Westward Expansion

Pearl, TX

The Slater Cemetery is nearly all that survives of a once-thriving farming and ranching community that took root in Coryell County in the late 1800s. By the early 1900s Slater supported two churches, a post office, a school, and businesses. In 1907 James and Ellen Martin donated land for a free burial ground, and their son Curry, buried that year, lies in its oldest marked grave.

Slaton, TX

Slaton owes its very existence to the Santa Fe Railroad. When the Pecos and Northern Texas branch reached the South Plains in 1911, banker O. L. Slaton — who had helped secure the right-of-way — lent his name to the brand-new townsite, which opened for business only a month after its first lots sold. As a railroad division point complete with a Harvey House, roundhouse, and machine shops, Slaton boomed almost overnight into a farming and ranching hub.

Slaton, TX

The Santa Fe Railroad laid out Slaton on the West Texas plains in 1911, and by 1919 residents had organized a bucket brigade to fight fires, drawing water from wells to fill chemical tanks and pails. Chief Alex DeLong led the early volunteers until the city built a water system and fire mains and bought its first fire truck in 1922. The department grew from a corner of City Hall into its own station by 1928.

Morton, TX

This was the working heart of the pioneering C.C. Slaughter Ranch, a 246,669-acre spread across Cochran and Hockley counties assembled by Col. C.C. Slaughter—a Texas leader in ranching, banking, and religion—between 1898 and 1901. The first headquarters was a humble half-dugout, but in 1915 the Slaughter cattle company brought workers from Mexico to build this adobe-and-concrete quadrangle in the form of a Spanish hacienda. It stood among the finest Texas ranch buildings of its day.

Slidell, TX

This Wise County community took its name from John Slidell, a Confederate diplomat at the center of the 1861 "Trent Affair," and grew up to supply the surrounding farmers. A post office opened in 1884, and as merchants moved in, a young doctor set up his office and drugstore while local donors gave land for a cemetery, church, public square, and school. Others strung the first telephone line, knitting the little town together.

Taylor, TX

David McCurdy Sloan and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Easley, came to Texas from South Carolina and raised this house in 1854, hauling finished lumber all the way from Houston while the rest was hand-hewn in the nearby river bottom by enslaved workers. It stands as one of the older surviving homesteads of Williamson County's Anglo settlement generation. The house was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Arlington, TX

In the spring of 1838, Captains Robert Sloan and Nathaniel T. Journey led some ninety northeast Texas frontiersmen on a punitive raid against Indians who had struck their homes in present-day Fannin County. The trail carried them into what is now Tarrant County, where they attacked a small Native village. The episode was among the earliest recorded Anglo-American incursions into north Texas, part of the violent process that opened the region to white settlement.

Hampshire County, WV

The Sloan–Parker House stands in the mountain country of Hampshire County, in what was then the western frontier of Virginia and is today West Virginia's oldest county. Sturdy stone dwellings like this one were raised by early settling families who pushed into the Potomac highlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, building to last against hard winters and uncertain times. Passed down and preserved, the house survives as a tangible link to the region's founding generations.

Edgewood, TX

By the 1870s farming families had put down roots in this corner of Van Zandt County, and within a generation the settlement called Small had a school, a Baptist church, a cemetery, and even a post office tucked inside William Henry Luster's mercantile store. For a few decades it hummed with the ordinary machinery of a rural East Texas town — a drugstore, a doctor, a barber, a photographer, a gin, a grist mill, a blacksmith, and a woodworking shop. As nearby Edgewood drew off its churches and its schoolchildren in the 1930s and 40s, the town quietly emptied, until by 1999 only the cemetery and the Baptist church remained.

Andice, TX

Bryce M. Smart built this home in 1855, when central Texas was still raw frontier and the great cattle drives were beginning to shape the land. A man of many trades, Smart ran a grist mill, a tannery, and a freight line, and family lore holds that his children rescued newborn calves abandoned along the nearby Chisholm Trail. Five generations later, McCormick descendants still keep the house.

