Westward Expansion

Goliad, TX

When Spain entered the American Revolution against Britain in 1779, Bernardo de Gálvez went to New Orleans to raise an army—and remembered the wild cattle of the Texas country where he had once been stationed. At his request the Spanish governor of Texas rounded up some 10,000 head from the missions and ranches, assembling them at Presidio La Bahía. Driven east between 1779 and 1782 to feed Gálvez's Gulf Coast campaign, this is regarded as the first major Texas cattle drive.

Corpus Christi, TX

By 1840 tens of thousands of wild longhorns roamed the brush country between the Rio Grande and the Gulf, so plentiful they were nearly worthless to the Texans who owned them. Ranchers began trailing small herds toward distant markets — New Orleans, Missouri, Ohio, even California and Chicago — but the real boom came after the Civil War, when hungry Northern cities and advancing railroads finally made the long drives pay. Feeder trails near here fed the great Chisholm and Dodge City routes to the Kansas railheads, and by 1880 some four million head had gone up the trail.

Graham, TX

Under this oak near Graham in February 1877, forty cattlemen banded together to form the Cattle Raisers Association of Texas, choosing their first officers on the open range. In an era of unbranded strays, rustling, and the great trail drives, the group organized ranchers to protect their herds and their interests. By 1936 the association counted some 2,500 members.

Decatur, TX

Near this Wise County site ran a feeder branch of the Chisholm Trail, the most famous of the routes that funneled Texas cattle toward the hungry markets of the North. The main trail was blazed in 1865 by Jesse Chisholm, a trader of Scottish and Cherokee descent, and drovers soon extended its branches from the Rio Grande up to the Red River, passing fixed fords like the Trinity crossing at Fort Worth. By the 1890s barbed wire, railroads, and tick quarantines had ended the great drives, but not before the trail helped rebuild a Texas economy wrecked by the Civil War.

Dublin vicinity, TX

Once called South Bolton Cemetery, this Erath County burial ground holds its earliest marked grave from 1879, from the years the Franks family owned the land. The Caudle family bought the property in 1883, and matriarch Rebecca Clayton Caudle was buried here in 1886. Among the poignant stories is Fannie Caudle, who died on her wedding day in 1895 and was laid to rest in her bridal dress; descendants rediscovered and restored the neglected cemetery in 1997.

Boise, ID

Cecil D. Andrus (1931–2017) was Idaho's longest-serving governor and served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. He was closely identified with land and resource conservation in the American West, including landmark protections for public lands. This monument, dedicated in 2018, honors that career of public service.

Larimer County, CO

Built around 1905 as a tourist cabin by the Estes Park Land and Investment Company, this rustic structure went up as Colorado's Front Range was blossoming into a mountain getaway for travelers seeking the clear air and grandeur of the Rockies. In 1909 it passed to the YMCA of the Rockies as part of the original land purchase that founded the association's famous mountain retreat, and it survives as one of the last buildings from that earliest era.

LaGrange, TX

The Lewis family settled the La Grange area in the 1830s and set aside this ground as a family burial place, where the earliest marked grave dates to 1857. German immigrants left a deep imprint here—records were kept in German until 1931 and their culture is carved into many of the tombstones. Renamed several times as it grew into a community cemetery, it holds veterans of every American conflict from Texas independence through the Korean War.

Chappell Hill, TX

Cedar Creek was a Methodist settlement that thrived between the mid-1830s and early 1850s, halfway between San Felipe de Austin and the town of Washington, and became a center of the Texas Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1849 its residents founded nearby Chappell Hill, which grew into the hub of Methodism in central Texas as the older community faded into it. By the end of the Civil War the site had reverted to farmland, and today only rocks around the community spring remain.

Abilene, TX

First called Coates for early settler Kem Coates, the Cedar Gap community took shape in the late 1800s as families from Robertson County put down roots, organized a Baptist church, and opened a school. Transportation made the town: a stagecoach pike ran south from Abilene toward Content, and in 1909 the Abilene & Southern Railway pushed through on its way to San Angelo, its frame waiting station and construction jobs drawing more residents. A blacksmith, general store, cotton gin, and lodge rounded out its life before the school consolidated away in 1948 and the community faded to a cemetery.

