Westward Expansion

Graham, TX

The western peak of the twin Belknap Range mountains, Standpipe Mountain lay within land the Graham brothers bought in 1872 as they founded the town that bears their name and set to developing its resources. E. S. Graham even prospected the mountain for silver in the 1890s. It took its name in 1907 when the city built a water tank on its crest, and after World War I it was given to the city as Victory Park.

Snyder, TX

Mrs. W. B. Stanfield, wife of a Snyder rancher, lived in this home for more than fifty years. She sketched out the plans herself and handed them to a wandering architect passing through from Fort Worth. The result featured fine oak woodwork, pine floors, and leaded glass panels at the entry—comforts of settled prosperity on the West Texas ranching frontier.

Waco, TX

In 1862 the Reverend Thomas Stanford, a pioneer Methodist preacher, brought his family from Arkansas to this corner of central Texas and, with the Barcus family, planted the trio that anchored so many frontier settlements: a school, a church, and a cemetery. His daughter and son-in-law gave five acres for the graveyard in 1875, the year of its first recorded burial. After decades of neglect the ground was restored in the 1960s and is still tended by a cemetery association today.

Corpus Christi, TX

Stanislav (Stanley) Kostoryz, born in 1866 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, immigrated through New York in 1886 and became a teacher, journalist, and land developer. In 1902 he founded the Bohemian Colony Lands southwest of Corpus Christi, buying thousands of acres and advertising 80-acre tracts in Czech-language newspapers to draw settlers from Texas, Nebraska, and the Midwest. His vision turned roughly 10,000 acres of South Texas brush into a thriving Czech farming community complete with school, church, and mutual-aid societies.

Houston County, TX

This burial ground opened in grief in 1861, when a diphtheria epidemic took the young daughter and infant son of William and Nancy Stanton within days of each other, and they were laid to rest on family land. Their surviving son later left written instructions to protect the plot, and members of the Hill, Beavers, and Stanton families were buried here into the 1960s. A family association founded in 1975 keeps the cemetery today.

Pershing County, NV

Founded in 1861 after rich silver ore was struck in the Star Mining District, Star City exploded during the boom of 1864–65 into a town of 1,200 with hotels, stores, a Wells Fargo office, a church, and a dozen saloons. Its biggest operation, the Sheba Mine, had produced some $5 million in silver by 1868, but that year the rich ore began to give out. Within three years only seventy-eight residents remained, and today nothing survives but crumbling foundations and rusted machinery.

Industry, TX

Bryan Daughtrey, a veteran of the War of 1812, came to Texas in 1822 as part of Stephen F. Austin's Second Colony and settled here in present Austin County. When his wife Anna died in 1847 he buried her on this spot, beginning a cemetery later used by the German Sternenberg family who bought the land. The community, its burial ground, and a school that ran until 1928 all took the name Star Hill—the English translation of Sternenberg—and descendants of those pioneer families still tend the graves.

Kerrville, TX

This Hill Country burial ground began as a family plot for James Monroe and Martha Adeline Starkey, whose son Jones was the first laid to rest here in 1868. J.M. Starkey, arriving in 1854, was Kerr County's first assessor-collector and later its chief justice, central to organizing the frontier county. Though only a handful of pioneer families rest here, they counted civic leaders, mill builders, ranchers, Texas Rangers, and Civil War veterans among them.

Nocona, TX

As settlers poured into north Texas after 1850, B. L. Starkey and his sons arrived from Ellis County around the Civil War. The cemetery began in the 1860s when a newly arrived Wells family, having lost a daughter over the winter, asked their nearest neighbor for a place to bury her. The Starkeys organized a Methodist church here in the 1870s and funded a community school; "Grandmother Sloss," born in 1850, later preserved much of the area's oral history.

Elkhart, TX

This hillside graveyard is the resting place of the family of Texas pioneer John Starr and his descendants. Starr, who died in 1872, lies beside his wife Susannah, with six of their eight children interred nearby — including two sons who served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The family's ancestral home still stands on nearby Starr Hill.

