Westward Expansion

Vernon, TX

The Red River Valley Museum holds one of Texas' notable regional collections of Indian artifacts, tracing the long human presence along the Red River. Before the great Chisholm Trail cattle herds crossed at nearby Doan's Crossing, this was the country of the Comanche, Kiowa, and Wichita peoples. Mr. and Mrs. J. Henry Ray of Vernon spent thirty years assembling the collection, which they donated to Wilbarger County in 1963.

City of Syracuse, NY

This monument honors Lewis H. Redfield, who was born in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1798 and lived out his long life in Syracuse, dying there in 1882. His years spanned the transformation of central New York from a raw early-republic frontier into a booming Erie Canal salt city, and as one of the community's early settlers he watched — and helped shape — that rise from a village into a thriving Onondaga County seat. Nearly a quarter-century after his death, in 1906, his daughter, Mrs. W.H.H. Smith, raised this stone so her father's place among the city's pioneers would not be forgotten.

Lufkin vicinity, TX

The roots of Redland Baptist Church reach back to 1859, when the Angelina County community organized Liberty Baptist Church, reconstituted in 1895 under its present name. For decades the faithful gathered in a local schoolhouse until they raised their first sanctuary in 1924, followed by new buildings in 1939, 1960, and 1976 as membership grew. The congregation called its first full-time pastor in 1942.

Berclair, TX

James D. Reed founded this Goliad County ranch in 1869, and it later passed through the hands of the Peninsula Company and, in 1885, to Laura McCampbell Wiess. At its heart stands a two-story house Reed began in the 1870s, which Laura and her husband Valentine later dressed in Queen Anne detail; more than twenty-five structures make up the sprawling complex. In 1970 the ranch was given to the Baptist Foundation of Texas.

Rogers vicinity, TX

Founded in 1834 by settlers of the Sterling Robertson colony, Reed's Lake was the earliest settlement in Bell County, established while Texas was still part of Mexico. It took its name from the family of John Burnett Reed, who in 1859 built a large house that still stands, added a cotton gin, and donated land for a school and cemetery. The settlement anchored the surrounding countryside as Anglo colonization pushed into central Texas.

Pittsburg, TX

When a migrant worker died in 1879 with no place to be buried, Georgia-born Civil War veteran Counce Reeves and his wife Selina donated two acres for a church and burial ground in this Camp County community. A visiting minister organized the Reeves Chapel Methodist congregation, which first met under a brush arbor before building a frame meetinghouse that same autumn. As the fellowship grew, the family gave still more land and the members set out to raise a larger building.

Pecos, TX

Carved out of Pecos County in 1883 and organized the following year, Reeves County took shape as railroads and settlers pushed into far West Texas. It was named for George Robertson Reeves, a Confederate colonel who also served in the Texas Legislature, and the town of Pecos became its seat. Markers like this, erected in 1936 for the Texas Centennial, fixed the young county's origins in public memory.

Pecos, TX

The flat, arid Toyah Valley around Pecos drew farmers to its river and springs long before the town existed—Native people are believed to have irrigated crops here in the 16th century, and Mexican farmers later raised grain and vegetables. Cattlemen arrived in the 1870s, and the Texas & Pacific Railway's 1882 line to El Paso brought merchants and mechanics to Pecos City and Toyah. Large-scale irrigated agriculture began around 1900, aided by deep wells and the 1935 dam, the only one on the Pecos River in Texas.

Carthage, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1788, William McMillan Sr. moved to Alabama, married Elizabeth Wren, and brought his family to Texas in the late 1830s, receiving a Republic of Texas land patent in 1846 just as the Republic became a state. The settlement around his home was named McMillan's Post in 1848, with William as its first postmaster. The family set aside this ground for neighbors who had nowhere else to bury their dead; its infant graves and five victims of the 1919 influenza epidemic testify to hard frontier conditions. A Reeves descendant's 1976 gift added the family name to the more than 300 graves.

