Westward Expansion

Uvalde, TX

On May 29, 1861, two of southwest Texas's most noted frontiersmen were ambushed here by a band of some twenty Native warriors. Henry Robinson, a tall, red-bearded man so well known that his likeness had been painted on a rock near the Llano River, was traveling to Camp Wood with his companion Henry Adams when the attack came. Both men were killed and scalped, after which the raiders struck Robinson's home—only to be driven off by his family.

Riverside, TX

Founded in the 1870s on land owned by Lacy Harrington and named for the area's chalky geology, this graveyard's earliest documented burial is that of Civil War veteran Barney Carroll, who died in 1880. For more than a century it has served the Kittrell community, which once supported a post office, school, church, blacksmith, general store, cotton gin, and grist mill. A cemetery association formed in 1971 continues to tend the historic grounds.

Chalk Mountain, TX

Chalk Mountain began as a trading center before the Civil War, and its cemetery — the community's only burial ground — holds a marked grave dating to 1874, with unmarked plots hinting at earlier use. Confederate veteran Hiram Berry Rogers deeded the ground to the county in 1915, and more than 350 people rest here, among them veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and Korea. A cemetery association has cared for the site since 1959.

Hughes Springs, TX

In 1839 brothers Reece and Robert Hughes, hunting for rumored pirate gold, instead found mineral springs whose iron salts gave them the name 'chalybeate.' Reece Hughes, a planter who later built an iron foundry, started the first town of Hughes Springs at the site in 1847. The springs and the early iron works anchored settlement in this corner of East Texas.

Winnsboro, TX

Originally called Musgrove Springs for the settler who owned the land, these waters were renamed Chalybeate Springs for their heavy iron content and gave rise to a thriving 19th-century resort. After a school was built in 1881, the village added churches, stores, and a post office, and in the 1880s Walker Fore opened a two-story hotel and spa. The hotel closed in 1895, the community faded, and its school shut in the 1950s.

Kingsville, TX

At the turn of the 20th century, King Ranch owner Henrietta King and neighboring ranchers backed the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway to move cattle to market, and the new railroad town of Kingsville rose around its headquarters. In 1908 a cemetery association bought forty acres and opened Chamberlain Cemetery the next year, naming it for Henrietta's father, pioneer minister Hiram Chamberlain. It became the resting place of Henrietta and Captain King, railroad visionary Uriah Lott, and other builders of South Texas.

Anahuac, TX

Chambers County was carved from Jefferson and Liberty counties and organized in 1858, taking its name from General Thomas Jefferson Chambers (1802-1865), the sole superior judge of Texas before the revolution and later a delegate to the 1861 Secession Convention. Its first county seat was Wallisville, and since 1908 the seat has been at Anahuac, near the mouth of the Trinity River on Galveston Bay.

Anahuac, TX

Chambers County, named for Texas pioneer Major General Thomas Jefferson Chambers, was organized in 1858 with its seat at Wallisville. In 1908, after rice canals and wandering hogs helped tip an election, Anahuac won the county seat; its 1912 Renaissance Revival courthouse burned in 1935. The current three-story limestone building, blending Art Deco and Moderne styles, rose in 1937 with funding from the New Deal's Public Works Administration and remains little changed today.

Marathon, TX

The Chambers Hotel began as an adobe building raised in 1891 in the desert railroad town of Marathon, first run by Mrs. Mary Collins. In 1905 "Gran" Chambers bought it, enlarged it, and framed a wooden structure over the thick original walls, operating it as a hotel until 1930. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Forreston, TX

This creek carries the name of Thomas Jefferson Chambers, who in 1834 received the first land grant within present-day Ellis County from the Mexican government — a reminder that Texas settlement began under Mexican rule. The place was also known as Howe's Settlement for William R. Howe, the region's first settler in 1843. Its early post office and brief turn as the first seat of Navarro County (1846–1848) mark it as one of the area's founding sites.

Anahuac, TX

Built in 1845, Chambersea was the home of Thomas Jefferson Chambers, an early Texas civic and business leader who proclaimed his devotion to the state with a "Star" window in the west gable. The modest board-and-batten house featured a distinctive spiral exterior stairway and sat at the center of a plantation with barns, outbuildings, and a lattice summer house. The home's story turned dark in 1863, when Chambers was assassinated here.

McKinney, TX

Elisha and Peggy Ann Chambers brought their seven children to Texas in 1847, claiming headrights in Collin and Dallas Counties and donating land for a cemetery and school that seeded the community named in their honor. By the turn of the century Chambersville thrived with a sawmill, cotton gin, blacksmith, post office, and stores, while its school doubled as auditorium, dance hall, and even a roller rink. During World War I the Red Cross worked out of the school as local women rolled bandages for the troops.

