Westward Expansion

Port Arthur, TX

Laid out in 1835 on a Mexican land grant to Horatio M. Hanks, Aurora was platted with at least 160 blocks and its first lots sold in 1837, just after the Texas Revolution. But hurricanes, hard freezes, and the absence of medical care emptied the townsite, and by 1890 it stood deserted — until Port Arthur rose nearby in 1895.

Austonio, TX

Before Texas won its independence, settlers on this exposed stretch of frontier built a fortified block house as a refuge from raids. Elisha Clapp and his neighbors used the sturdy log structure as a rallying point in times of danger, a common feature of frontier defense in the 1830s and early 1840s. By about 1844, as settlement grew safer and denser, the block house was abandoned.

Newton, TX

In the settlement era of the early 1800s, this Sabine River crossing was one of only four main gateways for pioneers entering Texas from Louisiana, letting families bring their stock and household goods across the border. Known first as Hickman's Ferry and later for Dr. Timothy Burr — a second cousin of Vice President Aaron Burr — it also anchored "the Old Beef Trail," over which thousands of cattle were driven to Alexandria for shipment to New Orleans. By the Civil War the site was strategic enough that Confederates dug breastworks and cleared timber to guard against Federal invasion.

Wilmeth, TX

Mazeland sprang up in 1903 when a post office and store opened on A. B. Hutchinson's ranch, likely named for the maize grown nearby. As settlement spread, a second community called Wilmeth was named in 1906 for a popular Ballinger banker, and residents took turns hauling mail by horse-drawn wagon between the two. Both post offices were shut down in 1909, and the little communities faded away.

McMullen County, TX

Platted across 1,600 acres by 1902 and named for landowner Samuel Crowther, this townsite was heavily promoted as a future oil-and-farming center despite early oil discoveries nearby. The boosterism never paid off, and by 1921 the place was a ghost town. It later passed through further owners in the 1930s.

Comanche vicinity, TX

W. A. Gill, son of a San Jacinto veteran, settled this Comanche County land in 1874 after fighting in the Civil War and serving as a captain in the Texas Rangers. His sons E. V. and Fleet lived here for many years on the family farm. In 1964 the remains in the family plot were reinterred a mile north at Buffalo Cemetery.

Gilmer, TX

Along the old Cherokee Trace stood the first town of Gilmer, where in 1845 the inaugural Upshur County Court met in the open shade of an oak. The next spring Judge O. M. Roberts pressed the nearby W. H. Hart home into service as a courthouse until a permanent county seat could be carefully chosen. The Old Gilmer Cemetery lies a mile north.

Goodnight, TX

Founded in 1898 by pioneering Panhandle ranchers Colonel Charles Goodnight and his wife, this college began with twenty students meeting in the Methodist church while donated funds went up as a three-story administration building, dormitories, and a dining hall. Enrollment reached 200, and the school fielded a strong athletic program before shifting to a Baptist academy in 1905 and a junior college by 1913. It closed during the World War I era after nearly two decades of service.

Goodnight, TX

This site holds the first ranch established in the Texas Panhandle, founded in 1876 by Charles Goodnight (1836–1929)—scout, trail blazer, Indian fighter, and rancher known as the 'Burbank of the Range.' The State of Texas erected the marker recording it in 1936.

Happy, TX

On the high, dry Texas Panhandle, the Hugh Currie family's 1891 home, "Happy Hollow," stood alone along the Amarillo-to-Tulia freight and stage route, doubling as the place where scattered settlers collected their mail and freight. The Postal Department shortened the cheerful name to "Happy" for the post office, and when the Santa Fe railroad came through in 1906, the whole town simply picked up and moved two miles west to meet the tracks.

Midlothian, TX

In May 1848 William Alden Hawkins and his large family arrived here from Indiana as the first settlers in what became Ellis County, part of the Peters Colony land-grant scheme. In a frantic 28 days they cut and hauled cedar logs to raise five houses and secure claims to some 2,500 acres, drawing water from the spring beside the family home. When the county organized in 1850, Hawkins was appointed its first chief justice, and much of Midlothian later grew up on the family's surveys.

