Industry & Invention

Mineola, TX

The Select Theater was the latest in a line of Mineola entertainment venues reaching back to 1886, named by Mattie Hooks in 1920 for a Texas motion-picture franchise. She and her husband ran it for years, and a 1948 remodel added a sloping floor, elevated stage, and a 24-foot neon tower visible for miles. It anchored the town's Main Street entertainment into the late 20th century.

Upper Darby, PA · est. 1985

Built around 1684, Sellers Hall was the first permanent home in Upper Darby, raised by Samuel Sellers and his bride Anna Gibbons in the earliest days of Penn's colony. The family became famous for its bent toward mechanics and science across generations. One son, John Sellers, helped found the American Philosophical Society and in 1769 joined the celebrated observation of Venus crossing the face of the sun.

Town of Cuba, NY

The Seneca Oil Spring near Cuba is the oldest known oil spring in North America, long used by the Seneca and other Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples, who skimmed its dark seep for medicine and trade. In 1627 a Franciscan friar recorded the oily waters, leaving one of the earliest European accounts of petroleum on the continent. Two centuries before the first drilled well launched the modern oil age, this quiet spring in the western New York hills already marked the place where Americans first took notice of oil.

Plymouth, PA · est. 1992

In the coal town of Plymouth, Sephaniah Reese built and drove a three-wheeled, one-cylinder motor vehicle on the streets in 1887–88, making him one of America's earliest automobile experimenters. His machine shop, incorporated in 1888, was also an early bicycle manufacturer. The firm remained a fixture here for more than eighty years.

Big Spring, TX

When oil was struck on the Settles ranch in 1927, Will and Lillian Settles poured their new fortune into this fifteen-story hotel, which opened in grand style on October 1, 1930. Designed by David Castle, it was for years the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso, with 150 rooms, ballrooms, restaurants, and a private club crowning the top floor. Though the family ran it for only two years, the skyscraper stood as a bold emblem of West Texas oil-boom optimism.

Irving, TX

The Shady Grove Road Bridge rose in 1931 across the Trinity River, part of a broader flood-control effort that followed the disastrous 1908 flood and reshaped the river's channels by 1930. Its 1,778-foot span, anchored by a Parker pony truss, connected southeast Irving to the new industrial district of west Dallas and fueled Irving's growth, eventually carrying more than 14,000 vehicles a day. Closed for safety in 1984, it was replaced in 1990 by a new bridge that still links Irving and Dallas.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1958

On these Monongahela lowlands in 1792, just as the young republic was pushing industry west of the Alleghenies, a small charcoal-fired furnace began casting stoves and grates. It is remembered as the first stirring of what would become Pittsburgh's defining trade. The venture proved fragile, though: within roughly a year the nearby supplies of iron ore and hardwood for charcoal ran short and the fire went cold.

Georgetown, TX

This hand-cut limestone building, raised in 1870 by John H. Shafer, stands where a cabin served as the county's first courthouse back in 1848. Shafer worked leather here as a frontier saddlery, living with his family in quarters upstairs. In the years since, its rooms have housed attorneys, a newspaper, and a long parade of other tenants.

Tyler, TX

The Shamburger family arrived from Mississippi in 1847 and put down deep roots in Smith County, where son Mathew and grandson T. J. helped pioneer the commercial growing of fruit trees and roses that would define East Texas agriculture. This family graveyard began in 1874–75 with the burial of T. J. and Settie's infant daughter, Nettie, and grew over generations to hold parents, children, and in-laws, with the last interment in 1967.

Shamrock, TX

When Shamrock incorporated in 1911, residents still drew water from town wells or hauled it in barrels, so the young city voted bonds for a modern waterworks. In 1915 the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company erected this 176-foot all-steel standpipe—the tallest tank of its class the firm ever built—engineered to withstand the fierce Panhandle winds. Long a landmark for travelers watering their teams in the troughs below, it remains one of the tallest water towers in Texas.

Pierce, TX

In the decades after the Civil War, Texas cattle moved north up the great trail drives, and few names loomed larger than Abel Head "Shanghai" Pierce. Arriving with almost nothing, he built one of the era's vast cattle empires through relentless drive and sharp dealing, earning the title "cattle king" of the coastal plains. His ranch near this spot became a center of the open-range cattle world that defined Gilded Age Texas.

