Westward Expansion

Plano, TX

This medallion marks Bowman Cemetery, established in 1868 and later designated a Historic Texas Cemetery. Founded just after the Civil War, it served the farming families settling the Blackland Prairie of what is now the Plano area of Collin County.

Lakeside City, TX

W. A. Bacon donated this ground to a German missionary society in 1885, and the first grave—that of Christina Schmith—was dug the same year. Many who rest here were German immigrants, and a striking sandstone mausoleum built around 1900 by A. F. Decker for his parents still marks the cemetery's south side. Descendants formed an association in 1940 to keep the graveyard tended.

Stephenville vicinity, TX

This Erath County burial ground began in 1885 when A. B. Keith deeded an acre to the Primitive Baptist Church, and its earliest known grave belongs to an infant who lived only months in 1886. The area later took the name Bowman Ridge for pioneer Benjamin Bowman, who gave land for a schoolhouse, and a Confederate veteran was among those laid to rest here. The many graves of children speak to the hardships of pioneer life.

Richland Springs, TX

Around 1858 the Abel Bowser family settled at a bend of the Colorado River, and the village of Bowser Bend grew up with a school, cemetery, cotton gin, and store by the late 1880s. Recurring floods pushed the town to relocate after Paul Varga donated higher land for a chapel and cemetery in 1890, but the loss of its post office, gin, and school sent Bowser into decline by the 1940s.

Alto, TX

The Box families came from Alabama to Texas in 1834, and Roland W. Box and his wife Mary built a log fort on a hill on part of the Stephen Burnham grant, enclosing a house and dugout. Box's Fort became the nucleus of a settlement as the extended family raised homes nearby, and Box men fought in the Texas Revolution of 1836. A post office called Box's Creek operated from 1851 to 1866, but by 1900 the fort had vanished from area maps.

Manor, TX

Aaron Boyce moved his family to Texas in 1837, during the young Republic, settling a 1,280-acre tract in the rolling hills near present-day Manor. The cemetery holds only five graves, but they carry hard history: the first burial was fifteen-year-old James Boyce, killed by a Lipan Apache raiding party. The Boyces went on to help found the town of Manor in Republic days, and their family plot survives as one of the settlement's oldest.

Anson, TX

Settlement came to Jones County in the late 1800s, first near the abandoned Fort Phantom Hill and then around ranches and farms, and in 1895 Reese Davis, Joe Swent, and Alex Boyd built the school that gave Boyd Chapel its name. Shaped by landowning families like the Youngs, who deeded ground for churches, a school, and a tabernacle, the cotton-farming community thrived until World War II drew its young people into the armed forces and city jobs. After its school consolidated with Anson in 1947, Boyd Chapel faded, and today only graves in the Neinda Cemetery mark where it stood.

Clarendon vicinity, TX

Illinois native Henry S. Boydstun brought his family to the Texas Panhandle in 1890, and after his infant son Eddie died that year, he buried the child in a corner of the family farm. In 1898 he deeded two acres for a public burial ground, around which a small farming community with a school and post office grew up. Ironically, Boydstun and his wife were themselves buried in the nearby town of Groom.

Jasper, TX

Tucked into the piney woods of deep East Texas near Jasper, this family burial ground took shape around 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, as settler families put down roots in the region. Family cemeteries like this one were often the first permanent institutions on the frontier, marking the land a family claimed as home long before towns and churches arrived. Its recognition as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016 formally preserves that early footprint.

Meridian, TX

On this Bosque County homesite—now marked only by a surviving log kitchen—grew up John A. Lomax, who would become one of America's greatest collectors of folk music. Sitting astride the Chisholm Trail, young Lomax absorbed the ballads of trail-driving cowboys and the jig tunes, chants, and work songs of Black servants, jotting the music down while still a boy. When he left home at twenty he carried a roll of cowboy ballads that became the seed of a lifetime's work preserving the nation's vernacular song.

Midway, TX

Bozeman Cemetery was established in 1852 near Midway in Madison County, when this part of Texas was still a young frontier of scattered farms and settlements. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, it preserves the resting place of some of the area's earliest pioneer families. Its weathered stones are among the few remaining records of the community that settled here before the Civil War.