Abilene, TX

In December 1880, a Texas & Pacific Railroad official met local cattlemen near this spot — the old headquarters of the Hashknife Ranch — to choose a site for a cattle-shipping center. Bypassing the county seat of Buffalo Gap, they platted a brand-new town and named it Abilene after the famous Kansas cattle town. A lively sale of city lots followed in March 1881, and Abilene grew swiftly into a major regional city of West Texas.

Hillsboro, TX

Founded about 1851 on Jack's Branch, Lexington was Hill County's very first settlement—and, when the county organized in 1853, its only polling place. For four months two log cabins did double duty as a courthouse, until a special election moved the county seat to Hillsboro and Lexington faded away. The marker itself was relocated to the courthouse square in 2006.

Lubbock, TX

In 1890, three factions led by W.D. Crump, W.E. Rayner, and Frank Wheelock competed to organize Lubbock County—not by backing established towns, but by founding new ones. The Crump and Wheelock groups started 'Old Lubbock,' or North Town, above Yellow House Canyon, a settlement of some 50 people and 37 buildings anchored by the Nicolett Hotel, while Rayner's rival 'Monterey' sat to the south. Rather than feud to the bitter end, the rivals struck a rare compromise on December 19, 1890, merging to found present-day Lubbock.

Nacogdoches, TX

Worshippers of several denominations gathered here as early as 1836, giving the congregation its first name, Union Church. Formally organized in 1838, it built a log meetinghouse on ten acres donated by Dr. John M. Sparks; the present structure dates to 1852. Many of the leading Anglo-American settlers of Nacogdoches County lie in its graveyard.

Lampasas, TX

From 1883 to 1894 the Elks (or Barnes) Opera House brought traveling theatricals, local dramas, musical programs, and Confederate veterans' reunions to frontier Lampasas, its tiered leather chairs and brilliant chandeliers a mark of modern refinement. It was one of several hundred Texas opera houses that flourished between the Republic and World War I, drawing touring companies from San Francisco to Cincinnati before it burned in 1894 and the automobile, radio, and movies ended the era.

Crowell, TX

Founded in 1880 by early settlers Benjamin E. Lower and the Wesley family, Pease City grew around a stone post office and trading post that served some 3,500 square miles of thinly settled North Texas country, with mail carried by stage or horseback. Named for the Pease River and Governor E. M. Pease, the town faded when its post office closed in 1885 and the county seat shifted to Margaret. The site later became part of Foard County.

Cleburne, TX

With its wood and water, this shaded ground served the community around Camp Henderson for public gatherings after 1854. When the settlement became the county seat in 1867, men at a Fourth of July picnic here chose the town's name — Cleburne — in honor of the Civil War commander whom many local veterans had served under.

Canadian, TX

On the 1870s freight and military trail linking Fort Elliott, Fort Supply, and Fort Dodge, A. G. Springer built a road ranch that became Hemphill County's first post office—famously connected to its corral by a tunnel from the dugout store. It was stagecoach stand, tavern, and supply house for teamsters and buffalo hunters, and a favorite stop for soldiers seeking a card game. In 1877 the poker-loving Springer and his partner Tom Ledbetter were killed in a gunfight with angry soldiers and buried at the ranch.

Vega, TX

Old Tascosa began as an Indian camping ground at a Canadian River crossing, became a Mexican trading point, and by 1876 had exploded into an open-range trading center and "capital of a cattle empire." Its streets drew cowboys, gamblers, and gunmen — Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and Bat Masterson among them — and its Boot Hill cemetery earned lasting fame. When the railroad bypassed it in 1887 and barbed wire ended the great cattle drives, the town withered, and by 1915 the county seat moved to Vega, leaving only the courthouse behind.

Utopia vicinity, TX

Founded in 1883 on land donated by Henry Taylor, Gid Thompson, and other settlers, the Taylor School began as a one-room frame building furnished with homemade desks and recitation benches. It was far more than a classroom—the community met here for a weekly Literary Society, Sunday school, and church—until, after two rebuildings, it consolidated with Utopia in 1937.

