Westward Expansion

Nye County, NV

In May 1900, Nye County District Attorney Jim Butler made the discovery that ended a twenty-year slump in Nevada's economy — the Paiute had long used the name Tonopah for a spring in the nearby mountains. The strike proved to be the richest silver producer in the nation, spawning a railroad, great mills, and a population of some 10,000, and by 1905 it had taken the county seat from Belmont. Though the mines faltered in the 1920s, Tonopah's lasting fame rests on the financiers and politicians it launched.

Grapevine, TX

This hand-hewn log cabin was raised along a creek at the edge of the Cross Timbers near the pioneer settlement of Dove, on a headright taken up in 1845 by Francis Throop, a Peters colonist from Missouri. J. C. Wiley bought the land in 1868 and sold it in 1886 to Kentucky farmer John R. Torian, whose family lived in the cabin into the 1940s. It was moved about four miles to this site in 1976.

Jefferson, TX

William P. Torrans built this Greek Revival home in Jefferson during the 1860s, when the town was a bustling riverport in East Texas. It later passed to a former mayor and druggist and to the family of Dr. Albert Clopton before Confederate veteran Solomon Spellings moved the residence to this site after 1882. Successive owners, including a local grocer, added to it into the mid-twentieth century.

Waco, TX

Established in 1844 during the days of the Republic of Texas, Torrey's Trading Post No. 2 sat on a bluff above Trading House Creek as a meeting ground between settlers and Native nations. Here President Sam Houston delivered his celebrated peace talks to assembled chiefs, and the post served as a "listening post" that helped keep an uneasy frontier calm. Run by George Barnard for the Torrey brothers, it was later moved to the growing town of Waco.

Sonoma, CA · est. 1982

Built in 1852 on land once owned by General Vallejo, this adobe began as a store, library, and dwelling before evolving into a succession of hotels. By 1886 Italian proprietors renamed it the Tuscano Hotel, a spelling that local usage softened to Toscano. Its layered history mirrors Sonoma's growth from Mexican-era town to a community shaped by immigrant enterprise.

Tow, TX

The 1850 grave of eight-year-old Margaret Thorp, said to have died of a snakebite, marks the age of this burial ground in the community that grew around the Bluffton-Tow Saltworks. A successful fur hatmaker arrived in 1853, the same year William Tow and his family settled Tow Valley, and generations of area families have tended the graves ever since. An association formed in the 1950s continues that long tradition of care.

Mexia, TX

Gen. José Antonio Mexía was a Mexican military officer and promoter of Texas colonization who served in his country's legation to the United States and its senate in the early 1830s. Though he first backed Santa Anna, he turned against the general when he seized dictatorial power, fleeing to Texas in 1834 and leading expeditions against him until he was captured and executed by Santa Anna's order in 1839. His son and daughter later settled the family's Limestone County land and donated the site for the town that bears his name in 1871.

Bryan, TX

William Joel Bryan came to Texas in 1831 as a grandson of Moses Austin and nephew of Stephen F. Austin, placing him at the center of the family that founded Anglo Texas. He fought in the 1835 Battle of Bexar during the Texas Revolution and, upon Stephen F. Austin's death in 1836, inherited leadership of the influential Austin-Bryan clan. A lifelong planter near Peach Point, he later donated the land for the town of Bryan, which became the seat of Brazos County in 1866.

Abernathy, TX

Abernathy sprang up in 1909 when the Santa Fe Railroad pushed south from Plainview toward Lubbock, and it was named for Monroe G. Abernathy, treasurer of the company that promoted the townsite. It thrived as a cattle railhead, absorbing buildings moved from the vanished town of Bartonsite, and centered its civic life on the "Old Tabernacle" from 1918 to 1947. In its earliest days, before roads existed, plowed furrows guided visitors to the town doctor's house.

Amherst, TX

Amherst began in 1913 as a cattle-shipping point on the Pecos & Northern Texas Railroad, serving the vast 300,000-acre Springlake Ranch that W.E. 'Colonel Bill' Halsell and his son Ewing had established in 1902. When the High Plains economy shifted from ranching to farming in 1923, the Halsells carved up their land for new settlers at $25 an acre and set aside town lots, a hotel, and ground for schools and churches. A general store, post office, and bank followed, and by 1930 the town's population reached 964.

