Industry & Invention

Chillicothe, TX

On this forage-crop station in 1909, scientists planted the first Sudan grass grown in the United States — seed the Department of Agriculture had carried all the way from Khartoum. What followed was more than half a century of patient sorghum breeding under researchers like A. B. Conner, J. R. Quinby, and J. C. Stephens, culminating in hybrid seed that dramatically boosted yields. Their work reshaped farming across the semiarid Great Plains.

McKinney, TX

Organized in 1883 by a roster of McKinney's leading citizens—including former Texas governor James W. Throckmorton—the Collin County National Bank opened with $75,000 in capital and grew into a pillar of the local economy. From its first home on the courthouse square it moved and expanded over the decades, financing the growth of McKinney and Collin County for more than a century.

Austin, TX

Facing a Federal blockade of the Gulf coast, Texas created a single new wartime agency — the State Military Board — to arm and supply itself. Trading state bonds and, above all, cotton, the board ran goods through neutral Mexico and past the blockade by fast runners, buying guns, powder, and cloth and seeding local factories for cannon and percussion caps. Chronic shortages of money and transport blunted its reach, but it helped earn Texas its nickname as the Storehouse of the Confederacy.

Lampasas, TX

In May 1885, inspired by the American Bankers Association, two young Lampasas Springs bankers, Frank R. Malone and E. M. Longcope, wrote to the Galveston News urging a Texas counterpart—and touting their spa town as the perfect convention site. The appeal drew a swift response, and on July 23, 1885, thirty-one bankers gathered at the Park Hotel to found what became the oldest and largest state bankers association in the nation. One of its early resolutions, calling for the chartering of state banks, became Texas law in 1905.

Benjamin, TX

Pleasant C. Sams came to Texas from Arkansas as a boy in the 1850s and was left in charge of the family mills at sixteen when the Civil War broke out, ordered by his father to give the flour to Confederate widows. After serving in a Confederate frontier regiment and famously slipping through enemy lines to reach his bride, he settled in West Texas and became a founding cattleman, merchant, and banker at Benjamin. He led the Benjamin Commercial Company and the town's First National Bank.

Dallas, TX

As Texas prepared to mark a century of independence, a group of Dallas businessmen led by R.L. Thornton won the city the role of hosting the central celebration. The Centennial Exposition Corporation took over the State Fair grounds in 1935, and more than a hundred architects and artists built a dazzling complex that put thousands to work in the depths of the Great Depression. Opened by Governor Allred in June 1936 and visited by President and Mrs. Roosevelt, the exposition drew over six million people in 178 days.

Mission, TX

In the 1920s citrus grower and developer John H. Shary set out to promote the Rio Grande Valley's fruit crops, and the first Texas Citrus Fiesta followed in 1932 with a coronation, exhibits, packing contests, and a parade. From a one-day event it grew into a two-week celebration featuring the beloved Product Costume Style Show, whose garments are fashioned entirely from local produce. The festival remains a signature cultural event of the Valley.

Texas City, TX

Texas City grew from a handful of bayshore families in the mid-1800s into a shipping and industrial powerhouse. A federal lighthouse in 1854 drew a village first called Shoal Point; then in the early 1890s Minnesota investors and manager Frank Davison reimagined it as a deepwater port, dredging a ship channel finished by 1905. A 1920 tank farm launched decades of oil refining, and despite the devastating 1947 port explosions the city's petrochemical economy doubled its population in the 1950s.

Texas City, TX

When Texas City's early boosters cut a ship channel straight across Galveston Bay's natural water line — against engineers' advice — currents kept silting it up. The answer was the Texas City Dike, authorized in the 1913 Rivers and Harbors Act and completed in 1915 under the Army Corps of Engineers to deflect the bay's waters and keep the channel clear. Extended to 5.4 miles by 1934, the dike protected a busy shipping lane and later became a beloved local spot for fishing, boating, and bait shops.

Texas City, TX

On April 16 and 17, 1947, ammonium-nitrate explosions aboard two ships at the Texas City docks unleashed one of the deadliest industrial disasters in American history, killing hundreds. With no public cemetery in town, a burial committee bought this two-acre tract, and on June 22 an interfaith, interracial service before some 5,000 mourners laid the unidentified dead to rest in caskets and hearses donated by funeral homes from 28 towns. Sixty-three victims who were never named still rest here and are remembered each April 16.