Smethport, PA · est. 1949

Smethport has served as the seat of McKean County since 1807, when land agent Francis King laid out its town lots amid the northern Pennsylvania wilderness. Growth came slowly on this rugged frontier: Arnold Hunter raised the first cabin in 1811, but lasting settlement waited until 1822, and the first courthouse rose in 1827. The town's steady establishment reflects the patient, hard-won process of settling the region.

Brookston, TX

At roughly 2,100 acres, the Smiley-Woodfin meadow is the largest surviving remnant of the vast native grassland that once rolled from Texas to Canada. A lack of fuel and surface water spared it the plow, and owner M. L. Smiley used it for grazing and hay while neighboring fields eroded under cultivation. After his death the land passed to the Woodfin brothers, and it remains the state's largest supplier of native hay.

Meridian, TX

John Jackson Smith and his wife Margaret migrated from Mississippi to Bosque County in the 1850s and founded the Smith Bend community, giving land for this cemetery after their son Burton died in 1856. Their daughter Ann and her husband Silas McCabe started the nearby settlement of Coon Creek, and the two communities have long shared the care of the burial ground. Enlarged over the years, the site now holds more than 500 graves of pioneers, their descendants, and friends.

Lampasas County, TX

In the years after the Civil War, settlers pushed into the rolling prairies of central Texas, and the Browning Community took root in the 1870s along the Old Belton Road—a lifeline that carried goods, travelers, and mail between frontier towns. John R. Browning, his wife Julia, and their children were among the first families to put down roots here, farming the land and building the ties that knit a rural neighborhood together. The cemetery that survives is the enduring record of those pioneer households.

Athens, TX

Smith Cemetery was established in 1850 in Henderson County, Texas, in the early decades of the state's Anglo settlement. Such family and community burial grounds were frequently the first lasting institutions on newly settled land. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002.

Tyler, TX

This burial ground grew from land granted to Mary M. "Polly" Long by the State of Texas in 1846, part of which her son preserved as a cemetery when he sold the tract in 1881. In use as early as 1857, it holds the graves of local settlers, many of them Long relatives and neighbors, including early county commissioner William Green and Civil War veterans. Its name honors the many members of the Smith family laid to rest among the pioneers here.

Oakalla, TX

Tennessee-born James Gibson Smith Jr. and his Arkansas-born wife Sarah settled this part of Burnet County in 1850 and set aside ground as a family burial place while raising eight children. Their granddaughter Anita Fay, lost to diphtheria in 1901, was the first laid to rest here, soon followed by a neighbor and by the family patriarch. Descendants formed an association in 1981 to tend the site, which holds veterans of the Civil War and World War II.

Lewisville, TX

This area was known as Holford's Prairie for the pioneer Halford brothers who claimed 640 acres through the Peters Colony, and Basdeal Lewis platted nearby Lewisville in 1853. Thomas and Elizabeth Smith bought farmland here in 1859, and after their 20-year-old son died in 1862 the family began a burial ground that in 1881 became a community cemetery. Its 400-plus graves carry the surnames of Denton County's pioneer families, and oral tradition holds that some unmarked graves are those of people once enslaved by the Fox family—a poignant record of the era's harsh realities.

Palmer, TX

Established in 1852 on a lonely knoll then surrounded by wilderness, Smith Cemetery was founded by Nancy Owen Smith for her family and neighbors. Its first burial was her husband Hans Smith, a former lawmaker in Missouri and Arkansas who moved to Ellis County in 1846, opened the area's first cotton gin, and helped organize the county before being robbed and murdered in Houston. Generations of pioneer descendants followed him into the ground here, and a cemetery association was chartered in 1955.

Tyler, TX

Carved from Nacogdoches County and organized in 1846, Smith County took its name from General James Smith, a soldier and statesman who counted Sam Houston, Thomas J. Rusk, and J. Pinckney Henderson among his friends. Tyler was chosen as the county seat, and Smith himself was buried with military honors at Henderson in 1855. The county's creation came just months after Texas joined the United States.

