Historic Markers in Texas

Electra, TX

As Electra's population swelled during the North Texas oil era of the 1910s, local business leaders commissioned Fort Worth architects Meador & Wolfe to design a proper entertainment house. Opened in 1920, the Grand hosted vaudeville, opera, boxing, and silent films—its orchestra pit later fitted with an organ and piano to accompany the movies. Its eclectic Mission-and-Classical design, full of swags, piers, and a vaulted motif, reflected the boomtown's appetite for fancy and fantasy.

Fort Worth, TX

Organized in 1880 under a national order chartered in 1843, this lodge of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows became an active pillar of Fort Worth's Black community in the early twentieth century. Its members funded charities and offered seminars and business-training sessions that helped build economic self-reliance. They raised this building in 1926 and met on its second floor until disbanding in 1937, leaving it as one of the few surviving landmarks of the city's original Black business district.

Corpus Christi, TX

This Corpus Christi home was built in 1904 for Benito Grande, who arrived as a boy in the late 1860s and grew into a prominent leader of the city's Mexican-American community after taking over the family business. In 1925 the house was acquired for Rebecca Grossman, matriarch of a family she helped emigrate from Russia in the early 1900s, and her descendants became leaders in business, medicine, law, and politics. Moved to this site in 1982 to save it from demolition, the house blends two-story central-hall and bungalow features beneath a wraparound porch.

Grandfalls, TX

Raised in 1910 by three Protestant congregations pooling their efforts, the Grandfalls Union Church was the first church building in a West Texas town founded only in 1897. Shared 'union' churches were a practical frontier answer to thin populations, letting several denominations worship under one roof until each could stand on its own.

Grandview, TX

Grand View reportedly took its name in 1854 when John Whitmire exclaimed "What a Grand View!", and settler F. L. Kirtley soon donated land for a Baptist church and cemetery. The town grew with general stores, a blacksmith, and Johnson County's first Masonic lodge, though its founder James Scurlock died during the Civil War. The cemetery holds pioneers, the mysterious murdered traveler remembered only as "Annie," and an African American section including early settlers Scott and Elmira Matlock. When the railroad passed a mile away in 1881, the town migrated to the tracks and the cemetery gradually reclaimed the original site.

Grandview, TX

Chartered on June 14, 1861, the Grandview Masonic Lodge is Johnson County's oldest lodge in continuous operation, having held its first meeting the previous December. It began by sharing a building with the Methodist church near the Grandview cemetery, then relocated with the town, weathering a sale in 1893 and a destructive fire in 1920 that was quickly followed by rebuilding. Today its members continue community activities and scholarships.

Rio Vista, TX

In the farming settlement of Nolands River, a chapter of the Grange — the national farmers' fraternal order — organized in 1874 and raised a two-story hall that doubled as school, church, and Masonic lodge. In 1878 the Kizziars gave land for a cemetery, where more than half the marked graves predate 1900 and a few early burials are marked only by rocks or bois d'arc posts. The community faded after the railroad town of Rio Vista rose nearby in the 1880s.

Corsicana, TX

Grange Hall Cemetery served the small farming community of Cryer Creek and likely took its name from the Grange, the farmers' organization that was a powerful force in rural life. Burials began here as early as 1872, five years before pioneer Samuel Wilson donated the land for a Methodist church and churchyard. Among those at rest are Civil War veterans, pioneer families, and members of a colony that migrated from Meridian, Mississippi, in 1870.

Fairfield vicinity, TX

Settlement here began in the 1850s just as Texas carved Freestone County from Limestone, drawing farming families who soon threw themselves into the Grange movement — the national agrarian organization founded in 1873 to give farmers cooperative power. A local resident, Joseph Burton Johnson, served as the first master of the statewide Texas Grange, and the community renamed itself for the two-story hall its members built in 1877 to house both Grange meetings and a public school. The building passed to school and church trustees and served the neighborhood, in various rebuilt forms, into the 1980s.

Granger, TX

Czech Protestant immigrants began farming the rich land around Granger in the early 1880s, worshiping at first in a schoolhouse whenever a traveling minister could come. Encouraged by the Rev. Adolph Chlumsky, who commuted from Brenham for eighteen years, they organized a congregation in 1892 and built their first church in 1901. In a landmark moment for Czech-American religious life, the Unity of the Brethren denomination was formally organized at this church in 1903.

