Westward Expansion

Rankin, TX

This round, flat-topped mesa rises some 475 feet above the surrounding plain, a remnant of a vast limestone cap that once blanketed the region. It belongs to the great geologic uplift of the Permian Basin, an area that was a shallow prehistoric sea more than a hundred million years ago. Erosion has since stripped away most of that ancient rock, leaving buttes and mesas like this one standing above the West Texas landscape.

Tahoka, TX

In December 1902, more than a hundred settlers gathered around a bonfire in a ravine near Tahoka Lake and voted to organize a county and lay out a seat, borrowing an Indian word said to mean fresh water. A townsite company surveyed and platted the town in 1903, and stores, churches, a courthouse, a newspaper, and a post office followed in quick order. The Santa Fe line reached Tahoka in 1910, and for years it ranked among the nation's busiest cattle-shipping points.

Columbus, TX

Physician and civil engineer Charles William Tait came from Alabama in 1844 and opened the 6,000-acre Sylvania Plantation, growing cotton, corn, and cane and firing brick and lime. Enslaved workers hewed the logs and fired the brick that built the plantation headquarters compound in 1847. A grandson relocated and restored the double log barn and slave cabin here in 1969–70.

Stillwater, MN

Here in 1839, when this land still lay in Crawford County of Wisconsin Territory, fur trader and pioneer Joseph R. Brown built the Tamarack House and laid out the townsite he called Dahcotah. As a member of the territorial legislature the next year, Brown pushed through legislation that helped organize the St. Croix valley for settlement. His enterprise marks the very beginnings of what would become Minnesota.

Fort Worth, TX

Scottish-born Robert Watt Tannahill and his wife Mary Catherine came to Tarrant County from Mississippi in 1853 and patented a 320-acre tract on the Fort Worth-Azle Road. In 1874 Tannahill built a stone house from a nearby creek bank that served many roles at once — a county judge's residence, a post office from 1878 to 1885, and the first stagecoach stop west of Fort Worth. The homestead later passed to pioneer William Thomas Tinsley and others.

Eureka County, NV

The Tannehill brothers raised this cabin in 1864 as one of the first houses in the new mining camp of Eureka, living in it about a year before selling their claims to a New York company. It later passed through many hands, including the pioneering mercantile firm of Nathan & Harrison. Having survived fires, floods, and the passage of time, the cabin endures as a rare relic of Eureka's earliest days.

Burkeville, TX

Thomas and Charlotte Tanner arrived in Mexican Texas in the late 1820s and raised twelve children on land they bought along McGraw Creek. When Thomas—a veteran of the Republic of Texas army—was buried on the hill overlooking his property in 1862, he began a cemetery that soon served the wider community. Generations of Tanners followed, including sons who wore Confederate gray and later kin who served in both world wars, their more than fifty family names now scattered across the headstones.

Boone County, KY

Tanner's Station, founded in 1789, was the first settlement in Boone County, begun when the Baptist preacher Rev. John Tanner built a blockhouse on 2,000 acres he owned with John Taylor. Shawnees captured Tanner's nine-year-old son here and held him until he was grown. Tanner, who had preached in the Carolinas and Virginia before coming to Kentucky in 1781, later moved on to Missouri and died there around 1812; the town was renamed Petersburg in 1818.

Fort Worth, TX

Built between 1893 and 1895 in red Texas granite, the Tarrant County Courthouse rose in the Renaissance Revival style, its designers deliberately echoing the Texas State Capitol save for the addition of a clock tower. Its $408,840 price tag struck many citizens as such an extravagance that voters turned out the County Commissioners' Court in 1894. The building nonetheless became an enduring civic landmark of Fort Worth as the city surged into the Gilded Age.

Fort Worth, TX

Rising in 1917–18 on ground that once held old Camp Worth, the 1849 frontier post that gave Fort Worth its name, this building put the county's justice system under one roof. The prominent local firm of Sanguinet and Staats gave it Beaux Arts and Classical Revival dignity, while inside it held not only a criminal courtroom but a jail, gallows, hospital, mental wards, and the offices of sheriff, district attorney, and district clerk.

