Westward Expansion

Concan, TX

This rugged pass takes its name from a silver mine the Spanish are said to have opened in the 1700s; the ore proved poor, but fourteen shafts still honeycomb the hills. In the early 1830s James Bowie—later a hero and casualty of the Alamo—built a fortification nearby, and in 1831 his men fought off a daylong Comanche attack. The fight's celebrated hero was Bowie's enslaved companion, remembered as 'Black Jim Bowie,' who braved the open ground to bring water to the besieged.

Silver Spring Township, PA · est. 1947

Among the very first Europeans to push into the Cumberland Valley were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who in 1734 gathered a congregation on land held by James Silver. The stone church that still stands was raised in 1783, in the hopeful early years of American independence, and was carefully restored in 1928 to its 18th-century form. Nearly three centuries on, worship continues on the same ground.

Silver Valley, TX

The first known grave here belongs to Helen A. Averitt, an early spiritual leader and educator buried in 1881, two decades before the land was formally designated a cemetery. Originally called Robinson's Peak Cemetery, it holds early settlers, veterans of every branch of the U.S. military, and the families of Mexican railroad workers who came to the region in the early 20th century. An association formed in 1958 keeps the still-active grounds.

Victoria, TX

Silvestre De León (1802–1842) was a son of empresario Martín De León, founder of the De León Colony and the city of Victoria. Active in the church and serving as alcalde of Victoria, he was a soldier and Indian fighter who was taken prisoner by the Mexican Army during the Texas War for Independence. He also owned and traded vast herds of horses, mules, and cattle.

Muldoon, TX

Simon Peter Ford came to Texas in 1830 as a teenager and, at twenty, fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Captain William Wood's company—the decisive 1836 clash that secured Texas independence. He lived on into the 1890s, a link between the revolutionary generation and the settled state. Texas erected his marker in 1962, its Star and Wreath honoring a veteran of the founding fight.

Burkburnett, TX

Tennessee-born Simon Peter Hawkins brought his family to present Wichita County in 1875 in search of good grass, settling along Gilbert Creek in a colony cowboys nicknamed Nesterville. He signed the petition to organize the county, voted in its first election, sat on its first grand jury, and helped found the area's first Baptist church, Masonic lodge, and school. When the railroad shifted settlement to the new town of Burkburnett, the community he helped build moved with it.

San Antonio, TX

This state marker honors Simona Smith Fisk, born in San Antonio in 1829 as a daughter of Erastus "Deaf" Smith, the celebrated scout whose reconnaissance served Sam Houston's army during the Texas Revolution. She married James Nathaniel Fisk and lived until 1890, her grave marked by the State of Texas in 1936. Her life spanned the era of Texas independence, statehood, and the Civil War.

Palo Pinto County, TX

Simpson Crawford carried a soldier's life west: a Kentucky native, he fought in the Mexican War at Vera Cruz and Mexico City before marrying and moving to Texas in 1852. By 1854 he had settled in the Keechi Valley of Palo Pinto County, part of the Peters Colony land-grant settlement, where he built a home and grew a ranch of some 3,100 acres. He also rode with the Texas Rangers, patrolling a still-dangerous frontier.

Mechanicsburg, PA · est. 1954

Laid out around 1792, Simpson Ferry Road ran from Michael Simpson's ferry crossing on the Susquehanna River inland toward Carlisle, tracing at this point a route later remembered as Simpson Street. In the young republic it was a vital artery for settlers and travelers pushing toward the western part of the state.

Seagraves, TX

When the railroad town of Seagraves was platted in 1917, Alice Jenkins built this two-story lodging as the Hotel Texan. R.P. and Emma Simpson, who first owned it in the early 1920s, bought it back in 1927 and reopened it under their own name. With its stucco exterior and simple detailing, the Simpson Hotel typified the modest hotels that served travelers in early twentieth-century West Texas until it closed in 1974.

