Westward Expansion

Fredericksburg, TX

The U.S. Army established Fort Martin Scott in December 1848 to shield travelers and settlers on the Texas frontier from Indian attack, naming it for Major Martin Scott, killed the year before at the Battle of Molino del Rey in the Mexican-American War. Its garrison saw many skirmishes before the post was occupied only intermittently after 1852. Confederate forces held the site during the Civil War, and it was permanently abandoned in 1866.

Menard, TX

The U.S. War Department established Fort McKavett in 1852 to shield frontier settlers from raids, naming it for Captain Henry McKavett, who had fallen at the Battle of Monterrey in the Mexican-American War. Federal troops abandoned it in 1859, reoccupied it after the Civil War in 1868, and finally closed it in 1883 as settlement and the railroads pushed the frontier westward. Its life span traces the arc of the U.S. Army's presence on the West Texas frontier.

Dinero, TX

Fort Merrill rose on the Nueces frontier in February 1850, established by Captain S. M. Plummer of the First U.S. Infantry to shield settlers pressing into South Texas. It honored Captain Hamilton W. Merrill, a dragoon decorated for gallantry in the recent Mexican War. The post proved short-lived, permanently abandoned by the end of 1855 as the line of settlement moved on.

Itasca, TX

Established about 1846, Fort Smith was one of a chain of posts running from the Colorado to the Red River, built to shield settlers on the advancing Texas frontier. Named for Major Thomas I. Smith, it guarded a line of settlement pressing into contested Indian country. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936 to record the vanished post.

Ft. Stockton, TX

Founded on the Comanche Trail in 1859, Fort Stockton guarded the San Antonio-San Diego mail route and was named for Commodore Robert Field Stockton, who had helped seize California for the United States. Federal troops abandoned it during the Civil War and reoccupied it in 1867 as the army worked to curb Comanche raids and protect westward travel. The post was permanently abandoned in 1886 as the frontier it policed faded away.

Sonora, TX

Fort Terrett was established by the U.S. Army in February 1852 to shield frontier settlers, and it carried the name of Lieutenant John C. Terrett, killed at Monterrey in 1846. Posts like it formed a thin line of defense across the Texas frontier before being abandoned as settlement pushed westward, and Terrett was left behind after barely two years, in 1854. Its brief life mirrors the restless army calculus of a fast-changing frontier.

Junction, TX

Chartered in 1896, this dam and its network of irrigation and power ditches were meant to run mills, supply a young town's water, and green the surrounding ranch land. Built of native stone and cypress, the main ditch ran wide and deep, carrying water into the mid-1920s before proving unprofitable. The charter was finally forfeited in 1950.

Cuero, TX

Around 1839–40, Daniel Boone Friar built a home and store at the crossing of two important roads, and it quickly became the hub of early De Witt County life. Within a few years the two-story frame building was serving as a stagecoach stop, a temporary courthouse, and the county's first post office, named Cuero, with Friar as postmaster. Crockett Cardwell bought the place in 1849 and kept it running as a stage stand and gathering spot until the railroad drew the town four miles south in 1873; the old building came down in 1916.

Lisbon, IL

This spot once served travelers on the Chicago-to-Ottawa road as a stop on the Frink & Walker line, the dominant stagecoach empire of the frontier Midwest in the 1830s and 1840s. Before railroads laced the region together, coaches like these carried mail, passengers, and news across the prairie, and stations offered fresh horses, food, and shelter along the rutted route.

El Paso, TX

In August 1848, just months after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo drew the El Paso region into the United States, T. Frank White planted the settlement of Frontera on the bank of the Rio Grande. Sitting at Mule Ford on the old Chihuahua Trail — part of the Camino Real — it briefly held real promise, with White serving as magistrate, customs collector, and trading-post proprietor. The Compromise of 1850 placed Frontera on the Texas side, White lost his influence, and the little settlement faded, absorbed at last into the modern city of El Paso.

Mesquite, TX

Confederate veteran Benjamin Franklin Galloway brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1872 and bought 101 acres near Duck Creek, raising crops, horses, mules, and cattle. He built up a home place and a Blackland Prairie hay business whose Dallas customers included the Ringling Brothers Circus, while his son Bedford Forest later served as mayor of Mesquite for over a decade. Designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1973, the house was eventually moved to rural Sunnyvale to save it from encroaching development.