Gilmer, TX

At a strategic crossing of Big Cypress Creek, this pioneer ferry carried settlers pressing west into the Texas interior, many arriving through the busy river port of Jefferson and stopping for provisions at nearby Coffeeville. James L. Tarver, who lived on the Coffeeville Road, likely worked the ferry in the 1860s. Long before wagons and oxen came this way, the Caddo people forded the stream at the very same spot, until a bridge built by 1867 finally rendered the ferry obsolete.

Boys Ranch, TX

For a rowdy decade beginning in 1877, Tascosa was the cowboy capital of the Texas Panhandle, a wide-open town where hands from the great ranches gathered and where legends like Billy the Kid were said to pass through. Its name garbled the Spanish Atascoso, or "boggy," first attached to a nearby creek. It served as seat of Oldham County until 1915, then faded into the frontier legend celebrated in Wild West fiction.

Boys Ranch, TX

Built in 1884, the Tascosa courthouse served twelve counties across the Texas Panhandle and hosted trials for the gunfights that filled the town's notorious Boothill Cemetery. It remained the seat of Oldham County until 1915 and for years served as headquarters of the Julian Bivins Ranch. In 1939 the building became the birthplace of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, a home for troubled boys that gave the old frontier town a new life.

Arlington, TX

Evan Calloway Tate brought his family from Georgia to this part of North Texas in 1870, founding the Tate Springs community. When he and three of his children died, the family set aside this ground, formally deeding it to the community in 1894. Generations of the Tate family and their neighbors were laid to rest here, many in graves now unmarked, with descendants tending the site into the twentieth century.

Columbus, TX

This Columbus landmark grew in layers that read like a timeline of small-town Texas prosperity: a modest one-story cottage raised about 1867 by Phocian Tate, given a second story and exuberant Victorian porches by merchant A. Senftenberg in 1887, and extended again by Kenneth Brandon in 1900. Its basement, laid with locally made Columbus brick, survives alongside much of the early fabric, and in 1968 the house was acquired to be restored as a period-furnished museum.

Tatum, TX

This burial ground began in 1862 on land that had been the rose garden beside pioneer settler Albert Tatum's plantation home, when his son William was laid to rest there. Tatum's son Paul (1848–1914), known as "Uncle Fox" and donor of the Tatum townsite, deeded the site as a public cemetery in 1914. Still in use, it preserves the memory of the early families who shaped the community's growth.

Kingsville, TX

In March 1846, as Zachary Taylor's army marched from Corpus Christi to the Rio Grande, its four regiments camped in succession at this spot on Santa Gertrudis Creek. Within weeks the Mexican-American War erupted at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma near present Brownsville. The war fixed the Texas boundary at the Rio Grande and, through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, brought vast new territory into the United States — and the officers who camped here, among them future presidents Zachary Taylor and Ulysses S. Grant, went on to command great armies in the Civil War.

Jefferson, TX

Ward Taylor Sr. and Nancy Mathews Taylor came from Alabama to Marion County in 1845, joined by relatives who helped settle the area. The first burial, in May 1860, was four-month-old Emmett Taylor, though family history says the ground was already in use, and legend holds that several enslaved people were buried just outside the fence to the north. The land passed down through the Taylor family, and a cemetery association formed in 1961 to care for its marked and unmarked graves.

Trinity County, TX

This burial ground began in 1852 when a Georgia-born family, the Durdins, buried two young sons on the East Texas land they had settled the year before, setting the plot aside as a family graveyard when they sold the property. The Taylors, who bought the land in 1857, continued burying their kin here and opened the grounds to community burials around 1890. Neighbors from nearby Pegoda came to use and maintain the cemetery, and a caretaking association formed in the 1950s.

Abilene, TX

Created in 1858, Taylor County honors brothers Edward, James, and George Taylor—Tennesseans aged 18, 20, and 22 who came to Texas in 1833 and died together at the Alamo on March 6, 1836. Organized in 1878 with its first seat at Buffalo Gap, the county saw the Fort Concho–Fort Belknap stagecoach and Kansas-bound longhorn herds pass through before the county seat moved to Abilene in 1883. The marker also surveys how Texas named its 254 counties, most for the heroes of independence, statehood, and the Confederacy.

