Transportation

Shippen Township, PA · est. 1949

Long before roads crossed the mountains, travelers moving between the Susquehanna's West Branch and the Allegheny River faced a 23-mile overland carry that began at a "canoe place" near this point. Native peoples and later pioneers hauled their canoes north to Portage Creek, then took to the water again near present-day Port Alleghany. The route stitched two great watersheds together across the Pennsylvania wilderness.

Port Allegany, PA · est. 1949

Here the waters of two great river systems nearly meet, and travelers long exploited the gap. The roughly 23-mile Allegheny Portage carried canoes and cargo overland from the West Branch of the Susquehanna, up Portage Creek to a "canoe place" near this point, where boats could be relaunched down the Allegheny toward the Ohio country. Native people and, later, pioneers used this crossing to move between the eastern and western drainages of Pennsylvania.

Portage Township, PA · est. 1994

Before tunnels pierced the Alleghenies, the mountains stood as a wall across Pennsylvania's ambitious canal system. From 1834 to 1854 the Allegheny Portage Railroad solved the problem with a feat of engineering, hauling entire canal boats up and over the ridge along a series of inclined planes on a 36-mile line between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown. Horses and mules pulled the first cars, later giving way to steam locomotives, with Plane No. 2 serving as the line's headquarters.

Allegany Township, PA · est. 1947

High in Potter County rises the modest headwater of the Allegheny, a river whose importance far outstrips its quiet source. For centuries it carried Native travelers, and later French and British traders and westward-bound settlers, deep into the interior. Winding hundreds of miles to Pittsburgh, it joins the Monongahela to form the mighty Ohio, one of the great arteries of the American continent.

Allen, TX

Fertile prairie and reliable water had drawn settlers here since the 1840s, but Allen truly began in 1876 when the Houston and Texas Central Railroad built a water stop on Cottonwood Creek and platted a town, naming it for railroad founder Ebenezer Allen. In 1878 an outlaw gang said to be led by Sam Bass robbed the depot in what is often called Texas's first successful train robbery. Interurban electric rail arrived in 1908, and late-century growth in the Dallas metroplex swelled the town past 19,000.

Murchison, TX

The Murchison community grew up as a station on the Texas and St. Louis Railway, named for Confederate officer T.F. Murchison, and soon supported a school, post office, cotton gin, churches, and farms of corn, cotton, and peaches. This burial ground served residents from the late 1800s, with James Mack Pettiet's 1890 grave the oldest marked stone and the family of J.C. Allen giving it its name. Pioneers, farmers, ranchers, and veterans reaching back to the Civil War rest here under vertical stones and fraternal markers.

Allen, TX

The town of Allen boomed after the Texas Traction Company's interurban line arrived in 1908, linking Dallas and Sherman with hourly electric passenger cars and twice-daily freight. After first working from a farmhouse, the company bought this property and built a brick depot in 1913. Renamed the Texas Electric Railway in 1917, the line ran from Denison to Waco until it was abandoned in 1948.

Allen, TX

The Allen Water Station traces its roots to an 1848 railroad charter obtained by former Republic of Texas Attorney General Ebenezer Allen, whose line became the Houston & Texas Central. When the H&TC reached Denison in 1873 it completed the first all-rail route linking Texas to St. Louis and the East, and in 1874 the company built a stone dam and water station here to supply its steam locomotives. Worked by American, Irish, German, and Swiss laborers, the station spawned the town of Allen and served until diesels replaced steam in the mid-twentieth century.

Houston, TX

This bend of Buffalo Bayou was Houston's first port, where in January 1837 the steamer Laura tied up and began the ocean-going trade the Allen brothers had envisioned when they founded the city. Though shallow and winding, the bayou made Houston 'the head of navigation' and drew steamers and sailing vessels to its natural turning basin. Generations of dredging, from the 1910 'Houston Plan' onward, deepened the channel into one of the nation's great seaports.

Alleyton, TX

Alleyton was once the oldest permanent settlement and largest town in Colorado County, founded by the Alley brothers—William, John, Rawson, Thomas, and Abraham—all members of Stephen F. Austin's original 300 colonists. Its prominence grew when it became the terminus of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railroad from 1860 to 1867.