Grapeland, TX

Reuben and Sarah Brown left Illinois to settle here in 1833, and their son John lived his whole long life within a mile of his birthplace at Old Fort Brown. In 1865 John deeded two acres for a church and school, on a site his mother-in-law had already chosen and named 'Refuge' as the family's resting place. Another acre followed in 1889, and a cemetery association tends the ground today.

Refugio, TX

Refugio takes its name from Mission Nuestra Señora del Refugio, the last Spanish mission founded in Texas, established in 1791 to draw Indigenous people of the coast into Catholic mission life. When Mexican Texas reorganized in 1835 and the revolution created new counties in 1836, Refugio became one of them, with the old mission town as its seat. The county was formally organized in 1837.

Goliad, TX

When the Civil War ended, South Texas ranch country dissolved into lawlessness, with wild cattle running unbranded and federal occupation troops unable to check the thieving and violence. In 1868 the Union commander appointed Jack Helm as a special marshal, and he raised a vigilante band of some fifty ranchers—the Regulators—based at Middletown, now Weesatche. They pursued suspected outlaws ruthlessly, ordering many to leave the state and shooting those who defied them without trial, until reorganized Texas Rangers and the passage of time finally restored order in the 1870s.

Ladonia, TX

This site has drawn worshippers since 1840, when it became the first house of worship in this corner of Fannin County and a gathering place for camp meetings, burials, and annual reunions. A chapel built in 1850 was destroyed by a tornado and rebuilt in 1885. It endures as one of the region's oldest continuously used sacred grounds.

Arlington, TX

This burial ground opened in 1871 with the grave of infant Mary Miller and became the resting place for the vanished community of Sublett, named for settler John Sublett. The little town once held a school, post office, and church, and the one-room schoolhouse beside the cemetery doubled as the Rehoboth Baptist meeting house. More than 500 graves fill the 2.5-acre site, many marked by headstones now worn illegible, among them pioneer settlers and their descendants.

Waller, TX

Seventeen worshippers organized Reid's Prairie Baptist Church in August 1890, and by 1895 they had raised a sanctuary along the old Navasota Stage Road. Rural congregations like this one were the social spine of frontier Texas, doubling as gathering places in scattered farming country.

New Caney, TX

In 1918 Conrad Reinhardt bought this East Texas land and, around 1920, raised a bungalow-style farmhouse from heart-pine and magnolia timber cut on the property itself. He and his wife Lillie Bell Freeman built a family homestead here — house, garage, barns, and sheds — and lived out their lives on the place. The hipped roof and tapered-column porch mark it as a classic early-20th-century Texas farmhouse.

Mercedes, TX

Once part of a Spanish land grant, Relampago — 'lightning' — Ranch sat along the stage and military road linking Rio Grande City and Brownsville. Thaddeus Rhodes arrived in 1852 as Hidalgo county clerk, later serving as commissioner and judge, and Jose Maria Mora bought adjoining land around 1856; together they helped bring stability to the region. Mora's family farmed, ranched, and ran the area's only general store, and their descendants still live on the land.

Bryan, TX

In 1874 two Bryan attorneys donated four acres for a Baptist church, school and cemetery in a community first called Little Georgia, named for the home state of an early-1850s wagon train of settlers. More families arrived in the 1870s, fleeing hard times in the post–Civil War Southeast, and David Lloyd renamed the place Reliance around the founding of its Baptist church. The village grew a store, gristmill, cotton gin and post office; as cotton wore out the soil, farms gave way to cattle ranches, and the church and cemetery endured among century-old oaks.

Mountain Home, TX

This modest cabin of eight-inch elm logs was raised in the 1850s in the Texas Hill Country, when the road west from San Antonio was a hard and dangerous journey. By the 1870s it offered food and lodging to stagecoach travelers, and it is remembered as a spot where riders could swap tired horses for fresh mounts, earning it the name Remount Station and Stage Stop. Later moved to the Y.O. Ranch and restored, it survives as a token of the overland travel era.

