Westward Expansion

Lufkin vicinity, TX

Allen Squyres, son of Beulah pioneers, joined the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845 and was licensed to preach in 1868 after returning from the Civil War. In 1883 area Methodists split from the Baptists they had shared a church with to form their own congregation, and by 1892 that fellowship moved to Beulah and joined the Congregational Methodist Conference with Squyres as its first pastor. More than a century later the small church still offered worship and outreach to the Beulah community.

Jasper, TX

On the Angelina River, Bevilport became the seat of the Bevil municipality in 1834 and a busy inland shipping point, its docks crowded with flatboats and keelboats carrying cotton, hides, and other East Texas goods downriver to New Orleans. It took its name from John Bevil, a Texas Ranger, delegate to the 1835 Consultation on Texas independence, and later chief justice of Jasper County. Like many river towns, it thrived on the rich bottomlands and the water route to market.

Sidney, TX

Bibb sprang up when Anglo cotton farmers settled western Comanche County in the 1870s, and by 1891 seven men platted a proper town of 44 lots. At its height in the 1890s it bustled with cotton gins, general stores, a school, four churches, a broom factory, and Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges. As roads improved and rail bypassed it, the population drained away; today no trace of Bibb remains on the ground.

Macon, GA

Bibb County was created in 1822 from parts of four neighboring counties and named for Dr. William Wyatt Bibb, a physician and legislator who became the first governor of Alabama. Its first officers were commissioned in 1823, and the county would grow around Macon at the center of Georgia.

Winchester, OH

Laid out in 1815 by Joseph Darlinton, the village of Winchester rose in the newly settled hills of Adams County as Ohio filled with families pushing west after statehood. Founders like Darlinton platted towns along the roads and creeks of the early frontier, each hoping their crossroads would grow into a thriving community. This monument, raised for the town's bicentennial, marks two centuries since that founding day.

New Orleans, LA

Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the French-Canadian colonizer who founded New Orleans in 1718, spent decades governing France's struggling Louisiana colony along the lower Mississippi. Erected in 1955 for the Louisiana Purchase Sesquicentennial, this statue offers the "homage of Louisiana, Canada, and France" to the man who chose the crescent bend in the river where the city still stands.

Boone County, KY · est. 1938

Where a sulphur-and-salt spring seeped to the surface in the Ohio Valley, generations of Ice Age mammoths and mastodons came to lick the minerals — and many died and were preserved, leaving a boneyard that astonished the first Europeans to reach it in 1739. Through the mid-1700s the lick drew a parade of frontier travelers and salt-makers, and by the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson, fascinated by these 'incognitum' giants, dispatched William Clark to gather specimens here. Later collectors like geologist N. S. Shaler hauled away tusks eight to ten feet long, making this quiet Kentucky spring one of the birthplaces of American paleontology.

Comanche, TX

In 1869, Mississippi transplant George William Montgomery bought 480 acres in Comanche County, where he built a log building that served at once as church, school, and gathering place — a school known as "Big Eye," where Montgomery taught, preached, and practiced medicine. The nearby Big Eye Cemetery was established in 1872 and holds five marked graves, a row of unknown crypts, and roughly sixty unmarked burials, including one Civil War veteran. The last known burial came in 1894, and the cemetery is now all that remains of the vanished community.

Groesbeck, TX

Big Hill Cemetery was established in 1888 in Limestone County, Texas, during the settlement era that followed the Civil War. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery, it served the farming families of the surrounding rural community. Burial grounds like this often outlast the settlements they once served, standing as quiet records of pioneer life.

Briley Township, MI

Big Rock was one of countless small crossroads settlements that dotted the northern Michigan interior as farmers and loggers spread across the region. Named for a massive glacial boulder left behind by retreating ice ages earlier, the hamlet gathered at the meeting of what are now M-32 and Thornton Road, with Seth Gillet serving as its first postmaster. Like many such crossroads communities, it thrived briefly and then faded as roads, rails, and fortunes shifted elsewhere.

