Westward Expansion

Smithland, TX

This family burial ground served the people of the old Wilkinson Plantation and takes its name from Seaborn Jones Wilkinson and his wife, Elizabeth Ann. The earliest grave, from 1854, is an infant daughter of Confederate veteran Abner Pulaski Moseley. Also interred are the Confederate minister William Hilary Moseley and Samuel Fountain Moseley — a U.S.-Mexico War veteran, lawyer, and owner of the Jefferson Herald newspaper. A cemetery association formed in 1994 to maintain the site.

Grandview, TX

In November 1866 Henry and Sarah Ann Wilkinson set out from Mississippi with their seven children, enduring a 62-day journey by two ox-drawn wagons before settling here in January 1867. They rented land at first, then bought 762 acres in 1869 to build a farm and a small log home, becoming leaders of a rural community first called Hugh and later Antioch. When Henry died in an 1879 farming accident he was buried in a grove near his home, beginning the family cemetery still tended by his descendants.

Higgins, TX

One of America's most beloved humorists first sharpened the rope tricks that made him famous as a young cowboy on the Little Robe Ranch near Higgins. Will Rogers had left school in 1898 after some pranks and drifted into Texas, forming a lifelong friendship with his employer's son before joining a wild west show in 1902 and rising to national fame. His life ended in 1935 in a plane crash alongside aviator Wiley Post during a pioneering flight around the globe.

Raymondville, TX

Carved from Cameron and Hidalgo counties in 1911 and reorganized a decade later, Willacy County honors John G. Willacy, a state legislator and tax commissioner. Its seat shifted from Sarita to Raymondville as the county settled into its modern shape in the 1920s.

Raymondville, TX

After Willacy County was reorganized in 1921 with Raymondville as its seat, officials held early meetings in a bank building and even borrowed a jail cage from the King Ranch. They soon commissioned architect Henry T. Phelps — who had designed the earlier courthouse in remote Sarita — to build a proper three-story courthouse and jail, completed in 1923. The understated brick building became the focus of civic pride and community life in the South Texas county.

Bellingham, WA

This monument honors the deputy surveyors of the General Land Office who, between 1856 and 1910, mapped the townships of northwest Washington from the Willamette Meridian. Working through mountains, tidewater, and forest, these crews laid down the invisible grid that turned frontier land into surveyed parcels open to settlement.

Fort Worth, TX

This pioneer burial ground holds the descendants of Edward and Nancy Willburn, upper-South emigrants who put down roots in southwestern Tarrant County in the 1850s, when north-central Texas was still open range. The graves gathered here — a cattle-drive cowboy, Civil War veterans, and a woman who gave land for a church, school, and cemetery in Benbrook — trace a single farming and ranching community across a generation. The earliest marked grave, an infant from 1867, speaks to the hard cost of frontier settlement.

Millett, TX

Ohio-born William A. Waugh joined the 1849 gold rush to California before settling near the Cibolo Creek Crossing on the Laredo–San Antonio Road in 1856, years before La Salle County existed. He briefly served as a Texas Ranger during the border troubles known as the Cortina War, then made his mark as a merchant, district court clerk, and justice of the peace. He and his family helped build up this stretch of South Texas frontier before his death in 1901.

Wills Point, TX

Tennessee native William A. Wills moved his family to Texas in 1847 and settled along the Dallas–Shreveport Road, where the Wills home became a welcome stop for travelers. He served the young county as tax assessor-collector, road overseer, and commissioner, and by 1855 court records were already calling the area around his property 'Wills Point.' When the town was laid out along the Texas and Pacific Railroad in 1873, it took his name for good.

Bigfoot, TX

William A. A. Wallace—known far and wide as "Big Foot"—became a legend of the Texas frontier as a soldier, ranger, and mail rider. Through decades of hard service he helped guard the advancing line of settlement against raids and danger until his death in 1899. His nickname and exploits made him one of the most storied figures of nineteenth-century Texas.

Fort Worth, TX

Born in England in 1819, William Alfred Sanderson came to Texas in 1841, obtained a Republic of Texas land grant, and settled in Tarrant County in 1847 with his wife Isabella. He established himself as a farmer and stock raiser, helped charter the First Christian Church of Fort Worth, served as Justice of the Peace, and took part in moving the county seat from Birdville to Fort Worth. His life traces the transformation of the region from frontier grant land to organized county.

Springtown, TX

Bill Woody, one of Parker County's first Anglo settlers, left the Tennessee hills in December 1846 and set out for Texas on foot with his wife Elisabeth and their six-week-old son. After years of moving, the family built a story-and-a-half dogtrot home here by 1855, using hand-sawn yellow pine hauled by ox from New Orleans. In the Veal's Station community the house became a stagecoach stop, a boarding house for college students, a cobbler's shop, and a meeting place for every local congregation, and in 1858 Woody helped build a frame hall that served as church, school, and eventually Parsons College.

