Mexican-American War

Corsicana, TX

A Scottish native, Alexander Beaton emigrated to the United States in 1843 and reached Texas in 1848 after serving in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War. Settling in Corsicana in 1850, he practiced law and, in 1871, chaired the finance committee that persuaded the Houston & Texas Central Railroad to route its line through town — an effort that earned him the street bearing his name. A Mason, Methodist, and amateur geologist, he raised a family there with his wife, Elizabeth Jane McKinney.

Victoria, TX

Built in 1883, this Victoria home belonged to Alexander Lowe — a veteran of the Mexican War who went on to serve as mayor and to work as a businessman and wheelwright. He was also a pioneer in refrigerated shipping, an innovation that transformed how perishable goods moved to distant markets.

Maysville, KY

Born about five miles west of Maysville in 1808, Alexander W. Doniphan moved to Missouri and became a militia general known for restraint—famously refusing an order to execute Mormon leader Joseph Smith and others after the 1838 disturbances. His lasting fame came in the Mexican War, when he led the 1st Regiment of Missouri Mounted Volunteers on a remarkable 3,600-mile campaign, defeating larger Mexican forces with a poorly equipped command. His march remains one of the epic feats of American volunteer soldiering.

Hallettsville, TX

Tied to the Hackberry community, this burial ground took its name from settler A.G. Andrews, who by 1866 had given land for a cemetery and Baptist church. Its oldest marked grave, from 1860, belongs to Mexican War veteran Alfred Morrow, and among those buried here is Joseph Lawrence, a veteran of the Battles of Plum Creek and San Jacinto who at his death in 1897 was believed the oldest living veteran of the Texas Revolution. A local association still tends the grounds and gathers for annual homecomings.

Riviera, TX

In 1845, with the annexation of the Republic of Texas approved, the United States sent Gen. Zachary Taylor to occupy the contested land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. After wintering and drilling near Corpus Christi, his army—whose rosters included two future presidents and many future generals—marched south in March 1846 along a road roughly traced by this spot. Skirmishes and the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma soon followed, prompting the U.S. declaration of war.

Santa Clara, CA

During the American conquest of California in the Mexican-American War, this spot saw the small but decisive Battle of Santa Clara — remembered locally as the "Battle of the Mustard Stalks" for the fields the combatants fought through. On January 8, 1847, Californio leader Francisco Sanchez surrendered himself, his arms, and his American prisoners to Lieutenant Grayson, closing the skirmish that had erupted days earlier. An oak tree long marked the site of this armistice.

Corpus Christi, TX

After Texans accepted annexation on July 4, 1845, General Zachary Taylor massed some 4,000 U.S. troops at Corpus Christi, holding the new state's coast for eight months before marching to the Rio Grande and the opening of the Mexican-American War. Among the men encamped here were three future presidents—Taylor, Pierce, and Grant. A sulphur-rich artesian well drilled beside the camp later became the heart of Artesian Park, deeded to the city in 1854 as one of Texas's earliest public parks and cherished for generations after.

Seymour, TX

Baylor County was carved out on the Texas frontier in 1858 but not formally organized until 1879, once settlement had pushed westward. It honors Dr. Henry W. Baylor, a physician who served as a Ranger captain and fought in the Mexican War before dying young in 1854. Seymour became its county seat.

Sonoma, CA

On June 14, 1846, a band of American settlers known as the Bear Flag Party raised a homemade flag on this spot and declared California's independence from Mexican rule, launching the short-lived Bear Flag Republic. Weeks later, on July 9, 1846, Lieutenant Joseph W. Revere lowered the Bear Flag and raised the American flag, following the U.S. seizure of Monterey by Commodore John Drake Sloat. This monument, erected by the Native Sons of the Golden West and the State of California, commemorates those events.

Sonoma, CA · est. 1907

This monument, dedicated on Independence Day in 1907, commemorates the raising of the Bear Flag at Sonoma on June 14, 1846. On that day American settlers declared an independent "California Republic" in what was then Mexican territory. The gesture lasted only weeks before U.S. forces asserted control during the Mexican-American War, but its bear-and-star emblem endured as California's state symbol.