Gonzales County, TX

Bartlett McClure and his wife Sarah Ann built a log cabin here in 1831 in Green DeWitt's colony; McClure went on to become Gonzales County's first chief justice and a delegate to the 1833 Texas convention. The present house, a vernacular take on the Greek Revival style, went up in 1842–43. After McClure's death, Sarah Ann married Charles Braches of the Republic of Texas Congress, and the home witnessed many events of early Texas history.

Minden, TX

This crossroads in Rusk County has worn a remarkable string of names—Gibsontown, Murval, Needmore, and finally Brachfield. The last honored Charles Louis Brachfield, a judge and 23-year state senator who once gave a stump speech here and who in 1926 became the first Jewish candidate for statewide office in Texas when he ran for attorney general. A hotel, school and post office came and went as sawmills, cotton, dairy, cattle, poultry and later oil and gas took turns sustaining the little farming community.

DeBerry, TX

Pioneer settlers Thomas and Mary Bracken brought their family to this corner of East Texas in the 1830s and set aside part of their land as a burial ground for their family and neighbors. The oldest marked grave belongs to the infant Clarence Liston, who died in 1876, and the cemetery holds pioneers from a scattering of early settlements—Grand Bluff, Elysian Fields, DeBerry, and others. Their son-in-law Dan Briggs formally deeded the site as a cemetery in 1891.

Augusta, KY

Bracken County, formed in 1796, was named for the frontier hunter and Indian fighter William Bracken, who ranged this country as early as 1773. For its size the county produced an outsized share of firsts: it cradled John Gregg Fee, founder of Berea College; the noted surgeon Joshua Taylor Bradford; and Augusta College, chartered in 1822 as the world's first Methodist college. In 1867 the first White Burley tobacco was grown from Bracken County seed, transforming Kentucky agriculture.

Palo Pinto, TX

Local tradition traces this cemetery to the 1870s, when a young girl died as her family passed through Thomas Lindsey's land and was buried on the spot, soon joined by Lindsey's own sister. The earliest marked grave, that of infant Tump Mapes, dates to 1877, and the ground passed through several owners and names—Lindsey, Ioni, and finally Brad—before a cemetery association incorporated in 1973. With more than 400 graves, it still serves the surrounding rural community.

Houston County, TX

In 1838, as the young Republic of Texas drew settlers west, Bradford Davis left Mississippi to farm the Houston County frontier — and, in a detail that captures how raw that frontier was, met his death while checking bee bait. His sons carried the family into the next generation as farmers, a gin operator, a river merchant shipping goods down the Trinity, and a schoolteacher. Family members and the enslaved people they held are buried together on this ground.

Washington, PA · est. 1953

David Bradford built this fine stone house in 1788, and six years later he emerged as a leading figure in the Whiskey Rebellion, the armed uprising of western Pennsylvania farmers against the federal excise tax on distilled spirits. When President Washington sent a militia army to enforce the law, the rebellion collapsed and Bradford fled to Spanish West Florida to escape prosecution. His abandoned home stands as a monument to one of the young republic's first great tests of federal authority.

McKinney, TX

Edward Bradley brought his family from Kentucky in the 1840s as members of the Peters Colony, building a log home on a branch of Wilson's Creek in what is now McKinney. A nearby hillside became the family graveyard and then a community cemetery, holding eleven marked headstones and many unmarked graves — including, in a wooded plot to the south, an enslaved people's cemetery marked with bois d'arc wood. The oldest documented burial is Edward Bradley himself, who died in 1855.

La Grange, TX

Built in 1886 for La Grange merchant Amzi T. Bradshaw and his wife Sarah, this frame house passed in 1908 to their daughter Nellie and her husband John Killough. In 1924 the Killoughs gave the Victorian home a fashionable makeover, adding a crenelated Tudor Revival entry portico and a side porte cochère. Its two-story bay window and corbelled chimneys still hint at the residence's original nineteenth-century lines.

