Transportation

Stephenville, TX

Stephenville grew from a mid-1850s settlement and became the seat of newly formed Erath County in 1856. When the railroad arrived in 1889 it touched off an economic boom, and county leaders commissioned rising architect J. Riely Gordon to design this limestone Romanesque Revival courthouse, completed in 1892. Its central clock tower has dominated the town square ever since.

Millcreek Township, PA · est. 1946

Pennsylvania's only outlet to the Great Lakes came through the Erie Triangle, a wedge of shoreline the state secured in 1792 to gain a harbor on Lake Erie. Surveyors Andrew Ellicott and William Irvine laid out the town in 1795 on ground that had already carried French, British, and American forts. In 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry built his fleet in this sheltered harbor before sailing out to win the Battle of Lake Erie.

Summit Township, PA · est. 1946

Pennsylvania's only Great Lakes port grew out of the Erie Triangle, a strip of Lake Erie shoreline the state acquired in 1792 to gain a harbor. Andrew Ellicott and William Irvine surveyed the town in 1795 on a site layered with earlier French, British, and American forts. Here in 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry assembled the fleet that would sail to victory in the Battle of Lake Erie.

City of Rochester, NY

In the heart of Rochester, the Erie Canal once crossed the Genesee River on a great stone aqueduct — a water bridge carrying boats over a river. The 1842 structure marked here replaced an earlier, smaller aqueduct from the 1820s, reflecting the canal's enormous traffic and the city's explosive growth as the nation's first inland boomtown. Powered by the river's falls and the canal's commerce, Rochester earned its nickname as the "Flour City" by milling grain shipped along this waterway. The aqueduct later carried the city's subway and today underlies Broad Street downtown.

Sharpsville, PA

The Erie Extension Canal carried boats and cargo across northwestern Pennsylvania from 1840 to 1871, linking the Pittsburgh region toward the Great Lakes in the era before railroads reshaped American commerce. Its slack-water channels and locks floated the iron, coal, and goods that fed the growing furnaces of the Shenango and Mahoning valleys. Lock #10, a surviving guard lock at Sharpsville, is a rare physical remnant of that vanished waterway.

Hermitage, PA · est. 1946

For three decades before the railroads swallowed its traffic, the Erie Extension Canal carried boats, iron, and goods across western Pennsylvania between Pittsburgh and the Great Lakes. Opened around 1840, it was a lifeline for the region's early iron industry, floating raw materials and finished metal along a slender ribbon of engineered water. By 1871 the age of rails had made it obsolete, and today a single surviving lock at Sharpsville stands as its stone memorial.

West Salem Township, PA · est. 1947

In the canal-building fever of the early nineteenth century, Pennsylvania cut the Erie Extension to link its interior with Lake Erie. The Shenango Line, running from New Castle toward Conneaut Lake, formally opened to Greenville in August 1840. A private company ran the waterway from 1844 until 1870, but railroads soon made it obsolete and it closed in 1871—its channel still traceable across the landscape today.

Sadsbury Township, PA · est. 1948

This channel was part of the ambitious Erie Extension Canal, which in the 1840s stitched northwestern Pennsylvania into the era's booming inland-waterway network. Engineers raised Conneaut Lake nine feet above its natural level so it could feed water into the canal at its highest point, where the Shenango and Conneaut lines met. The whole system carried boats and cargo from 1844 until 1871, when railroads finally rendered it obsolete.

West Fallowfield Township, PA · est. 1948

To keep the Erie Extension Canal supplied with water, builders diked off part of the great Pymatuning Swamp with a three-mile bank, creating a 600-acre reservoir along the canal's western edge. The state began the work in 1838 and the Erie Canal Company finished it in 1843–44, an early exercise in the large-scale water management that canal engineering demanded. The reservoir was one link in a system that moved goods across northwestern Pennsylvania for nearly three decades.

Sadsbury Township, PA · est. 1948

Beside the later railroad, the faint bed of the Erie Extension Canal still traces where boats once floated through this corner of Crawford County. Nearby the Shenango Line running up from New Castle joined the Conneaut Line coming down from Erie, part of a waterway that tied Lake Erie to the Ohio country. In use from 1844 to 1871, the canal was eventually eclipsed by the very railroads that now run alongside its remains.