Pierce, TX

Built in 1886 in lavish style, this house served as the working headquarters of Shanghai Pierce's enormously successful cattle operation, with the ranch office on its first floor. Pierce—the flamboyant "cattle king" credited with introducing hardy Brahma cattle to Texas—loomed large in local legend, said to hold forth from the nearby Southern Pacific railroad station. The home reflects the wealth the open-range era brought to the Texas coastal plains.

Sharp, TX

In the fertile blackland prairie of Milam County, settlers drawn by the rich soil began putting down roots in the years just after the Civil War. By the 1890s a store, a blacksmith shop, and a cotton gin had knit the scattered farms into a recognizable community, and when the post office opened in 1901 the place took the name Sharp to honor a nearby physician. Cotton drove the local economy, and the tight-knit community endured well enough to launch an annual reunion in 1978.

San Gabriel, TX

Civil War veteran Daniel G. Davis Sr. built this commercial building in two stages in 1895 and 1896. Operated as the Sharp General Store by Davis and his descendants until 1985, it was the area's largest mercantile business and the main outlet for local produce, offering banking, public scales, and a barrel of drinking water on the porch where neighbors gathered. It survives as a fine example of late-19th-century free-standing commercial architecture.

Odem, TX

In the 1870s Sharpsburg blossomed into a South Texas trade hub as Sidney Gail Borden ran a store, cotton gin, gristmill, and meat packery and expanded a ferry across the Nueces River. Flat-bottomed sailing vessels carried local goods downriver to markets like Corpus Christi, drawing farmers from twenty-five miles around. The town peaked in the 1890s, then faded when the railroads bypassed it, and today its site has returned to ranchland.

Mission, TX

Designed by San Antonio architect Harvey P. Smith and completed in just 150 days in 1939, this two-story building was raised on the site of Mission founder John Conway's offices to house the enterprises of John H. Shary, the "Father of the Texas Citrus Industry." Its Spanish Colonial Revival design borrows from Mexican domestic architecture, from the clipped-eave tile roof to window tiers evoking wrought-iron balconies. Sold in 1960 by Shary's daughter and her husband, former Governor Allan Shivers, it became Mission's city hall.

Italy vicinity, TX

In use from about 1850 to 1873, the Shawnee Trail was the earliest and easternmost of the great cattle trails that drove Texas herds north to market, crossing western Ellis County and fording the Brazos at Waco, the Trinity at Dallas, and the Red River at Preston en route to Missouri. The Blackland Prairie's forage, water, and gentle terrain made ideal droving country, and towns like Waxahachie rose as supply stops. Outbreaks of tick fever and the Civil War disrupted the drives, and after Joseph McCoy opened the Chisholm Trail in 1867 the Shawnee slowly gave way, though herds still moved up it through 1873.

Nacogdoches, TX

Ephraim Shay's 1880 design, with its vertical pistons and direct gearing, gave loggers a locomotive that could crawl over the rough, twisting tram roads of the timber woods where ordinary engines failed. This 36-ton example, built by Lima in 1907, hauled logs for Texas lumber companies from forest to mill and later ran on the company-owned Moscow, Camden & San Augustine Railroad. After decades parked on a Camden siding, it was rescued in 1970 and preserved with a log car of the same era.

San Angelo, TX

Spanish explorers brought the first sheep to the Southwest in the 1500s, and Spanish missions relied on them for food and cloth. Angora goats arrived in Texas in 1853, and from 1857 George Wilkins Kendall pioneered modern sheep ranching, crossbreeding Mexican churro with fine-wooled merino. The Edwards Plateau's land and climate proved ideal, and after 1870 the industry boomed—making Texas the nation's leading producer and San Angelo its great wool and mohair market.

Shelby County, KY

This ornate cast-iron fountain was purchased jointly by the city and county of Shelbyville in 1895 from New York's J. L. Mott Iron Works to celebrate the town's first public water works. Originally placed at Fifth and Main, it was moved in 1914 to the public square to make way for a new courthouse. Its crowning figure follows Mott's "Atlantis" pattern.