Brady Township, PA

This great bend of the Allegheny River bears the name of Captain Samuel Brady (1756–1795), a frontier scout whose exploits grew into legend. In June 1779, in what was then Seneca country, Brady led a party to answer the killing of a settler and her four children and the capture of two more. His force surrounded a small band of Seneca and Munsee, killed their Munsee leader, and freed the two captive children.

Bradys Bend Township, PA

For a third of the nineteenth century, the bend of the Allegheny River at Brady's Bend roared with the work of one of America's great early ironworks. Founded in 1839 as the Great Western and later reorganized as the Brady's Bend Iron Company, it grew into one of the largest iron operations of its era, drawing on the coal and iron ore of western Pennsylvania. Most remarkably, it became the first works to roll iron rails on the western side of the Allegheny Mountains — feeding the very railroads that were then stitching the growing nation together. When it closed in 1873, it left behind a company town and the memory of a place where American heavy industry came of age beyond the eastern seaboard.

Junction, TX

Brambletye was built between 1895 and 1900 by English immigrant William Hall, who came to Texas in 1888 and raised a stone house on a hill overlooking Bear Creek in the Hill Country. Its hand-cut walls two feet thick and hand-hewn walnut ceiling beams make it a rare example of late 19th-century English vernacular architecture in the region. After Hall's death in 1900 the house and its ranchland passed through several early ranching families.

Edna, TX

Raised in 1861 by Sarah Wiseman on the Texas coastal plain, this house became a fixture of the lower bay country. From 1867 onward the family of E. G. Branch and the Bonnot heirs kept it as a place of open hospitality for the surrounding community. It was formally recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Colleyville, TX

Named for pioneer Felix Grundy Bransford, this Tarrant County hamlet coalesced around a post office that moved to the railroad line in 1889, drawing stores, doctors, blacksmiths, and a lodge hall to the depot. Two daily passenger trains and the surrounding farms kept it humming until the post office closed in 1913 and highway travel drew life away. By the time Colleyville incorporated in 1956, Bransford had all but vanished.

Round Rock, TX

John Bratton brought his family from Kentucky to Texas in the late 1830s and later set aside an acre of his land as a burying ground for kin and neighbors. Many of the more than one hundred graves are marked only with rough fieldstones, and most date to the 1800s. As one of the area's oldest cemeteries, it records the short lives and hardships of a frontier community.

Brazoria, TX

Founded in 1828 by John Austin, a friend of colonization leader Stephen F. Austin, Brazoria grew into a port, market, and social center for the young Anglo colony. Here Jane Long — widow of the filibuster Dr. John Long, who had tried in 1819 to wrest Texas from Spain — kept a tavern that anchored the town's public life. Burned during the Texas Revolution and rebuilt, Brazoria served as a county seat and business hub until 1897.

Snook, TX

Also called the Old Tunis Cemetery, this burial ground served pioneers of the fertile Brazos valley, with graves reaching back to the 1840s. John and Sarah Wright Echols formally set aside the land in 1867 for a graveyard and a Baptist church that later disbanded. Among those resting here is Judge John Gregg, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence, planter, and Milam County justice.

Bryan, TX

Carved from Washington County in 1841 as part of Stephen F. Austin's colony, this county was first called Navasota with its seat at Boonville, then renamed Brazos in 1842. Through the Civil War, Millican flourished as the end of the railroad from Houston, but when the line pushed north Bryan became the county seat in 1866. The 1876 opening of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas — now Texas A&M — drew College Station into being around it.

Fayetteville, TX

David and Sarah Breeding came from Kentucky in 1833 with their sons to settle here in Mexican Texas, and three of those sons—John, Napoleon, and Fidelio—fought in the Texian army, sharing in the victory at San Jacinto in 1836. On the family's land in 1834, a teacher named Rutland held what is remembered as the first school session in Fayette County, drawing children from settler families for miles around. The family cemetery opened with David Breeding's burial in 1843 and still holds him and his kin.