Canton, TX

In 1886 James F. Starr, acting for landowner Sarah F. Clapp, deeded two acres here for a community school, and within a few years the ground was also serving as a burial place — the earliest marked grave being the infant son of B. A. and Ora Monroe, who died in 1889. A formal cemetery followed in 1911 when A. C. White and his wife sold the adjoining land. The school and cemetery knit together the scattered Starr, Todd Hill, and Wentworth communities, and among those laid to rest here is Civil War soldier Joseph Staley.

Rio Grande City, TX

Starr County was carved from Nueces County and created on February 10, 1848 — just as the Mexican-American War closed and the Rio Grande became the international boundary. It was named for Dr. James Harper Starr, a pioneer surgeon who served as Secretary of the Treasury of the Republic of Texas and later as an official of the Confederacy. Rio Grande City became and remains the county seat.

Winona, TX

In 1852 the Rev. Joshua Starr, a Methodist minister from Alabama, bought a square mile of land on the Dallas-Shreveport Road and laid out Starrville, selling lots with covenants forbidding gambling and liquor. It grew into one of Smith County's earliest and liveliest towns, with mills, foundries, a wagon factory, and a remarkable cluster of schools — a female high school, a Baptist female academy, and a male college — all before the Civil War. Then the Tyler Tap Railroad bypassed it in the 1870s, and the town slowly emptied as post office, lodge, and schools moved away to Winona.

Groom, TX

State National Bank opened in 1904 as a private bank founded by John Walter Knorpp, of an established Missouri and Southwestern banking family, together with regional oil and grain developer Eugene S. Blasdel. Chartered by the state in 1908 and nationally from 1926, it drew its strength from the thrifty settlers and pioneer families of the Panhandle. The bank weathered the Panic of 1907, the Dust Bowl, and two world wars while backing the region's cattle, grain, and oil economy.

Greeneville, TN

In the years just after the American Revolution, settlers in what is now upper East Tennessee tried to form their own state — the short-lived 'State of Franklin,' declared in 1784 with Greeneville as its seat and John Sevier as its governor. Never admitted to the Union and dissolved by 1788, Franklin was one of the boldest experiments of the frontier's early statehood movements. This replica of its rustic log capitol lets visitors stand where an unrecognized American state once tried to govern itself.

Oglesby, TX

Established in 1856 beside a Methodist Episcopal church, Station Creek Cemetery opened with the burial of 28-year-old Robert Morris, whose mother would join him twenty years later. Most of its forty headstones predate 1890, and among the graves are numerous Confederate soldiers and two brothers, W.R. and J.M. Green, hanged by a vigilante mob as accused horse thieves. When the congregation moved to McGregor in the 1880s, the cemetery was left to the wider community.

Freeport, TX

This statue honors Stephen F. Austin, remembered as the "Father of Texas" for leading the first organized Anglo-American colonization of the region in the 1820s under Mexican authority. When tensions boiled over into revolution in 1835, Austin briefly commanded Texian forces before turning to diplomacy, seeking support for the fledgling republic. The monument stands near the Gulf coast in Brazoria County, close to where his colonists first settled.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2011

On October 15, 1811, the side-wheeler New Orleans slid into the Monongahela near Suke's Run — the first steamboat ever built west of the Alleghenies. Its launch proved that steam power could conquer the powerful currents of the Ohio and Mississippi, and Pittsburgh, already rich in iron and timber, quickly became a bustling yard for building the boats that carried a nation west.

Brownsville, PA · est. 1994

Along the Monongahela at Brownsville, the steamboat Enterprise was built in 1814 with an engine designed by Daniel French and, under Captain Henry M. Shreve, steamed to New Orleans and back—the first vessel to ascend both the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers under steam. The feat proved that western rivers could be navigated upstream, transforming inland commerce. For over a century, the boatyards of Bridgeport and Brownsville turned out flatboats, keelboats, and more than 700 steamboats that carried trade and settlers into the American interior.