Carthage, TX

Soon after the Civil War, settlers founded a community here and named it Snap for a local physician, Snap Cariker. In 1905 members of the nearby Six Mile Church organized under the Rev. W.A. Reagan, built their own sanctuary by 1912, and took the name Cedar Grove Baptist Church. While the farming village of Snap declined after World War II, the congregation kept growing, adding a full-time pastorate in 1951 and new facilities as it passed its centennial.

Trinity, TX

Cedar Grove Cemetery received its first documented burial — that of Phebe A. Martin — in 1875, three years after the town of Trinity was surveyed. Nearly 100 of its graves date to the nineteenth century, many from a devastating diphtheria epidemic in 1897-98. A cemetery association chartered in 1914 has cared for the grounds, which hold the town's founders, business leaders, and veterans of the U.S. armed forces.

Burkeville, TX

After the Civil War, a group of freedmen founded the Cedar Grove community here to take advantage of the area's strong cotton market, naming it for the cedars they cut for lumber. At its heart stood the Cedar Grove Community Church, organized with help from the Spears Chapel congregation, which also housed the community's first school. River-transport losses in the 1880s, followed by disease and floods, drove the settlement's decline, leaving the church and cemetery as its enduring markers.

Silver, TX

Stock-farming homesteaders settled the Cedar Hill area around 1890, naming it for a nearby cedar-covered rise and building a one-room school in 1891 near the cemetery that still remains. No town ever took hold — drought and hardship drove many families away by 1904, and the school closed after 1917. Three decades later an oil boom swept the county, and the once-emptied land came to sit within one of West Texas' largest oil fields.

Rusk, TX

Established in 1847 as Rusk's city cemetery, Cedar Hill sits atop a forested hill named for the massive cedars shading its oldest, northern section. It holds the graves of the town's prominent founding families alongside those of early pioneers, including the Cobbles—typical of families who traveled through early Texas during westward expansion—whose descendant Dr. Thomas H. Cobble led Rusk Memorial Hospital in 1949. War veterans from the Confederacy through the Spanish-American War, both world wars, and Korea and Vietnam lie beneath markers ranging from ornate obelisks to stone tree-trunks and a brick crypt.

Salado, TX

The first settlers along the Lampasas River basin were veterans who took land grants after Texas independence and stockmen seeking grassland for their herds. This cemetery below Cedar Knob Mountain grew from an 1858 homestead burial and a donation of land by Silas Burks in the 1870s, gathering pioneers who arrived by wagon caravan from as far as Missouri. In 1965 the Army Corps of Engineers relocated it and nine other cemeteries here ahead of the Stillhouse dam, consolidating burials dating to the late 1840s.

San Saba, TX

This cedar log structure served more than a century ago as stables on the Charles Harris ranch along Cherokee Creek south of San Saba, built sturdy enough to keep horses from being stolen in the raiding days of the Texas frontier. Preserved as the Cedar Log Cabin Museum, it was given in memory of Eula Gray Kuykendall by her husband and children. The building stands as a rare survivor of early ranch life in the county.

Cedar Park, TX

In 1873 George and Harriet Cluck bought a swath of cedar- and limestone-rich land in Williamson County, and their ranch became the seed of a community first called Running Brushy, where Harriet served as postmistress. The railroad's arrival in 1882 renamed the town twice before 'Cedar Park' stuck, and Cluck opened a yard selling the cedar posts then in demand for barbed-wire fencing. The town faded in the early 20th century but boomed again in the 1970s as Austin's growth spilled north, and Cedar Park incorporated in 1973.

Cedar Park, TX

George and Harriett Cluck settled this Williamson County land in the early 1870s, just after returning from a cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail, and built a log home that helped anchor the growing community. When their infant grandson Emmett died in 1901, they set aside part of the farm as a family burial ground, formally deeded as a community cemetery in 1912. The Clucks lie here among family and neighbors.

