Historic Markers in Texas

Bellville, TX

The son of a Prussian immigrant, Emil H. Harigel opened a hardware, tinware, and stove store in Bellville in 1881 and soon built this home for his family. Its Mansard roof and Gothic Revival and Second Empire touches reflect the tastes of a prosperous small-town merchant, and Harigel descendants have kept the house in the family for more than a century.

Palmer, TX

Carpenter and blacksmith D. H. Harkey built this four-room house around 1870. Dr. J. M. Johnson bought it in 1896 and added the second story and Colonial Revival columns before selling it in 1897 to Confederate veteran John Payne, a successful Palmer merchant. Framed in cypress, the home stayed in the Payne family until 1906.

San Saba, TX

Founded in 1855 when the Harkey family moved from Arkansas, this San Saba County community grew famous for its horses and its racetrack—drawing crowds for half a century behind a fleet-footed mare Riley Harkey brought from Arkansas. A single street of stores, a blacksmith shop, a school, and a baseball diamond overlooked the racetrack flat. The track closed in 1907, the school consolidated in 1929, and the last store shut in 1954, leaving only a community hall to mark the town.

Harleton, TX

Settlers trickled into the country between Big and Little Cypress creeks in the 1830s, but Harleton truly took off when a railroad arrived in 1891 as part of a scheme by the Harle brothers and their backers to harvest the area's virgin forests. Their Hope Lumber Company built a depot, commissary, and band sawmill, and their well-stocked store so outclassed the nearby village of Grady that its post office moved over and took the Harle name. Timber wealth spurred farming and a cluster of thriving merchants, though the company closed its mill by the late 1890s once the nearby forests were cut over.

Harleton, TX

Methodist worship in this corner of Harrison County began in settlers' cabins in the 1840s, when East Texas was still raw frontier. By 1901 the congregation had land and a sanctuary of its own, and in 1914 they raised a brick church here under trustee R. W. Taylor. Long a shared civic space for other local groups, it became Harleton United Methodist Church in 1970.

Harlingen, TX

As World War II approached, Harlingen offered the Army 960 acres of its flat coastal plain — useless for artillery but ideal for aircraft — and in August 1941 the Harlingen Army Gunnery School took its first students. At its peak the base trained up to 9,000 airmen, among them Women Airforce Service Pilots, before closing in 1946. Reactivated during the Korean War as Harlingen Air Force Base, it trained more than 13,000 navigators until its 1962 closure dealt the local economy a heavy blow; its grounds now serve an airport, museums, and schools.

Harlingen, TX

When Lon C. Hill, the founder of Harlingen, deeded these acres to cemetery trustees for a token dollar in 1912, he was formalizing a burial ground that had already received its first grave three years earlier. Like many South Texas cemeteries of its era, it was originally laid out in separate sections for Anglos, Hispanics, African Americans, and infants — divisions abandoned after the city took it over in 1947. The tombstones and grave decorations still preserve the borderland's braided cultural traditions.

Harlingen, TX

Harlingen's first hospital opened in this building in 1923, the joint venture of local businesswoman Ida Gilbert and nurse Marie Yeager. The seven-bed facility, with wings added to a central section, served the young Rio Grande Valley town for just four years before the larger Valley Baptist Hospital eclipsed it. The structure later became a rooming house and residence, and was moved to this site in 1978.

Topsey, TX

The Harman community's schoolhouse traces to an 1891 land gift by M.F. Harman, moving twice before a three-classroom building with a stage rose here in 1917-18 on land bought for $200. Beyond lessons, it hosted Boy Scouts, a home demonstration club and even a rat-killing club before consolidating with Gatesville schools in 1948 and becoming a lasting community center.

Happy, TX

Holland E. Toles opened a grain elevator in this Panhandle area in 1926 and was joined by Vernon Harman in 1938, with the partnership continuing after Toles's death. Wartime demand, expanding irrigation, and a federal grain program soon called for larger storage, and construction of this six-unit concrete elevator began in March 1945. The labor came from an unexpected source: some fifty Italian prisoners of war from a camp near Hereford, working under Geneva Convention rules, who finished the job that July.