McKinney, TX

Elisha and Margaret Ann Chambers came to Texas from Indiana in 1847, and when their infant son died in 1853 they gave the land where he was buried for a cemetery and school. The site once stood at the crossroads of a busy farm community of homes, a cotton gin, stores, and a post office, and those buried here were its storekeepers, teachers, blacksmiths, farmers, and soldiers. By 1999 some 950 graves recorded the community's long history.

McKinney, TX

Though Chambersville dates to 1847, its residents worshiped in non-denominational services at scattered locations until the Methodist congregation formally organized in 1905. J. M. Bryan deeded land across from the community school, where members first met in a white frame building and later built anew in 1948. Its Harvest Festival, begun in 1945, grew into a lasting Chambersville tradition.

Cedar Park, TX

John "Jack" Champion left York County, South Carolina, and had reached Texas by 1850, when he and Naomi Jane Standefer were licensed to marry in Williamson County. In 1854 he bought more than 200 acres at the headwaters of Brushy Creek, later serving in the Civil War and briefly as county sheriff. Naomi, who died in 1862 as mother to seven of his nineteen children, lies in the oldest of the family plot's marked graves, among several more that are unmarked.

Mount Desert, ME

This monument honors Samuel de Champlain, the French soldier, navigator, and administrator who explored the coast of what is now Maine in the early 1600s and gave Mount Desert Island its name for its bare, rocky summits. Champlain's voyages opened the way for French settlement in North America and mapped a coastline that European powers would contest for generations. He is best remembered as the founder of Quebec and a central figure in the story of New France.

City of Plattsburgh, NY

Samuel de Champlain was the French navigator and cartographer who charted much of northeastern North America in the early 1600s, founding Quebec in 1608 and, in 1609, becoming the first European to document the long lake that still bears his name. Traveling with Algonquin and Huron allies, he pushed south into the waterway that would become a strategic highway between the St. Lawrence and the Hudson. This monument on the Plattsburgh shore marks the lake he opened to European maps and the New France he worked to establish.

Fairfield, TX

When Reuben and Mary Chancellor came to the Brown's Creek settlement of Freestone County in the 1850s, they brought a large family, enslaved laborers, and the ambitions of Deep South planters transplanted to the Texas frontier. The land they gave for a church, school, and burying ground became the heart of a rural community, and the Predestinarian Primitive Baptist congregation organized here in 1854 doubled as schoolhouse and gathering place. The cemetery that grew up around it holds four generations of settlers, many infant graves, and veterans of the Civil War and World War II. A separate section set aside for the formerly enslaved records, in stone, the tangled histories that bound these families together.

Heath, TX

Kentucky natives Henry and Martha Chandler were among the earliest Anglo settlers of the Rockwall County area, established here by 1860. Their small family burial ground opened in sorrow in 1869 with the death of their nine-year-old daughter Mary, and grew to seven marked graves — six of them Chandlers, plus a neighbor's daughter, Hattie Harvey. Henry was laid to rest in 1904 and Martha in 1908, the last known burial.

Snyder, TX

Deep Creek was once a spring-fed tributary of the Colorado River that both began and ended within Scurry County. In the 1870s it watered buffalo hunters camped in hide-covered dugouts, and W. H. "Pete" Snyder's trading post on its bank grew into the town of Snyder. Though official surveyors named it Culvers Creek, the famed hunters John and J. Wright Mooar called it Deep Creek in 1876 and that name stuck, as the stream became the stage for the young town's picnics, horse races, and baptisms.

Channing, TX

Channing rose in 1890 as the headquarters and supply point for the vast XIT Ranch, one of the largest ranches in the world. The Methodist congregation organized here is said to have been the first Methodist church north of the Canadian River, and its earliest members read like a roster of the frontier town — the XIT's ranch manager and his family, a hotel keeper, a plumber, and Hereford cattle breeders. Trustees bought this site in 1901 and finished the building the next year.

Fort Worth, TX

This burial ground began with the mid-1850s settlement of the Fanning and Raibourn pioneer families, and, by family tradition, with the 1856 grave of Eliny Raibourn on land her brother-in-law John Fanning then donated as a cemetery. A one-room school — Horse Creek or Lone Star School — was the area's only communal building until a chapel rose beside the graves, giving the place its later name of Sweet Chapel. As families moved on and the chapel vanished, it became known simply as Chapel Cemetery, tended for years by neighbors before a cemetery association took it in hand in 1985.

San Augustine, TX

Chapel Hill Cemetery near San Augustine holds burials reaching back to 1838, beginning with a veteran of the American Revolution whose widow is said to have given land along the old El Camino Real for a public graveyard. Its oldest graves face north-south beneath slabs of hewn native rock, and among those interred is a Cumberland Presbyterian minister who served as chaplain and courier for Sam Houston during the Texas Revolution. The surrounding community lived and worshipped here through the cotton era until World War II drew its people to combat and coastal shipyards.

