Innovation & Flight

Brownsville, TX

Completed in 1937, the Kraigher House is a nationally known example of International Style architecture, designed sight unseen by Austrian-born modernist Richard Neutra using his nature-attuned 'biorealist' approach in concrete, glass, and steel. Its owner, George Kraigher, was chief pilot and operations manager for Pan American Airways' western division and a decorated aviator in both world wars. After years of decline, the city bought the house in 1999, and a restoration completed in 2008 turned it into a center for training young artists and designers.

Lufkin, TX

Commercial radio reached Angelina County in 1938, when the Redland Broadcasting Association won the area's first license and station manager Darrell Yates built and launched KRBA-AM from a Lufkin drugstore. Broadcasting news, drama, music, sermons, and Lufkin Panther football, the station adapted with the times — hiring women during World War II, previewing rock-and-roll, and introducing African American and Spanish-language programming in the 1950s and 1960s. It broadcasts still, a fixture of East Texas life into the 21st century.

Houston, TX

On May 25, 1953, KUHT-TV Channel 8 went on the air from the University of Houston as the first non-commercial educational television station in the United States. Built on the vision of regents chair Hugh Roy Cullen and station manager John Schwarzwalder, it pioneered televised 'distance education,' broadcasting courses, science and space programming, and local cultural and civic events long before public broadcasting was widespread.

Harford County, MD

The oldest part of this house went up around 1747, when Henry Scarff settled a Maryland farm and raised a modest four-room dwelling; generations of his descendants enlarged it, adding the tall central block by 1849. In 1929 Harvey S. Ladew, a wealthy sportsman and self-taught gardener, bought the old Scarff place—then called Pleasant Valley Farm—and set about transforming its grounds into one of America's most celebrated topiary gardens, sculpting hedges and yews into fanciful shapes still admired today.

Runaway Bay (Bridgeport), TX

After the United States entered World War II in 1941, Lake Bridgeport became an ideal, sparsely populated site for military training, serving as a bombing target range and auxiliary seaplane base for Eagle Mountain Lake Marine Corps Air Station. Beginning in 1942, crews built an administration building, seaplane ramp, and stone and floating targets, and hundreds of Navy and Marine aviators trained here in strafing, dive-bombing, glider work, and tests of the early TDR radio-controlled assault drone. Training took lives, too — two Marine aviators and a local guard died in accidents in 1944.

Vernon Hills, IL

During World War II, the U.S. Navy did something almost unimaginable: it turned the freshwater expanse of Lake Michigan into a carrier-flight-training ground, safely inland and beyond the reach of enemy submarines. Two former Great Lakes excursion steamers were rebuilt with flat wooden flight decks as the training carriers USS Wolverine and USS Sabre, operating out of the Chicago area. Thousands of naval aviators made their first carrier takeoffs and landings on these paddle-wheel carriers before shipping out to the Pacific—among them a young pilot named George H.W. Bush.

Laredo, TX

Military aviation came to Laredo during World War I, when the Army carved auxiliary landing fields across South Texas to relieve an overtaxed Kelly Field in San Antonio, including one north of old Fort McIntosh. As the country geared up for another world war around 1940, that foothold grew into a full training installation, eventually known as Laredo Air Force Base. Thousands of airmen and gunners trained beneath the wide border sky.

Laredo, TX

When telephone service reached Laredo in 1884, the technology was barely eight years old, yet this booming border city on the Rio Grande was quick to wire itself into the modern age. The switchboard operated out of a private residence — the home of Lázaro and María del Refugio de la Garza, later associated with the prominent Bruni family — a common arrangement in an era when the earliest exchanges were run from parlors and front rooms. It was a small but telling sign of Laredo's ambition as a commercial hub linking Texas and Mexico.

Miami-Dade County, FL

During World War II the U.S. Navy blanketed South Florida with air stations to train pilots for the war in the Atlantic and Pacific, and this parkland began life as part of one of them in 1942. A 1945 hurricane wrecked the base, but a huge concrete directional arrow — pointing north to guide aircraft — still survives on the ground. Such arrows were part of early aviation's navigation network, later repurposed and remembered as relics of the flying age.