Cuero, TX

Also called Taylor-Bennett Cemetery, this DeWitt County burial ground began with Josiah Taylor, whose grave from 1830 is its oldest. Taylor first entered Texas in 1812 with the Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition, fighting at La Bahía and in the battles of Rosillo and Alazán Creek, then settled with his family as part of the DeWitt Colony in 1829. His descendants included Texas Rangers, veterans of the Texas Revolution, and participants in the Runaway Scrape, and among those buried here are men killed in the notorious Sutton-Taylor Feud.

Oak Point, TX

Samuel and Martha Taylor and their grown sons were among the first to settle the area known as Sand Town, arriving from North Carolina in 1859 with three enslaved people—Kijeah, Matilda, and James—and friends the Lunn family. The Taylors prospered raising crops and livestock, and folklore still recalls the "race mare" that son Moses sold to the outlaw Sam Bass. Not every grave is marked, but the surviving stones chronicle the pioneers who opened the Little Elm area to settlement.

Mason, TX

This sandstone house grew in stages, its first rock rooms built around 1870 and a two-story cut-stone section added in 1875 for Mrs. E. B. Taylor, an Irish immigrant and prominent rancher. The Carter family owned it for nearly a century, adding a frame wing in 1928. Symmetrically arranged around a central hall with arched windows and corbelled chimneys, it carries Italianate touches unusual on the Hill Country ranching frontier.

Georgetown, TX

Georgetown became the seat of Williamson County in 1848, and the Taylor family soon arrived, opening one of the town's earliest stores on the courthouse square. After Emzy Taylor returned from Confederate service in the Civil War, he bought this site in 1869 and built an ashlar-limestone, central-passage house in the National Folk style. Later, he and his son-in-law R.T. Cooper enlarged it around 1889 with Greek Revival elements — a wraparound portico, columns, and a formal dining room — creating the layered home that reflects the family's rising fortunes.

Del Rio, TX

Around 1870, James H. Taylor—one of the five founders of Del Rio—and his Mexican-born wife Paula moved from Uvalde and built this one-story adobe home. Taylor prospered as a landowner, merchant, and gristmill operator until his death in 1876. Paula later remarried, ran the house as a boarding home, and became a benefactress to the city's Mexican community, giving land for a school and a cemetery; the house stayed in her family until 1939.

Georgetown, TX

John McQueen Taylor came to Texas from Tennessee in 1829 as a colonist in Lorenzo de Zavala's empresario grant, arriving while the region was still Mexican territory. He took part in the 1834 Anahuac disturbances and, as a soldier in the Texas Army, fought in the Grass Fight and the Siege of Bexar during the Revolution. He later served as a justice of the peace before settling in Williamson County to raise his family.

Comanche vicinity, TX

This burial ground began beside the Concord Primitive Baptist Church, organized before 1881 in the pioneer country north of Comanche, with its earliest marked grave that of F. M. Warren in that same year. Warren's father, Posey W. Warren, was a deacon and likely founder of the church, and the surrounding land belonged to large settler families like the Browns, one of whom was a Confederate veteran. When a Methodist congregation formed here in 1901 on land from Alabama native James "Hood" Taylor, the site took on the name Taylor's Chapel Cemetery.

Comanche, TX

In 1901 a Methodist circuit preacher gathered area families under a brush arbor near Soda Springs, and the next year Hood Taylor deeded land that gave the congregation its name. For generations the church anchored a scattered rural community, often worshipping outdoors under arbors and tabernacles even after its first sanctuary rose in 1902. A handful of long-serving pastors, two of them together spanning more than thirty years, carried it into its second century.

Junction, TX

Rising over the Kimble County landscape, distinctively shaped Teacup Mountain served as a natural lookout for both Native peoples and settlers in pioneer days. The rugged country around it saw the frontier violence of the 1870s, including the 1872 killing of settler James Bradberry, Sr. In 1878 Texas Rangers under Lt. N. O. Reynolds captured a wanted man nearby.

Aurora, TX

John Teague, a veteran of the U.S. war with Mexico, brought his family from Missouri to settle this North Texas land in 1858 and later served on the frontier during the Civil War. The burial ground that bears his name holds about thirty graves, its earliest inscribed stone marking the Rev. Jacob Moffett, killed by Indians in September 1865. When Teague moved on to Foard County in 1885, the cemetery fell out of use as other plots opened nearby.

