Frontier, gold rush, and the trails west.
8,204 markers in this collection — showing 841–900.
Daingerfield, TX
The Caddo Trace was an ancient hunting and trade path worn by the Caddo people who lived in the northeast corner of what became Texas. Like many Indigenous routes, it was later taken over by newcomers, becoming part of stage and mail lines after 1840 and a road for teamsters and marching soldiers. It touched or crossed the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Trammel's traces, and modern state highways still trace its course.
Streetman, TX
The Cade community sprang up in the 1870s across the farmland where Navarro and Freestone counties meet, named for early resident Cade Hayes. Its cemetery opened in 1876 and the settlers built a church and Masonic hall on land deeded by the Coleman family. When a rail line bypassed the area in the early 1900s, Cade faded, but local women revived and still tend the burial ground.
Ingram, TX
Alabama native Guilford Marion Cade served as a doctor in the Confederate Army before moving to Texas in 1865 and, in 1883, bringing his family to Kerr County. After a storm destroyed the family's log cabin, his son built a frame house, and in the early 1930s a grandson and great-grandson raised this two-story stone house on a high hill — its irregular rubble masonry doubling as a demonstration model for the builder's carpentry clients.
Beeville, TX
Organized in 1877 as Lapara Baptist Church, this congregation of 32 charter members first worshipped under a brush arbor and in a schoolhouse before raising a sanctuary on Lapara Creek. In 1920 the building was moved here and the church renamed for the Cadiz settlement, growing and enlarging over the decades. By 1960 it had earned recognition as Rural Church of the Year.
Alvarado, TX
Nancy and Aquilla Cahill settled this Johnson County land in 1859, and the farming community that gathered around them took the family name. In 1893, Sarah E. Snodgrass deeded ground for a Methodist church and cemetery in memory of her father, Aquilla, and members built a sanctuary and open-air tabernacle served by circuit-riding preachers. The church long stood as the gathering place for a wide stretch of rural country.
Lockhart, TX
The land that became Caldwell County began as part of DeWitt's Colony in 1825 and was carved from Gonzales County when the county was created and organized in 1848, with early settlements along Plum Creek and the San Marcos River. It honors Mathew Caldwell — nicknamed 'Old Paint' — a soldier-statesman who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and commanded the Texas Rangers. Lockhart was named the county seat.
Lockhart, TX
Caldwell County was organized in 1848 and named for Mathew Caldwell, a Texas Ranger and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The present courthouse in Lockhart—the county's third—was begun in 1893 and finished the next year, a three-story sandstone building in the Second Empire style, crowned with a central clock tower and outfitted with the era's latest conveniences, including electricity. Its mansard roof and elaborate detailing made it a proud civic landmark of the Gilded Age.
Lockhart, TX
Caldwell County lost its original log jail to an 1858 fire and held prisoners in the courthouse basement until outlaw activity prompted a stone prison in 1873. In 1908 county voters approved a $25,000 bond for this castellated brick jail, with the jailer's quarters on the ground floor and fifteen concrete-and-steel cells above, one rising from the building's center. Gallows are said to have been removed in the 1930s.
Caldwell, TX
Caldwell's volunteers banded together in 1886 as Hook & Ladder Co. No. 1 — five years before the town was even incorporated — buying their first hand-pulled truck, ladders, axes, and leather buckets through dues and citizen donations. Reorganized in 1907 and gradually supported by the young city, the department answered fires in town and countryside alike. It also stitched itself into community life, hosting circuses, maifests, and safety classes and tending Fireman's Park.
San Marcos, TX
Robert M. Caldwell, son of pioneer Texas colonists, built this San Marcos house in 1869. His wife was a sister of Edward M. House, the shadowy "Colonel House" who became President Woodrow Wilson's closest confidential adviser. The Kone family owned it from 1874, among them Edward Rives Kone, a long-serving county judge who won election as state agriculture commissioner in 1908.