Sonoma, CA · est. 1914

In June 1846, a small band of American settlers in Mexican Alta California seized the town of Sonoma and raised a hastily made flag bearing a grizzly bear and a lone star, proclaiming a short-lived "California Republic." The uprising, remembered as the Bear Flag Revolt, unfolded just as the United States and Mexico slid into war. Within weeks U.S. forces took control, and the improvised banner became the ancestor of California's state flag.

Sonoma, CA

On June 14, 1846, a band of American settlers in Mexican Alta California seized the town of Sonoma and raised a hastily made flag bearing a grizzly bear and a lone star, declaring the short-lived 'California Republic.' The Bear Flag Revolt lasted only weeks before U.S. forces folded it into the Mexican-American War, but it gave California its lasting emblem. This monument, erected on Independence Day 1907 near Sonoma Plaza, commemorates that day.

Sonoma, CA

Set at the very spot where the Bear Flag was raised in 1846, this time capsule was sealed in 1996 during the 150th-anniversary commemoration of that event, to be opened at the bicentennial in 2046. It links the founding moment of California's short-lived republic to the community that still gathers on Sonoma's plaza to remember it. The marker turns a historic site into a bridge between generations.

Leming, TX

Brite Cemetery has served Atascosa County since the 1850s, formally set aside when pioneer Thomas Ransdele Brite died in 1859, though his infant son's 1854 grave is the earliest marked burial. Brite came to Texas in 1839, served in the Republic of Texas Army campaigns and the Mexican-American War, and became the county's first tax assessor-collector. Among those buried here are Texas Ranger and Mexican-American War veteran Robert E. Neill and San Jacinto veteran Alfred Kelso, alongside many other early settlers.

Bastrop, TX

Alexander and Althea Brooks raised this Greek Revival home of native cedar and pine by 1851, in the early years of Texas statehood. In 1865 it passed to James Harvey Wilbarger—son of famed frontier survivor Josiah Wilbarger—who as a teenager had ridden with the Texas Mounted Volunteers in the U.S.–Mexico War. His family held the property for more than a century, adding a carriage house and cook's house by 1887.

Brownsville, TX

Carved from Nueces County in 1848, Cameron County was named for Ewen Cameron, a captain of the ill-fated Mier Expedition executed at Querétaro. Its ground along the lower Rio Grande witnessed the opening clashes of the Mexican War and, remarkably, the last land battle of the Civil War at Palmito Ranch in 1865. Few American counties can claim to bracket two wars so precisely.

Brownsville, TX

Created in 1848 in the wake of the U.S.-Mexican War, Cameron County sits where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf—ground crossed by explorers, empresarios, soldiers, and cattle kings for four centuries. This 1936 state monument catalogs the sweep of that history, from Cabeza de Vaca and the Escandón colonists to Zachary Taylor, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and border figures like Richard King and Mifflin Kennedy. The roll call reads as a layered map of who shaped the lower Rio Grande valley.

Brownsville, TX

When the United States declared war on Mexico in May 1846, thousands of volunteers poured into Brazos Santiago, and General Zachary Taylor established Camp Belknap here that summer to hold them. Spread across a narrow rise of high ground, it may have been the largest volunteer encampment of the war, sheltering an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 men. No enemy ever attacked, but exposure, disease, and squalor killed many before the troops moved upriver by year's end.

Campbellsville, KY

Settled around 1800, Campbellsville was established by the legislature in 1817 and named for brothers Adam and Andrew Campbell, who came from Virginia to their father's land grants. When Taylor County—Kentucky's 100th—was formed from Green County in 1848, the town became its seat. The county honors Gen. Zachary Taylor, the Indian-fighter of the War of 1812, Black Hawk, and Seminole campaigns whose victory at Buena Vista in 1847 made him a national hero and carried him to the presidency in 1848.

Corpus Christi, TX

Soldier, colonist, and explorer, Captain Enrique Villarreal once held title to most of what is now Nueces County through the vast Rincon del Oso land grant, awarded by Mexico in 1831 though he had ranched it since 1810. Raiding forced him off the land until peace came in 1824, and as a Mexican officer he fought through the Mexican War for Independence, the Texas Revolution, and the U.S.-Mexican War. When Henry Lawrence Kinney founded his trading post on Villarreal's grant, he set in motion the sales that would make him the land's eventual owner—and give rise to the city of Corpus Christi.

