Westward Expansion

Dodge City, KS

By 1876 Dodge City was a booming Kansas cattle town at the end of the great trail drives, rowdy with cowboys, saloons, and gambling halls. Wyatt Earp served as a lawman here during those wild years before earning wider fame as a peace officer across the frontier West. His reputation as a steady, formidable enforcer of order became part of the enduring legend of the American cattle-town era.

San Bernardino County, CA · est. 1995

Born in Illinois in 1848, Wyatt Earp came west as a boy and made his name as a lawman in Wichita, Dodge City, and Tombstone, where the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral sealed his legend. In later years he prospected the western boom camps and drew income from oil and gold mining, wintering for over two decades near this spot with his wife Josephine; the settlement of Drennan was renamed Earp in his honor in 1930.

Stephenville, TX

The Wyatt-Boyd Ranch Complex is a rare, nearly complete example of a 19th-century Cross Timbers farmstead, its two-room rough-limestone ranch house thought to date from the early 1870s. Later owners altered the house in the 1890s and again in the mid-20th century, and the site still includes a masonry dugout, two stone barns, and a cistern base. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1987.

Richmond, TX

Wyly Martin's life ran through the founding struggles of two frontiers. Born in Georgia in 1776, he scouted under William Henry Harrison and served under Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, then reappeared in Texas as alcalde of San Felipe de Austin, a delegate to the conventions of 1832–33, and a captain in the Army of Texas during the 1836 revolution. He closed his career as chief justice of Fort Bend County before his death in 1842.

Channing, TX

The legendary XIT Ranch sprawled across three million acres of the Texas Panhandle, land the state traded to investors in exchange for building its capitol in Austin. In 1898–99 the ranch raised this handsome general office in Channing, hauling in five railroad cars of brick and dressing it in Victorian detail — a wraparound porch, decorative eave brackets, and turned columns meant to impress visitors amid the open range. It ran the vast operation until 1912.

Colorado City, TX

Raised in Fort Worth, Y.D. McMurry joined Company B of the Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers in 1882, serving under his brother Captain Sam McMurry as they brought order to the Colorado City country. Elected Mitchell County sheriff from 1892 to 1898, he helped capture the notorious train robber Bill Cooke. Away from the badge he was a merchant, cotton broker, and a longtime Presbyterian deacon.

Mountain Home, TX

Charles Armand Schreiner, an Alsatian immigrant who came to Texas in 1852, joined the Texas Rangers at fifteen, served in the Civil War, and built a mercantile and ranching empire in the Hill Country. After buying the Taylor-Clements Ranch and its Y.O. brand in 1880, he drove more than 300,000 longhorns to Kansas railheads and made Kerrville the self-styled "Mohair Center of the World." The last cattle drive off the ranch came in 1941, and the Y.O. later won fame for its longhorns and wildlife conservation.

McMullen County, TX

Founded in 1858 and named for early settler John Swanson Yarbrough, this South Texas community of some thirty log "picket houses" clung to the frontier amid frequent hardship — harassment by Indians, cattle thieves, and wild animals. Its founding families, among them the Dilworths, Walkers, and Winters, typified the hardy settlers who staked out life on the edge of settled Texas.

Cooper, TX

George and Mary Polly Wallace Yates brought their family to Texas in 1846 and settled newly formed Hopkins County land that would later become part of Delta County, raising livestock on nearly a thousand acres. When their fifteen-year-old daughter Mary died in 1855, she was buried on a hill near the family's log house, beginning the graveyard that still bears the family name. A later gift of land added the adjoining Methodist Protestant cemetery, and both burial grounds remain in the care of descendants.

Somerville, TX

This 62-mile Brazos tributary was christened "San Francisco" by the Spanish in 1690, but Stephen F. Austin relabeled it "Yegua"—Spanish for "mare"—on his 1822 map, after the wild mustang mares and foals that grazed its timbered banks alongside Native people. Colonist John P. Coles built a mill here in 1826, and in 1837 a measure signed by Sam Houston made the creek a county boundary. Long prone to devastating floods, its waters were finally tamed by Lake Somerville in 1967.

La Grange, TX

Yellow fever haunted nineteenth-century Texas, its mosquito-borne cause unknown and its course—from fever to jaundice to death—often swift and merciless. When the disease reached La Grange in August 1867, terrified citizens fled, homes were quarantined under the sign of "Yellow Jack," and the town fell nearly silent. Striking rich and poor alike, it claimed doctors, the district judge, the sheriff, and clerks, killing an estimated two hundred people—fifteen to twenty percent of the population—many now lying in mass graves in the old city cemetery.

