Westward Expansion

Cleburne, TX

This reliable spring drew explorers, soldiers of the Confederate Camp Henderson, and early settlers who traveled many miles to wash, haul water, and visit. Enterprising boys "toted" buckets to town merchants at a nickel apiece, and though the brick-lined pool was often dipped dry, the spring always refilled it. It supplied Cleburne until the town's first city well finally tapped the same source.

Edna, TX

Founded in 1834 by Dr. F. F. Wells, a friend of empresario Stephen F. Austin, Texana served as the seat of Jackson County from 1835 to 1883 and cradled the county's first Methodist and Presbyterian churches and Masonic lodge. When the railroad bypassed it, the once-thriving town faded away, leaving only this site to mark where it stood.

Monterey, CA · est. 1997

This spot in Monterey marks where the original flagstaff stood when Commodore John Drake Sloat raised the American flag on July 7, 1846, claiming California for the United States. The seizure came during the war with Mexico, and the territory was formally ceded two years later under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. A 1997 dedication by the state park commission and the Native Sons of the Golden West preserves the memory of that morning.

Forreston, TX

War of 1812 veteran and Republic of Texas frontier commander Edward H. Tarrant built his home on this Ellis County land in 1845 and raised the county's first mill nearby. A statesman and campaigner against Native peoples, he lived here until his death in August 1858. The State of Texas marked the plantation site in 1936.

Throckmorton, TX

Established in 1854, the Comanche Indian Reserve on the Brazos was a federal experiment to settle Comanche people on farmland under government oversight. Here, in April 1856, Colonel Robert E. Lee — then commanding nearby Camp Cooper — held a peace parley with Chief Catumseh. Within a few years the reserve failed, and its residents were removed to Indian Territory in 1859.

New Boston, TX

Virginia-born jurist Richard Ellis practiced law and served on the bench in Alabama before coming to Texas in 1825. In March 1836 he presided as president of the Convention that declared Texas independent from Mexico, then served in the Congress of the new Republic. He lived out his years at this Bowie County home, dying here in 1846.

Bon Weir, TX

Founded in 1839 in the piney woods of what became Newton County, Belgrade grew into a thriving settlement in the years before the Civil War. Like many East Texas river-country towns of the Republic era, it prospered briefly and then faded, leaving little but its remembered site along the Sabine.

Jasper vicinity, TX

Established by John Bevil, Bevilport was an important river navigation point from 1830 to 1860 and gave its name to the municipality first organized in 1834. It served as a mail station in 1835, was county seat of Jasper County from 1836 to 1837, and was incorporated in 1837. A business and social center on the Angelina River trade, the town thrived until the Civil War.

Bryan, TX

In 1841, a handful of Texas pioneers laid out Boonville on the Brazos frontier and made it the seat of what was first called Navasota County—renamed Brazos the following year. For a quarter century the little town served as the county's civic hub, taking its name from settler Mordecai Boon. Its fortunes collapsed in 1866 when the railroad arrived a few miles away and gave rise to Bryan, which drew away Boonville's people and purpose.

Liberty, TX

General Sam Houston built a home here in 1843 and lived in it until 1845, and by 1846 a post office had opened to serve the little settlement. The town's fortunes flickered over the following decades, its post office closing and reopening before the community was renamed Ironwood in 1869. By 1900 the post office was shuttered for good, and the town faded from the map.

Lufkin, TX

Once known as Angelina, the town of Homer served as the third seat of Angelina County from 1858 to 1890 before losing that role and fading from the map. Like many nineteenth-century county seats, its fortunes rose and fell with courthouse politics and the routes of new roads and railroads. Today only a marker southeast of Lufkin recalls the vanished town.

Huntington vicinity, TX

For a brief four years in the 1850s, Jonesville served as the second county seat of Angelina County in the pine woods of East Texas. County seats were the beating heart of frontier governance, and their locations shifted as populations moved and rivalries flared. When the seat moved on in 1858, Jonesville faded, leaving little but this marker.

Fulton, TX

Founded in 1838 and named for Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, this coastal town on the Aransas Bay was made a port of entry in 1839 during the heady early days of Texan independence. Its fortunes never rose far, and Union troops sacked the settlement in February 1864 during the Civil War. Though it clung to life until 1914, Lamar quietly faded into one of the Gulf Coast's many vanished towns.