Thrall, TX

Settlement near this spot began in the 1870s, anchored by the Wilder family's cotton gin, grist mill, blacksmith shop, and general store. By the 1890s the community had a post office, school, and church and took the name Gano in honor of Confederate general R. M. Gano. After the general store closed, a storm claimed the church, and the school consolidated with Milam County in 1919, the town faded until few traces remained.

Universal City, TX

German immigrants Wilhelm Geier and his family arrived at Galveston in 1849 from Wolfenbüttel, and after settling in New Braunfels their daughter Johanna married fellow immigrant Martin Schmid. In 1855 the families moved to the community then called Cibolo (later Selma), buying 127 acres they eventually split between them. Martin, a Confederate cavalry veteran, was buried here in 1880, founding a family cemetery; the neighboring Kincaid graves hold a Kentucky-born blacksmith and his kin. Fences and headstones have long since vanished from both burial grounds.

New Summerfield, TX

Settlers from Griffin, Georgia, founded this East Texas town, which flourished in the early 1850s before the railroad's arrival elsewhere after 1872 slowly drained away its people and trade. Its most famous son was John Benjamin Kendrick, born here in 1857, who went up the cattle trail to Wyoming and rose to become that state's governor and a U.S. senator. By 1930 Griffin's last store had closed, leaving a ghost town behind.

San Saba, TX

Settled in the 1870s by families including the Olivers, Lewises, and Howards, Harmony Ridge took its name from the cooperative spirit with which residents raised their single public building in 1877 — a two-story frame structure serving as both Cumberland Presbyterian church and school. The Oliver family gave land for the building and cemetery. The community has since faded, though its cemetery association still gathers each year.

Calvert, TX

On a November night in 1836, in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas, John Harvey's family was killed and his young daughter Ann and a servant girl carried off by an Indian raiding party along the contested Brazos frontier. Ann spent four years in captivity in Mexico before an uncle recovered her; she later married, returned to Texas, and settled — as the marker notes — near the very ground of the tragedy. The account captures the violence, dislocation, and improbable survival that shaped frontier settlement in the region.

Austin, TX

In 1852 the noted Austin architect Abner Cook—then also at work on the new Texas State Capitol—built a Federal-style home here for Dr. Samuel Garner Haynie, four-time mayor of Austin. Financial trouble soon forced Haynie to sell to Cook, and over the following century the house passed through the hands of mayors, state supreme court justices, and shopkeepers before being rolled on logs to make way for new development. Both it and the neighboring Nalle-Sharp House were demolished by 1953, and a mid-century high-rise rose in their place.

Sunray, TX

Before the mid-1880s the open Texas Panhandle had no range fences, so winter blizzards drove cattle from Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas south onto Texas ranches, overgrazing the Canadian River breaks and mixing herds. To stop the costly spring sorting, ranchers with brands like the Turkey Track, Bar C, and LIT joined to build a single drift fence along their northern lines — a four-strand, four-barb barrier some 200 miles long, running from the Panhandle's corner into New Mexico. Built from roughly 65 carloads of wire and posts hauled from Dodge City, most of it was torn down by 1890 to comply with a state law against fencing public land.

Dumas, TX

Before the mid-1880s the Texas Panhandle had no range fences, so winter blizzards drove cattle south from Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas onto Texas ranges, mixing the herds and overgrazing the Canadian River breaks. To stop the costly spring separations, ranches like the Turkey Track, LX, and LIT joined to build a 200-mile, four-strand barbed-wire drift fence — until an 1889 state law against fencing public land forced most of it down by 1890.

Rotan vicinity, TX

Ranchers John and William Hittson were among the first to settle here around 1870, and the community that grew near their homes took their name. A post office, school, store, and church followed, and oil discovered after World War I brought new income. Yet the labor drain of the Second World War left its small family farms unable to survive, and by the century's end only a few homes and a cemetery remained.