Tyler, TX

Soon after its 1846 founding, Smith County grew into a legal hub of East Texas, its first district court convening in an abandoned log cabin in Tyler in 1846. When the legislature spread the state Supreme Court across the state in 1850, Tyler became one of its three seats and also a U.S. District Court seat, and later hosted the new Court of Criminal Appeals created by the 1876 constitution. These high courts continued to sit in Tyler until they were consolidated permanently in Austin by the early twentieth century.

Tyler, TX

Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner and builder Henry Kane erected this Italianate structure in 1880–81 as Smith County's fourth jail, its stuccoed walls scored to imitate cut stone and dressed with elaborate window molds and classical beltcourses. A second story added in 1894 doubled its cell space. After a new jail replaced it in 1916, the building found a second life as the Lewis Hotel until 1986.

Stephenville, TX

Established by 1907, this cemetery served the now-vanished Smith Springs community and holds many kin of Swiss-born stonemason Frederick Hook, who helped build the Erath County Courthouse. Among its graves is Milton Brown, remembered as one of the founders of Western swing—the dance music that fused string-band and jazz traditions in 1930s Texas. Woodmen of the World monuments, curbing, and grave slabs mark the pioneer-era plots, tended today by a cemetery association.

Rockport, TX

Built in 1903 in Old Rockport beneath giant oaks, this early frame bungalow blends Cottage and Craftsman styling. It passed in 1920 to W. H. Smith, a grandson of Refugio pioneers, and in 1934 to rancher John Frederick Brundrett, whose family worked thousands of acres on Matagorda Island and Port Bay. The devout Brundretts kept the home for 53 years, until Fred died in 1987 at ninety-nine.

Gilmer County, WV

This marker designates the Smith-Bush Farm as a West Virginia Century Farm — land worked by the same family for at least a hundred years. The state's Century Farm program honors the endurance of family agriculture in the Appalachian hills, where clearing and holding a farm across generations was hard-won. It speaks to a rural way of life that shaped West Virginia long before and after its 1863 statehood.

Fort Davis, TX

In 1873, a former Buffalo Soldier of the 24th U.S. Infantry named Archie Smith claimed 160 acres near Dolores Mountain in the Trans-Pecos country and raised an adobe home with native oak beams. Its vaulted room served as a family chapel open to neighbors of every denomination before the town's first Catholic church was built. Later owners, the Carltons, preserved and eventually restored the structure, which survives as the oldest home still lived in at Fort Davis.

Amarillo, TX

Built around 1904 for early Amarillo settlers James Bynum and Marie Lowery Smith, this house first stood on South Taylor Street. In 1945 auto dealer Jesse A. Rogers bought it and, rather than raze it for his dealership, moved it to a new site as his family home. In the relocation, architect C.W. Brott reworked the design, so the Classical Revival house today blends 1900s leaded glass, roof cresting, and woodwork with 1940s brick veneer, balustrades, and full-height columns.

Ozona, TX

A Louisiana-born Confederate cavalry veteran, Samuel Theodore Smith came to Texas in 1872 and settled in Ozona in 1891, where he became a builder of the young town's institutions — its first school, first courthouse, and Baptist church among them. He married Alice Crimm in 1876 and raised three children. His hammer and saw quite literally framed the civic life of frontier Crockett County.

Albany, TX

For a few years before the Civil War, this spot on Chimney Creek was a relay station on the Butterfield Overland Mail, the great stagecoach line that stitched Missouri to California. Coaches changed teams and pressed on, covering the run in under 25 days, a speed that seemed miraculous to a young and expanding nation. It was the only Butterfield stop in what is now Shackelford County, a lonely link in a chain that reached across a still-wild frontier.

North Richland Hills, TX

Twelve charter members organized this congregation in 1895 under the Rev. G. W. Green, building a sanctuary in 1902 on lots donated by G. W. Gunter. Over the following decades it launched missions, youth and women's groups, and even a daughter church at Shady Grove. Renamed First Baptist Church of Smithfield in 1958, it built a new sanctuary in 1962 and grew alongside the community now called North Richland Hills.