Hillsboro, TX

This Hill County house began before 1870 as two rooms with a detached kitchen and grew under Dr. William Thomas Sims, a prominent early Hillsboro dentist and Methodist and civic leader who bought it in 1906. Later it passed to Leroy and Lalia Womack, business and civic figures who purchased it on their 1934 wedding day. It has remained in the family ever since.

Matagorda, TX

A South Carolinian and a soldier of the War of 1812, Sinclair David Gervais came to Texas with two daughters in 1835, on the eve of the Texas Revolution. Provisional governor Henry Smith named him the first alcalde of the municipality of Mina, later Bastrop, and after moving to Matagorda in 1837 he was appointed the county's second chief justice by President Sam Houston. His career places him among the officeholders who built local government in the earliest days of the Texas Republic.

San Saba, TX

Sion Record Bostick lived the whole sweep of early Texas history. As a teenager he was among the party of young Texans who captured the fleeing General Santa Anna after the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He went on to fight Comanches at Plum Creek, serve in the Mexican War, and enlist with Hood's Brigade during the Civil War before becoming a fixture at veterans' reunions.

Sipe Springs vicinity, TX

Settlers found seeping spring water here about 1870 and built a milling and ginning town whose very name—pronounced 'seep'—stirred spelling disputes from the start. John C. Smith donated five acres for this cemetery in 1873, and residents added a tabernacle in 1890 that still hosts an annual July homecoming. When an oil boom struck in the winter of 1918, sleepy Sipe Springs swelled toward 10,000 people, complete with an opera house and a pro baseball team, before the boom passed.

Sisterdale, TX

Sisterdale sits along the old Pinto Trail, an ancient Native American route linking San Antonio's missions to lands north, at a crossing of the Guadalupe's tributaries. German settlers of the Adelsverein began arriving in the 1840s, and engineer Nicolaus Zink built the first home here in 1847; Ottmar von Behr, who named the village and became its first postmaster, drew the name from nearby Sister Hills. Populated by educated free-thinkers—many refugees of the failed 1848 German revolution—it became one of the Hill Country's 'Latin settlements,' impressing even the traveler Frederick Law Olmsted in 1854.

Melrose, TX

In 1782 the Spanish official Antonio Gil Y'Barbo granted a league of land at El Atascoso to Nacogdoches citizen Miguel de Cordova for a ranch and farming. Straddling El Camino Real between the Mexican border and Louisiana, the rancho was a typical outpost of Spanish Texas and a busy site of trade—both legal and illegal—until it faded in the 1820s and gave way to a small settlement that lingered into the days of the Texas Republic.

Nacogdoches, TX

Before 1800, this spot was known across East Texas as "Old Soledad," the headquarters of William Barr and Samuel Davenport, licensed traders who did business with the region's Native nations. In the Spanish borderlands, such traders were the crucial go-betweens, exchanging manufactured goods for hides and deerskins and knitting frontier economies together. A 1936 state marker fixes the site's place in that vanished world.

West Columbia, TX

Orozimbo was the plantation home of Dr. James Aeneas Phelps, one of the "Old Three Hundred" families of Stephen F. Austin's colony and a surgeon for the Texas Army at San Jacinto. Following that decisive 1836 battle, the captured Mexican general and president Antonio López de Santa Anna was held here as a prisoner from July to November of that year. The site marks where the defeated commander was detained during the fragile first months of Texas independence.

Canton, TX

Approved in 1894, this brick courthouse replaced a plain frame building that had served Van Zandt County since just after the Civil War. Designed by the celebrated San Antonio architect J. Riely Gordon in his signature Richardsonian Romanesque style, it rose on a Greek-cross plan with a soaring six-story tower crowned by a copper eagle. The grand structure stood only into the 1930s before being demolished.

Leander, TX

In 1836, as the Republic of Texas was born, Texas Rangers under Captain John J. Tumlinson raised a blockhouse here—the first Anglo post in what became Williamson County. It stood only briefly, destroyed by Native raiders in 1837. Its short life captures the precariousness of the earliest frontier defense.