Gonzales, TX

William Buckner Houston rose from De Witt County roots to become one of Gonzales's leading ranchers and civic figures during the cattle-and-cotton boom of late-19th-century Texas. In 1898 he and his second wife, Susan, raised this three-story Queen Anne on family land, its corner turret, wraparound porch, and porte cochere announcing the prosperity of the era. The house sheltered three generations of Houstons before leaving the family in 1952.

Schulenburg, TX

As one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred," William B. Bridgers received a Texas land grant in 1824 among the first Anglo colonists in Mexican Texas. During the Texas Revolution he served in Capt. John Alley's company, which rushed to aid Col. John H. Moore of Fayette County. A farmer, rancher, and hatmaker, he later served as a Fayette County justice of the peace and postmaster of Lyons.

Columbus, TX

William B. DeWees came from Kentucky in 1822, when Texas was still part of Mexico, and received a land grant in 1824 as one of Stephen F. Austin's 'Old 300' colonists. He worked as a blacksmith and trader, and after Columbus burned during the 1836 revolution he laid out the present town and gave land for its courthouse and school. His published letters left rare eyewitness accounts of the 'Runaway Scrape' and life in colonial Texas.

Belmont, TX

Born in Georgia in 1830, William B. Fleming came to Texas before 1850 and rode with the Texas Rangers' mounted volunteers before serving in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Settling afterward in Gonzales County, he built a black-walnut log cabin along the Guadalupe River and turned to horse breeding. His stallion "Old Billy" founded the celebrated line of "Billy" quarter horses prized by cowboys, rodeo riders, and racers.

Elgin, TX

Illinois-born William B. Standifer fought at San Jacinto in 1836 as a member of Capt. Jesse Billingsley's company, one of the units in Sam Houston's decisive army. His marker records a life (1819–1876) spent in the young Texas he had helped bring into being.

Moscow, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1806, William Barnett Hardin came to Texas in 1826 and carved out a plantation near Moscow as the area's first permanent Anglo settler. When the fight for Texas independence came, he served as a first lieutenant and was wounded at the Battle of San Antonio in December 1835, earning a 640-acre land grant signed by President Sam Houston. He later helped survey the region's first county roads, literally laying the lines of the community he had helped begin.

Clarksville, TX

Born in Virginia around 1787, William Becknell became one of the great pathfinders of the American frontier. A veteran of the War of 1812 who fought at the Battle of Credit Island, he organized a trading party in 1821 that reached Santa Fe just after Mexico won independence from Spain, opening legal commerce along what became the Santa Fe Trail. He later settled in Red River County, where he led a militia company protecting frontier settlers.

Clarksville, TX

William Becknell, born in Virginia in 1797, blazed the commercial route to Santa Fe in 1821, earning lasting recognition as the 'Father of the Santa Fe Trail.' He later served in the army of the Republic of Texas and settled in Red River County, where he died in 1865. The State of Texas erected this memorial marker in his honor in 1957.

Iredell, TX

William Berry Smith came to Texas from North Carolina in 1834, served as a soldier in the Texas War for Independence, and went on to fight as a veteran of the frontier Indian wars. He lived to the age of 84, dying in 1876, and was honored with this state marker in 1957.

Carroll Township, PA · est. 1951

William Bigler was born about a mile west of here in 1814 and went on to serve as governor of Pennsylvania from 1852 to 1855, then as a United States senator from 1856 to 1861. In office he fought the reckless chartering of "wildcat" banks and opposed the log-rolling omnibus bills of the day. In a remarkable family coincidence, his brother John — born on the same ground — was serving simultaneously as governor of California, giving one Pennsylvania household two statehouses at once.

Windsor, NC

Born in this corner of colonial North Carolina, William Blount rose to sit in the Continental Congress and to sign the United States Constitution in 1787. President Washington named him governor of the Territory South of the River Ohio, and Blount went on to become one of Tennessee's first U.S. senators as the young nation pushed west. His career bridges the Revolutionary founding and the opening of the trans-Appalachian frontier.

Henderson, TX

William C. Davis came to Texas from North Carolina in 1835, settling in what was then part of Nacogdoches County during the era of the Republic of Texas. He earned a land grant for service in the frontier conflicts of the late 1830s and became patriarch of a large family, setting aside part of his homestead as a family cemetery after his first wife Caroline died in 1852.

