Westward Expansion

Richardson, TX

When the Rev. George L. Blewett's daughter Ann died in 1855, he opened this ground for family and community burials. A Cumberland Presbyterian minister, Blewett had come to Texas from Kentucky in 1853 with his family and fellow pioneers. Nine of his children lie here alongside George and his wife Nancy, and for decades it served as one of the primary burial grounds for the Richardson community.

Auburn, CA

Bloomers Cut, sliced through the earth of the Bloomer Ranch near Auburn in 1864, was one of the great engineering feats of the Central Pacific Railroad as it pushed east toward the Sierra Nevada. Crews—largely Chinese laborers whose grueling work drove the transcontinental line—carved the deep passage by hand and black powder, and it survives virtually unchanged today. It was an early and celebrated obstacle overcome on the way to linking the nation by rail.

Manor, TX

Pennsylvania natives Alfred Sutton Bloor and his wife Martha raised this brick home in 1897–98 as they made their living ranching and farming the land around Manor. Built by the Elgin Press Brick Co. with turreted corners and a massive portico, the house blends Queen Anne exuberance with Colonial Revival restraint. For over sixty years it stood as a Bloor family landmark before passing from their hands in 1960.

Henderson, TX

Founded in 1879 on land donated by the Pattersons, this congregation began as Pleasant Hill Methodist Episcopal Church — the first church in the Chapman community, named for a Texas Revolution veteran who had settled the area on a 640-acre grant. Renamed Blossom Hill around 1927 and rebuilt in brick in 1959, it shared a remarkable rhythm with the neighboring Willow Springs Presbyterian Church, alternating Sundays and holding a joint July revival for roughly a century. Its community sunrise Easter service, begun in 1929, still carries on.

Fort Davis vicinity, TX

Held every August since 1890, this interdenominational gathering was founded by Presbyterian minister Rev. W. B. Bloys, who preached from a pulpit made of an Arbuckle Coffee crate to 48 people camped in tents and wagons at Skillman Grove, a campground since the 1850s. Ranch families brought chuck-box meals and shared them with guests, and in 1902 Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Methodists, and Presbyterians formally incorporated the Cowboys' Camp Meeting. Some 1,500 people now attend the mid-August meetings, where—by tradition—nothing has ever been sold in camp.

Jefferson, TX

Blue Bonnet Farm's raised cottage was begun in 1847, in the early years of the young Republic-turned-state of Texas. Its main wing, added in 1869, was built of heart pine cut on the home place itself. The house survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark near Jefferson.

Kermit, TX

Despite its name, Blue Mountain is the southern escarpment of the Llano Estacado and the highest point in Winkler County. For centuries it served as a landmark and lookout on the West Texas plains, offering fuel, shelter, and water to those who passed. A 1938 excavation of its rock shelters found mortar holes and pictographs of hands, serpents, horses, and geometric designs, evidence of long human use.

Blue Ridge, TX

Named for the blue-flowering grass that hazed its hilltop between Desert and Pilot Grove Creeks, Blue Ridge drew pioneers beginning in the 1830s, including Republic of Texas land-grantee Matthew Mowry and the area's first doctor, W.C. Holmes. The Moyers brothers opened the first store—a one-room log cabin—in the 1870s, soon joined by a school, a Masonic lodge, cotton gins, a bank, and shops around the town square. Farmers and ranchers raising cotton, corn, and cattle sustained the town, whose 1937 high school was built with WPA labor.

Reagan, TX

Organized in 1859 by eleven charter members, Blue Ridge Baptist Church held its first services in settlers' log cabins, guided by early Texas missionaries including Z.N. Morrell and Judge R.E.B. Baylor. In 1873 George Harlan deeded 28 acres — part of an 1835 Mexican land grant to his father — for a church, school, and cemetery, and the congregation has worshiped continuously ever since. Its present sanctuary dates to 1908, and its "May Day Singing" tradition has continued since 1887.

Polk County, TX

After the Civil War, families who had supported the Union — among them the Collins and Knight households — left Mississippi for the pineywoods of Polk County to escape hostile Reconstruction-era neighbors. Their settlements gave rise to the Bluewater community, whose cemetery was established in 1898, the same year a Missionary Baptist church organized nearby. More than 600 graves rest here, many marked by handmade concrete stones and shaded by old cedar trees.