Huntsville, TX

Dr. Rufus Bailey, president of Austin College, built this oddly steamboat-shaped house in 1858 as a wedding gift—so mocked by neighbors that the newlyweds refused to live in it. Its fame instead comes from its most famous tenant: Sam Houston, who rented it after leaving the Texas governorship over secession, and who died in an upstairs room in 1863 with his funeral held in the parlor above. Saved and restored for the 1936 Texas Centennial, the house was moved to its present site as a shrine to the state's towering founder.

Oregon City, OR

On April 8, 1854, the steamboat Gazelle blew up near Oregon City on the Willamette River, killing twenty-four people. Boiler explosions were a grim commonplace of early river steam travel, when high-pressure engines and lax inspection turned vessels into floating hazards.

Dallas, TX

Brought to the Republic of Texas as a colt in 1844, the horse called Steel Dust became the frontier's most celebrated sprinter—so fast his jockey reportedly coated his back with molasses to stay aboard. He outran famous rivals in match races across North Texas in the 1850s until an injury at a starting gate ended his racing days and left him blind, though he lived on for years at stud. His bloodline, later cultivated at the King Ranch, helped found the modern American Quarter Horse.

Gonzales, TX

The Steen family's long push west carried them from a Tennessee friendship with the Crockett family to the Texas frontier, where John Rumley Steen bought this land in 1849 on ground that came to be called Steen Flat. He married Mahala Burkett, whose people had reached Texas in 1830 with DeWitt's Colony, and when their young son James died in 1863 the family honored his wish to rest beneath the shading trees that still stand here.

Lakeside Village, TX

Founded in 1891 as Fowler Baptist Church, this Bosque County congregation rebuilt after a 1907 fire and took the name Steiner when its town was renamed in 1916. Its most dramatic chapter came in 1950, when the creation of Lake Whitney forced the town of Steiner to evacuate and the church was hauled off on mule teams and wagons. Unable to clear a nearby bridge, the building simply stopped where it stood — and there it has remained at the roadside ever since.

Winchester, IL

This monument commemorates Stephen A. Douglas, the Illinois statesman who began his career in this part of the state before rising to the U.S. Senate. Known as the "Little Giant," Douglas championed "popular sovereignty"—letting territories decide the slavery question—drove the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and famously debated Abraham Lincoln in 1858. His policies on western territories made him one of the most powerful and controversial figures of the turbulent 1850s.

San Felipe, TX

This monument honors Stephen F. Austin, the 'Father of Texas,' who between 1823 and 1828 effectively governed the young colony and planted the famed 'Old Three Hundred,' settling more than a thousand families across his colonies. Erected by the State of Texas in 1936 with federal centennial funds, it marks the San Felipe region where his colonizing effort took root. His own words—calling the prosperity of Texas 'the idol of my existence'—serve as his epitaph.

Nacogdoches, TX

Stephen Fuller Austin inherited a colossal task when his father Moses died in 1821: settling hundreds of families in Spanish—then Mexican—Texas. Born on the Virginia frontier and schooled across the young United States, Austin proved a shrewd administrator, guiding the original "Old Three Hundred" families and hundreds more into southeast Texas. Imprisoned in Mexico after pressing for Texas statehood, he returned to help win independence and served as the new Republic's first secretary of state.

Etna, CA

Stephen H. Meek was a fur trapper employed by the Hudson's Bay Company who reached Scott Valley in 1836, remembered here as the earliest known trapper to visit the area. The fur trade drew hardy, restless men across the Far West years before the wagon trains and the Gold Rush, mapping rivers and valleys as they went. Meek later made this northern California valley his home, and the Native Daughters of the Golden West dedicated this marker to him in 1949.

Sour Lake, TX

Born in South Carolina, Stephen Jackson joined Lorenzo de Zavala's colony in 1831, part of the wave of Anglo settlers who took Mexican land grants in Texas. He earned a farm, then a full league of land encompassing the future community of Sour Lake, and in 1836 marched with the Texas army in its war for independence. He and his wife Susan raised a family here and lie with their children in the cemetery near this spot.

