Transportation

Abernathy, TX

Abernathy sprang up in 1909 when the Santa Fe Railroad pushed south from Plainview toward Lubbock, and it was named for Monroe G. Abernathy, treasurer of the company that promoted the townsite. It thrived as a cattle railhead, absorbing buildings moved from the vanished town of Bartonsite, and centered its civic life on the "Old Tabernacle" from 1918 to 1947. In its earliest days, before roads existed, plowed furrows guided visitors to the town doctor's house.

Amherst, TX

Amherst began in 1913 as a cattle-shipping point on the Pecos & Northern Texas Railroad, serving the vast 300,000-acre Springlake Ranch that W.E. 'Colonel Bill' Halsell and his son Ewing had established in 1902. When the High Plains economy shifted from ranching to farming in 1923, the Halsells carved up their land for new settlers at $25 an acre and set aside town lots, a hotel, and ground for schools and churches. A general store, post office, and bank followed, and by 1930 the town's population reached 964.

Antelope, TX

Antelope took its name from the springs where pronghorn watered and where the Kiowa once camped. Platted in 1875 along the Henrietta–Graham mail route, it grew into a bustling supply stop for cattle drives heading north, boasting a spa built around its mineral wells, a hotel, school, and 400 residents by 1887. Ranching and later oil kept the community alive well into the twentieth century.

Aquilla, TX

Named for the nearby creek, Aquilla was surveyed in 1879 as the Texas Central Railroad pushed through Hill County, and it quickly grew into a busy shipping point crowded with stores, hotels, churches, and even a health spa. At its peak in the 1910s the streets filled with ranchers, farmers, and traveling salesmen, and one of Texas's earliest chartered state banks did business here before the town settled into a quieter farming life.

Bedias, TX

Long before Anglo settlers arrived, the Bidai people—an agricultural nation regarded as the region's oldest inhabitants—gave their name to the Bedias creeks and, eventually, the town. The first white settlement here rose in 1835 under Thomas P. Plaster, and in 1903 the coming of an International & Great Northern Railroad branch pulled the population toward a 'New' Bedias, though residents fought to keep the old name rather than honor a railroad official. The area is also famous for its 'Bediasite' tektites, glassy stones the Indians called 'jewels of the moon,' and as the one-time home of Sarah Dodson, credited with sewing the first Lone Star flag.

Calvert, TX

Calvert began as "Sterling" in Sterling C. Robertson's 1820s colony and became a rowdy, booming cotton-export and trade center — its inscription conjures ox-carts, saloons, and casino tables piled with gold. It served as a Civil War mustering and supply point, then moved two miles to meet the Houston & Texas Central Railroad in 1868, taking a new name from Judge Robert Calvert, a landowner descended from Lord Baltimore. The railroad cemented its place as a regional cotton hub.

Caldwell, TX

Originally called Yellow Prairie and settled by Alexander Thomson, Jr. — an early Texas patriot and partner of colonizer Sterling C. Robertson — this community relocated to the railroad tracks when the line came through in 1880. It was renamed in 1884 for Capt. H.C. Chriesman, a surveyor for Stephen F. Austin. Today it serves the surrounding ranches.

Claude, TX

Claude sprang up in 1887 as the Fort Worth & Denver Railroad pushed across the Panhandle, and it took its name from Claude Ayers, the engineer of the first passenger train through town. First resident Jerry Cavanaugh donated the townsite, and in an 1890 county-seat contest the deciding vote was famously cast by legendary rancher Charles Goodnight. Churches, a school, and the incorporation of the town soon followed, and noted Panhandle historian Laura V. Hamner taught among its early teachers.

Corrigan, TX

Tucked in the piney woods of East Texas, Corrigan began about 1860 when settler James B. Hendry donated land for a townsite. The coming of the Texas & New Orleans Railroad in the early 1880s sparked a timber boom, and the town — named for railroad official Pat Corrigan — soon boasted a hotel, stores, a blacksmith shop, and even a ten-pin bowling alley. Lumber, ranching, and farming still anchor the local economy.

Craft, TX

First called Independence, the town of Craft sprang up along the railroad in the 1890s and took its name from Thomas J. Craft, its first postmaster and leading citizen. In 1896 local growers launched commercial tomato production here, and within two decades this corner of East Texas shipped an astonishing ninety percent of the state's tomatoes. Though the town faded in the 1930s, its brief boom made it a linchpin of a regional farm economy.