Antelope, TX

Antelope took its name from the springs where pronghorn watered and where the Kiowa once camped. Platted in 1875 along the Henrietta–Graham mail route, it grew into a bustling supply stop for cattle drives heading north, boasting a spa built around its mineral wells, a hotel, school, and 400 residents by 1887. Ranching and later oil kept the community alive well into the twentieth century.

Bedias, TX

Long before Anglo settlers arrived, the Bidai people—an agricultural nation regarded as the region's oldest inhabitants—gave their name to the Bedias creeks and, eventually, the town. The first white settlement here rose in 1835 under Thomas P. Plaster, and in 1903 the coming of an International & Great Northern Railroad branch pulled the population toward a 'New' Bedias, though residents fought to keep the old name rather than honor a railroad official. The area is also famous for its 'Bediasite' tektites, glassy stones the Indians called 'jewels of the moon,' and as the one-time home of Sarah Dodson, credited with sewing the first Lone Star flag.

Buffalo Gap, TX

Buffalo Gap takes its name from the pass in the Callahan Divide that funneled the great herds — buffalo that fed the Apache and Comanche and later drew white hunters around 1874, whose dugouts became the town's first homes. Named county seat in 1878 and sitting on the Western Cattle Trail, it briefly flourished, only to be eclipsed in 1883 when the railroad crowned nearby Abilene as county seat. Its rise and decline mirror dozens of small Texas towns that lived and died by the trail and the rail.

New Orleans, LA

Surveyor Charles Zimpel laid out Carrollton in 1833 on the former Macarty Plantation, land that had once been the uppermost portion of Bienville's 1719 French grant. The town served as the seat of Jefferson Parish from 1852 to 1874, when it was annexed by a growing New Orleans. Its 1854 courthouse was designed by the noted architect Henry Howard.

Schlopata, TX

Cat Spring was founded in 1832 by members of the Amsler, Kleberg, and Von Roeder families, among the earliest German immigrants to settle in what was then Mexican Texas. Their arrival marked the beginning of a wave of German migration that would leave a lasting imprint on the region. The community became a nucleus of German culture in Austin County.

Caldwell, TX

Originally called Yellow Prairie and settled by Alexander Thomson, Jr. — an early Texas patriot and partner of colonizer Sterling C. Robertson — this community relocated to the railroad tracks when the line came through in 1880. It was renamed in 1884 for Capt. H.C. Chriesman, a surveyor for Stephen F. Austin. Today it serves the surrounding ranches.

Claude, TX

Claude sprang up in 1887 as the Fort Worth & Denver Railroad pushed across the Panhandle, and it took its name from Claude Ayers, the engineer of the first passenger train through town. First resident Jerry Cavanaugh donated the townsite, and in an 1890 county-seat contest the deciding vote was famously cast by legendary rancher Charles Goodnight. Churches, a school, and the incorporation of the town soon followed, and noted Panhandle historian Laura V. Hamner taught among its early teachers.

D'Hanis, TX

In 1847, twenty-nine families led by Theodore Gentilz settled here on behalf of Henri Castro, the Alsatian-born empresario whose colony brought European immigrants to the Texas Hill Country in the years just after annexation. The community took its name from Guillaume D'Hanis, an official of Castro's colonization society. When the Southern Pacific Railroad later bypassed the settlement, residents relocated to a new townsite, leaving behind what is now called Old D'Hanis.

Dawn, TX

Named by hopeful pioneers who saw in it "the dawning of a new country," Dawn gained the county's second post office in 1889. Its first building was a Santa Fe Railroad boxcar pressed into service as a station house in 1905, and W.E. Neal and his sons developed the townsite in earnest in 1914 with a lumber yard, hotel, bank, and store. It settled into life as a center of the surrounding farming country.