San Antonio, TX

A South Carolinian who reached San Antonio in 1835, Samuel Maverick guided Ben Milam and the Texian force in the first assault on the town, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, and endured seven months as a prisoner in Mexico's Perote castle. Twice mayor of San Antonio, he rode with Jack Hays' Minute Men against Comanche raids and later helped negotiate the bloodless surrender of federal forts in 1861. His habit of leaving cattle unbranded gave English the word 'maverick.'

San Augustine, TX

On this site stood the home of James Pinckney Henderson, who lived here from 1840 to 1856 during the formative decades of Texas statehood. A North Carolina native, Henderson became the first governor of the State of Texas when it entered the Union, serving in 1846 and 1847. He later represented Texas in the United States Senate, dying in Washington in 1858; his remains were returned to the State Cemetery in Austin in 1930.

Odessa, TX

Born in Alabama in 1835, William C. Sublett came to Texas before the Civil War, served the Confederacy, and after his wife's death took his three children to the frontier to hunt buffalo — supplying game to Texas & Pacific Railroad crews in 1881–1882. Settling near Odessa, he lived in a dugout-and-tent home, hauled wood, and 'water-witched' for settlers' wells. He became legendary for paying in gold nuggets he claimed came from an Apache-shown mine in the Guadalupe Mountains, vanishing and returning with more but never revealing its location before his death in 1892.

Gonzales, TX

Hopkinsville sprang up after farmer D.S. Hopkins settled here in 1852, growing into a thriving pioneer community in the surrounding farm-and-ranch country. Cattle herds gathered here before striking out for the Chisholm Trail. When a new railroad bypassed the town in 1873, its residents pulled up stakes and moved south to found Waelder, leaving Hopkinsville a memory on the land.

Macdona, TX

Idlewild grew from a scattered farming settlement — where a violent 1867 raid left two members of the Gross family shot and one scalped — into an organized community by 1879. A New York lawyer named Thomas Dunkin tutored, taught the district's first school, and named the town after Idlewild, New York, after the postal service rejected his earlier choices. When the railroad bypassed it for nearby Lacoste, Idlewild's fortunes faded; its post office closed in 1902 and its last school in 1955.

Brady vicinity, TX

According to this 1936 state marker, on November 21, 1831, a small party led by James and Rezin Bowie fought off a far larger force of Caddo and Lipan warriors near this spot, holding out through a day and a night. The clash took place in Mexican Texas, years before the Texas Revolution, as Anglo-American adventurers pressed into contested Indian and Spanish-Mexican borderlands. The Bowie name later became legend through James Bowie's death at the Alamo.

Comanche vicinity, TX

Founded in 1851 by John A. McGuire, Indian Creek was among the first settlements in Comanche County, and its most vital structure was a double-walled stockade called "Double Pens"—a fortified storehouse where women and children sheltered during Indian raids while the men were away. As the frontier quieted, the refuge gave way to civic life: a school in 1876, the Indian Creek Methodist Church in 1880 with its famous two-week summer camp meetings, and a cemetery whose first burial came that same year. Services ended in 1958, leaving the community to memory.

London, TX

The Ivy community took its name from brothers Sam, Jack, and Bob Ivy, who came to Kimble County in 1883. S. H. Ivy deeded land for a school in 1898 and again in 1917, when a new schoolhouse rose that doubled as a community chapel, voting place, and site of box suppers and other social gatherings. Though the school consolidated with London in 1939, the chapel has continued to serve the area.

Brazoria, TX

Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long, sometimes called the "Mother of Texas," opened a boarding house on this site in 1832 after years on the Gulf frontier. Her tavern at the busy port of Brazoria became a hub of Anglo-American political life: she hosted a benefit for Stephen F. Austin in 1835 after his release from a Mexican prison, and in 1836 a ball attended by President Sam Houston and the adjourned Congress of the Republic. She later moved on to run a hotel in Richmond.

Brownfield, TX

Married in East Texas in 1885, Joseph Thomas and Laura Letha Hamilton moved west with their young children and settled here in 1902, before Terry County was even organized. Joe worked as a stock farmer, carpenter, mail carrier, and one of three men who built the county's first courthouse, while Laura ran a large household and served neighbors as nurse and midwife. Their home near this site anchored an early Brownfield-area community.

