Westward Expansion

Temple vicinity, TX

Peter and Mary Isabella Stokes came to Bell County from Virginia in the late 1850s with their children and Mrs. Stokes's parents, Nathaniel and Mary Nelson. Begun in 1858 with the burial of a relative, this small graveyard on the Stokes farm holds about ten graves, including those of both couples. Restored in the 1980s, it stands as a quiet emblem of the county's pioneer beginnings.

Stoneham, TX

Organized in 1885 by a dozen members from the Plantersville church, Stoneham Methodist served its new railroad-era community first in a schoolhouse under circuit-riding ministers, then in a frame sanctuary built in 1893 with its first full-time pastor. The congregation flourished in the 1920s, closed twice as area population declined, and was revived in 1973 to continue serving the area. Its ebb and flow mirrors the fortunes of small rural Texas towns.

Humboldt County, NV

Long before the railroad, this spot on the Humboldt corridor was a natural camping place for Native people and for emigrants pushing west. In the 1860s the Overland Stage Company raised a stone house here as a dining and overnight stop, and when the Central Pacific pushed through in 1868 the nearby springs watered its locomotives. A little trackside settlement grew up to serve railroaders and ranchers, complete with a post office that ran from 1890 until 1915 before the place faded away.

Center Point, TX

George L. Leigh, a Missouri native, moved to Kerr County in 1878 for his health and opened a store in Center Point before serving a term as county tax assessor. In 1883 he bought a 640-acre tract and, with his brother Edward's help, expanded it past three thousand acres, running a dairy and raising racing horses. Named for the family's ancestral home in England, Stoneleigh Ranch later operated as a guest ranch from 1936 to 1943 and stayed in the Leigh family until 1960.

Stonewall, TX

This cemetery first served Millville, a settlement laid out after the Civil War by Israel Nuñez, who ran a nearby stage stop. Though Nuñez set aside the ground early, it was not formally deeded until 1934, and its earliest marked grave dates to 1879. Millville became Stonewall in 1875, and after a pause the cemetery saw burials resume in 1966.

Aspermont, TX

The rolling country of Stonewall County holds a deep frontier history: Spanish explorer Francisco de Coronado passed through in 1541, and U.S. Army mapmakers followed in 1849. Its salt springs supplied settlers, and from 1876 to 1879 the rough buffalo-hunters' town of Rath City reigned as a hide-trade capital. The county, created in 1876 and organized in 1888, honors Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and its seat shifted from Rayner to higher-set Aspermont in 1898.

Saint Jo, TX

Built of native stone in 1873, the Stonewall Saloon was Saint Jo's first permanent building and a welcome rest stop for cowboys driving cattle up the trail through North Texas. After county prohibition arrived in 1897 it traded whiskey for ledgers, housing offices and a bank, and it was named for Confederate general "Stonewall" Jackson. Stuccoed in the 1930s and given a wooden facade in 1964, it still anchors the town square.

Melissa, TX

In the 1870s and 1880s Stony Point was a bustling farm community with a cotton gin, gristmill, molasses mill, store, and school. Residents organized the Stony Point Baptist Church in 1878, and it grew into a spiritual hub—ordaining ministers and helping plant congregations in neighboring settlements—before declining population closed its doors in the late 1950s. Its cemetery, older than the church itself, still hosts funerals and an annual decoration day.

Rocksprings, TX

This route was one of many military roads built to link the frontier cavalry posts of Texas, running south to Fort Clark and north to Fort McKavett, both established in 1852. Paint Rock Springs, at the head of the South Llano River, made a natural midway rest stop, and in 1877 Major John B. Jones gathered his Texas Rangers here to launch a campaign against frontier outlaws. Beyond its military purpose, the road carried immigrants, cattle drovers, ranchers, mail riders, and freighters into the open country.

Marlin, TX

Settled as Blue Ridge before 1850, this community reorganized on land donated by David Barclay and grandsons of Thomas Garrett after Garrett's estate closed the original site. A visiting Frenchman suggested the name Stranger around 1870, and by 1869 a Methodist-Presbyterian Union Church and a Baptist church were holding services that doubled as the first schools. Once home to a cotton gin, stores, a stagecoach inn, and mills, Stranger today keeps only its cemetery and churches, used for biannual homecomings.

