Industry & Invention

Lockhart, TX

Lockhart cotton buyer Julius W. Karbach had this two-story house built in 1911, blending Victorian and classical revival styling under builder Louis Neeb. In 1924 it passed to Martin Owen Flowers, a former city attorney who went on to become Caldwell County judge and, in 1939–41, Texas secretary of state under Governor W. Lee O'Daniel. The home thus reflects both the cotton economy and the political life of early twentieth-century central Texas.

Comfort, TX

Saloon owner Ernst Karger had this building raised in 1913 next to his business in the German-founded town of Comfort. Its first tenant was Fritz Anderwald's pool hall, and over the years a succession of enterprises followed, including a cabinet shop that swapped the storefront for garage doors before a later restoration. The frame building's showpiece is its decorative pressed-metal facade, pediment, and siding, manufactured by the George L. Mesker & Co. of Evansville, Indiana.

Holmdel Township, NJ

In 1932, Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky, working at this Holmdel site, detected radio waves coming from beyond the Earth while investigating sources of static on radio calls. Tracing the mysterious hiss to the sky, he found it came from the direction of the Milky Way's center — the first radio emissions ever recorded from space. From this quiet New Jersey field grew the entirely new science of radio astronomy.

Karnes City, TX

Founded in the Christmas season of 1890 when Otto Buchel's partnership bought 1,000 acres beside the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad, the town was first named for Texas Ranger hero Henry W. Karnes before 'City' was added with its 1891 post office. It grew so fast that by 1894 voters moved the county seat here from Helena. In its railroad heyday six passenger trains a day rolled through a town built on ranching, farming, uranium, oil, and gas.

Karthaus Township, PA · est. 1948

Near this spot Peter Karthaus built an iron furnace in 1817, part of the early push to work the ore and timber of Pennsylvania's Clearfield County wilderness. Rebuilt in 1836, the furnace made a notable experiment in 1839 as one of the earliest in the region to try coke in place of charcoal for smelting iron. The venture proved short-lived and was abandoned that same year, but it foreshadowed the fuel revolution that would soon transform American iron.

Shiner, TX

When barbed wire replaced smooth fencing in the 1890s, August Kaspar — son of a Swiss Lutheran missionary — salvaged the discarded plain wire and, in 1895, twisted it into a corn-shuck basket. A neighbor's purchase turned a backyard hobby into a business; by 1898 Kaspar was manufacturing wire baskets and horse muzzles full time, armed with little more than pliers and ingenuity. Passed down through three generations, the firm grew into a maker of display and newspaper racks and shelving sold worldwide, earning the first Governor's Expansion Award in 1967.

Town/Village of East Rochester, NY

Kate Gleason (1865–1933) was a Rochester-area pioneer who broke barriers in engineering, machine-tool manufacturing, and real-estate development at a time when few women entered such fields. She worked in her family's Gleason Works, an internationally known gear-cutting machine company, and later became the first woman admitted to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the first woman to head a national bank. After her death, her estate funded community improvements, including this memorial erected in 1949.

Hillsboro, TX

When the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) line reached Hillsboro in 1881, it stitched the growing town into the national rail network, and this handsome depot—completed in 1902 in a blend of Eastlake, Victorian, and Prairie styles—became its front door. Katy trains hauled building materials and new residents into town and, over the years, carried notable travelers including presidents Wilson, Taft, Coolidge, and Truman. Moved from its original site in 1978, the station preserves the era when the railroad was a small town's lifeline to the wider world.

Kaufman, TX

Like many Texas counties in the 1880s, Kaufman County opened a poor farm in 1883 to shelter and feed indigent residents while replacing older, ad hoc relief. All able-bodied residents worked the land, and by 1893 even county inmates convicted of minor crimes lived on site; in the 1930s the farm doubled as a showcase for new agricultural methods. Usually filled to capacity, it operated into the 1970s, leaving behind a cemetery and a few buildings.

