Industry & Invention

Bartlett, TX

Though the town of Bartlett had electricity by 1905, the farms around it stayed dark for another thirty years—an everyday hardship across rural America. That changed with Franklin Roosevelt's 1935 executive order creating the Rural Electrification Administration, which lent the local light-and-power company $33,000 to string a 59-mile line to some 110 farm homes. Energized in 1936, it was the first REA project in Texas and the first in the nation to come alive under an REA loan.

Bartonville, TX

Bartonville grew from post-Texas Revolution settlement along Denton Creek, where fertile sandy soil drew subsistence farmers raising peanuts, cotton, and grain. In 1881 brothers Bentley and James Barton bought ten acres at a busy crossroads; Bentley's store and gristmill prospered, and the settlement soon shed the name "Barton's Mill" for Bartonville. The store remained the town's hub through incorporation, disincorporation, and reincorporation over 130 years, closing only in 2013.

West Buechel, KY

Built in 1874 to a design by architect Henry Whitestone for J. B. Wilder, this estate took its name from a Maryland ancestral home. In 1887 George J. Long transformed the farm into a nationally renowned thoroughbred stable whose peacock-blue and yellow silks became famous on Kentucky's racetracks. Three Kentucky Derby winners — Azra, Manuel, and Sir Huon — were foaled here before the horses were sold in 1922 and the buildings fell to demolition decades later.

Whitney, TX

In the 1950s a severe statewide drought pushed Texas to build reservoirs, and those new lakes—paired with postwar urbanization—turned bass fishing into a beloved pastime for city families seeking recreation. The Waco Tribune-Herald organized a pioneering tournament on Lake Whitney in 1955 that grew into the Texas State Bass Tournament, while improved tackle, federal fish-restoration funds, and the later introduction of Florida largemouth bass boosted the sport further. Catch-and-release limits in the 1980s helped make bass fishing one of Texas's most popular sports and a sizable industry.

Brenham, TX

Brothers Benjamin and Thomas Bassett opened their bank and law office in this Italianate building soon after it was completed in 1873, using bricks from Brenham's own Wild & Co. Brickyard. The bank operated here until it closed in 1884, and a third story was added in the early 1900s. Its round arches and stucco hood moldings made it a distinctive landmark on the Brenham streetscape.

Kosse, TX

Henry Caleb Bassett, a Connecticut-born tradesman turned banker, moved to Texas in 1869 and by 1871 was buying land near the Little Brazos River northwest of Kosse. Ahead of his first child's birth in 1875, he and his wife Hattie built a two-story brick house — a rarity among Texas farmhouses of the era — likely from local Kosse brick. The surrounding Bassett Farms grew to nearly 2,500 acres of livestock, corn, cotton, and peaches and stayed in the family for over a century.

Bastrop, TX

Built in 1889 by D. S. Green and P. O. Elzner, the Bastrop Opera House brought traveling drama and opera troupes, musicians, and other performers to a small Central Texas town hungry for entertainment. Its three-part facade with pilastered bays marked it as a place of occasion, and over the years it hosted not just shows but graduations and school proms. The merchant Elzner became its sole owner in 1901.

Lander County, NV

Battle Mountain took its name from a nearby range where California emigrants were said to have been ambushed in the 1850s, but the town itself sprang up in January 1870 after the railroad shifted its station here from Argenta and renamed the Reese River siding. Stage and freight roads teemed with mud wagons and heavy freighters bound for the mining camps to the south, and from 1880 to 1938 the town served as headquarters for the Central Nevada Railway. A copper boom arrived in 1897, and the growing town finally won the county seat from Austin in 1979.

Morgan's Point, TX

Named for early landowner Colonel James Morgan, this breezy bluff on Galveston Bay became a summer refuge for well-to-do Houston families escaping the city's heat. In 1893 twelve of them formed the Bay Ridge Park Association, platting narrow beachfront lots assigned by ballot and building verandaed cottages in Eastlake and Queen Anne styles. Grander early-twentieth-century homes followed, including one modeled on the White House for Governor Ross Sterling.

