Westward Expansion

Honey Grove, TX

Virginia-born Samuel Erwin, married in Tennessee in a ceremony performed by the frontiersman David Crockett, became the first settler of the Honey Grove area when he arrived in 1837. A surveyor by trade, he laid out land grants for fellow pioneers and platted the townsite for his friend B. S. Walcott in 1848. He also served as the town's first postmaster and one of Fannin County's earliest justices of the peace.

Lexington, KY

Here lies Samuel Boone (1728–1816), eldest brother of the famed pioneer Daniel Boone. Born in Pennsylvania, he came to Kentucky from South Carolina in 1779 and settled at Boone's Station, joining the 1782 defense of Bryan's Station during a period of intense frontier warfare. That same year his son Thomas was killed at the Battle of Blue Licks, one of the last engagements of the Revolution in the West.

Burkburnett, TX

Samuel Burk Burnett came to Texas from Missouri just after the Civil War and, partnering with his father-in-law, founded the famous Four Sixes (6666) Ranch in 1875. He grew into one of the state's most powerful cattlemen and a leading force in Fort Worth business. By tradition, the town of Burkburnett was named at the suggestion of President Theodore Roosevelt after a 1905 wolf hunt with Burnett.

Huntsville, TX

Samuel Calhoun, born in South Carolina in 1788 and a cavalry captain in Georgia during the War of 1812, came to Texas in 1845 and acquired land near the ferry that bore his name in Walker County. He raised a large family across two marriages and saw sons serve in the Mexican War and the Civil War. Generations of his descendants lie buried on the ground he established, though his own tomb was carried by steamer to Cincinnati in 1872.

West Columbia, TX

Massachusetts-born Samuel Damon came to Texas in 1831 and joined the fight for independence, serving as a wagonmaster for Stephen F. Austin at the Siege of Bexar and famously taking the mission bells to be melted into bullets for the rebel cause. He aided Sam Houston's 1836 campaign and later earned a Republic of Texas land grant. Settling in Brazoria County, he gave his name to the mineral-rich Damon Mound and worked half a century as the town brickmaker.

Willow Point, TX

A Tennessee native, Samuel G. Evetts came to Texas in the 1830s and was wounded at the Siege of Bexar in December 1835, an early clash of the Texas Revolution. He later lived in several counties, earning land grants for his Republic of Texas military service and a state pension in 1870, before moving to Wise County, where he died in 1884. Thrice married and father of eleven, he saw his name spelled variously as Evetts and Evitts over the years.

Round Top, TX

Samuel Knight Lewis left a Mississippi plantation to bring his family to Texas in 1838, serving Austin County in the Republic of Texas House of Representatives before settling near Round Top in 1848. Sensing opportunity along a planned stage route, he bought land whose home grew into a welcome stopping place for travelers, later known as the Winedale Inn. Given to the University of Texas in the 1960s, the property became the heart of the Winedale Historical Center.

Glenville, WV

This marker honors Samuel Lewis Hays, a 19th-century public figure tied to the early history of Glenville and Gilmer County. Active when central West Virginia was still a sparsely settled frontier region, Hays was among the local leaders remembered for the area's founding and early growth. The community has preserved his name as part of its heritage.

Buffalo Township, PA · est. 1947

Samuel Maclay was among the first generation of statesmen to represent the new United States, serving in the U.S. House and Senate as well as Pennsylvania's General Assembly in the decades after independence. He had put down roots in the Buffalo Valley of central Pennsylvania as early as 1770, when the region was still a raw frontier, and he lived out his life there until his death in 1811. His grave lies in the churchyard near this spot.

Galveston, TX

Samuel May Williams sailed from Rhode Island into a life of business and language, learning Spanish in Buenos Aires before joining Stephen F. Austin's Texas colony in 1823 as translator and clerk. He and Thomas F. McKinney ran a mercantile firm whose credit helped bankroll the Texas Revolution, extending some ninety-nine thousand dollars in support, and later helped build ships for the young republic's navy. In 1848 he opened a Galveston bank and lived out his days in this home.