La Grange, TX

Insurance agent H. B. Kaulbach built this La Grange home in 1885, incorporating five rooms of an earlier house on the site. Designed by architect C. Michaelis, its Victorian exterior shows off a two-story columnar gallery and graceful arches carried on slender turned columns. The house was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Nash County, NC

Kay Kyser, the self-styled "Ol' Perfesser," turned a dance band into a national sensation as host of radio's "Kollege of Musical Knowledge" from 1938 to 1950, a quiz-and-music show that later moved to television. His childhood home stood just 50 yards south of this marker. He was among the entertainers who defined the golden age of American broadcasting.

Wichita Falls, TX

Frank Kell came to Wichita Falls in 1896, following his brother-in-law Joseph Kemp, and together the two men steered the region through decades of explosive growth. Beginning with the Wichita Mill and Elevator Company, Kell chartered railroads to reach north Texas wheat, coal, and oil, built downtown warehouses and banks, and sold his milling empire to General Mills in 1928 while serving thirteen years as a Dallas Federal Reserve director.

Wichita Falls, TX

Joseph Alexander Kemp, who opened his first store at eighteen, moved to Wichita Falls in 1883 and spent his life building the young town into a commercial city. He helped charter rail lines, platted new neighborhoods, erected banks, hotels, and a library, and — most consequentially — privately financed Lake Wichita in 1901 and later Lakes Kemp and Diversion to give the arid region a dependable water supply.

Kempner, TX

Founded in 1882, this town honors Harris Kempner, a Polish immigrant who became a Texas banker, railroad magnate, and philanthropist. After arriving in America he joined Parson's Brigade in the Confederate Army and was wounded in the Red River Campaign, left for dead on the battlefield before recovering to serve out the war. He went on to help rebuild Texas in the decades that followed.

Yorkville, IL

This marker commemorates the mills of Kendall County, Illinois, and in particular the county's first mill, built in 1834 by John Schneider at the mouth of Blackberry Creek. Water-powered grist and saw mills were the first industry of any frontier district, grinding settlers' grain and cutting the lumber for their homes. Schneider's mill helped turn raw prairie into a functioning farming community.

Kennard, TX

Kennard was founded in 1903 by the Louisiana and Texas Lumber Company on 160 platted acres, with land agent Alexander McTavish doubling as its first postmaster. As the terminus of the Eastern Texas Railroad hauling timber toward Angelina County, the town quickly drew businesses and residents from older settlements nearby, gaining banks, stores, and lodges. Timber and farming carried it through the 1920s and 1930s, and after State Highway 7 shifted its center to Main Street, Kennard incorporated in 1969 and endures in the heart of the Davy Crockett National Forest.

McKeesport, PA · est. 2012

On April 21, 1947, two young, first-term members of the House Labor Committee met at the Penn-McKee Hotel in McKeesport to argue the merits of the newly proposed Taft-Hartley labor law. The debaters were John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, then obscure congressmen at the start of their careers. Neither could know that thirteen years later they would face each other again in the first televised presidential debates.

Frankfort, KY

Kentucky's Executive Mansion in Frankfort is the second official residence of the state's governors, built between 1912 and 1914 at a cost of $95,000 under the guidance of Governor James B. McCreary. Constructed of limestone in a Beaux-Arts manner said to be patterned after Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon villa, the twenty-five-room house and its gardens have been renovated several times. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

Frankfort, KY

Championed by Gov. J. C. W. Beckham to relieve the overcrowded Old Capitol, this Beaux-Arts capitol was funded in part by federal war-claim reimbursements. Architect Frank M. Andrews was chosen in 1904, the cornerstone laid in 1906, and the building dedicated in June 1910. Its dome and rotunda echo Napoleon's tomb, and its marble stair recalls the Paris Opera House.

Kerens, TX

Kerens sprang up in 1881 when the Texas & St. Louis narrow-gauge railway surveyed a townsite here and named it for a St. Louis railroad official who apparently never laid eyes on the place. Streets bore the names of railroad men, isolated cotton farmers streamed in from the prairie, and nearby Wadeville simply picked up and moved — homes, businesses, and all. Cotton gins, a bank, and a cottonseed-oil mill made Kerens a thriving cotton town until a 1931 highway and the crop's decline reshaped its fortunes.