Lubbock, TX

Yellowhouse Canyon was known to Spanish explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries and described by traveler Albert Pike in 1832, long before Anglo settlement reached the Llano Estacado. It was here in 1877 that white buffalo hunters clashed with the Native peoples who had long ranged these plains—remembered on the marker as the last such battle in Lubbock County. The canyon stands as a threshold between the era of the free plains tribes and the settlement that displaced them.

Smithville, TX

John C. Yerger, who settled in Texas from Mississippi in 1840, and his son-in-law John W. Hill, a Bastrop County native, built this Colonial-style home in 1887. They also moved the family store from Alum Creek to the new town of Smithville, laid out as a division point on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) Railroad. The house stands as a record of that founding-family enterprise.

Yoakum, TX

Yoakum rose on land granted by Mexico in 1835 to settler John May, in country used to gather cattle bound up the Chisholm Trail. The arrival of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad in 1887 turned it into a transportation hub, and the town — named for rail official B. F. Yoakum — incorporated in 1889 around industries in beef, leather, and canning.

Plains, TX

Carved out in 1876 and named for Henderson Yoakum — the only Texas county named for an author — this corner of the West Texas plains was so remote that only buffalo hunters and scattered ranchers ventured through until after 1900. The sale of state lands drew homesteaders, the county organized in 1907, and the 1935 discovery of oil finally brought industry and population to a place long defined by its frontier isolation.

Jefferson Hills, PA

In the years around the Revolution, the western edge of Pennsylvania was contested ground: Virginia insisted its charter reached across the Monongahela country and, in 1776, carved the disputed region into three counties. Yohogania was one of them, and this hilltop served as its seat of government and justice from 1777 to 1780—complete with a courthouse where Virginia magistrates held court over settlers who thought they lived in Pennsylvania. The overlapping claims were only untangled when the two states finally agreed to extend the Mason-Dixon Line westward, extinguishing Yohogania County and returning the ground to Pennsylvania.

Columbus, TX

Built in the 1860s of cypress and pine on locally fired brick foundations, this modest cottage stood on the Texas frontier as Columbus was still finding its footing. It passed through a line of notable owners — from county's first banker James H. Simpson to a county clerk — before Dr. Willis G. Youens bought it in 1915, beginning a long tenure by a family of local physicians. More than a century and a half on, it remains in that family's hands.

Plano, TX

Sam and Patience Young came to Collin County from Illinois in 1842, part of a wave of Midwestern settlers drawn to North Texas farmland. Young bought land, founded a school, and opened this cemetery when Patience died in 1847. Eleven pioneer families rest among its fifty-one known graves, including veterans of both the War of 1812 and the Civil War.

Granger, TX

Built in 1901 for the A. A. Young family, this Granger residence blends Classical Revival and Beaux Arts styling, with large dormers, decorative balustrades, and two-story Corinthian columns. It long served as a center for civic and social gatherings and stayed in the Young family until 1951. It is a rare survivor of its kind in the town.

Smithville, TX

In 1872 pioneer John P. Young gave two acres for a community school and cemetery, and carpenter Samuel Sanford raised a schoolhouse of hand-hewn pine logs that same year. The five-month-term school taught local children until 1907, when a rail line drew families to a larger school nearby; the building lived on as a community center and house of worship, and Young School House Baptist Church still gathers on the site. The adjoining cemetery, in use since 1874, has served area settlers and their descendants for well over a century.

Ft. Stockton, TX

F. W. Young, a former post sutler at Fort Stockton, built his store and home in 1876 at the ford over Comanche Creek, with a wagon yard and corrals out back. Positioned at a natural crossing on the frontier, it served travelers, soldiers, and the growing town alike. The building marks the shift from selling to soldiers on the post to serving a civilian community taking root beside the fort.

Robinson, TX

In December 1874 the Rev. Samuel King led twenty-one former members of Waco's First Presbyterian Church to organize the second congregation in the community of Robinsonville, later Robinson. The church grew quickly at first, meeting in the local schoolhouse until it built its own home in 1878, then declined in the 20th century to just twenty-one members by 1942. Revived after World War II, it received a new building in 1956 funded by two benefactors honoring their mothers, and was renamed Youngblood Memorial in their memory.