El Paso, TX

Kentucky-born trader James Magoffin and New York-born miller Simeon Hart both built fortunes in the El Paso borderlands—Magoffin from a trading post at Magoffinsville and his deep contacts in Mexico, Hart from a mill grinding a hundred barrels of flour a day. When the Civil War came, both threw their commercial networks behind the Confederacy, funneling supplies to the 1861–62 Arizona–New Mexico campaign and trading Southern cotton for war goods through Mexico and Europe. Hart's arrangements even helped thwart a planned Union thrust across the Rio Grande in 1863.

Corpus Christi, TX

Forbes Britton, a Virginian and West Point graduate, first came to Corpus Christi as an army captain during the Mexican War of 1846 and returned as a civilian to build this classical revival house in 1849–50. He ranched, ran a shipping firm, helped fight for a deep-water channel, and served in the Texas senate, even carrying Governor Sam Houston's word to President Buchanan in 1860. During the Civil War the house served as a hospital for Confederate and then federal forces, and it is recognized as the oldest surviving structure in the city.

High Island, TX

Born in Marseilles in 1805, Charles Cronea shipped to America as a cabin boy at thirteen and soon fell in with the privateers of Jean Laffite, cruising the Gulf off Spanish Mexico. Settling in Texas, he joined the fight for independence at the Siege of Bexar and, by some accounts, guarded prisoners near the Battle of San Jacinto; a decade later he marched under General Zachary Taylor in the war with Mexico. Awarded 1,280 acres as a surviving veteran of the Texas Revolution, the old adventurer farmed near Sabine Pass and finally settled his family at High Island, where he is buried.

Orange, TX

Born in Mississippi around 1820, Charles Holmes Saxon came to Texas in 1842 and, after serving in the Mexican War, helped organize Orange County in 1852, sitting on its first commissioners court and later serving as sheriff. He farmed, made shingles, and rode into the Civil War, seeing action across Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana before dying in 1919 at nearly a century old.

Bandera vicinity, TX

Amasa Clark, a veteran of the Mexican War, became the first permanent settler of Bandera and worked an orchard and nursery on this homestead for decades—living to the remarkable age of 101. This family cemetery, opened with the 1883 burial of his first wife, holds several generations of Clarks, including Amasa, two wives, and many of his nineteen children.

Yorktown, TX

Yorktown owes its founding to two very different frontiersmen. Kentucky-born John York came to Texas in 1821 and served as a captain in the 1835 siege that drove the Mexican army from Bexar, later giving the land for the town before dying in a fight with Indians in 1848. German immigrant Charles Eckhardt, a veteran of the Texas independence struggle and the Mexican War, surveyed a trade route from the coast to New Braunfels, built the town's first house, and made Yorktown a link in his freighting network.

Bellmead, TX

The Concord Baptist Church organized in 1866, and the first burials in its adjoining cemetery came in 1869 with Elizabeth Parrish and her triplets. The graveyard is now nearly all that remains of Concord, a vanished town that once had a store, cotton gin, school, and church. Among the many veterans resting here is Elija Goodnight, considered the last U.S.-Mexico War veteran buried in Texas.

Cross Plains, TX

The land holding Cross Plains Cemetery was first granted to James Knight, one of Stephen F. Austin's original colonists, as reward for service in the Mexican-American War, before passing through a string of absentee owners. The first burial came in 1882 — the young son of "Uncle Johnnie" Laird — and in 1905 the Steele family deeded the ground to cemetery trustees. Today it holds the town's founding families, its first mayor, John A. Wagner, many military veterans, and members of its fraternal lodges.

Monterey, CA

Built by the Mexican government in 1827, Monterey's Custom House collected duties on foreign shipping when the town was the capital of Alta California, Mexico's far northern province. U.S. consul Thomas O. Larkin contracted to enlarge it in 1841, and on July 7, 1846 Commodore John Drake Sloat raised the American flag over the building, signaling California's passage from Mexican to U.S. rule. Later restored, it stands today as California's first registered historical landmark.

Webberville, TX

David Crawford Edmiston came to Texas as a boy in 1835 and spent his life on its contested frontier—riding with the Texas Rangers in frontier defense, again during the Mexican War, and serving in the Confederate army during the Civil War. He and his wife Rhoda raised eleven children on their Webberville farm, whose surviving buildings still mark the land the family worked.