Platea, PA · est. 1948

The town now called Platea began life in 1839 as Lockport, named for the remarkable staircase of locks—28 of them packed into just two miles—that stepped canal boats down toward Erie and Lake Erie. The Erie Extension Canal carried traffic here from 1844 until 1871, when the railroad that replaced it was laid partly along the old channel. Traces of that abandoned waterway can still be seen beside the tracks.

Millcreek Township, PA · est. 1948

This stretch of the Erie Extension Canal was part of a system meant to connect New Castle with Erie and the Great Lakes. The Conneaut Line, running from Erie to Conneaut Lake, was begun by the state in 1838 but left unfinished until a private company led by Erie's R.S. Reed completed it in 1843–44. A surviving section of the canal still lies at the foot of the nearby slope.

West Salem Township, PA · est. 1948

From 1840 to 1871, the Erie Extension Canal carried boats and cargo between Pittsburgh and the Great Lakes, part of the ambitious canal-building era that briefly bound the young nation together by water. Mules towed freight along its towpaths until railroads made the slow waterway obsolete. Its old bed can still be traced through Clarksville and for several miles along the road toward Mercer.

Erie, PA · est. 2004

In 1818 a beacon rose over Presque Isle Bay at Erie—the first lighthouse to shine on the Great Lakes—guiding the ships that were beginning to knit the young nation's inland coast into a commercial highway. The unstable ground beneath it forced repeated rebuilding: a brick tower in 1858, and the sandstone tower of 1867 that was the third erected here. Its light marked the growth of Great Lakes shipping.

Hughestown, PA · est. 1997

Near this spot in 1934, Harry Tompkins was walking along the tracks when he was struck and badly hurt by a door swinging from a passing Erie Railroad train. His injury lawsuit climbed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1938 issued one of the most cited decisions in American law: in disputes between citizens of different states, federal courts must apply state common law rather than an invented "general" federal common law. The ruling cost Tompkins his case but reshaped how the nation's courts operate.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Long before highways crossed this brushy corner of South Texas, travelers on the old Presidio Road paused at Espantosa Lake, a reliable watering and camping spot on the earliest route linking Texas with the Mexican state of Coahuila. Generations of teamsters, soldiers, and traders knew the lake, and its lonely reputation gathered a thick crust of legend. In 1876 the spot saw real violence when Texas Rangers cornered and killed a band of outlaws here.

Spring Branch, TX

In the mid-1800s, Fredericksburg Road ran northwest of New Braunfels to one of the first safe crossings of the Guadalupe River, a shallow, solid-rock ford that carried ox-drawn wagons and carriages toward Johnson City and Fredericksburg. German immigrant Charles Esser settled here in 1858 and ran a way-station, and the site gained a postal station named Wesson. County officials chose the crossing for a wrought-iron Whipple truss bridge, completed in 1904 and later removed in 1979.

Ontario, CA

Preserved under shelter in Ontario, this is one of the mule-drawn street cars that once climbed the median of the city's grand Euclid Avenue in the late 1800s. Riders took the car uphill behind a plodding mule, then let the animal hitch a ride on a rear platform for the gravity-powered trip back down, a charming quirk of early Southern California transit.

Eureka County, NV

According to local lore a miner cried "Eureka!" when he struck rich ore here in September 1864, and the town took its name from the shout. Eureka went on to develop the nation's first important lead-silver deposits, and during its furious 1880s boom it boasted 16 smelters, more than 100 saloons, a population of 10,000, and its own colorful railroad — the Eureka and Palisade — reaching 90 miles north to the transcontinental line. Production began slipping in 1883, the smelters shut by 1891, and their sites are still marked by the great slag piles at either end of Main Street.

Navasota, TX

Newlyweds John Thomas and Maude Martin Evans built this Navasota house in 1894 on land given by his mother. Evans worked as a ticket agent for the International and Great Northern Railway while serving his town as alderman and city treasurer. The home is a fine example of 19th-century vernacular building, with a gabled roof and a three-bay porch dressed in turned posts, spindlework, and jig-sawn brackets.