Columbus, TX

When war came, the little railhead of Alleyton became a vital artery of the Confederacy. As the terminus of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railroad, it gathered cotton from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas to launch it down the "Cotton Road" toward the Rio Grande. After Vicksburg fell in 1863 and the Mississippi was sealed, this route to neutral Matamoros, Mexico became the South's lifeline, exchanging cotton for guns, clothing, and medicine that flowed back through Alleyton.

Kilgore, TX

These twin Allis-Chalmers reciprocating pumps stand as relics of Kilgore's transformation into an oil boomtown after the Lou Della Crim No. 1 well blew in on December 28, 1930, opening the vast East Texas field. Brought here in 1931 by the Shell Pipe Line Corporation to push crude toward Houston-area refineries, the pumps ran until 1985 and are estimated to have moved over a billion barrels.

Alma, TX

Settlers reached this stretch of Ellis County as early as 1848, but the town of Alma was truly born in 1871 when the Houston and Texas Central Railroad laid track through the county. Landowner C.C. Hemming gave part of his property for the right-of-way and named the new town for his daughter. A busy farming center for decades, Alma faded after the 1950s when Interstate 45 was cut straight through its heart.

Bryn Athyn, PA

In the 1880s, when railroads were reshaping how Americans spent their leisure time, the Alnwick Grove picnic grounds opened along the banks of Pennypack Creek. It was a shrewd bit of promotion: the newly built Philadelphia to Newtown line needed weekend passengers, and a shady grove within an easy train ride gave city dwellers a reason to buy a ticket. Excursion parks like this one turned a stretch of countryside into a destination, and the clatter of holiday-bound trains became a familiar summer sound.

Santa Fe, TX

Named with the Spanish for "high land," Alta Loma rose on the gently swelling ground of inland Galveston County. In 1893 an investment company platted a townsite along a Santa Fe rail line and installed water, electric, and telephone systems to draw settlers, many of whom planted orchards and truck farms. Battered by the great 1900 storm, the town rebuilt and thrived on farming and dairying before its residents drifted toward Texas City's oil jobs; in 1978 it merged with Arcadia to form the city of Santa Fe.

Corpus Christi, TX

Colonel E. H. Ropes swept into Corpus Christi in 1888 with grand schemes—a deepwater port, a railroad to the Rio Grande Valley, and a fashionable suburb called the Cliffs. The three-story, 106-room Alta Vista Hotel was the centerpiece of that dream, designed by young San Antonio architect James Riely Gordon. But Ropes's eastern backers withdrew, and the hotel, finished about 1893, never truly opened; after brief use and long abandonment, it burned in 1927.

Altoona, PA · est. 1947

Altoona was born of the railroad, laid out in 1849 as the mountain-base terminal from which the Pennsylvania Railroad pushed its tracks westward over the daunting Allegheny front. Within a generation the town's yards and shops made it one of the great railroading centers of the nation. In 1867 it hosted a War Governors' Conference, one of several wartime and postwar gatherings that made the city a meeting ground for state leaders.

Alvarado, TX

Alvarado grew from David Mitchell's late-1840s trading post as colonists of the Peters empresario grant settled the area. William Balch, the "Father of Alvarado," had the townsite surveyed in 1854 and donated land for a cemetery, school, and union church; the town was named for Alvarado, Mexico. The arrival of two railroads in 1881 and 1884 sparked a boom, and by 1885 Alvarado boasted churches, schools, gins, an opera house, a bank, a newspaper, and about 2,000 residents. Its community school evolved from the 1875 Masonic Institute into Alvarado High School by 1908–09.

Alvarado, TX

In the 1870s, two pioneer families — the Campbells and the Sansoms — buried their dead on a rise of North Texas prairie, the earliest a seven-month-old child laid to rest in 1876. When the railroad reached Alvarado in 1881, newcomers poured in and buried their own kin beside those first family plots, and by 1896 the Knights of Pythias and Odd Fellows had added lodge burial grounds. During the Great Depression the city took over care of the combined grounds, known ever since as Glenwood Cemetery.

Seattle, WA · est. 1962

This tribute, placed in October 1962, marks the northern terminus of the Alweg monorail — the first commercial monorail in America — built for the Seattle World's Fair. Running between downtown and the fairgrounds, the sleek elevated line dazzled visitors as a glimpse of the future during the fair's April-to-October run. The monorail still glides above Seattle's streets today.