Port Lavaca, TX

Around 1831 pioneer Victoria merchant John Joseph Linn located a warehouse on this stretch of the Texas coast, and a small port settlement grew up around it. On August 8, 1840, a massive Comanche raiding party swept down to the Gulf and burned Linnville to the ground, part of the famous Great Raid of 1840. The town was never rebuilt, and the State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Margaret, TX

First called Pease, this settlement was renamed for Margaret Wesley, remembered as the first Anglo-American child born in Hardeman County. From 1884 to 1890 Margaret served as the county's first seat of government before the honor — and much of the town's reason for being — moved elsewhere. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936, during the state's centennial wave of historical markers.

Douglass, TX

John Durst founded Mount Sterling in 1837 near the ruins of an old Spanish mission, building a saw and grist mill and a large warehouse along the Angelina River, where boats moored at its wharves. For a brief moment it promised to be a thriving river town of the young Republic of Texas. But the Córdova Rebellion of 1838—an uprising involving disaffected Tejanos and Native allies against the Republic—unsettled the region, and Durst abandoned the place, leaving Mount Sterling to fade into a ghost town.

Gause, TX

Surveyed in the fall of 1835 as the capital of Sterling C. Robertson's colony, Nashville, Texas, took its name from Nashville, Tennessee, home of many of its settlers. It served as an early seat of justice for the Milam municipality and county and was the first Texas home of George C. Childress, who chaired the committee that drafted the Texas Declaration of Independence. The town has since vanished from the map.

Ballinger, TX

Established in 1880 as Runnels City, this settlement served as the first seat of Runnels County during the early years of West Texas ranching and settlement. When the county government moved to Ballinger in 1888, the town lost its reason for being and faded away.

Trinity County, TX

In the late 1850s, as steamboats and flatboats still carried cotton and goods along East Texas waterways, the town of Sebastopol rose as a busy shipping point in what is now Trinity County. Its name echoed the Russian naval station made famous during the Crimean War, then fresh in the world's headlines. Like many antebellum river landings, Sebastopol thrived only until the railroads arrived and rerouted commerce, leaving the town to fade.

Trinity County, TX

Sumpter was the first county seat of Trinity County, established on land granted in 1850 and formally laid out in November 1855. Incorporated in 1862, the young town served as the county's seat of government until fire destroyed its courthouse and records in 1872. The following year the county seat moved to Trinity, and Sumpter faded from the map. The State of Texas marked the vanished town's site in 1936.

Groveton, TX

Sumpter was the first county seat of Trinity County, laid out on November 20, 1855, on land granted in 1850 and made the seat of government in 1854. Incorporated in 1862, the town lost its courthouse and public records to fire in 1872. The next year the county seat was moved to Trinity, and Sumpter dwindled away. Little but the marker now recalls the once-important town.

Goodrich, TX

Laid out in 1838 with 86 blocks and two public squares, the town of Swartwout was platted along the Trinity River during the days of the Republic of Texas. It honored Samuel Swartwout, a New York speculator and politician who had advanced funds to the Texas government in 1836. A busy steamboat landing before the Civil War, the site kept a ferry crossing running until 1930 before fading away entirely.

Jasper, TX

Zavala grew up on land within the 1829 empresario grant to Lorenzo de Zavala, the Mexican statesman who would later help found the Republic of Texas, and it took his name. Set along a river, the town served as an early boat landing and a mail and stage stop, and it incorporated in 1838. Its post office lasted until the Civil War before the community faded into memory.

Bellingham, WA

This marker pinpoints where the town pillory once stood in 1890, in the young Pacific Northwest settlement that would become Bellingham. A pillory was a public device of punishment and humiliation, a holdover of older frontier and colonial-era justice still lingering in fast-growing western towns at the close of the 19th century. Its location, now quietly noted, recalls a rougher civic past.

Perryton, TX

C. E. Jones opened this trading post in 1874 along the Jones and Plummer Trail, the freight and cattle route running from Dodge City, Kansas, down to Mobeetie in the Texas Panhandle. At first it dealt food and cloth to Native peoples in exchange for hides; as ranching took hold, it became a supply stop for cattlemen hauling goods up from Dodge City. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Pottsboro, TX

Around 1837, on the eve of Texas independence, Holland Coffee opened a trading post here on the Red River to deal with the Indigenous peoples of the region and the western plains. Captives held among the tribes were sometimes ransomed and freed at this spot, and in 1843 the controversial Snively Expedition set out from nearby to raid the Santa Fe trade. The post was abandoned after Coffee's death in 1846.

Graham, TX

Young County's early history swung with the fortunes of the frontier: organized in 1856 at Belknap, it saw its records flee to Jacksboro amid renewed Indian conflict during the Civil War before being reorganized around Graham in 1874. In 1884 workers quarried native sandstone east of town to raise a two-story courthouse laid out as a Greek cross, built by Swedish-born mason N. J. Rosenquist. Razed in 1932, the building survives only in a single preserved archway rescued during 1936 street work.

