Westward Expansion

Utopia, TX

This marker commemorates William Ware (1800–1853), a Kentucky-born soldier who commanded a company in the Texian army during the fight for independence. His unit served in the 2nd Regiment at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 engagement that secured Texas's break from Mexico. He lived out his years in the Texas Hill Country.

Goldthwaite vicinity, TX

After the Civil War, families settled the Mills County area first called Lookout, and in 1889 A. F. Smith deeded two acres for a public school. When the infant son of the Nixon family died that year, he was buried on the school land, seeding a cemetery that remained when the school later burned and moved. More than 150 graves include veterans from the Civil War through both World Wars, and the burial ground endures as one of the few remnants of the vanished town of Caradan.

Carbon, TX

After a jailbreak destroyed Carbon's 1905 lockup, the town built this squat reinforced-concrete calaboose with a single steel door in 1921. Lacking lights or heat, it was meant only to hold prisoners briefly before transfer, and it often stood empty—used in World War II for scrap-drive collections and, by local custom, to lock up newlyweds on their wedding nights. It survives as a rare example of a building type once common in small Texas towns.

Pend Oreille County, WA

This gravesite marks Carl Harvey, remembered as a beloved fixture of the community along the Pend Oreille River. Nineteenth-century gold seekers were the first non-Indians to settle the area, and while most drifted off as anonymously as they had come, a few, like Harvey, stayed to take up homesteads and put down roots.

Pacifica, CA

In November 1769, the Spanish land expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá crested the hills above present-day Pacifica and became the first Europeans to sight San Francisco Bay — a discovery that would reshape Spain's colonial plans for Alta California. This marker honors Carl Patrick McCarthy, who devoted the last fifteen years of his life to winning national recognition for that Discovery Site, personally guiding thousands of visitors and sharing the expedition's story until his death in 1981. His meticulously counted 11,863 visitors and 9,343 slide-show attendees testify to one man's determination to keep a pivotal moment of American exploration from being forgotten.

Elko County, NV

Carlin Canyon opened to European Americans in December 1828 when Peter Skene Ogden's Hudson's Bay Company brigade passed through; one of his trappers, Joseph Paul, died and became the first emigrant buried in the Humboldt country. Frémont's men struggled through in 1845, and the doomed Reed-Donner Party glimpsed it in 1846. The Central Pacific's Chinese crews pushed the transcontinental railroad through in 1868, and later the Western Pacific followed in 1907. In 1913 the first auto road took over the old rail grade—becoming the Victory Highway, U.S. 40, and at last Interstate 80.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1751 as the seat of Cumberland County, Carlisle grew into one of Pennsylvania's key frontier towns, a staging point for movement into the interior. Its people supplied a contingent for the first regiment of the Continental Army in 1775, and in 1794 the federal march against the Whiskey Rebels set out from here. The town sat at the crossroads of the young nation's military and westward ambitions.

North Middleton Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1751 as the seat of Cumberland County, Carlisle grew into one of Pennsylvania's key frontier towns, a staging point for movement into the interior. Its people supplied a contingent for the first regiment of the Continental Army in 1775, and in 1794 the federal march against the Whiskey Rebels set out from here. The town sat at the crossroads of the young nation's military and westward ambitions.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1751 as the seat of Cumberland County, Carlisle grew into one of Pennsylvania's key frontier towns, a staging point for movement into the interior. Its people supplied a contingent for the first regiment of the Continental Army in 1775, and in 1794 the federal march against the Whiskey Rebels set out from here. The town sat at the crossroads of the young nation's military and westward ambitions.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1947

Laid out in 1751 as the seat of the newly formed Cumberland County, Carlisle sat at the edge of British settlement, a jumping-off point for traders, soldiers, and settlers pushing into the Pennsylvania backcountry. Its people answered the Revolution early, sending men to the first regiment of the Continental Army in 1775. In 1794 the town became a staging ground again when President Washington's forces mustered here to march west and put down the Whiskey Rebellion.