Longview, TX

Harmon General Hospital, authorized by the U.S. Army in 1942 and named for Col. Daniel Warrick Harmon, treated servicemen in Longview from late 1942 until the end of 1945. This ecumenical chapel, opened in January 1943, served Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish personnel alike. After the war the property became a college campus, and the well-preserved little chapel was renovated and formally named Speer Chapel.

Hankamer, TX

The Harmon family made saddles in East Texas from before the Civil War, when Joshua Harmon worked leather part-time in Orange as early as 1856. After moving to Chambers County, he partnered with another saddler—Harmon carving the wooden saddletrees, Bingle working the leather—and built a reputation among Gulf Coast cowboys and ranchers. His son Charles formally opened the Harmon Saddle Shop in 1896, and the business, prized for comfort and durability, stayed in the family for generations.

Newcastle, TX

Kentucky-born Peter Harmonson came to Texas in 1845 as a settler in the Peters Colony and helped organize Denton County, where he served as its first sheriff. In 1854 he moved his family west to establish a ranch near this site—Harmonson Rancho—and went on to help found Young County as its first chief justice. He died of a wound suffered in the Elm Creek Indian raid in 1865, and years later his old ranch was again the scene of a clash between Indians and cattlemen involving his son.

Palestine, TX

The Harmony community took root in 1855 as families from South Carolina and Mississippi carved farms out of the East Texas landscape. In 1891 nine charter members organized Harmony Missionary Baptist Church, worshipping in a small building on a local farm that doubled as the community school. Across the next century the congregation outgrew building after building, trading creek-side baptisms for an indoor baptistry in 1976.

Helena, TX

Oral tradition traces the Harmony Baptist Church to 1864, and by 1875 Thomas Ragsdale had donated land here for a church building. That building also hosted school classes and Woodmen of the World lodge meetings, making it a center of community life. The adjoining cemetery holds early settlers of Harmony and Karnes County, its oldest marked grave dating to 1875, and descendants still gather annually though the church disbanded in 1974.

Navasota, TX

When John Moore McGinty and his wife Mary Loretta Brown settled the Grimes County prairie in 1853, they gathered their neighbors into a frontier congregation that soon met in a local schoolhouse and took the name "Harmony." The first church house rose in 1870, and the family later deeded the burial ground that had already served the community for years. The present building was finished about 1924, and services continued here into the 1930s.

Nacogdoches, TX

When James Norvel Pitts came to Texas in the 1870s, his wife, son, and a caravan of Pitts brothers and Mississippi friends followed by wagon to join him, founding the community they aptly named Harmony. Pitts donated land for a combined church-and-school building and this public cemetery, whose oldest marked grave dates to 1886. Families long gathered for an annual cemetery cleaning day, a tradition later carried on by a formal association, and among those buried here are veterans reaching back to the Civil War.

Huntsville, TX

Harmony Cemetery is a quiet ledger of frontier Walker County, its earliest known grave dug for pioneer Vincent Herlock in 1851. Known in turn as Herlock and Goolsby cemetery, the ground later anchored the Harmony Missionary Baptist Church after it relocated here in 1906. Church and graveyard tell the familiar rural rhythm of settlement, worship, decline, and revival by a caretaking association.

Weatherford, TX

Harmony Cemetery began as a community gathering place, its first grave that of Mary Green, buried here in 1869; her son Rufus, a Civil War veteran, and his wife owned the surrounding land. Rufus later sold a parcel including the burial ground to the DeBusk family, who deeded it to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Though no church was ever built on the site, it went on serving as the community burial ground for the Green family's kin and other pioneer settlers.

Fairfield, TX

Among the oldest church buildings in Freestone County, this sanctuary rose in 1876 to serve the Stewards Mill community, which had worshiped in homes and the schoolhouse before. Families with names like Awalt, Bonner, and Steward built it as a shared space, meant to host different denominations on different days, and Rev. Thomas Joel Bonner preached its first sermon that December. Its board-and-batten walls and paired transom-topped doors mark it as a fine survivor of nineteenth-century rural church design.