Mount Enterprise, TX
Caledonia Methodist Church traces to the late 1860s, when Methodists of the Caledonia community set out to organize formally and three local men bought a tract for a first meetinghouse. In those same years Thomas Smith Garrison and his wife Sarah arrived and became church leaders, and though they later moved on, their daughter Adele and her husband carried on the work. Garrison descendants and other longtime families guided the congregation through the twentieth century, and it remains active today.
Morgan, GA
Created in 1854 from former Creek lands in southwest Georgia, Calhoun County was named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina statesman who resigned the vice presidency in 1832 to defend states' rights in the Senate against Daniel Webster. Calhoun also served as secretary of war and secretary of state. The marker lists the county's first officers.
Port Lavaca, TX
Calhoun County was carved from Victoria, Jackson, and Matagorda counties and organized in 1846, the year Texas joined the Union, with the coastal town of Port Lavaca as its seat. It was named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina statesman who served in Congress and the Cabinet and as vice president of the United States. The marker records the county's creation at the moment the young state was organizing its government along the Gulf coast.
Port Lavaca, TX
Calhoun County was carved from three neighboring counties in the spring of 1846, just as Texas was joining the United States, and organized that July with Port Lavaca as its seat. It was named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina statesman, congressman, cabinet officer, and vice president whose long career shaped—and divided—antebellum national politics. The county's Gulf-coast location made its port a gateway for goods and settlers.
Port Lavaca, TX
Hurricanes have shaped Calhoun County's history as powerfully as any human event, their high winds, rains, and tidal surges repeatedly reordering life along Matagorda Bay. Entire towns vanished to 19th-century storms, including Indianola—a major Gulf seaport and the county seat—and the Republic-era port of Saluria on Matagorda Island. Alongside the loss of property and life run enduring stories of survival and rebuilding.
Lumpkin County, GA
About a mile from here lies the Calhoun Gold Mine, said to be where vein gold was first found in Georgia by white prospectors. According to tradition, Benjamin Parks of Dahlonega stumbled on quartz gold while deer hunting in 1828, striking a find so rich it looked like egg yolk. The mine was later sold to Senator John C. Calhoun and worked by his son-in-law Thomas G. Clemson, whose fortune helped found Clemson College.
Eagle Pass, TX
After Fort Duncan was founded nearby in 1849, this spot became a camp and staging ground for California-bound forty-niners who chose the southern route through Mexico toward the Gila River or the Pacific port of Mazatlán. Settlers from the older smugglers'-trail town of Paso del Águila moved here for the trade the emigrants brought, and in 1850 San Antonio landowner John Twohig laid out a townsite and named it Eagle Pass. The gold seekers passing through helped seed a permanent border community.
Dallas, TX
When gold was discovered in California, thousands of "49'ers" streamed west along the Southern Transcontinental route — and here, at a shallow reach of the Trinity River, they forded the stream on their heroic trek to the Pacific. The crossing later carried stage lines and the railroad, funneling traffic through Dallas and Cedar Springs on the long road to El Paso. It marks a vital pinch-point on the overland route across Texas.
San Francisco, CA
Added in 1996 to San Francisco's 1894 Pioneer Monument, this plaque reframes the monument's celebration of California's settlement by acknowledging its devastating cost to Native peoples. It records that at least 300,000 Native people lived in California before European settlement began in 1769, a population reduced to roughly 15,000 by 1900 through disease, malnutrition, and violence — a catastrophe that accelerated after the 1848 Gold Rush — before rebounding across the 20th century. It stands as a rare public reckoning attached to an older triumphalist memorial.
Honeyville, UT
In 1855, at the direction of Brigham Young, Anson Call and his associates raised a fort of thick adobe and earthen walls to shelter settlers in the exposed country of northern Utah. Measuring roughly 120 feet square with walls eight feet high, the fort was built as protection amid tensions with local Native peoples during the era of Mormon expansion. This monument marks the southeast corner of that vanished stronghold.