Amarillo, TX

Amarillo rose on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle after 1887, taking its name from the Spanish 'Arroyo Amarillo,' the yellow creek nearby. Chosen as the seat of Potter County and incorporated in 1892, the town grew into the transportation, financial, cultural, and medical hub of the region. From here travelers still reach Panhandle landmarks like the Alibates Flint Quarry, Palo Duro Canyon, and Lake Meredith.

Amarillo, TX

When the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad pushed through the Panhandle in 1887, Colorado City merchants led by J. T. Berry platted Amarillo to serve their South Plains trade, and cowboys elected it the seat of newly organized Potter County. Ranchers J. F. Glidden and H. B. Sanborn of the Frying Pan Ranch soon lured residents to a new townsite addition, and from 1892 to 1897 Amarillo was the nation's largest rural cattle-shipping point. Sanborn's maneuvering to win a key rail junction in 1898 sealed the town's future as the commercial center of the Texas Panhandle.

Amarillo, TX

Amarillo's Natatorium opened in July 1922 as an open-air pool on the High Plains, then was enclosed for year-round use the next year. By 1926 owners had floored over the pool with 10,000 square feet of maple and reinvented "The Nat" as a dance hall, where traveling bands rolling through on Route 66 stopped to play. Though it closed as a public dance hall in the 1960s, it remained one of Amarillo's great social gathering places for decades.

McKinney, TX

In the depths of the Great Depression the Barrow Gang—infamous for Bonnie and Clyde—terrorized the region, but two other members, Raymond Hamilton and Ralph Fults, were just as dangerous. In 1935, after Bonnie and Clyde were dead, the pair robbed the Beaumont Armory and stashed the loot near McKinney. Returning to collect it that February, they were ambushed by Collin County officers at a culvert north of town; though Hamilton was shot, both escaped, ditching their stolen Ford coupe in Weston.

Carmel, IN · est. 1998

In 1923 the intersection of Main Street and Range Line Road in Carmel received what this marker calls America's first automated electric traffic signal, invented by local resident Leslie Haines. Within a few years such signals appeared at thousands of American intersections as automobiles flooded the nation's streets. Haines built the devices for a decade at a small factory just blocks away.

Hellam Township, PA · est. 1947

In the 1820s, iron was an exotic material for shipbuilding, when nearly every hull afloat was made of wood. Yet in York, machinist John Elgar built the "Codorus," an iron-hulled steamboat, and launched it onto the Susquehanna on November 22, 1825. Named for a nearby creek, the little vessel is remembered as the first iron steamboat built in the United States.

Sierra Blanca, TX

At Sierra Blanca in 1881, two rival railroads racing across the desert finally met, completing the nation's second transcontinental line and its long-sought southern route. Rather than build competing tracks, Jay Gould of the Texas & Pacific and Collis P. Huntington of the Southern Pacific struck a deal here to join their lines into one continuous road to the Pacific. Through service began that December, decades after statesmen like Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun first championed the idea in Congress.

New York, NY

This memorial stands for America's merchant mariners — the civilian sailors who crewed cargo and supply ships and whose losses lie in the unmarked depths of the sea. Merchant seamen have long borne heavy casualties, especially in wartime, when their vessels ran gauntlets of submarines and mines to keep the nation supplied. The memorial gives a place of remembrance to men who have no marked graves.

Caldwell, TX

After the Civil War, the Chisholm Trail carried Texas longhorns north to the Kansas railheads and eastern markets, and a branch of that famous route swung from Matagorda County up through Burleson County toward the main trail near present McGregor. Stores like James L. Dean's — later the town of Deanville — and the White Inn sprang up to serve the drovers, turning the cattle path into a commercial road. When rail lines reached the area in the late 1870s, the long drives faded.

Sturgeon Bay, WI

This anchor, raised from northern Lake Michigan in 1979 by the crew of the Coast Guard cutter and buoy tender Acacia, is displayed as a relic of the lake's long maritime past. The waters off Door County are famous for shipwrecks, and recovered gear like this recalls the vessels that once worked these routes. It stands as a tangible link to the age of Great Lakes shipping.