Brenham, TX

Brenham Presbyterian Church was founded in 1877 by the Rev. Warner B. Riggs and a small band of charter members, and within three years its rolls topped fifty names and a sanctuary rose on West Main Street. Financial hardship once forced the church to close for eight years, but the congregation endured and kept serving the community. Since 1951 it has worshipped in a sanctuary originally built in 1913 by the Fourth Street Methodist Church.

Douglass, TX

This family burial ground dates to 1816, when East Texas was still Spanish and later Mexican territory, and it holds members of the Brewer family who helped win Texas independence. Henry and John Brewer took part in the Battle of Nacogdoches, an 1832 clash that pushed Mexican forces from the town, while Henry Mitchell Brewer fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. Their graves record a household woven directly into the fight for the Texas Republic.

Cushing, TX

In 1835 the Mexican government granted Henry Brewer a league of land — some 4,000 acres — where settlers built log cabins by the springs and farmed, raised stock, and mined iron on the peak variously called Flowery, Brewer, or Iron Mountain. Brewer and his son John fought in the 1832 Battle of Nacogdoches, and Henry Mitchel Brewer served at San Jacinto before John later joined the Confederacy. A 1936 Texas Centennial marker honors the family and doubles as a grave marker; descendants revived the overgrown cemetery in 2001.

Alpine, TX

Carved from Presidio County and created in 1887, Brewster County grew in 1897 when the territory of the short-lived Buchel and Foley counties was added, making it the largest county by area in Texas. It was named for Henry Percy Brewster, a soldier and statesman remembered as a hero of San Jacinto. Its seat, first called Murphyville in 1887, was renamed Alpine in 1889.

Alpine, TX

Erected in 1887 as vast Brewster County was carved out of the Big Bend country of far West Texas, this courthouse anchored civic life in the frontier town of Alpine. It served the neighboring Buchel and Foley counties too, until those areas were folded into Brewster. Generations later, the courthouse square remains the gathering place for community events.

Bowie, TX

After the Civil War, with new rail lines opening and frontier conflicts fading, settlers poured into this corner of Montague County — and many of those pioneers now rest at Briar Creek. The earliest burials, in the late 1870s, were Kentucky-born G.W. Simmons and an infant of the Dooley family; land for the graveyard was later deeded by Simmons's sister Margaret and her husband, G.W. Burnett. An early school once stood on the adjoining land, but only the cemetery survives to mark where the community's first families lived and died.

Screven County, GA

In 1827, on land deeded by the Rev. Peyton L. Wade, Screven County Methodists raised a brick sanctuary they simply called 'Brick Church,' successor to an earlier log meeting house on nearby Rocky Creek. The congregation traced its roots to the Rev. John Crawford, remembered as the founder of Methodism in the community, whose widow later married Wade. The original 1827 building still stands on the site.

Chapman, TX

This burial ground began in 1861 when Eli Buckner set aside a half-acre around his family's graves as a public cemetery, and it grew as pioneer families poured into the Chapman community—among them the Reverend J. C. Alford Bridges, who reportedly arrived from the Deep South with ten children in twenty covered wagons. A Confederate veteran, Bridges bought the land in gold and gave it his name, and his descendants served as postmasters and neighbors for generations. Today the cemetery holds pioneers, dozens of veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam, and, in unmarked graves, people believed to have been enslaved.

The Colony, TX

The Bridges settlement, reportedly the oldest in Denton County, took root in 1843 as part of the Peters Colony land-grant venture. This cemetery, on land granted to W. A. Bridges in 1850, holds burials dating to 1855, including many children and Civil War soldiers among its early immigrant families. Deeded to the county in 1889, it preserves more than a hundred sandstone and granite markers.

Mount Pleasant vicinity, TX

Relious and Candice Bridges settled here in the late 1850s with Candice's brother Thomas Grissom, and in 1867 the family gave land for a Methodist church and cemetery. Loss came quickly: Mary Bridges Williams died in childbirth in 1868, and both Relious and Candice died on the same October day that year, with six of their children later interred here. A 1904 tornado scattered the fragile wooden markers before order was restored.