Detroit, TX

In the 1870s Benjamin Weatherly, who had soldiered in both the U.S.-Mexico War and the Civil War, gave about two acres of Red River County land for a church and burying ground. A Baptist congregation organized here in 1878 and remained tied to the cemetery for three decades before relocating. Weatherly, his wife Sarah, and three of their children lie among the marble, limestone, and granite markers, with the grounds later expanded and now tended by a cemetery association.

Bluff Dale, TX

Around 1906 this open-air tabernacle rose on land donated by Andrew Jackson Glenn, who had also given the Bluff Dale townsite. It hosted the days-long camp meetings and revivals that drew every area denomination, along with plays, singings, funerals, and even a high school graduation. Those gatherings became a wellspring of shared identity for the scattered rural community, and the tabernacle still hosts an annual homecoming.

Bluff Dale, TX

Bluff Dale's Methodists trace their roots to an 1881 camp meeting on the Paluxy River, gathering regularly until they raised a church building in 1894. As the Erath County community grew, so did the congregation, which weathered the denominational mergers of the 20th century to become the Bluff Dale United Methodist Church in 1968.

Llano, TX

When the damming of the Colorado River created Lake Buchanan in the 1930s, entire cemeteries in the flood's path had to move. This site, donated in 1930, received relocated graves from the Old Bluffton Cemetery and several others, their reburials carried out in stages from 1931 to 1937. Among the first new interments was Ike Maxwell, who had named the Bluffton community in 1854 and, as a legislator, helped choose native granite for the state capitol.

Blum, TX

Blum Cemetery took shape around 1881, just as the town of Blum sprang up as a stop on the newly laid Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway. Landowner A. J. Davis is said to have donated the ground with the condition that burial lots be free. The oldest dated stone marks a nine-year-old boy who died in 1882, and the site still shelters area pioneers and local veterans.

Llano, TX

This burial ground served the Lone Grove community on land owned by W.A. and Sallie Templeton, taking its name from a mill once on nearby Board Branch Creek. Oral history holds that its earliest grave belongs to a settler reportedly killed in 1864, and more than eighty burials predate 1900. Among those resting here are Confederate veterans, including an Army surgeon, alongside veterans of the World Wars and other conflicts.

Boardman Township, OH

In 1798, this corner of northeastern Ohio was surveyed frontier at the edge of the Connecticut Western Reserve—the "New Connecticut" that Connecticut retained when it ceded its other western land claims to the young United States. The cryptic "Range 2, Town 1" is survey shorthand from that grid, the system by which the Reserve was carved into townships and sold to New England investors. Elijah Boardman, a Connecticut merchant and land speculator (and later U.S. senator), purchased this township and lent it his name, drawing Yankee settlers west to build farms and a town center on land only recently opened to them.

Grapeland, TX

Bobbitt Cemetery was established in 1876 near Grapeland in Houston County, one of countless family and community burial grounds laid out as East Texas farming settlements took root after the Civil War. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2005, it preserves the resting place of the area's early residents. Such grounds often outlast the homesteads and churches that surrounded them, becoming the last physical trace of a vanished rural community.

San Augustine vicinity, TX

A.T.L. Bobbitt, Sr., a Tennessee native, came to Texas from Mississippi in 1846 to join his brother's household and in 1851 married Martha Hobdy, who had been born near this spot. The family cemetery began in 1873 with the burial of their son Alfonzo, and it grew to hold A.T.L., Martha, and other relatives on the old family farm. It stands as one of the few remaining reminders of early Anglo settlement in this part of San Augustine County.

Seguin, TX

When Friedrich Boecker was buried in 1880 in a corner of his 203-acre farm, he began what became a neighborhood cemetery for the German farm families nearby. Over the next fourteen years eleven more were laid to rest here before his son sold two acres to trustees in 1896, formally establishing Boecker Cemetery. A cemetery association formed in 1901, charging a modest membership fee that carried burial rights, and the grounds still serve the settlers' descendants today.