Stratton, TX

Established before the Civil War as the hub of a large farming district, Stratton took its name from John Stratton, a Cuero saddler with land interests nearby. At its height it had a post office (1887–1905), general store, school, cotton gin, drugstore, and blacksmith shops, and in 1914 the Primitive Baptist congregation relocated there. Pioneer settlers and two Civil War veterans rest in the community's Alexander Cemetery.

Freeport, TX

Robert Edward Lee Stringfellow started on a Brazoria County cattle ranch at fourteen and soon had a herd of his own, opening a Velasco meat market in 1890 that fed the crews building jetties at the mouth of the Brazos. His holdings grew to 20,000 acres and he became an early investor in the new town of Freeport. After a 1932 hurricane injured him, his wife Nannie ran the ranch and the family's Freeport interests for decades more.

McMullen County, TX

On September 28, 1870, the Thomas Stringfield family was overtaken in their wagon by raiders striking north from Mexico. Thomas and his wife Sarah Jane were killed, as was young Adolphus, while four-year-old Thomas vanished without a trace. Eight-year-old Ida Alice fought her captors, was speared and trampled and left for dead — yet she survived, rescued and living on until 1937.

San Marcos, TX

John Drayton Pitts, a civil engineer and Georgia legislator, visited Texas in 1842 and later bought 640 acres near San Marcos from General Edward Burleson, land the general had gained after the Battle of San Jacinto. The colony Pitts founded in 1847 drew family and friends who built farmhouses strung at half-mile intervals along the Austin–San Antonio Road, earning the settlement the name Stringtown. Its "model farms" survived early drought, and after emancipation crops were shared with former slaves given land, while Mexican farmers arrived to work the fields and enrich the area's culture.

Crockett, TX

This log cabin was raised in the 1850s on the Jeremiah Strode League, most likely by his son-in-law B. R. Wallace, a Texas legislator, or by a Wallace cousin. Over the years later additions swallowed the original structure until, by 1950, no trace of the logs was visible and the building served merely as hay storage. Rediscovered in 1973, the cabin was donated, moved, and restored as part of the American Bicentennial and Houston County's birthday celebrations.

Henderson, TX

Set in the rolling farmland of East Texas, this burial ground grew out of the family and community of John Strong, a Georgia-born pioneer who helped lead the nearby Church Hill settlement in the decades before the Civil War. The earliest graves date to the early 1850s, and in 1877 Strong's widow Mary formally set aside three acres for a cemetery. Tellingly, its north section was first used to bury enslaved people, a quiet record of the plantation-era society that shaped the region.

Strongsville, OH

Strongsville sits in Ohio's Western Reserve, the tract of northeastern Ohio that Connecticut sold off to settlers pushing west in the early 1800s. The Historical Village gathers a cluster of preserved period buildings — the kind of early meetinghouse, school, and homestead that a young farming township left behind — into one open-air site tended by the local historical society. Walking it is a way to see how a Western Reserve community assembled itself out of timber, faith, and hard winters.

Tolar, TX

The Stroud Creek community grew up in western Hood County during the late 1870s and early 1880s, drawn by land grants, a nearby stagecoach line, and the end of Native American raids that had long deterred settlement. Burials began on Benjamin Irby's land in 1883 and the ground later served the town of Tolar, gathering community leaders, merchants, educators, farmers, and veterans beneath curbed plots, fraternal emblems, and upright stones.

Oakland, TX

Built around 1875, this house is an example of the early Texas open-hall or breezeway style, with a central passage designed to catch the breeze in the days before mechanical cooling. It was the home of John Monroe Woolsey while he served in the 20th Legislature representing Colorado County. The dogtrot form ties it to the practical building traditions settlers carried into the state.

