Westward Expansion

Italy, TX

The Sims family were among the first pioneers of Ellis County, settling along Chambers Creek in 1851 where Nicholas P. Sims operated a mill and helped lay out the county's early roads. In 1852 Nicholas donated land for a Methodist church and, with his brother-in-law Ezekial Marshall Brack, organized the Waxahachie Masonic Lodge; Brack went on to serve as county judge. Over 150 years the family built ranches, a cotton gin, and — through bequests from Nicholas and his stepson S. M. Dunlap — public libraries in Waxahachie and Italy.

Arlington, TX

Few places wear their layered past as openly as Texas, where six national flags have flown in turn. From Spain's banner planted beside missionary crosses in 1519, to La Salle's ill-fated French colony, to Mexican rule, the Republic of Texas born at San Jacinto, U.S. statehood, and the Confederacy, each era left its mark on the land. This exhibit distills more than three centuries of conquest, revolution, and settlement into the story of a single state.

Smyer, TX

Isaac Ellwood, who made a fortune as one of the inventors and manufacturers of barbed wire, bought this vast South Plains range in 1889 from the veteran cattlemen D.H. and J.W. Snyder. Branded with the "Spade," the ranch was first stocked with calves from Ellwood's southern Renderbrook Spring holdings and eventually stretched fifty-four miles across several Panhandle counties before farmland sales moved its headquarters in the 1920s. Ellwood's descendants still own and operate it today.

Nacogdoches, TX

Standing on the Pedro Esparza Grant confirmed by Spain around 1810, this pioneer home belonged to Dr. John Marion Sparks, whose family reached Texas in 1832 and whose father Richard served as the last alcalde of Nacogdoches before the Texas Revolution. Built before 1851 and enlarged in 1884, the typical East Texas dwelling was moved to its present site for restoration in 1971.

Burkeville, TX

Spears Chapel was organized in 1839—when Texas was still an independent republic—by the Rev. Moses Spear, its first log meetinghouse rising on land owned by William McMahon. Its charter membership drew heavily on the family of the Rev. Henry Stephenson, who had founded the first permanent Methodist church in Texas at McMahan Chapel in 1834. Fire claimed the original building in 1883, and the present church dates to 1905, with services held here into 1939.

Panhandle, TX

In the mid-1880s the Niedringhaus brothers of St. Louis hauled lumber by ox-cart from Dodge City to raise this simple square house on their N Bar N Ranch in the Texas Panhandle. When the Southern Kansas Railway pushed toward Panhandle City in 1887, a railroad official lived here, and over the years bankers, ranchers, judges, and a sheriff called it home. Now the oldest house in town, it was restored in 1965 as the Carson County Museum.

Bedford, PA · est. 1951

When the Penn family had their Manor of Bedford surveyed in 1761, they set aside these public squares as property of the town itself. It was a piece of deliberate colonial town planning on the Pennsylvania frontier, carried out by the heirs of William Penn during the proprietary era, laying out communal ground for a settlement that guarded the route across the mountains.

Hale Center, TX

Before roads reached the South Plains, mail and news arrived by whatever route a contractor could lay off with a compass. Around 1890 that route fell to Stant Rhea, a small, red-haired man who drove wild Spanish mules on a 240-mile round trip between Amarillo and this area three times a week, carrying the mail for nineteen years. Six miles east he kept a mule corral and a dugout that doubled as a waiting room for passengers, until railroads finally rendered his stage line obsolete.

San Antonio, TX

Erected in 1867, this San Antonio building housed the workshop of Diedrich Heye, a German-born master leather craftsman who made the saddles, bridles, and harness that outfitted the great age of Texas ranching and trail driving. Among his customers was Captain Richard King of the legendary King Ranch. A century later the building was restored in tribute to its history, its Victorian brick facade, arched windows, and native limestone walls preserved.

Windthorst, TX

Named for rock formations resembling teepees and once an Indian ceremonial ground, the Stone Houses gave their name to a sharp frontier clash on November 10, 1837. Lieutenant A. Van Benthousen and 18 Rangers, tracking stolen horses, were attacked nearby by a much larger Keechi force; ten Rangers and many warriors fell in a three-hour fight before the survivors escaped on foot. In 1874 the area's first permanent home was built close by the formations.

