Westward Expansion

La Grange, TX

William Sion Robson came to Texas as an infant with his Georgia-born parents in 1852, settling first near Round Top before the family moved to La Grange in 1863. He rose from butcher to public servant, holding offices from tax assessor to deputy district clerk, and in 1880 he and his wife Lucy built the first section of this home. Robson became a lawyer and served three terms as Fayette County Judge beginning in 1890, and was a charter member of the Texas Bar Association.

Jefferson, TX

Built before 1850 in the thriving riverport town of Jefferson, this home was once the residence of B. J. Terry, who served as Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge of Texas. Dating to the early years of Texas statehood, it reflects the prominence of fraternal leaders in the civic life of a young frontier community.

Dripping Springs, TX

Georgia-born William Thomas Chapman came to the Dripping Springs area after being wounded and captured in the Civil War, and by the 1870s had become the community's postmaster, stagecoach operator, and driving civic force. He gave land for a church, a Baptist congregation, and the Dripping Springs Academy, and in 1881 platted the town itself from his wife Martha's inherited acreage, naming the main street for their son. A merchant and Confederate-veterans organizer, he helped found Camp Ben McCulloch.

Chappell Hill, TX

William Westcoat Browning, a native of South Carolina, moved his family to Texas in the 1850s and had this Greek Revival plantation home built in 1856–58. Its false wood graining, widow's walk, and two-story porches show the architectural tastes early planters carried west from the older Southern states. The house stands as a refined example of that transplanted style at Chappell Hill.

Alpine, TX

Built in 1908 by local contractor William Daugherty for pioneer settler William Wallace Townsend, this cast-stone house is a fine turn-of-the-century residence in the far West Texas town of Alpine. Its paired front doors, shingled dormers, and Eastlake-influenced porch reflect the tastes of a settling frontier community, and later owner Allen H. Palmer lived here into the 1920s. An outside stair added before 1913 was later removed.

Georgetown, TX

Built in 1895 for merchant, alderman, and mayor William Y. Penn, this Georgetown home was one of several Victorian houses raised by the local Belford Lumber Co. In 1907 it became the residence of the presiding elder of the Methodist Church's Georgetown District, and over the following decades it passed to a druggist, a doctor, and other families. The house reflects the comfortable prosperity of a growing central Texas county seat.

Granbury, TX

Established in 1894, the W.M. Miller Cemetery is one of the small family and community burial grounds that dot Hood County, and it carries the state's Historic Texas Cemetery designation awarded in 2008. Such late-19th-century graveyards took root as scattered farming families needed consecrated ground close to home. Its official recognition helps protect a modest but genuine link to the county's settlement era.

Dallas, TX

When George W. Glover acquired this Dallas County land in 1844, Texas was barely a decade past its revolution and still a sparsely settled frontier. The ground became a burial place in 1857 with the interment of five-year-old Sarah Beeman, and Glover later deeded it to his son William Wald Glover, for whom the cemetery is named. More than seventy pioneer families rest here, including early civic leader Richard Lagow, in a community graveyard used until 1951.

Albemarle County, VA

Just north of this Albemarle County marker, in the same Virginia Piedmont that shaped Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis was born in 1774. He grew into a soldier and Jefferson's private secretary before the president tapped him to lead the Corps of Discovery across the newly purchased Louisiana Territory. From 1804 to 1806 Lewis and William Clark traced the rivers and ranges of the West, reaching the mouth of the Columbia River and the Pacific in late 1805.

Waco, TX

Founded in 1849 and named for the Waco Indians who had lived along the Brazos, the city grew from a frontier settlement into a hub of Central Texas. In the Civil War it sent men to both state frontier defense and the Confederate Army and counted five Confederate generals among its residents. Today it anchors the region as home to Baylor University, Paul Quinn College, and the Heart O'Texas Fair.