La Grange, TX

Built around 1828 as a fortified place of defense, this twin blockhouse—known as Moore's Fort—took its name from frontiersman John Henry Moore, a noted Indian fighter who commanded the Texans at the Battle of Gonzales in October 1835. The city of La Grange itself was established on Moore's land in 1831.

Abilene, TX

When newspaperman Stoddard Johnston platted the town of Abilene in the early 1880s, he set aside this site for a school. While the first schoolhouse was under construction in the spring of 1881, classes met in a tent pitched between Hickory and Cedar streets, and—as was typical on the frontier—the finished building doubled as a community center and church. By 1884 the growing student body had outgrown it and a new school was built elsewhere.

Marfa vicinity, TX

Alamito Creek had been a corridor of human activity since prehistoric times when Spanish explorers first passed through in 1535 and Mexican families began raising rancheros here around 1715 despite Apache pressure. In the 1850s the storied Chihuahua Trail brought freight wagons rumbling past, and by 1870 Alamito was a farming community led by North Carolina pioneer John Davis, who married into the founding Herrera family and served peach brandy to travelers. A railroad reached the site in 1930 and renamed it Plata, but today only ruins of the homes, chapel, school, and canal remain, with wagon ruts still cut into the bedrock.

Canyon, TX

In the treeless Texas Panhandle of the 1880s, fencing meant barbed wire — the practical version perfected by Illinois inventor Joseph F. Glidden by 1876 and marketed in Texas through agent H. B. Sanborn. In 1881 real-estate investors Jot Gunter and William B. Munson strung a line fence on this site to enclose a 240,000-acre horse pasture, part of a transformation that ranchers resisted, cowboys resented, and merchants welcomed. Barbed wire ended the open range, cut off the old cattle trails, and ultimately saved the industry by allowing controlled breeding and feeding.

Gilmer, TX

Early in the nineteenth century a band of Cherokees established a village on this East Texas ground, part of the tribes that had migrated westward ahead of American expansion. They lived here until 1839, when the Cherokee and their allied peoples were forcibly driven from the young Republic of Texas.

Spur, TX

Behind earthen breastworks at this spot, Major Thomas M. Anderson of the Tenth U.S. Infantry maintained a supply camp during the Army's campaigns on the Southern Plains. From here he provisioned the Fourth U.S. Cavalry under General Ranald S. Mackenzie, whose 1874–1875 operations broke the resistance of the region's Native peoples. Those campaigns forced Indigenous nations onto reservations and opened the plains to Anglo settlement.

Texas City, TX

As early as 1825, empresario Stephen F. Austin pressed Mexico to develop ports around Galveston Bay to boost foreign trade, and by the 1830s the small village of Austinia had taken shape on his coastal land. After Austin's death in 1836 the property passed to his sister Emily Austin Bryan Perry, and in 1837 George L. Hammeken and partners sought a Republic of Texas charter to run a railroad from Austinia to the Brazos to capture the river valley's trade. The ambitious plans for houses, public buildings, and a rail line never materialized once Hammeken chose a different route, and Austinia faded away.

Houston, TX

On the afternoon of April 21, 1836, near this spot, Gen. Sam Houston's small Texian army formed up to fall upon the much larger Mexican force of Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna. The surprise attack that followed lasted only about eighteen minutes but shattered Santa Anna's army and led to his capture the next day. The victory secured the independence of the Republic of Texas.

San Angelo, TX

Ben Ficklin began as a stage stand named for the frontiersman and mail contractor Major Ben Ficklin, who helped organize the Pony Express and once carried the first message from California's governor to Missouri's. From 1875 it served as the first county seat of Tom Green County, until a catastrophic flood swept it away on August 24, 1882. The county seat then moved to San Angelo.

Carthage, TX

Bethany was a thriving Panola County town in the 1850s, sited on the Shreveport Road—one of the main routes by which emigrants crossed into Texas. Little remains today but the memory of the place and the road that ran through it. The marker fixes the location of a settlement that flourished on the tide of antebellum migration.