North Richland Hills, TX

This cemetery began in the early 1870s when Eli Smith — the namesake of Smithfield, who came from Missouri to Texas around 1859 — gave part of his farm for a burying ground. Its oldest marked grave, an infant's, dates to 1872, and more than seventy-five graves come from that first decade, including Smith's own. Among those laid to rest here are pioneer physician Lilburn Howard Colley, for whom Colleyville is named, and Civil War veterans from both Union and Confederate armies.

North Richland Hills, TX

This marker records the founding of a Masonic lodge whose organizational meeting was held on July 13, 1875, first known as the Grand Prairie Lodge. In its earliest days the fraternal group met inside the Zion Church until members raised their own lodge building in 1876. The account reflects how frontier-era Texas communities built civic and social institutions almost as soon as they took root.

Smithville, TX

The Smithville area was noted as early as 1691, when a Spanish expedition sighted an Indian-named lagoon still known today as Shipp's Lake. A ferry crossed the Colorado here in 1836 and steamboats plied the river until the 1860s, but the town's fate was sealed by the railroad: when the Taylor, Bastrop & Houston line arrived in 1887, "Old Smithville" picked up and moved to the tracks. Legend says a coin toss kept the name Smithville over "Burlesonville" before the town incorporated in 1895.

Marble Falls vicinity, TX

The Smithwick Cemetery began with a single wish: in 1854, eighteen-year-old Rebecca Chambers, gravely ill while traveling through, asked to be buried on this flowered hillside. Over the following decades the site grew into the shared burial ground of the Hickory Creek, Elm Grove, and Smithwick's Mill communities, its roughly 65 earliest graves marked only by stones. Today some 600 burials rest here, including veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Korea.

Aurora, CO

The Smoky Hill Trail was one of the principal overland routes to the Colorado goldfields in the late 1850s and 1860s, carrying prospectors and freighters west across the plains toward Denver during the Pikes Peak gold rush. It cut through what is now the Aurora area, part of the network of trails that opened the central plains to Anglo-American migration and later to the railroads. This marker designates a stretch of that historic route as a city historic site.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

Smyrna Baptist Church grew out of the pioneer Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, organized in 1858. After Mt. Carmel dissolved, former members and area residents gathered at Chinquapin Spring in August 1873 and formed this new congregation, at first sharing meeting places at Chinquapin Spring and Redland with local Methodists. The church built its own sanctuary in 1907 and has belonged to the Mt. Zion Association throughout its life.

Harleton, TX

Pioneer physician John Chadd received an 1845 land grant here and the following year donated ground for a church, school, and cemetery, choosing the biblical name Smyrna for the community. The burial ground dates to 1850, with its earliest surviving headstone from 1859, and grew alongside the Methodist congregation Chadd later helped endow. Among its 675-plus graves rest early settlers and veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Harleton, TX

In 1846, Dr. John Chadd led a party of settlers from Indiana into the piney woods of Harrison County, and the Methodist congregation he helped found first met in his own home, served every three weeks by the circuit riders who stitched frontier Texas together. For decades the little Smyrna church shared a log building with a Masonic lodge and the community school, rebuilding after fire, a second fire, and a 1905 cyclone. Its fifth sanctuary still anchors the Smyrna community today.

Needville, TX

The headstones here read like a roster of the Snake Creek community that farmed this stretch of Fort Bend County from the mid-1800s. Among them lie two veterans of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, Emory H. Darst and John P. Gill, alongside several Confederate soldiers, binding the site to both Texas independence and the Civil War. Land for the graveyard was granted in the 1850s by William Cole and Peter L. West, and a nearby community church served residents until a 1932 hurricane destroyed it.

Daingerfield, TX

Settlers reached the area they called Snow Hill by the early 1840s, and in 1852 residents organized a Baptist congregation under the Rev. Samuel Morris. The first sanctuary, doubling as a community schoolhouse, was moved to this site around 1871 on land — including the adjacent cemetery — donated by J. W. and Thurza Cason. The church has anchored the surrounding rural community since before the Civil War.