Houston, TX

Founded in Oklahoma City in 1904 by the Anderson brothers and their Clayton in-laws, this cotton firm moved to Houston in 1916 and built a sprawling shipping complex on the new Houston Ship Channel. From its perch in the Houston Cotton Exchange, the company grew into a global cotton trader with more than 24,000 employees before diversifying into foods and textiles and finally being absorbed by Quaker Oats in 1986. Its partners left an outsized mark: the M.D. Anderson Foundation seeded the Texas Medical Center, and Will Clayton helped shape the postwar Marshall Plan.

Port O'Connor, TX

A Danish teenager who crossed the Atlantic at thirteen, Andrew Rasmussen spent sixty years at sea along the Texas coast. After his own schooner wrecked in 1885, he joined the very Saluria life-saving crew that had rescued him, rising by 1889 to command the station that later folded into the U.S. Coast Guard. In 1911 he and his wife Theresa built their home on this spot near the Gulf.

Jasper, TX

Andrew F. Smyth, a riverman and farmer, built this Jasper home in 1849, milling its lumber on site and bringing glass and hardware upriver from Galveston. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark from the era of the young state.

Arlington, TX

A Tennessee-born Cumberland Presbyterian preacher, Andrew Shannon Hayter came to Texas around 1850 and eventually settled in Tarrant County, where he founded churches, a school and a Masonic lodge and earned his living as a surveyor. His frontier knowledge made him the natural choice in 1876 to help route the railroad and lay out a small town between Dallas and Fort Worth. Offered the honor of naming it for himself, he instead chose 'Arlington,' after Robert E. Lee's Virginia estate.

Roanoke Rapids, NC

Andrew Joyner (1786–1856) served as a lieutenant colonel in the War of 1812 and went on to a long career in North Carolina public life, sitting in the state senate from 1835 to 1852. He was also an entrepreneur of the transportation age, leading the Roanoke Navigation Company and the Weldon & Portsmouth Railroad as the region worked to move goods by water and rail. His grave lies a short distance to the south.

Washington, TX

Andrew Robinson Sr. was the first of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists to reach Texas, arriving in November 1821 with his family and later receiving title to over 9,000 acres. He co-founded the town of Washington, ran a ferry at the La Bahia Crossing, and kept a hotel and saloon. In 1835 he fought at the Battle of Gonzales, where his unit carried the original Lone Star flag sewn by Sarah Dodson.

Lufkin, TX

Chartered in 1900 and based in the sawmill town of Keltys, the Angelina and Neches River Railroad began as a humble short line hauling logs from the East Texas woods to the mills of the Angelina County Lumber Company. Its lumber-baron founders were part of a wider trend of timbermen turning to railroading, and the line grew from ten miles of narrow-gauge track and two wood-burning engines into a standard-gauge carrier reaching neighboring counties. With Southland Paper Mills' founding in 1938, it hauled pulpwood and shipped out newsprint.

Linwood, TX

The Angelina River carries one of Texas's gentlest origin stories: the name honors a young Indigenous girl of the Caddo (Tejas) world whom Spanish missionaries met around 1690, prized for her kindness, and who grew to serve as an interpreter between rival French and Spanish parties. Long an artery of travel, the river was crossed by the Camino Real and by "Smugglers' Road," and by 1799 guided settlers inland from the coast. The word "Tejas" itself—the Caddo term for friend—gave Texas its name.

Odem, TX

Angelita was one of several rural communities that sprang up in San Patricio County after the Civil War, its 1880s schoolhouse serving as the heart of local life. When the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railroad arrived in 1904, a town was platted and its depot became a shipping point for cattle and crops. But when the post office and school moved to nearby Odem in 1916, Angelita dwindled and finally disappeared.

Corsicana, TX

The community of Angus sprang up after rail lines reached this stretch of Navarro County in 1871, and a public school opened under teacher Lila Blackburn just three years later. The original two-room frame schoolhouse was moved several times before a brick building replaced it in 1921. After the school merged with the Corsicana district in 1941, the building lived on as a community center.

Aledo, TX

Community founder A. B. Fraser was a Confederate soldier who chose exile in Central America over swearing loyalty to the Union, and it was there his daughter Anneta was born in Honduras. Back in Texas by the 1870s, he built a store and freight station west of Fort Worth and named it for her; when the Texas and Pacific Railroad arrived in 1880 it adopted the name as Annetta. The cemetery that grew up here holds hundreds of graves — civic leaders, farmers, and, in a poignant testament to pioneer hardship, thirty-five infants buried between 1882 and 1910.