San Jose, CA

Founded around 1906 on the salt marshes near Alviso, the Bayside Canning Company grew under Thomas Foon Chew into the third-largest cannery in the United States by 1931 and pioneered the canning of green asparagus. A Chinese American entrepreneur who overcame the era's steep racial barriers, Chew built a business that employed hundreds and helped make the Santa Clara Valley a powerhouse of American food processing. The cannery's success was a landmark achievement in an age of exclusion and discrimination.

Baytown, TX

Built in 1936–37 as the Goose Creek Post Office, this building anchored the area's mail service for nearly fifty years and still holds an interior fresco commissioned through the Works Progress Administration's Federal Arts Program. Designed by supervising architect Louis A. Simon in a restrained modern style, it reflected the federal building boom of the Depression era. When the post office relocated in 1985, the structure found new life as the Baytown Historical Museum.

Port Lavaca, TX

When merchant C. U. Yancy built the Beach Hotel in 1904, it was the tallest building in Port Lavaca, a beacon for a coastal town courting tourists. Special excursion trains carried vacationers down from San Antonio and other inland cities to enjoy the Gulf, while traveling salesmen lodged in its rooms and townsfolk gathered in its dining hall. For generations it was the social heart of the community.

Montgomery County, MD

Long before the Washington suburbs reached this far, the rolling land of Montgomery County was worked as farmland, and the Beall family were among the region's established early landholders. Interpretive sites like this one recall the era when dairy farming anchored the county's rural economy — herds grazing the Piedmont pastures, milk hauled to market, and daily life keyed to the rhythms of the barn. The homestead preserves a glimpse of that agricultural world, which shaped the county for generations before development transformed it.

Nye County, NV

Beatty grew into the hub of three short-lived "gold" railroads spawned by the early-1900s strikes at Tonopah, Goldfield, and Rhyolite—boosters even dubbed it the "Chicago of the West." Between 1906 and 1907 the Las Vegas and Tonopah, the Bullfrog Goldfield, and the Tonopah and Tidewater railroads all reached through the area, converging on the boom camps. The rush proved fleeting, and the rails at Beatty were finally torn up beginning in July 1942.

Beaumont, TX

Settled in 1825 as Tevis Bluff and incorporated as Beaumont in 1838, this Jefferson County seat grew as a riverboat port and center for lumber, rice, and ranching. Everything changed near here in 1901 with the Spindletop gusher, which turned oil into a modern industry and remade Beaumont into a hub of ports, shipyards, and petrochemical works. Few Texas towns pivoted so completely from frontier trading post to industrial powerhouse.

Beaumont, TX

The first Beaumont Enterprise rolled off the press in 1880, founded by John W. Leonard, and grew into one of southeast Texas's oldest continuous businesses. Among its editors was William P. Hobby, who joined in 1907 and went on to become governor of Texas, while James L. Mapes built the paper into a nationally respected voice. For more than a century the Enterprise has chronicled life across the Texas-Louisiana borderlands from the Trinity River to the Calcasieu.

Beaumont, TX

Ringed by pine forest, Beaumont was a lumber town from its founding, marking one square on its original plat as "Steam Mill Square." From Lucien Hopson's 1840 saw pit floating logs down a canal, the industry grew through hand-powered shingle mills, then steam mills in the 1850s, and after the ruin of the Civil War a dense thicket of companies powered the city's recovery. Tycoon John Henry Kirby bought up several mills around 1900, but by the 1920s the surrounding forests were exhausted and the city mills gave way to operations deep in the woods.

Nederland, TX

Beauxart Gardens—its name blending Beaumont and Port Arthur—was a federal subsistence homestead colony created under the New Deal's National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. One of five such colonies in Texas, it settled fifty families on 2.5-to-4.5-acre plots of fertile rice land, where residents worked part-time at area refineries while keeping gardens and livestock. The government transferred title to a homestead association in 1936, and the community—with its parks, roads, and community center—still retains its New Deal identity.

Beaverton, OR

When the Beaver Theatre opened in 1925, movie houses like it were the social heart of towns across America, showing silent films accompanied by live music — here, by local teenage girls who played the organ. Just five years later the theater crossed a technological threshold when 'talkies' arrived, a transition that reshaped the entire entertainment industry almost overnight. For Beaverton, the little theater was where the modern age of sound and spectacle came to town.

