Westward Expansion

Dunlay, TX

German immigrant Henry Schuehle built this one-and-a-half-story limestone cottage in 1850 on land he bought in Medina County. In 1900 it passed to the Saathoff family, who had come to Texas from Germany in 1846 and helped found the nearby settlement of Quihi, and who lived here for about 75 years while active in public education. Its native-stone construction reflects the practical building traditions the German settlers carried to the Texas Hill Country frontier.

Schulenburg, TX

Organized about 1871 as the High Hill Missionary Baptist Church, this congregation first met in a building whose lumber was hauled to the site by oxen. In 1873, just before the railroad arrived and gave rise to Schulenburg, the structure was rolled overland on logs to this new location. Shared for decades by several faiths as a "Union Church," it was reorganized in 1927 as First Baptist Church.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

The Schuylkill Arsenal, built in the early 1800s, was where Meriwether Lewis gathered and stored the supplies he purchased in Philadelphia before shipping them west to Pittsburgh for the start of his great expedition. For more than a century afterward the arsenal outfitted American soldiers, supplying military goods through the Civil War and both World Wars. It stood until 1963, when it was finally razed.

McKinney, TX

Scott Cemetery began in the 1850s on the land of pioneer James Preston Scott, whose two-year-old granddaughter, Mary C. Taylor, was the first person buried here. Among its more than 200 graves — at least 30 of them unmarked — are two enslaved people, Jake and Rhoda, laid to rest in the northwest corner. Scott himself, who died while serving in the Texas Legislature, was buried here in 1858, and the ground still serves the surrounding rural communities.

Georgetown, KY

Formed from Woodford County in 1792, Scott County was the second created after Kentucky became a state. It honors General Charles Scott, a Virginia-born Revolutionary officer who saw action at Trenton, Germantown, Monmouth, and Stony Point, settled in Kentucky in 1785, and later served as the state's fourth governor.

Melissa, TX

This L-plan Victorian dwelling went up around the 1870s, as the young town of Melissa was taking root in the Blackland Prairie of North Texas. Merchant Louis A. Scott and his wife Louise bought it in 1880, and after 1903 it passed to the Barker family, whose daughters lived here for 85 years. When a devastating tornado tore through Melissa in 1921, the sturdy house lost only a chimney—a small testament to its solid construction and its distinctive dormers and Mansard-type roofs.

Hillsboro, TX

This burial ground served the vanished community of Scott's Chapel, tied to the family of James Williams Scott, a signer of the Goliad Declaration of Independence who came to Texas in 1831. His sons gave land for a school, church, and, in 1860, this cemetery. Among those resting here is Samuel McFall, a survivor of the deadly Black Bean Episode of the 1842–43 Mier Expedition.

Cisco, TX

Settled in the 1870s, Scranton grew into a full community with a post office, stores, cotton gin, blacksmith, school, and academy. In 1896 Joseph Jackson Ray and his wife Sarah donated land for a Baptist church and graveyard, though the first burial — an infant of the Sprawls family — had already taken place that July. A cemetery association formed in 1968, and the nearby community center still hosts services and an annual homecoming. Veterans from the Civil War onward lie here alongside the settlement's pioneers, educators, and officials.

Denton, TX

The oldest part of this Denton house was built in 1885–86 for grocer Robert C. Scripture and his wife Annie, then later owned by merchant Robert Hann. Around 1912, under banker B. H. Deavenport, the Victorian residence was enlarged and remodeled in Mission Revival style by local contractor M. B. Whitlock, gaining its distinctive third-floor rose window.

Clifton, TX

Set on two acres of an 1846 land survey, this cemetery was deeded to Bosque County for public burials by Lowry Hampton Scrutchfield in 1883. Family tradition holds that an infant, Minnie Henderson, was the first laid to rest here, though the oldest legible stone marks a six-month-old child from 1885. Scrutchfield, his wife, and his mother lie among more than fifty marked and unmarked graves of the county's early settlers.

