antonio. Its heavy traffic faded only when the railroads arrived.

Goliad, TX

On a Sunday afternoon in May 1902, a tornado remembered as one of the worst in Texas history tore across Goliad. Sounding like a freight train, it cut a mile-long path through the northwest of town, flattening more than a hundred homes and killing 114 people. At least fifty died when a Black Methodist church was destroyed, and the county courthouse was pressed into service as a hospital and morgue.

Cuero, TX

The Golly Hollow community built its first schoolhouse in a low-lying spot, then moved it to higher ground in 1884 on an acre donated by Theresa Hubers-Burger. Named for pioneer Antone Golly, the school joined the public system around 1893 and taught local children until 1946, when it consolidated with Arneckeville. The old building found a second life as a community center in 1952.

Brownfield, TX

On August 3, 1903, nine worshippers gathered under a wagon-sheet tent to organize this Baptist church, led by the Rev. J. R. Miller and meeting monthly in the Gomez schoolhouse. A one-room sanctuary built in 1909 was later moved when the town of Gomez itself was relocated for highway construction, and a larger church rose in 1936. The congregation gained its first full-time pastor by 1942 but was disbanded in 1992, its fortunes tied to the fading town of Gomez.

Brownfield, TX

Established in 1902, this cemetery served Gomez, the first settlement in Terry County, which then stood a half-mile to the west. Pioneer settler H. F. Adams deeded the original four-acre tract to the Gomez School trustees in 1906, and some of the area's earliest homesteaders were buried here. When the county seat shifted, many graves were moved to Brownfield in 1918.

Gonzales, TX

Here on September 29, 1835, Mexican troops arrived to reclaim a small cannon the government had lent the colonists of Gonzales for defense against raids. The Texians stalled for two days while reinforcements gathered, then flung back their famous answer — "Come and Take It." The standoff over that little gun helped ignite the Texas Revolution.

Gonzales, TX

At this spot in a peach orchard, the colonists of Gonzales buried their contested cannon to hide it from 150 Mexican dragoons sent to seize it in September 1835. Two days later they dug it up, mounted it on ox-cart wheels, loaded it with chains and scrap iron, and fired what is remembered as the first shot of the Texas Revolution.

Gonzales, TX

This cemetery holds, by tradition, the reinterred remains of Gonzales's earliest settlers in a common grave, alongside figures central to the Texas Revolution. Among them are Dr. George W. Barnett, quartermaster Major Valentine Barnett, and Matthew Caldwell. Gonzales itself was the site of the revolution's opening skirmish over the "Come and Take It" cannon.

Gonzales, TX

Gonzales County was organized in 1837, in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas, and after its first courthouse burned in 1893 this second one was raised between 1894 and 1896 at a cost of $64,450. Serving as a gathering place for Texas leaders and the setting for consequential court decisions, the building has anchored the civic life of a town already famous in Texas history. It remains a proud landmark of the county seat.

Gonzales County, TX

When Green DeWitt planted his colony on the Guadalupe River in 1825, he ordered a road cut to link his capital at Gonzales with San Antonio, and surveyor Byrd Lockhart opened the eighty-mile route in 1827—its mileage notched into roadside oak trunks. Settlers, traders, and Mexican travelers braved the road despite the danger of raids. A decade later it became a thoroughfare of the Texas Revolution: the 'Immortal 32' marched down it from Gonzales to reinforce the Alamo, and Santa Anna's army followed after the fort fell.

Denton, TX

In the 1850s pioneers from Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, and beyond were drawn to this North Texas prairie by its rich soil and reliable water, forming the Rue Settlement that later took the name Good Hope. The cemetery holds the community's dead, with the earliest legible stone dated 1870 and more than eighty nineteenth-century burials that testify to the hardships of frontier life. As churches closed and the school shut in 1949, the settlement faded, leaving the graveyard as one of the few reminders it ever existed.