Dallas, TX

Cedar Springs is remembered as the earliest known historic site in Dallas County, visited in 1840 by Colonel William G. Cooke while scouting a route between Austin and the Red River. A community by the same name, founded in 1843 by Dr. John Cole, grew so quickly that it challenged Dallas for the county seat in the 1848 election. The land was finally annexed to Dallas in 1929.

Dallas, TX

Surveyed in the late 1830s during preparations for a military road, the Cedar Springs area drew Dr. John Cole and his family in 1843 under a Peters colony land grant. Cole built a home and store near the springs, and a small community with a distillery, flour mill, and grist mill grew up around them. After Dallas was chosen county seat in 1850 the town faded, later revived as the suburb of Oak Lawn and absorbed into Dallas between 1920 and 1940.

Rosebud, TX

Tucked into the Robertson Colony country of rural Falls County, this burial ground holds its earliest marked grave from 1874, though at least twenty people were laid to rest before the land was formally deeded in 1901. Most early burials cluster inside the fenced plot of surveyor and colony attorney J. G. W. Pierson, suggesting it began as a family ground; among those resting here are Civil War soldiers who lived out their later years on the Texas prairie.

Bay City, TX

The Cedarvale Cemetery began in 1896 with a tragedy — the death of Rufus A. Mathis in a hunting accident, one of the very community leaders then working to establish a burial ground near Bay City. Landowner D. P. Moore formally deeded four acres that March, and by 1906 a cemetery association had formed to tend and enlarge the grounds. Many of Bay City's earliest settlers rest here.

Kaufman, TX

Established around 1850 near the town of Kaufman, Cedarvale Cemetery dates to the first wave of Anglo settlement in the blackland prairie of North Texas, when the young state was drawing farming families westward. Its recognition as a Historic Texas Cemetery marks it as an enduring record of that founding community.

Lakeside Village vicinity, TX

In the 1850s settlers moving west were drawn to the fertile bottomlands along Cedron Creek in northeastern Bosque County. Among their first shared projects was a one-room cedar schoolhouse that doubled as church and gathering place, later rebuilt in frame and finally consolidated away in 1938. The community cemetery nearby holds its oldest marked grave, that of schoolteacher J. T. Hungerford, who died of tuberculosis in 1880; today the graveyard and a foundation are the last traces of a once-thriving settlement.

Paducah, TX

The Cee Vee community grew up around 1926 on land once grazed by cattlemen Clairborne Varner and Charles Goodnight, whose "C V" brand gave the place its name. As open range gave way to family farms, Cee Vee gained a cotton gin, stores, churches, and a school, while its prairie cemetery — tradition says it began with a cowboy buried near the old ranch house — took in the community's dead, including veterans of both World Wars. Renamed Haven of Rest by a local club in the 1950s, the burial ground is still tended by an association as a link to the area's ranching past.

Laporte Township, PA · est. 1999

In 1850 Peter E. Armstrong founded Celestia on this remote mountaintop, envisioning his followers as 'wilderness exiles' preparing a 'City of Heaven' for the millennium. In 1864 he took the extraordinary step of deeding the land to Almighty God 'and to His heirs in Jesus Messiah' — a title the county could not tax, leading it to sell the property in 1876 to Armstrong's own son. Peter struggled to sustain his religious utopia until his death in 1887, and the settlement faded into the woods.

Redwater, TX

Founded in 1840 by Republic of Texas pioneers Charles Moores and his wife Mary Harrison, this five-acre burial ground served the vanished town of Mooresville and its all-faiths chapel, where circuit-riding preachers once held services. About 100 graves lie here, including men who held Republic of Texas land grants, three sons who became Texas Rangers, and children of American Revolution soldiers. Restored in 1967, the cemetery is now the only trace of the community that once stood nearby.

Springfield, OR

This viewpoint was built in 1985 to mark the centennial of Springfield, Oregon, which took shape as a Willamette Valley town in 1885. Overlooking the community it celebrates, it commemorates a full century of local growth from frontier settlement to modern city.