Granger, TX

Built in 1908–09, this eclectic building first housed Farmers State Bank, the second bank in the prosperous farming town of Granger. Its facade blends Italianate, Moorish, and Romanesque touches into a Victorian-era hybrid that announced the town's early-twentieth-century wealth. The bank closed in 1926, and by 1929 the structure had begun a second life as Granger City Hall.

Granger, TX

By the time this handsome brick schoolhouse rose in 1924-25, education had been a fixture on this Granger site for nearly forty years, through three earlier buildings dating back to 1887. Its designers dressed an ordinary institutional plan in the fashionable Spanish Colonial Revival style, crowning it with an "Alamotif" parapet, tile panels, and cast-stone flourishes that gave a small Central Texas farm town a touch of civic grandeur.

Austin, TX

Austin architect Charles Granger designed "The Perch," a two-story garage-and-apartment at the rear of this lot, in 1938, giving it a stucco façade and a continuous band of plain steel windows in a rare local example of residential International Style. After marrying in 1946, Granger designed a larger midcentury-modern home for his growing family, completed around 1951, that stepped down a hillside and featured corrugated asbestos panels and a glass rear wall. Together the buildings trace the architect's own evolving modernist vision.

Cedar Park, TX

When quarried limestone proved unsuitable for the new Texas Capitol in the 1880s, builders turned to pink granite from Burnet County's Granite Mountain. The Austin and Northwestern Railroad, which had opened up western Williamson County and founded Brueggerhoff (Cedar Park) and Leander, extended a line to the quarry in 1885. More than 4,000 flatcars of granite rolled through this area in 1886–87 toward Austin—so many that three dozen blocks tumbled into the creekbed were simply left behind, since the state got its stone free of charge, and the Capitol was finished in 1888.

Llano, TX

The great granite outcrops of Llano County drew their first quarry in 1888, and when the railroad arrived in 1892 the demand for the pink-and-gray stone soared. Among the quarrymen was Italian immigrant Vincenzo Fantozzi Petrick, whose stone armored Texas coastal jetties and joined the granite shipped to build capitols, universities, and monuments. Llano granite still faces the Texas State Capitol and buildings from Austin to Kansas City.

Marble Falls, TX

A few miles from this marker rises Granite Mountain, the source of the distinctive pink granite quarried to build the Texas State Capitol. Constructed from 1885 to 1888, that capitol was second in size only to the United States Capitol. The stone was paid for in a remarkable barter — three million acres of state land traded for the building's construction.

Marble Falls, TX

Granite Mountain is an 866-foot dome of solid pink granite—molten rock that cooled deep underground into crystals of quartz and feldspar eons ago—and today the site of one of the largest granite quarries in the United States. Its fame was sealed in 1885 when, amid a dispute over building stone for the new Texas Capitol, Governor John Ireland resisted pressure to use imported limestone, and the quarry owners donated their native pink granite to the state. A special rail spur was built to haul the stone to Burnet, and the granite went on to face the Capitol, the Galveston sea wall, and monuments across the world.

Socorro, TX

Founded in 1915 as El Paso County's second poor farm, this refuge was run by the O'Shea family and later by daughter Helen O'Shea Keleher, who spent fifty years caring for more than four thousand orphaned and abandoned children. Renamed Granja Río Vista, it hosted Depression-era relief efforts including the Texas Transient Bureau, the WPA, and a Civilian Conservation Corps unit. From 1951 to 1964 the farm became a processing center for the Bracero program, receiving Mexican workers bound for the fields of the El Paso valley and other agricultural regions of the United States.

Moran, TX

Ohio-born Granville Eades Waters came to Texas in 1871 and settled in Shackelford County, where he and his wife raised five sons amid the hardships of frontier life—the nearest post office days away at Fort Griffin. Known by the courtesy title of "Colonel," he made his name introducing Hereford cattle to the region in 1885 and rose to lead the American Hereford Cattle Breeders' Association. In his later years he turned to oil and gas leasing, scouting for the Texas Company and helping open the county to petroleum exploration.

Corsicana, TX

In the early 1880s, landowner G. W. Eliot set aside ground at this rural Navarro County site for the fourfold anchors of a frontier settlement: a school, a Methodist church, a parsonage, and a graveyard. Families like the Doolens, Duncans, and Wimberlys built their community around these institutions, with burials beginning about 1881. Time thinned the settlement — the school consolidated away in 1928, the church burned in 1975 — but the cemetery and an annual memorial gathering keep the community's memory alive.