Plainview, TX

Mennonite minister and farmer Peter B. Snyder, hunting cheap land, bought property in Hale County in 1906 and urged fellow Mennonites to join him, and by 1907–08 families were arriving by train and raising houses after first camping in tents. They built a one-room schoolhouse open to all faiths for lessons, worship, and socials. But dust storms, prairie fires, hail, and the brutal droughts of 1915–16 broke the colony, and most—including Snyder—had left by the mid-1920s.

Social Circle, GA

In the rolling Piedmont of early-1800s Georgia, a well and its surrounding gathering spot became the social heart of a young frontier settlement. As the legend recorded here tells it, a passing stranger, welcomed into a circle of townsfolk sharing a drink, remarked that this was surely a "social circle" — and the name stuck. The story captures the easy hospitality of a small Southern crossroads town taking shape in the decades after Georgia opened its interior to settlement.

Earth, TX

On the treeless High Plains of West Texas, water meant survival, and this spring long served as an Indian camp and watering place. In 1876 buffalo hunters George and John Causey and Frank Lloyd raised the first sod house here—giving the site its name—in what became the region's first permanent settlement. A cattle camp followed in 1882 before the great Capitol Syndicate, which built the Texas Capitol in exchange for three million acres, absorbed the land.

Soda Springs, TX

The reliable water of the Brazos River and Soda Springs drew farming and ranching families to this corner of Parker County in the mid-1800s. The Rev. George W. Slaughter soon gathered a Baptist congregation, which raised a log church in the 1850s and used it until a frame building replaced it in 1895. A one-room school taught local children until 1945, and the community's cemetery, begun in the 1850s, holds many of the area's pioneers.

Sinton, TX

In 1907–08 an Iowa land developer partnered with the vast Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company to market 56,000 acres of South Texas brushland to Midwestern buyers, and Mexican migrant laborers cleared mesquite so thick that prospects had to blaze their own trails. The settlement that grew here took the promotional name Sodville for its fertile soil, sprouting a school, stores, cotton gins, and churches through the 1910s and 1920s. As rural Texans drifted toward cities after mid-century, its school consolidated, its stores closed, and by 2000 only a corner and a few homes remained.

Brady vicinity, TX

This waterhole on an old military road served U.S. soldiers — including troops under Robert E. Lee — who patrolled for raiders in the 1850s, as well as westbound emigrants camping before the Civil War. The marker records a grim toll: in 1850 a party of eighteen men, women, and children was attacked here, their wagons burned and horses stolen. Long before, the same reliable water had drawn Native peoples to what was noted as an ancient Indian campground.

La Feria, TX

This active family burial ground grew out of the Solis Ranch, established in 1898 when Lazaro Solis and his brother-in-law Ysabel Cantu bought some 5,000 acres of the La Feria Grant to raise cattle, horses, and goats. When Lazaro died in 1904 he became the cemetery's first burial, and within a year his widow partitioned the land among their children. Surveyed and platted in 1929, the mesquite-shaded ground now holds more than three hundred graves spanning five generations and people of Hispanic, Anglo, and African American descent.

Milwaukee, WI

Solomon Juneau was a French-Canadian fur trader who set up a trading post on the Milwaukee River in the 1810s and became one of the men whose rival settlements merged into the city of Milwaukee. When those villages united in 1846, Juneau was chosen as the new city's first mayor. This monument, a gift to the city, honors that founding-generation figure at the moment Milwaukee became a city.

Milwaukee, WI

This plaque marks a replica of the 1822 log cabin of Solomon Juneau, the French-Canadian fur trader whose trading post grew into the city of Milwaukee. It was given to honor Dr. Francis Huebschmann, an early German-American physician who tended to Juneau, and later re-set by a local preservation group. The original cabin stood in the earliest days of white settlement at the mouth of the Milwaukee River.