Newburgh, IN

In the early 20th century, electric interurban lines knit together the towns of southern Indiana, and this station served the traction railway linking Newburgh with nearby Evansville. Riders boarded fast, clean electric cars that carried commuters, shoppers, and freight along routes that predated the automobile age. Interurban systems like this one flourished for a few decades before cars and buses drove them out of business.

Santa Fe, TX

When the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad set a depot near here, Henry J. Runge laid out the town of Arcadia in 1890, and a burial ground soon followed to serve the growing settlement. Evergreen Cemetery took in its first known burial in 1897, gained a formal association and state charter by 1907, and later became a resting place for the community's indigent residents. Volunteers restored its grounds in 1972.

Everman, TX

Settlement of this Tarrant County spot, first called Enon, began around 1847. When the railroad arrived in 1903, residents picked up and moved to be near the tracks, renaming their town Everman for a railroad official. The cemetery here had already been founded in 1882 as the Morris family graveyard, after Rosa Morris was buried on the family farm, and it gradually became the community's shared burial ground.

Tuscaloosa, AL

This marker traces how engineers tamed the Black Warrior River for navigation, beginning in 1875 with work to clear snags, trim overhanging trees, and dredge shallow shoals. In 1886 the U.S. Congress authorized three locks to carry boats past the Tuscaloosa Falls, the start of a lock-and-dam system that would open Alabama's interior to steamboat and barge traffic. It captures the Gilded Age push to engineer American rivers into reliable commercial highways.

Lufkin vicinity, TX

For two decades a company sawmill town thrived on the west bank of the Angelina River, springing up after H. G. Bohlssen built a mill in 1919 to cut the surrounding virgin hardwood forests. At its height Ewing held 850 people, a commissary, post office, and a combined church and school — a self-contained East Texas timber town. When men left for World War II service and war industries, the mill shut down in 1944 and the town faded.

Jefferson, TX

The oldest hotel in East Texas, the Excelsior House began as a frame building in the 1850s, with a brick wing added in 1864. During Jefferson's heyday as a bustling riverport, its guest register reportedly included Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes and the poet Oscar Wilde. Rescued from decline, it was restored in the early 1960s by the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club.

Archer City, TX

In 1908 landowner Charles E. Graham granted the Wichita Falls and Southern Railroad a route across his property and laid out a townsite, naming it Anarene for his wife, Annie Lawrence Graham. He built a hotel and secured a post office, cattle pens, and a dipping vat, and the schoolhouse doubled as a place of worship. Oil discovered nearby in 1921 and a refinery in 1938 sustained the town until production ceased and the trains stopped in 1954, after which Anarene quickly faded.

Columbus, TX

Exum Philip Whitfield helped build the young town of Columbus into a commercial hub along the Colorado River, wearing the many hats common to ambitious men on the mid-19th-century Texas frontier — merchant, physician, farmer, and railroad president. His leadership of the Columbus Tap Railway from 1861 to 1866 tied a small Texas town into the region's expanding rail network, even as he twice enlisted in Confederate service during the Civil War. His long life spanned the boom decades that transformed Texas from republic to industrializing state.

Barren County, KY

In 1855, brothers John and Francis Marion Jones opened a general store at Myers Steam Mill on Beaver Creek, and their business became the seed of a whole village. A post office followed in 1856, and the settlement—renamed Coral Hill—soon gathered homes, churches, a school, a blacksmith, a cobbler, and a mill around the store. The Cumberland Trace Stage Line rolled through twice daily on the seven-day, 214-mile run between Nashville and Lexington, until the Civil War ended the route.

Flatonia, TX

Born in Bremen, Germany, in 1820, F.W. Flato immigrated to Texas in 1846 and by 1866 had settled in southwestern Fayette County, where he and his wife ran a thriving mercantile business. When the GH&SA Railway approached in 1873, Flato helped negotiate moving the town closer to the tracks, and the community — renamed Flatonia in his honor, with Flato as postmaster — grew around the line. An energetic entrepreneur, he built a brick factory and steam sawmill and promoted land sales to the immigrants pouring in along the new railroad.

Wake County, NC

After 1928, this half-mile dirt oval near the state fairgrounds helped popularize Indy-style automobile racing in North Carolina. It earned a footnote in motorsport history in 1970, when it hosted the last NASCAR premier-series race run on a dirt track. The site captures the moment stock car racing left its rural dirt roots behind.