Texas City, TX

In 1893 Minnesota investors — brothers Jacob and Henry Myers with Augustus B. Wolvin — founded a company to build a port and townsite here, linking their docks to the national rail network by 1897. Wolvin reorganized the venture, won federal funding to dredge a deep-water channel by 1904, and secured Texas City's designation as a customs port in 1905. As official Hugh B. Moore drew oil refiners to the industrial district, petroleum came to dominate the port's traffic, and the railway also supplied the young community's first utilities, telephone, newspaper, and bank — enduring even the catastrophic 1947 dock explosion.

Jacksonville, TX

In 1863 the Chapel Hill Manufacturing Co. built an ironworks on this site to make farm and kitchen tools the Confederacy badly needed, smelting native East Texas iron ore with Cherokee limestone and charcoal from nearby hardwoods. A crew that included 100 enslaved workers from Louisiana fed ore down the hillside into the furnaces, where molten iron was cast into molds. By the 1880s at least sixteen ironworks operated across East Texas.

Port Arthur, TX

Days after the January 1901 Spindletop gusher, oilmen J. S. Cullinan, Arnold Schlaet, and former governor James S. Hogg's group formed the Texas Fuel Company, soon reorganized as the Texas Company. Its Port Arthur Works began with two tar stills in 1903 and its first crude still that November, and here innovations like thermal cracking and, during World War II, fluid catalytic cracking for high-octane gasoline and synthetic rubber were perfected. Renamed Texaco in 1959, it is the only surviving company born of the Spindletop boom.

Stamford, TX

Founded in 1930 alongside the Texas Cowboy Reunion, this association gathered aging cowhands—335 of them who had worked the range before 1895—to preserve the customs of the people who raised longhorns and endured droughts and freezes on the open range. Its early ranks even included Will Rogers, publisher Amon Carter, and bandleader Paul Whiteman. A donated bull funded a bunkhouse and roundup hall, and the annual reunion still features chuckwagon meals, square dancing, and what's billed as the world's largest amateur cowboy show.

Austin, TX

The roots of this professional body reach back to 1869, when dentists meeting in Houston drafted a constitution and elected Dr. Menard Michau their first president, winning a state charter in 1871. After struggles in the 1870s the group reorganized as the Texas State Dental Association in 1880, then merged the two efforts under the original charter in 1881. Its 'Texas Dental Journal,' begun in 1883, is the oldest continuously published dental periodical in the Western Hemisphere.

Palestine, TX

Growing out of the postwar county gatherings that showcased new farming equipment, the Anderson County Fair opened in October 1898 and earned the nickname "Texas Fruit Palace" for the region's many orchards. It roamed among Front Street, a horse track, and the courthouse square before settling on leased grounds in 1947, always featuring farm products, produce, and livestock. Its stages hosted the Bill Hames carnival and country stars like Roy Acuff and Hank Williams; though the fair has closed, its Youth Livestock Show carries on.

Wharton, TX

The Texas Gulf Sulphur Company, renamed from the Gulf Sulphur Company in 1918, first produced sulphur in 1919 and soon expanded into Wharton County's Boling Dome. In 1928 it opened a new company town, Newgulf, complete with hundreds of homes, a hospital, school, library, movie house, golf course, and four churches. Over the decades the Boling Dome yielded more than 80 million long tons of sulphur—the largest such mine in the world—until production ceased in 1993 and the town was dismantled.

Austin, TX

Created on April 4, 1917, as automobiles were revolutionizing travel and farmers demanded all-weather roads to market, the Texas Highway Department set out to organize a statewide system backed by federal matching funds. A one-cent gas tax after 1923 and New Deal relief funds during the Depression fueled massive road building, and in 1933 the agency completed this headquarters building. From here DeWitt C. Greer led the department for decades; the building was later named in his honor.

Trinity, TX

East Texas rode a river of pine, and few mills ran it better than the Texas Long Leaf Lumber Company, which bought the Thompson Brothers' Trinity mill in 1922. Under Paul Sanderson's 22-year leadership the operation became a national leader in yellow pine and hardwoods, employing as many as 450 people and pioneering selective cutting, reforestation, and fire protection. During World War II the mill cut up to 140,000 board feet a day—lumber that reached Europe and Africa and earned the coveted Army-Navy "E" Award in 1944. The mill's 1955 closure devastated Trinity's economy and closed a defining chapter in the town's life.

Terrell, TX

The railroad remade this corner of North Texas. A line laid in 1882 was bought a decade later by the famously frugal financier Hetty Green and reorganized as the Texas Midland Railroad under her son Edward. For generations the line carried the freight and passengers that built up towns like Terrell, where its maintenance shops were based, until it ceased operating in 1958.