Matador, TX

In the 1870s, when the southern buffalo herd still darkened the plains of West Texas, traders threw up a rough camp of picket houses and tents where the Middle Pease River meets Tee Pee Creek, naming it for the abandoned tipi poles scattered along the water. Charles Rath and his partners hauled in wagons, cattle, and dance-hall gear to profit from the hide trade before moving on. As the hunters emptied the range, Tee Pee City settled into a hard-drinking outpost of saloons, gambling, and gunplay wild enough to draw the Texas Rangers, until the Matador Land and Cattle Company bought the land and shut the saloon in 1904.

Matador, TX

In the late 1870s, when the southern buffalo herds were being slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, Tee Pee City rose as a hunters' camp on the empty plains — for a few years the only settlement between Henrietta, Fort Griffin, and old Fort Elliott. Captain G.W. Arrington's Texas Rangers used it as a base while policing the raw frontier, and the birth of Nora Cooper here in 1882 marked the first for Motley County. By 1886 the buffalo were gone and the town with them, leaving only graves and memory.

Saratoga, TX

Alabama-born Richard Teel reached East Texas in the 1850s, married Nancy Hart, and settled in what is now the Big Thicket. When their son died in 1893 he was buried beside the family home, and in 1908 Teel formally set the ground aside as a cemetery. Its sixty-odd graves gather the Teels with the relatives, friends, and neighbors who were the area's first permanent settlers.

San Augustine, TX

This burying ground began in 1856 when George W. Teel was laid to rest beneath a pear tree by his home. Teel and his wife Rebecca had come from Arkansas in 1824 as colonists in Stephen F. Austin's 'Old Three Hundred,' later settling here to farm and keep an inn; he also served as a university trustee and fought in the Battle of Nacogdoches and the Texas War for Independence. Kin buried alongside him include a son who served as a Confederate soldier and county officeholder.

Tehuacana, TX

Perched on one of the highest points between Dallas and Houston, Tehuacana was home to the Tehuacana Indians, a Wichita people who farmed here until Cherokee raids destroyed them in the early 1830s. Settler John Boyd secured a Mexican land grant in 1835, and the town he built even vied to become the state capital in 1850. Its Presbyterian academy helped spark the founding of Trinity University in 1869, and later colleges kept the hilltop a seat of learning for generations.

Pearsall, TX

Deeded from the land of James and Amanda Bandy, Tehuacana Cemetery received its first burial in 1875, and the surrounding community soon added acreage for a log church, a school, and a frame parsonage. The graveyard holds the region's early pioneers, including victims of the smallpox epidemics that swept through in 1882–1884 and a dozen Confederate veterans. When the church relocated to Medina County in 1900, the cemetery endured as a record of frontier settlement.

Tehuacana, TX

Tehuacana grew up around John Boyd, a Republic of Texas congressman who moved here in the 1840s and opened the town's first post office in his store in 1847. His gift of land and money brought Trinity University to the hilltop town in 1869, and the cemetery's oldest documented grave belongs to his infant granddaughter, who died in 1850. Among the many small headstones testifying to the frontier's harshness lie college founders, a state comptroller, and Boyd himself, a roll call of the town's rise as an early Texas education center.

Ft. Stockton, TX

On the frontier at Fort Stockton, where the U.S. Army guarded the roads across the Trans-Pecos, a small building did double duty for a growing settlement. The smaller structure served as the first office for the army telegraph line that reached the post in 1876, wiring this remote outpost into the nation's communications network, and by 1883 the site also hosted the area's first school. It marks the moment a military fort began turning into a civilian community.

Telegraph, TX

Named for a canyon whose trees supplied telegraph poles in the mid-1800s, this remote Hill Country crossroads gained a store and post office around 1890–1900, when Ruth Holmes became its first commissioned postmistress. For generations it served as a stopover for travelers and vacationers along the South Llano River, and it even functioned as the local mailing address of Texas Governor Coke Stevenson. The rustic building has anchored this small Kimble County community for more than a century.

