Westward Expansion

Buffalo Springs, TX

During the Civil War, Buffalo Springs stood in a thin line of sentry forts guarding the Red River and the exposed North Texas frontier from 1861 to 1865. Cavalry manned it at intervals — notably when 3,000 Federal troops massed to the north in Indian Territory in 1864 — while enduring chronic shortages of guns, food, and horses. Frontier families "forted up" here in a fortified square of picket houses, posting guards on wood- and water-gathering parties until a water famine forced them out in 1862.

Colorado City, TX

These preserved tracks come from an ancient buffalo trail, one of the deep grooves that thundering herds pounded single-file into the West Texas ground as they moved between grazing grounds and watering holes. Migratory routes ran from the Rio Grande to Canada, and buffalo hunters like the Mooar brothers killed thousands here in the 1870s for hides, tongues, and meat. Native peoples had long followed these paths to the herds, and later explorers and railroad engineers built roads and rail lines along the very same routes.

Goldthwaite, TX

Local tradition holds that this burial ground began when two sheep herders died while camping here, though its oldest marked grave dates to 1882. After Frank and Mary Crowder bought the land in 1889, Mary later gave part of it for a community cemetery serving the Buffalo and Ebony neighborhoods. Pioneers and veterans rest here, joined in the 1940s by three members of the Reynolds family reburied when their original graves fell within a new military camp.

San Marcos, TX

Raised in the 1850s by Edward Burleson, Jr., a noted frontier fighter, this San Marcos home later gained fame as the birthplace of Albert Sidney Burleson, who served in President Woodrow Wilson's cabinet as Postmaster General. The house thus bridges two eras—the rough frontier of early statehood and the national politics of the Progressive age. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Bullard, TX

Bullard Cemetery was established around 1870, in the years after the Civil War when the community that became the town of Bullard was taking shape. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2001, it holds the graves of the area's early settlers. Such burial grounds are often the oldest surviving record of a community's founding families.

Bullard, TX

This marks the site of Bullard's historic town well, the reliable water source around which the community grew. When the Kansas and Gulf Short Line railroad pushed south from Tyler in 1883, the new town of Bullard—named for postmaster John Henry Bullard—supplanted the older settlements of Etna and Hewsville. Drawing on the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, the well watered people and animals alike and served as an early social gathering place.

Ranger vicinity, TX

When infant Georgia A. Barnes was buried on William Nolen's land in 1878, a one-room schoolhouse already stood on the site. In 1886 Nolen donated two of his 160 acres to formally establish a school and cemetery for the settlement that became the Bullock community. The grounds were even leased for oil drilling in 1918, though the well came up dry. A cemetery association formed in the 1960s, and the burial ground still serves the area.

Asheville, NC

Built between 1824 and 1828, the Buncombe Turnpike ran some 75 miles from the South Carolina line to the Tennessee line, threading the French Broad valley and opening the isolated mountains of western North Carolina to the outside world. Settlers, travelers, and above all livestock drovers herding hogs and cattle to market crowded the road each fall. It became the region's commercial lifeline for a generation.

Chester, TX

In 1835, on the eve of the Texas Revolution, early settler Peter Cauble raised this house in the pine woods of present-day Tyler County. His son-in-law Valentine Burch, a veteran of the decisive 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, later enlarged it. Named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964, the home survives as a tangible link to the first families who put down roots on this stretch of the East Texas frontier.

El Paso, TX

Built in 1912 for prominent attorney Richard Fenner Burges, this El Paso house took its present classical look — a portico of fluted columns — in a 1927 remodeling by architect Otto Thorman. Burges lost his wife, Ethel, during the home's original construction, then went on to serve as city attorney and state legislator while raising his family here. The house stayed in the Burges family until 1986.

Alpine, TX

This desert spring carried a layered history: named San Lorenzo by the Spanish explorer Juan Dominguez de Mendoza in 1684, later called Charco Alzate for an Apache chieftain, and finally honoring pioneer freighter John W. Burgess, who reportedly outwitted Apache raiders here. Along its banks ran the emigrant road to California by way of Chihuahua. In the arid Big Bend country, reliable water dictated where travelers, traders, and armies could go.