Austin, TX

The Civil War devastated Texas journalism: the state's newspapers shrank from 82 titles with a combined circulation of 100,000 to fewer than 20 by early 1862 as editors enlisted or ran out of ink and paper. Surviving papers printed on wallpaper, tissue, straw paper, and brown wrapping, often shrinking to half a page, while editors scavenged months-old letters and clippings for news. The 'State Gazette' even kept a pony express rider at the Brenham railhead to rush in Houston papers just 18 hours old.

Panhandle, TX

John F. Weatherly and his family were among the first landowners on the wide-open Texas Panhandle, starting a ranch in 1898 and running the country store, post office, and telephone exchange for their neighbors. The 1924 discovery of oil on their land helped spark the founding of Borger, and the family gave freely—donating ground for churches, schools, and a park. His wife, Maggie Marie Deahl Weatherly, later built Weatherly Hall at Texas Christian University.

Sugar Land, TX

The land here began as a 5,235-acre sugar plantation worked by leased convict labor starting in 1878, when Texas ran a self-sustaining prison system funded by renting prisoners to private operators like Cunningham and Ellis. Despite brutal camp conditions, the leasing program persisted into the 1910s; the state bought the plantation in 1908 and renamed it Imperial State Prison Farm. Reforms of the late 1920s ended leasing and improved conditions, and in 1932 the Art Moderne main building rose here—poured reinforced concrete with a pyramidal-roofed tower—as the first modernized structure in the Texas prison system.

Dallas, TX

Standing on land first owned by Dallas founder John Neely Bryan, this five-story Romanesque Revival building was completed in 1901 for the Southern Rock Island Plow Company after fire destroyed its predecessor. Decades of ordinary commercial tenancy followed — until November 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly fired from a sixth-floor window as President John F. Kennedy's motorcade passed below, and the building entered history forever.

Del Rio, TX

The Edwards Plateau of southwest Texas became sheep-and-goat country in the decades after ranchers like Phillip Palmer and Charles Dissler introduced flocks and herds in the late 1800s. In 1915, alarmed by a wave of livestock thefts, sixty stockmen gathered at Del Rio's Princess Theater to found what became the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers' Association. Thirty signed the charter and chose local rancher J. B. Murrah as first president; the group later moved its headquarters to San Angelo and grew into a major trade and political force.

Fort Worth, TX

Riding the boosterism of the railroad age, Fort Worth promoters built the Texas Spring Palace in 1889—a fanciful two-story hall in Moorish and Oriental styles, its surfaces decorated by women's groups with flowers, seeds, and grasses to showcase the state's agricultural bounty. During its second season, on the night of May 30, 1890, fire tore through the crowded building; the sole death was Alfred Hayne, an English-born man who rushed back inside to save others and died of his burns. Plans to rebuild collapsed in the Panic of 1893.

Austin, TX

After an earlier 1850s limestone statehouse proved structurally unsound and then burned in 1881, Texas financed a grand replacement by setting aside three million acres of public land. Detroit architect E. E. Myers won a national competition, and from 1882 crews raised a Renaissance Revival capitol of Texas Sunset Red granite hauled in on rail lines built for the job. When the Goddess of Liberty was hoisted atop the dome in 1888, the building stood more than fourteen feet taller than the U.S. Capitol.

Rusk, TX

In the late 1880s the Texas prison system laid a short rail line from the Rusk penitentiary to timber stands, where charcoal was burned to fire the prison's iron-ore smelters. Organized in 1894 and built by convict labor, the Texas State Railroad grew to reach Palestine by 1909, championed by two Cherokee County–born governors, James Stephen Hogg and Thomas M. Campbell. After the smelters and prison unit closed, the line passed in 1972 to the state parks system.

Palestine, TX

The Texas prison system first laid a short rail line from the Rusk penitentiary to timber stands where charcoal was burned to fire its iron-ore furnaces. Organized in 1896 and completed to Palestine in 1909, the convict-built railroad was meant to make the prison self-supporting and develop East Texas. After the furnaces closed and financial troubles mounted, the line was leased to commercial railroads until 1969, then handed to Texas Parks & Wildlife, whose inmate-restored tracks and vintage steam trains now draw tourists.