Socorro, TX

On the old San Elizario road along the Rio Grande valley near Socorro stood a walled hacienda that appears on an 1852 map beside the crossing of the Acequia Madre, the region's ancient mother irrigation ditch. By 1873 part of the building had been torn down, but the surviving rooms housed the store of Juan Carbajal and served as local municipal offices. The site preserves a trace of the Spanish-Mexican settlement that long predated Anglo Texas in the El Paso district.

Sterling City, TX

Cummins grew up around 1890 beside the saddle-and-harness shop of its first permanent settler, Robert Benjamin Cummins. When Sterling County was created in 1891, it and nearby Sterling City became bitter rivals for the county seat, their newspaper editors trading barbs in print. A contested first election ended in a tie after voting boxes were thrown out; a second vote gave Sterling City the seat by 13 votes, and Cummins soon emptied — today nothing remains of the town.

Westbrook, TX

Teacher and merchant D.T. Bozeman founded Cuthbert in 1890 on a main wagon road northwest of Colorado City, naming it for a neighbor and installing his wife as first postmaster. A good well by his general store drew freighters, a school opened in 1893, and in 1898 the county's first rural telephone line ran from Bozeman's home to Colorado City. By 1907 the little town had two stores, a gin, church, school, and trades, but the post office closed in 1959 and Cuthbert faded away.

Freeport, TX

Long before Freeport rose nearby, the town of Velasco stood at the mouth of the Brazos River as one of the earliest gateways into Anglo Texas, funneling more than 25,000 settlers into Stephen F. Austin's colonies between 1821 and 1835. In 1832 it became the scene of an early armed clash between colonists and Mexican forces, an ember of the coming Texas Revolution. By the mid-1800s the same coastline had reinvented itself as a breezy resort for wealthy plantation families, before the Civil War and an 1875 hurricane hollowed the town out for good.

Paxton, TX

Founded by Civil War veteran James Jackson Spivey, the town of Spivey grew up around a station on the Houston East & West Texas Railroad built across his land in 1886. A lumber mill, post office, and Baptist church followed, but after 1900 the community drifted over to nearby Paxton Switch, leaving only the Friendship Cemetery and its thirty-three graves to mark the site.

Bertram, TX

Strickling grew up in the 1850s as a rural crossroads on the Central Texas frontier, named for Martha Webster Strickling, who settled here in 1853. As a child she had survived the infamous Webster Massacre near Leander and months of Indian captivity—a harrowing frontier ordeal. With a post office established in 1857, the town became a mail terminal and stage stop where lumber and buffalo hides moved through, supporting a school, churches, a doctor, and stores until the railroad bypassed it in 1882.

Joaquin, TX

Also called Willow Grove, this community grew around a store opened around 1840 by pioneer James Truitt, a Republic of Texas congressman and leader in the Regulator-Moderator War. Sitting on an early trade route, the store became a stopping place for settlers moving west out of Louisiana, and churches, schools, and a Masonic lodge soon followed. When the railroad laid its tracks just north through the new town of Joaquin in the mid-1880s, residents and businesses drifted away, leaving a church and cemetery to mark the site.

Zapata vicinity, TX

Uribeño traces its origin to 1803, when a stretch of the Rio Grande known as Porción 41 was granted to José Nicolás Clemente Gutiérrez de Lara for his service in the Spanish army. Despite Indian raids, drought, and flooding, his family established a ranch, and after Mexico won independence in 1821 the growing community took the family's name, numbering 152 people by 1860 with a cemetery, schoolhouse, and store. In the 1950s the federal government's Falcon Dam flooded Uribeño and four neighboring settlements; only its cemetery was relocated to mark where the town had stood.

Colorado City, TX

In 1905 nine men of the Lone Wolf Valley agreed to build a community school, naming it Valley View and hiring an eighteen-year-old, Aury Williams, as its first teacher. Neighbors donated the land and raised the one-room schoolhouse by hand, using it as a community center as well. It served the surrounding ranch country until 1942, when consolidation into the Loraine District ended the era of the rural one-room school.

Eldorado, TX

Verand, the first town in Schleicher County, sprang up around 1890 near the Vermont Ranch headquarters, platted into 86 lots with a stagecoach station, post office, store, hotel, and homes for a few dozen families. But settlers could not secure clear title to their land, and when Eldorado's founder offered free lots five miles south in 1895, the whole town simply picked up and moved. The abandoned site soon returned to open range.