D'Hanis, TX

In 1847, twenty-nine families led by Theodore Gentilz settled here on behalf of Henri Castro, the Alsatian-born empresario whose colony brought European immigrants to the Texas Hill Country in the years just after annexation. The community took its name from Guillaume D'Hanis, an official of Castro's colonization society. When the Southern Pacific Railroad later bypassed the settlement, residents relocated to a new townsite, leaving behind what is now called Old D'Hanis.

Dawn, TX

Named by hopeful pioneers who saw in it "the dawning of a new country," Dawn gained the county's second post office in 1889. Its first building was a Santa Fe Railroad boxcar pressed into service as a station house in 1905, and W.E. Neal and his sons developed the townsite in earnest in 1914 with a lumber yard, hotel, bank, and store. It settled into life as a center of the surrounding farming country.

Dawson, TX

Dawson grew out of Spring Hill, the oldest settlement in Navarro County, which Republic of Texas Indian agent Dr. George Washington Hill founded in 1838 as a trading post to ease relations with Native peoples. Britton Dawson, a San Jacinto veteran who claimed his land as service bounty, settled at Spring Hill in 1846 and built a home that served as a stagecoach stop. When the Texas & St. Louis Railroad — the "Cotton Belt" — laid tracks through in 1881, Dawson's sons donated 100 acres for a townsite, and the population of Spring Hill promptly picked up and moved to the new railroad town.

Dinero, TX

Settled in 1838 by farmers and ranchers, this town began as "Barlow" after a local ferry operator, and its people helped organize Live Oak County in 1856 and started a school by 1858. Around 1872, rumors of buried "dinero"—Spanish for money—gave the town its lasting name. It moved a mile west in 1913 to meet a new rail line, later piped natural gas toward Houston, and counted among its residents the celebrated Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie.

Douglass, TX

Michael Costley, remembered as "The Father of Douglass," reached Texas in 1832, enlisted in the Texas Army, and patrolled the Old San Antonio Road before laying out a town he expected to flourish. A river port on the Angelina shipped its cotton to the Gulf and a stagecoach line came through, but Costley was shot dead in a 1837 gunfight before his vision fully took hold. Named for Republic of Texas congressman Kelsey Harris Douglass, the town grew into a modest but busy waystation of inns, shops, and churches on the road between the Angelina and Neches rivers.

Eagle Lake, TX

The town takes its name from a lake where, in 1821, an exploring party led by Stephen F. Austin killed an eagle. A stage line linking Houston and San Antonio set up lakeside headquarters in 1851, and the townsite was platted in 1856, just before the railroad arrived in 1859. Over the decades Eagle Lake reinvented itself again and again — cattle and farm market, then rice-growing center after 1898, then oil town and shipper of sand and gravel, and finally a mecca for fishing and goose hunting.

Ennis, TX

Ennis sprang up in 1872 as a market stop on the Houston & Texas Central Railway, named for a railroad official, and quickly gathered churches, schools, and a mixed population of Anglo, French, Mexican, and — after 1874 — Czech settlers working its cattle and cotton economy. A coup in 1892, when local backers won the railroad's division shops, secured the town's industrial future.

Fashing, TX

Platted in 1915 near the old San Patricio Trail, this town was first called 'Hickok' until the post office rejected the name and residents borrowed 'Fashing' from a popular tobacco tag reading 'Fashion.' Early life centered on schools and churches, but the ground beneath proved the town's fortune: oil arrived in 1946, the first major uranium discovery in Texas came at nearby Tordilla Hill in 1954, and gas and sulfur plants followed. Fashing became a genuine center of mid-century mineral development.

Fulshear, TX

The land here was granted in 1824 to Churchill Fulshear, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists. His son, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence, built a four-story brick mansion in the 1850s and bred and raced horses; his protégé John Huggins went on to train the first American horse to win the English Derby. The town itself was platted in 1890 when the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad arrived, quickly becoming a local trade center.

Grandview, TX

Grandview owes its name to a traveler who took one look at the rolling Johnson County prairie and exclaimed "What a grand view!" Settled in 1850 on a land grant from Governor Elisha M. Pease, the community hauled its supplies by ox wagon from Houston and built up a church, post office, and the county's first Masonic lodge before the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad pulled the whole town a mile southeast in 1883. Incorporated in 1891, it survived a devastating 1920 fire that razed 135 buildings and rebuilt, merging its name into one word in 1925.