Weches, TX

Frontiersman Daniel McLean and his brother-in-law John Sheridan settled here in 1821, soon joined by other pioneer families. The little community—first called Boston, then Augusta after a postmaster's daughter in 1857—weathered deadly frontier violence, including the Edens-Madden Massacre, and grew to some two dozen stores, a Masonic lodge, and a coeducational academy. As ranching and forestry supplanted cotton, the town faded away.

Lometa, TX

Named for a 1850s cattle king who laid out the townsite and donated land for a cemetery and school, Senterfitt grew up around an early stage stand and post office established in 1877. At its height the town of some 400 people supplied a wide swath of central Texas with wool, hides, cotton, and pecans. When the railroad passed it by around 1890, the town faded away—a common fate for settlements that lived and died by the rails.

Nixon, TX

Settled in the 1860s, Union Valley grew around a log schoolhouse donated in 1872 that also served as Masonic hall, church, and courtroom — the multipurpose civic heart of a frontier settlement. A post office opened in 1883, and stores, cotton gins, saloons, and smithies bearing a roll call of pioneer family names lined its streets. Like so many rural towns, it faded after the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railroad bypassed it in 1906.

Paradise, TX

One of Wise County's earliest settlers, O.H.P. Read, made his home here in 1858 in a community first called Eldorado, where William M. Anderson opened a general store and surveyor Ben Banks laid out a town square. Renamed Paradise after a post office naming conflict in 1876, the town shifted northeast in the 1890s to be near the new Rock Island rail line, and "old" Paradise faded away by 1927 as its cotton crops failed. Today only a home built by Confederate Lt. William Hall Jay remains on the old square.

Floresville, TX

By 1720 this land along the river was known as the country of the Cayopines, a Coahuiltecan people, and it became vital to the San Antonio missions, whose herds grazed here tended by herdsmen in adobe huts. Apache raids after 1731 drove those herdsmen to shelter at Mission Cabras, and the ground passed through Spanish ranchos and Canary Islander families before Anglo settler Stephen T. Cook opened a store in 1858 and named the place Lodi. Chosen county seat in 1867, Lodi lost that honor to Floresville in 1872 and reverted to ranching.

Wallisville, TX

Elisha H. R. Wallis settled here in 1825 within an empresario grant, and by 1858 Wallisville was the seat of newly organized Chambers County. It grew into a busy market town with a shipyard, cotton gin, skating rink, and the county's first newspaper, linked to Galveston by sloop and to Liberty by daily stage — even boasting a courthouse with a tower built for executions. The county seat left in 1908 after the celebrated "County Seat Hog War," a storm battered the town in 1915, and part of the old site now lies beneath the Wallisville Reservoir.

Morse, TX

In 1873 the English-born hunters Jim and Bob Cator wintered a buffalo camp on the plains above the Canadian River, in what became the first permanent settlement of the Texas Panhandle. By 1875 it had grown into a two-room trading post stocked with groceries and ammunition—the first north of the Canadian—wryly named Zulu for the African warriors then in the news. As a depot on the Fort Dodge–Fort Bascom military road it served hunters, soldiers, and freighters until it was finally abandoned in 1912.

Fulton, TX

Irish-born James Power came to Texas as an empresario, winning authority in 1828 with James Hewetson to settle 200 families along the coast. He served his adopted country under three flags as colonizer, soldier, and statesman, and in 1836 he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. This site near Live Oak Point marks one of the homes of a man the State of Texas honored with this monument in 1936.

Mart, TX

In early 1878, Baptists in the tiny community of Willow Springs, Texas, first gathered in a private home to hear a visiting preacher, and that April eighteen of them met beneath a large elm tree to formally organize their congregation. They raised a frame church beside the tree and opened a burial ground that grew into Mart City Cemetery. The town itself was later renamed Mart, and the church moved on in 1893, but this spot marks where the community's spiritual life began.

San Antonio, TX

First Baptist Church of San Antonio was organized in January 1861 by a missionary pastor, the Rev. John H. Thurmond, on the eve of the Civil War. The congregation worshipped in temporary quarters until it raised its first permanent home — a two-story, 40-by-60-foot white limestone church built from 1872 to 1877, with a parsonage alongside. Services continued at this site until 1905, when the growing church relocated to Fourth and Taylor.