Geneva, TX

This cemetery honors North Carolina native William Scurlock, a Texas Revolution veteran remembered as the 'Man with the Charmed Life.' He and his brother Mial settled here in 1834, enlisted the next year, and William survived the Siege of Bexar, the Matamoros Expedition, and escape from the Goliad Massacre before fighting at San Jacinto; Mial died at the Alamo. William later sat in the Republic's Congress, fought in the Mexican War, and settled here, where he lies alongside Confederate veteran W. J. Walton.

Snyder, TX

Scurry County was created in 1876 from older Texas territories and organized in 1884, with Snyder as its seat. It honors General William R. Scurry, a member of the last Congress of the Republic of Texas and a Confederate officer killed in 1864. The county's founding was part of the steady organization of West Texas as settlement pushed onto the plains.

Snyder, TX

Scurry County was created in 1876 and organized in 1884, and local landholders donated the lots at the center of town for a courthouse square built atop a former buffalo trail. Citizens themselves bought the construction bonds, and a two-story courthouse of locally made red brick went up in 1886, complete with board sidewalks, a chain hitching rail, and a public windmill that served as the town's social hub. The present courthouse replaced it in 1909–11, and the old precinct boundaries laid out along the lanes approaching the square are still in use.

Snyder, TX

By 1911 Scurry County's two earlier jails, built in 1884 and 1886, had proven too small, so the commissioners court used bond money to purchase this site and raise a sturdy brick building, finished with local labor in 1912. The jailer and his family lived on the first floor, while prisoner cells and even a small hospital occupied the upper two stories. A grim feature set into the design was a trapdoor meant to serve as a hanging gallows. The jail did its duty for more than sixty years.

Dallas, TX

Beginning as a buffalo trail, Scyene Road became one of the earliest roads in Dallas County, linking the town of Scyene with Dallas — a full day's wagon journey west — and reaching east toward Jefferson and Shreveport. Settled in the 1840s and 1850s and named for a town in ancient Egypt, Scyene reportedly sheltered outlaws such as Belle Starr and Jesse James along this route in the 1870s. Once a thriving town with a post office, stores, school, and churches, Scyene declined after the Texas & Pacific Railroad bypassed it in 1872.

Bainbridge Island, WA

Built in 1910, the Seabold Community Church served the rural north end of Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, a district settled by farmers, loggers, and immigrant families in the early 20th century. Small community churches like this were the social and spiritual anchors of isolated island settlements before bridges and ferries knit the region together. It is recognized by the Bainbridge Island Historical Society as part of the island's heritage.

Bainbridge Island, WA

On the north end of Bainbridge Island, the Seabold community grew up around the ferry landings and small farms that dotted Puget Sound in the early twentieth century. Neighbors here organized a community club, and the hall that carried its name became the social heart of the district — the place for grange-style meetings, dances, potlucks, and holiday gatherings when scattered farm families needed a common roof. Such clubhouses were the civic glue of rural Washington before automobiles and bridges knit the islands to the mainland.

Seadrift, TX

Settlement near this spot began in the 1840s when German immigrants landing at Indianola lingered in the area. A post office arrived in 1888, its name drawn from the storm-blown "sea drift" that piled on the shore, and by 1912 A. D. Powers had organized a formal townsite. Within two years Seadrift boasted churches, banks, hotels, and a newspaper, and it survived a punishing 1919 hurricane to remain a coastal resort town.

Spring, TX

Seal McDougle Cemetery was established in 1883 in the Spring area of Harris County, a burial ground serving the farming families who settled north of Houston in the late nineteenth century. It was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2005. Like many such grounds, it endures as a quiet record of a rural community as the surrounding countryside gave way to suburban growth.

Sealy, TX

In 1879 railroad agent George Sealy bought nearly 12,000 acres from the old township of San Felipe de Austin to establish a depot, and the town of Sealy quickly grew up around it. The cemetery recorded its first burial—an infant, Annie Fowlkes—in 1883, and families bought plots from the railroad until the company donated the land to trustees in 1887. A ladies' society organized in 1904 rallied community support, even launching a Christmas bazaar that became a beloved local tradition.