Ft. Stockton, TX

Built in 1900, the Annie Riggs Hotel was Fort Stockton's first hotel of real significance, an adobe building trimmed with "gingerbread" woodwork. Its wide verandas, dining room, parlors, and guest rooms welcomed travelers passing through the West Texas town. The hotel remains a landmark of the region's turn-of-the-century frontier hospitality.

Sprigg Township, OH

Before county sheriffs and professional police reached into rural corners of America, neighbors banded together to protect their most valuable and easily-stolen property: their horses. This marker at Bentonville commemorates the Anti-Horse Thief Society of Adams County, a volunteer protective association that rode from 1851 until 1961 — more than a century of members pledging to pursue thieves, recover stolen animals, and stand as a kind of mutual insurance for the farming community. Such societies spread widely across the Ohio Valley and beyond in the 19th century, filling the gap where formal law enforcement was thin or slow.

Kingsland, TX

Where the Llano and Colorado rivers meet, the Austin and Northwestern Railroad built a bridge and depot in 1892 and, soon after, the Antlers Hotel — a two-story wooden resort that opened in 1901 to greet railroad passengers stepping off the train. Guests strolled to a cottonwood park with a pavilion, fished the adjoining lake, and took in river views from the porches. As automobiles eclipsed rail travel the hotel quieted, passing through several owners before being refurbished and reopened in 1996.

Rockdale, TX

This ford across the San Xavier (San Gabriel) River has carried travelers for centuries, in a valley people have inhabited for some ten thousand years. In the 1700s it was home to Native peoples including the Apaches, and despite their objections Spanish missionaries chose the area for three missions and a presidio, used between 1746 and 1757. Settlers followed the fertile ground and reliable water; a 1913 bridge finally rerouted traffic, and in 2004 the crossing joined the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail.

Gilmer County, GA

Stretching roughly 2,000 miles from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Trail was one of the boldest ideas of early American conservation—a continuous footpath along the spine of the eastern mountains, first proposed in the 1920s and stitched together largely by volunteer hiking clubs. The Georgia Appalachian Trail Club, formed in 1930, cut and blazed the trail's southern reaches through these Blue Ridge highlands, and the full path was completed in 1937. A plaque like this one marks not a battle or a birthplace but a shared act of stewardship: ordinary walkers building a wilderness corridor by hand.

Pershing County, NV

In the summer of 1846, brothers Jesse and Lindsay Applegate led a party south from Oregon's Willamette Valley seeking a safer eastern route, reaching a broad Humboldt River meadow—now Rye Patch Reservoir—and blazing the Applegate Trail. Oregon-bound emigrants used it successfully over the next two years. But in 1848, Peter Lassen guided a small wagon train toward his California ranch along a barely passable extension, and the emigrants suffered such loss of life and livestock that it earned the grim name "Death Route." The two branches shared this desert junction.

La Vernia, TX

The Applewhite line reached Texas through Thomas Applewhite, a North Carolina–born War of 1812 sergeant who, with his wife Elizabeth and eight enslaved people, moved to Wilson County in 1853 and bought 214 acres here the next year. Local tradition holds the homestead served briefly as a stage stop on an alternate branch of the Chihuahua Road running from the coast to San Antonio. After emancipation, African American families who had taken the Applewhite name established their own homes nearby and remained in the area for generations, their story bound up with the land's original stone house, largely destroyed by 1950s highway work.

San Antonio, TX

Built by Franciscan friars in 1731, this stone aqueduct carried water from the San Antonio River to irrigate the fields of Mission San Francisco de la Espada. Its round arches span Piedras Pintas Creek in a design that echoes the great aqueducts of Rome. Remarkably, the structure survives in fine condition and still moves water nearly three centuries later—often called the only Spanish colonial aqueduct still functioning in the United States.

Gholson, TX

Aquilla Creek's crossing was notoriously impassable in wet weather, so in 1887 the county judge contracted for an iron span with a hundred-foot approach on each bank. The first firm failed to finish, and the Missouri Valley Bridge & Iron Works of Leavenworth, Kansas, completed the truss bridge in 1892 for $3,000. Two sister iron bridges over the same creek fell in the 1950s, but strong local support saved this one even after a modern concrete bridge took over the traffic in 1998.