Galveston, TX

Born in Rhode Island in 1795, Samuel May Williams became one of the most influential figures of early Texas as the intimate friend and colony secretary of Stephen F. Austin. A pioneer banker who handled important commissions for the colony, Republic, and state, he lived out his life in Galveston, dying there in 1858. This state monument honors a man remembered for years of patriotic and self-sacrificing service.

Houston, TX

Samuel McCarley, his wife Celia, and their ten children settled on Spring Creek in 1831, and by 1836 their home sat on a well-traveled road between Washington-on-the-Brazos and Harrisburg. On April 15, 1836, Sam Houston's Texas Army arrived at dusk and, over one hungry night, consumed the family's cattle, corn, and bacon and burned some four thousand fence rails for fuel. The next day Houston took the Harrisburg road and, on April 21, won independence at San Jacinto; decades later the state paid the widowed Celia $460 for the damage.

Breckenridge, TX

Samuel P. Newcomb traveled alone from Connecticut to Texas at seventeen, settling by 1857 on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, where he taught school, held county offices, and served in a state ranger unit during the Civil War. What outlasted his brief life was his pen: his diaries vividly recorded frontier daily life, buffalo herds, and the fort where he lived, as did those of his wife Susan Reynolds. He died in 1870 at just thirty-one.

San Antonio, TX

Boston-born Samuel S. Smith rode with the Woll and Somervell expeditions of 1842, the volatile border campaigns that followed Mexican incursions into the young Republic of Texas. He lived until 1882 and is remembered here alongside his wife Sarah.

New Summerfield, TX

Born in Switzerland in 1800, Samuel Smith emigrated to Tennessee at nineteen, earned his U.S. citizenship, and in 1849 joined a party of settlers bound for Texas, helping found the town of Knoxville in Cherokee County. He built this farmhouse in 1859, and his family went on to give land for a church and cemetery, run the settlement's first blacksmith shop, and connect with the railroad that arrived in 1872.

West Columbia, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1792, Samuel Tubbs took his grandmother's surname Angier and earned a Brown University medical degree before joining Stephen F. Austin's Old 300 colony in 1824. As one of the first American families to settle the Mexican province, he practiced medicine, served as a Freemason, and acted as an election judge for delegates to the 1836 convention that declared Texas independent. He also worked to establish public education in the young Republic of Texas.

Rockne, TX

Samuel Wolfenberger came to Texas in 1831, while it was still part of Mexico, as one of Stephen F. Austin's colonists, and received a Spanish league of land — some 4,444 acres — in this area. When revolution came he took up arms, joining the storming of Bexar in 1835 and riding with Robert Coleman's Rangers in 1836. He settled at Bastrop, helped campaign to make it capital of the young Republic, and served as a town official before his death in 1860.

Rockne, TX

Samuel Wolfenberger came to Texas from Virginia in 1831, arriving as Anglo colonists and Mexican authorities edged toward open conflict. He fought under Lt. W. J. Russell at the 1832 clash at Velasco, took part in the 1835 storming and capture of Bexar, and served in Colonel Robert M. Coleman's Rangers during the 1836 revolution. His grave and that of his wife Caroline were marked by the State of Texas in 1956.

El Paso, TX

In 1824, Mexican families from Socorro and San Elizario blazed the roughly 90-mile San Andres Salt Trail north to the salt flats near present-day Lake Lucero — salt being vital for preserving food and processing silver ore. Under Spanish and Mexican custom the deposits were a public resource, but after the U.S.-Mexico War brought the region into the United States, pioneer James Magoffin tried to charge fees, sparking the 1854 Magoffin Salt War when armed miners clashed with a sheriff's posse. The trail faded from commercial use afterward, a monument to salt's frontier importance.

Van Horn, TX

Surveyed in 1848 by a party under the famed Ranger Jack Hays, the San Antonio–El Paso segment became one of Texas's first cross-country wagon roads, carrying emigrants and gold-seekers west. By 1857 it formed part of the pioneering San Antonio–San Diego mail line, whose passengers paid dearly to jolt across 1,500 miles of dust, floods, and danger in a crowded Concord coach over nearly a month. The service ran only until the Civil War broke out in 1861.