Twitty, TX

In 1906, D. M. Pollard bought Panhandle land and lived in a dugout, and near his home the Center School opened in 1909, doubling as a place of worship. The Center Cemetery was dedicated just to the west, its oldest marked grave dating to March 1909, with 34 marked graves and signs of many unmarked ones. Among those interred are a Civil War veteran and a World War II veteran, and Pollard's descendants still own the surrounding land.

Star, TX

As settlers pushed into the rolling country of central Texas after the Civil War, a former blacksmith and Texas Revolution veteran, Noah Turner Byars, gathered a congregation here in 1875 and helped knit it into a new association of frontier Baptist churches. Known first for nearby Bennett Creek, it took the Center City name in a 1901 deed, held summer revivals under a brush arbor into the 1940s, and rebuilt after a 1946 windstorm flattened the frame sanctuary. For generations it doubled as a shared community space and a training ground for deacons and ministers who went on to larger pulpits.

Star, TX

The Center City Cemetery began in 1874 with the burials of a settler's adult and infant daughters, a poignant marker of how fragile frontier life could be in the ranching country of central Texas. In 1905 a local judge bought the ground to serve as a community graveyard, and by the mid-20th century neighbors had organized a committee and endowed a maintenance fund to keep it up. More than 500 graves here hold many of the area's earliest settlers.

Star, TX

Settled in 1854 by the Jenkins and Morris families, this Mills County community was first called "Hughes Store" for the couple who opened a shop here in the 1870s. Hopeful founders platted a townsite in 1876 and dreamed of the railroad and the county seat, gathering beneath an ancient live oak long held by tradition to mark the geographic center of Texas. Renamed Center City, the town bustled with stores until the railroad passed it by in 1885; its post office lingered only until 1920.

Star, TX

In the young settlement of Center City—first known as Hughes Store—a circuit-riding preacher brought Methodism to the area in the early 1870s, and charter members organized a church in 1878. The congregation first gathered in the Masonic lodge before building its own home in 1901, then a new building in 1952. Through mission work and youth ministry, it has remained a spiritual anchor of this small central Texas community.

Cookville, TX

First known as the Yancey Cemetery, this burial ground began in the mid-1860s on land donated by David Yancey, Sr., whose party had traveled from Tennessee to Texas—an orphaned infant from that group being the first laid to rest here. Many of the earliest graves are marked only with rough fieldstones. Renamed Center Grove in 1900 for the nearby Church of Christ, it holds veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Lovelady, TX

The Ellis family came from Mississippi to Texas in 1839, part of the wave of southern settlers pushing into the region in the years before statehood. Charles McHenry Ellis raised a large family here, and in 1876 his son deeded land, including the family burial ground, for use as a church and cemetery. Among its early graves is that of Elizabeth Lovelady Ellis, alongside unmarked graves believed to be those of enslaved people and, later, military veterans.

Cotton Center, TX

West of Hale Center, the Center Plains community grew up around a cemetery and schoolhouse on land donated by homesteader William S. Bolivar in 1890, with a post office opening in 1902. When a proposed railroad bypassed the area in 1907 and the line was abandoned by 1910, the nearby boomtown of Norfleet collapsed and the school moved back. Today only the cemetery remains of what was once the hub of a large rural district.

Center Point, TX

The land around Center Point drew its first settlers in the 1850s, including Dr. Charles Ganahl, who named the early community Zanzenberg after his Austrian hometown before it became Center Point in 1872. That same year land was set aside here for a church and cemetery, which grew over the decades to more than five acres and some 1,452 graves. Among the pioneers and community leaders buried here rest 32 Texas Rangers, an unusually dense gathering of the frontier lawmen.

Saint Jo, TX

Begun in the late 1800s as Fairview Graveyard on a hilltop that also held a Baptist church and school, this cemetery served as a gathering place for the surrounding community. The Armstrong and Dean families deeded the land in 1893, though the earliest marked grave—that of three-year-old Xanthippa Rountree—dates to 1875, and many unmarked graves may be older still. Pioneer settlers, young children, and Civil War veterans rest here together.