Kermit, TX

Kermit rose on the far West Texas plains as the seat of Winkler County, organized in 1910 in ranch country near the New Mexico line. The town carries an unusual namesake: Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had visited a nearby ranch. What began as a ranching center was transformed by the discovery of oil and gas, making Winkler one of the state's leading energy-producing counties.

Lufkin, TX

Regarded as the oldest continuously operating business in Angelina County, Kerr's began in 1870 as a general store in the early county seat of Homer, opened by Civil War veteran Capt. Joseph Kerr, a South Carolina native. When the railroad founded nearby Lufkin, Kerr moved his store there in the 1880s, and his sons carried on the firm. Over its long life the business evolved from general store to tin shop to steel fabricator.

Kerrville, TX

The Kerrville Daily Times traces its lineage to the Center Point News, founded in 1910 and moved to Kerrville in 1925 by James J. Starkey, son of Kerr County pioneers. Starkey renamed it more than once—settling on The Kerrville Times—while writing a "Pioneer History" column until his death. His nephew G. Rankin Starkey and co-publisher Sam Braswell converted it to a daily in 1949, and over the decades it absorbed rival papers to become the Hill Country's only daily. It remains one of the oldest continuously operating businesses in the county.

Kerrville, TX

The Kerrville Mountain Sun traces its lineage to an 1870s frontier paper called The Frontiersman, which passed through several names before J. E. Grinstead—an adventurer, writer, and early photographer—gave it its enduring title after buying the paper in 1898. Grinstead sold the paper in 1917, and by 1919 it came under the full ownership of brothers W. A. and Clarence Salter. The Salter family continued to run the paper across later generations.

Kerrville, TX

In 1896, A. C. Schriner and D. H. Comparette sealed a deal with a handshake and $1,000 to start Kerrville's telephone exchange, first linking two wool warehouses before other businesses clamored to join. Within two years lines stretched to Rocksprings, Harper, Junction, and Medina, with remote ranches serving as toll stations well into the 1950s. Incorporated in 1907, the family-run company operated for more than a century.

Bastrop, TX

William Kesselus, a German immigrant, arrived in Bastrop in 1853 and set up as a tailor. In 1891 this building replaced his earlier frame shop, and his son Will carried on the business until 1919. It later held a succession of mercantile stores and stands as a marker of German influence in Bastrop.

Fort Worth, TX

A Tennessee-born major in the 7th Texas Infantry, Khleber Miller Van Zandt came to Fort Worth in 1865 and threw himself into building the frontier town. As merchant, banker, and rancher he helped make the city a rail hub and had a hand in founding its newspaper, public schools, streetcars, and First Christian Church. He served in the state legislature and the 1875 Constitutional Convention, and late in life led the United Confederate Veterans nationally.

Pittsburgh, PA

In the early 1850s, years before Edwin Drake's famous 1859 oil well, a Pittsburgh druggist named Samuel M. Kier was already turning a nuisance into an industry. Crude oil kept fouling the salt wells his family worked at Tarentum, so Kier tinkered with distilling it — and around 1854, on this site, he set up a small five-barrel still to refine that crude into clean-burning 'carbon oil' for lamps. It was, in effect, America's first commercial petroleum refinery, lighting homes before anyone imagined an oil boom.

Dublin vicinity, TX

In 1873 several families settled the Green's Creek community, among them John M. Kiker, who arrived from Alabama with his wife Serena and their eight children. In 1878 Kiker and his brother-in-law John Holcomb built a steam-powered cotton gin, fueled at first by timber cleared from cotton fields and taken as credit against ginning bills, and later by coal and then oil. The gin was the community's main enterprise and doubled as an election precinct and meeting place, running until 1947.

Bay City, TX

Prominent ranchers and merchants Edward John and Ann Elizabeth Kilbride built this classical revival house in Bay City in 1910–11, a fine example of the large residences rising in early 20th-century Texas towns. Its elaborate rear porch reflected the home's nearness to the bay. Their daughter Margaret Kilbride Barkley inherited it in 1939, and the house—long a setting for the family's social gatherings—remained with the Barkleys until 1992.