South Plains, TX

Established by the Baker brothers in 1877, the Quitaque Ranch was purchased in 1880 on behalf of Cornelia Adair by the legendary cattleman Charles Goodnight. Joined with the Palo Duro ranches, it formed part of a vast holding of more than a million acres assembled by Goodnight in 1887 before being broken into smaller tracts. This spot marks the original headquarters of one of the great open-range empires of the Texas Panhandle.

Brackettville, TX

From 1856 into the 1880s this limestone-walled ground was the burying place for Fort Clark, a frontier Army post guarding the Texas–Mexico border country. Among the dozens laid to rest here were a young West Point lieutenant who died in 1857 and Pvt. Peter Corrigan, the lone fatality of Col. Ranald Mackenzie's 1873 cross-border raid into Mexico. When a new cemetery opened south of the post in 1880 the site fell inactive, and in 1946 all its dead were reinterred at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.

Owensville, TX

Owensville served as Robertson County's third county seat from 1855 to 1869, on land donated by D. H. Love and named for pioneer county clerk Harrison Owen. Sitting on the Houston-to-Waco mail, stage, and freighting road, the town drew officials, doctors, lawyers, and merchants, and during the Civil War it armed and dispatched soldiers. When the Houston & Texas Central Railway bypassed it in 1868, the county records moved to Calvert and the town faded, leaving only its cemetery to mark the site.

Lampasas, TX

When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe reached Lampasas in 1882, the town became a rail terminus and a fashionable spa destination famed for its healing sulphur springs. Houston and Galveston businessmen built the Park Hotel, opened in 1883: a 300-foot frame resort with 200 rooms, ballrooms, a bandstand, and a mule-drawn trolley to the depot, host in 1885 to the first Texas Bankers Association convention. Its glory was brief — as the rails pushed west and medicine outgrew mineral cures, the hotel declined and burned in 1895.

Bovina, TX

Parmerton began as Parmer Switch on the Pecos & Northern Texas Railroad in 1898 and grew when a model farm using the Campbell dry-farming method took root there in 1906. A townsite company laid out streets in 1907, and Parmerton briefly became the county seat with its own post office. But when nearby Farwell won the county seat later that year, residents literally packed up and moved their houses away, leaving only the railroad switch to mark the spot.

Woden, TX

Founded in 1844 by riverboat pilots Robert and Moses Patton, this vanished port sat at a bend of the Angelina River on land patented to Texas Revolution general Thomas J. Rusk. The brothers proved the river navigable with a keelboat, then bought the steamboat Angelina and ran regular trade, sending cotton downstream toward the Gulf and hauling supplies up to be wagoned overland to Nacogdoches. Silting sandbars, fallen logs and dropping water levels doomed the enterprise, and the coming of the railroads finished it; today nothing at all remains of Pattonia.

Ballinger, TX

Founded in 1862, Pickettville was the first civilian settlement in Runnels County, named for the picket houses and corrals its frontier families built. Ranching households — the Guests, the Wylie brothers and their hands, the Gordons, and the Coffeys — banded together for protection amid the Indian raids that intensified during the Civil War. In 1866 they drove their cattle off to open range, and their old picket corrals later held the herds of trail drivers passing through.

Pierce, TX

In the 1890s, famed Texas cattleman A. H. "Shanghai" Pierce platted the town of Pierce beside his ranch, hoping it would become the county seat. He laid out squares for a courthouse, academy, and cemetery and built a three-story hotel meant to house cattle buyers and salesmen drawn by the railroad. The planned boom never came; the hotel never opened to the public and was razed in 1980, leaving only its widow's walk as a memorial.

Hungerford, TX

In the summer of 1837 the young Republic of Texas established Post West Bernard Station as an ordnance depot, stockpiling cannons, rifles, muskets, powder, and shot. Sited on the West Bernard River, it helped shield Houston — then the capital — against the threat of a Mexican invasion. Officers like Lt. H. L. Grush and Capt. Martin K. Snell held the post under harsh conditions until 1838–39, when its arms were transferred to the new Houston Arsenal.