Sebastian, TX

Carved from the old San Juan de Carricitos land grant and later part of the vast King Ranch, this South Texas townsite was renamed Sebastian in 1906 for a Rock Island Railroad officer and promoted after 1914 as a coming agricultural center. Its early years also caught the violence of the border troubles, when a bandit raid claimed two members of the Austin family.

Palo Alto, CA · est. 1969

In 1847, brothers Secundino and Teodoro Robles bought the sprawling Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito, more than four thousand acres, from José Peña. The original adobe had begun humbly as a sheep-herder's shelter tied to Mission Santa Clara. Secundino turned it into a lively social center of Mexican-era California, complete with a ring for the bull-and-bear contests popular in that day.

Palo Alto, CA

In 1847, Secundino and Teodoro Robles purchased Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito, a sprawling 4,418-acre grant, from José Peña. During the Mexican-era rancho period, Secundino made the adobe a hub of social life, complete with a ring for bull and bear contests. The site captures Alta California life on the eve of American annexation.

Whitley County, IN

This marker stands within the former Seek's Village, a Miami Indian reservation in northeastern Indiana named for the Miami leader Seek. Under the mounting pressure of federal Indian removal policy in the 1830s, the U.S. government ordered the resident Miami to a reservation near Leavenworth, Kansas, and they left in 1837. The site records both a Native homeland and the moment it was forcibly emptied.

Austin, TX

These oaks mark where Gideon White built a home in 1839 on the edge of the Texas frontier, only to be killed in 1842 in the violence between settlers and Native peoples that shadowed early Austin. His daughter Louisa married Edward Seiders in 1846, giving the grove its lasting name. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Stephenville vicinity, TX

First called Garrett Springs for settler J. B. Garrett along Sims Creek, this Erath County community was renamed Selden after John Selden arrived in the mid-1850s. It grew into an important local trade center with a grist mill and cotton gin, a school, post office, lodge hall, and stores serving the surrounding farms. Its story is a reminder of the farming hamlets that once dotted the Texas countryside.

Matagorda County, TX

William Selkirk came to Texas from New York in 1822 as one of Stephen F. Austin's original 'Old Three Hundred' colonists, working as a surveyor, serving in the militia, and joining a party sent to treat with the Waco and Tawakoni peoples. His 1824 land grant near the mouth of the Colorado River — among the first the Mexican government issued to Austin's settlers — became known as Selkirk Island, a stretch once cut into islands by river channels and long famed in legend for pirate treasure buried by one of Jean Lafitte's men.

Linwood, TX

When surveyor William Roark brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1834, the frontier was still raw and burials came early — his mother and brother were laid to rest here around 1837. As the Linwood community grew, the half-acre plot became a shared resting ground, and marriage into the Selman family gave it the name it still carries. Generations of settlers expanded and tended the grounds across the 19th century.

Seminole, TX

Founded and named county seat in 1905 when Gaines County organized, Seminole took its name from the nearby Seminole Wells watering places and grew slowly around its first store, post office and 1906 courthouse. The arrival of the Midland & Northwestern Railroad in 1918, followed by highways and oil, transformed the sleepy trading point into a farming and petroleum hub.

Lometa, TX

Pioneer Reuben S. Senterfitt arrived in the 1860s, and a town bearing his name grew up around him—at its height boasting hotels, mills, stores, saloons, a school, churches, and a stage stop. When the railroad bypassed the town in the 1890s, it withered away, leaving this cemetery as one of its few surviving traces. Among the graves are early settlers and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam, the oldest being three-year-old Joseph C. Howell, who died in 1877.

Menard, TX

Built in 1852 by soldiers of the 8th Infantry, this cypress-and-limestone structure served as an officer-of-the-day station and sentry post along the road toward Fort Concho. It was part of the network of frontier posts—anchored here by nearby Fort McKavett—that the U.S. Army maintained to shield settlers pressing into the Texas Hill Country. The building is a rare survivor of the everyday military architecture that guarded the mid-19th-century frontier.