Granbury, TX

Organized in 1854 as the Methodist Protestant Church, this is among Hood County's oldest institutions, rooted in the pioneer community of Center Mill. Early worshippers gathered under a brush arbor and sometimes cut services short when Native Americans were reported nearby, before building a log structure around 1870 that doubled as school and lodge hall. Frame buildings followed, and the congregation has endured into the present.

Mobeetie, TX

A son of Texas hero Sam Houston, Temple Lea Houston became a brilliant courtroom attorney and served this Panhandle county in the state senate in the 1880s. Known for his eloquence, he delivered the dedicatory address for the new Texas Capitol in 1888. He practiced in the old courthouse near this spot and made his home nearby with his wife and three sons.

Panhandle, TX

Born in the Governor's Mansion as the last child of Sam Houston, Temple Lea Houston came to the Texas Panhandle in 1881 as a young district attorney and won a state senate seat in 1884 before he was even of legal age. Tall, handsome, and famed as an orator, he championed frontier interests and delivered the keynote at the 1888 dedication of the new Austin capitol, proudly noting that Panhandle lands had paid for it. He later moved to Oklahoma, where his courtroom eloquence made him a legend in his own lifetime.

Sonoma, CA · est. 1951

Temple Lodge No. 14, chartered in the early 1850s as California entered statehood, was among the civic institutions that knit together the young town of Sonoma. This plaque, placed in 1951, honors the lodge's founders and a century of members, and marks the 1909 building recognized as a City of Sonoma historic structure. Fraternal orders like the Masons were fixtures of community life across the settling West.

Houston, TX

Chartered on May 10, 1838, Temple Lodge was the fourth Masonic organization in Texas and the first established in the young Republic, whose seat of government then sat in newly founded Houston. Its founders read like a roll of Texas statesmen—George Fisher as first worshipful master, San Jacinto veteran Richard Bache, and future governor Francis R. Lubbock. The lodge met in the Senate Chamber of the Houston capitol and conducted the Republic's first Masonic burial in July 1838.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Founded in 1838 by settlers who rolled in by wagon from the Old South, Tennessee Colony chased fertile, well-watered farmland — and found wealth in cotton shipped down the Trinity from Magnolia Ferry. The town grew into a trade center reaching as far as Dallas, with stores, craftsmen, a Masonic lodge, and a two-story church-school-lodge hall finished in 1860. Its schools were famous enough to draw students from surrounding towns, including the Clark brothers who would later help found the forerunner of Texas Christian University.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Settlers from the southern states founded Tennessee Colony in 1838, a decade before Anderson County existed, and one of their first acts was to raise a log church on a nearby hill. The burial ground beside it holds graves reaching back to the 1840s and 1850s, though most were marked only by fieldstones long since scattered; the oldest legible stone belongs to Mrs. Manurva E. Shelton, who died in 1862. Deeded to a cemetery association in 1974, it still serves the community it has held for well over a century.

Crockett County, TN

This marker points the way to the grave of a Revolutionary War soldier who joined the Continental cause in 1776 and endured the brutal winter encampment at Valley Forge, where Washington's ragged army drilled itself into a disciplined fighting force. After years of battle he turned west, fighting in the frontier campaigns against Native nations before receiving an honorable discharge at Pittsburgh — then the raw edge of American settlement at Fort Pitt. Like many aging veterans, he eventually followed the frontier south and west, coming to rest in the West Tennessee country that became Crockett County.

Timpson, TX

This East Texas congregation began in 1857 as a Union church serving Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian families, many of whom had migrated from Tennessee. First called Mount Carmel, its one-room frame building — with log seats — doubled as the community schoolhouse, and the name changed to Tennessee Church by 1871. The three denominations shared quarters, including a two-story building whose upper floor housed a Woodmen of the World lodge, until they finally divided in 1913.

Belton vicinity, TX

In 1851, eight families from Tennessee came to this curve of the Leon River looking for good, affordable farmland, and named their new home Tennessee Valley. Sheltered by the Sparta Mountains, its fields gave grain, cotton, nuts, and peaches for nearly a century, though the Leon River's floods were a recurring threat. In 1954 that same river was dammed to create Belton Lake, deliberately flooding Tennessee Valley and two neighboring communities to protect the wider region.