Kilgore, TX

Kilgore began in 1872 as a railroad town named for a Confederate colonel turned congressman, but its destiny arrived with the East Texas oil boom, which planted it at the center of one of the richest fields on earth. At its peak the town bristled with a famous forest of steel derricks and became a hub of petroleum production and supply. It also nurtured surprising cultural fame, as home to Kilgore College, its celebrated Rangerettes drill team, and the young concert pianist Van Cliburn.

Kilgore, TX

In 1935, with the East Texas oil field booming even as the Great Depression gripped the nation, Kilgore residents voted to found a junior college. Classes met in the high school until this building was finished in 1936 with help from the federal Public Works Administration. Designed by the San Antonio firm of Phelps and Dewees, the administration building is a fine example of the streamlined Art Moderne style of its day.

Kilgore, TX

When oil gushed in East Texas in the early 1930s, Kilgore transformed almost overnight from a sleepy town into a forest of drilling derricks and sudden fortunes—even as the rest of the nation sank into the Great Depression. Flush with that prosperity, the Kilgore National Bank's directors commissioned this handsome Art Moderne building in 1937, designed by Henderson architect James L. Downing. Its sleek, streamlined lines were a confident statement of boomtown wealth in hard times.

Killeen, TX

W.E. Bennett rolled out the first Killeen Herald in June 1890, just eight years after the Central Texas town itself was founded. Under later owners — notably civic leader W.T. Carter, who edited it from 1907 to 1950 — the weekly grew into a daily by 1953 and became the oldest continuously operated business in Killeen. Its columns chronicled the town's growth from a small railroad stop into a city.

Junction, TX

In 1877 the Denman brothers—Claud, Lon, and Sel—started Kimble County's first sawmill on the South Llano River, powered by a mill dam that Claud, a stonemason, built himself. The green "rawhide" lumber they cut had to be nailed before it warped and hardened; a house still standing on East Main was framed from it. Their enterprise brought milled wood to a remote stretch of the Texas Hill Country frontier.

Kosse, TX

Limestone County's rich kaolin clay, found in the Wilcox formation, made it a center of 19th-century Texas pottery. Most kilns were of the "groundhog" type—a brick- or rock-lined underground passage drawing heat from a firebox to bake ware within. German immigrant Lee Kimik built one such kiln active in the 1870s and 1880s, notable for its deeper sidewalls and for the rare practice of marking his pottery, which he sold directly to nearby Headsville. Archeologists documented the site in 1984.

Uvalde, TX

Raised in 1927 in memory of cattleman and civic leader William Davis "Billy" Kincaid, this four-story hotel became the crossroads of Uvalde's ranching economy, its lobby a standing meeting place for ranchers and cattle traders. Over the decades it hosted Texas governors, congressional leaders, and celebrities, including President Lyndon Johnson — a Uvalde-country figure — and future president Ronald Reagan.

Batesville, TX

William Davis Kincaid learned the cattle trade in West Texas before bringing his family in 1905 to land he bought southeast of Uvalde, building one of the region's notable ranches and serving as a bank and school-board president before his death in 1914. In his honor his family raised the Kincaid Hotel in Uvalde in 1927, which became the business and social hub where ranchers from across the region made "The Kincaid" their headquarters.

Tuscaloosa County, AL

In the late nineteenth century, crossing a wide, working river like the Black Warrior meant iron and timber spans engineered to carry wagons and early traffic. The King Bowstring Bridge was one of four spans that reached across the river between 1882 and 1896, part of the surge of bridge-building that knit growing Alabama communities together. The distinctive bowstring design — an arched top chord tied by a straight lower beam — was a favored form of the era's ambitious ironwork.

McCamey, TX

Rising 3,000 feet as part of an uplift in the southern Permian Basin, King Mountain likely took its name from rancher Guy King, who drilled the first water well on its summit around 1900. The heights and their Rim Rock are tied to the oil fields that later defined Upton County, and many Indian relics have been found along the escarpment — traces of far older human presence.

Fort Lauderdale, FL

Built in 1907 by Edwin T. King—Fort Lauderdale's first builder, a boatwright and early citrus grower—this Dade County pine house stood on the New River as the young town took shape. It remained in the King family until 1968, sheltering King's daughter Louise and her husband, a brother of the noted civic figure Ivy Cromartie Stranahan. In 1971 the Junior League floated the house upriver by barge to save it from demolition.