Temple, TX

In the 1930s, drought and wind stripped the southern plains of topsoil in one of the nation's worst ecological disasters, the Dust Bowl. As conservationists like Hugh Hammond Bennett pressed for solutions, Texas responded: after years of failed bills, Gov. W. Lee 'Pappy' O'Daniel signed the state's Soil Conservation Law in 1939, creating locally controlled districts and a state board — headquartered in Temple under first chairman V.C. Marshall of Bell County.

Jefferson, TX

Charles Allen Culberson practiced law in Jefferson before rising through thirty-two years of Texas public office as attorney general, governor, and U.S. senator. As attorney general he recovered more than two million acres of public land claimed by railroads and backed Governor Hogg's antitrust reforms and the Railroad Commission, later leading the Senate minority and its Judiciary Committee.

Texas City, TX

Founded in 1910 to boost profits at the young port of Texas City, the Texas Sugar Refining Company grew into a nine-building, five-million-dollar complex employing hundreds and turning out a million pounds of "Diamond Star" sugar a day. It rode boom and bust — contracting to package sugar under the American Sugar label, sliding into bankruptcy over a mortgage default, reorganizing, and finally closing in 1932. Its buildings, later held by Monsanto, were among those destroyed in the catastrophic 1947 Texas City disaster.

Lubbock, TX

The Livestock Judging Pavilion was among the first four buildings on the new Texas Tech campus and the very first raised specifically for agricultural education, reflecting the school's founding emphasis on farming and ranching in the 1920s. Designed by noted Fort Worth architect Wyatt C. Hedrick, the versatile hall even hosted early basketball games before settling into its role as a monument to agriculture's place in the university's origins.

Lubbock, TX

Completed in 1927 to house the cows of Texas Tech's Animal Husbandry Department, this dairy barn was deliberately designed as an Arts and Crafts bungalow to appeal to the farmers the young college served, setting it apart from the campus's Spanish Renaissance Revival architecture. Architect Wyatt Hedrick laid out a working dairy complete with milk house, milking rooms, calf stalls, and a cast-concrete silo. By 1930 the operation supplied milk, butter, and ice cream to the cafeteria, and students could offset their tuition by selling the products of cows they kept there.

Dallas, TX

Opened in 1931 as the largest suburban theater in Texas, the Texas Theatre was an "atmospheric" movie palace designed to transport audiences, its Venetian-court auditorium glittering with 118 twinkling stars beneath a painted night sky. Built at the commercial heart of Oak Cliff with rare Motiograph sound equipment, it drew crowds for decades. On November 22, 1963, it earned lasting fame when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in its auditorium after the Kennedy assassination, and later renovations, a role in the film "JFK," and a foundation's rescue kept this landmark alive into the twenty-first century.

Beaumont, TX

Along the Gulf prairie of Southeast Texas, early rice growers depended so entirely on rainfall that their crop earned the wry name "Providence Rice." J. E. Broussard changed that: a pioneer grower and irrigator, he founded the Beaumont Rice Mill in 1892 and helped organize the Rice Millers' Association, spurring mills across neighboring counties. The present mill building went up in 1907, and Broussard's descendants have kept the firm running ever since.

Weslaco, TX

Citrus was central to the Rio Grande Valley economy as groves boomed in the 1920s and 1930s — so fast that production outran the means to market it. In 1932, seventeen citrus associations formed the Rio Grande Valley Citrus Exchange, shipping under the TexSun and Tex Maid labels and adding box, juicing, canning, and cattle-feed operations. It became a public corporation in 1956 and closed in 1991, but left a lasting mark on the Texas citrus trade.

Vernon, TX

A lawyer and World War I veteran, T. Edgar Johnson relocated his family from Breckenridge to Vernon and, in 1930, opened the Johnson-Davis Ford Company at this spot. In an era when the automobile was reshaping rural Texas, the dealership not only survived the Great Depression but became a leading regional transportation business for three decades. Johnson also poured himself into civic life, serving on the Pease River Flood Control District and leading the Vernon Chamber of Commerce as its 1937 president.

Fort Worth, TX

Built in 1906–07 by Col. Thomas Marion Thannisch, one of north Fort Worth's early developers, the eastern portion of this block rose to serve the booming Stockyards district as a hotel and office space. As cattle trade swelled the neighborhood, the building was enlarged in 1913 into a three-story commercial structure. Its decorative brickwork, chevron detailing, and corbeled parapet still mark the streetscape of the historic Stockyards.