Roganville, TX

Ruffin C. Turner, a settler from North Carolina, built this house between 1838 and 1840, in the days of the Republic of Texas. Its lumber was pit-sawn and hand-planed, its plan a frontier design with an enclosed hall, and the original glass still glows in the fanlight and entry panels. The yard is famous in its own right, holding what has been recognized as the largest red cedar tree in the United States.

Melissa, TX

In 1844, after a Red River flood, Hiram Brinlee moved his family to present-day Collin County, building a general store and blacksmith shop in a community called Stony Point, or Chambliss. His wife Elizabeth was the niece and ward of Collin McKinney, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The family set aside a burial ground east of their homestead; among its roughly 70 marked graves are many children and victims of accidents—stark reminders of how hard early frontier life could be—along with a number of veterans and, likely, unmarked burials of enslaved people.

Silverton, TX

Created in 1876 and organized in 1892, Briscoe County honors Andrew Briscoe, a defender of Texas liberty who fought at the Battle of Concepción, the capture of Bexar, and San Jacinto before serving as chief justice of Harris County. Carved from the vast Bexar Territory, the county took shape as settlement pushed into the Texas Panhandle, with Silverton as its seat. Its very name links this frontier land to the generation that won Texas independence.

Silverton, TX

Built in 1894 of stone hand-cut and hauled by horse-drawn wagon from Tule Canyon, this jail anchored law and order in newly organized Briscoe County. Early sheriffs and their families even lived in it as a residence, and during World War I its lower floor served as a workroom for Red Cross sewing volunteers. Sturdy and plain, it endured as a symbol of frontier justice on the High Plains.

Leming, TX

Brite Cemetery has served Atascosa County since the 1850s, formally set aside when pioneer Thomas Ransdele Brite died in 1859, though his infant son's 1854 grave is the earliest marked burial. Brite came to Texas in 1839, served in the Republic of Texas Army campaigns and the Mexican-American War, and became the county's first tax assessor-collector. Among those buried here are Texas Ranger and Mexican-American War veteran Robert E. Neill and San Jacinto veteran Alfred Kelso, alongside many other early settlers.

Graham, TX

Britt Johnson, a formerly enslaved African American frontiersman, worked as a cowboy and scout near Fort Belknap when the Elm Creek Raid of October 1864 killed his son and carried his wife and children into captivity. He tracked his family and, by daring and stealth, recovered them from Indian Territory. In 1871 Kiowa warriors attacked his camp near this spot; the more than one hundred spent shells around his body testified to the fierce fight he and two companions waged before they were killed.

Dawson, TX

Rewarded with a bounty of Navarro County land for fighting at San Jacinto in 1836, cattleman Britton Dawson settled here in 1847 and first lived in a three-room cabin. In 1858–59 he raised a two-and-a-half-story Greek Revival house of cypress hauled by oxcart from the Gulf Coast, complete with an unusual suspended second-floor gallery; the home sheltered his large family and doubled as a stage stop, and his sons later gave land for the town of Dawson.

Morgan County, UT

This marker traces the desperate route of the Donner Party, the California-bound emigrants who in 1846 struggled through the Wasatch Mountains, unable to force a path down Dixie Hollow and instead turning up Broad Hollow. Their exhausting detour through this rough country cost precious time—days that would prove fatal when they were later trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada. Mormon pioneers followed the same broken trail a year later.

Mount Pleasant, TX

Paris and Mary Broadstreet built this farmhouse soon after arriving from Mississippi in 1861, settling southeast of present Mount Pleasant. Their son Samuel earned a medical degree in Louisville in 1888 and practiced from the house for two years before moving to a town office, going on to serve Titus County as a physician for nearly half a century. The house was moved and restored in 1971 and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark the following year.

Fort Worth, TX

Nine people gathered on the last day of 1882 to organize what began as South Side Baptist Church, worshiping in a rented hall before building on Broadway and St. Louis Avenue and taking the name Broadway Baptist in 1890. A devastating 1909 fire that leveled more than 200 South Side structures destroyed the church, parsonage, and members' homes, yet the congregation rebuilt at once. By its centennial it counted over 2,500 members and had helped launch at least seven other Baptist churches.