Bethany, PA · est. 1947

In this house in Bethany, David Wilmot was born on January 20, 1814. A Pennsylvania congressman, he gave his name to the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, a proposal to bar slavery from any territory won in the Mexican War. Though it never became law, the Proviso set off one of the fiercest debates in American politics, hardening the sectional divide over slavery's westward spread in the years before the Civil War.

Dripping Springs, TX

Dr. Joseph M. Pound served in the Mexican War as a teenager, earned his medical degree in Louisville, and in 1853 settled near Dripping Springs, where his home doubled as a clinic and hospital for rich and poor alike. As a Confederate surgeon he contracted scarlet fever, recovered, and returned to a frontier regiment. The marker vividly recounts the desperate improvisations of Civil War medicine—bark teas standing in for quinine, opium milked from garden poppies, sutures of horsehair and silk, and the first widespread use of anesthetics and female army nurses.

Poteet, TX

Edward Brown (1808–1886) came to Texas by way of New Orleans, volunteering for the Republic of Texas Army in 1836 and staying on after independence. When General Woll's Mexican force recaptured San Antonio in 1842, Brown helped defend the town and was among the prisoners marched to the notorious Perote Prison, freed only through U.S. diplomatic pressure in 1844. He later served in the U.S.–Mexico War, then settled on a preemption grant along the Atascosa to raise his large family by farming and ranching.

Mercedes, TX

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo fixed the Rio Grande's main channel as the U.S.–Mexico line, but the river's wandering course bred endless disputes. In 1906 an unauthorized canal shifted the Rio Grande and stranded the 419-acre El Horcon tract—home to the freewheeling resort of Rio Rico—on the Mexican side, where it drifted under Mexican control. After the U.S. ceded the tract to Mexico in 1970, a Rio Rico native's lawsuit secured U.S. citizenship for some 200 people born there before the transfer.

Hemphill, TX

James Trehane Ener left Cornwall in 1835, fleeing hard times, and by the 1840s had settled along Housen Bayou in southeastern Sabine County, where he farmed, worked as a blacksmith, and rented land to sharecroppers. He served in a Texas mounted volunteer company during the U.S.–Mexico War before being murdered near the county courthouse in 1859. The cemetery that bears his name began with the burial of one of his infant daughters and holds mostly his kin and descendants.

Corpus Christi, TX

In June 1845 Texans voted to join the United States, and President Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to mass troops near the Rio Grande as a boundary dispute with Mexico simmered. Corpus Christi became the army's staging headquarters, and on September 12, 1845, the steamer Dayton was ferrying soldiers to St. Joseph's Island when its boilers burst and the burning vessel sank near McGloin's Bluff. Eight soldiers died and were laid to rest here in a same-day military funeral chosen by General Hitchcock. Their gravestones name men born from Poland, England, Canada and across the young republic.

Cooke County, TX

Massachusetts-born Daniel Montague came to Texas in 1836 and took up the dangerous work of surveying the Fannin Land District, helping settlers stake claims while defending against raids. He joined the 1843 Snively Expedition against Mexican traders in the Republic's disputed borderlands and captained a company in the Mexican War of 1846. When Cooke County was organized in 1848 he became its first surveyor, and like fellow surveyor John H. Reagan he was honored with a county bearing his name.

Brownsville, TX

Established as Fort Taylor in March 1846 on the disputed Rio Grande, this post was soon renamed to honor Major Jacob Brown, killed defending it that May—among the opening actions of the Mexican-American War. Made permanent in 1849, Fort Brown was abandoned and reoccupied through the Civil War, held at different times by Federal and Confederate troops, and garrisoned by the U.S. Army into the twentieth century. It stands as the oldest permanent fort in Texas.

Brownsville, TX

General Zachary Taylor named this post during the Mexican-American War for Major Jacob Brown, who died defending its earthworks in 1846, and a permanent reservation was laid out in 1848. Its roster of young officers reads like a preview of the Civil War—Grant, Meade, and Thomas among the future Union generals, Longstreet, Bragg, and Kirby Smith among the Confederate ones, with Robert E. Lee serving here in the late 1850s. The fort changed hands repeatedly during the Civil War, was burned in 1863, and a new permanent post rose in 1867–69.