Panhandle, TX
This library honors the pioneer family of Asbery A. Callaghan, who came to the Texas Panhandle with his parents in 1890 and grew into one of the region's most trusted public men — deputy sheriff, county treasurer, county judge, school board member, bank director, and church steward. It was built in 1970 through a bequest from his son-in-law, the businessman H.J. "Friday" Hughes. The building turns one settler family's civic devotion into a lasting community resource.
Baird vicinity, TX
Callahan County was carved out in 1858 and named for Texas Ranger James H. Callahan, but real settlement waited until after the Civil War. When residents organized county government in 1877, the small village of Callahan City — two stores and a post office — served briefly as county seat, hosting the first commissioners court that July. It lost a spirited December election to nearby Belle Plaine, and once the post office moved away in 1878 the little town swiftly vanished.
Baird vicinity, TX
Established before Callahan County was even organized in 1877, this cemetery holds the graves of pioneers who settled the region during the era of Indian conflict and the great early cattle ranches. It served now-vanished communities such as Admiral and Callahan City, gathering the dead of a frontier world that has largely disappeared from the map.
Baird, TX
Callahan County was carved from the vast Bexar Territory in 1858, recreated in 1876, and finally organized in 1877. It honors James H. Callahan, a soldier of the Texas Revolution and captain of the Texas Rangers. The county seat migrated from Callahan City to Belle Plain before settling at Baird, a crossroads where early military roads, the Chisholm Trail, and the first government telegraph line all met.
Baird, TX
After the Callahan County seat moved from Belle Plain to Baird in 1883, a succession of noted architects left their mark here — F.E. Ruffini on the first courthouse, J. Riely Gordon on a larger 1900 building, and finally Voelcker & Dixon on the Classical Revival courthouse completed in 1929. Adorned with acanthus leaves, rosettes, medallions, and cartouches, the current building was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 2003.
Victoria, TX
This Victoria County house began as a hunting lodge built by Dr. Stephen Cocke on Green Lake, framed of hand-hewn pine lumber shipped from New York. In 1854 the lodge was carefully taken apart, its boards numbered, and rebuilt on the present site. Since 1871 it has been home to pioneer lawyer William L. Callender and his descendants, and was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.
Calliham, TX
This McMullen County community started as Guffeyola, a 1918 post office in H. H. McGuffey's store, then exploded after oil and gas strikes between 1917 and 1922 — first a tent city, then a town of shotgun houses. It piped the first natural gas to San Antonio and was renamed in 1923 to honor rancher and townsite owner J. T. Calliham. It still produces oil and ships fine rocks and petrified wood.
Callisburg, TX
Callisburg's founder, blacksmith Samuel Callis, is believed to have been among the first members of the Methodist congregation that met in homes and a local schoolhouse as early as the 1880s. Formally organized in 1896 under the Rev. R.F. Bryant, the congregation bought this site in 1898 for twenty-five dollars, where William Campbell and his eight-year-old son built the first sanctuary. Remodeled in 1954 and joined by a relocated church-turned-parsonage in 1956, the congregation celebrated its centennial in this sanctuary in 1998.
Euless, TX
The oldest graves here belong to the Calloway brothers, who owned this Tarrant County land in the 1860s; in 1886 Richard's widow Catherine deeded 1.5 acres for a public burial ground. A wooden tabernacle went up in 1908, and many of eastern Tarrant County's pioneer settlers rest in the grounds families tended until a perpetual-care fund took over in 1971.
San Angelo, TX
Established on June 12, 1893, Calvary Catholic Cemetery received its first burial — that of Yrinia Buendia — within the month, while graves bearing earlier dates were moved here from older grounds. A memorial altar and crucifixion scene were raised in 1960, and a security fence followed when the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Angelo was created in 1961. Today a committee of local parishes tends the grounds, which hold generations of area pioneers, veterans, and church families.
Trinity County, TX
After the Civil War, Alexander and Jane Smith brought their family from Alabama to settle the Nogalus Prairie community, and this ground became its burial place—by family tradition, first opened to bury a son, Nathan, who had been murdered, though grave dates from 1875 hint at even earlier interments. Over the following century, churches, families, and associations expanded and cared for the cemetery, which by 1992 held more than 380 graves, among them veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and Korea.