Huntsville, TX

In 1871, businessman William Koehl donated an acre north of Huntsville so the African American residents of Pine Prairie could establish a church, led by deacons W.T. Watkins and Matthew Bryant and Reverend W. Watkins. The building doubled as the Pine Prairie school, and for over a century Harmony Grove was the community's only Black church. After fire destroyed it in 1978 — a neighbor rescued the bell — the congregation rebuilt, and it still holds its August homecoming and sustains youth, nursing-home, and prison ministries.

Tatum, TX

The oldest grave here belongs to J. W. Hall, buried in 1844 beneath a large rock before John W. Kuykendall formally donated the first two acres in 1852. Maintained by a cemetery association since 1882, the grounds have grown through later gifts of land. Those laid to rest include the area's early settlers and county leaders alongside veterans of the Mexican War, Civil War, both World Wars, and Vietnam.

Enon, TX

In the late 1920s and 1930s, scattered one-room schools across Wood and Upshur counties faced a choice familiar to rural America: consolidate or fall behind. Beginning with the 1929 merger of Mt. Gilead and Rosewood, a string of tiny districts folded together into a single school housed in a rock building here. The founders named it Harmony to mark how smoothly the notoriously touchy business of school consolidation had gone.

Pickton, TX

After landowner Jesse Odom brought an itinerant preacher to hold revivals for area settlers in 1877 and 1878, a congregation formed and built its first sanctuary in 1879 on land Odom donated, with the Rev. S. W. Jones as first pastor. A cemetery opened that year on an adjacent tract given by Henry P. Barron, whose 1880 burial is the earliest recorded. Local tradition holds that the goodwill and harmony during the sanctuary's construction gave the church and cemetery their name; the congregation dissolved in 1963, but the cemetery is still maintained.

Hemphill, TX

This burial ground began in 1896 with the death of J.R. Harper, a Mississippi native who brought his family to Texas and gave his name to the surrounding community once known as Lick Skillet. As the Harper Chapel community grew, local Baptists raised a frame church here in 1934, and neighbors continued burying their dead on land expanded by later donors. Veterans of conflicts beginning with World War I rest among the generations of area families.

Hemphill, TX

Local Baptists first gathered for revivals under a brush arbor on this spot before raising a proper frame chapel in 1933–34. The men of the community did the building while the women funded it by selling box lunches, a small drama of Depression-era self-reliance. Though the congregation disbanded in the 1950s, the chapel with its beveled siding and four-over-four windows still hosts funerals, weddings, and community gatherings.

Houston, TX

In 1905, a rising Houston industrialist named Benjamin Harper built this home in the new Westmoreland district using mail-order plans from George Barber, one of the era's most popular architects of pattern-book houses. Its late Queen Anne dress — wraparound porch, decorative gable, Doric columns — matched Barber's published design 'Suburban Beauty,' a reminder of how middle- and upper-class Americans could order architectural fashion straight from a magazine. Harper himself embodied Houston's early-twentieth-century growth, running Union Iron Works and helping lead a local bank.

Harper, TX

Harper's schoolhouse story begins in 1884, when a handful of settlers organized classes for a growing Hill Country community and raised a one-room frame school on donated land the next year. Voters formalized the Harper Independent School District in 1906 and put up a limestone building, then weathered a decade of budget shortfalls that repeatedly cut the school year short. Through consolidations, WPA-built additions in the early 1940s, and homemade six-man football on cleared pasture, the district outlasted dozens of rural neighbors to become one of only three left in Gillespie County.

Harper, TX

Founded in 1881 as the Barnett Spring Presbyterian Church, this Hill Country congregation began in a schoolhouse before moving to Harper in 1901, where members raised a simple frame church on donated land. A bell was hung in 1903, and over the decades the building did double duty—housing the Harper School in 1906 and again in the 1940s and welcoming other denominations to worship.

Haltom, TX

When Henry Jackson Harper moved his family from Tennessee to this corner of Tarrant County in 1894, the frontier still swallowed travelers whole. The cemetery began, as many did, with grief on the road: a passing family's child died and was laid to rest among trees on Harper's farm. Over the following decades the Harpers buried their own kin here, from grandson Henry Mayton to the patriarch himself in 1928.

Kingston, TX

In the 1850s the early settler Richard Harrell built cabins and a brush arbor here, creating one of Hunt County's first religious sites. Each summer, when crops were laid by and work was slack, Methodist families forded the Sabine River with milk cows, cook stoves, and wash tubs to camp for weeks of preaching, hymns, and scripture — a rare gathering in hard, lonely lives. Between meetings the camp often sheltered passing travelers, and its influence lasted half a century.

