Westward Expansion

Waco, TX

Born in Virginia in 1796, Thomas Hudson Barron fought at the Battle of New Orleans with the Kentucky Militia before joining the stream of settlers into Mexican Texas, appearing in Stephen F. Austin's 1831 registry of families. As a Ranger captain he oversaw the building of Fort Fisher on the Brazos in 1837 and became one of the earliest settlers of what would grow into Waco, later serving as the county's first court clerk. A street, a school, and a creek in the city still carry his name.

Corsicana, TX

Born in Virginia in 1800, Thomas Ingles Smith soldiered in the War of 1812 under his father before coming to Texas in 1836 to join the Republic's army. He was wounded at the Battle of the Salado in 1842 and figured in the "Archive War" when Austin residents blocked his Rangers from removing the Republic's records. A frontier Ranger, Indian scout, and treaty commissioner, he lent his name to Fort Smith and helped found Corsicana before his death in 1848.

Milford, TX

Thomas J. Jordan carried a rifle for the fledgling Texas Army in 1836, the year Texian forces won independence from Mexico at San Jacinto. Tennessee-born like so many who poured into the new republic, he lived out his days on the Blackland Prairie of Ellis County, where he and his wife Stacy are remembered side by side. Their joined dates trace a full pioneer lifetime spanning frontier Texas from revolution to the Gilded Age.

Portland, OR

This memorial bears a line from Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation's third president. His words about the 'boisterous sea of liberty' reflect his lifelong conviction that self-government, though turbulent, was worth its storms. Jefferson's era saw the young republic take shape and, through the Louisiana Purchase, double in size and turn its gaze westward.

Liverpool, TX

Illinois-born Thomas Jefferson Callihan fought in the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, the swift and decisive clash that won Texas its independence. He lived to 1880, and rests here alongside his German-born wife Johanne, whose life stretched into the 1920s.

Nacogdoches, TX

Thomas Jefferson Rusk passed the bar at twenty-one and, drawn to Nacogdoches, threw himself into the Texas independence movement, signing the Declaration of Independence and serving as secretary of war. He fought beside Sam Houston at San Jacinto and briefly commanded the Republic's army, then helped bring Texas into the Union and served in the U.S. Senate, where he worked to fix the state's boundary and promote a transcontinental railroad. Grief-stricken after his wife's death, the ailing statesman took his own life in 1857.

Sherman, TX

Thomas Jefferson Shannon arrived in Texas in 1839, when it was still an independent republic, and settled in the area that became Grayson County in 1845. As the county's first state legislator he pushed to move the county seat to present-day Sherman and donated the land for the townsite, earning the nickname "Father of Sherman." A pioneering cattleman, he even imported Durham cattle said to be a gift from Queen Victoria in 1848, while his daughter Julia named the town's first streets.

Richmond, TX

Born in Virginia in 1808 and raised in Georgia, Thomas Jefferson Smith joined the fight for Texas independence in 1836, serving under James W. Fannin at Refugio. Captured at Goliad, he was spared to repair weapons for the Mexican army and escaped amid the confusion of the Battle of San Jacinto. He settled in Richmond after the war, running a blacksmith shop, hotel, and livery stable, and served as Fort Bend County sheriff in the 1850s.

Austin, TX

Thomas Jones Hardeman came to Texas from Tennessee and helped govern the young republic and state, serving in the Second Congress of the Republic of Texas and later in the state legislature. He also acted as chief justice of Bastrop County and rose to lead the Masonic Grand Lodge of Texas in 1850. His grave marker records a life woven into the civic institutions of frontier Texas.

Galveston, TX

Thomas Miller Joseph (1823–1905) arrived in Galveston about 1841 as a young man from Hartford, Connecticut, and made the booming island city his home for the rest of his long life. Admitted to the bar, he rose as a Democratic Party leader, serving as county judge, state legislator, and senator, and raising eight children with his wife Mary. Fittingly for a place battered by hurricanes, his own grave may lie atop his mother's, its exact spot lost after storms swept the cemetery.