Follett, TX

At the far northern tip of Texas—closer to six other state capitals than to Austin—Fairmont Cemetery outlasted the towns that made it. Settlers founded Ivanhoe in Oklahoma in 1901, moved it to the railroad as South Ivanhoe, then in 1917 dragged its buildings on skids across the state line to a new Santa Fe stop named Follett. The cemetery, deeded in 1910, holds its first burial the reinterred body of a mother of six killed by lightning, alongside the children of Mexican railroad workers lost to the 1918 influenza epidemic and more than a hundred military veterans.

Philadelphia, PA

This is an old milestone — a roadside stone that once told travelers they had eight miles yet to go to reach Fairmount, the rise above the Schuylkill River that gave its name to Philadelphia's celebrated Water Works and Fairmount Park. In the era of turnpikes and toll roads radiating out of Philadelphia, such stones were the GPS of their day, spaced a mile apart to measure a journey by horse, stagecoach, or wagon. Weathered and easy to overlook, they mark the routes that carried farmers, merchants, and mail into one of early America's greatest cities.

Fort Worth, TX

The Fairmount-Southside Historic District spreads across roughly 375 acres and 100 blocks just south of downtown Fort Worth, with more than 1,200 contributing homes and buildings. Platted largely between 1883 and 1907 during the boom that followed the railroad's 1876 arrival, its additions—led by the 1890 Fairmount Addition—drew middle-income workers, and streetcar lines soon carried doctors, lawyers, and railroad men to and from their homes. Its cottages, bungalows, and foursquares chart the evolution of domestic style from Queen Anne to Craftsman.

Falfurrias, TX

Falfurrias was founded in 1904 as a cattle-shipping point by rancher Edward C. Lasater, who took the name from a village on land he had bought in 1893. When the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad reached the area, Lasater platted the townsite and built its hotel, store, water and power plants, and cotton gin, then opened the region to truck farming, citrus, and dairying — founding South Texas' first creamery. Later oil and gas discoveries added yet another chapter to the boomtown's growth.

Encino, TX

A surviving stretch of roadway here dates to the very first years of organized state road-building in Texas. In 1918, just a year after the Texas Highway Department was created, engineers drew plans for the Brooks County segment of what became U.S. 281 — a soft sand track that gained a caliche surface in 1920 and concrete paving in 1928. The old fragment records the rapid evolution from wagon-era dirt to modern paved highway.

Marlin, TX

The falls of the Brazos, where the river once dropped about ten feet over a rocky ledge, long served Native peoples and settlers as a landmark, meeting point, and campsite. In 1834 colonizer Sterling C. Robertson founded Sarahville de Viesca here, abandoned in 1836; later came Fort Milam and the town of Bucksnort. As the only hard-bottom crossing for 200 miles and the head of steamboat navigation, the falls gave Falls County its name in 1850 before the river shifted course in 1866.

Cochise County, AZ

This monument marks a high point along a road across the Arizona desert, built in 1913–14 by convict labor under the state's Board of Control. Arizona had just become a state in 1912, and its young government — led by its first governor, George W. P. Hunt — put prison crews to work carving roads through rugged country to knit the new state together. The roster of officials chiseled into the stone reads like a snapshot of Arizona's fledgling government at work.

Anderson, TX

Henry Fanthorp built this structure in 1834 as a home for his bride, Rachel Kennard, then enlarged it into an inn as travelers multiplied. It housed the region's first mercantile store and, from 1835, its first post office, standing at the crossroads where stage lines from Houston and between Nacogdoches and Austin met. Here Kenneth Lewis Anderson, vice-president of the Republic of Texas, died in July 1845.

New Braunfels, TX

Spanish supply caravans on El Camino Real forded the Guadalupe near here in the 1700s, sometimes waiting weeks for floods to recede. In 1887 Comal County hired Ohio's King Iron Bridge Company to build a high-water crossing — a monumental wrought-iron truss stretching more than 640 feet, combining Pratt and Whipple spans on masonry piers. It carried the main Austin-to-San Antonio traffic until a concrete bridge replaced it in 1934, then served locals until fire damaged it in 1979.