North Middleton Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1751 as Cumberland County's seat, Carlisle grew up on the frontier of British Pennsylvania, a gateway for settlers and armies moving west. The town supplied men for the first regiment of the Continental Army in 1775, and in 1794 troops gathered here to march against the Whiskey Rebels in the new nation's first challenge to federal power.

Sebastopol, TX

This burial ground grew up alongside a small East Texas settlement that answered to several names in turn — Vaughns Mill, then Bold Springs, then Carlisle — as families like the Bonds put down roots in the 1870s. Moses Bond donated the land, and the oldest marked grave belongs to a Civil War veteran who died in 1867, a reminder that the dead here predate the formal settlement. Slabs, upright stones, a false crypt, and curbing still mark generations of area pioneers and community leaders.

Lubbock, TX

The Carlisle community took its name from W. Augustus 'Uncle Gus' Carlisle, a cattleman and landowner who settled here with his wife Lizzie in 1890 and donated land for a school. In 1918 he set aside part of his property as a public cemetery, first used two years later for a victim of the 1920 influenza epidemic. Later heritage-association volunteers marked unmarked graves with white crosses.

Carlton, TX

Carlton Cemetery tells the story of a Texas town that rose and faded as railroads and changing agriculture reshaped rural life. Its earliest graves reach back to the 1860s and 1870s; among those buried are victims of the 1918–19 influenza epidemic and a deputy sheriff killed by bandits in 1932. Local families have tended the grounds for generations, forming a cemetery association in 1957.

Stanton, TX

In 1882 six German Carmelite friars from Kansas founded a monastery at a rail stop between Fort Worth and El Paso, renaming it Marienfeld and planting a German Catholic farming colony on the West Texas plains. From this adobe building—raised in 1884 with four-foot walls and Gothic pointed-arch windows—the friars rode across West Texas and eastern New Mexico establishing parishes, and their presence helped spur the organization of Martin County. Drought and depression thinned the colony; the Carmelites left by 1901, and the Sisters of Mercy ran an academy here until a 1938 tornado.

Covington, KY

Built around 1815 by Thomas Carneal, a founder of Covington, this was the young river city's first brick house, its Georgian form showing the influence of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio. In 1825 the Marquis de Lafayette visited as a guest of then-owner William W. Southgate during his celebrated American tour. Other notable guests over the years included Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Andrew Jackson.

Trinidad, CA

This marker recalls the day in June 1775 when a Spanish maritime expedition came ashore near Trinidad Head and claimed the northern California coast for King Carlos III of Spain, erecting a wooden cross inscribed with his name. It stands among the earliest European gestures of possession on this remote shore, long the homeland of the Yurok people. Nearly a century and a half later, in 1913, the Club Women of Humboldt County replaced the weathered original to keep the memory alive.

Austin, TX

In 1854 the Austin merchant and land speculator L.D. Carrington bought this bluff-top property from Hannah Burnet, wife of David G. Burnet, the first president of the Republic of Texas, and made it his family farm. The house took its present vernacular form through decades of alteration — a structure of the 1880s, a 1911 remodel by owner Charles Morrison, and a second story added by Joseph O'Reilly in the 1920s and 1930s. Square porch columns and wavy glass in the front door still recall its nineteenth-century origins.

Austin, TX

Leonidas Carrington, a Mississippi merchant, came to the young capital of Austin in 1852, bought this block the next year, and opened a store on Congress Avenue. In 1856 he hired local builder John Brandon to raise this vernacular Greek Revival house of rough limestone, finished in the spring of 1857. Over the following century it served as a family home, an eye-and-ear hospital, and a boarding house before Texas acquired and restored it in the early 1970s.

Athens, TX

The Carroll Springs community, named for the Carroll family and nearby springs, began burying its dead here as early as 1859, with the earliest marked grave that of John Buck Hogg. In 1884 A.M. Carroll set aside nearly five acres for a school, church, and cemetery, and generations of pioneer families, ministers, teachers, and veterans of American wars from the Civil War onward were laid to rest here. The school later consolidated into Athens, but the Methodist church endures and the community still gathers each year to remember.