Waco, TX

Chartered in 1852 as Bosque Lodge and renamed in 1856, this Masonic lodge is the oldest organization in continuous existence in Waco. Devoted to benevolence, its rolls included three Texas governors — Richard Coke, Lawrence "Sul" Ross, and Pat M. Neff — spanning the decades from Reconstruction into the 20th century.

Waco, TX

Waco began where a Native village once stood, the former home of the Waco Indians, when the first town lots sold in 1849 and Shapley Ross opened a ferry across the Brazos the next year. Ferry, then bridge in 1870, then railroad in 1872 turned the settlement into a cotton-trading powerhouse and, by 1900, one of Texas's great inland cotton ports. Baylor University arrived in 1886, three governors called the city home, and 20th-century military camps made Waco known far beyond Texas.

Odessa, TX

A few years after Odessa's founding in 1881, a squirrel is said to have buried a stolen pecan that sprouted into this tree, a green rarity in the dusty West Texas downtown. By the time the Waddell family moved to the adjoining home in 1926, neighbors were gathering to enjoy its native pecans. "Cotton" Waddell and his wife Mary Lee, part of a family influential in the region since the 1870s, let the tree shade the community as freely as they gave their time to civic life.

Brookshire, TX

Wade Cemetery began in 1846 on the sprawling plantation of William Wade, a Mississippi planter who came to Texas in the 1820s and amassed over 11,000 acres of Republic of Texas land along the Brazos. His wife Hulda's grave is the oldest here; later generations—including a son who fought for the Confederacy—and neighbors from the Brookshire and Fulshear communities were laid to rest alongside the family.

Decatur, TX

The Reverend Henry Fullingim, a Georgia-born circuit-riding Methodist minister, brought his wife Martha and their seventeen children to northeast Texas in 1849. His son Archibald and son-in-law John Hale—who became Wise County's first sheriff in 1856—were among the county's earliest settlers. The cemetery took its name from John T. and Sarah Waggoner, on whose land Martha Fullingim's 1868 burial became the first recorded here.

Vernon, TX

Spottswood Lomax, a founder of the famed Matador and Espuela (Spur) ranches, built a Queen Anne house on this spot in 1890, at the height of the great Texas cattle empires. Around the turn of the century the prominent cattleman W. T. "Tom" Waggoner remodeled it in the Colonial Revival style and deeded it to his son, banker Guy Leslie Waggoner. In 1907 it passed to farmer and oil investor E. P. Hicks, whose family held it for sixty years — a chain of owners tracing the region's shift from cattle to banking to oil.

Fredonia, TX

This burial ground served the Blue Stretch settlement, which took the name Wagram when its post office opened in 1906. Established beside the community schoolhouse, its first marked grave holds three-month-old Marion Eaker Miller, who died in 1880, though rock-marked graves may be older still. Deeded to the community in 1897, it remains in use under a perpetual-care association.

Fredericksburg, TX

This stone house rose during the great wave of German immigration that gave the Texas Hill Country its distinctive character. Johann Christian Wahrmund brought his family to Texas in 1846 and settled along Bear Creek, where the original portion of the house was built between 1852 and 1866. Prussian immigrant Johann Priess bought the property in 1866, and his family enlarged and held it for another sixty-five years.

Carthage, TX

In the years after the Civil War, East Texas communities like this one in Panola County were still being knit together by the families who settled its piney woods. Local memory holds that the graveyard began in 1872 when a settler was laid to rest in a cedar grove she had admired, on land the Waldrop family later deeded to the community in 1885. As neighbors added parcels, it grew into a resting place for many of the area's pioneer families.

Weatherford, TX

On a bend of the Brazos River, this community took its name from W. J. Walker, who settled here in the 1860s, and by 1884 had its own school that served children until 1925. The nearby cemetery holds 24 recorded graves of pioneers and Walker family members, the oldest being W. J. Walker's infant son Thomas, buried in 1878. Long neglected, the burial ground was restored by the Abandoned Cemetery Association in 1993.