Nye County, NV

Named for its smoky-blue distances, Big Smokey Valley lies in Shoshone country between the Toiyabe and Toquima ranges and saw a procession of Western legends pass through. Jedediah Smith crossed in 1827 and John C. Frémont, with Kit Carson, came in 1845; by 1859 the valley carried the Jackass Mail, Pony Express, Overland Telegraph, and Overland stagecoaches. Silver strikes at Austin in the 1860s sparked its first mining boom, dotting the ranges with camps like Ophir Canyon and Jefferson. The Tonopah strike of 1900 revived the rush and gave rise to Manhattan and Round Mountain.

Dallas, TX

Big Spring bubbled up in the White Rock Creek valley for uncounted generations, drawing Native peoples to its waters long before Anglo settlers arrived. John Beeman claimed the site in 1842 as the first family to settle permanently in the county, and in 1843 Sam Houston camped here with his Indian-treaty delegation en route to Bird's Fort. Over the next 160 years the spring passed through three pioneer Dallas families — Beeman, Bryan, and Pemberton — before the city bought it in 2003 for the Great Trinity Forest.

Cedartown, GA

Asa Prior, a Virginia-born pioneer, settled this valley and in 1834 bought a tract that included this spring, deeding the spring and ten acres to Cedartown in 1852. Nearby stood Walthall's Indian trading post, where Cherokees gathered and their young people danced the corn dance beneath the cedars. The park was later beautified by a garden club and made the site of a memorial shrine to Senator William Julius Harris.

Big Spring, TX

For more than a century, from about 1750 to 1875, the Big Spring was a vital oasis where Comanche paths from across the southern plains braided into a single War Trail running down to San Antonio and into Mexico. War parties watered and rested horses here, moving with families, pack animals, and captives taken in raids on frontier settlements. Comanche power ran high through the Civil War years, and only after most bands were forced onto reservations in 1875 did the old trails pass to settlers, railroad crews, and hunters.

Lefors, TX

For generations, the springs near this spot were a rare oasis on the Texas Panhandle plains, drawing Native peoples and, later, U.S. military expeditions. Captain Randolph B. Marcy camped here in 1852 while searching for the headwaters of the Red River, and the springs figured in the campaigns of Ranald S. MacKenzie and Nelson Miles. Archeology has confirmed that an 1874 clash between troops under Lt. Frank Baldwin and Cheyenne chief Grey Beard occurred nearby, during the Red River War that ended free Native life on the Southern Plains.

Richland Springs, TX

Established in 1859, Big Uncle Cemetery lies in the rolling San Saba County country of central Texas, settled in the years just before the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2000, it marks one of the earliest burial grounds of a frontier farming and ranching district. Its graves record the pioneers who ventured into a still-remote corner of the young state.

Dodd City, TX

In 1854 the Jackson and Biggerstaff families left Missouri and settled adjoining farms in Fannin County, quickly building the twin institutions of frontier community — a schoolhouse on one farm and a family burial ground on the other. The cemetery's first recorded burial came in 1864, and roughly fifty graves accumulated before the last interment in 1935. It remains the resting place of two pioneer clans and their descendants.

Hempfield Township, PA · est. 1946

In the sod of this Mercer County ground lie Jacob and Susan Bigler, a Pennsylvania farming couple whose two sons rose to lead states on opposite coasts. Their son William became governor of Pennsylvania in 1852, while in that very same span his brother John presided over California, still fresh from the Gold Rush and newly admitted to the Union. It is a rare distinction in American history: one family, two brothers, two governor's chairs held at the same time.

Taylor, TX

Born around 1870 to a former slave and raised in Taylor, Bill Pickett revolutionized the rodeo by inventing "bulldogging," leaping from his horse to wrestle a steer to the ground by its horns. One of the very few Black cowboys on the circuit, he became an international sensation, performing across North America and Europe before a riding accident took his life in 1932. In 1971 he became the first African American inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

Prairie Hill, TX

Tennessee native E. J. Billington settled here with his family in 1854 and in 1890 sold a half-acre for a church and cemetery, with John Sanders the first recorded burial that year. The nearby town named for him once bustled with a school, post office, and several stores. Additional land was added in 1900, and the cemetery — with more than a hundred marked graves — still serves the area even as the community around it has faded.