Stoneham, TX

Franklin Jarvis Greenwood, who came to Texas in 1829, donated the land for this burial ground, first called 'High Point' after a nearby settlement. Its earliest known graves hold two of his daughters, lost to cholera in 1856, and victims of yellow fever were specially marked to guard against the spread of epidemics. Many buried here descend from Stephen F. Austin's original colonists; the cemetery and town took the name 'Stoneham' after John H. Stoneham gave land for the railroad in 1879.

Burkesville, TX

Founded on land William Williams surveyed under an 1834 Mexican grant, 'The Survey' drew settlers who built the community's first frame house in 1847 from lumber hauled from Alexandria, Louisiana. Farming and later lumbering sustained the families named Booker, Mattox, Cobb, and others, and at least sixteen residents fought for the Confederacy. Shifting population after the 1940s consolidated the school, closed the post office, and disbanded the church, leaving cemeteries and old buildings tended by a local association.

Lander County, NV

After the nation's domain reached the Pacific in 1848, the federal government mounted a series of surveys to map railway routes, wagon roads, water transport, and military relationships across the new territories. Nevada figured in two notable efforts: Captain F.W. Lander's Honey Lake to Fort Kearny wagon road, completed in 1860, and Lieutenant Simpson's 1859 route from Camp Floyd to Genoa. Military engineers such as Stansbury, Marcy, Whipple, Beale, Simpson, and Lander lent their names to the landscape, Lander to a whole Nevada county.

Ennis, TX

Built in 1867 for the Kirkpatrick Presbyterian Church, this Ellis County sanctuary later sheltered several congregations, serving as a Baptist church from 1909 to 1961. Its builders blended Greek Revival lines with High Victorian Italianate flourishes—shoulder architraves, paired cornice brackets, and six-over-six windows. A 1960 tornado tore it from its foundation, but it was stabilized and then fully restored to its historic appearance in 1986.

San Angelo, TX

After the Civil War, Congress authorized six regiments of Black soldiers, and in 1867 the Tenth Cavalry organized under Colonel Benjamin Grierson. Reassigned west to escape discrimination at Fort Leavenworth, the regiment reached Fort Concho in 1875, where its troopers endured grueling scouting and mapping expeditions across the high plains. They played a key role in the 1880 defeat of the Mescalero Apache leader Victorio before moving on to Fort Davis and, in later generations, service around the world.

Abilene, TX

Chartered by Congress in 1871 to reach the Pacific, the Texas & Pacific Railway pushed across West Texas in 1880 under railroad magnate Thomas A. Scott and engineer Grenville M. Dodge, the veteran builder of the Union Pacific. The first train reached Abilene in January 1881, and a station—housed at first in a boxcar—opened weeks later. To seed a town, railway agents auctioned 178 lots in March 1881 for over $27,000, launching what grew into the commercial center of central West Texas.

Waco, TX

The arrival of cheap barbed wire in the late 1870s collided head-on with Texas's tradition of free grazing on open public land. As farmers fenced their crops and drought-stricken ranchers lost cattle in the 1880s, fence-cutting erupted into a range war that the state criminalized in 1884. Governors dispatched the Texas Rangers, who went undercover to hunt the cutters across the whole sweep of Texas until stockmen finally embraced fencing and windmills of their own.

San Saba, TX

Isolated from courts and railroads, San Saba County in the mid-1800s spawned vigilante "mobs" that first promised protection and then curdled into a secret terror society. By the 1880s the shadowy San Saba Mob — organized like a fraternal lodge, complete with secret signs and midnight meetings at places like Buzzards' Water Hole — was ambushing settlers, leaving victims marked by nine bullet holes. In 1896 the state sent in the Texas Rangers under Sgt. W. J. L. Sullivan and later Capt. Bill McDonald, who paired with District Attorney W. C. Linden to move trials out of the county and finally break the Mob's grip by 1900.

San Augustine, TX

Dr. Samuel Thompson and his wife Precious, with their grown sons, were among the earliest Anglo settlers of the San Augustine area, and Samuel served as alcalde before helping organize local churches and schools. Their sons stood at the center of Texas's founding drama: eldest son Burrell came with Stephen F. Austin's colonists in 1821 and joined the Fredonian Rebellion; others fought in the Texas Revolution, sat in the Convention of 1833, and served in the Republic of Texas Congress. One brother was murdered by horse thieves, another rode with a Ranger company, in the rough world of the frontier borderlands.