Galveston, TX

David G. Burnet led an eventful life long before he served as provisional president of the Republic of Texas in 1836 — joining youthful expeditions to free Venezuela from Spain, running a Louisiana trading post, and, while ailing with tuberculosis, living some eighteen months among the Comanches of west Texas. Elected the republic's interim president by a margin of six votes, he guided a chaotic government that was often fleeing Mexican troops by minutes even as it pressed for military victory. A man said to carry a gun in one pocket and a Bible in the other, he held office through the republic and statehood before his death in 1870.

Paris, TX

John S. Chisum came from Tennessee to Paris as a boy in 1837 and grew into one of the West's greatest cattle barons, driving herds numbering in the tens of thousands from Texas into New Mexico. During the Civil War he supplied beef to Confederate forces west of the Mississippi while his cowboys guarded the frontier, and he later built a vast spread near Roswell. His fortunes ultimately soured amid a bad packing-house deal and the violent Lincoln County War that also entangled Billy the Kid.

Prairie Lea, TX

Born in Pennsylvania in 1805 and schooled at Princeton, John McCullough was ordained a missionary in 1835 and reached Texas in 1838, at the height of the young Republic. He served as chaplain to the Third Congress, founded Galveston's First Presbyterian Church, and famously hauled a Conestoga wagon dubbed the "Little Church in the Wilderness" to San Antonio, where he helped raise the city's first Protestant sanctuary. He kept preaching and teaching across the frontier until his death at Prairie Lea in 1870.

Wayne Township, OH

In the early 1790s the young United States fought the Northwest Indian War for control of the Ohio country, and General "Mad Anthony" Wayne rebuilt the shattered American forces into a disciplined army known as the Legion of the United States. As Wayne's troops marched and camped across the frontier toward their decisive 1794 victory at Fallen Timbers, sickness and hardship claimed men far from any battlefield. Two of those soldiers died while the Legion camped here in 1793 and were laid to rest near this spot, their names lost to history.

Loving, TX

This marker names seven teamsters hauling forage between Jacksboro and Fort Griffin who were killed on May 18, 1871, in a raid led by the Kiowa chiefs Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree along with Comanche warriors. The attack on Henry Warren's contract wagon train was one of the most notorious episodes of the Southern Plains wars, and it led directly to the arrest and trial of the Kiowa leaders. Texas erected the memorial in 1936.

Fort Worth, TX

The first known burial in this graveyard was Mary Overton Burke, who came in 1851 with her children and widowed mother to settle land her late husband had chosen. She died in December 1867, and her mother followed just two days later. In 1900 the half-acre was formally deeded as a family burial ground, and more than a hundred graves of the Burkes and allied families have since been recorded here.

Burke, TX

Burke Methodist Church was founded in 1889 by a small band of Methodists and quickly became a center of community life. H. and Nannie Belote donated land in 1894, and the first sanctuary was finished in 1901, later moved, remodeled, and eventually replaced by a brick church and educational building in 1957. Through worship, education, and outreach, the congregation has served the town of Burke for well over a century.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Among the first families to settle what became Dimmit County, the Burlesons arrived near Carrizo Springs between 1865 and 1870. In 1895 tragedy struck fast: three young Burleson men died suddenly, probably of food poisoning, and that July another brother succumbed to heat stroke and was buried alongside them and a Burleson child. Over the decades the graves faded into local mystery until a Texas Department of Transportation investigation in the late twentieth century identified the family resting here.

Caldwell, TX

The land here was farmed as early as 1744 by Native people under Spanish missionaries, and in 1830 Fort Tenoxtitlan guarded the Brazos crossing on the old San Antonio Road, drawing Anglo-Texans who lived off wild game. The county was organized in 1846 and named for Gen. Edward Burleson — a hero of San Jacinto, Indian fighter, and Republic of Texas vice-president — with its seat at Caldwell. During the Civil War it sent troops, cotton, and food to the Confederacy.