Iowa Park, TX

Iowa Park was one of countless towns that leapt up ahead of the rails crossing Texas in the 1800s, born in 1885 as "Daggett's Switch" on the Fort Worth and Denver City line. Union Pacific builder Gen. G. M. Dodge promoted the townsite, and land agents recruited Midwesterners — many from Iowa — laying out a plat full of parks in 1888. Two decades of farm prosperity gave way to frenzy in 1918 when oil was struck nearby, sending speculators and land prices soaring until the boom burned out by 1925 and a steady farm economy returned.

Knippa, TX

Reached by the railroad in 1882, this fertile stretch of Uvalde County was settled in 1887 by freighter George Knippa, who lured friends to the land he knew from hauling between East Texas and Mexico. A bearded stranger tried his luck at gold-mining here in 1899, a post office arrived in 1900, and the platted town—once called Chatfield—took Knippa's name. The Trap Rock Mine, opened in 1913, still works the local stone.

Latexo, TX

This East Texas town began as Oldham, was renamed Starks' Switch when the International & Great Northern Railroad laid a sidetrack in 1872 to serve a nearby sawmill, and became Latexo when a Louisiana land company platted 3,000 acres of fruit land and a townsite in 1907. After logging stripped the timber, settlers turned to fruit and cotton, and around 1915 Latexo became the first Houston County school to teach agriculture. The town incorporated in 1979 and added civic buildings through the 1980s.

Lovelady, TX

Lovelady arose when Houston and Great Northern Railroad investors ran their line through a grant belonging to Cyrus Lovelady, drawing settlers from nearby communities like Nevil's Prairie, Pennington, and Weldon. With its post office, livery, blacksmith, and hotels, the town quickly became a market and shipping point; by 1876 school met in a log house, and an 1881 two-story building was shared by Baptists and a Masonic lodge. Incorporated in 1927, it settled into life as a center for ranching and pulpwood.

Midway, AL

This granite boulder in Midway marks both the memory of Confederate soldiers and the route of the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, a named road promoted in the 1910s by the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a coast-to-coast counterpart to the Lincoln Highway. Monuments like this one, placed decades after the Civil War, fused transportation boosterism with Lost Cause commemoration, planting Confederate memory along the emerging national road network. Its placement reflects the early automobile age as much as the war it names.

Nash, TX

Nash began about 1873 as "T. C. Junction" where the Transcontinental Division met the Texas & Pacific Railroad, and was later called Park for its first postmaster before taking the name of T&P superintendent Martin Manny Nash in 1906. A one-room school opened in 1885, replaced by ever-larger buildings across the decades. Among its notable residents was Dr. Joseph Abner Dodd, who served six terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

Penelope, TX

The International and Great Northern Railroad laid out Penelope in 1902, naming it for an official's child, and drew settlers — Anglos and Czechs alike — from the older nearby town of Zee Vee. The new depot town prospered and incorporated in 1913. Later improvements, including good well water found in 1959, kept the small community going into the modern era.

Pettus, TX

Pettus grew up around the sprawling 1850s ranch of John Freeman Pettus, son of one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists. The sleepy cattle country woke in 1886 when the San Antonio & Aransas Pass railroad arrived, turning the town into a shipping hub where wood-burning engines took on water—one stop even hosting President Taft's train in 1909. A 1929 oil strike remade it again as the 'oil capital of Bee County.'

Riverside, TX

Riverside sprang up in 1872 as the Houston & Great Northern Railroad pushed through Walker County, where landowners gave earth, timber, and rock to win shipping facilities. The post office moved in from riverside Newport, whose wharves sat idle when the Trinity ran low—a telling shift from river to rail. The town grew to include churches, a school, a two-story hotel, a cotton gin, and other businesses, and in the 1920s gained Fuller's earth refining plants.

Saint Jo, TX

Saint Jo began in the 1850s as "Head of Elm," a settlement at the headwaters of the Elm Fork of the Trinity River founded by hopefuls chasing rumors of gold. Its fortunes turned when the Chisholm Trail routed cattle drives through town around 1868, bringing stores, saloons, and a growing population. Renamed for pioneer Joe Howell — with "Saint" added, one story says, because he was a teetotaler — the town incorporated in 1886 and has held near 1,000 residents on farming and ranching ever since.