Rutherfordton, NC

Beginning in 1831, the German-born metalworker Christopher Bechtler ran a private mint near Rutherfordton, striking gold coins from the ore of North Carolina's pioneering gold rush. Before it closed around 1849 the Bechtler mint produced more than $2.25 million in gold pieces that circulated widely across the region.

Victoria, TX

German-born Charles (Carl) August Beck bought forty acres here in 1862 and a decade later built this Greek Revival house as a wedding gift for his son Charles Theodore Beck. It became headquarters for a cattle operation that grew to roughly 25,000 acres, and in 1923 it turned to dairying under Arthur Yariger, whose family has held it since. The home marks the sweep of Texas ranching from open range to dairy farm.

Becket, MA

In colonial New England nearly every town maintained a "pound" — a stout stone or timber enclosure where stray cattle, hogs, and sheep were confined until their owners paid a fine to reclaim them. Raised in 1767, this pound in the Berkshire hills dates to the years just before the Revolution, when Becket was a young hilltown newly carved from the Massachusetts frontier. An elected "pound keeper" tended it, and the fees he collected helped enforce the fencing laws that kept the peace among neighboring farmers.

Cromwell Township, PA · est. 1947

Completed around 1788, Bedford Furnace was the first iron furnace in the Juniata region, launching an industry that would define central Pennsylvania for generations. Built along Black Log Creek, it produced charcoal iron—smelted using vast quantities of hardwood charcoal from the surrounding forests—and became renowned for quality. It stood at the leading edge of the young nation's westward-spreading iron industry just as the Constitution was being ratified.

Bedford Township, PA · est. 1947

Word of these mineral springs' supposed healing powers spread in the 1790s, and by the early 1800s Bedford Springs had grown into one of the nation's fashionable resorts, drawing politicians and society travelers to "take the waters." Its most famous guest, President James Buchanan, used the resort as a summer White House in the years just before the Civil War. Grand spa hotels like this one were where the antebellum elite mixed leisure with politics.

Schulenburg, TX

Built in 1888 by the King Iron Bridge Company of Cleveland with a Kansas subcontractor, this sixty-foot iron span carried the Old Praha Road across Mulberry Creek and opened easy access to the growing town of Schulenburg. A pin-connected, box-chord modified Pratt low truss — the "bedstead" type — it cost just $1,422 to erect and served a major travel route into the early twentieth century. Few bridges of its distinctive style still stand.

Pettus, TX

Carved largely from San Patricio County in 1857 and organized in 1858, Bee County took its name from Barnard E. Bee, who served the Republic of Texas as secretary of war, secretary of state, and minister to the United States. A cattle region since Spanish colonial times, it became an important beef producer after 1865 and gained its first railroad, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass, in 1886. Oil was discovered here in 1929, and the county seat has been at Beeville since 1860.

Kyle, TX

During the Civil War, Hays County's established cattle industry became a supply line for the Confederate army, with ranchers designated as "Government Stockraisers" tasked with feeding the Commissary Department. Driving herds across quicksand-bedded, flooded rivers while dodging raiders and enemy patrols, men like the Day brothers, Jesse Driskill, and Mexican War veteran William Washington Moon turned Texas beef into a war effort — some of them serving in uniform besides.

Danville, NH

Across New England the woods hide dry-stone "beehive" chambers — small corbelled huts of carefully stacked fieldstone whose builders and purpose have never been settled. Some scholars read them as colonial-era root cellars, cold stores, or field shelters raised by early farmers clearing this rocky ground; others insist their age and makers remain a genuine puzzle. This marker frames its little hut in exactly that spirit, tying it to the far more famous stone complex at America's Stonehenge in nearby Salem, New Hampshire, where the same questions have drawn curious visitors for generations.