Caldwell, TX

Burleson County sits in the rich Brazos River basin, settled as early as 1825 along El Camino Real, the old King's Highway. Here in 1830 Mexico built the fort of Tenoxtitlan, between Sterling Robertson's colony to the north and Stephen F. Austin's to the south. Surveyor George B. Erath platted Caldwell in 1840 and later authored the 1846 bill creating the county, named for Gen. Edward Burleson — soldier of Texas independence, congressman, and vice president of the Republic. Plantation agriculture gave way after the Civil War, and railroads arrived in the 1880s.

San Marcos, TX

This restored log house honors Gen. Edward Burleson (1793–1851), an officer in the Texas War for Independence, a leader in frontier defense, vice president of the Republic of Texas, and a state legislator. The original dwelling, built in 1848 of hewn elm and oak with a rock chimney, had fallen into ruin by 1917 before being rebuilt in 1964 using the old chimney stones and period logs. It stands for the generation that fought to establish and defend the young Republic.

Flower Mound, TX

This native post oak in Flower Mound predates 1820, meaning it was already a mature tree when the region was still open blackland prairie on the edge of Anglo-American settlement in Texas. The Town designated it a Historical Tree in 1992 and tied it to the Burleson Staton family, who farmed the surrounding 70 acres from about 1926 to 1966. It is a living witness to the shift from open range and homestead farming to the suburban growth of the Dallas–Fort Worth corridor.

La Grange vicinity, TX

In the mid-1820s, as Stephen F. Austin's colonists were spreading across the lower Colorado River country, Jesse Burnam set up a ferry where the old La Bahia Road met the water — the first in what is now Fayette County. It became a vital link on a route that carried settlers, traders, and travelers deep into Mexican Texas. During the frantic retreat of the 'Runaway Scrape' in March 1836, the Army of the Republic of Texas crossed here, and Sam Houston ordered the ferry destroyed so the pursuing Mexican army could not follow.

Burkburnett, TX

In the 1870s cattleman Samuel Burk Burnett launched his famous 6666 (Four Sixes) ranch in Wichita County. When drought struck the 1880s, Burnett and neighboring ranchers leased vast grazing lands from the Comanche and Kiowa across the Red River in Indian Territory, and he acquired land for a dedicated horse ranch during the outfit's greatest years of expansion and selective breeding. His son Tom kept ranching in the county after headquarters moved to King County; the family sold the horse ranch in 1906.

Trenton, TX

Tennessee native William Boyd Burns donated the land for this cemetery in 1876, next to the log cabin where he lived as a pioneer settler of the Trenton community. He also gave ground for a union church and schoolhouse, tying the burial ground to the area's earliest institutions. Its graves include Civil War veterans — among them a physician who fought at Shiloh — and generations of the settlers who built up Trenton.

Cuero, TX

When Arthur Burns reached DeWitt's colony in 1826 and built a two-story log home, he planted the seed of Irish Creek, one of the county's earliest settlements—a house that sheltered families during raids and once hosted Sam Houston in 1836. A grist mill, store, blacksmith, and stage stop clustered nearby along the Victoria–Gonzales road, and the settlement came to be called Burns Station. The cemetery, its land donated in 1853, holds an Ireland-born pioneer among its oldest graves.

Burnside, KY

This spot on the upper Cumberland began as Point Isabel, one of the small settlements planted by families drifting west from the Carolinas and Virginia around 1800 in search of new farmland on the Kentucky frontier. Its greatest moment came in 1863, when the Union army recognized the strategic value of the site and turned it into a rendezvous point and supply depot. From here troops and provisions were staged for the push into East Tennessee, part of the Federal effort to break Confederate control of that mountainous, Unionist-leaning region.

Dublin Township, PA · est. 1947

The odd name Burnt Cabins recalls a rare moment when colonial authorities acted against their own settlers. In 1750, provincial forces burned squatters' cabins in this vicinity to answer Native protests that whites were trespassing on lands still guaranteed to them by treaty. The gesture was meant to keep peace on a frontier already straining toward violence.

Tooele County, UT

This 1940 marker, one in a numbered series, points to the site of Burnt Station, a relay point on the Pony Express and Overland Stage routes across Utah's west desert. From 1860 to 1861 the Pony Express carried mail by horseback between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, while the Overland Stage ran the same country from 1858 to 1868. Stations like this one, spaced across the desert, kept riders and coaches moving through some of the loneliest land in the West.