Tennyson, TX

The rolling country around Mt. Margaret in Coke County was long ranged by Native peoples before open-range cattlemen moved in during the late 1870s. Permanent settlers followed in the 1880s, and in 1894 a post office opened under the unlikely name of the British poet Alfred Tennyson, with Sarah E. Kiser as its first postmaster. Schools came and went, but the community's ties endured through an annual homecoming and Easter sunrise services held near the old landmark hill.

Panhandle, TX

Renamed from "Carson City" in 1887, Panhandle was expected to boom as the meeting point of two railroads — until the Fort Worth & Denver City line swung 16 miles south, seeding Amarillo instead. Yet the town thrived anyway as a shipping hub, moving more freight during the great ranching era and the 1926 oil boom than any other stop on the Santa Fe line except Chicago.

Post, TX

Terrace Cemetery grew out of the earliest days of Post City, the model town founded on the Caprock in 1907 by cereal magnate C.W. Post. When two young deaths made a burial ground necessary, the Double U Company appealed to Post at his Battle Creek, Michigan headquarters; he supplied both land and a layout, along with a somber note on bowing to a power greater than his own. Platted at just under twenty acres in 1912, the cemetery has since grown to hold several thousand graves.

Post, TX

When cereal magnate C. W. Post founded Post City in 1908, workers gathered round rocks from nearby ranch canyons to build the piers of this cemetery gateway. Scottish immigrants George Samson and James Napier designed and built it, and Samson went on to serve the community as a leader for half a century.

Sanderson, TX

Terrell County was carved from Pecos County in 1905, part of the wave of new counties organized across West Texas as railroads and ranching pushed settlement into the arid Trans-Pecos. It was named for Alexander Watkins Terrell (1827–1912), a Confederate officer who went on to serve sixteen years in the Texas Legislature. The town of Sanderson, a stop on the Southern Pacific line, became its seat of government.

Alto, TX

Organized in 1851 and chartered by the Grand Lodge of Texas the next year, this Masonic lodge first met in the small Linwood community before relocating to Alto in 1852. It was named for a prominent public figure of the Republic of Texas who served as its attorney general and represented the young nation as both an Indian commissioner and a diplomat abroad. The lodge worshiped in two earlier buildings before its present hall was built in 1966.

San Saba, TX

In 1859, Stephen Woodson Terry and his wife Volumnia Jane moved their family from Tennessee to this part of San Saba County, joining the first wave of pioneers to the area. The family cemetery has held Terry descendants and friends since 1880, when their ten-year-old daughter Pocahontas became its first burial. Stephen served the frontier community as its tenth county sheriff, and later kin like Judge Lloyd Warden Terry carried the family's public service forward.

Brownfield, TX

Carved from Young and Bexar territories and created in 1876, Terry County was not formally organized until 1904, when settlers finally arrived in numbers to work its farmland. It honors Colonel Benjamin Franklin Terry, the planter who raised the celebrated Terry's Texas Rangers cavalry regiment and fell early in the Civil War in 1861. Brownfield became its county seat at the heart of this farming country.

Brownfield, TX

Terry County had no jail at all until 1916, twelve years after it organized, when this small frame structure with two steel cells went up on the courthouse square. A new courthouse jail replaced it in 1926, and the little building passed to farmer A. T. Fowler, who moved it to his land and plastered its walls for storage. Donated to the Terry County Heritage Museum in 1974, it was relocated and restored on this site.

Yoakum, TX

Founded in the 1850s and named for the family of county judge James D. Terry, Terryville raised a cavalry company for the Confederate Army and had a post office by 1869. In the 1880s the post office and most residents relocated about 2.5 miles away, and the original office closed in 1907. Today an old cemetery marks the first townsite while a Baptist church survives at the second.

Marion, TX

This limestone and stucco house, built in the 1870s, was the home of Carl August Edward Tewes, a German immigrant who arrived in 1854, served in the Civil War, and became a Guadalupe County merchant and longtime New Berlin postmaster. Its central-hall plan marks it as a characteristic early Texas pioneer dwelling, and it stayed in the Tewes family for a full century until 1976. The house embodies the German immigrant experience that shaped south-central Texas.