Grapevine, TX

Named for the wild mustang grapes that grew thick across the area, Grapevine took shape after Ambrose and Susannah Foster arrived from Missouri in 1845 and their family gathered land at the community's heart. Cattle raising dominated before the Civil War, with beef driven to nearby Camp Worth, and the arrival of the Cotton Belt Railroad in 1888 turned the town into a shipping hub for cotton, grain and dairy. Over the following century it absorbed a lake, paved highways, and eventually the sprawling Dallas–Fort Worth Airport within its limits.

Grapevine, TX

The Coble brothers, Samuel and Allen, settled here in the 1850s and in 1878 sold four and a half acres for a public cemetery. The oldest known grave belongs to 22-year-old Louisa Guiry, who died in 1860, and the grounds hold many of the area's pioneer settlers—among them Barton H. Starr, Grapevine's first mayor, and James Tracy Morehead, an early Tarrant County judge. Additional land was added in 1925 as the community grew.

Coppell, TX

The Grapevine Springs, feeding the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, have drawn people for thousands of years, and in 1843 Republic of Texas President Sam Houston camped here during treaty talks with Native American nations, an agreement later signed at Bird's Fort. Donated as county parkland in 1936, the site gained rock walls, footbridges, and picnic facilities built by the Works Progress Administration. After wartime reversion and later gifts, the City of Coppell now maintains it while efforts continue to restore the WPA-era features.

Grassland, TX

On the wide South Plains, this site lay along an ancient Indian trail that later carried explorers, U.S. Army columns, and — after 1880 — stagecoaches and freighters bound north from Colorado City. In 1888 Enos L. Seeds established Grasslands Ranch here, named for a Cleveland estate, building a frame house and the region's first trading post and serving as postmaster. The little community that grew up around it endures today as Grassland.

Paige, TX

German immigrants settled the Grassyville community in the 1850s and organized a Methodist church, and many of this cemetery's gravestones are lettered in German script. The two earliest burials date to 1871, and among those resting here are seven Confederate veterans who served in a Texas artillery battery during the Civil War. Though the village itself has vanished, the burial ground remains in use.

Goliad, TX

After Col. James Walker Fannin's outnumbered Texas force surrendered following the Battle of Coleto in March 1836, Santa Anna ordered the prisoners held at Presidio La Bahía executed. On Palm Sunday, roughly 400 men were marched out and massacred and the wounded shot within the fort, with Fannin himself the last to die; a handful were spared by their medical skill or saved by the "Angel of Goliad," and about thirty escaped. Weeks later Gen. Thomas J. Rusk's army gathered the scattered remains and gave them a military burial here on June 3, 1836.

Acton, TX

This grave marks the resting place of Elizabeth Crockett, second wife of frontiersman and Alamo defender David Crockett, who married him in Tennessee in 1816. After Crockett's death at the Alamo, Elizabeth eventually came to Texas on land granted for his service and died in 1860 in what is now Hood County. Her monument stands as a tribute to the family the famed frontiersman left behind.

Waxahachie, TX

Robert Russell Graves brought his family from Alabama to Texas in 1838, and by 1857 they had settled 510 acres in Ellis County near the Rockett community. The oldest grave belongs to Robert's father-in-law Joseph Hinkle, buried here in 1859, and in 1895 the Graves children formally deeded just over an acre as a family burial ground. Many early pioneer families of the area lie beside them.

Kopperl, TX

The Aaron S. Graves family, who had lived in Kentucky and Missouri, settled the Union Hill community of Bosque County by the 1870s, and a carved limestone brick in the fireplace dates this house to 1876. From 1940 to 1973 it was home to the family of Georgia native Shelton Payne, who farmed the surrounding land. The vernacular stone dwelling—with its gabled dormers, hipped roof, and double-pen plan—stands amid a windmill, cistern, and well typical of a self-sufficient pioneer farmstead.

Houston, TX

John Kirby Allen and his brother Augustus were New Yorkers who came to Texas and, just after the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, chose a humid, weed-choked bend of Buffalo Bayou as the site of a future 'commercial emporium.' They bought more than 6,600 acres, named the town for Sam Houston, and advertised it across the country, and J. K. Allen was soon elected to the Texas Congress and worked to make Houston the Republic's capital. He died of fever at just 28, but the city he founded became the largest in Texas.