Millard's Crossing, TX

Elijah M. Burrows, a Confederate veteran, built the back rooms of this Nacogdoches County farmhouse before marrying Molly Millard in 1867, then added the front rooms and porch over the next several years. His family lived in the house for more than a century, until a descendant of the original builder moved and restored it in the 1970s. It stands as a well-preserved example of a Reconstruction-era Texas pioneer home.

Cleveland, TX

Burton B. Tarkington and his wife Sarah left Indiana in the mid-1820s for the Mexican state of Coahuila, settling west of the Trinity River and building a ranch and farm on land that came to bear their name. Family tradition holds they fled in 1836 as Santa Anna's army advanced toward San Jacinto. After independence, the new Republic granted Tarkington more than 4,600 acres, and he later served in the Texas Militia and as a county commissioner.

Burton, TX

Georgia-born John M. Burton reached this area in 1834 and sold land for a townsite when the Houston & Texas Central Railroad arrived in 1869; a post office opened the next year. Stores, a cotton gin, an oil mill, and other trades soon followed. The town also counted among its residents the famed Texas Ranger Captain L. H. McNelly, who raised two Ranger units here in the 1870s.

Throckmorton, TX

On the rough post–Civil War Texas frontier, a dispute over rustled cattle turned deadly in 1873. Rancher Bill Hayes, accused by rancher-outlaw John Larn of stealing stock, was pursued by a posse joined by Buffalo Soldiers from Fort Griffin, who killed Hayes and several of his men; the surviving cowboys were arrested and, tradition holds, murdered on the road back. The victims are believed to lie in Bush Knob Cemetery.

Athens, TX

Orphaned young in Mississippi, Bushrod "Bush" Wofford came to Texas in the early 1850s and in 1853 bought 320 acres near Fincastle, where he raised a hand-hewn log house that his second wife, Eliza, expanded with a gallery porch and dog run. He farmed, ran the Wofford & Son mercantile, served as a lieutenant in a Civil War reserve unit, and raised a large family whose descendants became fixtures of Henderson County. In 2001 that family donated the old house for relocation and restoration here as a museum.

Zapata, TX

Don Pedro Jose Bustamante settled this stretch of the Rio Grande borderlands in 1822, receiving a 22,142-acre grant from the Mexican government in 1835 and bringing settlers, livestock, and a sandstone blockhouse for defense against raids. By the 1870s it was the headquarters of Rancho Las Comitas, nearly self-sufficient with its own store and school. A post office made Bustamante an official village in 1926, and oil and gas transformed ranch life in the 1930s—yet Bustamante descendants run it still.

Butler, PA · est. 1982

Butler County was set off from sprawling Allegheny County in 1800 as Pennsylvania's western frontier filled with settlers, and it honors General Richard Butler, an officer of the Revolution. A young George Washington had passed through this rugged country in 1753 on his mission to the French forts. In its earliest years the county also sheltered the Harmony Society, a German communal religious colony that farmed and prospered here from 1804 to 1815.

Kenedy, TX

This cemetery began as part of the homestead of William Green and Adeline Burris Butler, a ranching family that migrated to Texas before the Civil War and built holdings across five South Texas counties. The first burial was their 20-year-old son Emmett, killed in December 1884. Among its roughly 40 graves are relatives reinterred from other sites, and the family cemetery is still maintained through a trust.

Tye, TX

Authorized by Congress in 1857, the Butterfield Overland Mail ran semi-weekly stagecoaches between Missouri and San Francisco, a 2,795-mile journey scheduled at 25 days. Backed by John Butterfield and express pioneer William G. Fargo, the $2 million venture employed some 2,000 people and strung stage stations about every 20 miles — including Fort Belknap, Fort Phantom Hill, and Fort Chadbourne in this region. Crossing Comanche-held country, the line used mules west of Fort Belknap because they tempted raiders less than horses; it operated from 1858 until 1861.

El Paso, TX

From 1858 to 1861 the Butterfield Overland Mail ran a twice-weekly stagecoach relay of mail and passengers between St. Louis and San Francisco, and one of its major, well-equipped stops stood at Franklin — today's El Paso. Rival Upper and Lower Roads carried travelers past Hueco Tanks and along the Rio Grande, converging near the Concordia settlement before the service collapsed as the Civil War approached. The route boosted El Paso's commerce and bound the frontier town to the rest of the nation.