Groesbeck, TX

Born in 1811, Seth H. Bates served as an early Texas Ranger during the struggle for Texas independence, enrolling in Captain Seale's Company in 1835–1836 — a unit raised, as his marker notes, by order of the provisional Council of Texas. He lived on until 1886, his gravestone erected by the State of Texas in 1962. His service placed him among the volunteer fighters who secured the young republic.

Matagorda County, TX

Seth Ingram, born in Vermont in 1790, served as a sergeant in the 11th U.S. Infantry during the War of 1812 before heading to Mexican Texas. As one of Stephen F. Austin's surveyors, he helped lay out San Felipe de Austin, the capital of Austin's colony and the administrative heart of Anglo settlement. He died in 1857, his grave marked in Matagorda County.

Texas City, TX

During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved people founded a community on land that Judge William J. Jones platted for sale to freedmen near the Gulf Coast. Many had been brought to the area by cattlemen, and after the war some stayed on as cowboys for the Butler Ranch while building their own settlement, a church and a school by 1871. Proud of owning land and their freedom, residents called the place "Our Settlement"; it prospered into the early 1900s with an unusually high literacy rate before industry, integration and incorporation into Texas City gradually dispersed it.

Ridgefield, CT

In 1708, as English colonists pushed inland from the Connecticut coast to settle the western frontier, a scouting party sent to lay out the new town of Ridgefield is said to have sheltered against this boulder on their first night in the wilderness. The town they founded became one of the last of Connecticut's colonial-era settlements, purchased from the Ramapoo people and chartered soon after. This rock, marked in 1958 on the 250th anniversary of that founding, memorializes the humble beginning of a community that would later see Revolutionary War fighting at the 1777 Battle of Ridgefield.

Liberty, TX

The town of Liberty has governed this corner of Texas across seven courthouses and two nations. The first, a building of hewn logs, went up in 1831 when Liberty was a municipality of Mexican Texas; independence in 1836 turned the municipality into a county. From frame structures of split cypress to brick halls lost to fire and condemnation, each courthouse rose and fell until the Cordova-limestone building of 1931, enlarged in 1957, finally endured.

Liberty, TX

Benjamin Franklin Hardin arrived in the Atascosito District of Mexican Texas in 1826 and became surveyor of the district in 1834. As a member of the Liberty Volunteers he fought at Concepcion, the Siege of Bexar, and the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that won Texas independence, then built a home on this site in 1839. The place, later known as Seven Pines, stayed in the Hardin family for four generations, and in 1858 the legislature created Hardin County in the family's honor.

Colorado City, TX

The springs once here — now beneath Lake Champion — bubbled up in seven basins so round they looked man-made, earning the name Seven Wells. Fed by the same underground water that supplied Champion Creek, they drew great herds of buffalo whose tracks cut deep into the soft sandstone banks, and at least four trails converged where the creeks met. Native peoples camped at this watering place for centuries, and in the 1880s a small settlement called Artesia briefly rose at the site.

Jacksboro, TX

Dan Roland Sewell wore many hats in early Jacksboro — teacher, lumberman, rancher, and mayor — and it was during his term that the town got its first waterworks. In 1921 he gave the city a tract on Lost Creek that became Jacksboro's first public park. The gift capped a life of civic service to a young North Texas frontier town.

Albany, TX

Created in 1858 on land roamed by nomadic Indian tribes, Shackelford County took its name from a physician of the Texas Revolution. Its first Anglo settlers arrived on the eve of the Civil War, sheltering during the fighting in 'family forts' until the U.S. Army built Fort Griffin in 1867. The rough town of Griffin that grew around the post drew buffalo hunters and trail drivers on the Western Cattle Trail before the railroad arrived in 1881 and, later, an oil boom transformed the county's economy.