Dawson, TX

Dawson grew out of Spring Hill, the oldest settlement in Navarro County, which Republic of Texas Indian agent Dr. George Washington Hill founded in 1838 as a trading post to ease relations with Native peoples. Britton Dawson, a San Jacinto veteran who claimed his land as service bounty, settled at Spring Hill in 1846 and built a home that served as a stagecoach stop. When the Texas & St. Louis Railroad — the "Cotton Belt" — laid tracks through in 1881, Dawson's sons donated 100 acres for a townsite, and the population of Spring Hill promptly picked up and moved to the new railroad town.

Dinero, TX

Settled in 1838 by farmers and ranchers, this town began as "Barlow" after a local ferry operator, and its people helped organize Live Oak County in 1856 and started a school by 1858. Around 1872, rumors of buried "dinero"—Spanish for money—gave the town its lasting name. It moved a mile west in 1913 to meet a new rail line, later piped natural gas toward Houston, and counted among its residents the celebrated Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie.

Douglass, TX

Michael Costley, remembered as "The Father of Douglass," reached Texas in 1832, enlisted in the Texas Army, and patrolled the Old San Antonio Road before laying out a town he expected to flourish. A river port on the Angelina shipped its cotton to the Gulf and a stagecoach line came through, but Costley was shot dead in a 1837 gunfight before his vision fully took hold. Named for Republic of Texas congressman Kelsey Harris Douglass, the town grew into a modest but busy waystation of inns, shops, and churches on the road between the Angelina and Neches rivers.

Eagle Lake, TX

The town takes its name from a lake where, in 1821, an exploring party led by Stephen F. Austin killed an eagle. A stage line linking Houston and San Antonio set up lakeside headquarters in 1851, and the townsite was platted in 1856, just before the railroad arrived in 1859. Over the decades Eagle Lake reinvented itself again and again — cattle and farm market, then rice-growing center after 1898, then oil town and shipper of sand and gravel, and finally a mecca for fishing and goose hunting.

Falfurrias, TX

Founded in 1909 on old Spanish grant and later King Ranch land, Flowella was laid out as the trade center for a planned farm colony and named for a flowing well at its heart. A hotel, store, post office, and school briefly served about a hundred residents. But hard seasons closed the businesses one by one, and by the late 1920s the town had faded, leaving none of its original buildings.

Fulshear, TX

The land here was granted in 1824 to Churchill Fulshear, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists. His son, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence, built a four-story brick mansion in the 1850s and bred and raced horses; his protégé John Huggins went on to train the first American horse to win the English Derby. The town itself was platted in 1890 when the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad arrived, quickly becoming a local trade center.

Goodnight, TX

The Panhandle town of Goodnight bears the name of Charles Goodnight (1836–1929), the celebrated scout, trail blazer, and cattleman who established the first ranch in the Texas Panhandle in 1876. Known as the 'Burbank of the Range' for his experiments in breeding and range improvement, he loomed large in the settlement of the high plains.

Grandview, TX

Grandview owes its name to a traveler who took one look at the rolling Johnson County prairie and exclaimed "What a grand view!" Settled in 1850 on a land grant from Governor Elisha M. Pease, the community hauled its supplies by ox wagon from Houston and built up a church, post office, and the county's first Masonic lodge before the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad pulled the whole town a mile southeast in 1883. Incorporated in 1891, it survived a devastating 1920 fire that razed 135 buildings and rebuilt, merging its name into one word in 1925.

Gunter, TX

The town of Gunter rose on the sprawling North Texas ranch of Jot Gunter, a North Carolina–born Confederate veteran who came to Texas to practice law and became one of Grayson County's leading businessmen and land developers. By the mid-1890s his ranch spread across more than 20,000 acres. The community that grew on his land took his name and was incorporated in 1914.

Hidalgo, TX

Founded as Edinburgh in 1852, this Rio Grande town served as the seat of Hidalgo County for more than half a century. In 1861 it was renamed for Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the parish priest who launched Mexico's struggle for independence in 1810—a fitting tribute in a borderland deeply shaped by Mexican heritage. A devastating overflow of the Rio Grande in September 1887 nearly washed the town away.