Cuero, TX

Born in Florida and raised in Texas, Thomas M. Stell came up as a cowboy, driving cattle north to Kansas and Wyoming before studying at Covey College in Concrete. Elected sheriff of DeWitt County in 1892, he held the office fifteen years, relying on persuasiveness and tact — and once numbered the notorious gunman John Wesley Hardin among his prisoners. A member of the Old Trail Drivers Association, he served as president of the Texas Sheriffs Association.

Red Rock, TX

Thomas Osborn was one of the settlers-turned-soldiers who took up arms in the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836, the uprising that severed Mexican Texas from Mexico. The battles named here trace the war's arc: the early clash at Gonzales and the fight at Velasco, the grinding Siege of Bexar that drove Mexican forces from San Antonio, and the disastrous defeat at Coleto that led to the Goliad massacre. Texas erected the marker in 1962 to honor a veteran of that founding struggle.

Lampasas, TX

Thomas Pratt served as a captain in the army of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and, decades later, in the Texas militia and Confederate service during the Civil War. In private life he farmed and ranched land in Coleman and Lampasas counties, and his wife Susan belonged to one of the first Anglo colonies in Texas. Remembered as a kindly man, he left funds in his will to provide meat for poor and reputable widows.

Leming, TX

Born in Missouri in 1824 and raised in Bastrop County, Thomas Ransdell Brite came of age amid the conflicts of early Texas. He volunteered against Mexican incursions in the 1842 Vasquez, Woll, and Somervell campaigns, served in the Mexican War under Captain McCulloch in 1846, and joined the Texas Rangers in 1855 to counter frontier raids. Settling in what became Atascosa County, he was elected its first tax assessor-collector and later county treasurer before his death in 1859.

Helena, TX

Princeton-educated Thomas Ruckman was drawn to Texas by cheap land and boundless opportunity, arriving in San Antonio on Christmas morning of 1850. He opened a trading post on the Old Ox-Cart Road between San Antonio and Goliad, then in 1852 laid out with partner Dr. L. S. Owings a new town they named Helena, which became the seat of Karnes County in 1854. For nearly forty years Ruckman served as its leading merchant, banker, and postmaster, and in 1872 he helped found the Helena Academy.

Corpus Christi, TX

Philadelphia-born Thomas S. Parker came to Texas at twenty, and in 1839 he and his parents received large land grants near present-day Corpus Christi, where they raised cattle. He allied with trader Henry L. Kinney, and when Zachary Taylor's army camped near Kinney's post in 1845 — the staging ground for the war with Mexico — Parker won the contract to supply the soldiers' beef. "Col. Tom" went on to become the first sheriff of Nueces County, later a Texas Ranger and Confederate soldier, and finally Corpus Christi's city marshal, shaping the young city's commerce and law until his death in 1886.

Alamo, TX

After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War in 1848 and set the Rio Grande as the international boundary, Major William Emory led a survey to map that new border. Thomas W. Jones, a young surveyor from Washington, D.C., joined the effort at El Paso in 1850 and worked as an assistant surveyor on the Lower Rio Grande. In July 1853 he drowned nearby and was buried on a local ranch, one of many who gave their lives to the exacting work of charting the frontier.

Lake Creek, TX

Thomas Wilson Stegall was born in North Carolina in 1832, served as a Confederate private late in the Civil War, and moved his large family through Tennessee and Mississippi before settling in Delta County, Texas, in 1873. A Baptist preacher remembered for his kindness—he once cut a gap in his prized rose hedge just to give a neighbor a shortcut—he built a blacksmith shop that became the gathering place at the heart of the new town of Lake Creek. From that community nucleus a town grew.

Era, TX

When Dr. Benjamin Richard Thomason built this frame house in 1894, the little community of Era in Cooke County was still finding its footing on the North Texas prairie, and a country doctor doubled as one of the settlement's essential institutions. Lumber for the home and office was hauled overland from Gainesville by his son Robert Ewing Thomason, who went on to a long public life as a U.S. Congressman and federal judge. Its Victorian porch detailing and fine interior woodwork mark it as a place of standing in a young frontier town.