Kingsville, TX

Built in 1921 after a North Carolina promoter rallied local investors, the Kingsville Cotton Mill spun locally grown cotton into yarn for northern carpet makers, employing 250 workers at its peak. Low profits closed it in 1924, but new operators reopened it to make Model-T brake linings and packing twine; during World War II it turned out twine and khaki belts for military uniforms. After the war the King Ranch bought the building and converted it into an elementary school, which it gave to the community in 1947.

Hamlin Township, PA · est. 2011

Begun in 1881 to carry coal, lumber, and oil across a deep Pennsylvania valley, the Kinzua Viaduct rose as the highest and longest railroad bridge in the world. Rebuilt in 1900 to bear ever-heavier loads, it served until 1959 and became the centerpiece of a state park. In 2003 a tornado tore through and toppled much of the span; the surviving towers were stabilized and topped with a dramatic skywalk in 2011.

Kountze, TX

Built in 1902 and designed by Beaumont architect Frank T. Smith, this house was the home of James L. Kirby, superintendent of the Kirby Lumber Company founded by his brother, timber magnate John Henry Kirby. Fittingly, most of its materials came from the Kirby mills, and its blend of Colonial Revival and Victorian styling includes 48 pillars, curved walls, and six shingled gables. Kirby descendants lived in the house until 1990, and it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1998.

Kirbyville, TX

Kirbyville was born on May 1, 1895, when a town-lot auction marked the point where the Gulf, Beaumont & Kansas City Railroad—built by attorney and timber magnate John Henry Kirby with partner R. P. Allen—reached this spot. Kirby's lumber empire ran through the town, whose big Kirby Lumber Co. sawmill operated from 1903 until it burned in 1917. The community became a hub of the East Texas timber trade and, from 1926, a center of early forest-conservation work, with State Forest No. 1 nearby.

McKinney, TX

E.W. Kirkpatrick, a Confederate veteran who became a leading McKinney businessman and civic figure, bought this property in the 1870s for a thriving plant nursery. In 1901–02 he built this spacious Queen Anne house, hauling cypress siding by wagon all the way from Jefferson. His descendants have continued to live in and preserve the home, recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1976.

New York, NY

In 1921, in the quiet green of Kissena Park, Queens residents raised a "Memorial Knoll" to their neighbors who had died in the Great War just a few years earlier. The United States had entered World War I in 1917, and by the Armistice of November 1918 tens of thousands of New Yorkers had shipped overseas, many never to return. Across the country in the early 1920s, towns and city neighborhoods answered that loss by dedicating parks, groves, and knolls—living memorials meant to be walked through rather than merely looked at.

Pharr, TX

Built in 1928, this Mission-style building was the first meeting hall in all of Kiwanis International to be owned by a local club—raised just a year after the Pharr chapter was chartered. Doubling as a community center, it hosted civic gatherings and even sheltered the local Chamber of Commerce.

Bastrop, TX

Prussian immigrant Carl Kleinert and his wife Marie settled in Bastrop in the early 1860s, joining a sizable community of German merchants. In 1868 he built this grocery and mercantile, which after an 1890s fire gained the pressed-metal cornices, cast-iron columns, and wood storefront it still wears. The building stayed in the Kleinert family until 1931 and has since housed a succession of businesses.

Bastrop, TX

German-born blacksmith Henry Klockman and his wife bought this Bastrop lot in 1894 and built the house about 1895, where he worked his forge until his death two years later. His widow supported their son by taking in boarders, and after a 1926 fire the property passed to new owners who remodeled it. One later resident kept extensive diaries of daily life in the house that now reside in the Bastrop County Museum.

Electra, TX

Formed in January 1919 by four Wichita Falls businessmen—Joseph Kemp, the Munger brothers, and Reece Allen—the Kemp-Munger-Allen Oil Company gave its initials to a vast field that eventually spread across 135,000 acres and more than 3,000 wells. From its first well in 1919, the KMA field produced through decades of deeper discoveries and engineering advances like pressurized-gas and saltwater injection that kept the oil flowing. Its boomtown grew so large it needed a post office, and because "KMA" wouldn't do as a name, the postmaster added letters to christen the town Kamay.