Nursery, TX

W. H. "Uncle Billy" Kyle—trail driver, cattleman, and Civil War veteran—built this Texas colonial ranch home in 1872 as the cattle frontier boomed across the South Texas coastal plains. The plain, sturdy house reflects the working life of a man who moved herds up the trails in the great era of the Texas cattle drives. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Bleakwood, TX

Settlement of the Biloxi area began in the early 19th century as families moved into Texas from the southern states, and a post office opened in 1849. After the Civil War, many formerly enslaved people established homes here, forming a lasting community. Congregations including Biloxi C.M.E. Church, organized in 1870, and Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church, begun in 1921, along with a cemetery dating to the 1880s, anchored the settlement.

Pilot Grove, TX

Georgia natives Thomas and Pauline Binion moved to Grayson County after the Civil War, buying this 107-acre farm in 1871 and raising four children on it. Their son "Eddie" ran a syrup mill here from around 1900 into the 1940s, crushing sugar cane with mules and cooking molasses over wood fires — later swapping mule and wood for a piston engine and coal as fuel became available. Hard times during the Depression reversed those improvements, and the failing mill was finally dismantled, its iron and steel sold as scrap for World War II.

Alvin, TX

A. J. Birchfield, first editor of the Alvin "Sun," built this twelve-room Victorian house in 1894, and it soon proved its worth: during the catastrophic 1900 coastal hurricane it sheltered more than a hundred people. Passed down through leading local families—the Greers, Carletons, Fingers, and McCowns—the sturdy structure became a fixture of the town. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1972.

Temple, TX

On May 26, 1839, Captain John Bird and a company of just 34 Texas Rangers clashed here with a far larger force of some 240 Native fighters during the Republic of Texas era. Bird was killed in the fight, but his outnumbered command reportedly drove off their opponents. The engagement was one of many bloody frontier skirmishes as Anglo settlement pushed into Central Texas.

Temple, TX

On May 26, 1839, a small Ranger force of 34 men under Captain John Bird clashed with a far larger body of Native warriors near this site during the Republic of Texas's violent frontier era. Bird and several of his men were killed in the fighting, an episode the State of Texas marked in 1936 to honor the fallen. The engagement was one of countless bloody encounters as the young republic pushed its settlement line into Comanche and allied territory.

Haltom City, TX

Organized in late 1853 by five founding members, this Tarrant County congregation went dormant during the turbulent Civil War years of 1856-64 before ten members revived it as the United Baptist Church at Fossil Creek. It took its present name, Birdville Baptist Church, in 1917. The marker records the resilience of a frontier faith community through war and reorganization.

Haltom City, TX

Birdville grew up as one of Tarrant County's earliest settlements, and its community burial ground took shape around the 1852 grave of pioneer Wiley Wilda Potts. Legally set aside for burials before 1860 out of the George Akers Grant, the one-acre plot expanded with later donations, was formally organized under a burial association in 1917, and had gathered hundreds of graves by the mid-twentieth century. Several families here rest four generations deep in a single plot, a quiet record of the people who put down roots on the North Texas frontier.

Haltom City, TX

Just after Birdville became the Tarrant County seat, twelve charter members gathered for this congregation's first worship service in 1852. Reorganizing in 1882, they met in the Birdville school building and in 1900 hosted a revival led by Richard M. Gano, a noted evangelist and former Confederate general. The congregation built a frame church in 1906 and rebuilt in brick after fires in 1950 and 1970.