Skidmore, TX

The Aransas Creek valley layered one Texas frontier era atop another: the Karankawa who named the creek, Martín de León's 1805 rancho, Irish empresario colonists arriving via Copano Bay in the 1830s, and Anglo stock-raisers who followed. Later Frank Skidmore introduced barbed wire, windmills, and registered Herefords, and gave right-of-way to the railroad in 1886. Ranching, freighting, and trucking sustained life on the rich prairie.

Port Aransas, TX

Begun in 1855 and first lit in 1856, this 67-foot tower with its imported French lens marked the natural Gulf pass to Aransas and Corpus Christi Bays. During the Civil War, Confederates buried the lens and damaged the tower in 1863 to keep its light from aiding Federal forces. Rebuilt after the 1919 hurricane, it was finally decommissioned in 1952 once the shifting pass moved south of it.

Port Aransas, TX

Aransas Pass, the natural inlet separating San Jose and Mustang Islands, became a strategically vital point along the Texas coast during the Civil War. Early on, Confederate vessels moved cotton and supplies freely through the pass, but a Union blockade soon tightened, and Federal forces under Captain J. W. Kittredge seized control until his capture in 1862. Control seesawed through 1863 and 1864, and after Union forces withdrew, Confederate ships again slipped supplies through the pass to sustain the wartime South.

Chester, PA

This granite monument marks a point on one of America's strangest borders: the Twelve-Mile Circle, the great arc swung twelve miles out from the old courthouse cupola in New Castle to define Delaware's northern edge — the only truly curved state boundary in the nation. The line traces back to the 1680s, when overlapping royal grants to William Penn and the Calverts set off more than a century of boundary quarrels that even Mason and Dixon could not fully resolve. In 1892 the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey carried out precise field work to re-establish where the arc met the Pennsylvania–Delaware line, and commissioners from both states set this stone to fix the spot. Each face speaks for a different party to the agreement — Delaware to the south, Pennsylvania to the north, the surveyors to the west, and the year 1892 to the east.

Santa Fe, TX

The town of Arcadia sprang up along the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad in 1890, and its oldest surviving congregation, Arcadia Christian Church, organized in 1894. Early worshipers shared a building with the local Methodists until a tornado around 1909 spurred them to raise their own sanctuary in 1910. A steam-locomotive bell given by the Santa Fe Railway in 1961 hung in the belfry — a fitting nod to the railroad that created the town.

Archer City, TX

Carved from the Peters Colony land grant, Archer County was created in 1858 and finally organized in 1880, taking its name from Branch Tanner Archer, a Texas commissioner to the United States and secretary of war for the Republic of Texas. Permanent settlement began in 1874, and the railroad's arrival in 1890 helped fix Archer City as the county seat.

Crystal Lake Township, MI

This marker tells of Archibald Jones and the Benzie County River Improvement Company's ill-fated 1873 scheme to connect Crystal Lake with Lake Michigan. The project went badly wrong: instead of a navigable link, the digging drained the lake and dropped its surface by some twenty feet, permanently reshaping the shoreline. The blunder—remembered locally as "the Tragedy of Crystal Lake"—inadvertently created the broad beaches the lake is known for today.

Argyle, TX

First settled in the 1850s by families of the Peters Colony land grant, this Denton County community became the town of Argyle in 1881 when a Galveston developer platted it along a new rail line. Neighboring settlements fed its early growth, and several small country schools eventually consolidated into its district. A fire leveled the business district in 1895, but residents rebuilt, and the town has since ridden the tides of nearby urban growth.

Bonham, TX

Brothers Joseph and William Arledge arrived from Alabama in the 1850s and built successful farms that gave rise to the Arledge Ridge settlement. Joseph ran one of Fannin County's earliest freight lines to the port of Jefferson, while William established a cotton gin and donated land for a school, church, and, in 1876, this community burial ground. Its graves include early settlers and Civil War veterans, and a cemetery association has cared for the site since 1948.

Fort Worth, TX

In 1901 Fort Worth business leaders courted Armour & Co., one of the nation's largest meatpacking firms, offering land and incentives to lure a branch plant to the city. Construction began in 1902, and the sprawling operation just north of here helped make Fort Worth the livestock capital of the Southwest, spawning a web of supporting businesses. The plant ran for more than half a century before closing in 1962.