Silver City, TX

North Carolinians Alexander Younger and his wife Jane came to Texas in 1847, first receiving land in the Peters colony before settling to farm in Navarro County. In 1854 they set aside part of the farm to bury their son, and the plot grew into a community cemetery of more than 1,600 graves. Around 1860 the adjacent Woodward Cemetery began as a burial ground for enslaved people, and the site — still in use, with an annual May homecoming — holds many of the Purdon area's pioneer settlers and early leaders.

Van Alstyne, TX

In 1857 the Texas statesman Collin McKinney—one of the men who helped shape the young republic—deeded this Grayson County land to his son Younger Scott McKinney, a Kentucky-born farmer and Methodist Episcopal preacher who had grown up on the Red River frontier. He raised a family of six here with his wife Sarah while also serving as county surveyor, one of the essential jobs of a settling country still being measured and mapped. The homestead stayed in McKinney hands for more than seventy years, until 1928.

Killeen, TX

Michael Young settled this stretch of the Lampasas River around 1851, reportedly having stopped to care for a sick daughter who died and was buried in what became Live Oak Cemetery. A former ship captain, he is said to have named the place Youngsport because he had finally found his port. The community gained a post office in 1871, supported stores, a blacksmith, and churches by 1900, but faded as nearby Killeen drew away its trade; by 2005 only cemeteries and a church remained.

Botetourt County, VA

This marker recounts the 1838 creation of Roanoke County, carved from neighboring Botetourt and Montgomery counties in Virginia's mountainous southwest. Its name likely echoes the Roanoke River that threads the region, while the marker also nods to General Andrew Lewis, the Revolutionary-era frontier commander who once lived nearby. The city of Roanoke would later earn its "Magic City" nickname for its explosive growth after the railroad arrived in the 1880s.

Mesquite, TX

Zachariah Motley came from Kentucky to this part of Dallas County in 1856, bringing his large family and the people he held in slavery to settle a homestead carved from the Crittenden Survey. The family cemetery began with the 1863 burial of a daughter and remained in use for generations. Among its roughly twenty-five graves lie both Motley relatives and the enslaved people whose forced labor built the family's fortunes.

Temple, TX

In 1856, Jan Zabcik Sr. brought his family from Moravia to Galveston, part of the wave of Czech immigrants who settled first around Cat Springs before moving on to Bell County. There the family bought land—a marker of status in the Czech community—and a small settlement grew, changing names from Kocenda to Lugoville to Marekville as different storekeepers took over. In 1923 Frank Zabcik bought the store and land and renamed it Zabcikville, and much of that original family acreage remains with descendants who still farm it.

Lackawaxen Township, PA · est. 1989

Between 1905 and 1918, along the Delaware and Lackawaxen rivers, Zane Grey turned this quiet corner of Pennsylvania into the workshop where he built the modern Western. Here he wrote "Riders of the Purple Sage" (1912), the sweeping tale of the sagebrush country that became one of the best-selling novels of its age and helped fix the mythic cowboy West in the American imagination. Grey loved the surrounding countryside so deeply that he chose to be laid to rest within sight of the house.

Zapata, TX

Carved from Webb and Starr counties and organized in 1858, this South Texas county along the Rio Grande took its name from Antonio Zapata, a pioneer stockman who backed the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande. Its first county seat, Carrizo, was later renamed Zapata as well. The naming honors a borderland figure from the turbulent decades when the lower Rio Grande was contested ground between Mexico and the young Texas state.

Crystal City, TX

This corner of South Texas began as a Mexican land grant to John Charles Beales in 1832, with nearby Lake Espantosa serving as a campsite on the old road linking Mexico and San Antonio. During the Civil War the area was crossed by the Cotton Road running to Eagle Pass, a vital artery through which the Confederacy funneled goods such as guns, powder, and medicines. Organized in 1884, the county was named for Lorenzo de Zavala, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the Republic's first vice president.

Crystal City, TX

Spanish explorers passed through this region as early as 1691 under Governor Domingo Terán de los Ríos, and the historic San Antonio Road later carried travelers and settlers across it throughout the eighteenth century. This same route figured in the early Spanish settlement of San Antonio, including the arrival of the Canary Island colonists who helped establish one of the first civil communities there. The county was created in 1858 and named for Texas statesman Lorenzo de Zavala, though enough settlers to organize it did not arrive until 1884.

Alto, TX

In 1807 Lt. Zebulon Pike, commissioned to explore the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red Rivers and to scout Spanish settlements, led his party south from the Colorado mountains — where they had glimpsed the peak later named for him — only to be arrested by Spanish authorities. Under escort back toward the United States, the expedition camped near this spot on June 23, 1807. Pike's account became an important early window onto Spanish Texas and New Mexico.