Uniontown, PA · est. 1982

Formed from Westmoreland County in 1783, Fayette County honors the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who fought for American independence. Its rolling ground holds Fort Necessity, where a young George Washington fought an early engagement of the French and Indian War in 1754. Later the county's seat, Uniontown, incorporated in 1796, sat astride the National Road, the young republic's great federally built highway west that became U.S. Route 40.

Fayetteville, TX

Fayetteville began as a stage station on the Old San Felipe Trail, founded by members of Stephen F. Austin's first colony of settlers. The surrounding community became home to a remarkable roster of Texas Revolution figures—veterans of the Battle of Velasco, heroes of the San Jacinto campaign, and participants in the ill-fated Mier Expedition. Their presence made this quiet Fayette County town a gathering place of the Republic's founding generation.

Sherman, TX

After the federal district court established a Sherman division in 1902, the U.S. Treasury's supervising architect John Knox Taylor designed this Spanish Colonial Revival–Beaux Arts landmark, completed in 1907 for $140,000. With terra cotta tiles, faux balconies, wrought-iron grillwork, and two stone eagles over the entrance, it commanded Sherman's downtown near the rail station. For decades it housed the courts, a first-floor post office, and a rotating cast of federal agencies.

San Diego, TX

Felipe Valerio (1878–1953) and his wife Jesusa built this store in 1905 as the heart of the small community of La Rosita, roughly halfway between San Diego and Freer. It supplied groceries and goods to a rural stretch of South Texas, and the 1930s oil boom brought enough business to add a gas station and garage; it also served as a bus station, and Valerio was local postmaster from 1917 to 1929. The building closed in 1956 after State Highway 44 was built.

El Paso, TX

Felix Martinez rose from the frontier village of Peñasco, New Mexico, to become one of the most influential Hispanic leaders of the early-twentieth-century Southwest. He served in New Mexico's territorial legislature and published the leading Spanish-language newspaper, La Voz del Pueblo, before moving to El Paso in 1897. There he helped bring electric streetcars and power to the city, backed the Elephant Butte Dam that transformed Rio Grande agriculture, and was named a U.S. commissioner to South America by President Wilson before his death in 1916.

Baltimore, MD

Fells Point was founded in 1726 by Lancashire shipbuilder William Fell, and its deepwater shoreline quickly made it one of early America's great shipbuilding centers. From colonial times through the Civil War, more than six hundred vessels slid down its ways, including the frigate USS Constellation and the swift, raking-masted Baltimore clippers that made the port famous. The neighborhood grew into a bustling maritime community at the heart of Baltimore's rise.

Fenton, MI

When the Detroit and Milwaukee Railroad reached this Michigan town in 1855, it turned a frontier settlement into a stop on a growing rail network — and hotels sprang up to feed and lodge the passengers. The Fenton House rose in that moment, and by the 1880s its dining room had earned a reputation travelers compared favorably to those in far larger cities. It survives as one of the community's oldest continuously used buildings, a relic of the age when the railroad, not the highway, set the rhythm of a small town's life.

Temple, TX

Built in 1907, this Temple house was the family home of James "Farmer Jim" Ferguson and his wife Miriam, a couple who between them won the Texas governorship four times. When Jim was barred from office after impeachment, Miriam ran and won in 1924—becoming one of the first women elected governor of any American state. Their tenures saw the rise of the Texas Highway Department and a new emphasis on public schools.

Wills Point, TX

On May 6, 1901, twenty-one Wills Point men organized the Fin & Feather Hunting and Fishing Club at Thorn Lake, a reservoir the Texas & Pacific Railroad had built to water its steam engines. Stocked with fish and ringed by donated parkland, the lake became a gathering place for annual reunions of old settlers and Confederate veterans, along with fraternal orders, church groups, and community celebrations of music, dancing, and baseball. The club bought the lake outright in 1994 and still maintains it more than a century on.

Panhandle, TX

As the railroad pushed across the Texas Panhandle in 1887, the cattle firm of Finch, Lord & Nelson—already known for bringing the first Hereford cattle to the region—set out to found Panhandle City. They dispatched ten cowboys to stake claims around the new townsite, which flourished as the county seat. This little red barn is a replica of the frontier structures the firm built for those 1887 claimsmen.