Perryton, TX

Founded by settlers just across the line in Oklahoma, the Gray church was organized in January 1915 by the Rev. J. W. Duff, with lumber freighted from Kansas and furnishings bought by the ladies aid society. When the Santa Fe Railway laid track between Gray and Ochiltree in 1919, it created the new town of Perryton, and most of Gray's buildings were dragged south on horse and mule teams to the rails—leaving the church behind. For decades its blue neon cross and its message that "Jesus saves" drew travelers, until the congregation finally moved the building to Perryton in 2002.

Pampa, TX

Carved from the vast Young and Bexar territories, Gray County was created in 1876 as Texas organized the open Panhandle into governable units, though it was not formally organized until 1902. It honors Peter W. Gray, a member of the first Texas Legislature, the Confederate Congress, and briefly the Texas Supreme Court. The county seat moved from Lefors to Pampa in 1928 as the railroad and oil economy shifted the region's center of gravity.

Pampa, TX

This monument, dedicated in 1952, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Gray County's establishment in 1902 and honors the early pioneers whose efforts built it. Its plain, heartfelt inscription — "Lest We Forget" — reflects a mid-century impulse to memorialize the fast-fading generation that first settled the Texas Panhandle. It celebrates fifty years of progress on land that had been open frontier within living memory.

Pampa, TX

After the county seat moved from Lefors in 1928, Gray County raised this Beaux Arts courthouse, designed by W. R. Kaufman & Son of Amarillo and dedicated in 1930. Set on an Indiana limestone foundation, its steel frame and many windows lent a modern feel to the classical Georgian-trimmed design. The same firm shaped Pampa's city hall and fire station in matching style.

Houston, TX

As Houston boomed after the Civil War, twenty-two Master Masons petitioned in 1870 for a charter, and Gray Lodge No. 329 was constituted in the hall of the city's original Holland Lodge No. 1, becoming Houston's second-oldest Masonic lodge. It took its name from William Fairfax Gray, a Virginia attorney who came to Texas as a land agent, witnessed the 1836 convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos where independence was declared, and later served as clerk of the Republic of Texas legislature.

Mount Vernon, TX

Some of the unmarked graves here may reach back to the 1840s, when the town of Gray Rock grew up along a frontier highway. The oldest headstone belongs to an infant who died in 1872, and a devastating typhoid epidemic in 1899–1900 accounts for a cluster of burials. Though the town vanished after the railroad bypassed it, the cemetery has remained in continuous use and has been tended by a community committee since 1906.

Anahuac, TX

The farming community of Graydon grew along Double Bayou after Benjamin F. Sterling brought his family here in 1869, starting a school and opening a post office he named for his grandson in 1895. Rice, vegetables, and other crops moved by boat down the bayou and across the bay to Galveston, the community's lifeline. Sterling's son Ross went on to serve as governor of Texas, but reverses in farming, destructive hurricanes, and the rise of the automobile isolated Graydon until its post office and school both closed and the town faded away.

Sherman, TX

In June 1931, evangelist John R. Rice launched a month-long revival on the Grayson County courthouse square in Sherman—the very spot where the 1870s courthouse had burned a year earlier during mob violence that killed an African American man and destroyed Black homes and businesses. Huge crowds gathered, forty people answered the call to organize a new congregation, and the Fundamentalist Baptist Church was born in July 1931, baptizing converts in a tank built on the courthouse lawn. Renamed over the decades, it became Grayson Bible Baptist Church and founded Grayson Christian Academy in 1973.

Sherman, TX

Grayson County grew from Holland Coffee's 1837 trading post at the Red River's Preston Bend into a hub of the Peters' Colony and, in 1846, a county named for Republic of Texas attorney general Peter W. Grayson. Its seat, Sherman, moved to its present site in 1848 and earned fame for so many courthouses and fine 19th-century schools that it was called the "Athens of Texas." The Butterfield Trail, cattle drives, and early railroads all crossed the county, and Lake Texoma later made it a tourist draw.

Sherman, TX

From 1877 to 1963 the Grayson County Poor Farm sheltered those the era left without support—the aged without caregivers, orphans, widows, and the mentally ill—who worked its fields for their keep and the county's income. On roughly 220 acres bought from the Vaden family, it grew to include a superintendent's house, hospital, and patient quarters. In 1917 reformer Edna Gladney, appalled by conditions, led a drive to clean the facility and relocate its children; after a 1946 fire and postwar decline, the site became Shady Oaks Nursing Home.