Jefferson, TX

Among the oldest homes in Jefferson, this house was begun around 1857 on land owned by "Major" P. M. Graham, a land dealer, surveyor, and the original clerk of Cass County. Merchant Theo Nichols bought it in 1859 and later gave it to his daughter, Mrs. Samuel Thurman, whose family kept a deer park nearby and lived here until 1906, lending the place its lasting name. Its long chain of owners traces the rise of Jefferson as an important antebellum riverport town.

Marble Falls, TX

The Nat Tobey family came from Indiana to Burnet County's Backbone Valley in the 1850s, and sons Avery and Samuel bought land here in 1868. When twelve-year-old N. W. Tobey died in 1872, this hillside became a cemetery serving the surrounding ranches and farms, near a church and school that anchored the little community. Over a century more than 200 graves were laid here, and in 1964 an association formed to preserve the last surviving landmark of a valley settlement.

Graham, TX

This West Texas valley carries the name of the Tonkawa nation, who called themselves "the most human of people" and were settled here on a state-authorized reservation in 1855 before being removed to Indian Territory in 1859. After the Civil War and the opening of the old reserve to settlers in 1873, pioneer families built livestock farms, a dirt-floored log schoolhouse, and rival Baptist and Methodist congregations. A schoolmistress once took a gray plow pony as part of her pay, and by the mid-20th century consolidation folded the little community's schools into nearby Graham.

Langtry, TX

In the 1870s and 80s brothers Cesario, Bernardo, and Juan Torres won prominence in West Texas for their irrigation work, and Bernardo's Val Verde County land was chosen as the route of the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio railroad. After his death Cesario built the 7D Ranch and gave land for the rail line and depot. His son J.P. Torres, reportedly Langtry's first permanent resident, became Val Verde County's first Hispanic elected official, alternating as justice of the peace with his rival, the legendary Roy Bean.

Yoakum, TX

This memorial honors the cowboys who drove great herds of longhorns out of Southwest Texas between 1867 and 1887, the heyday of the long cattle drives north to railheads and open ranges. Yoakum sat squarely along the routes these trail drivers followed.

Trinidad, TX

Fed by its West, Elm, and East forks, the Trinity River has drawn people to its valley for thousands of years — the prehistoric Malakoff Man carved stone heads found nearby attest to habitation in the distant past, and Indian villages lined its banks when Europeans arrived. French explorer La Salle called it the River of Canoes in 1687, and the Spaniard Alonso de León gave it the name "Trinity" in 1690. Its fertile floodplain lured Republic-era settlers, and steamboats carried cotton, cattle, and lumber toward Galveston until the railroads arrived and ended the riverboat era, giving rise to towns like Trinidad.

Scranton, PA · est. 1993

In 1771, Isaac Tripp became the first settler of what would become Scranton, and by about 1778 his son had begun the building that still stands as the oldest in Lackawanna County. Both men represented the region in Connecticut's Assembly—a reminder of the era when Connecticut claimed this stretch of the Susquehanna Valley. Successive generations reshaped the house in Federal and later Victorian styles, keeping it in the Tripp family until 1900.

Santa Anna, TX

Built in 1886 by a Mississippi attorney in a colonial style, this house was enlarged from eight to twelve rooms after rancher and oilman Fred W. Turner bought it in 1903. Under the Turners it became a gathering place for the social and business leaders of the Santa Anna area.

Amarillo, TX

Between 1838 and 1863 the small U.S. Army Topographical Corps—never more than 36 officers—mapped vast stretches of the American West, often through country held by peoples resisting their advance. Armed with barometer, compass, sextant, and pencil, they recorded climate, terrain, soils, and possible wagon and railroad routes. Three parties surveyed the future Potter County: Lt. James W. Abert along the Canadian River in 1845, Lt. James H. Simpson on a Fort Smith-to-Santa Fe rail route in 1849, and Lt. Amiel W. Whipple mapping a Mississippi-to-Pacific line in 1853.

Summit County, UT

This marker recalls the Utah War of the late 1850s, when mounting friction between federal officials and the Latter-day Saint settlers over control of Utah Territory led President James Buchanan to send some 2,500 U.S. Army troops west. The confrontation brought the region to the brink of open warfare, though it ended largely without pitched battle after tense standoffs and negotiation.