Minden, TX

Born in 1806, William C. Hays cast his lot with the Texas independence movement, enlisting in Kentucky in December 1835 and fighting in the decisive victory at San Jacinto in April 1836. Rewarded with land grants, he brought his family to settle the East Texas frontier, where he helped General Sam Houston negotiate with the Cherokee leader Chief Bowles and became a founding church elder and Masonic lodge master. Five of his sons later took up arms for the Confederacy.

Davilla, TX

Tennessee native William Carroll Sypert joined the army of the Republic of Texas in 1836 at just twenty, in the year Texas won its independence. After marrying and making two covered-wagon journeys between Tennessee and Texas, he settled permanently in 1849 and built a life of public service—working as a schoolteacher and musician while serving as justice of the peace, postmaster at Bryant's Station, and later Milam County Judge.

Bigfoot, TX

William Carvin Winters was born in Tennessee in 1809 and came to Texas in 1834, on the eve of its war for independence. He was among the men wounded at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive fight that won the Republic of Texas its freedom. He lived on until 1863, one of the early Anglo settlers whose lives spanned the birth and growth of Texas.

Orange County, NC

In the mid-18th century, much of North Carolina's backcountry was still being mapped and parceled out from the vast Granville District, the surviving proprietary land grant of the Earl Granville. William Churton was the surveyor who charted that country, laying out lands, towns, and roads as settlers pushed inland. In 1749 he helped carry the disputed North Carolina–Virginia boundary some ninety miles farther west, fixing a line that shaped both colonies.

Jefferson, TX

The two back rooms of this house are thought to date before 1852, built by Allen Urquhart, the founder of the riverport town of Jefferson. In 1885 the merchant William Clark bought the place and added three front rooms, living here for forty-three years while serving as postmaster, county judge, and Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge of Texas.

Nacogdoches, TX

A Virginia native who cast his lot with Texas, William Clark, Jr. was among the delegates who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, the founding document of the Republic. He lived until 1871, and his wife Martha until 1863. The State of Texas raised their marker during the 1936 centennial of independence.

Orlando, FL · est. 1939

This monument, raised by junior high students in 1939, records the local tradition that the city of Orlando took its name from Orlando Reeves, said to have been killed near here by Indians in 1835. That was the eve of the Second Seminole War, when settlers pushing into central Florida clashed with the Seminole people resisting removal. Historians note the Reeves story is a cherished legend rather than documented fact, and the city's naming has competing accounts — but the marker itself has become part of Orlando's civic memory.

Hallsville, TX

At sixteen, William Delafield served in a Virginia militia company during the Revolutionary War in 1779, then joined the great westward migration — moving to Georgia in 1785, Alabama by 1832, and finally to Harrison County, Texas, by 1850. Awarded land for his war service, he was remembered by neighbors as an old man in a rocking chair, one leg lost in frontier fighting, who spun tales of times long past.

Columbus, TX

Born in Virginia and raised in Kentucky, William Demetris Lacey settled in what is now Columbus around 1831, opening a tanyard and saddle shop and marrying Sarah Ann Bright. Elected to office while Texas was still part of Mexico, he was chosen as a delegate to the Convention of 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos, where he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. After service in the Texas army he returned to find his home in ruins, resettling on land granted for his service before dying in Kentucky in 1848.

Bastrop, TX

William Dunbar, born in Tennessee in 1819, was a member of the ill-fated Mier Expedition of 1842–43, when Texans crossed the Rio Grande in a raid against Mexico and were captured and imprisoned. He survived that ordeal and lived until 1855, his grave in Bastrop marking a participant in one of the Republic of Texas's most dramatic military misadventures.

Silverton, TX

William E. Schott, born in Ohio in 1870, came to the Texas Panhandle in 1890 while still a minor and filed the first of what would become extensive landholdings. In 1891 he conquered the steep Caprock escarpment by building the first wagon road up to Silverton, and the next year he helped organize Briscoe County. A major force in settling the region, he backed local schools, worked to improve area cattle herds, and left his name on the Schott Cap Road.

Hallettsville, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1811, William E. Summers received a quarter-league land grant in the DeWitt Colony in 1835 and joined the fight for Texas independence. He mustered into the Gonzales Ranging Company of Mounted Volunteers, which slipped into the besieged Alamo on March 1, 1836, and he died there five days later among the reinforcements remembered as the Immortal 32.

Aubrey, TX

Born in Virginia in 1812 and licensed as a Methodist minister in Kentucky, William Edmunds Bates came to Texas in 1851 and settled in Denton County. Appointed to a 300-square-mile circuit that he rode once a month, he founded churches at Montague, Pilot Point, Denton, Jacksboro, and Gainesville. His tireless work helped plant Methodism across North Texas as the region was first being settled.