Brownsville, TX

In the spring of 1846, U.S. troops under Zachary Taylor threw up an earthwork fort on the north bank of the Rio Grande opposite Matamoros, and its bombardment helped ignite the Mexican-American War. First called Fort Taylor, it was renamed for Major Jacob Brown, who died defending it in May 1846. The massive earthen bastions—an 800-yard perimeter ringed by a deep ditch—guarded the contested new border for decades afterward.

Rio Grande City, TX

Established in 1848 at Davis Landing on the Rio Grande, this post was named for Major David Ringgold, mortally wounded at the Battle of Palo Alto in 1846 during the Mexican-American War. Its garrison came and went through the mid-19th century—abandoned in 1861, reoccupied after the Civil War—and a young Robert E. Lee passed through in 1856 and 1860 while stationed in Texas. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Comanche, TX

Connecticut-born and Yale-educated, Ashbel Smith studied medicine in France before coming to Texas in 1837, where he served as the Republic's surgeon-general, diplomat to England and France, and its last Secretary of State. He fought in the Mexican War, commanded the 2nd Texas Infantry in the Civil War, and later became the first chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents, shaping the young state's ideals of scholarship.

Kountze, TX

Braxton Bragg (1817–1876), North Carolina–born and a veteran of the U.S. Army in the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor, became a Confederate general who won renown capturing guns and prisoners at Shiloh in 1862 and in the Southern victory at Chickamauga in 1863. Later a military adviser to President Jefferson Davis, he was captured and paroled after the surrender, then settled in Galveston as chief engineer building the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway. When that line reached this area a junction was named Bragg — a railroad and oil-field town of 1901–1934 that is now a ghost site.

Sonoma, CA

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807-1890) was born in Monterey and rose to become the most powerful figure in Mexican northern California, founding the Pueblo of Sonoma in 1835 and commanding its frontier defenses. He lived through California's passage from Mexican rule to American statehood, later serving as a state senator and Sonoma's mayor while pursuing ranching and winemaking. This bilingual marker honors the breadth of his roles as soldier, statesman, and pioneer.

Castroville, TX

In 1846, as the United States went to war with Mexico, General John Ellis Wool gathered 3,400 troops in San Antonio for an intended march on Chihuahua, crossing the Medina River and passing through Castroville before orders redirected him to reinforce General Zachary Taylor. The path his army traced—echoing an earlier Mexican retreat—hardened into the Chihuahua Road, a vital artery of westward trade. Castroville's central position and reliable water made it a thriving stop for travelers and freighters.

New York, NY

This granite obelisk at the crossing of Fifth Avenue and Broadway honors William Jenkins Worth, a soldier from Hudson, New York, whose career traced the young republic's expanding military ambitions. He earned his commission in the War of 1812, spent the 1820s shaping the officer corps as Commandant of Cadets at West Point, and won his greatest fame in the hard-fought campaigns of the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. When he died in 1849, the city he served brought him home, and the monument that rose over his grave became one of the very few burial sites in Manhattan marked by a public memorial.

Sarita, TX

On March 15, 1846, General Zachary Taylor camped beneath a tree at this spot as he marched his "Army of Occupation" south from Corpus Christi toward the Rio Grande. Within weeks the clash of his troops with Mexican forces along that river would ignite the Mexican-American War. Taylor's popularity as a wartime commander soon carried him to the White House.

San Antonio, TX

Georg Heinrich Buchsenschutz, a veteran of the Mexican War, came to Texas in 1850 and by 1860 had bought more than 200 acres of farmland here, marrying Friederike Schulmeier the same year and raising ten children. When their eldest daughter died at fifteen in 1881, she was buried on the homestead, and her father joined her in 1895; a dozen more family members followed over the next half-century. The small family cemetery, recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2001, remains open to descendants.

Westhoff, TX

Born in England in 1816, George Lord immigrated to Canada and then New Orleans before joining volunteers for the army of the young Republic of Texas in 1837. He fought through the turbulent 1830s and '40s—the Córdova Rebellion, the Somervell Expedition, and the ill-fated Mier Expedition, where he survived the notorious Black Bean lottery and imprisonment at Perote—then served as a Ranger in the Mexican War. In 1849 he joined the Gold Rush to California, marrying Kate Myers along the way, and the couple returned with a fortune in gold to establish a Longhorn ranch in DeWitt County.