Fort Davis, TX

Blazed by westward expeditions in the late 1840s, the San Antonio–El Paso Road split into upper and lower routes that rejoined at the Pecos to cross the Davis Mountains. Couriers like Henry Skillman and George Giddings ran mail and relay stations along it, Fort Davis guarded it, and by 1867 troopers of the 9th U.S. Cavalry patrolled a route traveled under army escort until railroads made it obsolete in the 1880s.

San Augustine, TX

San Augustine stood as an eastern gate into Texas in country claimed by both France and Spain, where Spain chartered El Camino Real past this site in 1691 and founded nearby Mission Dolores de los Ais in 1717. Anglo families arrived in the 1790s and after, building a water mill by 1824 and a cotton gin by 1826, and in 1827 townsmen put down the Fredonian uprising at the Battle of Ayish Bayou. The town sent delegates to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence and fielded companies in the War for Independence, later producing governors, cabinet officers, and diplomats of the Republic and state.

San Augustine, TX

This East Texas burial ground began as the private cemetery of the J. C. Anderson family, its oldest graves dating to the 1830s, when Texas was still winning its independence. Among those interred here is Col. Stephen William Blount, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, alongside a Confederate captain killed in the Civil War and a noted Episcopal clergyman-historian. The city bought the cemetery in 1911, and an association has cared for it since 1921.

San Augustine, TX

When surveyors platted San Augustine in 1834 they set aside this square for public use, though it took twenty years and one of the 23 original counties of the new Republic of Texas before a courthouse rose here. Early judges convened in a hotel and a customs house until the first courthouse of 1854; an 1890 Italianate building followed, and in 1927 the present Classical Revival structure of Texas Lueders stone took its place. Its grounds hold a statue of James Pinckney Henderson, the state's first governor and a San Augustine man.

San Benito, TX

San Benito grew up along the Gulf Coast railroad that engineer Col. Sam Robertson pushed into the lower Rio Grande Valley in 1904, on land colonized under Mexico around 1770. First called 'Bessie' and then 'Diaz' before taking its present name for landowner Benjamin Hicks, the town gained land, water, and sugar companies in 1906 and its first school and postmaster in 1907. It was incorporated in June 1911.

McMullen County, TX

San Caja Hill's name — from "Sin Caja," or "without coffin" — recalls the December 1872 Turkey Creek fight, when ranchers from Oakville overtook a raiding party after a herder had been killed. The warriors' bones, placed in a cave here, later mysteriously vanished. The "Caja," or box, wordplay also spawned enduring legends of buried bandit loot and lost San Saba silver.

San Elizario, TX

Founded in 1789 as the Spanish Presidio de San Elceario, this outpost was relocated northward to shield settlers from raids, guarding the El Paso district through the twilight of Spanish rule and the Mexican War for Independence. After the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo drew the border at the Rio Grande, the town became El Paso County's first seat and, in 1877, the flashpoint of the violent Salt War over access to communal salt beds.

San Elizario, TX

San Elizario Cemetery, established in 1898, lies in one of the oldest settlements in the El Paso valley—a onetime presidio town and county seat with deep Spanish colonial roots. By the late 19th century the community was a farming center along the Rio Grande, and its cemetery holds generations of the families who lived there. It carries the Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

Houston, TX

Raised in 1837 — the very year Houston was incorporated as capital of the young Republic of Texas — this cottage stood on land belonging to early settler Mrs. Obedience Smith. It survives as the oldest known house in the city.

San Felipe, TX

San Felipe de Austin, founded in 1824 on the Brazos River, was the unofficial capital of Stephen F. Austin's colony and the principal town of Anglo-American settlement in Mexican Texas. As the political and commercial hub of the colonists, it hosted the conventions and the 1835 Consultation that set Texas on the road to revolution, and it was home to Texas's first English-language newspaper. The town was burned in 1836 during the "Runaway Scrape" as settlers fled the advancing Mexican army before the Battle of San Jacinto.