Stratford, TX

In May 1901, Sherman County voters chose to move their seat from the ranching center of Coldwater to Stratford, a town growing along the new railroad — and tempers flared. With an injunction threatened, officials held a 1 a.m. court session, canvassed the votes, and spirited the county records under cover of darkness to a tent, where armed guards kept watch for days until a horseman arrived too late to stop them. A lawsuit followed but was dismissed once Stratford's status was settled.

Westbrook, TX

Founded in the 1870s on the open range of West Texas, Renderbrook grew into a sprawling cattle operation that eventually covered well over a hundred thousand acres. In 1889 it passed to Isaac Ellwood, a partner in the barbed-wire industry that was fencing in the plains, who paid partly in wire and stocked the range with Spade-brand cattle. His heirs still run that brand, a rare thread of continuity from the era of the great ranches.

Indianola, TX

The French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, spent decades pushing into the North American interior, and in 1682 traveled the Mississippi to its mouth. In 1684 he sailed from France to plant a colony there, but overshot and landed at Matagorda Bay in early 1685, where he established Fort St. Louis. His venture unraveled, and in 1687 he was murdered by his own men while trekking toward Canada near the Trinity River.

Angelina County, TX

In 1839, John and Rebecca Renfro rolled into East Texas by wagon from Missouri, part of the great migration into the young Republic of Texas. Settling the tallgrass they called Renfro Prairie, they raised ten children, anchored the local Methodist congregation, and helped greener settlers find their footing in the piney backcountry. The burial ground that grew up here gathered the Renfros together with the neighboring Spivey, Berry, Davis, Kirby and Payne families.

Reno, NV

Long before Europeans arrived, the Washoe and Paiute lived in the Truckee Meadows; the Stevens-Murphy party passed through in 1844 and settlement began in the early 1850s. Charles Fuller launched a river ferry in 1859 and built a bridge and hotel, holdings soon acquired by Myron Lake, whose "Lake's Crossing" became the town's nucleus when the Central Pacific laid out a depot in 1868. Named for Civil War General Jesse Lee Reno, the town grew on railroads, lumber, and ranching — and later on its reputations for quick divorces, beginning in 1906, and legalized gambling in 1931.

Reno, NV

The Reno Arch first spanned Virginia Street in 1926, built to celebrate the completion of the Lincoln and Victory Highways that funneled early automobile travelers through northern Nevada. Its famous slogan—"The Biggest Little City in the World"—was chosen in a 1929 contest, and the glowing arch quickly became the emblem of a town whose fortunes rode on liberal divorce laws, legalized gambling, and the tourists who came for both. Successive arches have risen over the same spot, but the boast has never changed.

Littlefield, TX

The sprawling three-million-acre XIT Ranch built a 132-foot windmill on its Yellowhouse Division in 1887, setting it deep in a canyon so it stood tall enough to catch the wind and pump water. Reputed to be the tallest windmill in the world, it stood until high winds finally toppled it in 1926. This replica, raised in 1969, keeps the memory of that engineering marvel alive.

Bridgeport, TX

In June 1841, President Mirabeau B. Lamar dispatched an expedition of 321 merchants, engineers, and soldiers to extend the Republic of Texas' reach toward Santa Fe, then held by Mexico. Struggling through the dense Western Cross Timbers, the men burned much of their gear to move faster and forded the West Fork of the Trinity near this site that July. They were captured before reaching Santa Fe and marched to prison in Mexico City. One survivor, surveyor William Hudson Hunt, later settled in Wise County, where he had spotted the region's ranching promise.

Laredo, TX

In January 1840, Antonio Canales and fellow Mexican Federalists met near Guerrero, along the Rio Grande, to proclaim the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande. They were loyal to Mexico's liberal 1824 constitution, which centralist leaders in Mexico City had set aside, and their breakaway state claimed lands on both sides of the river with Laredo as a capital. The republic lasted less than a year before Canales reconciled with the central government.

St. Tammany Parish, LA

St. Tammany Parish lay within the Spanish-governed West Florida parishes and was not part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. In September 1810 residents revolted against Spanish rule and declared the Republic of West Florida, raising their own flag and electing a president. The republic lasted just 74 days before the United States annexed the territory by force in December 1810.