Sherman, TX

During the Civil War, Grayson County served as a Confederate military, defense, and supply hub on Texas's northern frontier. Cavalry regiments raised here captured federal forts in Indian Territory and manned a defensive line along the Red River, while Sherman depots gathered clothing and food for troops and soldiers' families. Even the notorious guerrilla William C. Quantrill camped nearby in 1863–64 before fleeing Confederate arrest.

Aransas Pass, TX

In 1909 developers E.O. Burton and A.H. Danforth hatched an audacious scheme to sell off Aransas Pass, hiring a journalist to promote the town by mail and a promoter to disguise the sale as an auction rather than an illegal lottery. Six thousand tickets sold for $100 each, one per lot, and buyers gathered that December to 'bid' — until postal inspectors deliberately overbid, muddling the sale and spawning lawsuits. The town still grew substantially, and the overbid money went into a trust that funded public and school libraries, including the one on this spot.

Claude, TX

By the 1890s most Indigenous people had long left the Texas Panhandle, but newly arrived settlers still carried the anxieties of the frontier. In late January 1891, rumors of an approaching attack swept the region, and for three days families barricaded their homes and braced to fight. The truth, discovered afterward, was almost comic: the 'war cries' and 'smoke signals' were cowboys chasing down a stray steer and roasting it over an open fire.

Raymondville, TX

Since the days of the first Spanish chroniclers passing through the region, a great salt lake here yielded salt that supplied much of northern Mexico. In an age before refrigeration, salt was essential for preserving meat and hides, making such natural deposits a prized resource. The lake tied this corner of South Texas into trade networks reaching deep across the border.

Amarillo, TX

This spot along the Canadian River sits near the Great Spanish Road, a route traders from Santa Fe used as early as the Revolutionary era and that Pedro Vial was commissioned to formalize in 1786 to link Santa Fe with San Antonio and East Texas. Nearby, the LX Ranch was established in 1877 by northern investors—once employing a young cowboy named Will Rogers—and Potter County's first store opened in 1878. Together the sites mark the layers of Spanish, ranching, and frontier commerce that crossed the Panhandle.

Kerrville, TX

Founded by rancher John T. Lytle in 1874, the Great Western Cattle Trail became the main artery driving Texas cattle to northern markets, stretching more than 2,000 miles toward Canada. Entering Kerr County at Bandera Pass and crossing the Guadalupe at Kerrville, it turned the town into a hub for trail outfitters centered on Charles A. Schreiner's mercantile. By 1886 railroads, overgrazing, barbed wire, and oversupply had ended the great drives.

Bandera, TX

When Captain John T. Lytle drove 3,500 head from South Texas toward Nebraska in 1874, he helped blaze what became the Great Western Cattle Trail—the longest of the great nineteenth-century cattle roads, reaching from Texas through Dodge City all the way into Canada. Bandera's abundant water and grass made it the trail's natural southern staging point. Over two decades, millions of longhorns and tens of thousands of cowboys followed the route before barbed wire and quarantine laws closed it in the 1890s.

Throckmorton, TX

From 1874 to 1886, millions of cattle moved north up the Great Western Trail from South Texas toward midwestern railheads, a route that outstripped the Chisholm Trail in both length and volume. It passed directly through Throckmorton County, where local ranchers built herds from the weak or young "drags" that drovers left behind. Cattle ranching became the county's economic backbone, and modern U.S. Highway 183 now traces the trail's exact path to Seymour.

Texas City, TX

In the years after the Civil War, a group of African Americans — many of them Black cowboys who worked the Chisholm Trail — bought land in central Galveston County to build a community. Their Baptist church, founded in 1885 by the Rev. Israel S. Campbell, an escaped slave known as the "Father of Black Texas Baptists," became the settlement's backbone. It changed names with its pastors over the years and, from an early school begun in 1874, long served as a place of both worship and learning.

Dallas, TX

Rooted in the mid-1800s and rising with Oak Cliff's Tenth Street Historic District, Greater El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church became a spiritual and civic anchor for Dallas freedpeople after Emancipation. Congregants dug the basement by hand and mule team, worshipping there until noted Black architect William Sidney Pittman completed the sanctuary in 1926. Under Rev. William L. Dickson the church ran a day nursery for working mothers and served as a place to counsel calm during years of racial violence.