Arlington, TX

In 1840 Jonathan Bird raised a fort along the Military Road linking the Red River to Austin, part of the young Republic of Texas's effort to hold and settle its northern frontier. Nearby in 1843, Republic commissioners signed a major treaty setting a boundary line between Indian nations and white settlements, and the battered survivors of the failed Snively Expedition sought shelter here. The spot sat at the crossroads of diplomacy, migration, and conflict on the Texas prairie.

Arlington, TX

In 1841 Gen. Edward H. Tarrant authorized Jonathan Bird to plant a fort and settlement near a crescent lake—the first Anglo-American colonizing attempt in present Tarrant County. Hunger and conflict scattered the Red River settlers, and in 1843 the disbanded Snively expedition, disarmed by U.S. troops, drifted through the abandoned post. That September, Republic officials and leaders of nine Native nations signed the Bird's Fort Treaty here, drawing a line between Indian lands and colonization.

Tom Green County, TX

Broken in 1868 as the first cultivated land in Tom Green County, this tract was promoted by real-estate man J. C. "Jake" Marshall as a German colony and named for Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor" then rising to power in Europe. Its thick-walled stone farmhouse doubled as a shelter for Ben Ficklin stage-line horses and sold its entire crop to the soldiers of nearby Fort Concho; its sturdy roof even saved lives in the 1882 flood that leveled the town of Ben Ficklin.

Pembina County, ND

Bowesmont was founded on the Red River in 1879 and moved in 1886 to sit beside the railroad, growing into a thriving community graced by a handsome neoclassical Community Hall. Today the town has all but vanished, and this memorial marks where it once stood.

Cleburne, TX

Founded in December 1856 on land donated by John P. Bailey, Buchanan became Johnson County's second seat of government, named for the newly elected President-elect James Buchanan. It gained a jail and a district clerk's office by 1858, but the lack of a reliable water supply choked its growth. When a resurvey of the county lines forced a new location, Camp Henderson—soon renamed Cleburne—was chosen in 1867, and today only a cemetery marks the vanished town.

Childress, TX

Frank Chriss established the Buck Creek Stage Stand in 1882 as a stop on the mail route running from Wichita Falls to Tascosa. Such stands offered rest and relay for the coaches that carried mail and passengers across the still-open plains. Within a few years the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad reached the region, and the stage stand was abandoned in 1886.

McKinney, TX

John (Jack) McGarrah and his family came from Tennessee in 1842 and opened a trading post here, becoming among the first settlers of present-day Collin County and defending their family fort against raids. When the county was created in 1846, its seat was laid out here as Buckner, where citizens elected their first officials on the Fourth of July and raised a company for the Mexican War. Found to sit outside the county's legal limits, the seat was moved to nearby McKinney by 1848, and Buckner reverted to farmland.

Madisonville vicinity, TX

Alabama native Calvin Cullee Bullard brought his family to this stretch of land between Bedias and Caney creeks in 1867, settling 160 acres and opening a blacksmith shop in the community that came to bear his name. The Bullards and their neighbors farmed cotton and took part in county affairs, with family members serving as tax assessor and county commissioner. A one-room schoolhouse—also used for worship—operated from 1890 until 1923.

Cuero, TX

Chosen in 1846 as DeWitt County's first seat of justice, the town of Cameron honored Captain Ewen Cameron, a prisoner of the ill-fated Mier Expedition who was executed on Santa Anna's order. Though platted on a hundred donated acres, it never grew beyond a log courthouse and clerk's office, and after four elections and four court fights it lost the county seat to Clinton in 1850.

Caldwell, TX

The Camino Real, or Old San Antonio Road, was the great artery of early Texas, tracing ancient Indian and buffalo trails and echoing the 1691 route of Spanish padres. Stretching roughly a thousand miles from Saltillo in Mexico into Louisiana, it carried explorers, traders, soldiers, and settlers for generations before it was surveyed around 1800 as the "King's Highway." Here it also marked the boundary between the early colonies of Stephen F. Austin and Sterling C. Robertson.