Del Rio, TX

In 1942, with the nation racing to train pilots for World War II, the U.S. Army built an airfield east of Del Rio, where year-round clear skies and open ground offered near-ideal flying conditions. It was named for Lt. Jack Thomas Laughlin, a Del Rio native shot down over the Java Sea and the first local pilot killed in the war; his widow and infant daughter attended the 1943 dedication. Instructors trained crews on the B-26 Marauder before the base closed at war's end and reopened as an Air Force base in 1952.

Brevard County, FL

Launch Complex 34 at Cape Canaveral was one of the pads that carried America into the space age. From here the mighty Saturn I and Saturn IB rockets rose in the early and mid-1960s, testing the hardware that would eventually send astronauts toward the Moon. It is also the solemn site where, on January 27, 1967, a fire during a ground test of Apollo 1 killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee — a tragedy that reshaped the safety of the entire lunar program.

Brownsville, TX

In the spring of 1915, as revolutionary turmoil spilled across the Rio Grande, the U.S. Army was just beginning to imagine what airplanes might do in war. From the old cavalry drill field at Fort Brown, two Signal Corps aviators took a fragile Curtiss biplane aloft to scout the movements of Pancho Villa's forces along the border. When ground fire struck their machine, it marked the first time an American military aircraft came under fire in hostilities—a small, dangerous milestone in the birth of American air power.

Maxton, NC

From 1942 to 1945, the Laurinburg-Maxton Army Air Base served as a major U.S. Army Air Forces glider training center. Engine-less gliders, towed aloft and released to land troops and equipment behind enemy lines, were trained here for airborne operations — including units that took part in the D-Day assault on June 6, 1944.

Lawn, TX

At the peak of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force ringed bases with intercontinental ballistic missiles, and this site near Lawn held one of the first subterranean Atlas F silos in the country. Sunk 185 feet deep and built of concrete, resin, and steel to survive a nuclear blast, the silo was linked by tunnel to a launch control center manned by a five-person crew of the 578th Strategic Missile Squadron from 1962 until the Atlas program ended in 1965. Most Texans never knew such weapons stood beneath their farmland.

Fort Worth, TX

Born in Greenville, Texas, in 1901, Lawrence Clifton Elliott showed his knack for flight by building an experimental airplane in high school. After training as an Army pilot, he began a 35-year federal aviation career in 1928, based for 25 years at Fort Worth, where he helped mark domestic flight routes, develop aviation weather broadcasting, and set standards for aircraft maintenance and safety. During World War II he served as a regional manager of the U.S. Civil Aviation System.

Logan Township, PA · est. 2000

Built in 1902 by Philadelphia's E. Joy Morris, Leap-The-Dips is a side-friction figure-eight coaster from the dawn of the American amusement-park era, when hundreds of such wooden rides thrilled crowds at trolley parks nationwide. As tastes changed and the others were torn down, this one at Lakemont Park endured to become the last of its kind and the world's oldest known operating roller coaster. It carries National Historic Landmark status.

Nether Providence Township, PA · est. 1955

Built in 1809-10 by Thomas Leiper and surveyed by John Thomson, the Leiper Railway ran about three-quarters of a mile to haul stone from quarries on Crum Creek down to a landing on Ridley Creek. It is remembered as the first railway in Pennsylvania and the first in America to be laid out by survey. Horses drew the loaded cars along its wooden rails decades before the steam locomotive age.

South Strabane Township, PA · est. 1953

In 1876 Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne, a physician and reformer, built the first crematory in the United States on this ground, convinced that cremation was more sanitary than traditional burial in crowded, disease-prone cemeteries. Between 1876 and 1900 the facility performed 42 cremations, a modest number that nonetheless launched a national conversation about death, public health, and reform. LeMoyne himself was cremated and lies buried at the site.

Washington, PA · est. 1953

Built in 1812 in the young town of Washington, this brick house became the home of Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne, a physician remembered as one of western Pennsylvania's most outspoken abolitionists in the decades before the Civil War. LeMoyne pushed his convictions in directions few contemporaries dared, later erecting the first crematory in the United States and championing public education and reform. The house survives as the home of the Washington County Historical Society, keeping that reform-minded legacy in place.