Pampa, TX

On November 8, 1874, during the Red River War against the Southern Plains tribes, Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin led two companies of U.S. troops in an attack on a large Cheyenne band about ten miles southwest of here, freeing two young girls held captive. The clash came amid the army's final campaign to force the Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa onto reservations and open the Texas Panhandle to settlement.

Salt Flat, TX

Bitter resentment over private control of the region's salt lakes—long known as the Guadalupe Lakes—boiled over into the El Paso Salt War of 1877. The dispute over who could gather this essential mineral cost many lives and much property in far West Texas. The state erected this marker in 1936 to commemorate the violent episode.

Fredericksburg, TX

This Fredericksburg home is a small chronicle of frontier building written in its own walls. The oldest section, from about 1845, is fachwerk — the timber-and-infill method German immigrants carried to the Texas Hill Country — while later additions in log and clapboard frame show how families adapted with what they had. The Ressmanns bought it in 1866 and the Boos family held it into the 1970s, more than a century in the hands of two settler households.

Quitaque, TX

Resthaven Cemetery has served Quitaque since the 1920s, in a region whose name may derive from the Quitaca Indians who passed through on a 1683–84 Spanish expedition. The area saw a trading post in 1865, the Lazy F Ranch later sold to famed cattleman Charles Goodnight, and a town platted in the 1890s. When brothers Alvin and Edgar Howard donated ten acres in 1922, the cemetery took shape, later enclosed by a WPA-built sandstone wall.

Graford, TX

Alabama-born Reuben Vaughan migrated to Texas in 1852 and in 1854 brought his family to this area as the first permanent settlers in present Palo Pinto County, raising a cabin of cedar and stone. A farmer and stock raiser who kept friendly relations with the region's Indian tribes, he served in a frontier battalion protecting settlements during the Civil War and lies buried in this family cemetery.

Elkhart, TX

Born in Virginia in 1781, Daniel Parker became a pioneer Baptist minister who carried his faith to the Texas frontier before his death in 1844. His wife, Patsy Dixon Parker, is remembered alongside him. The Parker name loomed large in early Anderson County history.

Burkeville, TX

Born in Virginia in 1772, the Rev. Henry Stephenson was among the very first Methodist preachers to work in Texas, delivering a sermon at Jonesboro in 1817 when the region still lay under Spanish rule. By 1834 he had organized the first permanent Methodist church in Texas and was overseeing all the denomination's work in the province. He died in 1841, a few years into the life of the Republic he had helped to evangelize.

Greene Township, PA · est. 1994

On the western Pennsylvania frontier of the 1790s, a federal excise tax on whiskey struck at the livelihood of farmers who distilled their grain into a marketable, transportable product. Baptist minister John Corbley became the area's most prominent voice against the tax, and on the "Dreadful Night" of November 13, 1794, he was among roughly 150 men rounded up by federal troops sent to crush the resistance. Jailed for a time in Philadelphia, he returned to Greene County and resumed his ministry.

Maysfield, TX

Joseph P. Sneed, born in 1804, was licensed as a Methodist minister in Tennessee in 1828 and, after a visit in 1834, volunteered as a missionary to the young Republic of Texas in 1838. He organized many churches and once rode a circuit covering seven counties, while prospering as a farmer and rancher. He died in 1881, having helped plant Methodism across frontier Texas.

Daingerfield, TX

Born in Virginia in 1802 and raised near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Nathan Johnson was licensed to preach in 1824 and served as a Methodist missionary to the Cherokee and others. He brought his family to Texas in 1851 and rode the East Texas circuit for seven years, ministering in towns like Marshall, Jefferson, and Clarksville before ending his life as pastor at Daingerfield, where he died of pneumonia in 1860.

San Augustine, TX

Born in Tennessee around 1804, Samuel A. Williams became the first Methodist minister regularly stationed in East Texas, arriving in 1838 when the Republic of Texas was made a district of the church. Riding circuits out of San Augustine and Nacogdoches, he organized far-flung congregations and chaired the region's early Methodist conferences. A respected preacher, he retired in 1863 and was buried at his San Augustine home.