Pottsboro, TX

A settlement first grew up near Fort Johnson along the Texas Military Road—also known as the Shawnee Trail—in the 1840s, passing through the names Georgetown and Reevesville before it became Fink. The name honored German immigrant Fiedrick Finke, who reached Grayson County in 1884, when a post office opened in 1897. Never incorporated and eventually absorbed into Pottsboro, Fink kept its identity alive through annual community celebrations begun in the 1960s.

Carson City, NV

On June 23, 1910, aviation pioneer Ivy Baldwin—already famous as a balloonist and parachutist—lifted a 48-horsepower Curtiss biplane off the old Raycraft Ranch west of Carson City, making the first airplane flight in Nevada. The trial run, staged for the Sagebrush Carnival, drew national notice partly because it happened at an unusually high 4,675-foot altitude. Baldwin climbed to 50 feet and covered half a mile before circling back, a modest hop that heralded a new age.

South Houston, TX

On February 18, 1910 — just two weeks before Lt. Benjamin Foulois made the first military flight at Fort Sam Houston — the French aviator Louis Paulhan lifted his Farman biplane over this site in what is regarded as the first documented airplane flight in Texas. The exhibition was staged as a land-promotion stunt by the Western Land Corporation and the Houston Post, which ran excursion trains from downtown; more than 2,500 spectators came the first day and nearly 6,000 the next, thrilled despite high winds that grounded Paulhan's boldest stunts.

Aledo, TX

Organized in 1879, this Baptist congregation first met in a building called Alma Hall, on land donated by a Mr. Middleton in memory of his daughter and shared with a Masonic lodge and Methodist worshipers. After merging with the Ebenezer Church in 1884, the congregation followed the railroad to the growing town of Aledo, worshiping in the schoolhouse until a sanctuary was finished in 1891 and a larger one in 1913. For more than a century it has helped shape the surrounding community.

Arlington, TX

This congregation first organized in the 1870s at Johnson Station, an early Tarrant County settlement and stagecoach stop. When the Texas and Pacific Railroad drove a line through the area in 1876 and founded the town of Arlington, the church—like the community's other institutions—picked up and moved to the new rail town. After decades in temporary quarters and successive sanctuaries, including one lost to fire in 1944, the congregation settled at its present site.

Bangs, TX

This congregation began in 1883 when the Rev. A. R. Watson gathered a small group of Baptist worshipers in the community of Mukewater. When the Santa Fe Railroad created the new town of Bangs in 1890, the church moved there and took the name First Baptist Church, building its first sanctuary in 1891 on land granted by the railroad and a larger one in 1923. It has served Bangs with worship, education, and outreach ever since.

Cisco, TX

When Baptists first gathered here in 1878, they met in a one-room log schoolhouse in the little settlement of Red Gap, organizing seven area churches into an association. The town's fate turned on the rails: where the Texas & Pacific met the Houston & Texas Central, the new town of Cisco rose and Red Gap faded, so the congregation followed the tracks in 1881. Across the next half-century it endured a killing tornado, two building fires, and the bust of an early oil boom, meeting in city hall and schoolhouses until it could rebuild.

Grapeland, TX

As Baptists from surrounding farms moved into the thriving railroad town of Grapeland, they organized this congregation in 1891, worshipping in the public school until a frame church was finished in 1909. Fire destroyed that building in 1948, and it was rebuilt the next year. The church has kept a full-time pastor since 1924 and helped found a local mission in 1986.

Jacksonville, TX

When the International and Great Northern Railroad laid out the new town of Jacksonville along its line in 1872, it set aside lots for churches, and two deacons bought a pair for a Baptist congregation in 1873. Formally organized by twelve charter members in 1884, the church grew from sixty members in 1887 to a two-story brick sanctuary in 1914, then still larger buildings in 1950 and 1977. Throughout, it backed missionary work and Jacksonville College.

Keller, TX

Twenty members broke away from Mt. Gilead Baptist Church to found the Keller Baptist Church in 1882, just as the railroad reached this corner of Tarrant County and drew new settlers. They gathered first in a schoolhouse and a shared union church before establishing themselves, and in 1886 helped charter the Tarrant County Baptist Association. The Rev. Elihu Newton led them as first pastor.