Blue Ridge, TX

George Washington Smith left Tennessee for Texas in 1834, arriving on the eve of revolution. He served as an artillery private in the Texas War for Independence and later as a Texas Ranger sergeant in the Mexican War under the famed Col. John Coffee "Jack" Hays. He settled his family in Collin County in 1852 and was buried near Blue Ridge after his death around 1876.

Fredericksburg, TX

Once crossed by the trails of roving Indian peoples, these Hill Country lands were settled by German immigrant pioneers in 1846, with a group of Mormons founding Zodiac the next year. The county was created and organized in 1848 and named for Richard Addison Gillespie, a Texas frontier defender and Mexican War captain who was killed at the Battle of Monterrey in 1846. Fredericksburg became its seat.

Coldspring, TX

George Tyler Wood came to Texas from Georgia in 1839 and settled along the Trinity River, rising through the Republic's Congress and the Annexation Convention. He left the state Senate to fight in the Mexican War, and his battlefield reputation carried him to the governor's chair in 1847. His single term wrestled with Indian conflict, the Santa Fe boundary dispute, and a heavy public debt, while establishing a state library and penitentiary.

McKinney, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1825, James W. Throckmorton came to the Texas frontier as a boy in 1841, served as a young hunter and scout, and fought in the Mexican War before turning to law and politics. Though he defended the right of secession, he was one of only seven delegates to vote against leaving the Union in 1861, then served the Confederacy during the war. Elected governor in 1866, he was removed the next year by General Philip Sheridan as 'an impediment to Reconstruction,' and later returned to serve in the U.S. Congress.

San Antonio, TX

Hamilton P. Bee was a fixture of early Texas public life, serving as secretary of the first state Senate, a legislator, and Speaker of the House in the 1850s before commanding troops in campaigns on the frontier. He fought as a cavalry lieutenant in the Mexican War, then rose to Confederate brigadier general, guarding the vital cotton road to Mexico and leading a brigade in the 1864 Red River Campaign, where he was wounded. His career threads through nearly every conflict of mid-19th-century Texas.

Munfordville, KY

Formed in 1819 from Hardin and Barren counties, Hart County was home to the Buckner family. Simon Bolivar Buckner, a West Point graduate and Mexican War captain, became a Confederate general and later governor of Kentucky; his son, Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., commanded the U.S. Tenth Army and was killed on Okinawa in 1945. Both rest in the Frankfort Cemetery.

Manheim, PA · est. 1962

Samuel P. Heintzelman was born in this Manheim house in 1805 and rose through the U.S. Army across two of the nineteenth century's defining wars. He earned distinction in the Mexican War of the 1840s and went on to command troops as a Union general in the Civil War. He died in Washington in 1880 and was buried in Buffalo.

Huntsville, TX

A West Point graduate who served on the frontier and in the Mexican War, Henderson Yoakum settled in Huntsville in 1845 and became a lawyer, civic leader, and close friend of Sam Houston. He helped found Austin College, serving as its first librarian and a teacher of law, and in 1855 published a landmark two-volume history of Texas. His descendants remained active in the state's cultural life.

Seguin, TX

Henry Eustace McCulloch's career spanned Texas's most formative struggles: he rode in the Texas Ranging Service in 1839–42, captained Rangers in the Mexican War, and served in the legislature and as a U.S. Marshal before the Civil War. He then rose to brigadier general in the Confederate Army, commanding the District of Texas and a brigade in the Vicksburg Campaign. He lies buried here beside his wife, Jane Isabella Ashby.

Corpus Christi, TX

Pennsylvania-born Henry Lawrence Kinney arrived on Corpus Christi Bay in 1838 and, a year later, opened a trading post on the bluff that would grow into a city. Much of his early trade was contraband run to Mexican Federalists, but his fortunes soared when General Zachary Taylor chose his outpost to stage the U.S. Army before the Mexican-American War. Kinney served as quartermaster, sold town lots to Taylor's soldiers, sat in the legislature for years, and chased grand schemes—a failed 1851 fair, a doomed Nicaragua venture—before dying in Matamoros in an unmarked grave.

Dripping Springs, TX

Dr. Joseph M. Pound and his wife Sarah raised the first log rooms of this Hill Country home in 1853, using hand-hewn timbers, square nails, and enslaved labor. The house served the frontier as church, hospital, and waystation — Methodist circuit riders preached here, and the sick came rich or poor. Pound had soldiered as a private in the Mexican War and would serve as a Confederate surgeon in the Civil War.