Giddings, TX

German and Wendish settlers founded the Good Hope community in the 1880s and had a school going by 1887. The cemetery's oldest marked grave, from 1889, belongs to Dora Vick, and several tombstones still carry German inscriptions. Buried here too is George Kruse, whose nearby rock quarry supplied fill stone—carried by a rail spur to the coast—for building the Galveston Seawall.

Houston, TX

Founded by the Rev. Samuel Grantham—who first preached in his own backyard—Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church was formally established in 1872 in Houston's Fourth Ward, its early members including formerly enslaved people. It grew into one of the city's leading Black institutions and a crucible of civil rights: pastor Albert Anderson Lucas led the local NAACP, member Dr. Lonnie Smith was the plaintiff in the landmark Smith v. Allwright, and Barbara Jordan worshipped here. Its influence reached far beyond the sanctuary walls.

Dallas, TX

Around 1920 Martha Schultze, a registered nurse trained in her native Germany before immigrating to the United States, opened Good Samaritan Hospital on Leland Avenue, where her husband Ernest ran an associated clinical laboratory. Starting with maternity care, the hospital added an operating room and general services by 1933 and treated neighborhood residents—elderly, infirm, and those unable to pay—until it closed in 1945. Schultze ran it for the whole of its roughly twenty-five years, and hundreds of children were born under its roof.

Valley Mills, TX

When W.H. Everett claimed 320 acres of central Texas prairie in 1846, death arrived before permanence did — he set aside this ground after four-year-old Sarah Hornbeak died in 1851. Two years later he brought his widowed sister Nancy Goodall and her eight children west from Arkansas, and one of those children, W.B. Goodall, bought the land and lent it his name. The burial ground holds about forty graves, a small record of the families who settled the McLennan County frontier.

Austin, TX

At the turn of the twentieth century, Austin's prosperous families were building grand homes on the streets radiating from the university, and this was among the finest. Physician Goodall Harrison Wooten, son of a Confederate-veteran doctor, and his wife Ella completed the house in 1900 and transformed it in 1910 into a Classical Revival showpiece of paired Ionic columns and wraparound galleries. Ella's celebrated gardens helped make it a local landmark, and the family held the property until the 1940s.

Athens, TX

Named for a pioneering family that migrated from Alabama in the 1850s, Goodgame Cemetery has served Henderson County since the Civil War era, its first recorded burial a young girl who died in 1863 while her father was away at war. Floyd Crockett Goodgame's sons became Confederate officers, and one, a schoolteacher, returned to teach and help found the community of Turkey Creek. The ground was formally deeded in 1901 and holds veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Korea, marked by Woodmen of the World stones and family curbing.

Austin, TX

Built in the early 1890s near the Texas Capitol, this handsome brick commercial building with decorative brickwork and iron railings served grocer Joseph Goodman, whose store occupied the main floor until 1924. Upstairs, from 1892 to about 1896, Jacob Bickler ran an elite German and English preparatory academy. Together they made the building a small hub of Austin's Gilded Age commerce and learning.

Tyler, TX

Begun in 1857 as a home called "Bonnie Castle," this Tyler landmark was bought after the Civil War by Dr. S. A. Goodman and enlarged by his son, Major W. J. Goodman, a surgeon in the 13th Texas Infantry of the Confederate army. Passed down and remodeled across generations, it was willed to the city in 1939 and has housed the Smith County Historical Society Museum since 1960.

Childress, TX

During the dangerous frontier years of 1866–71, this was a stretch of the great cattle trail blazed by Col. Charles Goodnight, carrying thousands of Texas cattle north to U.S. forts in Colorado and New Mexico. Herds watered at this spot on the drive. The site later became the town of Childress in 1886, and the old watering hole is now a lake in Fair Park.

Mentone, TX

This marker recalls the legendary Goodnight-Loving Trail, the cattle route pushed from the Fort Griffin–Dodge City road across New Mexico and into Colorado in the mid-19th century. It honors Oliver Loving (1812–1867), remembered as the first Texan to trail cattle north to distant markets, whose partnership with Charles Goodnight helped open the great era of Texas cattle drives.