Muldoon, TX

In 1867 Michael and Anna Boehnke bought 430 acres where they farmed, raised livestock, and reared nine children. The family cemetery began in tragedy in 1873 with the burial of their newborn son Ernest, and the last interment came nearly a century later, in 1967, with their granddaughter Mellie Biebas. Seventeen people rest beneath headstones of granite, limestone, and concrete, the record of one immigrant family's faith and perseverance.

Bogata, TX

William Humphries pioneered this area as early as 1818 and returned in 1836 to settle for good. When his nine-year-old daughter died in 1840, she was buried near the line between his land and a neighbor's, and soon other families laid their dead here too, always in free plots. The families deeded the ground for a cemetery in 1878, and by the nation's bicentennial it held more than 1,200 graves.

Austin, TX

Local tradition holds that this graveyard began in 1859 with the burial of young John Davis, accidentally shot after a skunk's spray sent him running through camp and he was mistaken for a Comanche intruder. His father later donated the land to the Onion Creek Masonic Lodge, and it grew into a community graveyard of more than 1,200 burials on some 6.6 acres. Among those interred are pioneer settlers, fraternal-order members, and veterans from the Civil War through the Korean Conflict.

West, TX

Doc Cauble built a cabin here in 1850 near flowing springs long home to Native peoples, and after his young son's Comanche friend died and was buried on this hill, a cemetery took shape. The surrounding community of Bold Springs grew into the second-largest town in McLennan County by 1860, with the first church in the county's northeast, a stagecoach stop, and roads linking Waco to Hillsboro. When the railroad drew settlement to the new town of West in 1881, Bold Springs faded, leaving this cemetery of more than 2,400 graves as its memorial.

Sanger, TX

Dr. Hiram Daily laid out the town of Bolivar in 1852 with a burial ground on high ground nearby, and by the 1870s local Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges had set aside acreage for community burials. The graves read like a ledger of frontier life and death: infants and adults lost to the influenza epidemics of 1892 and 1918, farmers and ranchers, teachers, physicians, and ministers. Among them rest veterans of conflicts from the Mexican War through Vietnam, generations of one small Texas community.

Port Bolivar, TX

Bolivar Point was a stage for the tangled struggles over Spanish Texas in the early 1800s: Colonel Henry Perry camped here in 1815 planning an invasion, and the privateer Louis-Michel de Aury — who named the point for South American liberator Simón Bolívar — marched captive Africans from this shore toward New Orleans in 1816. James Long built Fort Las Casas here in 1820–21, where his wife Jane gave birth to a daughter often called the first Anglo child born in Texas. A federal lighthouse rose in 1852, was dismantled by Confederate troops, and rebuilt after the Civil War, later sheltering residents through the deadly storms of 1900 and 1915.

Denton, TX

Founded in 1852 and named — after a rum-fueled election settled the dispute — for a settler's Tennessee hometown (itself honoring Simón Bolívar), Bolivar grew into the westernmost fort and busiest crossroads of early Denton County. Two stagecoach lines swapped horses here, and the town where the Texas cattle trail met the Chisholm Trail bustled with hotels, mills, a gin, and a saloon. It also drew a rougher crowd: cattle baron John Chisum ran herds nearby, and outlaw Sam Bass and his gang found shelter in the surrounding country.

Houston, TX

In 1852 Paul Norval Bonin, born in Louisiana in 1814, led his family and some fifty other French families from the bayou country to North Harris County, buying more than 1,200 acres at the heart of what became the area's French settlement. Neighbors bore names like Leleux, Melancon, and Pevateaux, and the earliest grave here marks a Bonin child who died in 1865. After the deaths of Norval and his wife Coralie, the land passed to their surviving sons, and in 1987 descendants formed an association that still gathers each April to honor their ancestors.

Fairfield, TX

Established in 1867, this cemetery holds five generations of the Bonner family, South Carolina brothers who came to Freestone County in the early 1850s and built vast cotton plantations. Patriarch William Bonner, a War of 1812 veteran, rose from a waggoner with little schooling to a fortune in Texas land, while his brother Dr. John Bonner was one of several physicians in the family. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, and farmers among their descendants rest here, a family long central to the county's growth.