Richmond, TX
This congregation grew directly out of the Episcopal Church's missionary push into Texas in the years right after the republic won independence from Mexico. In 1859 the efforts of Judge W. E. Kendall produced the first church building, and the mission became a full parish. Its early rolls carried names that run through Texas's founding story, including statesman Mirabeau B. Lamar and many descendants of Stephen F. Austin's early colonists.
Ebensburg, PA · est. 1982
Formed in 1804 from Huntingdon and Somerset counties, Cambria took a name meaning 'Wales' — a nod to the Welsh settlers who came to these highlands, dating back to Roman Britain's word for the land. The county became a crossroads of early transportation when the Allegheny Portage Railroad hauled canal boats over the mountains toward Johnstown. It was also the birthplace of Arctic explorer Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary.
Henrietta, TX
Founded in 1860, Cambridge was abandoned in 1863 as frontier raids swept the area, then revived when settlers returned in 1870 with a grist mill. By the mid-1870s it had a school, church, hotel, newspaper, and a military telegraph line linking Fort Sill and Fort Richardson. When the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad bypassed it in 1882, the town—by then called Henrietta—shifted, and only its cemetery remains at the original site.
Henrietta, TX
Cambridge Cemetery in Clay County traces its origins to about 1852, in the early years of Texas statehood when Anglo settlement was pushing into the north-central part of the state. A burial ground of this age marks one of the first permanent footholds of a pioneer community on this frontier. Its founding date places it among the older cemeteries in the region.
Emporium, PA · est. 1982
Cameron County was pieced together in 1860 from four neighboring counties and named for U.S. Senator Simon Cameron, the powerful Pennsylvania politician who would soon serve as Lincoln's first Secretary of War. Its seat, Emporium, took shape in the 1860s in a landscape of deep forests, and lumbering drove the early economy. Flagstone quarried in the county was later chosen for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington.
Brownsville, TX
Created in 1848 in the wake of the U.S.-Mexican War, Cameron County sits where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf—ground crossed by explorers, empresarios, soldiers, and cattle kings for four centuries. This 1936 state monument catalogs the sweep of that history, from Cabeza de Vaca and the Escandón colonists to Zachary Taylor, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and border figures like Richard King and Mifflin Kennedy. The roll call reads as a layered map of who shaped the lower Rio Grande valley.
Brownsville, TX
Completed in 1883, this was Cameron County's first purpose-built courthouse, replacing the rented rooms officials had made do with before. The three-story brick building with its gabled roof and central tower served justice until a new courthouse rose in 1914, after which a Masonic lodge moved in. Later remodeling stripped away its distinctive tower.
Boerne, TX
From the 1700s, the Camino Real de San Saba ran northwest from San Antonio through Comanche- and Apache-dominated Hill Country to the Spanish Presidio San Luis de las Amarillas on the San Saba River, a route mapped by Joseph de Urrutia in 1767. Long used by Native peoples and later by Spanish entradas, the "old trail" became a path for German settlers arriving from the 1840s onward, its alignment recorded by surveyors like Jack Hays and John James. It passed just west of Boerne's Main Plaza before threading north through Spanish Pass toward the Guadalupe River.
Brownwood, TX
Camp Collier, about 13 miles southwest, was one link in a chain of Confederate frontier posts spaced a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Manned by the Texas Frontier Regiment, its patrols checked Indian raids and rounded up draft evaders while the main armies fought far to the east. Texas—which voted better than three to one for secession and sent 90,000 troops to Confederate service—relied on posts like this, backed by rangers, militia, and "family forts," to guard a 2,000-mile frontier and coastline.
Pittsburg, TX
Carved from Upshur County in the spring of 1874, Camp County took shape during the tumultuous years after the Civil War as East Texas reorganized itself politically. It honors John Lafayette Camp, a soldier, lawyer, and lawmaker who sat in the 1866 Constitutional Convention and won a state Senate seat the very year the county was named for him. Pittsburg was made its seat.