Scranton, PA · est. 1948

Born in England in 1749, William Bishop became the first ordained minister to serve the future city of Scranton. Around 1795 he raised a combined log church and dwelling near this spot, where he preached to the scattered settlers of the region until moving on; he died in nearby Scott Township in 1816. His humble log meetinghouse was among the first institutions of faith in the Lackawanna Valley.

Henderson, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1785, the Rev. William Craig entered the Methodist ministry at eighteen and, about 1841, brought his family to San Augustine, Texas, settling in Rusk County's Oakland community by 1849. A circuit rider in the truest sense, he rode his mule Tobe as far as 300 miles on a single circuit, preaching across East Texas and holding services in Nacogdoches's Old Stone Fort. He organized the Henderson circuit and served as chaplain of the Texas Senate.

North Strabane Township, PA · est. 1931

The Reverend John McMillan carried Presbyterian faith and formal schooling into the rugged country of western Pennsylvania in the years after the Revolution. Over six decades of ministry he helped plant churches at Chartiers, Pigeon Creek, and beyond, and lent his energy to founding institutions that became Jefferson College and Western Theological Seminary. He and his wife endured the hardships of frontier life to build lasting religious and educational roots in the region.

Cincinnati, OH

Placed in 1909 by the Cincinnati chapter of the Sons of the Revolution, this tablet honors Revolutionary War soldiers who, after winning independence, moved west to help settle the Ohio country and now lie buried in Hamilton County. The dates 1775 and 1783 mark the span of the war for independence. The memorial links the founding generation to the westward push that opened the trans-Appalachian frontier.

Grapeland, TX

Reynard began as one of the scattered farm settlements that filled East Texas after the late 1830s, first known as Trinity Chapel until Thomas Jefferson Fox established his family's farm here in the 1880s. When a post office opened in 1901, the community took the name Reynard — French for "fox," a nod to its leading family. At its height it held two general stores, a church, a school, a cotton gin, and a sawmill before fading by the 1940s into the memory of the families who remain in Houston County.

Bovina, TX

In 1901 the Rhea brothers bought a slice of the vast XIT Ranch and resold parcels to farmers, seeding a settlement of midwestern and German immigrant families on the Texas panhandle. A post office, a school, and Immanuel Lutheran Church—one of the panhandle's earliest of its denomination when it organized in 1910—anchored the community. The schoolhouse doubled as a gathering place until the district was divided between Friona and Bovina in 1949.

Alvord, TX

Abner and Chloe Rhoads came by covered wagon from Kentucky in 1870, joined on their 205-acre tract by their son Moses, a Methodist circuit rider, schoolteacher, and carpenter. The cemetery's oldest graves — two young sons who died in 1879 and 1880 — testify to the hardships of settling the land. When decades of cotton cultivation exhausted the soil, the families relocated in the 1920s and 30s, and much of the property was sold in 1940 to become part of the LBJ National Grasslands.

Crockett, TX

Joseph Redmond Rice and his wife Wille built a log cabin along the old San Antonio Road in 1828, in the years when Anglo families were first putting down roots in what would soon become the Republic of Texas. Grief came early: the burial ground likely began with the deaths of their infant twins around 1830, and the high toll of childhood illness filled the plot with young graves, including four grandchildren. Deeded to trustees in 1953, the cemetery is still tended by the family's descendants.

Paint Rock, TX

Rich Coffey drove his family, cattle, and cowboys into the rugged country near present-day Ballinger in 1862 and later founded a settlement where the Colorado and Concho rivers meet. A cattleman, freighter, salt trader, county commissioner, and postmaster, he hired Irish stonemason Jonathan Cook to raise a rock house in 1880–81 — a one-and-a-half-story dogrun of unusually fine masonry, a Georgia-style floor plan rare for stone buildings in West Texas. In 1989 the house was moved to higher ground to escape the rising waters of Lake Ivie.