Del Rio, TX

Organized in the 1920s, Greater Mount Olive is the oldest surviving congregation rooted in Del Rio's African American community. After first worshiping in the local A.M.E. church, members secured their own property on Peirce Street in 1922 under the long leadership of Rev. James Fennell, who guided the church through decades of hardship and growth. The congregation later moved into the former Grace Lutheran Church building in 1974.

Marlin, TX

In 1893 a dozen worshippers in the Missionary Baptist tradition, led by the Rev. N.T. Denson, gathered in a Marlin schoolhouse and named their new congregation Providence to mark what they saw as divine direction. They worshipped under a brush arbor before raising their first sanctuary, only to lose two buildings and their earliest records to fires in 1941 and 1963. Rebuilding after the second blaze, the members renamed the church Greater Providence and kept growing through music, teaching, and community outreach.

Hearne, TX

When Hearne grew up as a rail crossroads on the Texas farmland where enslaved and later freed African Americans lived and labored, its Black community needed a burying ground of its own. Consecrated in 1894 as the New Colored Cemetery — later St. Mark's, then Riverside — it took its first known burial in 1896 and has since received hundreds, among them veterans reaching back to the Spanish-American War and members of the Mosaic Templars of America, a rare Texas chapter of that Black fraternal order. Church congregations and, from 1982, the Greater Riverside Association enlarged and tended the grounds to their present 24 acres.

Fort Worth, TX

Founded in 1895 by the Rev. J. Francis Robinson and members of Mt. Gilead Baptist Church, this congregation first gathered in Fort Worth's YMCA before raising its own home. Worshipers held services in the basement from 1913 until the Gothic Revival sanctuary — red brick trimmed with cast stone and art glass — was finished in 1918. It stands as a monument to a Black community building lasting institutions in the segregation-era South.

Crockett, TX

In 1884 a small group broke away from Crockett's Bethel Missionary Baptist Church to build a congregation of their own, securing land south of the courthouse square and raising a frame meeting house they named St. Paul in 1898. As families arrived from the surrounding countryside, the church moved closer to town, ran a Sunday School by the mid-1870s association records, and grew large enough that in 1924 it took the name Greater St. Paul to reflect the wide area it served.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1913 and named for A.M.E. Bishop Thomas M. D. Ward, this is the oldest congregation in Houston's Acres Homes community. It began in the home of Rev. John T. Williams, rebuilt after a 1934 fire, and raised its lasting sanctuary in 1955. Under ministers like Rev. Ollie Lewis Dawson—an NAACP activist who made the church a meeting place for civic affairs—it became a hub of community life, its trustees even winning the naming of nearby streets for historically Black colleges.

Houston, TX

Since the late 1800s, the congregation of Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church has anchored Houston's Greater Third Ward, tracing its roots to a brush-arbor meeting led by the Rev. Gilbert Green. Founded as Little Zion, the church grew alongside a Black community whose members often worked low-paying jobs, and it steadily turned its energy outward. Under the Rev. Moses Leonard Price, its longest-serving pastor (1938–1984), it opened a kindergarten, funded scholarships, and ran summer tutoring. Members have since run food pantries and built affordable homes.

Temple vicinity, TX

The Rev. Early Greathouse, a Georgia-ordained minister who had served in Alabama's government, brought his family to Bell County in 1870, built the area's first cotton gin, and organized its early Baptist churches. Around 1871 he set aside land for this burial ground, which grew from a family plot into a community cemetery. Among those laid to rest here are former slaves who came to Texas with the Greathouse family, a survivor of the Battle of San Jacinto, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Maypearl, TX

Archibald and Mary Greathouse settled here in 1848 and gave their name to a creek and the rural community that grew around a church, school, and cemetery. Settlers hauled lumber by oxcart from Waxahachie to build the Greathouse Missionary Baptist Church, and the little community even produced four ministers and a state appellate judge. When the railroad reached nearby Maypearl in 1904, families drifted away; the school closed in 1912 and the church around 1927, leaving the well-tended cemetery as the community's last witness.

Galveston, TX

Established in 1914 by Galveston's Hellenic Society, this is the only exclusively Greek Orthodox cemetery in Texas, its first burial recorded in 1915. It serves a community whose Eastern Orthodox roots on the island reach back to 1862, when Greek, Russian, and Serbian immigrants worshipped together before Galveston's Greeks founded their own congregation in the 1930s. Wrought-iron gates crowned with Orthodox crosses and headstones bearing Greek inscriptions mark the more than 200 graves of this still-active burial ground.