Brookville, PA · est. 2009

In 1912, only a few years after the Wright brothers first flew, Lewis Sandt of Brookville climbed into a fragile early aircraft and flew from Erie into Canada — the first international flight by an American. The feat thrilled crowds and helped fire the public's imagination for aviation. Like so many pioneer aviators, Sandt paid the ultimate price, dying of crash injuries the following year at just twenty-five.

Abilene, TX

Four months after his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh touched down at Abilene's Kingsolving Field during a nationwide goodwill tour, drawing thousands of West Texans to welcome 'Lucky Lindy.' His 'Spirit of St. Louis' was ringed by National Guard troops while a parade of mayors and officials escorted him — alongside Mrs. Mildred Moody, wife of the governor — into town. In a brief speech Lindbergh praised Texas's terrain and weather as ideal for developing civil and military aviation before flying on to Fort Worth.

Town of Hempstead, NY

On the morning of May 20, 1927, a young airmail pilot named Charles A. Lindbergh lifted his overloaded monoplane off the muddy runway of Roosevelt Field and pointed it toward Europe. Thirty-three hours later, alone and sleepless, he touched down at Le Bourget outside Paris — the first person to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic. The crowds that mobbed him made him the most famous man in the world overnight.

Spearman, TX

At about 10:50 on the morning of September 24, 1934, a small monocoupe touched down in a pasture west of here, and the pilot taxied to a windmill and asked the startled resident if he could park in her back yard. He was Charles Lindbergh, flying from California to New York with his wife Anne and, low on fuel, choosing tiny Spearman precisely to dodge the crowds a big town would bring. Word spread anyway; schoolchildren were let out to glimpse the famous aviator before he took off two hours later.

Shelby County, OH

After the catastrophic Great Miami River flood of March 1913 drowned Dayton and killed hundreds, Ohio pioneered one of the nation's first comprehensive flood-control efforts: the Miami Conservancy District. Completed in 1921, Lockington Dam is one of five earthen 'dry dams' the District built across the valley's tributaries — structures that stand empty most of the year and only pool water behind them during dangerous high water, releasing it slowly downstream. Among the largest earthworks of its kind when it was finished, its great length and height reflect the ambitious scale of engineer Arthur E. Morgan's regional plan.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2019

Lois Weber was born on this Pittsburgh site and grew up to become the first American woman to direct films—and one of the most prolific and daring directors of the silent era. Between 1908 and 1934 she wrote, directed, and acted in more than two hundred pictures, tackling controversial subjects like drug addiction, abortion, and poverty that most filmmakers avoided. She also helped pioneer cinematic techniques, including the split screen.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2010

Born on this spot, Lorenzo L. Langstroth transformed beekeeping with his 1852 patented movable-frame hive, whose precise "bee space" let keepers inspect and harvest without destroying the colony. His widely read manual, The Hive and the Honey-Bee, spread the method around the globe. Both the hive design and the book remain in use, earning him the title "father of modern beekeeping."

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

Louis I. Kahn ranks among the most influential architects of the postwar era, a designer who treated mass, light, and structure as the very substance of his buildings. Trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition at the University of Pennsylvania, he later taught there and ran his practice from this location, producing monumental works admired around the world. His buildings are known for their weighty, almost ancient presence married to a modern sense of purpose.

Dallas, TX

Convinced their city's future lay in aviation, Dallas leaders drew crowds to air shows and in 1917 secured a World War I Army flying school, which the Signal Corps named Love Field for Lt. Moss Lee Love, an aviator killed in a 1913 crash. Through the 1920s it hosted flying schools and pioneering air-mail routes and welcomed the likes of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, then served in World War II with a ferrying group, WASP pilots, and a Lockheed modification center. Nearly closed after a larger airport opened in 1973, it revived into one of the nation's busiest airports.

Upper Darby, PA · est. 1989

This modest log structure is the last survivor of several cabins that once lined Darby Creek, built by Swedish colonists who settled the lower Delaware Valley after New Sweden was founded in 1638. Its notched-log construction is a direct link to that short-lived Scandinavian colony, whose building style influenced American frontier architecture. Centuries later the cabin found a second life as a film set, used by Philadelphia motion-picture pioneer Siegmund Lubin for several movies before 1910.