Shepherd, TX

Shepherd grew from riverboat roots along the Trinity, where Old Drew's Landing shipped out cotton and tobacco for a scattering of pioneer settlements. When the Houston East & West Texas Railroad pushed through in the late 1870s, investor Benjamin A. Shepherd platted a townsite in 1875 and gave it his name, and a post office, physician, hotel, and church soon followed. Once a hub of the East Texas lumber industry, it settled into life as a steady market town of the piney woods.

Tatum, TX

Albert Tatum, a wealthy Alabama planter, settled in the 1840s where Trammel's Trace crossed the Grand Bluff Road, building a plantation home with enslaved labor that became a social center of the area. His family gave land for a railroad station in 1882, and his son Paul—"Uncle Fox"—laid out the townsite in 1892, after which farming and lumbering carried the community forward. A lake and power plant brought a fresh wave of growth in the 1970s.

Teague, TX

In 1905 this was a sleepy farming settlement called Brewer, named for an 1835 land grantee, until the Trinity & Brazos Valley Railroad chose it as its shops and main division point between Houston and Fort Worth. Renamed Teague for relatives of railroad magnate B. F. Yoakum, the town exploded almost overnight—a 1906 lot sale drew crowds by special train, a band playing 'Dixie,' and 5,000 pounds of barbecue. Brick buildings and boosterish dreams of '10,000 by 1910' followed, but as passenger rail declined, so did Teague, which drifted back to quiet with its old depot now a museum.

Big Lake, TX

For generations travelers found this stretch of West Texas arid and unwelcoming, and the surrounding lands — given to the University of Texas in 1876 — were leased out for cattle. Everything changed when driller Carl Cromwell brought in Santa Rita No. 1 in 1923, the first great oil gusher of the Permian Basin. The company town of Texon rose the next year to house the workers, growing to some 2,000 residents with stores, a hospital, a theater, and a celebrated baseball team, until the operation wound down and the town closed in 1962.

Thrall, TX

Thrall began in 1876 as an International & Great Northern Railroad siding called Stiles Switch, growing into a shipping point for the Swiss and German farmers who settled the area. Its 1901 post office honored Methodist minister and historian Homer S. Thrall, and nearby oil discoveries spurred incorporation in 1915. In September 1921 a two-day cloudburst dumped 38.21 inches of rain here, setting a world record, and since 1961 Texas A&M has run an agricultural research center in this still-farming town.

Coleman County, TX

Founded around 1855 as a trading post serving cattle baron John Chisum's ranching country, Trickham grew into a rowdy crossroads on the great cattle trails during the decades after the Civil War. Legend holds that pranks pulled at the local general store earned it the name "Trick'em" when settlers sought a post office.

Claude, TX

Laid out in 1887 by R.E. Montgomery, a son-in-law of railroad builder Gen. G.M. Dodge, Washburn briefly served as the terminus of the Fort Worth & Denver City line and became a junction connecting it to the Santa Fe. The Panhandle town boasted the plains' first newspaper, along with hotels, saloons, and stores, before it dwindled as rail patterns shifted. A handful of civic founders, including a judge and banker, are remembered as its town faded.

Weimar, TX

On land that was once part of Texas's first Anglo-American colony, Weimar grew into a townsite in 1873 when the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio rail line arrived and D. W. Jackson donated half the land. Named for Weimar, Germany, the town incorporated in 1875 and by 1887 boasted a booming cotton economy, many stores, two newspapers, and an opera house that was among the first between Houston and San Antonio.

Whitsett, TX

Whitsett sits on an 1835 Mexican land grant that once served as a watering stop and camp for cross-country cattle and hog drives. The town proper sprang up in 1913 when the San Antonio, Uvalde & Gulf railroad arrived and a post office opened, and it was soon shipping thousands of steers to northern markets. The area later gained wide renown for the beekeeping enterprise H.A. Coffey launched in 1924, alongside oil, uranium, ranching, and farming.

Winnie, TX

Winnie grew up on an 1835 Mexican land grant that stayed sparsely homesteaded until the railroad arrived. It took its name from Fox Winnie, a Kansas contractor who helped build the Gulf & Interstate Railway through the area in 1895, and a Galveston-based improvement company sold town lots to draw settlers. The young community weathered a punishing run of storms, freezes, and a hurricane that stranded its train in Galveston for three years, before rice, cattle, and later petroleum gave it firmer footing.