Bald Prairie, TX

Benjamin Rush Thompson left North Carolina for Milam County in 1841, when Texas was still an independent republic, and by the 1850s the census listed him as a Methodist clergyman and Mason. After moving his family to Robertson County, he set aside this ground as a family burial plot in 1873, following the death of his young son William. Of the thirteen graves here, only five bear inscribed stones; Thompson and his wife Margaret both lie among them.

Copeville, TX

Collin County pioneer Abner Thompson arrived about 1850 and set aside part of his land for a burial ground; fittingly, his own 1852 death brought its first grave, still marked by two weathered square stones. Nearby, bois d'arc posts have guarded an employee's grave for more than a century. As the Mount Pleasant Baptist congregation divided in the 1880s, its land passed to the cemetery, which grew to more than 800 graves and still draws neighbors from Lavon and Copeville to an annual Memorial Day service.

Forest, TX

Wiley and Cynthia Ann Thompson brought their children and a number of enslaved people from Alabama in 1847, buying a 636-acre tract along Larrison Creek and building a log home overlooking the bottomland. The community that grew nearby, called Forest, included a family-owned store, saloon, mills, and cotton gin. The cemetery began around 1850 with the burial of two of their children and holds more than thirty unmarked graves as well as veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Westworth Village, TX

The cemetery began in 1870 when Captain Henry J. Thompson let his neighbor bury a young wife on his land, near the Allen log cabin. From that first grave it grew into the resting place of the pioneer families who built White Settlement, River Oaks and Westworth Village — among them James Ventioner, founder of River Oaks, and the Farmer brothers, first to raise homes in White Settlement. Confederate veterans, a wagon-train child whose name was spelled in pebbles, and generations of settlers lie together beneath its many names.

Groveton, TX

In 1858 James D. Thornton brought his family by wagon train from Mississippi to join friends and relatives already settled in Trinity County. The farming community they built centered on the Thornton Church and School, raised on land Thornton donated. Farming sustained the settlement until its population began to fade after World War II, and many of its pioneers rest in the church cemetery.

Granbury, TX

North Carolina native Patrick H. Thrash brought his family to the Granbury area in 1872 and became the town's first mayor, building a modest one-story frame home here around 1880. Over the following decades the house passed through the hands of a saloon owner, a district attorney, and the county sheriff, and was enlarged into the Queen Anne–style residence seen today. Its changing ownership reads like a roster of Granbury's early civic and business life.

McDade, TX

This burial ground began as a family plot—marked first by the graves of two young Goerlitz children—before Peter Kellermier deeded an acre for wider community use in 1893. Long tied to a neighboring Catholic church, it was known as the Catholic Cemetery until the congregation faded in the 1930s. Renamed Three Oaks in 1975 to honor all who rest here, including veterans of both World Wars, it still serves the McDade community.

Three Rivers, TX

Founded in March 1913 by Charles R. Tips, this South Texas townsite was first chartered as Hamiltonburg for a local family, with lots going on sale that Fourth of July. The following year the Post Office renamed it Three Rivers to mark the nearby meeting of the Nueces, Atascosa, and Frio rivers. Ranching and farming gave way, over time, to an economy also built on gas, oil, and recreation.

Brownwood vicinity, TX

The community of Thrifty sprang up after the Army established Camp Colorado, a frontier defense post on Jim Ned Creek, in 1857. When troops withdrew as Texas seceded in 1861, settlers like the Mullins family faced the dangers of the frontier alone, but the area flourished after the Civil War with a hotel, gins, mills, and a mercantile store serving nearby farmers and ranchers. The railroad's bypass in 1886, paired with a hard drought, drained the town of its people and its purpose.

Throckmorton, TX

When Texas carved Throckmorton County out of the frontier in 1858, it borrowed the name of Dr. William Edward Throckmorton, a soldier of the American Revolution who had died in 1843. The honor carried a second weight: his son, James Webb Throckmorton, would sit in the governor's chair in 1866, during the fraught early days of Reconstruction. Formally organized only in 1879, the county reflects how slowly settlement and government followed the surveyor's line across West Texas.

Throckmorton, TX

Throckmorton County, named for pioneer physician William E. Throckmorton, was created in 1858 but not organized until 1879 as settlement finally reached this stretch of West Texas. Landowner F. E. Conrad donated the town square and built the first frame courthouse, replaced between 1890 and 1893 by a striking two-story Italianate building of quarried, polychrome sandstone. Topped by a mansard roof and square cupola, it gained a matching annex in 1938.