Fort Worth, TX

Constructed in 1900 for Robert G. Johnson on behalf of the Evans children, this Fort Worth building first housed G.Y. Smith's "Daylight Store," a general merchandise business. After John M. Shelton bought it in 1910 and added a third floor, it was leased for decades to S.H. Kress and Company. A 1937 remodeling brought in another variety chain, McCrory's, continuing its long life as a downtown retail address.

Montgomery, TX

Parts of this house may date to 1855, but master craftsman John E. Shelton built its main portion around 1858 for his friend and business partner Thomas Wesley Smith, who went on to become a leading cigar manufacturer in Montgomery County. Smith and his heirs kept the house into the 1920s, when a granddaughter's remodeling added its dormers. Successive owners have preserved it since.

West Manheim Township, PA

In the rolling farm country just outside Hanover, this plaque marks a reservoir built to secure a growing community's water supply. It credits two local benefactors, H.D. Sheppard and C.N. Myers, whose names were well known in the Hanover area's business and civic life around the turn of the 20th century. The Borough Council set the tablet not to mark a battle or a birth, but to thank two neighbors whose generosity turned a public need into a public work.

East Union Township, PA · est. 2015

On August 27, 1963, a shaft collapse trapped coal miners some 320 feet beneath Sheppton, and the nation held its breath as rescuers improvised a bold new approach. Drilling a borehole to reach the men below, they freed two miners after nearly two weeks underground, though a third was lost. The gripping ordeal spurred tougher safety rules for small independent mines and pioneered a rescue technique later credited with saving lives at Quecreek in 2002 and in Chile in 2010.

Town of Tonawanda, NY

In the 1920s, the automobile was transforming American life, and communities across the country raced to build the paved roads it demanded. Sheridan Drive was constructed between 1923 and 1925 to serve a growing "Greater Niagara Frontier" around Buffalo, knitting together the suburban towns of Erie County. This marker, placed by the Town of Tonawanda Town Board, celebrated the new thoroughfare as a milestone in modern highway transportation.

Anna, TX

When the town of Anna sprang up along the railroad in 1872, brothers Andrew and Fred Sherley—grandsons of Kentucky migrants—opened a hardware store, and in 1894 raised this brick building to house it. Over the decades the Sherleys sold furniture, farm implements, wagons, cotton and groceries and even served as undertakers, the wagon scales out front weighing the harvests of a farming county until the store closed in 1979.

Sherman, TX

Founded in 1891 as the Sherman Seamless Bag Mill, this plant rose to serve the booming cotton industry of North Central Texas. After rocky early years of intermittent operation, it was acquired by out-of-state textile firms, expanded its product lines to heavy duck and wide sheeting, and eventually merged into Burlington Industries in 1955. When the original cornerstone was opened in 1956, it revealed old coins, 1891 newspapers, and saloon tokens—small time capsules of the frontier town.

College Station, TX

Settled in the 1860s by Czech, German, and Polish immigrants, Shiloh was a community of large family farms bound by mutual aid — neighbors joined for planting, harvesting, and barn raisings. In 1883 they organized the Slavonic Agricultural and Benevolent Society, which still survives as the Shiloh Club, to pool purchases and coordinate help. The settlement was eventually swallowed by College Station, leaving its old graveyard as the chief reminder of a once-thriving place.

Shiner, TX

Shiner grew out of the German-Czech settlement of Half Moon when the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad arrived in 1887 and residents moved to the line, where Victoria landowner H. B. Shiner had donated a townsite. Built up by cattlemen, the town developed industries including a brewery and a wire works. Today it keeps a museum recording its immigrant heritage.

Shiner, TX

Built in 1895 by William Wendtland and Louis Wagener and later enlarged by William Koch, this two-story building housed a saloon and shops below and a true opera house above. Until the 1920s the upstairs hall was Shiner's main public auditorium, hosting theatrical shows, dances, political rallies, and lodge meetings. It was the beating social heart of a small Central Texas town.