Jackson Township, PA · est. 1947

Zelienople was founded in 1802 by Baron Dettmar Basse, a German nobleman who came to western Pennsylvania to establish a settlement and named the town for his daughter, Zelie. On a hill above the young community he built Bassenheim, an elaborate wooden "castle" that stood as a curiosity of Old World grandeur until fire consumed it in 1842. The town endured long after its founder's manor was gone.

Lawrence Township, PA · est. 2005

Born in Clearfield County, Zenas Leonard went west as a young fur trader and became clerk and second-in-command of Joseph Reddeford Walker's 1831–1834 expedition seeking a route across the Sierra Nevada to the Pacific. Along the way he recorded what is regarded as the first non-Native American description of the giant sequoias. His 1839 published narrative, admired for its vivid detail, became a valued account of the mountain West in the fur-trade era.

El Dorado County, CA

Jacob Zentgraf, a German immigrant born in 1821, settled along Sweetwater Creek in 1854, taking up land where a Mr. Stevens had earlier kept a small vineyard. While thousands around him chased fortunes in the gold fields, Zentgraf saw the deeper promise in the soil, planting roots that would outlast the diggings. He lived here until his death in 1911.

Zephyr, TX

The town of Zephyr took shape in the 1860s on early land grants, gaining a school in the 1870s, churches, businesses, and weekly mail from Brownwood, while this cemetery served the area from the same decade. Among its graves are veterans of six American wars, from the Mexican War through Vietnam, and thirty-three victims of the catastrophic tornado of May 29, 1909, which nearly wiped the town off the map. Now grown past seven acres, the burial ground endures as a monument to the community's resilience.

Port Lavaca, TX

This coastal graveyard, whose earliest marked burial dates to 1852, holds an unlikely thread of American military history. Buried here are John Gonzales and Joseph Mendez, natives of Spain who came to Indianola in 1858 as caretakers for a shipload of camels the U.S. Army had imported in its famous experiment to use the animals for frontier transport. The cemetery served the vanished port communities of Magnolia Beach and Indianola and took its name from the Zimmerman family, tied in by marriage.

Floydada, TX

Oregon native Fred Zimmerman came to the Texas Panhandle in 1916 and built a long career farming and ranching across Floyd and Deaf Smith counties. In 1930 he hired Wichita Falls architect Ray C. Arnhold to design this stuccoed brick house, a striking example of Pueblo Revival style with hand-hewn beams, vigas, and columns. The home stands as a distinctive expression of Southwestern architecture on the flat High Plains.

Iola, TX

Zion Cemetery grew from a log-cabin church and school that Methodist settlers established in Grimes County in 1852, when the first graves were laid among the trees. It holds early pioneers of the area, including Katy Holland McDowell Treadwell Cobb, a member of Stephen F. Austin's original Old Three Hundred colonists, along with victims of the 1867 yellow fever epidemic and veterans of every war from the Civil War through Vietnam. Managed today by a cemetery association, it remains tied to the Zion United Methodist Church in nearby Iola.

Comanche vicinity, TX

Organized on August 2, 1873, Zion Hill was the second-oldest Missionary Baptist congregation in Comanche County, founded by a small band of settlers who first raised a frame meetinghouse at nearby Zion Hill Cemetery. In 1875 delegates from area churches gathered here to form the county's first Baptist Association, and the congregation moved to its present site in 1912. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Zion Hill Community, TX

Named by settler Samuel Wolfenburger, who deeded four acres for a school, church, and cemetery in 1877, the Zion Hill community anchored a corner of Parker County. Its school opened in 1868 and doubled as the church meeting place until it merged with the Peaster system in 1927, while the church itself organized in 1871. The cemetery's more than 700 graves include Civil War veterans and many who served in the World Wars, beginning with Wolfenburger's granddaughter Margaret Lionberger in 1879.

Zion Hill, TX

Organized in 1852 on land soon donated by pioneer Aurin Goodgame Horn, Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church grew from a small log house to a board-and-batten sanctuary and finally a large frame building that stood into the 1960s. Its cemetery holds more than a thousand graves, among them citizens of the Republic of Texas and dozens of war veterans. The many small stones of children buried here are a stark record of the hardships of frontier life in East Texas.

Briscoe, TX

Established in 1918 beside the Zybach Methodist Church, this Panhandle cemetery has grown through a patchwork of donated additions and remains in use today. Among those buried here is Wiley McCray, twice honored as the world's greatest rodeo clown.