Rocksprings, TX

Joseph and Mary Jane Thurman came to this part of Edwards County in 1882, and in 1885 Mary Jane became the first person laid to rest in what grew into the family cemetery. Its 29 graves record the hard toll of pioneer life, including infant deaths and victims of typhoid and other diseases. Members of the Thurman and more than a dozen allied families rest here, and their descendants still tend the grounds, last used for burial in 1958.

Rhome, TX

Early families who called their Wise County home the "Illinois Settlement," later Fairview, put down roots here in the 1880s. When J. F. Thurmond's infant daughter died in 1883, neighbors chose a burial tract beside land he had already given for a church and school—part of six acres he donated to the community. Over the decades a cemetery association formed, the school consolidated and became a community center, and the graveyard, still in use, grew to more than 400 graves sustained by endowments and a gas well.

Martins Mill, TX

Pioneer L. H. Hobbs settled this part of Van Zandt County around 1850 and let a grieving family bury their two-year-old daughter on his land, quietly founding a cemetery. The graveyard took the Tidmore name after John Tidmore—who died in 1866 of afflictions carried home from the Civil War—and his family came to own the ground and were laid to rest there in turn. Around the Tidmore and Hobbs graves gathered generations of a farming community, including a dozen Confederate veterans and later soldiers of both World Wars.

Thornton vicinity, TX

Settlement along Steele Creek began in the 1850s around a Methodist church named for the Rev. David J. Tidwell, who arrived with his family in 1853 and served as the first postmaster. The little community — known variously as Steele Creek, Tidwell, Shady Grove, and Pleasant Grove — gathered two stores, a school, and homes. Its cemetery of some 175 marked graves, deeded to residents by Mary Chisum in 1886, records the harsh toll of frontier life, with many infant deaths and apparent epidemics.

Brownsville, TX

Tomás Tijerina, descended from an 18th-century Spanish settler of the Rio Grande, moved to this Brownsville site in 1904 and built the present brick home in 1912. A longtime deputy sheriff, he designed the house himself while his neighbor Teodoro Perez handled the carpentry. Its brick buttresses were raised deliberately to brace the walls against the hurricanes that regularly menace the Gulf coast.

McMullen County, TX

Settled in 1858 as Rio Frio, this ranching outpost earned the nickname "Dog Town" for the packs of dogs its cowmen used to round up wild cattle. A townsite was platted as Colfax in 1871, made county seat in 1877, and finally renamed for Samuel J. Tilden, who won the popular vote in the disputed 1876 presidential election. It grew into a center of ranching and, later, petroleum.

Baytown, TX

Family tradition holds that Charles Nathan Tilton served as a cabin boy for the pirate Jean Laffite before settling in Texas around 1829 and marrying Anna Barber in 1831. He fought in the Texas Revolution, received a large headright land grant, and traded in cattle and shipping—even lending his brand to the famed rancher Samuel Maverick. The family cemetery he established in the 1850s holds veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, chronicling generations of early Texas pioneers.

Tinicum Township, PA · est. 1947

In 1643 Colonel Johan Printz, the imposing governor of New Sweden, established his seat at Tinicum, founding what is recognized as the first permanent European settlement in present-day Pennsylvania. For a dozen years the Swedish colony held this ground along the Delaware, until the wider contest for the river swept it away — first to the Dutch in 1655, then to the English in 1664. Tinicum's brief Swedish chapter left a lasting mark on the region's earliest colonial identity.

Tioga, TX

Settlers founded Tioga on the edge of the East Cross Timbers in 1881, and after years of burying their dead in scattered family plots, the community got a formal cemetery in 1906 when W.R. and Sally Gillespie deeded five acres to the local Woodmen of the World camp — whose distinctive tree-stump headstones still mark many early graves. The burial ground holds Civil War veterans from both sides, Texas Senator Olin R. Van Zandt, and the Rev. H.G. Ball, who preached the funeral of U.S. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. An association keeps the grounds for future generations.