El Paso, TX

After the Civil War, the U.S. Army found its old El Paso post at Magoffinsville unsuitable and in 1868 moved the garrison to the Concordia Ranch, establishing Camp Concordia. Built of adobe barracks and outbuildings, the post was renamed Fort Bliss in 1869 and, despite hard living conditions, guarded the frontier until troops withdrew in 1876—only to return within a year. It was the third of six sites the Army's El Paso post would occupy over the decades.

Throckmorton, TX

Established in January 1856 by Major W. J. Hardee's 2nd U.S. Cavalry, Camp Cooper guarded the Texas frontier against the Comanche and oversaw a nearby Indian reservation. Robert E. Lee commanded here for nineteen months before the Civil War, and the post launched the 1859 Cimarron Expedition. Texas troops seized it in February 1861 as the state left the Union.

Del Rio, TX

Established as Camp San Felipe in 1876 as an outpost of Fort Clark, this U.S. Army post was one of a chain of forts defending the isolated settlements of the Southwest Texas frontier. General E. O. C. Ord created it to guard against raiding parties crossing the Pecos and Devil's Rivers. After the town of Del Rio grew up around it, the camp took the town's name; with the end of Indian raids by 1890, troops moved on and the post was abandoned in 1891.

Edna, TX

In the anxious months after San Jacinto, part of the fledgling Republic of Texas army camped here from December 1836 until President Sam Houston furloughed the restless troops in May 1837. Commanded first by Felix Huston and then by Albert Sidney Johnston, the encampment reflected the young republic's uneasy standoff with Mexico. Its darkest moment came when Captain Henry Teal was assassinated in his tent one night in May 1837, a killing that still shadows the site's memory.

Sabinal, TX

Camp Sabinal was established on July 12, 1856 by Captain Albert G. Brackett of the Second U.S. Cavalry to guard the San Antonio–El Paso Road and the frontier settlers strung along it. Federal troops held the post only until November of that year, and it later served as a Texas Ranger camp. Little remains but the ground where it stood.

Kerrville, TX

The U.S. Army opened Camp Verde in 1855 to guard the Texas frontier, and the next year it became headquarters for one of the country's strangest military experiments: some forty camels imported at Secretary of War Jefferson Davis's urging, tested as pack animals for crossing the arid Southwest before the idea was judged impractical. Confederate forces took the post in 1861; the U.S. Army returned in 1865 and abandoned it in 1869. The camel corps remains one of the most memorable curiosities of the antebellum army.

Camp Wood, TX

Camp Wood was established in May 1857 to guard the San Antonio–El Paso road and the Rio Grande Valley against raids, part of the chain of frontier posts the U.S. Army strung across Texas before the Civil War. It stood only a few years, abandoned in March 1861 when federal troops were withdrawn from Texas at the outbreak of the war. Its brief life marks the fragile military presence that shadowed westward travel.

Matagorda County, TX

This marker records the site of the Caney post office, established around 1838 near lands settled during Stephen F. Austin's colonization of Texas. Along Caney Creek, such a post office anchored a scattered farming community in the young Republic of Texas, linking isolated settlers to the wider world.

Matagorda County, TX

This site marks the vicinity of the old Caney Post Office, in a district where members of Stephen F. Austin's colony established some of Texas's earliest sugar plantations. Along the fertile bottomlands of Caney Creek, colonial-era settlers of the 1820s and 1830s planted cane in what became one of the state's pioneer sugar-growing regions.

McAllen, TX

McAllen sprang up after the railroad arrived in 1905 and irrigation turned the Rio Grande Valley into rich vegetable farmland, drawing a hotel, church, bank, and newspaper in short order. In 1916, border unrest brought some 12,000 soldiers to the area to restore order, and the resulting population surge fueled a business boom. Amid the growth, the Casa de Palmas Hotel opened in 1918 and became a leading business, social, and civic hub for the whole valley.