Lufkin, TX

The Red Land community, named for the red soil ridge at its heart, took shape after Thomas R. Walker arrived from North Carolina in 1846 and married Emily Briscoe. Walker served as county sheriff and judge and belonged to the local Masonic lodge, and when he died in 1877 he was buried in this graveyard that predated his purchase of the surrounding land. Deeds from his widow and neighbor J. W. Chamblee in 1892 enlarged the site into a community cemetery that still bears his name.

Huntsville, TX

Walker County was carved from Montgomery County in 1846, the year Texas joined the Union, and first honored Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, a leading advocate of annexation. In 1863 the county was pointedly rededicated to Captain Samuel H. Walker, the daring Texas Ranger who fell fighting in Mexico during the U.S.-Mexico War. Huntsville has served as its county seat throughout.

Huntsville, TX

Carved from Montgomery County in 1846, Walker County was first named for U.S. Senator Robert J. Walker, then rededicated to honor Samuel H. Walker, the Texas Ranger and Mexican War hero. Its seat, Huntsville, began as an Indian trading post and got its first courthouse in 1848; after fire destroyed a later one, the present courthouse rose in 1888. Today the county holds part of the Sam Houston National Forest and is home to Sam Houston State College, the oldest state-supported college in Texas.

Danville, KY

Walker Daniel founded Danville in 1781 and, two years later, became the first attorney general of the Kentucky District. Serving on a commission at the Falls of the Ohio, he helped allot the lands granted to George Rogers Clark's Illinois Regiment. His promising career was cut short in August 1784 when he was killed by Indians while traveling to visit his brother at Bullitt's Lick.

Mineral County, NV

Land around Walker Lake was set aside for 'Indian purposes' in 1859, but only on March 19, 1874, did President Ulysses S. Grant sign the executive order formally creating the Walker River Indian Reservation. Indian agent Calvin Bateman reported that year that it was home to at least six hundred Northern Paiute, urging that the government's promise 'remain inviolate.' A century later, the reservation still spanned more than 300,000 acres and remained home to the Paiute community.

Reklaw, TX

This cemetery grew from Walker's Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, South, founded by John Walker, who reached this Cherokee County vicinity by 1839. Harvey N. Cooper deeded the church its site in 1879, and the congregation became the heart of a rural community that took the chapel's name. The oldest legible grave dates to 1879, and among the burials are veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. A memorial service still gathers here each July.

Cameron, TX

The Walkers Creek community took its name from W.H. Walker, who arrived in the 1830s, and grew as families like that of Tennessee native Richard W. Cage put down roots. In June 1884 the Cage family gave land for a cemetery, Baptist church, and school, though burials had begun here by 1880. The church later disbanded, but an association keeps the cemetery active as a link to the settlers who shaped the area.

Bastrop, TX

This Bastrop house began about 1840 during the ownership of Dr. L. B. Harris, in the days of the Republic of Texas, and had taken its lasting shape by the turn of the twentieth century with the addition of a jigsawn wraparound porch. Among its residents were James P. Wallace, an early Texas Ranger and soldier of the Republic's army, and brickmason James S. Holme, who supervised Civilian Conservation Corps work at nearby Bastrop State Park in the 1930s.

Canton, TX

Settled in the 1840s, the Wallace community grew into a rural trading hub with a store and school in Van Zandt County. Its Methodist congregation was organized in 1889 by the Rev. W. D. Wheeler and eight charter members, meeting first in the schoolhouse before local benefactors funded the present sanctuary in 1910. Despite the long decline of the surrounding farm population, the country church has kept up its tradition of service.

Douglas County, NV

In 1862, along the Carson branch of the emigrant trail, David and Harriet Walley developed the hot springs bubbling up along this fault line into a $100,000 spa complete with beds, a ballroom, and gardens. The mineral waters—ranging from 136 to 160 degrees—were promoted as a cure for rheumatism and other ailments, drawing visitors until the resort burned in 1935. A century later the same thermal source drew engineers testing for geothermal power.