La Grange, TX

German-Texan stonemasons raised this Italianate commercial building for F. W. Grassmeyer in the late 1850s, and for decades it served as a hotel. In 1893 German immigrant Fritz Presun bought it as a regional sales office for large American breweries, adding a bottling works — the Crown Soda Factory — a few years later. His son carried the business forward, even branching into oil and gas, tying the little building to the wave of German enterprise that shaped central Texas.

Lincoln, CA

Fritz Beermann and his son Charles arrived in the young railroad town of Lincoln, California, in 1880 and worked side by side in a harness and saddle shop at 5th and F Streets—an essential trade in a horse-drawn frontier economy. Charles went on to serve as Lincoln's Town Treasurer after the 1892 election, a mark of how immigrant craftsmen put down roots and helped govern the communities they helped build. Their story traces the rise of a Gilded Age California town from its earliest tradesmen.

Kerrville, TX

When the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad made Kerrville its last stop, San Antonio lumberman Frank J. Beitel bought land here in 1889 to open a lumberyard, betting on the county's timber and coming growth. The business thrived, expanding into a warehouse, retail building, and lumber shed, and gained its own rail spur for loading goods after the town's depot was rebuilt in the 1910s. For more than a century the yard supplied the materials that built Kerrville.

Asherton, TX

Designed by noted San Antonio architect Alfred Giles and built in 1910, Bel-Asher was the home of Asher Richardson and his wife Mary Isabelle, whose combined names christened the house. Richardson founded the town of Asherton and routed his Asherton and Gulf Railway Co. through it in 1905, tying the community into the wider rail network. Built of native sandstone with prairie-school influences and broad projecting eaves, the house has stayed in the family for generations and was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1990.

Belton vicinity, TX

Settlement along the Lampasas River began in 1847, and Bell County was created in 1850, taking its name from Peter Hansbrough Bell—a San Jacinto veteran, Mexican War officer, and governor of Texas. The county seat soon moved from Nolanville to Belton, and by 1860 nearly 4,800 people lived there. When the Civil War came, the county sent a dozen troop companies and supplied its cause with flour mills, a hat factory, tanneries, and workshops.

Sturgis, KY

Two miles south of here lay mines owned by John Bell of Tennessee, a national political figure in the tense years before the Civil War. In 1860 the Constitutional Union Party nominated Bell for president on a platform of preserving the Union, and he carried Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia against Abraham Lincoln. A longtime congressman and senator, Bell would later reverse course and back secession once war came.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 1947

James Dunlap and James Harris laid out Bellefonte in 1795, and legend holds that the visiting French statesman Talleyrand admired its spring and christened it "beautiful fountain." The town quickly became an early center of Pennsylvania's charcoal-iron industry, its furnaces feeding the young nation's hunger for metal. Its prominence ran deep enough that five of the state's governors once called it home.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 1947

James Dunlap and James Harris laid out Bellefonte in 1795, and tradition credits the French diplomat Talleyrand with naming it for its "beautiful fountain." The town rose as an early hub of the charcoal-iron trade, its works helping supply a growing country. So central was it to Pennsylvania life that five of the commonwealth's governors once lived here.

Mineral County, NV

Founded in 1874 by Alsop J. Holmes, Belleville sprang up to mill ore from his Northern Belle Mine at Candelaria, shipping its first bullion bar in 1875. When the Carson and Colorado Railroad reached town in 1881, Belleville's population peaked near five hundred, supporting hotels, restaurants, a schoolhouse, and seven saloons. But once pipelines carried water directly to Candelaria's own mills in the late 1880s, the town lost its purpose and stood deserted by 1892.

Bellingham, WA · est. 1991

Bellingham's 'Flatiron Building,' built in 1908 on a narrow wedge of land at Bellingham Bay, is a distinctive triangular commercial block of the early twentieth century. Renovated in 1990, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, recognized for its exceptional value in illustrating the region's commercial architecture and growth.

Bellville, GA

Bellville was founded in 1890 on land platted beside the newly laid tracks of the Savannah & Western Railroad and named for pioneer Frances Bell Smith. Its depot quickly became the town's commercial and social center, and Bellville grew into a regional shipping point for cotton, naval stores, and lumber, home as well to the Bellville Academy.