Amarillo, TX

Established in 1877 by Colorado merchants W. H. Bates and D. T. Beals, the LX was one of the great open-range cattle operations of the Texas Panhandle, spreading across roughly 1,000 square miles between present-day Dumas and Amarillo. LX cattle were trailed north to Dodge City and on to the newly opened ranges of Montana and Wyoming as the buffalo vanished. A British firm bought the ranch in 1884, and when Potter County organized in 1887, the 38 LX cowboys voted to make Amarillo the county seat. Among its hands was Charles Siringo, later famous as a cowboy author and detective.

Richmond Hill, GA

In the mid-1930s the automaker Henry Ford built "the Bottom," the first of his employee housing projects in the Ways Station area of coastal Georgia, later renamed Richmond Hill. The name came from the swampy "bottom" land Ford had cleared and drained; on it rose 75 two- and three-bedroom homes, a recreation building, and a baseball field. Ford charged no rent until 1945, when tax rules required it — whereupon he simply raised workers' pay to cover the modest fifteen-dollar-a-month charge.

Port Huron, MI

On September 25, 1900, the schooner "John S. Martin," a 225-foot vessel loaded with iron ore, was being towed down from Lake Huron by the steamer "Grover." Maneuvering to avoid the wreck of the "Fontana," the "Martin" collided with an upbound ship in the busy, narrow waters of the St. Clair River. The episode is one of countless collisions and sinkings that made the Great Lakes shipping lanes among the most perilous stretches of nineteenth-century commerce.

Scranton, PA

In the mid-19th century, northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite fields ran on ingenious gravity railroads — lines that let loaded coal cars coast downhill by their own weight, with stationary steam engines hauling the empties back up a chain of inclined planes. The Pennsylvania Coal Company's route carried anthracite between the mines around Pittston and the canal at Hawley for more than three decades. This surviving 'Pioneer' car, retired when the gravity line gave way to conventional steam locomotives, was handed over to the City of Scranton in 1909 as a relic of that vanished technology.

Buffalo, NY

Standing where Lake Erie meets the Niagara River, the Buffalo Lighthouse rose in 1832–33 just as the city was booming into the western gateway of the recently completed Erie Canal. Its 44-foot tapering octagonal stone tower guided schooners and steamers into one of the Great Lakes' busiest harbors. Remarkably, it remains the oldest building in Buffalo still on its original site, even after its lantern room was replaced in 1857.

Paducah, KY

This spot marks the western edge of the water at the height of the catastrophic Ohio Valley Flood of February 1937—when more than 90% of Paducah lay submerged, 27,000 residents fled, and damages topped $22 million. The disaster drove over a million people from their homes across the region. In response, a twelve-mile floodwall, the TVA dam network, and upstream reservoirs were built to ensure it could never happen again.

Donora, PA · est. 1995

In late October 1948, a temperature inversion trapped industrial fumes over the mill town of Donora, turning a fog into a lethal, acrid smog. Emissions from the local zinc works choked the valley for days, killing about twenty people and sickening thousands before rain finally cleared the air. The disaster shocked the nation and became a rallying cry for regulating what factories could pour into the sky.

Colorado City, TX

In the late 1870s, cattlemen were the first wave to settle Mitchell County, and the 96 Ranch became one of its anchor spreads. Round Rock merchant James Durham Wulfjen caught ranch fever on an 1884 visit, filed on three sections along the Colorado River, and coaxed his wife Mary Jane from town comfort to a lonely cabin on an old buffalo hunter's camp. He registered the enduring "96" brand in 1885 and, with his sons, grew the outfit to more than 12,000 acres of fine Durham cattle and saddle horses. The Wulfjens also helped raise schools and a church, knitting a working ranch into a lasting community.

Albany, TX

The newspaper known today as The Albany News traces a lively lineage of frontier journalism, beginning with a Union veteran's Frontier Echo founded at Jacksboro in 1875 and carried west to Fort Griffin and then Albany. Rival editors sparred in print through the 1880s until the Echo, Tomahawk, and Star merged into a single paper prized for its coverage of crime, politics, religion, and public morals. A succession of long-serving 20th-century editors gave it stability, and historians still mine its columns for insight into West Texas life.

Terrell, TX

Banking in Terrell began in 1875, just two years after the town's founding, with a private bank opened by C. M. Bivens, John H. Corley, and F. A. Waters. Over the following decades a tangle of mergers and buyouts consolidated the town's competing institutions, with founders and directors including future Texas governor Oscar B. Colquitt and railroad magnate Edward H. R. Green, son of financier Hetty Green. Successive consolidations, including a Depression-era merger, produced the American National Bank, long the county's oldest and largest.