Mont Belvieu, TX

The Wallis family came from Louisiana in 1824 and settled on this hill in 1825, their home a welcome stop for travelers on the early Texas frontier. The graveyard began with the 1830 burial of young Elijah Wallis and grew into a family and community cemetery, holding at least one veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto among its roughly 25 graves. By the 1870s, swarming ant colonies made the ground unusable, and burials shifted to a new cemetery nearby.

Wallis, TX

In 1890 landowner M.L.H. Harry deeded ground to a group of trustees to establish a Methodist congregation in the young town of Wallis. The church counts its founding from 1893, when members took out a loan to build their first sanctuary under their first pastor, A.S. Blackwood. A century later, in 1993, the congregation marked its hundredth anniversary as a fixture of community life.

Wallisville, TX

In the late 1870s, settler Albert Gallatin Van Pradelles set aside a plot of Chambers County land to bury his three-year-old grandson, and within a month the ground was recorded as a legal cemetery. Sixteen family lots were surveyed in January 1879 and purchased by locally prominent pioneer families, and by 1884 Van Pradelles himself was laid to rest among them. Kept in the family for more than a century, the burial ground passed to the Wallisville Cemetery Association in 1986.

Azle, TX

Organized in 1867 under the Rev. J. C. Power, this Baptist congregation first met in a log cabin and, in the 1870s, in a larger cabin on Walnut Creek that served as both church and school in the community of Parker's Shop, now Reno. The congregation moved nearby and built a frame sanctuary in the late 1880s, expanding onto adjacent land in 1947. What began as a rural frontier church grew steadily alongside its community.

Diana, TX

Pioneer settlers organized a Baptist congregation at Walnut Creek around 1855, and in 1856 acquired more than seventeen acres for a sanctuary and cemetery, whose oldest marked grave dates to 1870. Over the generations the church added Sunday school facilities and a parsonage, replacing its old sanctuary with a brick building in 1978. It remains an active congregation and steward of its historic frontier cemetery.

Fort Worth, TX

Established around 1881 on the edge of a rapidly growing Fort Worth, Walnut Creek Cemetery holds the graves of the farm and ranch families who settled Tarrant County in the decades after the Civil War. Fort Worth in that era was a booming cattle-drive town at the northern reach of the Chisholm Trail, and burying grounds like this one anchored the rural communities on its outskirts. The state's Historic Texas Cemetery designation in 2009 recognized its enduring role in local memory.

Bremond, TX

The Walnut Creek community took root in the 1850s as farming families settled this stretch of Robertson County. Its cemetery is said to have begun before 1869 with the burial of a horse trader's young daughter beneath a cedar tree, on land given by settler J. Grant Taylor, who later donated acreage for a burial ground, meetinghouse, and school. Church congregations and classes gathered here until the school consolidated with Bremond during World War II.

Athens, TX

Farm families settled along Walnut Creek as early as 1850, raising grains, cotton, cane, and livestock in a community that gradually built the institutions of rural life. Worship began under a brush arbor in 1859; a Methodist sanctuary followed in 1884, an adjoining cemetery soon after, and a schoolhouse in 1899 that scheduled classes around the growing season. As nearby Athens grew and rail bypassed the settlement, Walnut Creek faded, but its cemetery—designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2001—still marks where the community stood.

Walnut Grove, TX

Founded in 1846 by the Rev. J.N. Vance as the Union Congregation, this fellowship took the name Walnut Grove in 1858 and built its first sanctuary on donated land in 1869. Camp meetings — the exuberant open-air revivals characteristic of frontier religion — were often held on its grounds. The plain frame church in use today dates to 1886, a survivor of the country churches that anchored rural Collin County.

Sherman, TX

Completed in 1920, this classical revival sanctuary served the Walnut Street Church of Christ in Sherman, a congregation with roots reaching back to the 1850s. Built as the members' third house of worship, the two-story raised structure boasts a grand portico, central stairway, and 48 stained glass windows. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1986.