Sturgeon Bay, WI

Sturgeon Bay's fortunes have long been tied to the ships and boats moving through its harbor, and the marine propeller was central to that story as vessels shifted from sail to steam. This display of ship propellers recalls the technology that powered the transition, driving the steamers that carried the region's cargo. The city grew as a shipbuilding and shipping center on the bay.

Bridgton, ME

Shorey Park was named to preserve the memory of Harry Shorey (1877–1952), remembered as a county editor and community leader. As a small-town newspaperman in the early twentieth century, Shorey would have shaped local opinion and civic life at a time when the county paper was the central forum for news, debate, and community identity in rural Maine.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

Built in 1808 by Thomas Sparks and John Bishop, this was the first shot tower in the United States, where molten lead was dropped from a great height to form perfectly round hunting shot as it cooled. When the works began producing ammunition for the War of 1812, Bishop, a Quaker opposed to war, sold his share. The Sparks family kept the tower in operation until 1903.

Crescent Township, PA

Along the Ohio River just below Pittsburgh, Peter Shouse launched the steamboat "Kentuckian" here in 1829, founding a boatyard that would become one of the region's busiest. Western Pennsylvania sat at the heart of America's steamboat age, where fast-flowing rivers and abundant coal and timber turned river towns into shipbuilding hubs feeding the Ohio and Mississippi trade. Over the next four decades the yard sent more than eighty vessels down the ways, culminating in the mighty 1,727-ton "Great Republic," celebrated on the Mississippi for its size and elegance.

Amarillo, TX

Completed in 1913 for cattleman J.D. Shuford, this Amarillo residence was designed by a Kansas City firm in the Prairie School style, with a low hipped roof, wide eaves, and a columned porch. In 1927 it passed to physician and civic leader R.S. Killough, remaining in his family until 1946. The home reflects the prosperity that cattle wealth brought to the early Panhandle city.

Athens, TX

Sid Williams Richardson was born in the East Texas town of Athens in 1891 and rose from trading cattle as a teenager to become one of the great independent oilmen of the twentieth century. His 1929 strike in the Keystone field of Winkler County—reportedly 80 producing wells without a dry hole—made him fabulously wealthy, and the lifelong bachelor became a confidant of presidents, hosting Franklin Roosevelt and later Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson at his island retreat off the Gulf Coast.

Corpus Christi, TX

Charlotte Scott Sidbury (1830–1904), a North Carolina native who came to Texas before the Revolution, built this Victorian house around 1893. A civic leader and bank director, she took over her late husband's lumber company and constructed rental houses during the 'Ropes boom,' when Colonel E.H. Ropes tried and failed to dredge Corpus Christi into a deep-water port. The elaborately galleried structure was later home to Padre Island rancher Patrick Dunn and was moved to Old Irishtown in 1926.

Corpus Christi, TX

North Carolina native Edward D. Sidbury came to Corpus Christi in 1867 and built a lumber business and commercial wharf served by the Texas-Mexican Railroad. He raised this Greek Revival home before his 1875 marriage to Charlotte Cook Scott. After Sidbury's death, Charlotte took over the family lumber company and became a leading Corpus Christi business and civic figure; the house later passed to descendants and was moved in 1946 to the old Irishtown neighborhood.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1994

From an optical shop on this block in 1897, Siegmund Lubin built one of America's first great motion-picture empires — six studios across five states — earning fame as the first movie mogul. A tinkerer and shrewd marketer, he helped turn flickering novelties into a popular entertainment that drew ordinary Americans into darkened theaters. The industry he helped create outgrew him; bankrupt by 1916, he died in obscurity.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2007

In the backyard of his Philadelphia home, film pioneer Siegmund Lubin made some of the nation's earliest motion pictures between 1897 and 1899. His subjects were the popular entertainments of the day — vaudeville and burlesque acts, boxing matches, circus and animal performers, even a filmed Passion Play. A German-Jewish immigrant and optician by trade, Lubin became an early force in the emerging American movie business.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2015

When engineer Joseph Tarsia opened Sigma Sound Studios in 1968, he gave a home to what became known worldwide as "The Sound of Philadelphia." Working with producers Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, the studio's lush, string-swept records by The O'Jays, the Stylistics, and others helped define soul music in the 1970s. Its reputation for sonic craft grew so large that artists like David Bowie and Stevie Wonder made pilgrimages to record within its walls.