Marshall, TX

Solomon Ruffin Perry (1810–1895) came from North Carolina to Texas in 1833 and lived through the violent Regulator-Moderator feud of 1840s East Texas without ever carrying a gun. He risked his own life to help bury Robert Potter, first Secretary of the Navy of the Republic of Texas, after Potter was killed by an enemy. Elected Harrison County sheriff in 1848 following his predecessor's assassination, Perry ultimately served 27 consecutive years, a testament to steady civic order in a turbulent frontier region.

Somerset, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1795 from Bedford County and named for an English shire, Somerset County took shape along the Forbes Road, the military route cut across the Alleghenies in 1758. Settlers followed that road westward, and the county seat was incorporated in 1804. Its high, cool farmland later became famous for maple syrup.

Glen Rose, TX

This county honors Alexander Somervell, a Maryland-born veteran of San Jacinto who served as the Republic of Texas secretary of war and led the 1842 Somervell Expedition against Mexican incursions. The region, long home to the Waco and other Native peoples, saw its first Anglo settler in Charles Barnard in 1848, and raised its first cotton crop and tannery during the Civil War. Carved from the south end of Hood County in 1875, the new county made Glen Rose — founded as Barnard's Mill — its seat.

Glen Rose, TX

Built in 1893 of native limestone in a Late Victorian style, this courthouse serves Somervell County, organized in 1875 and named for General Alexander Somervell, a Texas soldier, colonist, and statesman. Court had first convened in a store across the road from Barnard's Mill and later in a log cabin nearby. An earlier courthouse on this site, finished in 1882, burned in 1893 along with many county records — a loss the present building answered with a fireproof vault.

Sonoma, CA

General Mariano Vallejo built these adobe barracks on Sonoma's plaza in 1836 as a Mexican military headquarters on the northern frontier. Ten years later they became the seat of the Bear Flag Party, which proclaimed a "California Republic" here in June 1846. Weeks later Commodore John Drake Sloat claimed California for the United States, and by 1847 U.S. Army troops occupied the barracks.

Lyon County, NV

Before railroads and highways reached this rugged country between the eastern Sierra and western Nevada, stage stations like this one along the Sonoma–Conway route gave travelers and mail carriers a place to rest, water and change horse teams, and press on. Such waypoints kept people, freight, and news moving across the 19th-century frontier.

Fairlie, TX

The Sonora Cemetery began in 1872 with the burial of a child, S. B. McBee, beside the Sonora community's church and school, and it grew to more than seven acres by 1880. When a rail line was completed a mile to the west in 1887, residents drifted to the new town of Fairlie, but the cemetery endured. Today it holds more than 900 graves and still serves the surrounding area.

Houston, TX

In the decades after Texas won its independence, descendants of those who fought for the Republic sought to keep that memory alive. A lodge organized in Richmond in 1893 grew days later into the statewide Sons of the Republic of Texas, and after lapsing around World War I it was revived in Houston in 1922 under Andrew Jackson Houston, son of Sam Houston himself. Open to male descendants of those who served Texas between 1820 and 1846, the society championed Texas Independence Day and San Jacinto Day and worked to preserve the records of the Revolution and Republic.

New Braunfels, TX

During the Republic of Texas era, a society of German noblemen known as the Adelsverein organized to sponsor emigration to Texas, and their first commissioner general, Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, founded New Braunfels in 1845. He chose this commanding hill for a protective fortress and named it the Sophienburg for his fiancee, Princess Sophia, though only a log headquarters and storehouses were ever built. Prince Carl soon returned to Germany, the venture faltered financially, and the site later became home to the Sophienburg Museum.

Gilmer, TX

Named for Bishop Joshua Soule of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, who toured East Texas in 1846, this congregation grew from settlers worshiping in a log cabin by the 1850s. The cemetery was already in use by 1856, and in 1871 local landowners deeded acreage to the church's trustees. The present sanctuary rose after a fire destroyed the earlier building in 1977.

Belton, TX

South Belton Cemetery was established in 1851, in the earliest years of Bell County settlement, when Belton was taking shape as the county seat on the central Texas frontier. Burial grounds like this were among the first permanent institutions pioneer communities created, and it has since been recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery. It remains a tangible link to the settlers who founded the town.