Athens, TX

The Carroll Springs Methodist congregation carries a history of migration typical of rural East Texas, tracing its lineage through a chain of Henderson County churches that moved from homes to county line to New Hope, Coolsprings, and finally Carroll Springs in 1883. Guided for decades by the Rev. J. F. Lambright and later his son, its forty charter members planted a fellowship that endures. Its tradition of an August brush-arbor revival still echoes the camp-meeting roots of frontier Methodism.

Franklin County, GA

Instituted in 1797 among the first families to settle Franklin County on Georgia's early frontier, Carroll's Methodist Church took its name from the William Carroll family. The present sanctuary was raised around 1835 and restored in the early 1950s, and generations of local families and ministers, including the long-serving Rev. Nelson Osborn, have worshipped here.

Ector, TX

Local tradition holds that this Fannin County cemetery took its name from John Carson, who once owned the neighboring land, and that its earliest graves date to an 1842 Indian raid on the nearby home of Dr. W. M. Hunter. The three victims were Minerva Hunter, her young daughter Elizabeth, and an enslaved or hired African American woman whose name has been lost to record. Cemetery trustees secured title by 1878 and later added land, and Minerva Hunter's grave was finally marked in 1942, a century after her death.

Carson City, NV

Carson City grew from Eagle Station, a trading post and ranch established in 1851 on a branch of the California Trail and named for an eagle skin nailed to its wall. In 1858 Abraham Curry, finding Genoa's lots too dear, bought much of the Eagle Ranch and platted a town — deliberately reserving a central plaza for a future capitol. His foresight paid off: Carson City became the territorial capital in 1861 and the state capital when Nevada joined the Union in 1864.

Panhandle, TX

Carved out of the vast Texas Panhandle in the years after the Civil War, Carson County was created in 1876 and formally organized in 1888 as ranchers and railroad promoters pushed into the high plains. It took the name of Samuel Price Carson, who served as Secretary of State for the young Republic of Texas. The town of Panhandle became the county seat and, though it lost the great rail junction it was promised to nearby Amarillo, it endured as one of the region's early enduring towns and an early player in the oil and gas boom.

Panhandle, TX

Carson County was created on August 21, 1876, from earlier Young and Bexar territories and organized in 1888 as settlers spread across the Texas Panhandle. It honors Samuel P. Carson (1798–1840), a statesman of both the United States and the Republic of Texas. Wheat farming and later oil and gas made the high-plains county prosperous, with the town of Panhandle as its seat.

Douglas County, NV

The broad, cultivated Carson Valley below began as a ribbon of natural meadow where California-bound 49'ers rested their stock and bought vegetables from the Mormon Station settlers. After the 1858 discovery of the Comstock Lode, farmers extended the meadows by irrigation to feed the miners of Virginia City, and from 1870 German, Danish, and Swiss immigrants enlarged the fields further to supply booming camps like Bodie, Tonopah, and Goldfield. Sound range and farming practices have kept it among Nevada's finest agricultural regions.

Gilmer County, GA

Organized in 1834 as Cartecay Methodist in the newly opened mountains of Gilmer County, this congregation built its present sanctuary in 1859. During the Civil War, townsmen stood guard over the building at night to protect it from raiders, and among the young men who preached here was the future bishop Warren Candler.

Canton, TX

Among the first families to settle this stretch of Van Zandt County around 1851, the Carters put down roots that would outlast them in the ground they set aside for burial. Oral tradition remembers a young Carter son as the first laid to rest here, though the oldest documented grave dates to 1859. The family later deeded the land as a public cemetery, and a local association has cared for it since the 1960s.

Fairfield, TX

Built in 1845 as Texas was joining the Union, this log house was raised by David L. Carter, an Alabama emigrant, using tongue-and-groove logs pinned with wood and square-nailed rafters — flooring and ceiling materials hauled seventy miles by ox-wagon. Carter later served in the Confederate Army and helped found Woodland Boys' College. Its careful joinery makes it a fine surviving example of pioneer craftsmanship in early Texas.