Burkeville, TX

Thomas Bonner moved from Mississippi to Texas in the early 1850s, married Eliza Jane Rutledge in 1855, and settled his large family on the banks of the Sabine River. The family graveyard's first recorded burial came in 1861, that of the infant Lenora J. Bonner, and eight graves rest here in all. Though the surrounding land was sold to a timber company in 1926, Bonner descendants have continued to tend the little cemetery.

Napier Township, PA · est. 1992

Standing where the Forbes and Burd Roads met, Bonnet Tavern welcomed travelers on the rough frontier routes west from 1779 under Jean Bonnet and his heirs. In mid-1794 it became a flashpoint of the Whiskey Rebellion, as angry farmers gathered here and raised a liberty pole to defy the new federal excise tax on whiskey. That October, the troops President Washington summoned to put down the uprising camped at the tavern on their march westward.

Booker, TX

Booker owes its existence to the Santa Fe Railway's push across the Texas Panhandle in the years around World War I. Platted in 1917 and named for a railroad locating engineer, the town literally absorbed a neighbor: the community of La Kemp, Oklahoma, six miles north, picked up and moved to the rails in 1919. When the first train pulled in on July 4, 1919, residents marked it as the town's true birthday.

Glen Rose, TX

This limestone home was built in the early 1870s by William G. McCamant, an early Texan who had helped bring Somervell County into being and served as one of its first commissioners. In 1896 it passed to Civil War veteran George L. Booker during his long 36-year run as county surveyor. Its eighteen-inch stone walls and end chimneys are hallmarks of frontier-era construction.

Lexington, KY

Organized in November 1785 by elders John Taylor and John Tanner with eighteen members, this congregation stands on the same land as its first log meetinghouse. Among its founders were Daniel Boone's brother Samuel and his wife, Sarah, tying the church to Kentucky's most famous pioneer family. It later helped form the Boone's Creek Association of Baptist churches.

Lexington, KY

Daniel Boone surveyed this site in 1774 and by December 1779 was living here with other families in crude shelters, building cabins and a stockade the next year. By 1783 the fortified station sheltered fifteen to twenty families on the Kentucky frontier—but at a cost: Boone's brother Edward, his son Israel, and his nephew Thomas were all killed in the closing violence of the Revolutionary War. Boone remained until 1784, and in the 20th century the land was willed to the state, opening as Boone's Station State Park in 1992.

Trinity County, TX

Founded around the time of the Civil War by Whitney Alston Boone, the Boontown community established this burial ground in the 1880s on land granted to Edward Thomas "Buck" Smith. Boone himself lies among the interred, alongside pioneers and veterans of the nation's wars, with the earliest marked graves dating to 1887. A local paper mill deeded an additional acre in 1963, and descendants still maintain the site. Today the cemetery is the last physical trace of the vanished Boontown settlement.

Boys Ranch, TX

On the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, this burial ground took its nickname from the famous Boot Hill of Dodge City, Kansas — a place where men "died with their boots on" in the rough world of buffalo hunters and trail drivers. Alongside those violent ends rest law-abiding settlers, laid here in the 1870s and 1880s when the region was a hard frontier crossroads. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

McMullen County, TX

This lonely South Texas graveyard earned its grim frontier nickname the hard way. Its occupants, chronicled on the marker, include men killed in gunfights at Fort Ewell and outside the old Rock Store, cholera victims from an 1869 outbreak, a boy thrown from a horse, and a suspected member of an outlaw gang — a roll call of violent and untimely deaths from the 1860s and 1870s. The very first grave belonged to a suicide.

Taylor, TX

Built around 1880 for rancher and banker Crawford Henry Booth, this Taylor landmark is an unusual local take on the L-plan vernacular house, dressed in exuberant Queen Anne details. An octagonal turret with an onion-dome roof, polygonal bays, keyhole windows, and spindlework porch trim mark it as the home of a prosperous frontier businessman. The Booth family kept the house until 1958.

Gail, TX

Carved from the vast old Bexar District, Borden County was created in 1876 and organized in 1891, with Gail as its seat. Both the county and its town honor Gail Borden—surveyor, newspaper editor, and the restless inventor who perfected the process of condensing milk. His name thus marks a stretch of West Texas rangeland far from the industry that made him famous.