Valera, TX

Richard A. Pauley fulfilled a boyhood dream when he was elected sheriff of Coleman County in 1923 after years as a rancher. Widely respected as a true gentleman, he often went unarmed, preferring to persuade fugitives that the law was there to protect rather than harm them. His life ended in 1925 when he was shot by two stowaways while investigating a railroad car, leaving his wife Kate and son Russell.

Henderson, TX

Richard Brown embodied the perilous decade after Texas won its independence, when the young Republic and Mexico still traded raids across a contested border. A Philadelphia doctor's educated son turned frontier soldier, he joined the ill-fated 1842 Mier Expedition, was captured, and famously cheated a firing squad by drawing a white bean in the notorious black-bean lottery—only to endure two years in a Mexican prison. He returned to build a settled life as teacher, surveyor, and farmer, helping found a local church and Masonic lodge.

Austin, TX

Richard Ellis brought a Virginia judicial career to the Texas frontier, and in 1836 he presided over the convention that declared Texas independent from Mexico. As president of that constitutional convention and later a senator in the Republic's Congress, he helped lay the legal foundation of the new nation. Ellis County was named in his honor.

Matagorda, TX

Richard Royster Royall, born in Virginia in 1798, became a leading figure in the earliest days of Texas self-government. He served as temporary chairman of the 1835 Consultation and sat on the General Council of the provisional government during the pivotal months of the Texas Revolution. He died in 1840, having helped guide Texas from colony toward independence.

Lometa, TX

Richard S. Stokes came of age in the divided South, enlisting as a Confederate private in 1861 and rising to lieutenant before the war's end. Like thousands of Southerners, he headed west afterward, settling in Lampasas County, Texas, in 1868 to ranch, farm, and raise a large family. His most remarkable moment came in 1911, when at age 73 he pulled three young people from the Colorado River at Chadwick's Mill—an act of courage that earned him a Carnegie Hero Medal.

Louisburg, NC

Born near here around 1777, Richard Warfington served as a corporal on the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806. Entrusted by the captains, he led the crucial return party from the Mandan villages back toward St. Louis, safely delivering specimens, reports, and dispatches gathered in the expedition's first year. His steady leadership helped preserve the Corps of Discovery's early findings.

Reagor Springs, TX

John I. Richardson, a county surveyor and Mason who rode with the 12th Texas Confederate Cavalry, married Ann Elizabeth Reagor in 1865, both descendants of the family that gave Reagor Springs its name. The graveyard began with the 1879 burial of a Richardson cousin and was formally deeded for use as a cemetery in 1890. Holding about thirty graves, it became the resting place of the Richardsons and other early Ellis County families before the couple left the area near the turn of the century.

Lanevile, TX

Raised in the 1850s in the East Texas piney woods, this Greek Revival residence carries the classical facade and central hallway fashionable in the antebellum South. Its handmade bricks were fired in a kiln right on the property, and its first family was that of pioneer physician and farmer Dr. Peterson T. Richardson. Purchased by the Lowe family in 1919, it was lovingly restored by a grandson in 1973.

Sulphur Springs, TX

In 1872, as new farming settlements spread across Northeast Texas, a Baptist congregation and a country school took root at Richland, and the burying ground beside them became the community's enduring anchor. Its graves hold the area's early families and more than a dozen Civil War veterans, with reinterments carrying the record back to the early 1870s. The church and school are long gone, but caretakers have tended the cemetery through societies formed in 1922 and 1962.

Mertens, TX

After bringing their family from Georgia to Texas in 1858, Jesse and Mary Ann Thomas settled along Richland Creek and in 1883 deeded three acres for a community burial ground. The oldest documented grave, from that same year, belongs to Mary E. McCleskey. Five generations of the Thomas family rest here alongside area pioneers and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Llano, TX

Mississippi-born R.A. McInnis came to Llano as a young man in the 1870s and made himself a fixture of the growing Hill Country town. He ran the Llano Furniture Company on the square, served as county sheriff in the early 1880s, married Martha Caroline Bozarth in 1882, and later won election as one of the town's first aldermen. As president of the Llano Railroad Commission he pushed to connect the town to rail markets; the 1882 house he owned stayed in his family for 110 years.