Bellville, TX

Brothers Thomas and James Bell arrived with Austin's colony in 1822, and by 1846 Thomas's land offer won Bellville the county seat over old San Felipe. Settlers from England, Germany and across the eastern states poured in, and after the hard Reconstruction years the Santa Fe railroad's 1880 arrival doubled the population. Cotton, and later a 1915 oil strike, kept the town thriving through the twentieth century.

Bellville, TX

Bellville rose as the Austin County seat in 1848 and boomed after the railroad arrived in 1879-80. In 1928 two local physicians, Dr. Jubal Allen Neely—a World War I Army Medical Corps veteran—and Dr. Herbert Edward Roensch, opened the town's first hospital with just four beds, timed with an oil-field discovery that swelled the population. Over the following decades the little clinic grew into a voter-supported hospital district still serving the community.

Nye County, NV

A reliable year-round spring in Buena Vista Canyon long drew Shoshone people to this high valley for rabbit drives and gatherings before silver strikes in 1865 transformed it into the boomtown of Belmont. At its peak it boasted schools, churches, a newspaper, a Chinatown, and a rowdy reputation for brawls, feuds, and vigilante justice, serving as the Nye County seat from 1867 to 1905. When the shallow, high-grade ore played out around 1890, residents drifted off to newer strikes, leaving the surviving courthouse to preside over a quiet townscape.

Belpre, OH

When New England pioneers laid out Belpre on the north bank of the Ohio in 1789, they were among the first waves of settlers pushing into the newly organized Northwest Territory, farming the rich bottomland and trading along the river highway that carried people and goods west. The settlement was well enough established by the early 1800s to greet the Lewis and Clark expedition as it made its way downriver toward the frontier. A century later the same current that floated flatboats of grain was harnessed by locks and dams, and barge traffic turned the old farm town into a working industrial river port.

Belton, TX

Built in 1927 along Nolan Creek, the Belton Farmers Co-op Gin replaced an earlier gin that had burned on the site. Where most central Texas gins were frame buildings, local cotton farmers who owned this one built it of load-bearing brick, a two-story structure topped by a hipped metal roof and small cupola. It stands as a rare survivor from the years when Belton was the hub of Bell County's cotton trade, closing only after World War II.

Albany Township, PA · est. 1995

Born in Reading in 1870, Ben Austrian was a largely self-taught painter who won international fame for his lifelike renderings of barnyard fowl, woodland creatures, still lifes, and landscapes. His most famous creation, the little chick of the Bon Ami cleanser advertisements, became one of the era's best-known commercial images. Austrian kept studios in Paris, Florida, and at Mount Penn, but his heart belonged to his beloved retreat "Clovelly-at-the-Pinnacle" near here, where he died in 1921 and is buried.

Columbus, TX

Ben Marshall Baker and his brothers founded the "Colorado Citizen" newspaper in 1857, and all three joined the Confederate Army when the Civil War came — one brother, Hicks, was killed in the fighting. Ben returned to publish the paper from 1873 until his death in 1907, making this house the center of the town's press. His widow Virginia lived on here until 1916.

Houston, TX

Finished in 1924, this apartment building answered the demand for stylish multi-family housing in downtown Houston's south end after World War I. A successful businessman hired a noted local architect — later famous for grand civic works — to design it, and the couple lived in one unit while renting the others to well-off tenants. After decades as a hospital and then long vacancy, a 2000 rehabilitation returned it to use as offices.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

Benjamin Franklin, arguably the eighteenth century's most versatile American, built a fine brick house in this Philadelphia courtyard beginning in 1763. After decades abroad as a printer, diplomat, and revolutionary statesman, he returned to live his final five years here until his death in 1790. From this address the aging Franklin remained a fixture of the young nation's public life, corresponding, inventing, and advising to the last.

Boston, MA

Here, beginning in 1719, James Franklin ran the printing office of the New England Courant, one of colonial America's boldest and most independent newspapers. His younger brother Benjamin Franklin served here as an apprentice, learning the printing trade that would help make him famous. Later, from 1769 to 1776, Edes and Gill published the Boston Gazette on this spot — a fiercely patriotic paper that helped fan the flames of revolution.