College Station, TX

A Virginia native and War of 1812 veteran, Richard Carter came from Alabama in 1831 to claim land in Stephen F. Austin's colony, on ground that is now College Station. He grew into one of the area's wealthiest landowners and enslavers, raising cattle, corn, and cotton in the years before the Civil War. Named to Brazos County's first Board of Commissioners in 1841, he helped survey its first county seat at Boonville, and traces of his home and family cemetery survive nearby.

Springtown, TX

Founded in 1866 by a judge and two partners, Cartersville grew into a bustling community with two main streets, a school, two churches, and mills and gins serving area farmers. A post office opened in 1867 and the town was renamed Carter in 1888. By the early 1900s it had begun to fade, and little remains today.

Terrell, TX

This Victorian residence went up in 1883 for Matthew Cartwright (1855–1925), a third-generation Texan who was a rancher, banker, and civic leader, and his wife Mary Cynthia Davenport. One of the first large homes in Terrell, it was enlarged in 1893 to accommodate a household of ten children and a steady stream of visiting artists and statesmen. It reflects the prosperity of a leading family in a growing North Texas town.

Dallas, TX

In the early 1860s, pioneer settlers William and Mattie Worthington Caruth established this cemetery on their North Texas plantation lands. Across the road stood Caruth Chapel, where circuit-riding preachers held baptisms, weddings, and funerals for the plantation's tenants and neighboring families. The Caruth family donated the gravesites that anchor the ground today.

Arlington, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1843, Carver Dixon "Uncle Dutch" King came to Texas in 1873 and helped launch the new town of Arlington, serving as its first mayor after its 1876 founding. A grocer, icehouse owner, notary, and justice of the peace across thirteen terms, King wove himself into nearly every civic institution of the growing town. He died in 1930, remembered as one of Arlington's founding leaders.

Whitney, TX

This Hill County homestead traces an unusually complete arc of Texas settlement, beginning with an 1838 headright land grant to Mary Beacham and a two-room log cabin raised by Eliphas Spencer in 1845 under the wary protection of nearby Fort Graham. Passing through a line of determined women and the Carver family, the cabin was absorbed into a Victorian house in 1875 and finally crowned with a Neoclassical second story in 1912. Its surviving carriage house, smokehouse, and other outbuildings preserve the working texture of a frontier property that endured wars, droughts, and even a 1971 tornado.

Floresville, TX

This was the home of Erasmo Seguín, a leading figure in the transition of Texas from Spanish and Mexican rule toward its own independent identity. In 1821 he formally welcomed Stephen F. Austin, opening the door to Anglo-American colonization, and he later represented Texas in the Mexican Congress and pushed early on for self-government. From this house on the Wilson County frontier, a Tejano statesman helped shape the political ground on which Texas would be built.

Banquete, TX

Granted by the Spanish crown in 1798 to Juan Jose de la Garza Montemayor and his three sons, the Casa Blanca grant was the first Spanish land grant in what is now Nueces County, a vast tract of some 70,848 acres between Penitas Creek and the Nueces River. The Montemayor family built a ranch that held the land through decades of frontier conflict until it was sold in 1849, and part later passed to cattle baron Richard King. Oil was eventually discovered on the former grant, and its lands now span two counties.

Liberty, TX

When Mexico opened its Texas frontier to settlers, land commissioner J. Francisco Madero platted this square in 1831 as the public heart of a new town on the Atascosito lands. Colonists narrowly chose Smith's Plantation — soon renamed Liberty — over Moss Bluff, and from a 22-foot log courthouse they exercised a rare gift of local self-government. Sam Houston later argued cases here, and David G. Burnet's appeal of a verdict tried in Liberty carried him to the 1836 convention that made him the Republic of Texas's first president.

San Fernando, CA

Casa de López is a surviving adobe from San Fernando's Californio era, erected by Valentine Lopez in 1882 and occupied by Geronimo Lopez two years later. It weathered the destructive 1971 Sylmar earthquake, was restored soon after by the city, and remains a link to the Spanish- and Mexican-heritage families who shaped the valley. The old adobe now stands as a preserved landmark under the care of the community.