Marfa, TX

William Edward Russell left Kentucky as a young man and worked his way into the Big Bend, trading along the Chihuahua Trail and keeping a store at the Horsehead Crossing of the Pecos. He became one of far West Texas's leading figures—rancher, merchant, farmer, and silver miner—founding the settlement of Ruidosa, where he dug irrigation ditches and ran a mill, and holding county offices including sheriff. With his wife María Tomasita Rodriguez he raised a family straddling the Texas–Mexico borderland he helped develop.

Greer, SC

In the years just after the Revolution, the Carolina upcountry was raw frontier — a rolling landscape of forests and creeks being opened by settlers pushing in from neighboring colonies and states. This bridge honors one such pioneer who crossed over from Georgia in 1787 to put down roots in upper Greenville County, part of the steady stream of families who settled the Piedmont backcountry in the early Republic. His descendants stayed on the same land for generations, and in 1984 the community fixed his name to this river crossing.

Latrobe, PA · est. 1994

Near the western edge of Latrobe stood the modest log house of William Findley, an antifederalist congressman who lived plainly among the western Pennsylvania farmers he represented. A powerful shaper of frontier opinion, he sympathized with the grievances behind the Whiskey Rebellion yet worked to head off bloodshed as tempers boiled over in late 1794. His 1796 account of the uprising directly challenged Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's version of what had caused it.

Early, TX

Georgia native William Franklin Brown settled in this part of Central Texas in 1857 as a pioneer cotton farmer, and the very next year helped organize Brown County, serving as its district clerk and justice of the peace. He took part in the frontier defenses of a still-dangerous borderland and raised a large family marked by the hardships of the era. His long life spanned nearly a century of Texas history.

Phoenix, AZ

Dedicated in 1939, this plaque honors William G. Hartranft, credited by grateful contemporaries with the vision and drive behind the creation of Phoenix's public park system. In the early twentieth century, as Phoenix grew from a small desert settlement into a rising Western city, civic leaders fought to set aside green space for a booming population.

Austin, TX

William Hickman Hill came from Tennessee to settle in 1850s Austin, and his family became civic and cultural leaders in the growing capital. In 1890 his grandson William Green Hill and wife Ella built this house, angling it to catch the summer breeze, and added rooms for her father, a retired evangelist. Little changed over the generations, and Hill descendants have preserved the home ever since.

Shiner, TX

William Green and his wife India came from Kentucky and built this house in 1853 in the classic Texas style, with a central 'dog trot' breezeway dividing two main rooms. Their son William Jr. and his wife Julia ran the Winnton post office and a general store here, which from 1869 to 1889 served as a social hub for the surrounding countryside. The property is now a Boy Scout camp.

Langtry, TX

English-born William H. Dodd came to remote Val Verde County by 1894 and put down deep roots, running a ranch, a general store, and the local post office, and adding a boarding house with his wife Lula. Over four decades he filled nearly every civic role the tiny community of Langtry could offer, from justice of the peace to county commissioner, while Lula organized the town's festivals. He is also remembered for quietly supplying arms and goods to Mexican revolutionaries across the nearby border.

Edgewood, TX

William Henry and Molly Humphries were part of a large migration of Mississippi families to Edgewood in the early 1890s, drawn to a growing East Texas town. William opened a general store and bought up farmland to become a local business leader, and in 1893–94 he built this frame Victorian home where Molly hosted civic and church gatherings. The house sheltered the couple and their two sons and survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

De Leon vicinity, TX

William H. Pate, a Georgia-born pioneer, was a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, the 1836 clash in which Texian forces won independence from Mexico in a fight of less than twenty minutes. His grave marker, alongside that of his wife Jane, ties an ordinary Erath County family to one of the defining moments of the Texas Revolution.

Liberty, TX

William Hardin, born in Georgia in 1801, became a leading figure in the Anglo settlement that grew into Liberty, Texas. He served as alcalde and first judge of the Liberty municipality and was a delegate to the Convention of 1833, one of the gatherings that pressed Mexican Texas toward autonomy and, ultimately, revolution. He died in Galveston in 1839, in the early years of the Republic he helped shape.

Clute, TX

Virginia-born William Harris Wharton became a leading advocate for Texas independence during its turbulent 1830s. He took part in the 1832 Battle of Velasco, presided over the Convention of 1833, and after independence served as the young republic's minister to the United States. A member of the Fifth Congress of the Republic, he died in 1839 at just 33.