Pittsburg, TX
The Texas Legislature created Camp County from part of Upshur County in 1874, and voters made Pittsburg the seat, raising a first courthouse in 1881. When the growing county outgrew that building, commissioners hired the Paris firm of Smith and Praeger to design a new Classical Revival courthouse, completed in December 1928 with its stepped parapet, arched windows, and Corinthian columns. It remains the center of county government.
Santa Cruz County, AZ
This marker recalls Camp Crittenden, a U.S. Army post established in 1867 in the mountainous borderlands of what was then Arizona Territory. In the years after the Civil War, the Army planted a string of such camps across the Southwest to guard settlers, mail routes, and mines during the long Apache campaigns. Life at these remote posts was hard — disease, heat, and isolation took a heavier toll than combat — and Camp Crittenden was abandoned within a few years, leaving little but foundations and this commemoration.
Archer City, TX
During the Civil War the Confederacy strung a thin line of frontier posts from the Red River to the Rio Grande, and Camp Cureton anchored a stretch of it near where the Gainesville–Fort Belknap road crossed the West Fork of the Trinity. Manned by the Texas Frontier Regiment and named for veteran Indian-fighter Capt. Jack Cureton, its poorly supplied troopers patrolled against Comanche raids while guarding supply trains and watching for Union movement. Contemporaries judged them more effective at curbing raids than the U.S. Army had been.
Alamo, TX
In the early 1900s, ranchers Peter Ebenezer Blalock and George L. Hawkins amassed 32,000 acres in the lower Rio Grande Valley and built shipping pens beside a railroad depot they named Ebenezer. When their ranch was sold in 1909, the Alamo Land and Sugar Company transformed the tract into farmland, luring prospective buyers south on excursion trains and lodging them at "Camp Ebenezer." The depot's 1919 move a mile east seeded the town of Alamo.
Sterling City, TX
Camp Elizabeth, thought to date to 1853, served from 1874 to 1886 as an outpost hospital and sub-post of Fort Concho during the height of the frontier military presence on the West Texas plains. Such outposts anchored the U.S. Army's effort to secure travel routes and settlements during the Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century. Little remains, but its role in the network of frontier defense endures in memory.
Humboldt County, NV
From 1865 to 1868 the U.S. Army ran Camp McGarry near Summit Springs on the Old Applegate Trail, its troops guarding the Idaho-California mail and stage roads and the emigrant trails threading Nevada and Oregon. The post grew to include officers' quarters, barracks, a mess hall, and a 100-horse stone barn, and in 1866 became headquarters of the District of Nevada. At 75 square miles it was the largest military reservation in the state before its abandonment in 1868, when the troops moved to Camp Winfield Scott; the land later became an American Indian reservation.
Iraan, TX
Where the often flood-swollen Pecos River could be crossed, travelers found a lifeline for centuries. Spanish explorer Juan Domínguez de Mendoza camped and forded here in 1684, trader Henry Connelly used the same spot in 1840, and in 1868 the U.S. Army — seeking a safer route than Comanche-plagued Horsehead Crossing — built a floating pontoon bridge whose landings could shift with the river's width. To guard travelers the Army established nearby Camp Melvin, but by the 1920s better roads had left the crossing to history.
Bandera, TX
Established in 1862, Camp Montel was one link in the Confederate defense line stretching from the Red River to the Rio Grande, named for surveyor and Bandera colonizer Captain Charles DeMontel. Its troops of the Texas Frontier Regiment furnished their own guns and mounts but often went short of food, clothing, and supplies as they guarded settlements against raids. With most local men away at war—Bandera County counted just 399 people in 1860—these scouting parties managed to curb frontier attacks until the war's end.
Baird, TX
Established in 1862, Camp Pecan was one of a chain of posts set a day's horseback ride apart, manned by the Texas Frontier Regiment to guard the state's western line of settlement during the Civil War. With few men and chronic shortages of food, clothing, and horses, its Confederates faced Indian raids from the west and renegades and deserters from the east. Against these odds they managed to hold the frontier, and the State of Texas raised this memorial to them in 1963.