Bertram, TX

Anglo settlers began arriving in this part of Burnet County in the 1850s, and by the 1870s they had established cattle and sheep ranches alongside family farms. The Prairie Point community coalesced around a school that opened in 1882 and a Missionary Baptist church organized in 1883, which met in the schoolhouse, then a brush arbor, before building its own sanctuary in 1906. Both school and church eventually faded—the school closing in 1921, the congregation disbanding in 1957—leaving Prairie Point a vanished frontier settlement.

Ropesville, TX

When homesteaders began breaking the Hockley County prairie in 1902, their growing families soon needed a school. In 1909 parents hauled lumber roughly a hundred miles by wagon from Big Spring, donated their labor, and raised a one-room schoolhouse named Primrose for a wild prairie flower. Classes opened that December for children of a handful of pioneer families, and the building doubled as polling place, church, and meeting hall until the nearby town of Ropesville drew the community away.

Nada, TX

Provident City was born in 1909 as a land-promotion scheme by a Kansas City company that advertised across the Midwest with photos of bumper crops supposedly grown here. More than five hundred hopeful buyers purchased land sight unseen, and at its peak the town held twenty-one businesses, two churches, a bank, and a baseball team. But the promised railroad never got past a roadbed and the soil failed the settlers — within four years the disillusioned, bankrupt residents drifted away, leaving a ghost town.

Hungerford, TX

Founded about 1872 on the Wharton-Richmond road, the village of Quinan was named for Judge George E. Quinan, an Irish immigrant who served in the Texas Senate and on the Court of Civil Appeals and helped found the State Bar of Texas. The community had a school, a Methodist church, and a post office in Habermacher's store, but it declined after nearby Hungerford was founded in 1882, and its post office and businesses eventually moved away.

Rocksprings, TX

In 1882 Joe Thurman and his sons became the first permanent settlers on the west prong of the Nueces River, soon joined by neighbors who raised a brush-arbor church and school. Thurman served as doctor, dentist, and coffin maker to the community, and the family bred fine racehorses—once matching their best against a horse owned by future U.S. Vice President John Nance Garner.

Fort Worth, TX

This spot once held a small graveyard on the William Ray survey, where a dozen known burials and many unmarked graves held some of Tarrant County's earliest settlers. Ray, a colonist of the Peters colony that drew families to North Texas in the 1840s, was buried here with his wife Lucinda in the mid-1880s, and members of the pioneer Manship farming family lay nearby. As development pressed in, several graves were moved to Rose Hill Cemetery, and in 1984 the old burial ground was razed.

Silverton, TX

With the nearest railroad some sixty miles away, the opening of the Reeves post office in 1899 gave scattered High Plains pioneers a vital link to the outside world. It began in the front room of postmaster Joseph H. Reeves' two-story frame house and served 110 settlers before James U. Strickland took it over in 1905. The office closed in 1907, mail was rerouted to Silverton, and the old home later burned to the ground.

Victoria, TX

Built before 1836 by Placido Benavides, son-in-law of Victoria's founder Martín De León, the Round Top House was known as "the Citadel of Victoria." When Comanche raiders swept through the region in the great raid of 1840, the sturdy house became a place of refuge for the town's frightened citizens.

D'Hanis, TX

In 1847 Alsatian settlers founded the D'Hanis Colony, carrying French and German Catholic traditions to the Texas hill country, and their congregation soon needed a church of its own. By 1853 they had raised a limestone sanctuary with timber dragged by ox-wagon from the Medina River, later expanding it in sandstone when the parish gained its first resident pastor. The adjoining cemetery, begun with the burial of a colonist's child, served the community until a diphtheria epidemic in 1893 prompted a new burial ground.

Rusk, TX

Rusk twice hosted the towering, controversial figure of Sam Houston. In 1855 he debated politician Frank Bowden while trying to win back voters angered by his vote against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and in 1857 he campaigned here for governor to a notably cool reception — a three-hour speech met with weak applause and empty benches. These stops capture Houston at a low ebb, out of step with a Texas drifting toward secession.

Pleasanton, TX

The Esparza brothers—Manuel, Enrique, and Francisco—had survived the fall of the Alamo as children, sheltered within its walls while their father Gregorio died in the 1836 battle. In the following decade they brought their families to Atascosa County to farm and ranch, and soon built a small family chapel; in 1869 Enrique donated five acres to the Catholic Church, and the Esparzas raised a larger native-stone church they named San Augustine. Damaged by a 1940 storm and closed in 1942, the mission church was eventually razed, leaving only memory of the settlement it once anchored.