San Felipe, TX

Founded in 1824 as the capital of Stephen F. Austin's original Anglo-American colony, San Felipe de Austin set aside this ground for its dead in its very first Mexican charter, chosen by Austin and the Baron de Bastrop. The cemetery grew into a fenced Anglo section of some 370 graves alongside a separate African American section of roughly 200, at least three belonging to former slaves. Many of the colony's earliest pioneers and leaders lie here, in soil that predates Texas statehood.

Del Rio, TX

Spanish explorers named these springs in the 1600s for San Felipe de Jesús, the first Mexican martyr, and their reliable water made the site a natural stopping place on the arid road west. In 1849 the springs marked a watering point on the newly blazed route between San Antonio and the Pacific, and from 1857 to 1883 they served as a stage stand on the San Diego line.

Del Rio, TX

The seven San Felipe Springs have drawn travelers since at least 1542, and in 1675 Spanish priests named them for their king; in the 1700s Comanches camped here along a war trail into Mexico, and a mission rose downstream in 1808. By the 1850s the springs lay on the vast San Antonio–to–San Diego mail route and the Chihuahua Road, where wagons hauled Mexican silver and gold toward the Gulf port of Indianola. After settlers arrived in 1864 and dug the 'Mother Ditch' for irrigation, the town of Del Rio soon took root.

San Felipe, TX

San Felipe was the capital of Anglo colonization in Mexican Texas, and this town hall succeeded an 1828 building used by the ayuntamiento, or town council. In its predecessor hall the conventions of 1832 and 1833 and the Consultation of 1835 met, steps that led directly to the Texas Revolution, before the town was burned in 1836. The two-story section of the present structure was built about 1842, may have served as a county courthouse, and by old custom the council still meets on the Saturday before each full moon.

San Felipe, TX

After San Felipe de Austin—the capital of Stephen F. Austin's colony—was incorporated in 1837, the town built a multi-purpose cypress building on Constitution Square to serve as town hall, school, and church. Methodists worshipped there by evening, a second floor added in 1847 hosted a Masonic lodge whose painted "eye of God" ceiling survives, and by 1880 the structure became a dedicated church with a steeple and bell. The congregation still meets here and lights its historic oil lamps each Christmas Eve.

San Diego County, CA

Here the great southern overland trail crossed far older Indigenous trade routes traveled by the Kumeyaay (Kamia and Diegueño), Cahuilla, and Luiseño peoples. Warren F. Hall built and ran the San Felipe home station of the Butterfield Overland Mail, the audacious stagecoach line that in the late 1850s carried passengers and mail on a grueling weeks-long run between the Mississippi and California. A home station like this offered fresh teams, food, and rest in the harsh backcountry between San Diego and the desert.

San Gabriel, TX

Amid the well-watered land of Milam County—once home to eighteenth-century Spanish missions and a presidio—settlers of the Disciples of Christ, then called "Campbellites," began worshiping in private homes in the 1840s and formally organized in 1859. Fire, floods, and windstorms repeatedly destroyed their buildings, driving them to rebuild three times before settling at this site in 1924. The congregation counted among its leaders figures active in Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University.

Georgetown, TX

The springs here drew Native peoples for centuries and later Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo colonists competing over land grants in the 1820s and '30s, until George W. Glasscock secured the site as part of his headright in 1839. As “The Fairgrounds” it hosted revivals, reunions, and even the county's first public hanging, and Sam Houston spoke here in 1859. After a 1921 flood, Georgetown bought the land in 1933 and, with WPA labor, transformed it into San Gabriel Park.

Seguin, TX

Known first as Beard's Burial Ground, this cemetery on San Geronimo Creek began with the graves of William and Margaret Beard, who died a day apart in 1846 on their Republic of Texas land grant. William had come to Texas with Stephen F. Austin's colony in 1831 and helped found Walnut Springs, renamed Seguin in 1839; the oldest grave may be that of ten-year-old Stephen A. Johnson, dead in 1839. Renamed San Geronimo in 1897, it holds early county founders and veterans spanning from the Texas Revolution to the Gulf War.

Coldspring, TX

San Jacinto County takes its name from the hyacinth-choked stream that eighteenth-century Spanish explorers christened for Saint Hyacinth, later echoing the 1836 battle that won Texas independence. Anglo-American settlers arrived after 1820, and the county was carved from four neighbors in a stop-and-start process of creation, recreation, and organization between 1869 and 1870. Its shifting county seat name — from Cold Springs to Coldspring — reflects the improvised nature of frontier governance.