Marble Falls, TX

Amand von Struve came to Texas in 1848 with his father, a former Imperial Russian officer, and set about building a vast ranch that eventually spread over 8,000 acres of horses, cattle, and sheep. In 1869 he added this stone spring house and kitchen to his wooden dwelling, its thick walls meant to guard food and water from raids and wild animals alike. He married in 1871 and raised eight children; long after the main house was razed, this stone annex was restored to survive.

Liberty Hill, TX

Raised in 1871 from hand-cut native limestone, this is perhaps the oldest surviving building in Liberty Hill. It was built by S.P. Stubblefield, an Alabama native and Mexican War veteran, and stayed in his family until 1907, its ground floor holding shops and its upper floor serving as living quarters. Sculptor Mel Fowler bought and restored the structure in 1973.

Kennard, TX

Civil War veteran Wyatt M. Stubblefield bought land here in 1872, and the community took his name. Around the same time the New Ivie Missionary Baptist Church—rooted in the older Ivie Board congregation—began meeting in the local schoolhouse before building its own sanctuary, which twice burned before a third rose in 1926. Through Depression-era hardship, members grew cotton and saved butter-and-egg money to fund their preacher and missions, and though regular services ended in the 1950s, descendants still gather each May for the Stubblefield homecoming.

Hallettsville, TX

Sublime Baptist Church traces its worship to 1853 at a spot called "tick hill" near Geiger Cemetery, where a traveling circuit rider preached whenever he could reach the area and lodged with deacon J.R. Brooks. The congregation formally organized in 1878, and in 1887 town founder Robert Miller donated land for a frame church raised by 1905. Summer brush-arbor and tent revivals gave way to a new auditorium in 1954, and the buildings still host reunions, weddings, and community gatherings.

Salt Lake City, UT

The Sugar House district takes its name from an ambitious early Mormon effort to manufacture sugar from locally grown beets, one of the pioneer community's many attempts to become self-sufficient in an isolated desert valley. The machinery, hauled across the plains at great cost, never produced refined sugar as hoped, but the enterprise gave the neighborhood its lasting identity. This monument honors the boldness of that venture and the settlers who attempted it.

Hearne, TX

Calvin A. Suggs brought his family from Georgia to this stretch of Robertson County around 1868, in the uncertain first years after emancipation, and set aside part of his eighty acres as a burying ground. For more than a century it has been the principal cemetery of the Black Jack community, its oldest marked grave dating to 1880. Beneath its marked and unmarked stones lie the pioneer settlers — many of them African American — who built a rural community out of Reconstruction-era Texas.

Laporte, PA · est. 1982

Sullivan County was created in 1847 out of Lycoming County, taking its name from state senator Charles C. Sullivan, who pushed for its formation. Laporte became the county seat in 1853. In the wooded highlands here, Eagles Mere grew into a celebrated mountain resort and Worlds End became a beloved state park.

Village of Horseheads, NY

In the autumn of 1779, General John Sullivan led a punishing military expedition through the lands of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, part of a scorched-earth campaign ordered by George Washington during the Revolutionary War. As the weary army withdrew through what is now the Chemung Valley, Sullivan's exhausted pack horses—broken down after weeks of hard marching—were put down near this spot. The bleached skulls left behind so struck later travelers and settlers that the place came to be called Horseheads, a name the village still carries today.

Dimmitt, TX

In 1876 the English-born surveyor John Summerfield began mapping millions of acres across the Texas Panhandle, raising earth monuments to anchor his work. One such marker near this spot became a starting point for surveys spanning several counties and later gained the name Dameron's Corner after a nearby landowner. Citizens set a concrete monument here in 1925, though a road cut buried it in 1958.

Baker County, OR

The No. 2 dredge chewed its way north up McCully Fork and Cracker Creek toward the mining camp of Bourne, part of the great gold-dredging era in Oregon's Sumpter Valley. These massive floating machines tore through streambeds in the early twentieth century, leaving behind the long ridges of tailings still visible across the valley. Bourne itself faded into a ghost town as the gold played out.