Breckenridge, TX

The historian Walter Prescott Webb arrived in Stephens County at age four and spent seventeen formative years absorbing the frontier life that would shape his landmark theories on the Great Plains in American history. His father's moves between rural teaching posts exposed the boy to the region's varied geography, while neighbors supplied a wealth of frontier lore. Encouraged by a New York benefactor, Webb left in 1909 to attend the University of Texas, launching a distinguished scholarly career.

Big Sandy, TX

Before bridges spanned the Sabine, travelers crossed by ferry, and this one—started before 1849 by Texas Revolution veteran Robert Walters—carried settlers between Upshur and Smith counties for decades. Its posted 1860 rates, from fifty cents for an ox-drawn wagon to a nickel a head for loose livestock, sketch a vivid picture of frontier travel. The nearby town of Florence has since disappeared, and the ferry gave way to a bridge in 1903.

Ballinger, TX

This quiet burial ground is all that remains of Walthall, the first stable settlement in Runnels County. The community grew up around a stagecoach stop on the Camp Colorado–Fort Concho road in the 1870s, on land the John W. Guest family had claimed the decade before. Its oldest marked grave is that of infant Penny Cotten, who died in 1878; a stone hauled from the Colorado River marks the grave of Mrs. Guest, who died the same year.

Houston County, TX

The Waneta community took root in 1852 when Charles W. Butler bought land and began farming; by the 1870s a cluster of families had gathered around a general store, blacksmith, and cotton gin. A post office opened in 1899, and the Waneta School served local children from 1914 until it consolidated with Grapeland in 1949. Though the town faded after the 1940s, descendants of its founding families still live nearby.

Denison, TX

When the newly established railroad town of Denison counted forty Methodists in 1873, the North Texas conference sent the Rev. Alexander Jamison to organize them, and the little frame mission church was chartered in 1881. It took the name of E.B. Waples, a benefactor who cleared its debt for a single dollar and funded a larger building shortly before his death in 1898. Today it is remembered as the oldest continuing Methodist congregation in Denison.

Paris Township, OH

As war with Britain flared in 1812, the settlers scattered across the Ohio frontier of Union County raised a blockhouse here for refuge, wary of raids amid a conflict that drew Native nations, including the Shawnee, into the fighting along the frontier. Sturdy log strongpoints like this one dotted the young state's edge of settlement, offering shelter when alarm spread. The Daughters of the American Revolution later marked the site to preserve its memory.

Pyote, TX

Carved from Tom Green County in 1887 and organized in 1892, Ward County took its name from Thomas William Ward, a soldier of the 1835 storming of Bexar during the Texas Revolution who later ran the Republic's General Land Office and served as a U.S. consul. The marker anchors the county's origins in the sprawling reorganization of West Texas that followed the arrival of the railroads. Barstow was designated the original county seat.

Canyon County, ID

This monument, placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution, remembers the emigrants killed near this spot on August 20, 1854, in what became known as the Ward Massacre along the Oregon Trail in the Boise River valley. The attack was one of the deadliest on the trail and hardened tensions between overland travelers and Native peoples of the region.

Austin, TX

A Methodist mission organized in east Austin's tenth ward in 1885 grew into the First Street Methodist Church, renamed Ward Memorial in 1909 for Texas-born bishop Seth Ward. As the city spread southward its members followed, and the congregation bought land here in 1959 and built anew the following year.

White Pine County, NV

In the silver-hungry decades after the Civil War, the Egan Range foothills briefly roared to life as Ward, a boomtown that swelled to about 1,500 souls between 1876 and 1882. A single chamber of the Ward mine gave up a million dollars in silver, yet the camp raised its first school in an abandoned house and never built a church, settling disputes instead by vigilante committee and hanging rope. Abandoned by the late 1880s, Ward saw brief revivals in 1906 and the 1960s as new methods reopened old ground.