Coldspring, TX

After fire destroyed San Jacinto County's courthouse in 1915, landowners donated a site and moved the seat of government to "new town" Coldspring, where builders raised this Italian Renaissance–style courthouse in 1916–17 from brick fired locally out of native clay. Merchants and residents followed the courthouse, and within a decade the old town stood deserted. Despite 1936 alterations, its arched doors and windows still carry the original design.

Coldspring, TX

Built in 1887 as San Jacinto County's second jail, this structure is best known for a rare hangman's trap that was installed but never used — a grim feature added by a San Antonio steel firm along with its cells and a 1911 annex. When the county's frame courthouse burned in 1915 and a new brick one rose a quarter-mile away, the town's center of gravity shifted, yet the old jail kept serving its official purpose. It stands as a durable relic of nineteenth-century frontier justice.

El Paso, TX

This downtown El Paso square has watched the crossroads of the Southwest pass by since Spanish colonial times. When a group of buyers purchased and platted the townsite in 1857, they set aside this public plot and later donated it to the incorporated city — a shady resting place that saw ox carts, covered wagons, Jefferson Davis's experimental Camel Corps, stagecoaches, and the first railroad whistles. In 1902 the city fathers permanently named it San Jacinto Plaza.

El Sauz, TX

Part of a 1767 Spanish land grant along the lower Rio Grande, this ranch was named San José de la Mulada by the Pérez family, early settlers of José de Escandón's colonies. For generations they ran cattle and kept meticulous ledgers of ranch life, and the property passed down through the family into the 20th century. One heir, Casimiro Pérez-Alvarez, became a noted deputy U.S. marshal ranging the border on horseback.

Raymondville, TX

In 1792 the Spanish crown awarded Don Jose Narciso Cavazos the San Juan de Carricitos grant, more than half a million acres and the largest land grant in South Texas. Cavazos formally took possession the following year, and the grant eventually encompassed nearly all of present-day Willacy County. Though his heirs sold most of the land, some descendants still live within its old boundaries.

Bacliff, TX

On a peninsula ringed by bays, San Leon has been settled, abandoned, and reinvented many times. First claimed after Mexico opened the Texas tidelands in 1828 and platted as a townsite in 1837, the land reverted to open range before Galveston and Minnesota investors built the railroad town of North Galveston in 1892. The 1900 storm wiped out those ambitions; later the community was revived as a bayside resort and, between the world wars, was known for its fig and citrus orchards before turning to fishing.

San Leon, TX

The oldest graves here were dug by the 1890s, part of the town of North Galveston, itself carved in 1891 from the Republic of Texas townsite of San Leon first laid out in 1837. The great hurricane of 1900 destroyed the town, and in 1910 the land passed to Congressman Joe Eagle, who restored the old San Leon name and in 1920 deeded the burial ground to the community. Storms and erosion have swept away many graves and markers over the years, leaving the cemetery to carry what remains of the area's memory.

Merced County, CA

In the mid-19th century, settlers and travelers in California's Central Valley built with adobe, the sun-dried earthen brick that had shaped the region since Spanish and Mexican times. The San Luis Camp Adobe survives as the oldest building in Merced County, a rare earthen structure that outlasted the frame-and-brick towns that grew up around it. Its thick walls are a tangible link to the valley's earliest days of ranching and overland travel.

San Marcos, TX

Rooted in an 1834 Mexican land grant, this burial ground took shape in the decades after the Civil War, when a portion was purchased in 1868 by freedman Peter Roberts and, in 1876, a cemetery association bought ten acres to formalize the grounds. Local tradition holds that enslaved people were laid here even earlier, and over the following decades the cemetery grew to more than twenty acres. Those interred include pioneer settlers and veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam.

Luling, TX

Organized in 1853 in the home of pastor George Daniels, the San Marcos Primitive Baptist Church took its name from the nearby river and gathered just five charter members. When Daniels stepped down in 1862, James Milton Baker began a remarkable forty-eight-year ministry that carried the congregation through a flash flood that destroyed its first building and early records. Baker deeded land here in 1886, and the church endured on this spot before moving to Luling in 1930.