Mercedes, TX

In 1905, at the dawn of the Lower Rio Grande Valley's transformation into an agricultural powerhouse, developer B. F. Yoakum gathered investors to turn arid brushland into irrigated farmland. Their company bought a quarter-million acres and built the townsite of Mercedes as its headquarters, and by 1908 pumps were lifting river water into a growing web of canals. Within a dozen years the system had swelled to three main canals and five pumping plants, and it passed to public water districts in 1930 that still serve Valley farmers today.

Emory, TX

Between 1910 and 1912, James Alexander Amis hand-poured and cured the cast-concrete blocks for this unusual family home in Emory. Amis was a one-man engine of local enterprise, running a sawmill, lumberyard, truck farm, livestock operations, a pickle factory, and an undertaking business. He even sponsored a 1914 hot-air balloon flight over town and later championed building Highway 19 through the city.

Wichita Falls, TX

Completed in 1907 to a design by local architect Joseph C. Pate, the Anderson House rose on a hill overlooking a prospering Wichita Falls. It was home to businessman Guy Dewitt Anderson and his wife—a civic leader who served as a commissioner for the 1936 Texas Centennial—and later to oilman W. E. Connors, whose fortune reflected the region's petroleum boom. The Victorian residence still marks the former prominence of its neighborhood.

Athens, TX

Founded in 1885 by editors J. B. Bishop and George M. Johnson, "The Athens Review" grew out of the printing equipment of earlier short-lived Henderson County papers reaching back to the 1870s. Passing through a string of owners—including a 19-year-old Waco printer and, later, a Van Zandt County colonel who launched the daily edition in 1901—the paper became a durable community institution. For well over a century it chronicled and championed the growth of Athens and the surrounding county.

Upper Dublin Township, PA · est. 2014

On a farm beside the Upper Dublin Friends Meeting, Quaker abolitionists Thomas and Hannah Atkinson and their neighbors ran a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom-seekers—some of whom now rest in the meetinghouse cemetery. The family's antislavery conviction was matched by a gift for enterprise: son Wilmer Atkinson founded the influential Farm Journal in 1877. Circulated nationally, the magazine became a trusted source of practical knowledge and advocacy for American farm families.

Austin, TX

In the bruising years after the Civil War, Texas Democrats founded this newspaper in 1871 to push back against the state's Reconstruction government. It soon passed into private hands, found an early champion in attorney-editor John Cardwell, and began publishing daily in 1873. In 1924 it merged with the Austin American, forming a lineage behind one of the capital's enduring papers.

Lynchburg, VA

In the booming early years of the twentieth century, Lynchburg gained a distinctive landmark: a rare 18-sided building designed by the local architectural firm of Frye and Chesterman. Opened in 1902 as the gift of Randolph Guggenheimer, it was christened "The Aviary" because it originally housed exotic birds and wildlife. Its unusual polygonal form made it a curiosity in the city's park landscape during the Gilded Age era of civic gift-giving.

Cameron, TX

Benajah Jefferson "B.J." Baskin moved to Cameron from Alabama in 1883 and, with his brothers-in-law, bought a mercantile while prospering in farming and ranching. After his first wife died, he remarried in 1895 and around 1899 completed this home, where he and Sue reared nine sons. Originally built in the Queen Anne style, the house was remodeled in the 1930s to a Craftsman look and stayed in the family until 1983.

Burnet, TX

Completed around 1883, this two-story limestone building on the Burnet courthouse square was raised for a local financier and Captain Brandt Badger, a Georgia native and Confederate veteran who ran a drugstore on the ground floor while renting offices above. Over the following century it housed a hardware store, a national bank that failed in the Depression, telephone and loan companies, and from 1948 to 1959 the town post office. Few buildings have worn so many hats.

Latrobe, PA · est. 2013

By the turn of the twentieth century, steamships and railroads had made the once-exotic banana a cheap, everyday fruit in American cities and towns. In 1904, a young apprentice pharmacist named David Strickler put that abundance to delicious use at the Tassell Pharmacy soda fountain here in Latrobe, splitting a banana lengthwise and dressing it with ice cream. He is even credited with designing the boat-shaped dish that still holds the treat today.

Sonoma County, CA

The Sea Ranch, a planned community begun on the Sonoma coast in the 1960s, became a legal flashpoint after California voters passed the 1972 Coastal Zone Conservation Act (Proposition 20). The new North Central Coast Regional Commission's authority over shoreline building clashed with the development's build-out, and the disputes this marker recalls helped define how the state balances private coastal property against public access to the shore.