Livingston, TX

In 1882 seven families in this corner of Polk County gathered in the local one-room schoolhouse to organize a church, naming it for the wild sunflowers that grew nearby. They raised their first sanctuary in 1905, the same year they joined with the neighboring Lone Oak congregation, and expanded their meeting houses as the community grew. The church has anchored this rural neighborhood ever since.

Colmesneil, TX

Organized on April 22, 1882, by the pioneer families of the prosperous Sunny Dell farming settlement, this church began with fourteen charter members under the Rev. Arnold Rhodes, on land donated by James Sturrock. For many years it was a leading congregation in early Tyler County, but as the surrounding population thinned the church declined and discontinued regular services in 1955. Descendants still gather here each year for a homecoming.

Kerrville, TX

The oldest marked graves in Sunset Cemetery belong to four Dowdy children killed in an 1878 Indian raid soon after their family reached the Texas Hill Country from Goliad. Nearby lie four Byas children lost to an 1880s typhoid epidemic and pioneers like H. L. Nelson, who founded the Mountain Home post office. Assembled over decades from several landowners, the cemetery preserves the hardships of frontier Kerr County.

Montrose, PA · est. 1982

Split from Luzerne County in 1810 and named for its great river, Susquehanna County became an early hotbed of antislavery activity, with Montrose serving as an Underground Railroad stop. It was also home to Galusha A. Grow, the congressman who championed the 1862 Homestead Act. That law opened millions of acres of western land to ordinary settlers.

Sutherland Spring, TX

Founded in 1848 by Dr. John Sutherland — the Alamo courier whom William B. Travis sent out for reinforcements in 1836 — Sutherland Springs became one of southwest Texas's premier health resorts, drawing visitors to more than 100 hot and cold mineral springs long used for their curative waters. A stagecoach stop on the Old San Antonio Road, it served as the first seat of Wilson County in 1860 before politics moved the county seat away. A later resort boom at "New Sutherland Springs" collapsed after devastating floods in 1913 left it a ghost town.

Sutherland Springs, TX

Dr. John Sutherland, a Virginia-born physician, came to Texas in 1835 and was helping ready the Alamo's defense when a horse accident left him unable to fight; Col. Travis instead sent him riding to Gonzales for help, and the Mexican army stormed the fort before aid could come. Sutherland later settled near the sulphur springs on the Cibolo, boarding health-seekers in his home, which became a stop on the San Antonio–to–coast stage line. He set aside about five acres as a community cemetery in 1860, and the ground now holds Texas Rangers, veterans, officials, and residents of every background who built Wilson County.

Coloma, CA · est. 1949

Marshall's discovery drew some 300,000 'forty-niners' to California within a few years, reshaping the West, accelerating statehood, and devastating Native communities.

Sonora, TX

The land that became Sutton County holds signs of human presence stretching back many thousands of years and was home to Apache people up to the founding of Fort Terrett in 1852. Anglo-Texan settlement began at Sonora in 1879 around a trading post on the San Antonio–El Paso road, and the county was created in 1887 and organized in 1890. It honors John S. Sutton, a Santa Fe Expedition member, Texas Ranger, and soldier who died of wounds from the Battle of Val Verde.

Sonora, TX

The site of the Sutton County Courthouse began as something more elemental than government: the first water well in the area, where sheepmen brought their flocks to drink and decided to settle. That same scarce water bred violence — a deadly quarrel over watering rights left one West Texas family patriarch dead on the very ground where the courthouse would rise. The story compresses the ranching frontier's hard bargains into a single contested spot.

Sonora, TX

Soon after Sutton County organized in 1890, its commissioners hired a St. Louis firm to erect this jail, completed in September 1891 as a two-story native-stone building that combined cells with a jailer's residence. Its first inmate was gambler and gunman John Denson, a cousin of the notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin — a fitting christening for a frontier lockup. The sturdy stone structure embodies the arrival of formal law in a raw ranching county.

Jefferson County, WA

This memorial recalls the 1808 voyage of the Sv. Nikolai, a Russian-American Company vessel that sailed south from the colonial capital of Sitka toward the coast the Spanish called New Albion. The ship wrecked on the Olympic Peninsula's shore, stranding its crew among the Quileute and Hoh peoples in one of the earliest documented Russian encounters on the future Washington coast. It marks a moment when Pacific Northwest waters were contested ground among Russian, Spanish, British, and American interests.