Fairfield, TX

On Ward Prairie, named for an early pioneer family, a Methodist chapel stood by the 1860s and welcomed worshippers of many denominations. Ward Prairie Baptist Church organized there in 1869 and met in the borrowed chapel until 1893, when it received land of its own — and, by local tradition, moved the old Methodist building to serve as its new home. Through shifting membership and economic hardship, the congregation has endured for over a century.

La Ward, TX

Lafayette Ward, Sr., came from Missouri to Texas in 1836 — the very year of the fight for independence — and made his way as a pioneer rancher in Jackson County. In the 1860s he built this home, a substantial mark of a family that had put down deep roots on the coastal plain. It stands today as a recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Utopia, TX

The Waresville Cemetery is nearly all that remains of the Old Waresville Settlement on the Sabinal River, founded by Captain William Ware, a San Jacinto veteran who brought his family to the Sabinal Canyon in 1852. Ware fell ill and died within months, and his 1853 burial started the graveyard. By 1880 Waresville had grown into a thriving village of mills, gins, churches, and a school before being renamed Utopia in 1886. Among those buried here are the Ware family, Henry Fuller—a former slave of Captain Ware—early settlers, and victims of conflicts with local Indians.

Carrollton, TX

In 1852, Robert and Sarah Dean Warner emigrated from Ireland to Texas, joining the Peters Colony and establishing a farm in this area. The family graveyard began with the 1873 death of Robert Warner, Jr., and holds ten marked graves—most of them Warner kin—along with at least one unmarked burial. The Warners and their descendants went on to become leaders in the Carrollton community.

Dallas, TX

Warren Angus Ferris spent six years trapping and chronicling the Rocky Mountain fur trade before coming to the Republic of Texas in 1836. As surveyor for Nacogdoches County he mapped the Three Forks of the Trinity and helped fix the boundaries of Dallas and its neighbors. This family cemetery, begun in 1847 on his farm, holds Ferris kin alongside many of the county's earliest settlers.

Galveston, TX

North Carolina-born Warren DeWitt Clinton Hall came to Texas early and threw himself into the military expeditions that challenged Spanish and Mexican rule. At the time of the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 he was serving as acting secretary of war for the young Republic of Texas. He later practiced law and lived in Galveston until his death, and a Panhandle county bears his name.

Caldwell, TX

Freemasonry took root in Caldwell soon after Burleson County's creation in 1846, when nine Masons petitioned for a lodge and met in the county courthouse to install their first officers in 1849. Chartered in 1850 as Warren Lodge No. 56—by local tradition honoring the Revolutionary patriot Dr. Joseph Warren—the lodge counted among its early members a future sheriff, the courthouse contractor, and surveyor George B. Erath, who platted Caldwell and later served in the Texas Senate. The Masons built their hall in 1854, laid the courthouse cornerstone in 1889, and founded a public cemetery in 1890.

Graham, TX

On May 18, 1871, Kiowa and Comanche warriors leaving the Fort Sill reservation struck Henry Warren's wagon train hauling army supplies across this raw frontier, killing seven teamsters. The chiefs who led the raid were arrested; Satank died resisting, while Satanta pleaded eloquently for his people at a closely watched trial in Jacksboro. Governor E. J. Davis later commuted the resulting death sentences.

Annona, TX

George Washington Warthan came from Tuscaloosa, Alabama with his brothers in 1852 and, after marrying Amanda Johnson, settled in the Red River Valley in 1855. In 1861 he mustered into Company E of the 32nd Texas Cavalry, seeing action in more than thirty Civil War battles before being captured and held prisoner until 1865. Returning home, he expanded his landholdings and in 1881 set aside this cemetery, whose graves are believed to predate even the Republic of Texas.

Bells, TX

Samuel and Mary Washburn brought their family from Missouri to Texas in 1836 and received a large land grant two years later. As settlers filled the area, a corner of the Washburn survey was set aside for burials; the oldest marked grave dates to 1867, though rough graves marked only with stones or bois d'arc posts likely reach back to the 1850s. Roughly 300 graves now rest on the 2.5-acre site.