Portola Valley, CA · est. 1969

Built by Félix Buelna in the 1850s, Casa de Tableta served as a gambling retreat and gathering place for Mexican-Californios in the years around California statehood. It stood on the earliest trail across the peninsula, used by rancheros and American settlers alike heading to the coast. Acquired by an American owner in 1868, the building continued for generations as a roadhouse and saloon.

Portola Valley, CA

This structure on the San Francisco Peninsula served as a gambling retreat and gathering place for Mexican-Californios in the years before American annexation. It stood along one of the earliest trails linking the ranchos of the interior to the coast, a route later followed by arriving American settlers. Here the old Californio social world and the coming Anglo-American one briefly shared the same road.

Laredo, TX

Casa Ortiz stands on land granted by the King of Spain to Don José Reyes Ortiz, a merchant who served as a go-between for trade linking Mexico and Texas. The house sheltered five generations of the Ortiz family and was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964. Its story reaches back to Laredo's Spanish colonial origins, when the town was a frontier settlement on the northern edge of New Spain.

Socorro, TX

Tradition holds that this thick-walled adobe near Socorro was built before 1800, in the era of New Spain's far northern frontier. By the 1840s it belonged to José Ortiz, a 'Comanchero' whose ox-cart trains hauled salt from the Guadalupe Mountains and carried goods to Santa Fe and out onto the Llano Estacado, where he traded with the Comanches for buffalo hides and meat. With its cottonwood and willow vigas and earthen roof, the house is a fine surviving example of Spanish colonial frontier building.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

Caspar Wistar, one of early America's most respected physicians, lived here while serving as professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania and president of both the American Philosophical Society and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. In 1803, at Thomas Jefferson's behest, he tutored Meriwether Lewis in medicine and paleontology to prepare him for the Corps of Discovery's journey west. Wistar moved easily among the scientific, medical, and reform circles of the young republic.

Linden, TX

Carved from Bowie County land in 1846, Cass County took its name from Lewis Cass, a soldier-statesman who had pushed hard for annexing Texas into the Union. The county's loyalties turned sharply in 1861: swept up in secession fervor, residents renamed it "Davis" for Confederate president Jefferson Davis, only to restore the original name in 1871 after the war. Its seat shifted too, from the busy river port of Jefferson to centrally located Linden once Marion County was split off in 1860.

Linden, TX

When Cass County was organized in 1846, its court met in Jefferson, but Linden became the seat in 1852 and got a frame courthouse the next year. The present brick structure was begun in 1860 and, delayed by the Civil War, was not finished until after 1865; it was enlarged twice and gained a third floor after a 1933 fire. The courthouse also marks the early careers of U.S. Congressman Wright Patman and Texas Supreme Court Justice Ralph Hicks Harvey.

Castell, TX

In 1847 the German Emigration Company, led by Commissioner General John O. Meusebach, planted three settlements on the Fisher-Miller land grant, with colonists coming out from Fredericksburg. Castell became the company's only lasting town on the grant and the first permanent settlement in Llano County. Its sisters fared worse: Leiningen has vanished entirely, and Bettina, Texas's first communal colony, collapsed within a year when its supplies ran out.

Crane, TX

Castle Gap, a natural notch in the Castle Mountains of West Texas, has funneled travelers for millennia — from prehistoric Native peoples who left flint points, to Spanish explorers, California-bound gold-seekers, the Butterfield Overland Mail stages of 1858–1861, and the great Goodnight-Loving cattle drives after 1866. A spring within the gap made it a vital watering stop on the road to Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos.

McCamey, TX

A mile-long gap between Castle and King mountains, Castle Gap funneled nearly the whole pageant of West Texas travel through one narrow pass. Comanche war parties, the Spanish explorer Rabago y Teran, gold-rush '49ers, Butterfield Overland Mail coaches from 1858 to 1861, and the Goodnight-Loving cattle trail after 1866 all passed this way, and legend places buried Maximilian treasure nearby. Today its old coach ruts fade quietly into the desert.