Center Point, TX

Founded in 1879 by traveling Kentucky minister Green L. Surber, this Disciples of Christ congregation grew alongside the frontier settlement of Center Point during a broader campaign to strengthen faith across a growing Texas. After the first building burned in 1888, the community rebuilt in 1892 with materials hauled from San Antonio and Kerrville. In the 1920s its members helped establish the Guadalupe River retreat known as Camp Christian, later shared with a Jewish youth camp and other groups.

Center Point, TX

Methodism reached this Hill Country spot before the town did: in 1852 Mrs. Henrietta Rees arrived from Tennessee and arranged for circuit riders to preach in the area. A congregation bought land in 1872, built an early church house around 1876, and after a storm toppled one building under construction, the men of the congregation completed the present structure in 1911. The church's story runs parallel to the founding of Center Point itself.

Austin, TX

In 1847, only eight years after Austin was platted, ten members of the Disciples of Christ gathered to organize this congregation on the young Texas capital's frontier. By 1852 they were worshiping in a local schoolhouse, later building at Eighth and Colorado before moving to this site in 1929, and weathering a theological split in 1888 that left the church led by its laity until a pastor was appointed in 1896. As one of Austin's oldest congregations, Central Christian took its current name early in the 20th century and helped establish several other churches in the growing city.

Weatherford, TX

In 1894 sixty-five former members of Weatherford's First Christian Church broke away to found this Disciples of Christ congregation, dedicating a stone church near the courthouse square that May. It served for seventy years, and when a neighboring congregation disbanded in the 1950s, Central became the only Disciples of Christ church in Parker County. A new sanctuary followed in 1964, while the original building became a museum.

Sherman, TX

This Sherman congregation dates to the late 1850s, when pioneer minister Benjamin Franklin Hall arrived to preach and organize a church, gathering worshippers in a brush arbor and a Masonic-hall meeting house. A first sanctuary rose in 1875, and after acquiring a new site in 1895 the congregation built a larger church in 1905. It has served the people of Sherman for well over a century.

Nocona, TX

Built in 1894, six years after the Rev. M. F. Smith gathered the congregation, this sanctuary rose as one of the first Gothic Revival churches on the North Texas frontier. Its steeply pitched gables, pointed lancet windows, and fine interior woodwork brought a touch of old-world architecture to a young prairie town. The building earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1962.

Winnsboro, TX

Organized in 1893 with twenty charter members, the Central Christian Church of Winnsboro built this sanctuary the following year as the Disciples of Christ movement spread across rural East Texas. A tornado toppled its original steeples in 1895, and a 1914 remodeling gave the building the prairie and classical revival lines it carries today. Its rolls long included many of the area's civic leaders.

Lampasas, TX

This Disciples of Christ congregation organized as early as 1879, with V. R. Stapp as its first full-time pastor. In 1905 it replaced an earlier sanctuary with the present building of hand-quarried native limestone, whose Romanesque-revival masonry and corner tower still stand out. The stonework reflects the craftsmanship of central Texas's limestone country.

Dallas, TX

In 1844 the Congress of the Republic of Texas commissioned a road to link the U.S. military highway crossing on the Red River with the Trinity River in Dallas County. Surveyed by George W. Stell, the 130-mile Central National Road ran thirty feet wide through five counties and met the Preston Road, which Col. William G. Cooke's soldiers had opened in 1840 toward Austin. Together these routes joined north and south Texas, easing the way for pioneers to settle the young republic.

Ladonia, TX

Authorized in 1844, the Central National Road was meant to link the young Republic of Texas with the United States, running from Dallas toward a Red River crossing. Surveyor George W. Stell laid out a thirty-foot roadway cleared of stumps, and a small trace of it could still be seen near Lyday Cemetery in the 1970s.

Paris, TX

Created by the Republic of Texas in 1844, the Central National Road was conceived as a military highway to link with a U.S. Army road north of the Red River and to knit the young republic together. Major George W. Stell surveyed its 130-mile route from the mouth of Elm Fork on the Trinity to the Kiomatia Crossing, running through the newly founded town of Paris and past John Neely Bryan's cabin, the seed of Dallas. Builders earned 160-acre land grants for each mile cleared to a road 30 feet wide.