Whitfield County, GA

This roadside memorial marks the death of Lieutenant Theodore Marxon of the Army Air Forces, who was killed in the line of duty on February 5, 1943 — the same winter the United States was racing to build the largest air force in the world. During World War II the A.A.F. expanded from a few thousand aircraft into millions of personnel, training pilots and crews at airfields spread across the South, Georgia among them. Line-of-duty deaths like Marxon's were a grim, constant feature of that buildup, as young aviators flew unforgiving aircraft in the rush to prepare for combat overseas.

Montrose, CO

This static display honors the Colorado Air National Guard and its A-7D Corsair II, a subsonic attack jet flown from the 1970s into the Cold War's later decades. The inscription recalls the unit's championship performance at 'Gunsmoke,' the U.S. Air Force's biennial air-to-ground gunnery and bombing competition, in 1981. Retired aircraft like this one are commonly mounted as gate guardians to commemorate a squadron's service.

Lufkin, TX

First noted in 1907 as a "right newsy little sheet," the Lufkin Daily News grew from a Chicago transplant's one-man venture into a daily paper that mechanized typesetting in 1915 with a Mergenthaler Linotype. In 1940 it printed a record 288-page edition on the first commercially produced southern-pine newsprint in the world, made at nearby Southland Paper Mills. The paper computerized in 1974 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service in 1977.

Lufkin, TX

Chartered in 1902 as a repair shop and parts house for the East Texas sawmills, the Lufkin Foundry & Machine Company was founded by J.H. Kurth, the Kavanaughs, Eli Wiener, and Simon Henderson. Under W.C. Trout the firm moved into the booming oil industry and built the first enclosed geared pumping unit; Trout's 1926 patent for a counterbalanced crank made the company's name known worldwide. By 1939 it had added industrial gears and truck trailers to its lines.

Lufkin, TX

In 1898 two Lufkin friends, Dr. Alexander Denman and Judge Edwin Mantooth, strung a telephone wire between their offices—and the novelty proved so popular they soon formed the Lufkin Telephone Exchange with partner Eli Wiener. Long-distance service followed in 1908, and the company grew alongside the technology itself, eventually absorbing exchanges across much of East Texas before its 1985 reorganization.

Greensboro, NC

While tending his Greensboro drugstore in 1894, pharmacist Lunsford Richardson blended a menthol salve to ease his family's colds. He called it Vicks VapoRub, and the mentholated rub grew into a household staple sold around the world. His small-town pharmacy counter became the birthplace of an American consumer icon.

Eden, NC

Luther Hodges served as North Carolina's governor in the 1950s and then as U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Kennedy. His signature achievement was helping launch Research Triangle Park, the pioneering research hub that began steering the state's economy from textiles and tobacco toward science and technology. His home still stands just east of this marker.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2000

From his base in Wilkes-Barre, Lyman H. Howe ran six touring companies that carried the new marvel of motion pictures to small towns and rural audiences across America. Billing his programs as "high class," he paired films with coordinated sound effects and captured world and local events alike—including President Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 visit to the city. For many Americans, a Howe show was their very first movie.

Houston, TX

Monroe Dunaway Anderson, a Tennessee native, joined his brother and the Clayton family in an Oklahoma cotton business in 1904 and served as its financial officer as Anderson, Clayton & Company grew into the leading merchant in the global cotton trade. He moved the firm's operations to Houston, lived frugally as a lifelong bachelor in downtown hotels, and in 1936 established a charitable foundation. When he died in 1939 he left it $20 million, and the foundation's trustees used that fortune to help win and finance a state cancer hospital — the origin of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and the Texas Medical Center.

Terrell, TX

William Francis "Bill" Long came to Texas as a teenager and found his life's work in the air, flying as an observer with an aero squadron in World War I before building a chain of flight schools across the state. Known as "Mr. Love Field," he trained pilots and mechanics through the 1920s and 30s, then answered the nation's call as war loomed again. During World War II his four schools trained roughly a tenth of U.S. Army aviators and a third of Britain's RAF cadets who came to America, including the No. 1 British Flying Training School at Terrell.