Silsbee, TX

The Silsbee Ice, Light, and Power Company — absorbed by Gulf States Utilities in 1926 — flourished after moving into this brick building in 1930. A new rail spur of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe let the plant ship ice across the region, making it a major distributor in an age before home refrigeration was common. Designed by D. H. Paulson with Spanish Revival touches like tiled pent roofs, the plant ran until 1981.

Silver, TX

Silver began about 1880 as a pioneer ranching center in Coke County, its earliest landowners running stock and its lone physician, Dr. J. E. Reed, serving the area for half a century. The town took its name from a nearby peak. When oil was discovered in 1946, drilling, refining, and workers' camps transformed the quiet ranch community into a busy oil-and-gas center, until the camps closed in 1966 and the population fell away.

Concan, TX

This rugged pass takes its name from a silver mine the Spanish are said to have opened in the 1700s; the ore proved poor, but fourteen shafts still honeycomb the hills. In the early 1830s James Bowie—later a hero and casualty of the Alamo—built a fortification nearby, and in 1831 his men fought off a daylong Comanche attack. The fight's celebrated hero was Bowie's enslaved companion, remembered as 'Black Jim Bowie,' who braved the open ground to bring water to the besieged.

Esmeralda County, NV

Silver Peak ranks among Nevada's oldest mining districts, running a 10-stamp mill by 1865 and a 20-stamp mill two years later amid the lawlessness of a frontier camp. In 1906 the Pittsburg Silver Peak Gold Mining Company consolidated the area's properties, built the Silver Peak Railroad, and raised a 100-stamp mill at nearby Blair. The town rose and fell over decades, was abandoned by 1917, and burned in 1948—until the Foote Mineral Company began drawing lithium from beneath Clayton Valley.

Sweetwater, TX

The cotton-oil magnate and civic leader Robert Mosby Simmons built this Sweetwater home as a modest one-story house in 1919, then hired Dallas architect Anton Korn in 1934–35 to transform it into a two-story Spanish Colonial Revival showpiece. Its barrel-tile roof, bracketed soffits, bow window and classical doorway reflected the prosperity and tastes of West Texas business leaders between the wars.

Salt Lake City, UT

Built around 1880, this was the home of Simon Bamberger, a Salt Lake City businessman who built and ran interurban rail lines and went on to serve as governor of Utah from 1917 to 1921. His career bridged the Gilded Age entrepreneurship of the intermountain West and the Progressive Era's public leadership. The house was converted to offices in the 1970s.

Corpus Christi, TX

Simon Gugenheim arrived in Corpus Christi in 1882 with forty dollars and built a fortune, first through the Gugenheim and Cohn drygoods firm and later as a petroleum investor who helped steady the city's economy in the 1890s. Around 1900 he and his wife Lila Belle built this exuberant Victorian house, crowned by a turret that outlasted every other in the city's domestic architecture. The couple's philanthropy included donating land for a local YMCA.

Quanah, TX

After managing lumberyards in Quanah and Waco, L. Simpson launched his own lumber company and in 1910 built this three-story commercial block to house his offices. Over the decades it sheltered a corner drugstore, other local businesses, and the Elks Lodge on its top floor, its decorative brickwork and corner entry a proud statement of early boomtown prosperity. It remains a landmark of Quanah's architectural heritage.

Columbus, TX

Friench Simpson came to Colorado County as a young Virginian in the 1860s and rose to become a farmer, banker, Columbus mayor, state senator, and published poet — a portrait of Gilded Age ambition in a small Texas town. In 1882 he built this ornate house, its Italianate and Eastlake milled woodwork and roof cresting advertising the prosperity of the era. After 1916 it passed to physician Dr. C. A. Williamson, whose family kept it until 1968.