Rockwall, TX

Seeking to knit its scattered settlements together, the Republic of Texas Congress authorized the Central National Road in February 1844 — a 30-foot roadway to be cleared of stumps taller than a foot. Surveyor George W. Stell platted the route from the Trinity River near present-day Dallas northeast to the Red River, connecting a southern road toward Austin and San Antonio with a U.S. military highway running north to St. Louis. Pioneers soon settled along it, founding the towns of Heath and Rockwall.

Josephine, TX

In the mid-1840s the fledgling Republic of Texas, hungry to draw settlers into its northeastern reaches, chartered the Central National Road to link the Red River with the military roads along the Trinity. A five-man commission set the project in motion in 1844, and surveyor George Stell laid out a route from present-day Dallas northeast through seven counties, hugging open prairie and natural stream crossings. Though the road may never have been fully built and was soon eclipsed by the Preston Road and the railroads, it helped pry open a swath of frontier Texas to farms and towns.

Salt Lake City, UT

This marker recalls the overland emigrant trail where travelers crossed the Jordan River just west of Salt Lake City, a stream early Mormon settlers named for the biblical Jordan flowing from Utah Lake to the Great Salt Lake. A diary excerpt captures pioneers singing hymns of deliverance as they passed "over Jordan," turning a river crossing into a moment of faith on the long westward journey. The Tooele branch of the Central Overland route carried wagons across this valley in the mid-19th century.

Gonzales, TX

In 1825, while Texas was still part of Mexico, the surveyor James Kerr laid out this town as the capital of Green DeWitt's empresario colony and named it for the governor of Coahuila and Texas. The plan set an inner town of forty-nine blocks, with this Central Square at its heart. It was one of the earliest Anglo-American colonial settlements in what would soon become a contested borderland.

Ceres Township, PA · est. 1949

In 1798 Francis King, a surveyor and agent for the Philadelphia land company of John Keating, established what became the first permanent white settlement within present-day McKean County, a mile south of here. Land companies like Keating's were the engines of settlement in this era, buying up vast tracts and dispatching agents to survey lots and draw in pioneers. King's work opened this rugged corner of northern Pennsylvania to lasting settlement.

San Luis Obispo, CA

This land on Cerro San Luis Obispo passed through local hands including Charles and Rhonda Reed, and at the turn of the twentieth century Army veteran William G. Chandler became caretaker of the three-acre parcel and its thriving lemon grove, planted in the 1890s. The story reflects the citrus agriculture that shaped California's Central Coast in the Gilded Age and early modern era. Such groves were the economic backbone of many small California communities.

Lometa, TX

Built in 1874 by Henry Chadwick and his son Milam, this sandstone sawmill, flour mill, and cotton gin harnessed an oak dam and a millrace chiseled into rock. Customers sometimes waited days for their turn, fishing the millrace to pass the time, and by about 1900 the scenic spot had grown into a resort with a hotel and dance platform — until a shift in the river's course forced its abandonment in 1915.

Grapeland, TX

Chaffin Cemetery was established in the 1840s, in the earliest years of Anglo settlement in Houston County, Texas. Burial grounds like this were often among the first permanent marks a frontier community left on the land. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002.

Paducah, TX

Born of the drought years of the early 1900s, rancher W.Q. Richards carved his land into small irrigated farms, and a settlement known as Richards or Dutch Colony sprang up. A post office named Chalk opened in 1906, and by the early 1920s some 54 farms, a cotton gin, churches, and a school made it the business center of southern Cottle County. World War II drew people away, and one by one the school, churches, gin, and post office closed, leaving Chalk a fading memory by the late 1980s.

Waco, TX

Founded in 1870 as White Rock Baptist Church by settlers who wanted a Baptist congregation nearby, this church was received into the Waco Baptist Association in 1871 and worshipped at the Union Grove School until it built its own home in 1878. A move to dissolve in 1907 was rescinded the next year, and the congregation carried its old building's materials to a new home at Chalk Bluff. That structure burned in 1934 and was rebuilt, and the church still serves the Waco area today.