Gruver, TX

Brothers James and Bob Cator established this camp in 1872 while hunting buffalo on the Texas Panhandle plains. Over the next few years the site grew into a trading post known as Zulu, a small outpost of commerce in a raw and open country. It stands as a marker of the brief, intense era of the commercial buffalo hunt.

Silverton, TX

The Celtic post office opened on May 2, 1891 — nearly a year before Briscoe County was even formally organized — when pioneer E.R. Thomas ran it out of the store in his home. It moved the next year to the house of county organizer Hayden W. Savage before being folded into Silverton's postal operations in 1893. Though short-lived, it was a lifeline for the earliest settlers and cowboys working the surrounding Panhandle ranches.

Plains, TX

On the treeless, roadless ranchland of 1920s Yoakum County, local men built a one-room frame school near this spot in 1924, hauling the lumber in by freight wagon. Serving 64 square miles, it doubled as a church for Methodist and Baptist services and a hub of community life, with a single teacher handling every grade, the janitorial work, and sometimes even the students' transport for $80 to $100 a month. When voters consolidated the district in 1939, the building was moved to Plains, where it later became part of the American Legion hall.

Gun Barrel City, TX

Centerville became the seat of its county in 1848, chosen for its central location and built on land donated by Texas statesman James Harper Starr, with the clerk's records kept in a log-cabin courthouse. But its moment was brief: when the county was reduced in size in 1850, the seat moved to Athens and Centerville faded away entirely. Only the marker recalls the vanished town.

Mullin, TX

Chesser Valley took its name from John Dan Chesser, a Missouri native who came to Texas in 1854 and, after serving in the Texas State Troops during the Civil War, homesteaded 160 acres here with his wife Elizabeth. Their expanding log home doubled as church, hospital, and travelers' hotel, and the valley became a gathering place for camp meetings where families came by wagon to worship under a brush tabernacle. A one-teacher school opened in 1868, but after the Chesser house burned in 1926 the little community all but vanished.

Lamesa, TX

Around 1887, Chicago lumberman W.C. Bishop and George N. Fletcher founded the OTO (later Bar TO) ranch in Dawson County, and in 1889 a post office opened at its headquarters — named Chicago partly in wry jest at the empty surrounding plains. A village grew up around it, serving nearby spreads like C.C. Slaughter's Long S, until Lamesa won the county-seat contest in 1905. Within days Chicago's homes, businesses, school, and churches had picked up and moved south, and the community vanished.

Del Rio, TX

The Chihuahua Road was a bustling nineteenth-century trade artery linking the silver and gold country of Chihuahua, Mexico, with the Texas port of Indianola. It carried everything from stagecoaches and ox-carts to California-bound Forty-Niners chasing the gold rush. The road's commercial reign lasted until 1877, when the railroad reached San Antonio and rendered the long overland haul obsolete.

Belton, TX

Robert Childers, a pioneer settler and veteran of the 1836 Army of Texas, built the first water-powered mill in Bell County here in 1847. Sold in 1856 to G. W. Shanklin, who was said to have built the best water race in Texas, the site also served as a stage stand on the Old Military Road and a crossing point for cattle bound up the trail. It was a hub where settlement, commerce, and travel converged on the early Texas frontier.

Clifton, TX

R.G. Grant built a water-powered wooden mill on the Bosque River here in 1857, and during the Civil War the building served as a commissary and storehouse for the Confederate Army. Under later owner William Kemp, a new stone mill supplied flour and cornmeal hauled by ox cart to frontier settlements and forts across West Texas, and former governor and U.S. senator Richard Coke once held an interest in it. Rebuilt with a distinctive mansard roof and cupola, the mill later became an electric power plant before it was demolished in 1915.

Beaumont, TX

A crossing near this spot on the old Opelousas Trail carried travelers over the Neches as early as 1750, when Spanish, French, and Anglo explorers, priests, and traders followed Indian traces toward Louisiana. Its greatest era came from the 1820s to 1900, when great cattle herds forded here to bypass the streets of Beaumont. Though many operated it, the ferry took its lasting name from the Collier family, who ran it for fifty years.