Fort Worth, TX

Completed in 1930 at the height of Fort Worth's oil-fueled prosperity, this high-rise was designed by prominent local architect Wiley G. Clarkson for oilman Richard O. Dulaney. It soon took the name of the Sinclair Oil Company, whose offices—and later the headquarters of the billion-dollar Sinclair-Prairie firm—filled its floors. Its Art Deco exterior, rich with zig-zag ornament, Mayan-inspired accents, and terra cotta detailing, captured the confident glamour of the era.

El Paso, TX

Completed in 1928 for the Singer company, this Spanish Colonial Revival building was designed by the prolific El Paso architect Henry Trost. For more than fifty years its ground floor housed Singer's retail store, while the upper story held a school that trained seamstresses on the company's famous sewing machines. Its corner tower, red tile roof, iron grillwork, and the Singer crest set over an upper window still mark it as a showpiece of 1920s commercial design.

San Marcos, TX

The Sink Springs are part of the artesian spring system that pushes water up through the San Marcos fault to feed the San Marcos River. The land around them once belonged to Republic of Texas figures Thomas Jefferson Chambers and Edward Burleson, and since the late nineteenth century their steady flow has been put to work for homes, farm irrigation, a woolen mill, and a dairy. Their reliable water was central to the growth of San Marcos.

Sipe Springs vicinity, TX

Settlers found seeping spring water here about 1870 and built a milling and ginning town whose very name—pronounced 'seep'—stirred spelling disputes from the start. John C. Smith donated five acres for this cemetery in 1873, and residents added a tabernacle in 1890 that still hosts an annual July homecoming. When an oil boom struck in the winter of 1918, sleepy Sipe Springs swelled toward 10,000 people, complete with an opera house and a pro baseball team, before the boom passed.

Temple, TX

In 1927 engineer George W. Williams joined Roy Sanderford, George Carroll, and his brother E.K. Williams to form the Texas Aero Corporation, and in 1928 the firm won federal Approved Type Certificate No. 45 to build and sell the Temple Monoplane. Designed chiefly for airmail and equipped for night flight — a genuine innovation for its day — the aircraft showed real promise. But the 1929 stock market crash and Williams's death in a 1930 training accident closed the plant for good.

Waxahachie, TX

Erected in 1862 by William Rowen, this Confederate powder mill was part of the South's scramble to manufacture its own munitions after war cut it off from Northern industry. On April 29, 1863, the volatile works blew up, killing Rowen and a man named Joshua G. Phillips. The blast is a stark reminder of the dangers borne by those who supplied the Confederate war effort far from any battlefield.

Anderson, TX

On this spot from 1861 to 1865 stood a Confederate munitions factory, turning out cannon, cannonballs, guns, pistols, swords, sabers, bayonets, and gunpowder for the Southern war effort. Marked by the State of Texas in 1936, it recalls the improvised industrial base the Confederacy raised far from the front lines.

Lampasas, TX

In 1902 Lampasas businessmen hired a drilling company to hunt for oil on W.B. Abney's land but struck sulphur water instead, prized at the time for its supposed medicinal virtues. Abney and his son turned the flowing well into a swimming pool in 1927, and "Abney's Plunge" became a beloved local attraction until the school district bought the site and converted it to a play area in the 1950s.

Canyon, TX

In the treeless Texas Panhandle of the 1880s, fencing meant barbed wire — the practical version perfected by Illinois inventor Joseph F. Glidden by 1876 and marketed in Texas through agent H. B. Sanborn. In 1881 real-estate investors Jot Gunter and William B. Munson strung a line fence on this site to enclose a 240,000-acre horse pasture, part of a transformation that ranchers resisted, cowboys resented, and merchants welcomed. Barbed wire ended the open range, cut off the old cattle trails, and ultimately saved the industry by allowing controlled breeding and feeding.

Kerrville, TX

In the late 1930s Dr. Edward F. Knipling advanced a daring idea: that the screwworm, a parasite whose larvae destroyed livestock and wildlife, might be wiped out by releasing sterilized male flies to break its chain of reproduction. In 1950–51, at a laboratory moved to the Kerrville area, Dr. R. C. Bushland and D. E. Hopkins sterilized male screwworms using irradiation. The technique worked, leading to the eradication of the screwworm and saving countless domestic and wild animals across the United States.