Iowa Park, TX

Iowa Park was one of countless towns that leapt up ahead of the rails crossing Texas in the 1800s, born in 1885 as "Daggett's Switch" on the Fort Worth and Denver City line. Union Pacific builder Gen. G. M. Dodge promoted the townsite, and land agents recruited Midwesterners — many from Iowa — laying out a plat full of parks in 1888. Two decades of farm prosperity gave way to frenzy in 1918 when oil was struck nearby, sending speculators and land prices soaring until the boom burned out by 1925 and a steady farm economy returned.

Snyder, TX

Founded in 1888 by pioneers settling Bull Creek, this little community first called itself Bison for the great bull buffalo that once grazed the surrounding plains. When the Post Office rejected the duplicate name, the town became Knapp, its post office housed in a frontier dugout on land near the ranches of prominent Texas cattlemen A. P. Bush and Benjamin Tillar. After a last flush of life serving oil-boom workers, the post office closed in 1959 and the town faded.

Knippa, TX

Reached by the railroad in 1882, this fertile stretch of Uvalde County was settled in 1887 by freighter George Knippa, who lured friends to the land he knew from hauling between East Texas and Mexico. A bearded stranger tried his luck at gold-mining here in 1899, a post office arrived in 1900, and the platted town—once called Chatfield—took Knippa's name. The Trap Rock Mine, opened in 1913, still works the local stone.

La Feria, TX

This land was surveyed in 1777 as part of Spanish grants to Don Juan Hinojosa and José María Balli, ancestors of the priest for whom Padre Island is named, and by the 1790s the ranch hosted a fairground—giving La Feria its name—for fiestas, horse racing, and sport. After the Mexican War of 1846–48, the Balli heirs had their Texas title confirmed, and in 1850 cattleman Nathaniel White opened Anglo ranching here. The town of La Feria was platted under its old name in 1906 and grew into a trade center for the farming country of the Rio Grande Valley.

Lancaster, TX

Kentucky-born A. Bledsoe settled here in 1846 and, with the Rawlins family, laid out this town around 1852, naming it Lancaster after the Kentucky town his grandfather had founded. Stores, churches, a school, and mills soon clustered on the one-square-mile townsite, and during the Civil War a Confederate pistol factory operated here. The town weathered repeated fires and the rise and fall of Randolph College, living for a century as a cotton-market town whose fortunes rose and fell with the crop.

Lexington, TX

Settled in 1837 during the days of the Republic of Texas, Lexington took its name from the Massachusetts town where the American Revolution began. The Tonkawa were the area's first inhabitants; the first Anglo settler, surveyor and teacher James Shaw, arrived on a land grant earned for service at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto. Early cotton faltered, but the town revived in 1890 when the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad reached it.

Lovelady, TX

Lovelady arose when Houston and Great Northern Railroad investors ran their line through a grant belonging to Cyrus Lovelady, drawing settlers from nearby communities like Nevil's Prairie, Pennington, and Weldon. With its post office, livery, blacksmith, and hotels, the town quickly became a market and shipping point; by 1876 school met in a log house, and an 1881 two-story building was shared by Baptists and a Masonic lodge. Incorporated in 1927, it settled into life as a center for ranching and pulpwood.

Montgomery, TX

Founded in July 1837 by W. W. Shepherd during the days of the young Republic of Texas, Montgomery gave its name to the county created that December. A slate of commissioners chose it as county seat, a role it held until 1889, and before the Civil War it thrived as an important trade center for the surrounding country. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936 for the Texas Centennial.

Needville, TX

Needville began in 1892 when settler August Schendel opened a general store on his land, adding a blacksmith shop, cotton gin, and post office by 1894, when he became the first postmaster. He wanted to call it "Needmore" because it needed more of everything, but that name was taken. A farming and ranching village at first, the town was transformed in the 1920s and '30s by the discovery of oil, natural gas, and sulphur.

Newton, TX

When Newton was laid out in 1853 in Texas's easternmost county, it was little more than a stand of oaks and beeches—yet its central location won it the county seat that very year. Major John Moore built its first house and its first frame courthouse, and for decades the town crept along, counting just four buildings in 1859. The railroad's arrival in 1905 finally spurred growth, and sawmills turning the surrounding forests into baskets, tool handles, turpentine, and furniture made timber the backbone of the town's economy.