Round Rock, TX

Jacob and Mary Harrell came to Texas with Robertson's colony in 1833 and were among the first to settle the site that became Austin, where Jacob sold his homestead for the grounds of the State Capitol and served as mayor in 1847. In 1848 the family moved to Jacob's headright near this spot, helping organize the new Williamson County government. The cemetery holds Harrell family members and one of the family's enslaved people.

Little Elm, TX

The Harrington, Cassady, and Clark Cemeteries are three historically African American burial grounds now sharing 1.77 acres in Denton County. Founded in the 1870s on land owned by Black families — Jacob Cassady bought his plot in 1872, and Zack Rawlings and George Clark theirs in 1876 — the Cassady and Clark grounds were relocated in 1953 when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Little Elm to create Lewisville Lake. Roughly 170 graves, marked in marble, granite, fieldstone, and funeral-home plates, record the community of the vanished farming settlement of Lloyd.

Granbury, TX

Local stonemason I.W. Walley laid up the rock walls of this two-story commercial block on Granbury's square in 1899, dressing it with a cast-iron storefront and decorative brickwork behind a plastered facade. It was built for Wesley Smith Harris, who ran both a furniture store and a funeral home under the same roof — a pairing that made practical sense in an era when furniture makers also produced casket parts. The two businesses passed together to Ben Estes in later years.

San Saba, TX

Harris Cemetery was already in use by 1874, when A.J. and Ellen Crawford deeded five acres to local trustees for a burial ground, school, and place of worship. Its oldest marked grave belongs to N.M. Baker, born in 1819, and one relocated 1868 stone recalls a family whose remains were lost to a flood. Cared for by an association, the site endures as a tangible record of San Saba County's earliest settlers.

Mendoza, TX

Sidon H. Harris brought his family to Texas in 1851 and settled in this part of Caldwell County by 1856, buying land where the family cemetery began when he died in 1861. Two of his children were buried here in 1862, followed by his wife Amanda in 1866. Though descendants later sold the land, the graves were meant to be preserved; after the cemetery was destroyed in 1984 its markers were replaced.

Hughes Springs, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Cass County in the 1850s, and the community took its name after John T. Harris arrived in 1853 on land that already held a Methodist log church and burial ground. The church doubled as a schoolhouse, was rebuilt larger in 1859, and the cemetery grew alongside it, its oldest legible stone dating to 1859. Rebuilt again after a 1949 tornado, the church endures beside graves that include veterans from the Mexican War through Korea.

Houston, TX

Home to the Karankawa and Orcoquiza peoples and once eyed by Spain for a presidio, this region was permanently settled in 1822 by Stephen F. Austin's colonists. John R. Harris founded a village he named for his family and for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and it grew into one of the most influential colonial municipalities, playing a major role in the Texas War for Independence. The county was created in 1836, briefly held the Republic's capital, served as a Confederate command and ordnance center, and eventually grew into the world-commerce hub of Houston.

Seabrook, TX

This archeological site preserves evidence of Native life on the Texas coast reaching back thousands of years. It is a shell midden—a refuse heap of oyster and rangia clam shells left by early inhabitants beside their campsite—that also held a burial ground. Excavations recovered a Plainview dart point tied to very early peoples and radiocarbon-dated part of the midden to 1476 B.C., while ceramics buried with 32 individuals dated the cemetery to the first millennium A.D.

Houston, TX

When the Allen brothers laid out Houston in 1836, they set aside this block as the courthouse square, and a two-story pine-log courthouse rose here the next year. The grand Classical Revival building standing today—the fifth on the spot—was completed in 1910 to designs by Charles Erwin Barglebaugh of the Dallas firm Lang and Witchell, its domed roof, Corinthian columns, and terra-cotta ornament announcing a booming young city.