San Marcos, TX

Rising along the Balcones Escarpment, the San Marcos Springs pour out millions of gallons of clear, cold water daily and feed the San Marcos River. Their abundance drew Indigenous peoples for millennia, then Spanish explorers—who named the river on St. Mark's Day in 1689—and mission builders in 1755, before permanent settlers arrived in 1845 and General Edward Burleson and partners platted the town of San Marcos in 1851. In 1926 the springs were developed into the Aquarena Springs tourist park.

McMullen County, TX

This burial ground was already in use when Mary A. Maverick deeded five acres in 1883 for public school and graveyard purposes, and a one-room schoolhouse soon stood nearby, serving the community until 1938. The oldest dated grave belongs to the infant J.H. Byers, who died in 1875, though many graves here are unmarked. San Miguel Cemetery still records the settlers, veterans, and families who built this corner of McMullen County, cared for by their descendants.

San Miguel County, NM

Established in 1794 on a Spanish land grant, San Miguel del Vado grew up at the Santa Fe Trail's main crossing of the Pecos River. As the official port of entry into New Mexico, it was where trade caravans halted to pay customs duties before pushing on to Santa Fe, making it a bustling gateway of the frontier commerce economy.

Irvine, CA

On July 26, 1769, the Spanish Portolá Expedition—the first European overland exploration of Alta California—camped at the base of this hill beside springs that came to bear the name of Father Gómez, a Franciscan traveling with the party. The expedition was blazing the route that would soon knit together Spain's California missions and presidios.

San Patricio, TX

This ground carries three centuries of change, from Spanish exploration beginning in 1519 through Mexican independence in 1821. In 1828 empresarios James McGloin and John McMullen won a Mexican land grant and brought Irish colonists to settle it, and the county—named for St. Patrick—was created in 1836 and organized the next year. Its southern edge, the Nueces River, became a flashpoint in the run-up to the Mexican-American War, crossed by Zachary Taylor's army as it marched south.

San Patricio, TX

Founded in 1830 by empresarios John McMullen and James McGloin as the capital of their Irish colony, San Patricio de Hibernia—named for the patron saint of Ireland—stood as a lonely frontier outpost when the Texas Revolution erupted. On February 27, 1836, General José Urrea's division of Santa Anna's army surprised and overwhelmed a small Texan party under Johnson, killing several and marching the survivors to Matamoros as prisoners. After the Texan victory at San Jacinto the town was destroyed and its people scattered, and this 1936 monument names its early settlers, soldiers, and notable descendants.

San Marcos, TX

San Pedro Cemetery was established in 1909 to serve the San Marcos community and was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2007. Its Spanish name reflects the Tejano and Hispanic heritage woven through Hays County's history. The burial ground remains a quiet record of the families who made their lives in this stretch of Central Texas.

San Pedro, TX

In the 1830s, families from the southeastern states settled along San Pedro Creek beside the stage route to Rusk, where Joel W. Stowe's stage stop and store became a post office in 1842. The community boiled molasses from ribbon cane, raised cotton and corn, and milled its own lumber, gathering around churches, a cemetery, and a school. Its numbers ebbed during the two world wars before rebounding in the 1960s.

Cibola County, NM

The village of San Rafael, once called El Gallo, sits by a spring at the edge of the Malpais lava flow west of Grants. Members of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's expedition passed through the area in 1540, and in 1862 it was chosen as the original site of a frontier fort during the U.S. Army's campaigns in Navajo country. The marker layers three centuries of Spanish and American presence onto one desert spring.

San Saba, TX

Originally the Odd Fellows Cemetery, this burial ground began in 1883 when the local IOOF lodge bought ten acres north of old San Saba and maintained it for forty-five years. In 1929 the newly incorporated San Saba Cemetery Association purchased the grounds and additional acreage for token sums, and in 1935 burials from the town's earliest city cemetery were reinterred here. The cemetery stands as a continuing record of San Saba's earliest citizens and its changing community.