Smithville, TX

Stephen Scallorn was one of the ordinary families whose migration built the Republic of Texas. A Maryland-born frontier physician who had preached and doctored across Kentucky and Tennessee, he followed his son's glowing accounts of Texas after San Jacinto and settled near Plum Creek in the late 1830s, helping plant one of the region's early Baptist congregations. His long life spanned the whole arc of the Republic and early statehood — and cost him two sons, killed with Dawson's men in the border fighting of 1842.

Hallettsville, TX

Stephen Tucker Foley was born in Alabama and came to Texas in 1834, arriving just as the colony's break with Mexico approached. In 1836 he served in the Army of Texas, standing with Captain William Heard's company of citizen-soldiers at the Battle of San Jacinto. The State of Texas honored his service to the revolution with this marker in 1956.

San Diego, CA

Stephen Tyng Mather was a wealthy borax businessman who, beginning in 1916, became the first director of the newly created National Park Service and shaped the very idea of what a national park should be. He fought to unify a scattered collection of parks under one professional agency and to keep their landscapes unspoiled while still welcoming the public. This tribute, echoing the famous plaques placed in many parks after his death, captures the conservation ethic he made national policy.

Jasper, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1760, Stephen Williams enlisted repeatedly in the Continental Army and fought in Revolutionary War battles at Briar Creek, Camden, and Eutaw Springs. He volunteered again in the War of 1812 as a fifty-two-year-old sentry, then in 1835 — at seventy-five — shouldered his rifle at the Siege of Bexar alongside a son and four grandsons in the Texas fight for independence. Buried on his Jasper County homesite around 1839, he was reinterred in the State Cemetery during the 1936 Texas Centennial, when this monument was placed at his original grave.

Winchester, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, Stephen Williams left North Carolina and followed the great southern migration through Georgia and Alabama before reaching Texas in 1832. In 1843 he took a land grant in Washington County, where he became a prominent landowner and devoted Baptist. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Texas Baptist Education Society, and his farmstead stayed in the family for over 115 years.

Dennis, TX

William Henry Stephens and his wife Elizabeth came from Kentucky to Parker County in the early 1860s and, with their sons, carved out a family farm. When their son Hugh died in 1876, he was buried on the homestead, the earliest documented grave in the family plot. Though only four stones remain legible, as many as twenty-seven family members are believed to rest here, tended still by their descendants.

Breckenridge, TX

This ornate doorway is all that remains of the three-story red sandstone courthouse built in Breckenridge in 1883, its columns carved with the names of the architect, the county judge, and three of four commissioners—the fourth left off for protesting the building's cost. When the 1920s oil boom swelled the town, the old courthouse gave way to a larger one in 1926, and the portal was kept as a memento of pioneer days. A cistern behind the building once supplied the town's water.

Stephenville, TX

Built in 1899–1900, this carpenter Gothic church was raised by a Presbyterian congregation under the Rev. John William Everds and designed by local builder William John Wilson, whose fishscale-shingled steeple is its signature. The Presbyterians worshiped here until 1966, and when demolition threatened, the community moved and restored the building at Stephenville's historical museum in 1976.

Stephenville, TX

On July 23, 1860, twenty-four Masons—including Stephenville's founder John M. Stephen—assembled to organize a Masonic lodge, receiving their charter from the Grand Lodge of Texas in June 1861, on the eve of the Civil War. Members first met in a two-story log building on Belknap Street whose lower floor served as school and church. The lodge helped level the Erath County Courthouse cornerstone in 1891 and has long supported local and statewide charities.

Calvert, TX

This 11-acre burying ground holds some 400 Texas pioneers on land first granted in 1835 and bought in 1850 by Judge Robert Calvert, a leader of the vanished town of Sterling. Calvert dedicated the cemetery and built an adjoining Cumberland Presbyterian church from his own plantation timber; after his death in 1867 the congregation hauled the church by oxen to the new town of Calvert two miles east. In 1868 his widow and daughters deeded the site to the Cumberland Presbyterians.