Victoria, TX

Soon after founding Victoria in October 1824, empresario Martín de León erected the town's first church, served in its early years by Catholic priests during the Mexican colonial period of Texas. Restored in 1840 by John Mary Odin, the first Catholic bishop of Texas, the building was moved in 1850 to the site where Nazareth Convent later stood. The marker recalls the religious roots of one of Texas's oldest towns.

Langtry, TX

In 1882 the Southern Pacific faced its last great barrier—the Pecos River canyon—on the transcontinental line linking New Orleans and San Francisco. Beside the excavation of Tunnel No. 2 rose Vinegarroon, a rough camp named for a local scorpion and home to thousands of mostly Chinese laborers. Roy Bean ran a saloon and served as justice of the peace here until the rails were joined in 1883 and the camp was abandoned.

Maple, TX

In 1908, promoters carved the paper town of Virginia City out of the Texas High Plains and sold it as a coming metropolis, luring buyers with staged tours past shops, a courthouse lot, and a graded railroad bed. Named for the wife of an early landowner, the scheme collapsed when the promised rains never came and a ruinous drought settled over the region from 1909 to 1912. A local cowboy had already quipped that the town's biggest crop was 'suckers,' and within a few years the disappointed settlers moved on, leaving nothing but empty ground.

Houston County, TX

Westward-moving pioneers settled here after the Civil War, drawn by good farmland, timber, and water, and named their community High Prairie before it became Volga in 1897 with the opening of a post office in Samuel Knox's store. At its peak the town held homes, stores, a cotton gin, sawmill, school, and church. It began to fade after the post office closed in 1917, a decline hastened as young men left for World War I and the influenza epidemic swept through.

Canyon, TX

From about 1890 to 1921 this Canyon wagon yard was the working headquarters for ranchmen come to town, who slept in their bedrolls or a room above the office and cooked over a campfire in the yard. It cost a dime to stable a horse and fifty cents for a man; feed and coal were for sale, water was free, and hands were hired and horses doctored on the spot.

Cleburne, TX

In 1855 the newly organized Johnson County chose Wardville as its first seat of government, on land donated by settler William O'Neal, and named it for Thomas William Ward, a Republic of Texas soldier and land commissioner. O'Neal built a tiny 16-foot log courthouse for just $49. When officials realized the town violated a constitutional rule requiring the county seat to sit within five miles of the county's center, Wardville was abandoned in 1856 — only for later boundary changes to place it near the very center after all.

Claude, TX

In 1909 civic leaders Dr. William A. Warner and Phebe K. Warner built a two-story hub at the heart of the young Panhandle town of Claude. Designed by an Amarillo architectural firm, the Warner Building packed in a doctor's office, the Gate City Drugstore, a barber shop, the Claude News, a public reading room, a lodge hall, and even public rest rooms. A fire destroyed it in 1915, but the Warners simply reopened their drugstore elsewhere.

Portland, TX

After the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad reached this area in the 1880s, a 1908 land deal handed 14,000 acres to an Iowa promoter who mounted a huge advertising campaign, drawing trainloads of prospective buyers—mostly from Kansas—to settle West Portland. Mexican migrant workers cleared the mesquite and farmers worked the rich black soil, building a school that doubled as a community center and, in 1922, a cooperative cotton gin that became the heart of the district. The school consolidated with Taft in 1939, but descendants of the original settlers still own much of the land.

Westbrook, TX

When Westbrook was still just a flag-stop on the Texas & Pacific line, settlers in 1890 built a single tiny, one-room structure to serve as both school and church. Pupils recited lessons from memory on a long "recitation bench," while on Sundays the Westbrook Baptist Church — organized that same year — held services and all-day gatherings that doubled as social occasions for scattered families. As the town grew, a separate church rose in 1902 and a two-story schoolhouse in 1905, and the old building was sold off as a barn.

Abilene, TX

From 1876 to 1887 the Western Cattle Trail—also called the Dodge City or Fort Griffin Trail—carried several hundred thousand longhorns north out of South Texas to stock northern ranches, supply Indian reservations, and feed distant beef markets. This branch skirted the western edge of Abilene before turning toward Fort Griffin, where feeder trails converged. The great drives ended when barbed-wire fences closed the open range and the Texas & Pacific Railway made the long walk obsolete.

DuPont, WA

Built in 1841, this building housed observations made during the United States Exploring Expedition, the great naval and scientific survey led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes. The expedition charted Pacific coasts and islands and gathered specimens that helped seed the young nation's scientific institutions. A later marker from the DuPont company recalls the work once done on this ground.

Edna, TX

Here stood the first cotton gin in Jackson County, and here, on July 17, 1835, colonists gathered for the "Lavaca-Navidad Meeting." Chaired by James Kerr, the assembly adopted resolutions protesting the Mexican government's treatment of Texas settlers. The gathering was among the first formal public protests that foreshadowed the Texas Declaration of Independence the following March.