Borger, TX

This is a replica of the half-dugout that John and Maggie Weatherly built into the sod in 1898 on the treeless High Plains, where neither stone nor timber was at hand. Dug into the earth, such dwellings stayed cool in summer and warm in winter until settlers could afford proper houses. The Weatherlys became pioneer ranchers and civic leaders, and the oil-boom town of Borger later rose on their original homestead.

Poteet, TX

This land along the Atascosa River was first set aside in the 1700s for a San Antonio mission, then lay unsettled until José Antonio Navarro secured it as a Mexican land grant in 1831. Navarro was no ordinary rancher—in 1836 he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence—but by the 1850s he had made this his working ranch, running hundreds of cattle and summering in a log house above the river. He passed the ranch to his sons after the Civil War, and it stayed in the family until 1894.

Newark, IL

Near this site stood Kendall County's first store, built by George Hollenback, until it was burned in May 1832 during the Black Hawk War. That conflict — sparked when Sauk leader Black Hawk led followers back across the Mississippi to reclaim ceded homelands — swept panic and violence across northern Illinois, driving scattered settlers to flee or fort up.

Corpus Christi, TX

Henry L. Kinney built a fort-like trading post here, enclosed by a stockade around his home, store, and quarters for armed men, and Corpus Christi grew up around it. Much of his trade was with Indians and smuggling for Mexican Federalists, but business boomed when General Zachary Taylor's army camped nearby before marching to the Rio Grande in 1846. Kinney served as Taylor's quartermaster in the Mexican-American War, won repeated election to the legislature, and later ruined himself on a failed fair and a doomed Nicaragua scheme before dying in Matamoros.

Denton, TX

Charles Christian Lacy came from Kentucky with his wife Sarah in 1854 and helped plat the Denton townsite the following year, opening what is remembered as the city's first hotel here around 1858. For nearly a quarter century the Lacy Hotel served travelers on the young frontier town's dusty streets. In a footnote that later loomed large, a teenage Sam Bass worked here briefly as a livery stable boy before turning outlaw and becoming one of Texas's most notorious train robbers.

Alto, TX

Before 1835, Martin Lacy—an Indian agent for the Mexican government—built this home and trading post on the East Texas frontier. When the Killough family was attacked on October 5, 1838, in what became known as one of the largest such incidents in the region, settlers fled to Lacy's Fort for refuge amid the turmoil between Anglo colonists and Native peoples during the young Republic of Texas.

Paris, TX

In 1841, when Lamar County was newly organized in the young Republic of Texas, a plain clapboard courthouse rose on forty donated acres and became the county's first seat of government, a place called Lafayette. For two years justice was dispensed here under chief justice John A. Rutherford before the seat moved on and the town faded away. The State of Texas marked the spot in 1936 during its centennial, memorializing a vanished frontier community.

Plainview, TX

On the arid High Plains, water was everything, and Plainview's civic leaders staked the town's future on finding it underground. In 1911 they bored the region's first deep wells, and the next year the Texas Land & Development Co. sank a demonstration well that filled Lake Plainview—billed as the largest body of water in Texas fed by a well. Popular but costly, the lake reverted to nature after a 1917 fire destroyed its pump house.

Texas City, TX

Around 1821 the privateer and War of 1812 veteran James Campbell — a lieutenant and close friend of the buccaneer Jean Lafitte at Galveston — put the sea behind him to settle here as a rancher. He had earlier taken a bride, Mary Sabinal, in Karankawa ceremony, and the couple raised their community on this coastal ground. The settlement endured until a hurricane destroyed it a second time in 1915, and the Campbells lie with other early Texans in the nearby cemetery.

San Augustine, TX

Kenneth L. Anderson practiced law in San Augustine alongside such figures as Thomas J. Rusk and J. Pinckney Henderson before rising to become the last Vice President of the Republic of Texas under Anson Jones. Known as an able orator, he served the young republic as customs collector, congressman, and district attorney. He died in 1845 while traveling home from Austin, and the grateful citizens of Grimes County renamed their county seat Anderson in his honor.