Sterling City, TX

The prairie split by the north Concho River was long the hunting ground of the Comanche, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Lipan, and Wichita peoples, and may have been crossed by Spanish expeditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the 1860s and 70s came commercial buffalo hunters, one of whom, Capt. W. S. Sterling, gave his name to the creek; the outlaws Frank and Jesse James reputedly kept horse herds nearby, and the Army held Camp Elizabeth as a Fort Concho outpost. As big cattle outfits and then family homesteaders moved in, the county was created in 1891 and named for its first regular resident.

Sterling City, TX

Built in 1912, two decades after Sterling County was organized, this two-story jail was raised by the Southern Structural Steel Co. on land donated by the Stewart family, its exterior faced in locally quarried stone. The ground floor held living quarters for the sheriff, while seven cells occupied the upper story. A rear addition followed in the 1960s.

Heath, TX

Virginia-born Sterling Rex Barnes brought his family to this area from Mississippi in 1846, settling the community of Black Hill, now Heath. A charter member of a local Masonic lodge and the area's justice of the peace, he operated a toll bridge over the east fork of the Trinity River at a site now beneath Lake Ray Hubbard. Five of his sons and a son-in-law went on to serve the Confederacy during the Civil War.

El Dorado County, CA

In the 1850s and '60s, Green Valley Road was a bustling artery into the Sierra foothills, funneling gold-seekers, freight, and travelers toward California's mining country. The Central Overland Pony Express thundered past this spot on its famous relay between Missouri and Sacramento, and roadside inns sprang up to feed and shelter the constant stream of riders, teamsters, and stagecoach passengers. For a few short years this stretch of dusty road was the beating heart of the Gold Rush frontier.

Hochheim, TX

In 1846 Joseph and Sarah Ann Stevens arrived from Rankin County, Mississippi, with relatives and a number of enslaved people, buying land from members of Green DeWitt's Colony to farm and raise cattle. The family burial ground holds its oldest marker over the 1851 grave of their infant son, and the child's grandfather Elisha Stevens was laid to rest nearby months later. Pioneer family members, veterans, and descendants are honored here.

Junction, TX

Born in Kimble County in 1888 with barely two years of formal schooling, Coke R. Stevenson worked his way from a boyhood ranch job to owning a freight line, then rose through banking, law, and county office. He became the first Texan to hold the state's three highest offices, and as governor from 1941 to 1947 he turned a large deficit into a surplus while championing measures from the first driver's-license law to the Lower Colorado River Authority.

Commerce, TX

John and Ellen Stewart settled here about 1843, and John is credited with building the first pioneer home in eastern Hunt County during the Republic of Texas era. The family later sold land to the founder of nearby Commerce. The earliest legible marker is a child's grave from 1863, and the cemetery holds Confederate veterans — including the Stewart sons — as well as victims of an early-1900s epidemic.

Sulphur Springs, TX

On land first claimed by Hopkins County settler Zacharias Birdwell, this quiet burial ground began as Birdwell's Graveyard, taking its earliest known grave around 1870. When Birdwell's widow Polly deeded the property to her nephew W. A. Stewart in 1882, the cemetery took his name. Its two dozen marked graves—from an infant buried in 1879 to a final interment in 1915—hold the founding families of a corner of northeast Texas.

Bertram, TX

Benjamin Hansford Stewart left Tennessee for Texas in 1851 and made his living as a farmer and rancher, serving a term as Burnet County sheriff in the 1870s. In 1905 he built this frame house for his son Homer and daughter-in-law Viola, a typical Hill Country ranch home of its day set off by a chimney of hand-hewn limestone. Six generations of the Stewart family have lived in and cared for it.

Carson City, NV

Built about 1860 of local sandstone, this house was the home of William Morris Stewart until 1862, when he sold it to James W. Nye, the territorial governor. After Nevada achieved statehood in 1864, the two men were elected its first United States senators—Stewart serving into the twentieth century and Nye through 1873—both of them New York natives. The house later belonged to state Supreme Court Chief Justice George F. Talbot before becoming a Catholic rectory in 1917.