Austin, TX

Swedish immigration to Texas began in 1838 with the arrival of Swen Magnus, who settled on the gulf coast before moving to Austin and establishing a ranch he named Govalle, or "good grazing land." With his uncle Svante Palm, he actively promoted Swedish immigration, and by 1910 some 7,000 Swedes had built farms, businesses, and churches, concentrated in eastern Travis and Williamson counties. They founded colleges, a mutual aid society, a Swedish-language newspaper, and carried on festivals like St. Lucia and Midsummer.

Sweeny, TX

This burial ground began in 1833 when John Sweeny, an early landowner and member of Stephen F. Austin's colony, chose the site to bury his young daughter Freedonia. The neighborhood has used it ever since, and it holds the graves of veterans of every American war since the Texas Revolution. It stands as a quiet record of the families who settled this stretch of Brazoria County.

Sweetwater, TX

The oldest marked grave here belongs to an infant, Purl Ray Scott, who died in 1880—a year before the Texas and Pacific Railroad founded the town of Sweetwater. Handcrafted tombstones and wrought-iron fences mark the resting places of pioneers, immigrants, community leaders, and Civil War veterans. The graveyard reflects the hardships of pioneer life on the West Texas plains.

Sweetwater, TX

When West Texas towns were still finding their footing in the 1920s, Sweetwater invested in a grand civic stage. Built in 1926-27 by Austin's Page Brothers firm, its Spanish Colonial Revival arches and ornate balconies announced a growing regional center. For decades the hall drew everything from touring celebrities to political rallies and church gatherings, becoming the heart of the community's public life.

Stamford, TX

Swen Magnus Swenson, the first Swedish settler in Texas and an ally of Sam Houston, began buying vast West Texas tracts here in 1854. His sons built the operation into the SMS Ranches, running shorthorn and Hereford cattle under a distinctive reversed-S brand that is still used today. Incorporated in 1926 and headquartered here from 1927, the company grew to more than 500,000 acres and pioneered innovations like a mail-order cattle system before splitting into four family corporations in 1978.

Stamford, TX

Around 1900, the Texas Central Railroad and the SMS Ranch teamed up to create the town of Stamford, and this stout Lueders-stone building rose beside the tracks to serve it. It was the central supply depot for the four sprawling Swenson ranches of west Texas — Tongue River, Spur, Throckmorton and Flat Top. Goods came off the trains and waited here until ranch foremen rode into town to collect provisions and swap news.

Bleakwood, TX

The trading village of Salem was founded in 1835 by Seth Swift, a Quaker and former whaling merchant who moved his family from Massachusetts to the East Texas woods. When his wife Lydia died around 1852, Swift set aside an acre for a cemetery, and upon his own death in 1869 he was buried beside her in a pink marble casket he had shipped from New England. Lost for years to forest overgrowth, the graveyard has since been restored.

Lake Dallas, TX

The Swisher Cemetery began on land granted to H. H. Swisher for his service in the Texas War for Independence, marking some of the earliest Anglo settlement in this part of north central Texas. His son, Capt. A. P. Swisher, formally donated ground for the burials of the community then called the French Settlement, later renamed Garza and finally Lake Dallas when the dam on the Trinity's Elm Fork created the lake in 1926. Its 1,100-plus graves include veterans from the Civil War through the Persian Gulf, a century and a half of local history.

Tulia, TX

Swisher County honors James Gibson Swisher (1794-1864), who won distinction at the storming of Bexar in 1835 and signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. The county was created in 1876 and organized in 1890, with Tulia as its seat, from lands once part of the vast Young and Bexar territories. Its name carries a founding figure of the Texas Revolution into the settlement of the Panhandle.