Bertram, TX

South Gabriel took shape around a post office that opened in Thomas Lewiston's store in 1871, on the Austin-Burnet road and named for the nearby river. The little village — also called Lewiston — soon had two stores, a hotel, saloon, cotton gin, school, church, and a cluster of tradesmen's shops, with a population of thirty-nine in 1880. When the Austin and Northwestern Railroad passed to the north in 1882, the post office moved to the new town of Bertram and South Gabriel vanished.

Paintsville, KY

In 1750, a full generation before Daniel Boone, the Virginia physician and land scout Dr. Thomas Walker led a small party west through the Cumberland Gap in search of good ground for a land company. His expedition ranged across the rugged mountains and river valleys of what is now eastern Kentucky, naming the Cumberland Gap, mountains, and river along the way and bringing back the first detailed English descriptions of this frontier country. The Big Sandy region around Paintsville lay within the wild, densely forested backcountry that Walker's journey helped open to the awareness of colonial Virginia.

Canyon County, ID

This marker recounts the Ward Massacre of August 20, 1854, when nearly all of Alexander Ward's twenty-member, Oregon-bound party was killed in an attack near the Boise River; only two young boys survived. The killings shocked emigrants and prompted a military response that reshaped travel through the region.

Carson City, NV

Built around 1860 by Abraham Curry, co-founder of Carson City, the Warm Springs Hotel was a grand structure of hand-hewn sandstone from a nearby quarry. Nevada's first Territorial Legislature met here in 1861, and in 1862 Curry leased part of the building to hold prisoners—the seed of the Nevada State Prison, which the state purchased in 1864. For nearly a century, inmates cut the distinctive sandstone that built the State Capitol, the U.S. Mint, and the prison itself.

Hondo, TX

When German immigrant Johann Wiemers settled this Medina County land in 1854, a spreading live oak became the center of frontier community life. A circuit-riding minister preached beneath its branches and converted the Wiemers to Methodism, making them charter members of the New Fountain church. The same tree shaded family reunions and the mule-drawn press used to make molasses, and it still stands among their descendants' homes.

London, KY

In 1796, the young state of Kentucky opened its first wagon road, transforming Daniel Boone's old buffalo-trace footpath into a route broad enough for settlers' loaded wagons. Running from Crab Orchard through London to the Cumberland Gap, the improved Wilderness Road carried a flood of pioneers into the Bluegrass country and beyond, and for eight decades it was maintained as a toll turnpike. What had once been a rugged trace for horseback and foot travel became the great overland artery that stitched the trans-Appalachian West to the settled East.

Washoe County, NV

Completed around 1864, this large Gothic-style mansion was the home of Theodore and Maggie Winters and their seven children, built with proceeds from the Comstock on land the Winters brothers purchased from earlier Mormon settlers. Theodore expanded the property to some 6,000 acres, breeding outstanding race horses while also running a large dairy and raising cattle, work horses, and sheep. Active in politics, he was elected a territorial representative in 1862.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Dr. William C. Wright, a North Carolinian who came to Mt. Vernon in 1850, was the town's first physician, and around 1870 he built this house, converting his earlier home into a hospital that served the community into the mid-20th century. The family passed the home down through daughters and granddaughters before it was purchased and restored in the 1970s. It preserves the memory of frontier medicine in a small East Texas town.

Muleshoe, TX

In 1879 the Texas Legislature set aside a vast three-million-acre tract in the Panhandle to pay for the construction of the state's grand new Capitol in Austin — trading empty land for a monument to government. Chicago investors, the Farwell brothers, financed the building and in return created the sprawling XIT Ranch, whose fenced boundaries became legendary across the plains. This marker stands at the ranch's old south line, the edge of one of the largest cattle operations the West ever saw.

Graham, TX

Built in 1878 with the jailer's family living downstairs and a steel maximum-security cage above, this two-story jail saw some of frontier North Texas's most dramatic episodes. Jack Post, the only man ever legally hanged in the county, was carried from here astride his own coffin in 1881, and the notorious Marlow brothers shot their way out in 1888, touching off a manhunt that later inspired legend. The building outlived its jail years in 1921 and passed through many hands and uses.