Floresville, TX
West of present Floresville lay some of the richest cattle country of the great trail-driving era, where small herds were gathered into large ones bound north. The land traced back to Mission Espada's 1731 Rancho de Las Cabras before John F. Camp bought and built it up in 1874; by 1904 developers had carved his 10,000-acre spread into farm tracts, and twenty families formed the Camp Ranch community with a school, cemetery, shooting club, and Charley Boening's store. Most traces are gone, but Evergreen Cemetery still marks where the community stood.
South Plains, TX
In 1841 Republic of Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar dispatched merchants and a military escort toward Santa Fe, hoping to open a trade route and extend Texas's jurisdiction. Near here, exhausted and low on provisions and harried by Kiowa raiders, commander Hugh McLeod drew up the resolution — splitting his command — that gave this campsite its name; the expedition ended in captivity in Mexico City.
Eastland, TX
During the Civil War, Camp Salmon was one link in a chain of Confederate posts set a day's horseback ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, manned by the Texas Frontier Regiment to guard settlers against raids. Named for post commander Capt. John Salmon and later renamed Camp McCord, its men served short of food, ammunition, and horses, far from the war's celebrated battlefields. Their duty was to hold a 2,000-mile line of frontier and coast for a Confederacy that leaned heavily on Texas for supply.
Cooper, TX
The land around Camp Shed Cemetery, near the North Sulphur River, was home to the Caddo before Euro-American settlers began arriving in 1836, and many early migrants used the spot as a campground on their way west. Serving the communities of Enloe and Mount Joy, the ground saw its first recorded burial — Johnnie Kerbow — in 1880 and was formally deeded in 1886, when it was still called the "Campstead" graveyard after a camp shed that once stood there. Veterans of the Civil War and both world wars rest among its graves.
Beeville, TX
Stonemason Robert A. Ezell built this settler's "box" home in 1892 from Florida longleaf pine salvaged from a razed house in Old St. Mary's. Ingeniously planned, one of its three chimneys vented both a kitchen stove and a dining-room fireplace. Ezell's wife Sara Jane, daughter of legislator L. B. Camp, was born at Mission San José, and their six sons formed a popular orchestra that played from 1895 to 1904.
Mercedes, TX
In 1836 Antonio Cano established Rancho Guadalupe at Campacuas on part of the Llano Grande royal land grant, fronting the Rio Grande and stretching some fifteen miles north. He set his ranch headquarters on the wooded shore of Campacuas Lake — a resaca named for the Tampacuaze Indians who frequented it — and donated land for a school, chapel, and this cemetery. His own grave, an above-ground bóveda crypt, is the oldest marked burial among the handmade markers and tall monuments that remain.
Seguin, TX
Around 1850, Irish immigrant John Campbell is thought to have raised the first room of this log cabin near Seguin, then sailed home to persuade relatives—his brother Peter among them—to join him on the Texas frontier. Peter, a farmer and rancher, lived in the cabin and enlarged it as his family grew, and Campbell descendants kept it as a home until 1957. Relocated here in 1979, the humble structure survives as a tangible link to the region's immigrant pioneers.
Paris, TX
Campbell Cemetery dates to 1843, when Texas was still an independent republic and Anglo settlement of the region was just taking hold. Though the marker records little beyond its founding and its Historic Texas Cemetery designation, the burial ground stands as one of the area's oldest, holding the earliest generations of local settlers.
Palestine, TX
This is one of the countless small family graveyards scattered across Texas, begun by the Campbell family who settled the Mound Prairie community in 1844. Son John Bartlett Campbell returned from Civil War service, worked in a hardware store to buy his own land, and set aside an acre where his father became the first burial in 1876; descendants use the cemetery still.
Barry, TX
Navarro County pioneer David Wilson Campbell donated ten acres to the Harmony Methodist Church in 1855, setting part aside as a burial ground that came to bear his name. Campbell himself was laid to rest here in 1879, among marked and unmarked graves of early settlers, the earliest documented being a child who died in 1859.