Comfort, TX

German-born stonemason and sheep rancher Herman Stieler designed and built this rock house in 1890–1892 in the Hill Country near Comfort. He had hauled freight for the Schreiner Company and to Camp Verde before making his place a shearing station where fellow ranchers gathered and passing stagecoaches stopped for food and repairs. Its two-rooms-per-floor plan around a central 'dog-trot' hall was typical of the era.

McKinney, TX

Jesse Stiff arrived from Virginia in 1835 and claimed thousands of acres in what became Collin County, and a community called Stiff Chapel grew up around the family's homesteads. When his son James, serving as a Texas Ranger, died in 1847, he was buried near the family house on land that became this two-acre cemetery — most of its graves dating from the 1800s, with the last burial in 1935.

Big Lake, TX

Established around 1903 on the ranchland of settlers G. W. and Lizzie Stiles, this three-acre cemetery reads like a frontier chronicle. Its graves hold cowboys killed in range accidents, a Spanish-American War veteran, and victims of shootings, rattlesnake bites, and a dysentery epidemic—though most, the marker notes, were pioneers of quiet and steady lives. The plot was deeded to the county in 1920 by J. D. Wagner, a wanderer who split his years between Texas and South America.

Big Lake, TX

Built in 1911 from stone quarried just half a mile away at a cost of $20,000, this courthouse served the county until 1925, when the seat of government moved to Big Lake. In the years that followed it found new life as a community center and, for a single year, a school.

Stillman Valley, IL

In May 1832, during the Black Hawk War, a body of Illinois militia clashed with Black Hawk's Sauk and Fox warriors here in a rout that became known as Stillman's Run. The dead were buried on this ground, and tradition holds that a young volunteer named Abraham Lincoln helped lay them to rest. The monument marks both a frontier battle and the future president's brush with it.

Churchill County, NV

Named for the calm pools nearby, Stillwater took shape as an overland stage station in 1862 — two years before Nevada's statehood — gained a post office in 1865, and became Churchill County's third county seat in 1868. Its population peaked around 1880, and when the seat moved to Fallon in 1904 barely thirty residents remained. Though its town center is gone, the valley's fertile fields still testify to its pioneer ranchers, and the 163,000-acre Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, created in 1949, now adjoins the Stillwater Indian Reservation.

Stockdale, TX

Before the 1870s, Stockdale-area families buried their dead in small private plots, until an unrelated young man thrown from his horse needed a resting place and Dr. T. M. Batte donated an acre for a community burial ground. The cemetery grew through further gifts of land, including a 1938 acre set aside for anyone lacking a family plot. Among those interred are town founder John R. King, first schoolteacher Martin West, war veterans, and victims of the post–World War I flu epidemic.

Monte Alto, TX

Between 1912 and 1914 Swedish immigrants recruited by a Minnesota land company settled this stretch of the Rio Grande Valley, drawn by cheap, fertile farmland. They built churches, a school, a store, and a cotton gin, and pooled knowledge through a farm club while raising cotton, grain, corn, and dairy. Today little remains of Stockholm but its cemetery, a quiet marker of a vanished immigrant town.

Granbury, TX

In 1854 Thomas "Uncle Tommy" Lambert and Amon Bond led settlers, mostly from Tennessee, across the Brazos River to found Stockton Bend, whose riverside location offered protection and crossings at Abe's Crossing and Landers Ferry. The community gained a saloon, blacksmith, stores, and a school, and its residents shaped the new Hood County after 1866—a county-seat dispute here even led to the creation of Somervell County. By the early twentieth century the town had faded, its school closing in 1911.

Bartlett, TX

Founded on land first granted to a veteran of the Siege of Bexar, this cemetery began in 1890 with the burial of the Stocktons' fifteen-year-old son and grew alongside a family that settled Bell County in 1870. Among the more than eighty graves is Ead White, a formerly enslaved man who stayed with the family after the Civil War, and members lost to the deadly 1919 Corpus Christi hurricane.

Goliad, TX

One of Goliad's oldest buildings, this house may date to the 1820s and was certainly standing before pioneer settler Jessie W. Stoddard bought the property in 1847. Sold in 1879 to the wife of a local cattle rancher, it stayed in that family into the next century and still shows the layered additions of successive owners.