Brookfield, IL

Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president, died in 1919, and admirers across the country raised memorials to the conservationist, Rough Rider, and reformer. This fountain, funded by individual donors alongside the Chicago Zoological Society, honors him at a place fitting for a champion of wildlife and the outdoors. It reflects the deep public affection for a president whose name became bound up with America's natural heritage.

Harwood, TX

This marker records Theodore S. Lee, born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1799 and buried in Gonzales County, alongside his wife Hester, also a Vermont native. Their journey from New England to south-central Texas mirrors the wider migration of Northeasterners who settled the young state in the nineteenth century. The stone preserves the memory of an early Anglo family on the Texas frontier.

Austin, TX

When Austin was chosen in 1839 as capital of the young Republic of Texas, local government sprang up around it—militia beats, a Mormon-built jail and gristmill, and forts to guard against Comanche raids that continued into the 1860s. Congress formally created Travis County in 1840, naming it for Alamo commander William B. Travis, and the county seat has anchored state government, the University of Texas, and a fast-growing population ever since. This marker accompanied the courthouse built here in 1939 and the county's 125th anniversary in 1964.

El Paso, TX

This block was once the El Paso stop on the Butterfield Southern Overland Mail, the ambitious stagecoach line that carried passengers and mail between St. Louis and San Francisco. From 1858 to 1861, twice-weekly coaches linked the far corners of a growing nation across a vast stretch of frontier, until the coming of the Civil War severed the southern route.

Fort Worth, TX

Rising in Fort Worth in 1903, this Georgian Revival mansion was built for A.B. Wharton and his bride Electra, daughter of the immense cattle fortune of rancher W.T. Waggoner. Electra christened it "Thistle Hill," and the home later passed to cattleman-investor Winfield Scott, who died before he could move in. Saved from demolition in 1976 by a citizens' campaign, it survives as a monument to the Gilded Age wealth of the Texas cattle kingdom.

Fort Worth, TX

North Carolina native Thomas Bailey Saunders brought his family to Texas in 1850 and started a cattle ranch near Gonzales, launching a dynasty that would shape the state's beef industry for more than a century. His sons and grandsons drove herds to New Orleans and Kansas, became noted trail drivers, ran livestock commissions in San Antonio and Houston, and — in Thomas B. Saunders II — opened the first cattle-dealing firm on the Fort Worth Stockyards in 1902, pioneering the shipment of cattle by truck. Later generations built ranching operations and cattle clearinghouses across the Southwest.

Athens, TX

Dr. Thomas Boucher Wood earned his medical degree at Louisville in 1849, writing his thesis on pneumonia, and soon came to Henderson County to farm and practice medicine, marrying Susan Amanda Pinson in 1850. Their family cemetery began in 1851 with a stillborn daughter and filled steadily with children lost to the harsh conditions of pioneer life—and, cruelly, both the doctor and a grown son died of the very pneumonia he had studied. Enslaved people held by the family are believed buried just outside the plot; descendants restored the site in the late 1990s.

Johnson City, TX

Tennessee-born Thomas C. Felps came to Texas as a boy and to the Blanco County frontier in 1856, making his living freighting and serving with the county's rangers during the Civil War. In 1863 he married Eliza White, an Ohio native. In the summer of 1869, while Thomas recovered from a fever at her parents' home, the young couple was killed by a band of Indians along Cypress Creek, leaving two orphaned children to be raised by Eliza's family.

Weatherford, TX

An English immigrant who reached Texas in 1834, Thomas C. Snailum enlisted in the Texas Army in 1836 and fought in the revolution that won the young republic its independence. He married, raised a family across a string of frontier counties, and settled at Weatherford around 1866, ranching cattle before running the St. Charles Hotel until his death in 1884.

Athens, TX

This small family cemetery began with the 1877 burial of Mary Thomas Hall, who died young, likely in childbirth, on the family farm. Its patriarch, Jacob Thomas, was a planter born in North Carolina in 1800 who moved through Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas before reaching Henderson County, Texas, by 1860. His son Sylvester volunteered for the Confederacy but died of influenza in training, leaving Jacob to raise his grandchildren. Generations of the family lie buried here on the hilltop above the creek.