Panna Maria, TX

On Christmas Eve of 1854, the Rev. Leopold Moczygemba established Panna Maria, the oldest Polish settlement in Texas, having helped bring roughly 100 Polish peasant families across the ocean to the Karnes County prairie. The transition was hard, and within a few months many of the families scattered to seek homes elsewhere in Texas. Those who stayed rooted a Polish American community that endures on this spot.

Pettus, TX

Pettus grew up around the sprawling 1850s ranch of John Freeman Pettus, son of one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists. The sleepy cattle country woke in 1886 when the San Antonio & Aransas Pass railroad arrived, turning the town into a shipping hub where wood-burning engines took on water—one stop even hosting President Taft's train in 1909. A 1929 oil strike remade it again as the 'oil capital of Bee County.'

Quihi, TX

Quihi was surveyed in 1844 by Henry Castro, the pioneering empresario whose colony brought European immigrants to the Texas hill country. Ten families led by Castro's agent Louis Huth settled here in early 1845, on land at the very edge of the frontier. Life was perilous—many of the settlers were killed in raids before 1860—and the state marked the town's founding during the 1936 centennial.

Saint Jo, TX

Saint Jo began in the 1850s as "Head of Elm," a settlement at the headwaters of the Elm Fork of the Trinity River founded by hopefuls chasing rumors of gold. Its fortunes turned when the Chisholm Trail routed cattle drives through town around 1868, bringing stores, saloons, and a growing population. Renamed for pioneer Joe Howell — with "Saint" added, one story says, because he was a teetotaler — the town incorporated in 1886 and has held near 1,000 residents on farming and ranching ever since.

Scottsville, TX

The town of Scottsville was founded in 1834 by pioneer and statesman William Thomas Scott, two years before Texas won its independence. This marker was placed jointly by the State of Texas and Scott's relatives and friends in 1936, during the centennial celebration of Texas independence.

Tatum, TX

Albert Tatum, a wealthy Alabama planter, settled in the 1840s where Trammel's Trace crossed the Grand Bluff Road, building a plantation home with enslaved labor that became a social center of the area. His family gave land for a railroad station in 1882, and his son Paul—"Uncle Fox"—laid out the townsite in 1892, after which farming and lumbering carried the community forward. A lake and power plant brought a fresh wave of growth in the 1970s.

Coleman County, TX

Founded around 1855 as a trading post serving cattle baron John Chisum's ranching country, Trickham grew into a rowdy crossroads on the great cattle trails during the decades after the Civil War. Legend holds that pranks pulled at the local general store earned it the name "Trick'em" when settlers sought a post office.

Vernon, IN

Vernon, laid out around 1815 as the seat of Jennings County, is that rare place listed on the National Register of Historic Places in its entirety rather than as a single building. Perched on a horseshoe bend of the Muscatatuck River, its early street grid and 19th-century architecture survived largely intact, earning the whole town district its designation. The listing recognizes Vernon as a remarkably complete example of an early Indiana pioneer town.

Claude, TX

Laid out in 1887 by R.E. Montgomery, a son-in-law of railroad builder Gen. G.M. Dodge, Washburn briefly served as the terminus of the Fort Worth & Denver City line and became a junction connecting it to the Santa Fe. The Panhandle town boasted the plains' first newspaper, along with hotels, saloons, and stores, before it dwindled as rail patterns shifted. A handful of civic founders, including a judge and banker, are remembered as its town faded.

Whitsett, TX

Whitsett sits on an 1835 Mexican land grant that once served as a watering stop and camp for cross-country cattle and hog drives. The town proper sprang up in 1913 when the San Antonio, Uvalde & Gulf railroad arrived and a post office opened, and it was soon shipping thousands of steers to northern markets. The area later gained wide renown for the beekeeping enterprise H.A. Coffey launched in 1924, alongside oil, uranium, ranching, and farming.

Winnie, TX

Winnie grew up on an 1835 Mexican land grant that stayed sparsely homesteaded until the railroad arrived. It took its name from Fox Winnie, a Kansas contractor who helped build the Gulf & Interstate Railway through the area in 1895, and a Galveston-based improvement company sold town lots to draw settlers. The young community weathered a punishing run of storms, freezes, and a hurricane that stranded its train in Galveston for three years, before rice, cattle, and later petroleum gave it firmer footing.