Pittsburg, TX

Georgia-born William Harrison Pitts moved his plantation household to this corner of East Texas by 1854, bought land, and built a home around which a settlement gathered — earning the new post office the name "Pittsburg." A shrewd civic promoter, he set aside acreage for the town and in 1874 offered $50 toward a courthouse, tipping the election that made Pittsburg the seat of newly organized Camp County. By 1880 the railroad junction town numbered 750 people.

Wallis, TX

Kentucky natives William and Lydia Guyler married in 1845 and made the journey to Austin County in 1859, where William built a log cabin, trading post, sawmill and cotton gin that served settlers for twenty miles around. He served the Confederacy while Lydia nursed the sick through the 1867 yellow fever epidemic and aided soldiers at home. When the Santa Fe railroad came in 1875–76, the Guylers sold land that became the town of Wallis.

Amarillo, TX

The Frying Pan Ranch was founded in 1881 by Amarillo pioneer Henry Sanborn and J. F. Glidden, the inventor of barbed wire whose fences helped tame the open range. When the partnership ended, Glidden sold the ranch to his son-in-law W. H. Bush, who became a noted philanthropist—endowing libraries and parks, patronizing the Art Institute of Chicago, and donating the land for Amarillo's St. Anthony's Hospital. His 1926 "Round Up House" was a birthday gift to his daughter Emeline.

Town of Warwick, NY

In the Orange County village of Florida, near Warwick, was the birthplace of William Henry Seward, born here in 1801. He rose from small-town New York to become governor, U.S. senator, and Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State throughout the Civil War. A forceful opponent of slavery, he later negotiated the 1867 purchase of Alaska — ridiculed in its day as 'Seward's Folly' and only later judged a bargain.

Freeport, TX

Born in Edgefield, South Carolina in 1808, William Jarvis Cannan came to Texas in 1835 and joined the army in time to fight in the decisive victory at San Jacinto in April 1836. For his service he received headright and bounty lands across several Texas counties, and he raised eleven children by his two marriages before his death in 1881.

Baird, TX

Born in Illinois in 1829, William Jeff Maltby lived one of the great frontier lives of 19th-century Texas—soldier in the Mexican War and the Civil War, Texas Ranger, and builder of frontier forts for the U.S. Army beginning around 1850. Retiring to Callahan County in 1878, he reinvented himself as a nationally recognized horticulturist and nurseryman, and in 1906 co-authored a partial memoir titled 'Captain Jeff.' His story spanned the sweep of the Texas frontier from open-range danger to settled cultivation.

Texas City, TX

A Virginia-born prodigy licensed to practice law at nineteen, William Jefferson Jones came to Texas in 1837 at the urging of Mirabeau B. Lamar and served as an associate justice on the Republic's first Supreme Court. He joined Lamar's 1839 campaign to expel the Cherokee from East Texas, later pioneered sea-island cotton and cottonseed oil on the mainland, and drew up early plans for a deep-water port at Virginia Point. His generous land terms helped seed La Marque's African American Highland Station community after the Civil War.

Mineola, TX

Mississippi-born "Bill" McDonald came to Texas as a boy and built a life as a merchant, rancher, and lawman before earning fame as one of the most celebrated captains in the history of the Texas Rangers. Appointed a Ranger captain by Governor James Hogg in 1891, he became legendary as a tracker, investigator, and cool-headed queller of mobs, and later served as a bodyguard to President Woodrow Wilson and U.S. Marshal for the Northern District of Texas. His career carried the frontier lawman's reputation into the twentieth century.

Quanah, TX

William Jesse McDonald was the archetype of the fearless Texas Ranger — a crack shot famous for disarming opponents in a flash. Appointed captain of Company B of the Frontier Battalion by his friend Governor James Hogg in 1891, he broke up the notorious "Murder Society of San Saba" and cracked a Wichita bank robbery. He later guided President Theodore Roosevelt on a 1904 wolf hunt and served as a U.S. marshal under President Woodrow Wilson.

Jones Creek, TX

Grandson of Moses Austin, whose colonizing dream reshaped Texas, William Joel Bryan came to the country with his family in 1831 and served in the Texas army from 1835 to 1838 during the struggle for independence. A prosperous planter, he was instrumental in building a deepwater port at the mouth of the Brazos and lived at 'Durazno,' a plantation given to him by his uncle Stephen F. Austin. The city of Bryan, Texas, bears his name.

Luling, TX

The Rev. William Johnson, a farmer and Baptist minister who came to Texas in 1833, built this shotgun-style cabin near Tenney Creek in the 1870s and raised five children there. His land passed to the Connolly family in 1893, and a country doctor even used the cabin as an office late in that decade. The Luling Garden Club restored the structure after it was donated and relocated in 1972.