Houston, TX

The lack of public schooling was written into the Texas Declaration of Independence as a grievance, and President Mirabeau B. Lamar answered by setting aside county land to fund education — earning Texas the nickname "Father of Education." Harris County built on that foundation, funding schooling for indigent children by 1856 and creating its Department of Education in 1889 under first superintendent B.L. James, who oversaw more than fifty common school districts serving some 900 students. As statewide reforms reshaped public education, the department evolved into one of only two surviving county school entities in Texas.

McLennan County, TX

Harris Creek Baptist Church began in the home of Aquilla and Delila Jones, who in 1872 gave 1.6 acres of McLennan County land for a church, schoolhouse, and cemetery. The congregation grew through the following decades, sharing its building with a Methodist congregation from 1932 to 1960 and dedicating a new brick auditorium in 1977.

Winona, TX

Harris Creek Baptist Church took root in 1849 in the Mount Carmel community of East Texas, moving to this higher ground in 1852 after floods drove it from Lott's Spring. Its meetinghouse doubled as a schoolhouse, and Anglo settlers and the people they enslaved worshipped in the same building while seated apart. The adjoining cemetery, in use since at least 1857, holds several hundred graves and veterans of every war from 1812 to Vietnam.

Waco, TX

In the 1850s the Haley, Crain, Caufield, and Jones families settled along Harris Creek in McLennan County, founding a community that took the stream's name. The burial ground began with the 1865 grave of young Hattie Timmons and grew on land the Jones family formally set aside in 1872, part of it reserved for a church and school. Among those resting here is Joel Crain, who received the surrounding land as a grant for his service at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto.

Dallas, TX

The Harris-Savage House traces a Dallas family line back to 1843 pioneers, but its story centers on attorney Will Randolph Harris, who moved into this Mission-style home in 1921 after a career that included the successful impeachment of Governor James "Pa" Ferguson. His daughter Dorothy and her husband, former Dallas Mayor Wallace Savage, later carried on the family's civic legacy, founding the Dallas Academy and helping lead the city's historic-preservation movement. Their efforts helped make this house and neighborhood the first National Register historic district in Dallas in 1974.

Houston, TX

This burial ground took shape as African Americans settled around Harrisburg's cattle trade and railroads in the mid-1800s, and after emancipation freedpeople organized their own benevolent societies to bury their dead with dignity. Successive Black organizations and, later, one of Houston's oldest African American funeral homes cared for the grounds into the 1960s. Those laid to rest here include a body servant of Sam Houston who witnessed San Jacinto, a soldier of the 84th U.S. Colored Infantry, a buffalo soldier who served in Cuba, and veterans of World War I.

Selma, TX

As early as 1848, brothers-in-law John S. Harrison and William McCulloch ran stagecoaches from the Texas coast into central Texas, one thread in a web of competing lines and government "star routes" that carried travelers and mail under Post Office contract. Their Star Route 6285 linked Austin and San Antonio, an eighteen-hour run that left Austin at 3 a.m. and rolled into San Antonio by night, passing through New Braunfels and Selma along the old post road and stretches of the Camino Real. The Selma stop still stands as a prime example of "limecrete" construction, its walls poured from local sand, pebbles, and river slip.

Crosby, TX

Born into slavery around 1845, Harrison Barrett spent years after the 1865 emancipation of Texas slaves gathering his scattered family, reuniting nearly all of them east of the San Jacinto River. He bought this land in 1889 and founded what became Barrett Settlement, establishing a school, church, and cemetery and leading the growing community of homes and farms. His twice-rebuilt homestead still stands, and he lies with family in the cemetery descendants named Journey's End.

Fort Worth, TX

This one-acre burial ground began on the land of Tarrant County pioneer D.C. Harrison, its earliest known grave that of young Mary E. Harrison in 1871. In 1895 R.A. Randol, operator of the nearby Randol Mill, bought the tract and deeded it forever as a cemetery. Its roughly sixty graves gather early settler families, including Randol's brother John, killed in an 1894 mill accident.

Dew, TX

Founded in the 1850s with a mere dozen members on land donated by pioneer George Harrison, this Methodist congregation grew as settlers poured into the surrounding country. Its annual camp meetings drew worshippers from a wide area, a hallmark of frontier Protestant revivalism. The adjoining cemetery holds many of the region's earliest settlers, including numerous Confederate veterans, and the church itself relocated to Dew in 1870.