Cherokee, TX

Chappel, one of San Saba County's earliest settlements, dates to the 1850s, and this burial ground grew from land donated by Joab B. Harrell, the county's first Chief Justice, who had buried his own son here around 1871 before formally deeding the tract to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1886. A church, school, and store once made Chappel a community center. The graves chronicle the pioneers and families who settled this frontier corner of Central Texas.

Chappell Hill, TX

This burial ground opened in 1853 as a Masonic cemetery, with Chappell Hill's founder Jacob Haller its first interment. It became the resting place of the pioneers, soldiers, and statesmen who shaped early Texas, tended for over a century by Hubert Lodge No. 67 until a cemetery association formed in 1965.

George West, TX

Charles "Mr. Charlie" Tullis and his wife Emma carried deep Texas roots: his forebears walked from Tennessee in 1834 and gave sons and supplies to the San Jacinto campaign, while her ancestor John McGloin died in the Goliad Massacre. Born in 1873, Charlie served as Live Oak County sheriff from 1909 — known for delivering tax notices without a gun — through the county seat's move from Oakville to George West, and later spent thirty-eight years as founding president of the First National Bank of George West. He and Emma married in 1913 and are buried among the Irish Catholic pioneers at Gussettville.

Montgomery, TX

Charles Bellinger Stewart (1806–1885) came to Texas in 1830 and served as the young republic's first Secretary of State. A signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, he helped draft both the 1836 Republic constitution and the 1845 state constitution, and later served Montgomery County as district attorney and state representative.

San Marcos, TX

Charles S. Cock built this limestone house in 1867, in the years when San Marcos was still a young frontier town finding its feet after the Civil War. A farmer who later served as mayor in the early 1880s, Cock raised his home from a mix of local materials—limestone, elm, pine, and cedar—the kind of hand-gathered construction typical of the Texas Hill Country.

Industry, TX

Charles Fordtran, a German of Huguenot descent, joined Stephen F. Austin's colony in January 1831 and earned a league of land surveying for Austin's partner Samuel May Williams. He fought in frontier clashes, rode with the "Spy Rangers" protecting fleeing families during the Texas Revolution, and raised fourteen children on his land near Industry. Arriving well before the great wave of German immigration, he was among the first Teutonic settlers in Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Born in New Hampshire in 1811, Charles Frederick King came to Texas and served in the Texas Army in 1836, the year of the revolution that won independence from Mexico. He later served two terms as mayor of San Antonio, in 1847–1849 and again in 1852–1853, guiding the frontier town through its early years as part of the new state of Texas. He died in San Antonio in 1869.

Oran, TX

In 1857 a twenty-one-year-old Charles Goodnight set up his first ranch at Black Springs on the very edge of the Comanche frontier, where cattle and danger ran together. He scouted for the Texas Rangers during the Civil War, blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail in 1866, and famously hauled his dying partner Oliver Loving's body home for burial. Later he founded the panhandle's first ranch, the JA, and even bred buffalo with cattle—the "cattalo."

Goodnight, TX

Charles Goodnight glimpsed the promise of ranching at nineteen while crossing Texas bound for the California gold fields, and turned back to build a cattle empire. During the Civil War he scouted for the Frontier Regiment of Texas cavalry, guarding settlers against raids, and afterward he and partner Oliver Loving blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail across the arid, Comanche-dominated lands of West Texas and New Mexico to supply distant forts. A legendary cattleman and Indian fighter, he also founded Goodnight College before his death in 1929.

Ballinger, TX

When 21-year-old Charles H. Noyes was killed in 1919 by a fall from his horse while working cattle on his family's ranch, his grieving parents commissioned a monument not only to their son but to all Texas cowboys. Sculptor Pompeo Coppini studied horses for two years before creating the bronze, producing a work that memorializes the vanishing world of the open-range cowhand.

Horseshoe Bay, TX

Born in Vermont in 1814, Charles Haynes came to Texas in 1836 with Ohio's "Buckeye Rangers" to fight for independence, then settled at Lockhart, where he ran a blacksmith shop and served in early county government. Around 1859 he moved his family to Llano County, and in 1860 he organized a Masonic lodge at the Comanche schoolhouse. Twice married and father of eight, he was a builder of frontier civic and fraternal life.

Orange, TX

Born in Mississippi around 1820, Charles Holmes Saxon came to Texas in 1842 and, after serving in the Mexican War, helped organize Orange County in 1852, sitting on its first commissioners court and later serving as sheriff. He farmed, made shingles, and rode into the Civil War, seeing action across Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana before dying in 1919 at nearly a century old.