Albany, TX

In 1866 and 1867, cattlemen Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight drove herds through the wide, unsettled reaches of Shackelford County, tracing a route that would bear their names. Unlike the trails north, the Goodnight-Loving ran west and south through desert and mountain passes, exposing herd and drover alike to raids and brutal country — but it delivered cattle straight to markets in New Mexico and Colorado. Portions followed the old Butterfield Overland Mail route, whose lone Smith's Station stood on Chimney Creek, and the trail's success drew a flood of cattlemen behind them.

Goodrich, TX

Goodrich School is one of the few area schoolhouses known to have been built through the federal Works Progress Administration, with construction beginning in May 1934 under architect Emory S. White. Its Jeffersonian-style design and prized auditorium made it a source of community pride during a national push to strengthen rural schools. Long after classes, it has continued to serve as a gathering place for the town.

Cooks Point, TX

In 1854, enslaved people led by A. S. Broaddus arrived near Cooks Point after a six-month wagon journey from Virginia. In 1887 many of those now-emancipated African American families asked Broaddus to help them establish their own church, and after buying land near Cedar Creek in 1888 they called Jerry Shorter as first pastor. Rebuilt several times, Goodwill Missionary Baptist became the center of a community with its own school, store, and cemetery.

Graham, TX

Named for a bend in the Brazos River, Gooseneck Cemetery grew from land donated by Kentucky native George Washington Fore and his son John Silas Fore, on ground that had once been part of the Brazos River Indian Preserve. The Fores also gave land for a school and a church that became Bunger Baptist. Burials date from just after the Civil War, and those interred include a Virginia-born War of 1812 veteran, James James, said to have died at age 114.

Granbury, TX

Alonzo Peyton Gordon left Georgia for Granbury in 1871, teaching school before opening a mercantile store that became one of the largest in Hood County, housed in a stone building on the town square. A cotton-gin operator and civic leader, he served as local school superintendent and won a seat in the Texas Legislature in 1898. He built this house in 1882, and it remained in his family for a full century.

Decatur, TX

These bois d'arc trees are a remnant of a spiny hedge planted in 1861 around the log cabin of Stephen M. Gose, a Missouri emigrant who came to Texas in 1859 and served as justice of the peace, blacksmith, and Methodist leader. The dense, thorny growth was meant as a living barrier against raids on the exposed frontier. The surviving trees stand as a quiet witness to the dangers of frontier homesteading.

Eustace, TX

Established after the Civil War and named for the Biblical "land of milk and honey," Goshen served nearby farms as a marketing center and offered a rest stop to trail drivers moving cattle from East Texas. When the railroad bypassed it, merchants moved to Eustace on the new line, and the town faded. Local legend says the cemetery began with a wandering cowboy who sickened and died on a nearby ranch; the first documented burial, Benjamin G. Hooker, dates to 1869.

La Grange, TX

Opened around 1828 by Alabama settler James Gotcher, this trace linked San Felipe in Stephen F. Austin's colony with Bastrop in the "little" colony to the north. Short but dangerously exposed, it and the nearby Wilbarger Trace earned the grim nickname "via Dolorosa" of early Texas for the tragedies along them. Gotcher himself settled in this area, and in 1836 six of his family were killed and others taken captive in an Indian attack.

McKinney, TX

McKinney attorney James Rowland Gough built this Victorian residence, with its Queen Anne detailing, in 1898, at a time when he was representing the area as a state legislator. In 1918 the home passed to Wallace Hughston, another public servant who won a seat in the Texas Senate and later served on the Texas Railroad Commission, the State Board of Education, and with the Federal Housing Authority.

San Antonio, TX

When painter Robert J. Onderdonk settled in San Antonio in 1878, he brought a realist sensibility that helped shape Texas art, and in this 1882 house his family made a gathering place for the state's artists. His son Julian became a celebrated painter of impressionistic Texas landscapes, famous for bluebonnet scenes, while daughter Eleanor was a noted miniaturist and served for decades as art curator of the Witte Museum. The home preserved the legacy of one of Texas's most influential artistic families.