Frisco, TX

Settlers drawn to free land, spring water, and timber in the Peters Colony named their community Lebanon and won a post office in 1860. Sitting on the Preston Road and Shawnee Trail, it became a favorite stop for cattle drovers and grew through the 1880s and 1890s into a town of shops, churches, a hotel, and a two-story school. When the railroad bypassed it in 1902 in favor of nearby Frisco, residents drifted away, and by the 21st century only three original buildings remained.

Linwood, TX

Built about 1830 on land tied to some of the earliest Anglo families in Texas, Linwood stood at the crossroads of the region's founding dramas. Its builder, Joseph Durst, had risen to alcalde of Nacogdoches by 1826, and in 1832 the Battle of Nacogdoches ended on this ground with the surrender of Colonel Piedras's Mexican force to a small band of Texans. The home later belonged to George Whitfield Terrell, a diplomat of the Republic of Texas, and was the birthplace of congressman George B. Terrell.

Quitman, TX

In 1900, families from Indiana led by John M. Hart and Roland Alexander migrated to this part of Wood County, lured by promises of rich timber and soil that proved poor and flood-prone. Those who stayed built a schoolhouse by hand—hauling logs by ox wagon to the sawmill—and the seven-grade Little Indiana School opened around 1901 with Alta Alexander Hart as its sole teacher, though illness and failed crops emptied the community by 1907.

Falfurrias, TX

Los Olmos was the first permanent settlement in what became Brooks County, planted at the southwest corner of the El Paisano land grant given to Ramon de la Garza by the Mexican state of Tamaulipas around 1830. Sitting near the main road to the Rio Grande, it drew ranching families from northern Mexico and by 1880 had a post office, stores, and a school. As the nearby town of Falfurrias rose, Los Olmos faded—though descendants of its founders still live in the area.

Jermyn vicinity, TX

J. C. Loving, son of the legendary trail driver Oliver Loving, built his ranch house here in 1872 at the height of the open-range cattle era. He became a founder and the first secretary of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, which held its first office at this very ranch. The operation later passed to his son, Oliver II.

Houston, TX

Texas statesman Francis Richard Lubbock ran a 1,300-acre ranch near here from 1846 to 1861, building large cattle herds that grazed between the Brazos and Trinity and were shipped by steamer from Sims Bayou to New Orleans. The ranch even hosted forty army camels in 1858 before they were driven west for the War Department's desert-transport experiment. Lubbock went on to serve as Texas' Confederate governor during the Civil War and later as an aide to Jefferson Davis, with whom he was captured in 1865.

Canadian, TX

In September 1874, during the U.S. Army's Red River campaign against the Southern Plains tribes, Captain Wyllys Lyman's supply wagon train was besieged in the Texas Panhandle. Fighting from a wagon corral, Lyman and 95 soldiers held off some 400 Comanche and Kiowa warriors for five days in what became the longest Indian battle in Panhandle history. A scout slipped away to Camp Supply, and cavalry rode 80 miles through a rainstorm to break the siege.

Wilson, TX

On December 4, 1874, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie and two companies of the U.S. 4th Cavalry were caught by a brutal snowstorm at this spot on the Llano Estacado. With no wood, water, or grass, the troopers spent what they called the most miserable night of their Southwestern service, and several horses froze to death. Mackenzie was scouting for scattered bands during the closing weeks of the 1874 campaign to force the Southern Plains tribes onto reservations.

Galveston, TX

Formed in 1870, the Magnolia Grove Association laid out a hilltop cemetery to serve all of Galveston, dividing it into 25 sections. A destructive 1875 storm left the grounds in disrepair; the association went bankrupt and many families' graves were moved elsewhere, though burials continued for years. After more storms and land transfers, the city exhumed remaining graves in 1941 to build an airport, and in 1986 preserved a portion as permanent green space.

Brownfield, TX

By 1903 the French family had built a two-story home on the West Texas plains that became a working waypoint of the freight economy. Teamsters hauling goods from the Texas & Pacific Railroad, along with cattle drovers passing through, found a campground, water, hot meals, and a horse pen here. From 1905 the home also served as a stop on the mail route linking Lamesa through Brownfield to Gomez, until the mail was rerouted and the service ended in 1910.