Decatur, TX

From 1858 to 1861, the Butterfield Overland Mail rolled through Decatur on its 2,795-mile run linking St. Louis and San Francisco with semi-weekly stage and mail service. The route was one of the great logistical feats of its era, knitting the far-flung antebellum nation together across deserts and plains until the Civil War severed the southern line.

Grandfalls, TX

For a few extraordinary years, 1858 to 1861, the Butterfield Overland Mail ran stagecoaches twice a week from St. Louis to San Francisco, one of the longest stage routes ever operated. Its southern line threaded through Ward County along nearly the same path a modern highway follows today. The coming of the Civil War and, later, the railroads brought the great overland stage era to a close.

Gainesville, TX

From 1858 to 1861, Gainesville served as a stop on the Southern Overland Mail — the famed Butterfield Route — which carried mail and passengers on a semi-weekly run between St. Louis and San Francisco. Stretching some 2,795 miles, it was among the longest stage lines ever operated, knitting the far-flung corners of the country together before the railroads and the Civil War.

Forestburg, TX

For a few dramatic years before the Civil War, the Butterfield Overland Mail carried passengers and letters an astonishing 2,795 miles between St. Louis and San Francisco, twice weekly, and this Montague County ford was one of its crossings. Running from 1858 to 1861, the line was a marvel of coordinated logistics across a still-wild continent — until secession and war forced its northern reroute.

Newcastle, TX

For a few years on the eve of the Civil War, the Butterfield Overland stagecoaches thundered across this county twice a week, part of a mail and passenger line stretching from St. Louis to San Francisco. A station at Fort Belknap gave travelers a stop along the way. The route knit the far-flung country together until the war and the coming railroads closed the chapter.

Jacksboro, TX

Through this spot ran the Butterfield line of the Southern Overland Mail, which from 1858 to 1861 carried mail and passengers by stagecoach the astonishing 2,795 miles between St. Louis and San Francisco. Twice a week the coaches rolled through, and the reliability of the service over such punishing distance made it one of the great transportation feats of its age—until the Civil War severed the southern route.

Grape Creek, TX

When John Butterfield's Overland Mail Company won a federal contract in 1857 to carry mail between the Mississippi and the Pacific, stations sprang up a few miles apart to feed and rest drivers and swap out teams. Reporter Waterman Ormsby, the lone through-passenger on the 1858 inaugural run, praised Grape Creek as 'a fine stream' with welcome timber. The stop, first a corral of staked timber and later a more permanent post, seeded one of Tom Green County's oldest settlements before the route left Texas in 1861.

Denton, TX

When the Rev. William E. Bates gathered a Methodist congregation at Little Elm in 1853, north Texas was still thinly settled prairie, and worshippers made do with a shared meetinghouse before raising their own in 1916. The building's story took an unusual turn in the 1950s, when the rising waters of the new Lewisville Lake forced the whole church to relocate. A 1962 gift from a descendant of the pioneer Button family funded a fresh sanctuary and gave the congregation its present name.

Humboldt County, NV

In 1873 Frank Button and his uncle Isaac drove cattle into the fertile valleys of northern and eastern Humboldt County to start ranching under their famous Double Square brand. Across some 4,000 square miles of range they raised thousands of fine horses. Though the original ranch sold in 1884, Frank Button stayed in the country, serving as Button Point's postmaster and as chairman of the Humboldt County commissioners.

Jackson, GA

Butts County was created in 1825 and named for Captain Samuel Butts, killed in 1814 at the Battle of Calabee during the Creek War. Within its bounds lay Indian Springs, where treaties with the Creeks opened vast tracts—first the lands between the Flint and Ocmulgee, then the remaining Creek territory in Georgia—to settlement. The marker also names the county's first officers.