Somerset, KY

In 1801, when Kentucky was barely a decade into statehood and still a raw frontier, the new county of Pulaski needed a seat of government. William Dodson deeded forty acres for the purpose, and the fledgling town of Somerset took root beside a dependable spring. That water source was no small thing on the frontier, where a town lived or died by its access to it — the path settlers wore down walking to drink from the Old Town Spring became Somerset's busiest street.

Adamsville, TX

When Oliver Hazard Perry Townsen, 'Uncle Perry,' arrived in Texas in 1854 and settled along the Lampasas River, his family soon followed and built a mill that anchored a growing community. The cemetery began in 1875 with the burial of a four-year-old Townsen child and grew to hold nearly 300 graves, among them legislators, a county commissioner, a Texas Ranger, and dozens of veterans. Uncle Perry himself, who lost an arm in one mill accident and his life in another in 1891, rests here in the ground his family gave to the county.

Adamsville, TX

Built on Mill Branch in 1872, Perry and Jasper Townsen's steam-powered mill cut rough "rawhide" lumber and ground the wheat and corn of surrounding farmers. A post office opened in 1881 and moved in 1891 to John Adams's store in nearby Adamsville, where the Rev. McCall Smith built and pastored the area's earliest Presbyterian church. The mill was the practical heart around which a small Lampasas County community formed.

Warrenton, TX

Nathaniel Townsend came to Texas in 1830 and, after serving as the Republic of Texas consul in New Orleans, had this house completed in the late 1830s by builder James Stephens. Its Greek Revival lines make it a rare survivor from the Republic era. German immigrant Heinrich Bremer bought the home in 1905, and it stayed in his family until 1961, linking two waves of Texas settlement under one roof.

Columbus, TX

The front of this Columbus house dates to the mid-1800s, when it was owned by Stephen Townsend, a member of a prominent local family and a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto who, as the county's first sheriff in 1837, took part in a court held under a famous nearby oak. A later owner joined a second structure to the first in 1902 and added a porch, and since 1951 the home has belonged to former State Representative Homer Koliba and his wife Bernice, a Townsend descendant.

Columbus, TX

Built in 1890, this Eastlake-trimmed Victorian was the home of Marcus H. Townsend, a Texas state representative and senator. Among his legislative acts, Townsend sponsored the bill by which the state purchased the Alamo, and he named a county for his law partner. The house has remained a cherished family home across generations.

Coldspring, TX

The land beneath Coldspring began as a Mexican grant to Col. Robert Rankin, a veteran of the American Revolution. Its post office cycled through colorful names — "Coonskin," then "Fireman's Hill," and finally "Cold Springs" — before settling on the modern spelling in 1850. After fire destroyed the wooden courthouse in 1915, a stone replacement rose in 1918, and by 1923 most of the town had relocated up the hill to its present site. Early academies and an 1880 "Male and Female Institute" educated its children.

Dickinson, TX

Dickinson is the oldest mainland settlement in Galveston County, named for John Dickinson, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old 300 colonists. Laid out on a bayou land grant surveyed in 1830 by Austin himself, the community grew through early homesteads whose cabins still stand and, later, a booming produce trade that earned it fame as a Strawberry Capital of the World. Rail lines, a Methodist church, a post office, and a public school followed as the town matured.

Norton, TX

At the turn of the 20th century, settlers drawn by good farmland and climate began putting down roots in this corner of Runnels County. When a post office opened in 1906, the little community took the name Marie in honor of early settler Walter Gentry's wife. It never grew beyond a store, gin, blacksmith shop, and a schoolhouse that doubled as a Sunday church, and it faded as families drifted toward larger towns.

Farmer, TX

Named for the Rev. William H. Farmer, a missionary who camped on this spot in 1877 and soon opened a general store and served as first postmaster, the little town of Farmer once bustled with a school, two churches, a newspaper, three doctors, seventeen businesses, and its own justice of the peace. Today the old Farmer ranch house is nearly all that remains. It is a classic North Texas town that flourished briefly and then faded.