Albany, TX

Created in 1858 and organized in 1874, Shackelford County was named for Dr. Jack Shackelford, captain of the 'Red Rovers,' an Alabama company that joined Fannin's command in the Texas Revolution. Shackelford was among the few spared in the Goliad Massacre of 1836. Albany serves as the county seat.

Albany, TX

Completed in 1883–84 to designs by Dallas architect J. E. Flanders, this courthouse rose from local stone quarried just outside town and laid up by kilted Scottish masons, its foundations sunk into the caliche hardpan. Budgeted at $27,000, it ended up costing nearly $50,000, and a clock tower was added at the public's request. It has anchored the county seat of Albany ever since.

Albany, TX

Built in 1877–78 by the Fort Worth firm of Thomas & Woerner with ironwork shipped from St. Louis, this native limestone jail served frontier Shackelford County when Albany was a raw cattle town. The masons' initials still cut into the blocks are a rare record of stonemasons claiming payment for their labor. Among its early inmates was John Selman, who years later would gun down the infamous John Wesley Hardin in El Paso. Superseded by a new jail in 1929, the building later safeguarded the archives of playwright Robert Nail.

DeBerry, TX

Shady Grove Baptist Church was serving the rural residents of northeast Panola County by 1880, with the Rev. J. R. Alexander leading the congregation for nearly three decades. Its original one-room wooden building did double duty as church and school before a brick facility replaced it in 1954, and the adjacent cemetery holds burials dating to 1892. The church remained a fixture of country community life.

Winnsboro, TX

One of the oldest burial grounds in Wood County, Shady Grove served the pioneer community of the same name, whose leading settler Reuben Elledge arrived around 1845 and helped organize the county as a commissioner and judge. In 1850 he donated land for a school and Methodist church, and an acre was later set aside for this cemetery, where young Bobby Scoggins—drowned in 1855—may be the earliest burial. Rock cairns, obelisks, Woodmen of the World stones, and graves of Civil War veterans mark the site of early settlement.

Gilmer, TX

In 1852 land promoter Frost Thorn gave four acres to the Shady Grove Missionary Baptist congregation for a church and school, and the churchyard became a cemetery when two young children were buried a day apart in November 1855. The growing community gained businesses, a high school, and a post office before the Church of Christ built a new sanctuary here in 1889. Local women's clubs and, later, a cemetery association took up the long work of tending the grounds that record the once-thriving village of Shady Grove.

Paris, TX

This shaded grove near a creek crossing began as a resting place in 1844 for a dying young traveler who asked to be buried in the beautiful spot, and it soon became ground for camp meetings led by traveling frontier preachers. A local family deeded the land in the 1840s, and a Methodist church grew directly from those open-air revivals. An adjoining African American burial ground, its earliest marked grave from 1875, tells of the Black community that lived and worshiped alongside.

Greenville, TX

Shady Grove grew out of Charles F. Mercer's 1844 colony, chartered when Sam Houston's Republic of Texas granted land to settle families across a vast tract that included this site. Early arrivals founded the Concord Missionary Baptist Church in 1844 and raised a log building that doubled as church and school; the Reverend Benjamin Watson also built Hunt County's first flour mill in 1849. A naming dispute in the late 1850s pitted 'Alexander,' after benefactors who donated land for a schoolhouse, against 'Shady Grove,' and the trees won. Cotton gins, mills, and churches followed until the school consolidated away in 1918.

Bertram, TX

In the 1850s and 60s families put down roots along the Middle Gabriel River, where the Austin-Lampasas and Burnet-Belton roads crossed. On land deeded in 1877 a schoolhouse, church, and cemetery took shape, and the growing settlement — known at various times as Russell Gabriel, Grove, and Tamega — gained a cotton gin, corn mill, store, blacksmith, doctor, and Masonic lodge. Its school consolidated with Bertram in 1942, and the church property became a community gathering place.

Frankel City, TX

Just after the turn of the twentieth century, a burial ground took shape on the south bank of Shafter Lake, near a settlement that has since vanished from the map. It took its name from Colonel William R. Shafter, who had led a military expedition across this stretch of West Texas in 1875. The oldest legible stones date to 1909, and the once-neglected plot — now down to a dozen known graves — holds ranchers and travelers who died far from any town.