Jasper, TX

Adam Byerly came to Texas from South Carolina in 1833 and took up a Mexican land grant in the Jasper County pinewoods. He soon invited Methodist missionary Henry Stephenson to preach under a brush arbor, launching frontier camp meetings where scattered pioneer families wagoned in and camped for a week to worship and socialize. In 1843 the Byerlys deeded ten acres to the Methodist church; a frame meetinghouse rose about 1850, the burying ground opened, and the site served as church, school, and community anchor for nearly a century.

Crockett, TX

When Stephen and Keziah Box brought their family from Alabama to Mexican Texas in 1826, they were among the first Anglo settlers of what would become Houston County, and the acreage they set aside for their dead became one of the region's oldest burial grounds. The earliest grave belongs to their daughter Dicy, wife of a veteran of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, and the cemetery later passed to James Bynum, who gave it his name. Generations of the family kept it, and its rows hold veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Korea.

West Columbia, TX

A surveyor who came from Missouri to Green DeWitt's colony around 1826, Byrd Lockhart laid out roads from Gonzales to the coast and San Antonio and organized frontier defenses against raids. In 1835-36 he served in the Texan army at the Siege of Bexar, helped raise the Gonzales rangers known as 'the immortal 32,' and left the Alamo on a supply mission before its final fall, later working as a spy for the army. He died in Columbia in 1839, and the town of Lockhart was named in his honor.

Post, TX

Cereal-foods millionaire C. W. Post built this home in 1912 in the very town he founded, planting a colony on the West Texas plains that he stocked with settlers by selling land on generous terms and seeding new industries. True to his slogan "I Want Quality," he fitted the house with solid oak doors, redwood floors, and leather wallpaper. Post was as much a town-builder as a breakfast magnate, promoting agriculture and settlement across the region.

Lampasas, TX

Built in 1883 in the young Hill Country town of Lampasas, this house reflects the craftsmanship of its era with beaded wainscoting and carved beveled glass. From 1913 to 1927 it served as a Methodist parsonage, tying the residence to the religious life of a growing central Texas community. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Nordheim, TX

In the 1870s Virginian Joshua Butler settled 2,000 acres along Cabeza Creek, and neighboring ranchers soon ran large sheep and cattle operations across the DeWitt County range. A schoolhouse doubled as a place of Baptist and Methodist worship, and by the 1880s the village had a doctor, stores, a cotton gin, and a blacksmith. The post office closed in 1907, and as ranches gave way to small farms and schools consolidated, the community faded.

Goliad, TX

For nearly a century this ford on a San Antonio River tributary carried travelers along the La Bahía–Bexar road, a branch of the Spanish Camino Real linking the Gulf presidios to Bexar and, ultimately, to Mexico City. After the Presidio La Bahía and Mission Espíritu Santo resettled nearby in 1749, the crossing became a working artery for soldiers, ranchers, and traders, charted by Spanish captains and later mapped by Stephen F. Austin and the naturalist Berlandier. German immigrants of the 1840s followed the same ruts to new homes, until the railroads finally rendered the old road obsolete.

Round Rock, TX

Built in the early 1850s of squared logs and hand-hewn limestone, this sturdy cabin once stood near the village of Gabriel Mills on land settled by miller and blacksmith Samuel Mather. Before it became a family dwelling, it served the young community as a shared space for church services, schooling, and Masonic lodge meetings. Donated to Georgetown and restored as a community project, it survives as a monument to local pioneer life.

Caddo, TX

When Joe Schoolcraft settled on Caddo Creek in 1860, fewer than 200 people lived in all of Stephens County. Over the following decades the town gathered a post office, schoolhouse, churches, doctors, and even telephone service, its economy resting on cattle, cotton, and sheep. Then oil struck in 1916, and by 1919 Caddo led the state in production, drawing thousands before the boom faded, the highway bypassed town, and the population dwindled to fewer than 50.

Mount Pleasant, TX

For more than a thousand years, the Caddo peoples occupied a homeland spanning parts of present-day Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, building complex societies with ceremonial mound centers and sophisticated farming as early as A.D. 800. Early Spanish and French visitors recorded their customs and prized trade, but European diseases and later Anglo-American settlement devastated the population, and by the late 1850s the Caddo were forced to Indian Territory. Archaeologists studying village sites along Cypress Creek continue to recover the story of Caddo life from pottery, mounds, and burial patterns.