Greenville, TX

What began in 1941 as a federally aided civilian airport for Greenville quickly grew, with Congressman Sam Rayburn's help, into a $5 million Army Air Forces training base. Named for Lt. Truett Majors, the first Hunt County pilot killed in World War II, the field opened fully in January 1943 and trained cadets in BT-13s and P-47s. Alongside American airmen, it trained Women's Army Corps members and Royal Air Force and Mexican Air Force pilots before deactivating in July 1945.

Benton County, WA

Built in a matter of months during World War II, Hanford's B Reactor was the world's first full-scale reactor designed to produce plutonium. The plutonium made here fueled the Trinity test and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, part of the secret, sprawling Manhattan Project. Today it is preserved as a National Historic Landmark within the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

Wellfleet, MA

On the wind-scoured dunes of Cape Cod, Guglielmo Marconi's company raised a ring of towering wooden masts and, in January 1903, sent the first transatlantic wireless message originating on American soil — a greeting exchanged between President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII of Great Britain. The station, built in 1901–1902 by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, proved that words could leap the ocean with no cable beneath them. The Atlantic surf has since claimed the original towers, but the bluff where they stood remains a birthplace of modern communication.

City of Glen Cove, NY

In November 1937, on what would have been Marie Curie's 70th birthday, the Polish community of Glen Cove and their neighbors gathered to dedicate a living memorial — a tree and a bronze tablet — to the Warsaw-born scientist who had died just three years earlier. Curie, honored here as the 'Mother of Radium,' had shared a Nobel Prize in Physics and later won a second in Chemistry, pioneering the study of radioactivity that reshaped both science and medicine. The tree was a gift of Mrs. Harold I. Pratt, part of the wealthy family whose estates defined Long Island's Gold Coast, while the tablet came from Glen Cove's Polish residents proud to claim her as their own.

Helotes, TX

Scottish surgeon Dr. George Frederick Marnoch bought more than 1,500 acres near Helotes Creek in 1858 and hired noted San Antonio builder John M. Fries—designer of the Menger Hotel—to raise this limestone house in 1859. Marnoch practiced medicine and raised livestock, and his son Gabriel, also a physician, became a respected naturalist who discovered new amphibian and reptile species in the Helotes Hills. The distinctive house, with its half-octagon bay towers, stayed in the family until 1947.

Fort Worth, TX

Noted Fort Worth architect Marshall R. Sanguinet built this Shingle Style house around 1894, incorporating an earlier residence on the site that had been damaged by fire. A partner in the influential statewide firm of Sanguinet and Staats, he shaped many of Fort Worth's first multi-story buildings and helped develop the Arlington Heights subdivision where his home stood.

West Lampeter Township, PA · est. 1959

In this modest shop, built in 1719, a Pennsylvania gunsmith helped perfect one of early America's defining tools. By the 1740s the long, accurate flintlock later mislabeled the 'Kentucky Rifle' was taking shape here, its grooved barrel and slim stock ideal for frontier hunting and warfare. German and Swiss craftsmen in Lancaster County refined the design that would carry settlers—and armies—westward.

Carroll County, MD · est. 1970

Between 1763 and 1767, English astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed the disputed boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, using precise celestial observations to settle a long-running colonial quarrel. This particular stretch was run in late July and early August of 1765. Their meticulous line became one of the most famous borders in America.

Harford County, MD · est. 1970

From 1763 to 1767, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon carried their astronomical survey across the countryside to fix the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland and end the provinces' border disputes. This section of the line was surveyed on June 26, 1765. The exacting work stands as a landmark of eighteenth-century science applied to the shaping of colonial America.

New Castle County, DE

Between 1763 and 1767, the English astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon carried out one of the most precise surveys of the colonial era, settling a long and bitter boundary dispute between the Penn and Calvert families. This point served as a base reference from which their famous line was run westward. Guided by the stars and painstaking measurement, they drew the border that would forever bear their names.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2013

In 1763, English astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon set their instruments near Philadelphia's southernmost point to settle one of colonial America's most stubborn quarrels — a boundary dispute between the Penn and Calvert families that had simmered for generations. Their painstaking measurements of a degree of latitude set a new standard for professional surveying, though Indian conflicts and harsh weather to the west delayed the line's completion until 1768. The border they traced would one day take on a meaning far beyond property: the symbolic divide between North and South.