Somerset, KY

In 1801, when Kentucky was barely a decade into statehood and still a raw frontier, the new county of Pulaski needed a seat of government. William Dodson deeded forty acres for the purpose, and the fledgling town of Somerset took root beside a dependable spring. That water source was no small thing on the frontier, where a town lived or died by its access to it — the path settlers wore down walking to drink from the Old Town Spring became Somerset's busiest street.

Dickinson, TX

Dickinson is the oldest mainland settlement in Galveston County, named for John Dickinson, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old 300 colonists. Laid out on a bayou land grant surveyed in 1830 by Austin himself, the community grew through early homesteads whose cabins still stand and, later, a booming produce trade that earned it fame as a Strawberry Capital of the World. Rail lines, a Methodist church, a post office, and a public school followed as the town matured.

Sulphur Springs, TX

Named for Texas Ranger and Mexican War veteran Gen. Edward H. Tarrant, this town became the first seat of Hopkins County, established on land donated by Eldridge Hopkins. Through the 1850s it thrived with a courthouse, tannery, steam mill, Masonic lodge, school, newspaper, and a Methodist college. But its creek-ringed site was hard to reach, and after Reconstruction-era officials moved county records to Sulphur Springs, the legislature made that town the permanent seat in 1870—leaving only a rural community and old cemetery to mark Tarrant.

Tilden, TX

Laid out in 1913 with 189 city blocks along the San Antonio, Uvalde & Gulf Railroad, Zella was one of countless townsites platted across early-20th-century Texas in the hope that rails and rainfall would bring prosperity. A depot, store, school, and hotel rose, and a water well was drilled — but the First World War and the 1917 drought choked off growth. Few lots ever sold, and the dream of a thriving railroad town faded.

Toyah, TX

Toyah began in 1881 as a division point on the Texas & Pacific Railway, complete with shops, roundhouse, hotel, and cafe—though water was so scarce it had to be hauled in from Monahans and sold by the barrel. A stage carried passengers and mail onward, and by 1882 the cattle-shipping trade drew the famous cowboy-detective Charles Siringo here to hunt rustlers.

Marietta, TX

Trammel's Trace, established in 1813 by horse trader and smuggler Nicholas Trammell, was one of the earliest immigrant roads leading pioneers into Spanish and Mexican Texas. Running from the great bend of the Red River down toward Nacogdoches, it linked the Southwest Immigration Road from St. Louis to El Camino Real, often following even older paths worn by game and Native travelers. The crossroads community that grew here, Old Unionville, faded after the Civil War, though the trace's route survived into the twentieth century as a county road.

Texarkana vicinity, TX

Trammel's Trace entered Texas at this point, carrying a flood of pioneers down from the 1813 road out of St. Louis—among them Stephen F. Austin and his colonists, along with legends like Sam Houston, James Bowie, and David Crockett. Running southwest to Nacogdoches, it linked the Southwest Trail with the old King's Highway toward Mexico. It was surveyed by Nicholas Trammel, a scout from a family of U.S. surveyors, and remains the only trail to bear his name.

Hughes Springs, TX

Blazed in 1813 by Nicholas Trammel, this pioneer trail ran from St. Louis down into Texas, knitting the older "Southwest Trail" to the King's Highway that led toward Mexico. It entered Cass County at Epperson's Ferry and arced through Chalybeate Springs, later Hughes Springs. In the decades before roads and railroads, such traces carried settlers, traders, and adventurers into the contested borderlands of a still-Spanish, soon-Mexican Texas.

Jefferson, TX

Trammel's Trace began, like many Texas roads, as a Native American footpath before surveyors and travelers put it to new use. In 1824 government scout Nicholas Trammel began opening the roughly 180-mile route from Fulton, Arkansas, to Nacogdoches, Texas, and for years it carried settlers streaming into the young region. It crossed Marion County from its northern boundary to a point a few miles south of Jefferson.

Marshall, TX

This cabin, raised before 1842, was built of hand-hewn logs chinked with pipe clay and joined with butterfly mortising and tee-braced beams for strength — part of a two-pen dog-trot house typical of the region's early settlers. It stood near Trammel's Trace, the pioneer road that funneled settlers into Texas from the north. In 1938 Mr. and Mrs. Hobart Key, Jr. moved the structure here to preserve it as a relic of Republic-era frontier building.