Gail, TX

Built in 1896 of hand-hewn stone quarried from Gail Mountain, the Borden County Jail was engineered for maximum security on the West Texas frontier. Diebold Safe and Lock Co. won the $4,500 contract, lining the cells behind two-foot outer walls with third-inch case-hardened steel plates said to defy hacksaws. Its huge hasps and padlocks opened with a six-inch key.

Monongalia County, WV

In 1779 the western Virginia backcountry—today's West Virginia—was a raw and violent borderland, caught up in the frontier fighting that raged alongside the Revolutionary War. Isolated cabins at settlements like Dunkard Creek stood exposed to sudden raids, and defense often fell to whoever was home when trouble arrived. This marker preserves one such account: a settler woman, Mrs. Bozarth, who by tradition seized an axe and fought off attackers in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle at her own door. Whether burnished by retelling or not, the story captures the peril that defined daily life on the far edge of American settlement.

Waxahachie, TX

Kentucky-born Michael Boren moved to this part of Texas with his family in 1847, and his second wife Mary Ann, who died in 1857, is thought to lie among the cemetery's earliest graves. Boren and his son George donated the land for the use of the Reagor Springs and Bethel communities, and its stones now mark numerous military veterans and pioneer Ellis County families. The oldest legible date, 1868, belongs to a five-year-old grandchild.

Weatherford, TX

Born into slavery in Mississippi in 1834, Bose Ikard came to Texas as a child and stayed on as an employee after emancipation. In 1866 he joined Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving's famous cattle drives, becoming one of Goodnight's most trusted cowboys and closest friends. He later settled in Weatherford, raised six children, and at his death in 1929 was honored with a granite headstone that Goodnight himself erected.

Meridian, TX

Named for the wooded Bosque ("woods") River, this county was crossed by the Texan-Santa Fe Expedition in 1841 and surveyed by soldier George B. Erath before its first colonists arrived in 1850-51. English settlers at Kent, Norwegians at Norse, and Germans in the east gave the county an unusually international frontier character. Organized in 1854 as a farming-and-ranching country, it later saw the Chisholm Trail's cattle herds pass through in the 1870s.

Meridian, TX

Built of limestone quarried from the surrounding hills and dressed in Gothic styling, this is Bosque County's fourth courthouse — successor to a one-room log cabin that served in 1854. Its clock tower was modified in 1935 to strengthen the roof, but its distinctive iron stairs and railing remain. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

China Spring, TX

In 1841 Republic of Texas president Mirabeau B. Lamar dispatched an expedition to open trade with Santa Fe and press Texas' claims to New Mexico. Struggling with steep banks, the party crossed the Bosque River near here on July 6, 1841, early in a journey plagued by hunger and Indian attacks. When they finally reached New Mexico that September, Mexican troops captured them and marched them off to prison in Mexico City.

Waco, TX

Organized in 1854 in a log schoolhouse, this Baptist congregation has gathered without a break for well over a century and a half, first sharing quarters with a Masonic lodge, then raising its own sanctuaries after fire took an early building. Rural churches like this anchored scattered antebellum farm communities, doubling as school, meeting hall, and social center. Its unbroken life makes it one of the oldest country congregations in McLennan County.

Waco, TX

This Methodist congregation took root in the Bosqueville community outside Waco in 1853, when frontier worshippers gathered in homes, then a schoolhouse, then the local college before building a church of their own. Traveling circuit riders such as Mordecai Yell served the scattered settlers, a hallmark of Methodism's reach across the Texas frontier. The present sanctuary dates to 1911–12, with educational wings added in the 1950s.

New Waverly, TX

On November 26, 1881, nine residents of the rural Boswell community met in a log schoolhouse to organize this Baptist church, with the Rev. T. E. King as its first pastor. A frame chapel followed in 1883 on land given by Phillip J. Ellisor, and for decades the church was the center of community life. It declined after World War II and the congregation disbanded in 1950, though the site still hosts an annual homecoming.