La Salle, TX

Cattlemen John M. Bennett and George W. West began assembling this Jackson County ranch in 1875, eventually acquiring more than 35,000 acres of rich prairie between the Garcitas and Lavaca rivers. Bennett had earned his stake driving herds up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas. By 1902 the operation ran 7,000 head bred from longhorns and Herefords, and for three generations the James family served as its foremen.

Edgewood, TX

B.J. Carter, a former schoolteacher turned pharmacist, moved his family to Edgewood in 1911 and, with his wife Sallie, opened and jointly ran a downtown drugstore. In 1912 they built this Queen Anne–style house, with shiplap siding, a wraparound porch on Doric columns, and a hipped roof with projecting gables. The Carters spent the rest of their lives here as community leaders in the small Van Zandt County town.

Whitesboro, TX

This handsome residence was built in 1902 for business leader Bland Bennett and his wife Grace, blending Victorian ornament with classical revival details like a pedimented wraparound porch and corbelled chimneys. Its floor plan echoes both the center-passage house and the emerging American foursquare. The Richardson family bought the home in 1942.

Martinez, CA

Maximillian Bergamini raised this commercial building in 1905 to replace a grocery and notions store destroyed the previous year in a block-wide fire that swept through downtown Martinez. Such fires were a constant hazard in early twentieth-century business districts crowded with wood-frame buildings, and rebuilding in sturdier form was a common response. The new structure carried on the everyday commerce of a growing California town.

Berkeley, CA · est. 2010

For nearly half a century this 1925–27 Classical Revival tower was Berkeley's only "skyscraper," designed by Walter Ratcliff Jr. at the height of his career. Steel-framed and clad in brick and terra cotta, it housed the Chamber of Commerce and Wells Fargo Bank, its planned upper stories cancelled by the Depression. In 1930 the prized Stanford Axe was famously stolen from outside its doors by students in disguise.

Reading, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1752 from parts of three older counties and named for Berkshire in England, this region centered on the town of Reading. Its early iron forges and furnaces, drawing on rich local ore, helped launch what would become Pennsylvania's mighty iron industry. Reading grew from a colonial borough into a thriving 19th-century city built on that industrial foundation.

Schulenburg, TX

In 1889 Dr. I. E. Clark, a state senator and physician, traced out a racetrack on his farm by driving his buggy free-style across the ground — a plan for a half-mile oval that came out at five-eighths of a mile. Graded by mule-drawn scoops and chartered in 1894 for the Schulenburg fair association, the track drew famous horses in its heyday, and Clark and his son bred two of Texas's best-known runners here. In later years, automobiles took their turn on the same course.

Detroit, MI

In 1959 Berry Gordy launched his record company on this Detroit site with an $800 family loan, soon naming it Motown in honor of the Motor City. From this modest house-turned-studio poured a stream of hits and stars that defined the 'Motown Sound.' Over the next dozen years the company grew from a family business into an international enterprise.

Bainbridge Island, WA

Identified by the Bainbridge Island Historical Society and dating to 1948, this berry shed is a relic of the island's celebrated strawberry-farming era. For decades Bainbridge's fields were tended largely by Japanese American and Filipino immigrant families, whose berries shipped across Puget Sound to Seattle markets. Sheds like this one processed and stored the harvest at the heart of that agricultural economy.

Narberth, PA · est. 1997

From his home in Narberth, Bert Bell helped build professional football into a national institution. As NFL Commissioner from 1946 to 1959, he championed competitive balance, strengthened the league's ethics, and shaped the modern game, having earlier owned the Eagles and held a stake in the Steelers. Neighbors recalled him talking sports with locals at Davis's store, a reminder that the architect of pro football's rise remained a hometown figure.

West, TX

Built around 1890 by town founder Thomas M. West, this whimsical building first held two saloons until Prohibition arrived in 1919 and turned it into a grocery and bakery. In 1923 Jim Tobola remade it as the Best Theatre, which brought vaudeville, local acts, and movies to the Czech farming town of West until it closed in 1976. Its metal semicircular awnings and globe-like concrete finials still mark it as a small-town landmark.