Sweetwater, TX

A rancher and banker who helped bring the railroads to Sweetwater, and who was remembered as the town's founding father, commissioned this distinctive house in the early 1910s from a California architect whose work he knew through the Santa Fe Railway. Built in a Mission Revival and Prairie School style around a central atrium, the home later did double duty as the area's only hospital from 1923 to 1936 before returning to family use.

Palm Springs, CA

Built in 1965 as a dramatic gateway to Palm Springs, the Tramway Gas Station is a landmark of desert modernism designed by architects Albert Frey and Robson Chambers. Its soaring hyperbolic-paraboloid roof of steel and corrugated metal became an instant emblem of mid-century optimism. In 1998–99 it was carefully restored and adapted for new use, with Frey himself consulted.

Carson City, NV

The first authenticated flight over the Sierra Nevada ended here when four U.S. Army planes—three Liberty-powered DeHavillands and a Curtiss trainer—touched down on an improvised field after taking off from Mather Field near Sacramento. Governor Emmet D. Boyle personally welcomed the fliers, led by Lt. Col. Henry L. Watson, before the squadron continued on to Reno. On the return leg Boyle flew as a passenger, becoming the first civilian to cross the Sierra by air.

Derry Township, PA · est. 1947

At this bend of the Juniata River, four generations of American movement stacked up in a single view: the old stone turnpike later paved over in concrete, the crumbling towpath and locks of a canal, the memory of river craft that once poled goods upstream, and the Pennsylvania Railroad cutting along the far bank. Each replaced the last as the nation's appetite for faster, cheaper transport reshaped the Appalachian valleys in the 1800s. The Juniata corridor was one of the great gateways west, and every mode of travel left its trace here.

Garland, TX

As Garland's population nearly doubled between 1910 and 1920, developers platted the Travis College Hill Addition in 1913, betting on a planned interurban electric trolley line that would connect Dallas to Greenville along the neighborhood's edge. Built on 73 acres of pioneer Wyatt family land beside Garland College, the addition offered large lots meant to draw commerce and homeowners near the coming rail line. The trolley never came—killed by the traction company's bankruptcy, World War I, and the rise of the Model T—but the neighborhood flourished anyway, becoming home to many of Garland's leaders.

Trenton, TX

Drawn by fertile farmland, the earliest Anglo settlers reached this Fannin County locality—known as Wildcat Thicket—by the mid-1800s, and a community had formed by the 1870s. Settler A. J. Russell is said to have named Trenton for a hospital where he was treated during the Civil War. The railroad's arrival in 1881, along with a new post office, sparked a boom; Trenton incorporated in 1890 and outlasted many neighboring towns through the 20th century.

Quanah, TX

Episcopal worship came to Quanah in 1887, when missionary bishop Alexander C. Garrett preached to a handful of the faithful in a schoolroom. The congregation gained land in 1890 from railroad developer G. M. Dodge, whose Fort Worth & Denver City line was bringing the frontier town to life. The frame Victorian Gothic church was finally consecrated in 1913. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1976.

Groveton, TX

When the I&GN Railroad arrived in 1881, a land and railway company platted the new town of Groveton, and Trinity County voters made it their seat the following year. After an early brick courthouse proved unsound, commissioners built a fireproof records vault in 1908 and then wrapped a Classical Revival courthouse around it, completed in 1914 by the noted Austin firm C.H. Page and Bros. With its full-height portico and paired Tuscan columns, the building has anchored county life ever since.

Troup, TX

When the International & Great Northern Railroad platted the town of Zavala—later Troup—in 1873, it set aside no ground for the dead. Local leaders and Judge William Wright Morris pressed the railroad, which in 1875 deeded 1.67 acres for a public burial ground. Among the earliest interred was South Carolina native William A. Arms, reinterred here by his widow, alongside three of the town's early mayors who had helped bring the rail line through.

Washoe County, NV

The flats along the Truckee River were home to Native peoples for thousands of years, who fished with blinds and left petroglyphs on the surrounding boulders. After John C. Frémont recorded the river in 1844, it became a lifeline and a hazard for California-bound emigrants—among them the Stephens-Murphy-Townsend party that crossed Donner Pass and the ill-fated Donner party, trapped by Sierra snows in 1846. The Central Pacific followed the river's course in 1868, and its route later matured through the Lincoln and Victory highways into U.S. 40 and Interstate 80.