Brock, TX

In 1876 James and Sarah Maddux moved from Arkansas to this Parker County community, then called Olive Branch, and in 1880 donated land for a school, cemetery, and churches. The Methodist congregation they helped charter in 1882 met first in a brush arbor, then a log building, sharing quarters with the Baptists until it built its own sanctuary in 1908. Through decline and revival, the church has remained active in community life for well over a century.

Luckenbach, TX

Established in 1870 near Luckenbach in Gillespie County, Brodbeck Family Cemetery lies in the heart of the German Hill Country settled by immigrant families in the mid-nineteenth century. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery honors it as an enduring trace of one of those pioneering families.

Bronte, TX

Known first as Oso and Broncho in the early 1880s, this Coke County town was formally named in 1890 for the English novelist Charlotte Brontë and incorporated in 1907. Its economy rested on ranching in the semi-arid country at the eastern edge of the Permian Basin. Major oil and gas development after 1948 added a new chapter to the old cattle town.

Brookeland, TX

The Brookeland area was served by pioneer Methodist circuit riders as early as the 1840s, when preachers like Thomas Jefferson Jacks brought worship into settlers' cabins on the Bear Creek circuit. In 1876 Mary L. White Hamilton conveyed three acres for a church, school, and cemetery, giving rise to what became Brookeland United Methodist Church. A permanent sanctuary followed in 1907, and the congregation held steady through the Great Depression and decades of population decline.

Hostyn, TX

This Fayette County homesite sits on land whose owners were swept up in Texas's fight for independence: Samuel Brookfield bought it in 1835 and died at the Alamo the next year, while his son Francis and Musgrove Evans fought at San Jacinto. In 1838 the Republic's Congress even voted to make this land the site of its capital, "Austin," before Sam Houston vetoed the bill. When Mexican troops seized San Antonio in 1842, the Maverick family took refuge here, and local men including Francis Brookfield died in the Dawson Massacre that September.

Raytown, MO

In the decades after Missouri gained statehood in 1821, families like the Brookings helped organize civic life on the young state's frontier. This family burying ground holds Alvan Brooking (1796–1857), who served his community as a county judge and rose to the Missouri state senate. Small family cemeteries like this one dot the countryside around Kansas City, quiet reminders of the settlers who built local government out of open prairie.

Goliad, TX

This one-story home in early Goliad passed through three families whose names it now carries. Bivian Brooking built it before 1850; Dr. Leonidas S. Lipscomb bought it from Brooking's children in 1879; and Ruth P. and James A. White purchased it in 1905. Its early Texas Vernacular design — a central hall or enclosed dog-trot, triangular window lintels, and a broken-pitch roof with gable-end chimneys — preserves the everyday building traditions of the young state.

Haslam, TX

Georgia-born brothers Henry and William Brook migrated to Shelby County by 1850, and Henry secured 320 acres under a Republic of Texas land act—land he later had to defend all the way to the Texas Supreme Court. His 1871 burial began Brookland Cemetery, and after his death his widow Mary Jane ran the family farm, operated the Brookland-Logansport ferry, and gave land for a Methodist church. What started as a family graveyard grew into a community burial ground serving both Shelby County and neighboring Louisiana, still tended by an association founded in 1912.

Meadow, TX

The town of Meadow shifted to this spot to meet the railroad in 1917, and by 1922 a blacksmith shop stood on the site. Alabama-born, World War I veteran brothers Leslie and Herschel Brooks brought water-drilling know-how to the area, and through marriage and partnership the Brooks Blacksmith Shop became a three-generation family enterprise. Serving farms and ranches until it closed in 1996, the shop was also a gathering place at the heart of the community.

Shafter, TX

George H. Brooks fought in a California volunteer unit during the Civil War before settling in remote Presidio County in the 1860s and marrying Ygnacia Reza, a native of Mexico. The family cemetery began in 1904 with the burial of their son Albion, and it grew to hold Brooks kin, a former Texas Ranger, and friends and relatives from the Fuentes and Gonzales families. Still active and tended by the Shafter community, it remains a living record of a borderland family.