Knickerbocker, TX

Drawn by Dove Creek's water and irrigable land, farmers and stockmen settled this West Texas valley in the 1870s, beginning with the Baze brothers' 1875 irrigation ditch dug to supply nearby Fort Concho. In 1877 New York sheepmen named their ranch—and later the town—for Washington Irving's character Diedrich Knickerbocker, and by 1890 the community boasted stores, hotels, churches, and schools. Like many rural West Texas towns, it faded as automobiles and better roads pulled residents toward San Angelo.

Hardwick Township, NJ

Before mechanical refrigeration, Americans kept food from spoiling with natural ice cut from frozen lakes and ponds each winter. Crews sawed the surface into heavy blocks, slid them along docks like this one, and packed them in sawdust-insulated icehouses to be shipped to distant cities through the warm months. The Knickerbocker Ice Company was one of the region's well-known ice enterprises, and the weathered remains near this shore mark where that now-vanished trade once met the water.

Tarboro, NC

Between 1886 and 1890 Black farmworkers in this region joined the Knights of Labor, the era's largest and most inclusive labor organization, and hosted a state convention here in 1890. Their organizing fed directly into the Fusion movement, the biracial coalition of Populists and Republicans that briefly won power in 1890s North Carolina. It was a rare moment of interracial political alliance in the Gilded Age South.

Cuero, TX

The Knights of Pythias, founded in 1864 amid the divisions of the Civil War to promote friendship and reconciliation, reached Cuero in 1889 when local citizens chartered Jewel Lodge No. 103. In 1902 the lodge hired noted architect James Wahrenberger — possibly with local designer Jules Leffland — to build this Richardsonian Romanesque hall, its corner tower, arched windows, and corbelled brickwork marking it as a downtown landmark. As was typical, the ground floor was leased to businesses, from a wholesale grocery to an early automobile dealership, while members met upstairs.

Hamilton, TX

Built around 1900 by C. W. Cotton, this brick-and-stone building on Hamilton's square first housed mercantile stores. In 1913 a second story was added as a meeting hall for the local Knights of Pythias lodge, one of the fraternal orders that filled the civic life of small-town America, and after World War I the building served a range of community functions. Its restrained Italianate details and storefront windows are typical of turn-of-the-century commercial architecture.

Knippa, TX

The dark basalt beneath Knippa formed from volcanic lava that cooled more than 60 million years ago into the hard igneous stone known as trap rock. A prospector's 1907 search for gold turned up little of the metal but vast quantities of high-quality rock instead, and by 1919 the quarry here was the largest trap-rock operation in Texas, capable of producing about 100,000 tons a year and shipping it out by spur line to the Southern Pacific. So woven into the town was the plant that Knippa High named its team the "Rockcrushers" in 1946.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1994

Perched above the Pennypack, Knowlton was designed in 1881 by Frank Furness, among the boldest and most inventive American architects of the Victorian age, for banker William Rhawn. With its muscular massing and idiosyncratic ornament, the country house broke from convention and helped redefine what a modern American home could be. Furness's daring style would influence a generation, including a young draftsman in his office named Louis Sullivan.

Jenkins Township, PA · est. 1999

On January 22, 1959, the anthracite fields of the Wyoming Valley met their reckoning when the Knox Coal Company's illegal mining beneath the Susquehanna River breached the riverbed. More than ten billion gallons of icy water poured into the workings, killing twelve men and effectively ending deep mining across much of the valley.

Ft. Stockton, TX

In the cattle-and-railroad West of 1870s Texas, a sturdy field-stone building rose in the frontier outpost of Fort Stockton, hard by the old military road and springs of the Trans-Pecos. By 1884 Herman Koehler had turned it into a one-stop hub of frontier commerce — a saloon at one end and a general store and bank at the other — later crowned with a second story as the town grew. Buildings like this were the true civic centers of remote Texas towns, where a rancher could wet his throat, buy provisions, and settle accounts under one roof.