Freeport, TX

Established in the early 1830s on an island owned by Stephen F. Austin, San Luis blossomed into a busy port of some 2,000 people by 1840, complete with a boardinghouse, a Galveston ferry, and grand plans for rail and canal links to move plantation cotton. Developers platted a city of more than fifty blocks and dreamed of a bridge to the mainland. Storms, a sanding harbor, and a depressed economy doomed the town, and by the end of the twentieth century most of its site had vanished beneath the eroding shoreline.

Snyder, TX

Alonzo Orrin Scarborough came to Snyder in 1881 as a ranch horse trainer, taught himself medicine by 'reading' it, and began practicing in 1886 before earning his M.D. from the Kentucky School of Medicine in 1889. For decades he answered calls on horseback, riding alone through the night across the sparsely settled Scurry County range, and served as chief railroad surgeon and the county's first public health officer. In 1910 he opened the Scarborough Sanitarium, the county's first hospital, and kept practicing until he was ninety.

Beaumont, TX

Platted in 1835 by land speculator David Brown, the townsite of Santa Anna briefly served as the political and military hub for the region west of the Neches River. Storekeeper Joseph Pulsifer, who arrived in July 1835, left letters to his sister that remain a rare firsthand record of daily life here before and after the Texas Revolution. But the rise of nearby Beaumont, absentee landowners, and Brown's death in 1847 doomed the town, which faded away.

Driscoll, TX

In 1764 the governor of the Spanish colony of Nuevo Santander commissioned Captain Blas María de la Garza Falcón to explore the coast and establish a way station, and by 1766 he had moved his family, followers, and livestock to what became Rancho de Don Blas, or Santa Petronila Ranch. The outpost served as a base for coastal expeditions and drew colonists north from the Rio Grande, its garrison patrolling against Indigenous raids and foreign intrusion. Many settlers withdrew during the Texas War for Independence in 1836 but later returned, and descendants remain in the area today.

Dallas, TX

Settlers in 1840s Dallas County first gathered under a tree at this spot, and by the 1850s a succession of two-story frame buildings hosted a Masonic lodge, church services, elections, and one of the county's earliest public schools. Among its pupils was the young Myra Maybelle Shirley, later infamous as the outlaw Belle Starr. When the Texas & Pacific Railroad bypassed Scyene in 1872 the town dwindled, yet the community hall kept hosting fraternal groups and classes until 1927.

May Township, MN

This memorial marks the site of the Second Congregational Church of Marine, founded in 1878 by twenty-two members in the old lumbering community of Marine on St. Croix. Over the years its pulpit welcomed ministers of many faiths, a sign of how a single frontier church often served an entire community. In 1962 neighbors, descendants of the original members, and the county historical society joined to erect this remembrance where the church once stood.

Austin, TX

Built in 1875, the second Travis County Courthouse was a massive three-story Victorian limestone building whose fortress-like jail once held the writer William Sidney Porter, later famous as O. Henry, when he returned to Austin in 1897 to face embezzlement charges. The county traded away its long lease in 1931, the courthouse was demolished, and state offices moved in under the name Walton Building. That structure was itself razed in 1964.

Roxton, TX

In 1837, as the young Republic of Texas pushed settlement into the Red River country, Jesse Shelton raised a log house and stockade here that doubled as a way station and a refuge for families fleeing raids on the frontier. Designated a Republic post office in 1840 and used for Methodist worship, Shelton's Fort anchored the earliest civic life of Lamar County, where Shelton helped choose the county seat and served as a justice of the peace. The settlement that gathered nearby later took the name McGlasson after the man who bought the property in 1851.

Sonora, TX

In the arid ranchlands of Sutton County, water was the difference between a settlement and empty grass. In 1889 Charlie Adams used a horse-driven drill to sink Sonora's first well at this spot, where a windmill lifted water into a storage tank and the courthouse square soon took shape. Newer wells followed in the 1890s, and by 1895 the original waterworks had been bought up and carried away.