Fulton, TX

The ruined rendering vat here marks the Marion Packing Co., one of a dozen or more meat-packing plants that sprang up around Rockport and Fulton in the 1860s and 1870s to process the vast herds of range cattle roaming Texas after the Civil War. Beef was dried, salted, or pickled for shipment, while tallow, hides, horns, and bones went east to factories. Like most coastal plants, it thrived until about 1880, when driving cattle to northern markets proved more profitable.

Eldorado, TX

From 1894 to 1909 this corner of the old Mark Fury Ranch served as a stagecoach stop on Theodore Jackson Savell's line between San Angelo and Sonora. Six mornings a week a horn announced the stage's arrival, carrying passengers, mail, and express across country so remote that the line was, as the marker puts it, a thread of life for the region.

Leakey, TX

On April 19, 1881, a band of Lipan Apaches raided the McLaurin homestead in Frio Canyon while John McLaurin was away. In the violence, teenager Allen Lease and Catherine "Kate" McLaurin were shot and killed, though her three small children survived unharmed — six-year-old Maud running for help. Neighbors and soldiers from Fort Clark trailed the raiders 70 miles and into Mexico, in what is remembered as the last Indian raid in the canyon.

Millersview vicinity, TX

On March 16, 1684, the Spanish expedition led by Juan Domínguez de Mendoza paused at the junction of the Concho and Colorado rivers to establish Mission San Clemente, meant to convert and "civilize" the Native peoples of the region. Far out on the edge of Spain's northern frontier, the mission was a fleeting outpost of a colonial enterprise that reached deep into what would become West Texas. Only its remembered site survives.

Alton, TX

Monte Christo was one of the boom towns that blossomed across the Rio Grande Valley in the early twentieth century, platted in 1909 by the Melado Land Company. At its peak it boasted a bank, school, railroad station, cotton gin, two hotels, and some 1,500 residents, with Otto Woods managing the townsite and Virgil Lott publishing a newspaper aptly named 'The Hustler.' Border violence during the 1914–1916 raids drove people out, an inadequate water supply drove more, and by 1934 the town stood empty.

Marble Falls, TX

In 1851 some twenty Mormon families led by Lyman Wight settled here on the Texas frontier, building homes, lumber mills, and furniture shops. Wight, a former lieutenant of Joseph Smith who broke with Brigham Young's church, led his followers through a series of short-lived Texas colonies, and this one lasted only until 1853. The state marked the vanished settlement in 1936.

Tomball, TX

Founded before 1831 while Texas was still Mexican territory, New Kentucky briefly thrived as a trading settlement on the coastal prairie. Its fortunes collapsed when nearby Houston was laid out in 1836 and captured the region's commerce, and the town was abandoned by about 1840. Today only the marker recalls a place that once bustled with frontier trade.

Alvarado, TX

For decades these springs on the road from Fort Worth to Waco drew both people and history to a single patch of Johnson County prairie. Caddo families were camped here when the Balch family arrived to claim Peters Colony land around 1851, and the two lived as peaceable neighbors before settlers' growing numbers pushed the Caddo toward Oklahoma by 1860. Later owner Lafayette Norman kept the spring open to weary travelers, giving it the name Norman Springs, until the great droughts of the 20th century dried it to a muddy trace marked only by a willow.

Snyder, TX

In the early 1900s the O.K. Wagon Yard on Snyder's old Jackass Avenue offered travelers rooms and horse stalls for two bits apiece, along with blacksmithing, harness repair, and stud animals — and, with the right introduction, a jar of homemade "White Lightning." Saturdays brought passed-hat rodeos, and "first Mondays" drew farmers, ranchers, and mule skinners to swap livestock and goods. The yard closed in the 1930s.

Bedford, TX

Named for the wooded grove where it began in early 1886, Oak Grove Methodist Church started with 30 members as one of five churches on the Keller Circuit, complete with a brush arbor for summer revivals that drew neighbors of every faith. It gave rise to the Colleyville Methodist Church in 1924, but as population centers shifted, Oak Grove's own membership dwindled — from 99 in 1935 to just twelve by 1949, when it was dissolved. Its last building was moved to Colleyville and used there into the 1960s.