Henderson, TX

Raised in the early 1840s for Allen Birdwell—a county commissioner and Texas legislator—this hand-hewn log dwelling is a fine surviving example of "saddlebag" architecture, a story-and-a-half double house with squared, morticed corners later boarded over. Its four rooms and exposed-beam ceilings speak to the craft of frontier East Texas building in the days of the young Republic and early statehood. Moved to the Monte Verdi plantation and restored in the mid-1960s, it carries the memory of the region's first political families.

Birome, TX

Founded in 1910 as one of five International and Great Northern Railway stops in southern Hill County, Birome grew up as a shipping point for the surrounding farms. Its unusual name honors Bickham and Jerome Cartwright, descendants of the settler Matthew Cartwright, whose 1856 land patent had taken in the future townsite. The little community shows how the railroad, more than anything, decided where Texas towns would rise.

Kaufman, TX

In 1840, when this land still belonged to the Republic of Texas, William P. King led forty pioneers here from Holly Springs, Mississippi, and threw up a stockade for protection. Caddo, Cherokee, Delaware, and Kickapoo peoples moved through the region, and settlers clustered their log cabins inside the fort's walls. As tensions eased the settlement of Kingsboro—later Kaufman—took root, its supplies hauled in on grueling yearly wagon trips from San Antonio.

Martinez, CA

By local legend, the martini was born in Martinez in 1874, when a bartender served a gold-flush miner something special and dubbed it the 'Martinez Special.' As the story goes, the name slurred its way toward 'martini' after a round or two too many. The town has long claimed itself the cocktail's birthplace.

Bishop, TX

F. Z. Bishop founded this town in 1910 on land bought from the Driscoll Ranch, staking it on both sides of the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico railroad and dreaming of a model city on the prairie. He designed a uniform brick business district, planted 600 palm trees, laid miles of sidewalks, and planned a park with a lake and band pavilion; the town reached 1,000 residents within two years and incorporated in 1912. Though Bishop went bankrupt in 1916, the community endured, and mid-century oil and gas discoveries pushed petroleum past agriculture as its economic base.

Asheville, NC

Francis Asbury was one of the two founding bishops of American Methodism, and for more than three decades he rode a punishing circuit across the young nation's frontier, preaching wherever settlers gathered. On his travels through the North Carolina mountains he stopped at the nearby home of Daniel Killian, one of countless farmhouse pulpits from which he spread the faith. By his death in 1816 he had helped grow Methodism from a tiny sect into one of America's largest denominations.

Amarillo, TX

Cattleman Lee Bivins built this classically styled brick-and-stone town house in 1905 at the height of his Panhandle ranching empire. Beyond his vast cattle interests, Bivins helped open the region's oil and gas fields and served as mayor of Amarillo until his death in 1929. His widow, Mary Elizabeth Gilbert Bivins, later gave the home to the city.

Albany, TX

This pioneer burial ground near old Fort Griffin holds more than a dozen graves of African Americans who lived and worked on the West Texas frontier. Two surviving markers name Elijah Earls, a barber the Fort Griffin Echo called a "tonsorial artist," and Marriah McKay Williams (1781–1891), who came to Texas as a free Black woman before the Civil War. When the fort disbanded, many African Americans stayed to homestead, ranch, and farm the surrounding land.

Caldwell, TX

Sponsored by the nearby Liberty Baptist Church, this congregation organized in May 1885 with seventeen charter members and called James G. Cooper as its first pastor. Members met in the community schoolhouse until a sanctuary was built here in 1894, and a Sunday School began in 1909. Though its membership disbanded during World War II and again in the late 1960s, the church remains part of Burleson County's religious heritage.

Murchison, TX

Settlers were drawn to the Black Jack community of eastern Henderson County by its rich soil, water, and timber beginning in the mid-1800s, and this burial ground has served the area ever since. Pioneer William A. Burns donated land for a church, school, and the cemetery already in use, whose earliest dated grave belongs to Susan Adelaide Page in 1869. Farmers, teachers, Confederate veterans, and community leaders lie here beneath grave slabs, Woodmen of the World markers, and iron fencing still tended by their descendants.