Sonoma, CA

Built around 1850 by Don Salvador Vallejo beside his earlier 1836 dwelling, this adobe passed through many hands. In 1861 it was home to Dr. Victor J. Faure, who made prize-winning wines from the Vallejo family's grapes, tying the building to Sonoma's founding role in California viticulture. Later use as a hotel and restaurant gave it the name Swiss Hotel.

Newton County, TX

An 1845 land grant first drew pioneers to this corner of Newton County, and some of the graves marked only by a rough rock or post likely date to those earliest years of settlement. The oldest legible stone belongs to a thirteen-year-old boy who died in 1885. Among the settlers who shaped the community rest veterans of the Civil War and every major American conflict from World War I through Vietnam, still tended today by an association of descendants.

Port Lavaca, TX

This marker records the lives of Sylvanus Hatch, born in Massachusetts in 1788, and his wife Phamelia, born in Mississippi the same year, whose long lives spanned the founding decades of the American republic and Texas. Hatch lived to 1885, dying on the Texas Gulf coast near Port Lavaca. The stone preserves the memory of an early settler couple in this corner of the state.

Ballinger, TX

Sylvester Adams came to Texas as a young man and threw himself behind the Confederate cause, serving at Galveston during the Civil War. Afterward he helped organize Runnels County and became its first county judge, serving in the 1880s. When drought struck in 1886–1887 he worked to arrange relief, even as many proud residents refused what they saw as charity.

Canyon, TX

In the fall of 1877, cattlemen drove some 400 head to Spring Draw and raised a two-room log cabin, seeding one of the Panhandle's great open-range operations. Under the firm of Gunter, Munson & Summerfield, cowboys strung the area's first barbed wire around 240,000 acres and, in 1882, moved more than 10,600 cattle in what was called the largest drive on record. Through strikes, drought and blizzard the T Anchor endured, and when Randall County organized in 1889 six of its first officers were ranch hands, before the land was broken into smaller farms and ranches after 1902.

Canyon, TX

Raised in 1877 from logs cut in the dramatic depths of Palo Duro Canyon, the T-Anchor headquarters is counted as the oldest surviving house in the Texas Panhandle. Its builder, Leigh R. Dyer, broke the region's first farmland here before selling out in 1878 to a partnership that made the spread a hub of Panhandle ranching and settlement.

Tivoli, TX

Thomas O'Connor came to Texas as an orphaned boy from Wexford, Ireland, with his uncle the empresario James Power. He signed the Goliad Declaration of Independence at seventeen and fought at San Jacinto, later remembered as the youngest Texian in that decisive battle. On this land grant he built a log cabin in 1842; the present ranch house followed in 1874, its bricks fired from clay dug along the San Antonio River, and the T-C ranching operation has passed through five generations of his family.

San Saba, TX

Thomas Alan Sloan came to San Saba County from Mississippi in 1856 and rose to prominence in the cattle business as Central Texas moved from open range toward fenced pasture. In 1883 he and his wife Emma built this two-story frame house, a settled emblem of ranching wealth in a county still recovering from war and frontier raids. It stood for generations as the family seat of a pioneering ranching line.

Frisco, TX

T. J. Campbell built this cypress-sided home in 1869 in Lebanon, Texas, right on the old Preston Road as longhorn herds streamed north. When the railroad and mail line bypassed Lebanon, the Campbells simply moved the house to Frisco in 1902, dressing it up with gingerbread trim. For decades the pioneer merchant family served this corner of Collin County.

Snyder, TX

T. J. Faught arrived in newly settled Scurry County as a rancher in 1879 and, when the county's first sheriff quit in disgust, took up the badge and held it for four terms — famously never wearing a gun. A Masonic charter member who built the lodge's hall, he became one of Snyder's leading citizens, with a downtown street named in his honor.

Henderson, TX

In 1841, during the days of the Republic of Texas, Thomas Jefferson Walling and his wife Nancy raised this one-room cabin of hand-hewn timbers joined by square corner notches—a form typical of the pioneer farmsteads then dotting East Texas. Walling had already seen hard service as a veteran of the 1838–39 Cordova Rebellion and the Indian conflicts of the era. The family lived here until 1859, and in 1982 the cabin was moved to its present site for preservation.