San Augustine, TX

In 1822 Benjamin Thomas answered an advertisement calling families to Stephen F. Austin's new colony, and after waiting months at Natchitoches for an escort that never came, his large household pushed on along El Camino Real to found the Thomas Settlement in San Augustine County. A store, blacksmith, gristmill and sawmill grew up around them, and their children served the emerging Republic and State of Texas in arms, ministry, law and commerce. Today the two-acre cemetery, its oldest graves marked by native fieldstones, is the only physical trace of that once-thriving community.

Willis, TX

Founded in 1867 as Thomas Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, South, this is the oldest congregation in Willis—older than the town itself. Worshippers gathered in log and frame buildings and brush arbors until the present Gothic Revival church, with its large pointed-arch windows and square bell tower, was completed in 1899. For well over a century it has been a center of community and spiritual life.

Edenton, NC

Thomas Child served as attorney-general of the North Carolina colony from 1745 to 1761 and acted as secretary to Lord Granville, the proprietor whose vast district covered the colony's northern half. Child led a faction that clashed sharply with royal Governor Arthur Dobbs in the turbulent politics of the mid-eighteenth century. His home stood two blocks south of this marker in colonial Edenton, a hub of provincial government.

Panhandle, TX

After serving as a Civil War teamster and later working for the Union Pacific Railroad, Thomas B. Cree brought his wife to the treeless High Plains in 1888, where they carved a dugout home from the earth. At his wife's longing for a tree, Cree rode 35 miles to find a sapling and watered it from a lake he dug out of a buffalo wallow; though it never grew, it survived blizzards and drought for years. In 1963 Governor John Connally dedicated a marker to what was remembered as the first tree in the Panhandle.

Brenham, TX

Born near Baltimore in 1776 to a prosperous planter and ironmaster family, Thomas Deye Owings built a fortune in Kentucky's Bourbon Iron Works, founded Owingsville, and even laid an "Iron Road" to ship his goods. Commissioned a colonel in the War of 1812, he led the 28th U.S. Infantry and supplied ammunition for the Battle of New Orleans. Later he backed the Texas Revolution, financing companies of soldiers—roughly eighty of whom, including his son Robert, died at Goliad—and settling near Brenham, where he died in 1853.

Southlake, TX

Virginia-born Thomas Easter reached Tarrant County by 1848 and patented a 640-acre tract in the county's northeast corner. When he died in 1862, a portion of that land became a family and community burial ground, where his wife Charity and neighboring pioneers such as Hardin West were later laid to rest among several unmarked graves. A one-room schoolhouse once stood beside the cemetery, tying the burial ground to the small farming settlement that grew up around it.

Whitley County, IN

On June 23, 1838, near this site, Thomas Estlick Jr. was born — recorded as the first white child born in Troy Township, in the earliest days of Whitley County's settlement. Such "first birth" markers were a common way frontier communities dated their own beginnings, fixing the moment a wilderness township became a place where families put down roots. It reflects the wave of settlers pushing into northern Indiana in the 1830s.

Bastrop, TX

Born in Virginia in 1802 and arriving in Texas from Tennessee in 1830, Thomas H. Mays became Bastrop's first municipal surveyor in 1834 and laid out the young town's streets. He was wounded in the leg at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 while serving with Edward Burleson's "Mina Volunteers," then returned to a life of public service as county deputy surveyor, city alderman, and associate justice. He and his wife raised their family on a large Bastrop homestead that included this site.

Galveston, TX

Thomas Henry Borden was one of Austin's 'Old Three Hundred,' the first legal Anglo-American colonists of Texas. A surveyor, he laid out the town of Galveston, and in 1835 he helped found the Telegraph and Texas Register, the newspaper that chronicled the Texas Revolution. A New York native, he lived in Galveston until his death in 1877.

Mathis, TX

After the Coleman, Mathis, Fulton Cattle Company dissolved in 1879, Thomas Henry Mathis founded the 24,000-acre Henry Bend Ranch on a bend of the Nueces River, fencing thousands of acres with wooden planks and even raising prized polo ponies trained for buyers in England. Sensing the value of the railroad, he donated a right-of-way to the San Antonio & Aransas Pass line in 1887 and platted the fenced townsite of Mathis in 1889. The ranch headquarters near this site stood until 1953.

Call Junction, TX

Thomas Holmes helped steer Texas from colony to republic, serving as delegate for the Bevil municipality at the 1835 Consultation that set the Texas Revolution in motion. A decade later, as the frontier organized itself into counties, he became the first chief justice of newly formed Newton County in 1846.