Dickinson, TX

This 1962 home, designed for NASA engineer Maxime 'Max' Faget (1921–2004) from his own conceptual sketches, sits beside Dickinson Bayou. Faget began with NASA's forerunner in 1946 and went on to help design the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft—and in his garage workshop in 1969 he developed the concept for a reusable Space Shuttle, testing balsa-wood models on his own property. He retired in 1981 as one of the essential engineers who carried the United States into space.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2015

Maxfield Parrish, trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and under illustrator Howard Pyle at Drexel, became one of the most popular American artists of the early 20th century. His luminous fantasy scenes and the deep 'Parrish blue' made him a pioneer in blending fine art with commercial illustration and advertising. In 1915 he collaborated with Tiffany Studios on the shimmering Dream Garden glass mosaic located here.

Winston-Salem, NC

Opened in 1919, Maynard Field was North Carolina's first commercial airfield, operating on the edge of Winston-Salem until the mid-1930s. It was named for Lt. Belvin W. Maynard, a North Carolina native and celebrated early aviator. The field belongs to the barnstorming dawn of American aviation, when former military flyers turned open ground into the country's first airports.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2022

In 1796, in a young republic still importing most of its fine goods, John McAllister Sr. opened what is remembered as America's first optical shop near this Philadelphia site. His shop grew into a multigenerational dynasty of innovators: a son who became a pioneering hospital optician, a grandson who first taught the science of refraction to eye physicians, and a great-grandson who helped found a national professional body in 1898. For over a century the McAllisters helped turn eye care from craft into profession.

Sacramento County, CA

As tensions rose across the Pacific in 1936, Congress authorized the Sacramento Air Depot, the installation that would become McClellan Air Force Base. Built to supply and stage air operations on the West Coast, it grew into a major logistics hub during the wartime years that soon followed.

Red Willow County, NE

On the high plains of southwestern Nebraska, McCook Army Airfield trained bomber crews during World War II, one of hundreds of hastily built airbases that turned the rural interior into a vast flight-training ground. Crews learned to fly heavy bombers here before shipping overseas. Today the abandoned runways and scattered structures mark where the war effort reached deep into the American heartland.

Dayton, OH

In the years around World War I, the U.S. Army turned a stretch of Dayton floodplain into one of the nation's first centers for aviation research, fittingly located in the hometown of the Wright brothers. Through the late 1910s and 1920s, engineers here pushed the young science of flight forward, testing new aircraft, engines, and equipment and chasing altitude and speed records at a time when airplanes were still a novelty. As the work outgrew the cramped, flood-prone site, it moved to a larger field nearby that would eventually become Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Fort Davis, TX

McDonald Observatory grew from the bequest of William Johnson McDonald, a frugal Paris, Texas banker who loved reading science and gazing through a small telescope, and who left the University of Texas $800,000 to build an observatory. Erected in the 1930s atop a nearly 6,800-foot peak chosen for its clear, dark skies, it long held one of the world's largest telescopes. Astronomers there made discoveries ranging from interstellar polarization to new planetary satellites.

San Diego, CA

The McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet entered U.S. Navy and Marine service in the early 1980s as a versatile strike fighter, equally capable of dogfighting and ground attack. Flown from carriers and shore bases, it became a workhorse of American air power in the decades that followed. This example, displayed on San Diego's carrier-museum waterfront, represents the modern era of naval aviation.

McGregor, TX

Founded in 1904 by T.E. Streight, the McGregor Mirror soon drew a young typesetter named Chas Hall, who with his wife bought the paper in 1918 and launched a family dynasty that has now run it for three generations. The Mirror still operates in the same building where it began, which houses one of the earliest Model 14 Linotype machines in Texas, bought at the State Fair in 1925 and used into the 1990s. For over a century the paper has chronicled the life of its community.