Walker County, TX

Settlement of this part of Walker County began in the 1830s, and Black Jack Methodist Church was organized in 1871, moving to this site in 1886 on land donated by Sophronia Jane Warren. A cemetery opened here in 1887, and the building doubled as the community's school until 1916. Regular services ended during the Great Depression, leaving the church and its graves as the settlement's memorial.

Sulphur Springs, TX

Named for the black oaks around it, this Northeast Texas community took root in the 1850s among families holding government land grants, and by 1854 had a post office and a log building that served as both church and school. In 1856 elders organized a Baptist congregation of eight charter members, which grew alongside the community's gin, sawmill, and store, replacing its log meeting house with a frame sanctuary in 1909.

Boise, ID

As tensions over slavery pushed emigrants west in the 1840s and 1850s, laws in the Oregon Country sought to bar both enslaved people and free Black settlers — yet a determined few came anyway. Among them was Elvina Moulton, who walked the trail and settled in Boise in the 1860s, declaring she would walk no farther. She built a life taking in laundry and became a charter member of the city's First Presbyterian Church.

Oran, TX

Founded before the Civil War around a reliable spring, Black Springs grew into the leading town of Palo Pinto County on the strength of the North Texas cattle country around it. Its story brushes against legends of the range — trail drivers Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight and the frontier veteran J. J. "Jack" Cureton all figure in the area's early days. Renamed Oran in 1886 to honor Governor Oran M. Roberts, the town supported stores, churches, a school, and a railroad before fading in the 1930s and 1940s.

Oran, TX

Established for the pioneers of the Keechi Valley and the settlement of Black Springs, this burial ground holds the earliest marked grave of Mary A. Lasater (1841–1871). The land was given by Silas Adam Sheek, stepfather of the great Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight, and among those buried here is Goodnight's mother, Charlotte Sheek, alongside Civil War veterans and early community leaders. It was renamed Oran Cemetery when the town took its new name in 1886.

Bertram, TX

In 1851 William Black raised a cedar-log stockade on his own land as a refuge against Indian raids, where guns and ammunition were stored for public use and sentries kept watch on moonlit nights. The fort served the scattered frontier settlers until it was abandoned in 1868.

Killeen, TX

This small cemetery is the last remnant of the Blackburn family estate, land that now lies within Fort Hood. John Porter Blackburn, a veteran of the War of 1812, moved his family from Tennessee to Bell County in 1853 and was the first buried here after his death in 1855. His sons and descendants served in conflicts from the Civil War through World War II, the last laid to rest in 2001.

Fate, TX

In 1882 William and Cassandra Harvey gave land to the Blackland farming community for a school, church, and cemetery, which absorbed the older Bost family plot and its 1879 graves. The burial ground holds veterans reaching back to the Civil War, along with fraternal emblems, a zinc obelisk, and weathered upright stones. Today it stands as one of the few tangible reminders of the vanished Blackland settlement.

Canton, TX

Reputed to be the oldest house in Canton, this residence was built in 1886 for Henry F. Blackwell II — an early merchant who also served as county sheriff — and his wife Nannie Jane, who raised eight children here. Altered and expanded over the decades, it stayed in Blackwell hands until 1975 and was given to the city by the family's descendants in 1988. It survives as a rare link to the town's earliest days.

Allegheny Township, PA · est. 1947

Thomas Blair built his stone house here in 1785, in the years just after the Revolution when settlers were pressing into the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. The homestead passed to his son John Blair, who became a leading citizen of the area. When a new county was carved out in 1846, it was named Blair in the family's honor.

Coleman, TX

Georgia native J. T. Blair came to Coleman County in 1897, married into a pioneer local family, and made his living as foreman of the Overall Ranch while running his own spread. In 1914 he built this Classical Revival house in town—designed by architect J. P. Caldwell—so his five children could attend Coleman's schools. The Blair family kept the home for sixty years.