Tioga, TX

This congregation began with services in the homes of the Shiloh community, two miles east, and organized as the Shiloh Methodist Church in 1887 under the Rev. Mr. Allen. After the town of Tioga was founded, the worshipers moved and built their sanctuary on this site in 1893, expanding it over the years. Among its members was Olan R. Van Zandt, who served sixteen years in the Texas Legislature as both representative and senator from 1926 to 1942.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Titus County was carved from Red River and Bowie counties and organized in 1846, the same year Texas joined the Union. It was named for Andrew J. Titus, a pioneer of northwest Texas, a soldier in the Mexican War, and a member of the state legislature. Mount Pleasant became the county seat.

Austin, TX

This marker remembers rangers killed in the dangerous early years of the Republic. John Williams and Howell Haggett died in a May 1836 encounter with Indians while detailed from Captain John J. Tumlinson's company to protect the Hornsby settlement's families returning from the panicked flight known as the "Runaway Scrape." Pioneer ranger William Atkinson fell in a similar clash in 1845. The State of Texas placed the monument in 1936.

Austin, TX

Josephus Hornsby, son of pioneer Reuben Hornsby, grew up on the exposed Colorado River frontier east of Austin, settling in 1832. As a young Ranger he fought in the Indian and Mexican clashes of the Republic era — the Flores and Brush fights, Plum Creek in 1840, and the Vasquez and Woll campaigns — and in 1842 rescued two captives from an Indian raid in Austin.

Multnomah County, OR

This monument honors the Oregon pioneers of 1836 to 1859 — the era when thousands of emigrants followed the Oregon Trail across the continent to the Willamette Valley. Their overland migration transformed the Pacific Northwest and helped bring Oregon into the Union in 1859.

Elkton, KY

Todd County, formed in 1819, remembers a Virginia-born frontier soldier who helped wrest the Illinois country from British control. John Todd fought at Point Pleasant in 1774, came to Kentucky in 1775, and rode with George Rogers Clark's daring 1778 campaign, afterward serving as civil commandant of the new Illinois County. A champion of setting aside land for public schools, he was killed at the disastrous Battle of Blue Licks in 1782.

Mason vicinity, TX

In late December 1864, the family of George W. Todd, Mason County's first clerk, was attacked here while traveling to Mason. A twelve-year-old Black servant girl was killed, thirteen-year-old Alice Todd was carried off, and Todd's wife Dizenia was gravely wounded, dying about three weeks later. Alice's half-brother James Smith returned from the Civil War and searched for months, but she was never found.

Woodville, TX

Robert Tolar built this log dwelling south of Woodville in 1866, its timbers cut, squared, and notched on the spot and topped with hand-rived shakes above a mud-and-stick chimney. Over the years it became the family's "cook house," where three meals a day were prepared over the open fireplace, with pots kept full for any traveler who happened to drop in — a routine that continued until 1960.

Tolar, TX

Before air conditioning, open-air tabernacles gave Texas communities a shaded place to gather through the brutal summer heat, hosting revivals, weddings, reunions, fairs, and picnics. Built about 1897 with contributions from Tolar's churches, this tabernacle was community-owned and managed by trustees drawn from local congregations, who bought its ground outright in 1904 for $75. A sturdy improvement on the temporary brush arbor, its timber frame and corrugated-metal hip roof still shelter fish fries and the annual Tolar School homecoming held there since 1954.

Burkeville, TX

For centuries the great curve of the Sabine River known as Toledo Bend was a crossroads of the East Texas borderlands—a landmark for Spanish explorers and missionaries, and later a contested edge of the Neutral Territory disputed by the United States and Spain in the early 1800s. Just off El Camino Real, the King's Highway, it drew steamboat landings, ferries, and Anglo-American settlers who knew it as Bevil's Crossing and then Hadden's Ferry. In time it even became a cradle of the region's pecan industry before its modern life as a resort lake.

Lamkin vicinity, TX

This cemetery holds some of the earliest settlers of what became Comanche County, among them James H. Neel, one of the first seven men to bring their families to the area in 1852—four years before the county was even organized. Neel later served as postmaster of the nearby Resley's Creek village during the Civil War years. The graves mark the toehold of Anglo settlement on the central Texas frontier.