McKinney, TX

When J.B. and Nancy Wilmeth staked out 320 acres of untouched Collin County prairie in 1846, Texas had been a U.S. state for less than a year and the frontier was still raw. Their two-story home became a hub of pioneer life—a place of worship for the First Christian Church congregation J.B. organized, and a free school he and his children taught for nearly four decades. J.B. helped choose the county seat and served as district clerk and county judge, while marriages knit his family to that of Collin McKinney, the county's namesake and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence.

Decatur, TX

From 1885 to 1962, Wise County ran a 320-acre poor farm here to shelter and put to work its dependent and needy citizens, while county convicts labored off their fines on the same land. Its first superintendent managed the farm as his wife cooked, washed, and sewed for inmates and guards alike. The now-leveled cemetery at a bend of Center Creek held the poorest of the poor, most of them remembered by only a first name or none at all.

West Point, TX

From 1828 to 1842 the fortified residence of Zadock Woods served the colonists of this vicinity as a refuge against Indian attacks during the turbulent years of Mexican Texas and the Republic. Woods, a veteran of the War of 1812 and one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old Three Hundred" colonists, was by then an old man. He was killed at the Dawson Massacre on September 18, 1842, remembered as the oldest man to fall in that fight against invading Mexican forces.

Wharton, TX

This Wharton County land began as part of an 1824 grant to Martin Allen, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists, and later belonged to Albert Clinton Horton, Texas's first lieutenant governor. During World War II, when more than 50,000 German prisoners of war were interned across Texas, Camp Wharton was established here in 1943 as a branch of Camp Swift. Converted from old county-fair buildings, it housed prisoners who worked as farm laborers throughout the surrounding counties.

Fredericksburg, TX

In 1847, about 150 Mormons led by Lyman Wight founded the settlement of Zodiac near Fredericksburg, building a community and a mill along the river. Wight had led his followers to Texas as one branch of the fractured Latter-day Saint movement after the death of Joseph Smith. When floods destroyed their mill, the settlers abandoned Zodiac in 1851, leaving only a memory on the land.

Three Rivers, TX

In 1900 Dr. C. F. Simmons, a wealthy St. Louis patent-medicine manufacturer, bought this South Texas ranch land with grand ambitions, even building an all-faiths church here in 1908. When his son and heir died of a snakebite, Simmons changed course, breaking up the 60,000-acre ranch among some 4,200 small farmers and furnishing buildings for the rural community he hoped would rise.

Colorado City, TX

Rail service reached Colorado City on April 16, 1881, when a Texas & Pacific supply train arrived to build the town's first depot, and cattle pens soon rose on donated land nearby. The railroad and stockyards made the town the great shipping and supply hub for the vast ranching country of West Texas and eastern New Mexico — sending out cattle, hides, wool, salt, and buffalo bones — until passenger service finally ended in 1967.

Port Lavaca, TX

In December 1894 the Phillips Investment Company deeded land here to Josef Marek and John Drgac, and the settlement—soon called Marekville—drew Czech and German farmers with a bumper first cotton crop. A school rose in 1895 and a post office named Royal opened in 1905, while the enduring "Six Mile" name recalled that it was six miles to water from Port Lavaca. Though the post office closed in 1910, the farming community kept growing for generations.

Belton, TX

In November 1836, some twenty Rangers under Lt. George B. Erath built this Republic of Texas outpost, raising seven or eight cabins, a blockhouse, and a picket stockade around a half-acre near a spring. Rations were spare — an ear of corn a day, plus game, honey, and a little coffee. The Rangers withdrew by mid-1837, and settlers and hunters later used the site before its remains were cleared in the 1840s.

Enid, OK

Overlooking Skeleton Creek in what is now Garfield County, the Skeleton Trail Ranch was a working way-station on the great post-Civil War cattle trails that pushed Texas longhorns north toward the Kansas railheads. Like other trail ranches, it gave the drovers a place to hold and rest their herds and to find a few basic comforts along a long, dusty road. It stood at the meeting of open range, hard travel, and the booming beef economy of the late 1800s.

Pilot Point, TX

In Pilot Point's early days, Lucinda and Richard Skinner set aside two and a half acres for a cemetery, and the first recorded burial—five-year-old Josiah Taylor—came in 1858. Most of those laid to rest were Protestant families from Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee who had followed the frontier westward to farm and ranch. The stones record the hazards of the age, including sisters lost to the yellow fever epidemic of 1872–73, and by 1900 the ground held perhaps 200 graves.