May, TX

As settlers poured into Brown County in the late 1800s, the Hog Valley community formed and organized a Baptist church by 1894, holding services in the schoolhouse until permanent churches were built. When a post office opened, its postmaster asked that it be named Blake in honor of his son, and the whole community gradually took that name. The first burial in Blake Cemetery came in 1901, and the grounds—filled with everything from marble monuments to hand-welded steel crosses marking once-unmarked graves—still receive the care of a cemetery association determined to preserve local memory.

Johnson City, TX

Blanco County was carved from the neighboring counties of Burnet, Hays, Gillespie, and Comal, created and organized in the spring of 1858 in the Texas Hill Country. It took its name from the Blanco River that winds through the region. Blanco City served as county seat until 1890, when the honor passed to Johnson City, where it remains.

Johnson City, TX

Built in 1916 to a design by San Antonio architect Henry T. Phelps, the Blanco County Courthouse was the first permanent courthouse raised after the county seat moved from Blanco to Johnson City in 1890. Its Classical Revival limestone form, with Doric columns and a domed cupola, was contracted by stonemason James Waterston, a Scottish immigrant who had helped build the Texas Capitol. The building anchored the small Hill Country seat that would later become known as Lyndon Johnson's hometown.

Johnson City, TX

From this Blanco County headquarters in the 1870s, brothers J. T. and Sam Ealy Johnson launched thousands of cattle up the trails to Kansas railheads, gathering and processing herds at pens on Williamson's and Deer creeks. Theirs was the largest trail-driving outfit across Blanco and six neighboring counties, sending north herds of 2,500 to 3,000 head each season. Younger brother Sam Ealy Johnson would become grandfather to President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Blanco, TX

Organized in 1854 by a Methodist circuit rider, this Hill Country congregation worshipped in a log cabin and frame building before raising its enduring limestone sanctuary in 1883. The native stone was hauled ten miles from the quarry by ox cart, and the tower bell installed that year still rings. Its cornerstone, unusually set above the east doorway arch, marks the pioneer craftsmanship of a young Blanco County.

Beeville, TX

Refugio County's first Baptist congregation organized in 1855, meeting first in the Doughty Schoolhouse before raising a sanctuary in 1865 named for benefactor N. R. McDaniel's "N2" cattle brand. The Blanco Baptist Association formed at that church in 1873, and in 1888 the fellowship moved to Blanconia, building on this site in 1891. One of the oldest Baptist churches in South Texas, it seeded many area congregations.

Blanket, TX

Local tradition says Blanket Creek got its name in 1852, when surveyors found a band of Tonkawa hunters drying their rain-soaked blankets on the sumac bushes. Permanent settlement followed in the 1870s around a general store and post office, and Blanket became a stop on the Brownwood-to-Fort Worth stagecoach line before the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railway arrived in 1891 and prompted a whole new townsite. Sustained by cotton gins and a doctor who served for more than sixty years, the town incorporated in 1912 and has endured droughts and downturns ever since.

Leonard, TX

This supplemental plaque records the founding of Blanton Chapel in 1872 by Benjamin J. Blanton, one of the countless Methodist congregations that took root across rural North Texas during Reconstruction. Small chapels like this served scattered farming families as centers of worship and community in the decades after the Civil War. The marker preserves the memory of the chapel's origin and its namesake founder near Leonard in Fannin County.

Lubbock, TX

Built in 1925 on the newly organized range land of Cochran County, this Santa Fe depot at Bledsoe was far more than a railroad station—it doubled as a meeting hall for churches and clubs, and sheepherders and cowboys bedded down on its floor during shipping season. Rail service faded by 1966, and the structure was moved seventy miles to be preserved. It survives as a relic of one of America's last settled frontiers.

Eddy, TX

Born in the Republic of Texas in 1838, Amanda Ruble Taylor came to this area in 1855, and the cemetery began with her burial on family land in 1875. Her widower, the Rev. Isaac Taylor, deeded the ground to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1879. The many infant graves speak to the hardness of frontier life, while veterans resting here span conflicts from the Texas Revolution to World War II alongside the farmers who worked the land.