Bridgeport, TX

When Butterfield's Overland Mail crossed this stretch of the West Fork of the Trinity around 1860, a reliable river crossing was essential, and Colonel W. H. Hunt built a chartered toll bridge just to the west. The mail line collapsed with the coming of the Civil War, but a settlement had taken root; a Decatur merchant spanned the river again with an iron bridge in 1873, and the town shifted when the railroad arrived in 1893.

Menallen Township, PA · est. 1947

This toll house is one of six original gatehouses built along the Cumberland Road — the great National Road that was the first federally funded highway in the United States, pushing west across the Appalachians toward the Ohio country. The roadway was completed through this section of Fayette County in 1817–18, and when the federal government handed the road over to Pennsylvania in 1835, the state built these toll houses to collect the fees that would maintain it. Travelers, freight wagons, and Conestoga teams once paused here to pay their way west.

San Angelo, TX

Carved from the old Miller and Fisher land grant, Tom Green County was created in 1874 and organized the following year, taking its name from General Thomas Green, a San Jacinto veteran and Confederate officer killed in 1864. The first transcontinental mail routes had already converged nearby in 1858. The county seat began at Ben Ficklin in 1875 before shifting to San Angelo in 1882.

Iowa Park, TX

Son of the noted rancher Burk Burnett, Tom L. Burnett was raised on the famous 6666 Ranch and became a leading cattleman in his own right, running the Triangle Ranch and range land across several North Texas counties. A civic leader and philanthropist, he was known for his friendship with Native people, including the celebrated Comanche chief Quanah Parker, and for his backing of area rodeos, which earned him the nickname the "Rodeo King." He died at his residence on this site in 1938.

Iowa Park, TX

Cattleman and civic leader Tom Lloyd Burnett, heir to one of North Texas's great ranching names, built this stately Colonial Revival home in 1924, hiring the Wichita Falls firm of Voelcker and Dixon to design it. Its Dutch gambrel roof and clipped gable made it a landmark in Iowa Park. After Burnett's death in 1938 it passed to his cousin Will Burnett, another rancher and civic figure, keeping the house within the family that helped shape the region's cattle economy.

Gibson Township, PA · est. 1955

Tom Mix, born in this corner of Pennsylvania on January 6, 1880, became one of Hollywood's first great Western stars. After service as a soldier during the Spanish-American War, he rode to fame in hundreds of silent and sound films between 1910 and 1935, defining the movie cowboy for a generation. He died in an Arizona auto accident in 1940.

Canadian, TX

Tom T. McGee came to the Panhandle around 1884 and was working as a ranch foreman when he was elected the first sheriff of Hemphill County in 1887, the year Canadian was founded. In November 1894 he was mortally wounded in a gunfight defending a large money shipment against six armed men at the Wells, Fargo & Co. office. In a poignant coda, his widow later volunteered in England during World War I and died there, her ashes returned home for burial.

Florence, AZ

Charles D. Poston, often called the "Father of Arizona," was a mining promoter and booster whose lobbying helped create Arizona Territory in 1863, and he became its first delegate to Congress. Fascinated by Persian sun-worship, he dreamed of a temple atop this butte near Florence, and after his death he was entombed here in a stone monument erected by the Territory in 1907. The pyramid-topped tomb crowns what is now called Poston Butte, overlooking the desert country he championed.

Tombstone, AZ

Built in 1882, this handsome Victorian courthouse was the seat of justice for Cochise County during Tombstone's raucous silver-boom heyday, when the town's fortunes rested on rich ore and its reputation on frontier lawlessness. From these rooms judges, sheriffs, and juries tried to impose order on one of the West's wildest boomtowns. Long since restored, the building now serves as an Arizona state historic park and museum.

Arlington, TX

First used in the 1870s by the pioneer Wilkinson family, whose graves are marked by clusters of rock, this burial ground also holds members of the Angel and Tomlin families. Its oldest dated stone belongs to Virginia native Solomon Tomlin, a horseman and farmer who brought his family to Texas in the 1860s and died in 1884. His son James Tives "Buck" Tomlin, a noted breeder of racing horses, bought the property in 1888.