Andrews, TX

Platted in 1908, Shafter Lake was the first town in still-unorganized Andrews County, growing up around a water trough that served ranchers and freighters hauling between New Mexico and Texas. It took its name from the lake charted in Colonel William R. Shafter's 1875 survey, part of the campaigns that opened the Permian Basin to Anglo settlement. When the 1910 organization vote made Andrews the county seat, the town simply picked up and moved there, leaving Shafter Lake to fade away.

Andrews, TX

In 1875 Colonel William R. Shafter led a company of soldiers from Fort Concho across the arid plains toward Monument Springs, New Mexico, mapping the scarce watering holes that made the country passable. Along the way he skirmished with Native fighters and located the salt lake that still carries his name. The maps his expedition produced charted a land that had been largely unknown to newcomers, opening the Permian Basin to settlement.

Tyler, TX

The Shamburger family arrived from Mississippi in 1847 and put down deep roots in Smith County, where son Mathew and grandson T. J. helped pioneer the commercial growing of fruit trees and roses that would define East Texas agriculture. This family graveyard began in 1874–75 with the burial of T. J. and Settie's infant daughter, Nettie, and grew over generations to hold parents, children, and in-laws, with the last interment in 1967.

Shamrock, TX

As the Texas Panhandle filled with settlers around the turn of the twentieth century, a circuit-riding minister organized this Methodist congregation in a walnut grove in 1901 with seventeen charter members. Services moved from members' homes to the Shamrock schoolhouse and then into a succession of church buildings — one lost to a tornado in 1907 — as the community grew. The present sanctuary was completed in 1965.

Pierce, TX

In the decades after the Civil War, Texas cattle moved north up the great trail drives, and few names loomed larger than Abel Head "Shanghai" Pierce. Arriving with almost nothing, he built one of the era's vast cattle empires through relentless drive and sharp dealing, earning the title "cattle king" of the coastal plains. His ranch near this spot became a center of the open-range cattle world that defined Gilded Age Texas.

Pierce, TX

Built in 1886 in lavish style, this house served as the working headquarters of Shanghai Pierce's enormously successful cattle operation, with the ranch office on its first floor. Pierce—the flamboyant "cattle king" credited with introducing hardy Brahma cattle to Texas—loomed large in local legend, said to hold forth from the nearby Southern Pacific railroad station. The home reflects the wealth the open-range era brought to the Texas coastal plains.

Kirvin, TX

Two brothers from Alabama settled here with their families in 1859, and a small farming community grew up around a school built in 1870 on donated land. The adjoining ground became a public burial place known as Shanks Cemetery after the local post office opened in 1896, and a cemetery association has cared for the site since 1935.

Shannon, TX

This burial ground began with a settlement called Stampede Springs, drawn together in 1878 by a reliable spring and a general store. By 1880 the community had bought land for a school, church, and graveyard, and after a post office opened in 1893 the town took the name Shannon. Its population peaked near 112 in the 1920s before dwindling to a couple dozen by 1990, leaving the cemetery—with hundreds of graves and scores of family names—as the fullest record of a fading rural community.

Sharp, TX

In the fertile blackland prairie of Milam County, settlers drawn by the rich soil began putting down roots in the years just after the Civil War. By the 1890s a store, a blacksmith shop, and a cotton gin had knit the scattered farms into a recognizable community, and when the post office opened in 1901 the place took the name Sharp to honor a nearby physician. Cotton drove the local economy, and the tight-knit community endured well enough to launch an annual reunion in 1978.

Rockdale vicinity, TX

The oldest marked grave here dates to 1880, and in 1882 John and M. L. Gordon deeded land for Mt. Zion Presbyterian Church with its western half set aside for burials. After the church was moved and demolished, the cemetery endured for the Sharp community, its early stones marking many children and infants. A caretaking association formed in 1949, and by the 21st century nearly 400 graves lay here.