Hamshire, TX

Built in 1859 by A. Mobray for Sevan Broussard, this house has been occupied continuously by the same family. Its "dog-trot" plan—two rooms joined by an open central breezeway—was a hallmark of period construction well suited to the humid Southeast Texas climate.

Shelbyville, TX

Tucked on a wooded bluff above a creek between Shelbyville and Center, this burial ground served the family and neighbors of Francis Bird Bounds, Jr., who moved from Tennessee in 1845. The first grave was that of William Echols in 1855 and the last a Bounds descendant in 1900, making it a compact record of one pioneer clan's half-century in East Texas. A cemetery association formed in 2010 to restore its fences and stones.

Keller, TX

Aurelius Delphus Bourland, a North Carolina native and Civil War veteran who was also a Primitive Baptist preacher, bought land here in 1873 and began a family cemetery, its earliest marked grave that of his grandson in 1886. In 1899 he sold the burial ground to the residents of Keller for use as a public cemetery, and later families added more land. The Works Progress Administration built its gateway in 1935.

Greenville, TX

Built in 1883 by Virginia B. Stevens, daughter of Col. James Bourland, this Southern Colonial home rose on land tied to the very founding of Greenville, incorporating part of an earlier house. It passed down through her daughter before being sold in 1912, its successive owners drawn from the town's leading families. The house stands as a record of the founding generation who shaped Hunt County.

Bovina, TX

Bovina began as the Hay Hook Line Camp of the legendary XIT Ranch, the three-million-acre spread Texas granted in payment for building its state capitol. When the Pecos & Northern Texas Railroad reached the site in 1898, cattle poured onto rail cars bound for eastern markets, and for a time this was one of the largest shipping points in the nation — cowhands called it "Bull Town" before the town chose the name Bovina in 1899. From a frontier line camp it grew into the market center of a rich irrigated-farming county.

Bovina, TX

Before the town of Bovina existed, the sprawling XIT Ranch ran its southern headquarters near here, and when the railway arrived in 1898 a settlement grew up around the railhead — first nicknamed "Bull Town" for the cattle wandering the tracks. The XIT first used this ground to bury its cowboys, some marked only with names like "Dusty" and "Big Jim," now lost; the earliest surviving marker dates to 1907. A Historic Texas Cemetery, it holds generations of residents and veterans reaching back to World War I.

Bovina, TX

Bovina grew up in the early twentieth century in the heart of the vast XIT Ranch, strung along the Pecos Valley Railway on the Texas High Plains. Soon after the town's founding, a Methodist congregation of nine charter members took shape, meeting in a one-room schoolhouse and building its first sanctuary in 1910 with money raised largely from area cowboys. As the oldest Methodist church in Parmer County, it grew alongside the surrounding farming and ranching community.

San Antonio, TX

This peninsula in the San Antonio River, once bounded by water on three sides and the Concepcion Acequia on the fourth, was bought in 1845 by Philadelphia native John Bowen. He and his family built a seven-room home, planted orchards and vineyards, and ran a waterwheel-irrigated truck farm; Bowen served as city postmaster and treasurer and, a staunch Unionist, reportedly sheltered fugitive slaves. The island became a beloved gathering spot, hosting the first Volksfest and the German Turnverein before the river was diverted in the 1920s and joined it to the mainland.

Washoe County, NV

Bowers Mansion, built in 1864, stands as a monument to the sudden riches of the Comstock Lode. Lemuel "Sandy" Bowers and Eilley Orrum, whose adjoining Gold Canyon claims struck a rich vein, married and became likely the first millionaires the great find produced, raising this house on their new fortune. But misfortune chased fortune: the vein gave out, a mill was destroyed, Sandy died in 1868, and Eilley finally lost the property to foreclosure in 1878, dying in poverty even as the mansion lived on as a popular resort.

New Boston, TX

Carved from Red River County land in December 1840 and organized the next year, Bowie County honors James Bowie, the Long Expedition veteran who died defending the Alamo. The country had been home to agricultural Indians before 1800 and was charted for Anglo-American settlement in 1819, back when it was still frontier of the fledgling Texas Republic. Its county seat wandered among DeKalb, Old Boston, Texarkana, and Boston as railroads and farming, lumber, and manufacturing took hold.