Marshall, TX

Harrison County was carved from Shelby County and created in January 1839, in the days of the Republic of Texas, and organized in 1842. It honors Jonas Harrison, a New Jersey–born statesman who came to Texas in 1820 and served in the 1832 convention at San Felipe before his death in 1836. The county seat, Marshall, was named for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall.

Marshall, TX

Long home to the Caddo people, this corner of East Texas drew Anglo settlers from the southern states in the 1830s, many taking Mexican land grants before Texas won independence in 1836. Organized in 1839 and named for revolutionary leader Jonas Harrison, Harrison County became the most populous and among the richest counties in antebellum Texas — a cotton economy built on slavery that, after emancipation, left it with a large Black population. The Texas and Pacific Railway later made Marshall a major rail center, its shops and offices anchoring the town's growth.

Marshall, TX

Completed in 1900 at a cost of $62,000, this was the third courthouse to stand on the site, following the log 'Little Virginia' of 1851 and a brick Gothic hall of 1889 that burned in 1899. Built of granite, brick, and marble in a Capitol-inspired classical Roman style, it was crowned with a clock dome, belfry, and a figure of Justice, and since 1964 has housed the Harrison County Museum.

Columbus, TX

This Columbus residence began in 1861 as a modest two-room house. Between 1877 and 1901 owner Jesse Joyner Harrison hired the prominent local builders Andrew Wirtz & Sons to enlarge it into a two-story central-hall home, its wraparound porches trimmed with fine milled woodwork. The Hastedt family acquired it in 1911 and kept it until 1989.

Crockett, TX

Harry F. Moore began his banking career in Ohio, married Anna Laura May in 1885, and by 1891 had settled in Crockett, Texas. He helped organize the First National Bank and served as its president for 22 years beginning in 1904, setting a standard later followed by two of his sons. Beyond banking he helped found banks in neighboring towns and was active in his church and Masonic lodge.

Port Arthur, TX

Born in Louisiana in 1922 and raised in Port Arthur, Harry Choates became one of the defining voices of Cajun music, a fiddler who sang in French and English and blended traditional Cajun sounds with Western swing. His 1946 recording 'Jole Blon,' a reworking of an old Cajun waltz, won airplay nationwide and remains his enduring classic. But contract troubles, alcoholism, and a fractured personal life shadowed his talent, and he died in the Travis County Jail in 1951 at just 28.

Beaumont, TX

Trumpeter and bandleader Harry James, one of the biggest stars of the Big Band era, spent his childhood in Beaumont, where his father set up a music studio in the family home and started him young. James played in his school orchestras before turning professional in 1934, joining Benny Goodman's orchestra, and launching his own band in 1940 with hits like "You Made Me Love You." A defining voice of swing, he helped launch the careers of Frank Sinatra and Buddy Rich and reached film stardom alongside his wife, actress Betty Grable.

Mineola, TX

Harry Meredith arrived in Mineola around 1907 from Kentucky by way of a Kentucky brick plant, and spent the next half-century shaping the town from behind a banker's desk, serving as bank president, board chairman, and briefly as mayor. Late in life he turned his fortune toward the public good, and the Meredith Foundation he organized still funds the town's library, civic center, and youth and church programs. His home once stood on this site, a fixture of the community he reshaped.

Lampasas, TX

Raised just after the Civil War, this building began as a two-room, two-story stagecoach stand and hotel — a waypoint for travelers on the road. As Lampasas boomed as a health resort in the 1870s, it was enlarged twice to lodge visitors drawn by the local mineral springs. Over its long life it also served as a tannery and weathered two floods of Sulphur Creek.

Woodville, TX

This East Texas burial ground grew up around a water-powered mill on Sutton Lake and became the resting place of some of Tyler County's earliest Anglo pioneers. Families like the Barclays and Bevils arrived as Texas moved from a Mexican province to an independent republic in 1836, and their leaders helped organize the young county's government and courts, with John Bevil even serving as a delegate to the 1835 Consultation that set the Revolution in motion. James Walter Barclay's role as agent to the Alabama, Coushatta, and Pakana Muskogee peoples marks the uneasy meeting of settlers and Native nations on this frontier. In 1929 descendants formally deeded the ground as a community cemetery, and their families tend it still.