McCamey, TX

Rising to about 3,000 feet a couple of miles east, Castle Mountain has guided travelers between Texas, Mexico, and California since the 17th century. Spaniards, tradition says, named it for its resemblance to ancient castles. Its craggy profile gathered the usual folklore of the desert Southwest—tales of lost trains of gold and buried treasure.

Merkel, TX

From 1858 to 1861 the Butterfield Overland Mail carried the first through passenger and mail service linking the Mississippi to the Pacific, and its drivers steered by this 2,400-foot peak, visible for thirty to forty miles. Then called Abercrombie Peak for a U.S. Army colonel who defended the frontier, it struck the newspaperman Waterman Ormsby — riding the first westbound Butterfield stage — as resembling a fortress. The height was later renamed Castle Peak.

Dimmitt, TX

Carved from earlier territories and formally organized in 1891, Castro County honors Henri Castro (1786–1861), a French-born empresario who colonized the Texas Hill Country. Castro founded Castroville, Quihi, Vandenburg, and D'Hanis in Medina County, recruiting European settlers — many Alsatian — to a raw frontier. Dimmitt serves as the county seat on the High Plains far to the north of the towns that bear his mark.

Dimmitt, TX

When Castro County was organized in 1891, the town of Dimmitt set aside this square and held court in a private office until its first courthouse rose. That ornate wooden building burned after a lightning strike in 1906, a domed brick successor served into the 1930s, and the present stone courthouse was raised in 1939 with Works Progress Administration labor.

Canadian, TX

The Cataline community took root in the Texas Panhandle before Hemphill County was even organized, its settlers raising the county's first school in 1885 and its first church in 1887. When infant Emma Turner died in 1896, mourners chose a hill overlooking the Washita valley for her grave, and the Methodist Episcopal Church soon bought three acres to formalize the burial ground. With nine of its graves belonging to children under a year old, the cemetery is a quiet testament to the hardships of remote frontier life—and the last surviving trace of a vanished community.

Catarina, TX

Catarina rose in the 1920s around the headquarters of the Sinton-Taft (later Taft-Catarina) Ranch, which Kansas businessmen bought for development and sold off to eager buyers. By 1928 the town claimed some 2,500 residents and a full complement of businesses, including this Spanish Eclectic hotel built in 1925–26 with tile roofs, mission detailing, cast stone, and a courtyard with a fish pond. The building once also held a bank, café, shops, and offices.

Catawissa, PA · est. 1948

In the years just before the Revolution, Quaker families pushed into the Susquehanna's West Branch country and raised a plain log meetinghouse near Catawissa around 1775. The town itself owed its existence to William Hughs, a Berks County Quaker who laid out its streets, and the Friends who gathered here brought their quiet worship and tight community discipline to a raw frontier. Their meetinghouse stood as one of the first houses of worship in a region still contested and sparsely settled.

Montour Township, PA · est. 1948

A few miles from this spot in Catawissa stands a log meetinghouse built about 1775, still upright generations later as one of the finest surviving examples of a pioneer place of worship in the region. Simple and sturdy, it sheltered the Quaker settlers who filtered into the Susquehanna Valley in the last colonial years. Its survival is a rare physical link to the plain religious life of Pennsylvania's early frontier communities.

San Jose, CA

The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Joseph rises from the heart of downtown San Jose, its Latin dedication offering the building "to God, the best and greatest, in honor of Saint Joseph." The parish traces its origins to the early 1800s, when San Jose was a small pueblo in Spanish and then Mexican California, and the present grand cathedral crowns generations of rebuilding on the same sacred spot. It has stood as a spiritual and architectural anchor as the pueblo grew into a great American city.

Leakey, TX

On April 19, 1881, a Lipan Apache band raided the Frio Canyon home of 'Kate' McLauren while she was there with her three small children and a neighbor boy. Shot during the attack, she still managed to send her six-year-old daughter for help before dying that night after her husband's return. When a cemetery was established at Leakey, she and the boy killed in the raid were among its first burials, in what is remembered as the last Indian raid in the canyon.