San Marcos, TX

In 1847 the McGehee family left Alabama for the fresh farmland of newly annexed Texas, and by 1859 Charles Lewis McGehee, Jr. had claimed a stretch of the San Marcos River. The cabin he raised for his wife Sarah Jane and their children — with its hand-hewn stone fireplace and chimney — remains one of the oldest structures in this corner of Hays County, a survivor of the era when settlers turned river bottoms into homesteads before drifting into town life.

Nacogdoches, TX

Born in London and later joined by his German-born wife Anna Maria Ruoff, Charles Standfield Taylor became a public servant of the Republic and State of Texas over three decades. He served as a land commissioner in 1833, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, and went on to be chief justice of Nacogdoches County and a district attorney. His career shows how European immigrants helped build the institutions of frontier Texas.

Post, TX

Charles W. Post (1854-1914), the internationally known creator of Post Cereals and an advertising genius, turned his fortune to town-building in 1906. Buying the Curry Comb Ranch and adjoining land — some 225,000 acres — he laid out Post City as a self-contained model community of towns and farms. He financed and supervised the work without profit, offering settlers homes and businesses far below cost in pursuit of his vision of debt-free private ownership.

Brownwood, TX

John Wesley Hardin was among the most notorious gunmen of the Old West, and Charlie Webb a Texas Ranger turned Brown County deputy sent to pursue the Hardin-Taylor faction. On May 26, 1874, in Comanche, Hardin shot and killed Webb outside a saloon; Hardin fled Texas for three years before Rangers captured him in Florida, and after fifteen years in prison he studied law and practiced in El Paso until he was killed there in 1895.

George West, TX

At this spot in 1856, the newly created Live Oak County held its first organization and elected its first officers, planting local government on the South Texas frontier. In the years that followed the same ground hosted picnics, horse races, and school programs — the gatherings that knit a scattered ranching country into a community.

Nacogdoches, TX

Charles Hoya, son of a Prussian immigrant and longtime Nacogdoches County surveyor, built this land office in 1897 in an ornate Victorian style with Gothic Revival details. Designed by Houston architect Frank E. Rue, it was the first fireproof building in Nacogdoches and became a model for other local structures. The land office stayed in the family, run by Hoya's son-in-law until his death in 1966.

Fort Worth, TX

When E.E. Chase bought this land, it lay some distance beyond Fort Worth's edge, and the businessman built a home at its center and raised horses there. In 1906 a development company purchased and subdivided the property, moving Chase's house onto one of the new lots and creating the residential enclave known as Chase Court. Over the following decades it became home to many of the city's prominent businessmen and professionals.

Chatfield, TX

Methodism took root in this Navarro County community in 1846, when the Rev. J. E. Ferguson — whose son would one day govern Texas — preached to local believers. Chatfield's founder Robert Hodge built a brush arbor for camp meetings at his spring and later donated a lodge hall where worshippers of every faith gathered for years. Not until 1886 did the Methodists receive their own site; the congregation peaked in 1896, and after a storm destroyed the original building in 1937, the present church rose the following year.

George West, TX

Town founder George Washington West invited merchant Chauncy Canfield to open a business in his brand-new town of George West in 1914; Canfield came ahead to start a store, and his wife Minnie, sister, and three children arrived on the first passenger train. Designed in Prairie and English cottage style, their house was the first family home in the young town. Moved a block in 1947 and given a Southern Colonial face, it remained in the family until 1988.

Lexington, KY

One of the first buildings to rise outside Lexington's fort walls was a log schoolhouse on the east side of the public square in 1782, where the first teacher, John McKinney, was famously attacked by a wildcat. A stone market house followed in 1795, and the square grew into a bustling trading center whose monthly court day continued until 1921. Just east stood a succession of courthouses, the present one built in 1898-1900 after fire destroyed its predecessor along with Joel Tanner Hart's celebrated statue "Woman Triumphant."

Edgewood, TX

This congregation grew from services led by a Methodist circuit rider in the late 1870s, worshiping in a building shared with the public school on land deeded by the Texas & Pacific Railroad. A chapel under construction collapsed in 1923 but was rebuilt, and by 1953 new facilities and a memorial gift prompted a new name. The church also launched a noted fundraising effort known as the 'Edgewood Plan.'

Chelmsford, MA

In the farming communities of colonial New England, the town pound was nearly as essential as the meetinghouse: a sturdy stone or timber enclosure where stray and trespassing livestock were confined until their owners paid a fine to reclaim them. Chelmsford established its pound in 1654, just as the town was taking root on the edge of the Massachusetts Bay settlements, and kept it in service for more than two centuries. An elected pound keeper managed the impounded animals and collected the fees, one thread in a web of local ordinances governing fences, roaming cattle, and the everyday disputes of an agrarian society. By 1895 the old institution had outlived its usefulness and passed into memory.

Edom, TX

On this ground on July 16, 1839, Cherokee leader Chief Bowles was killed leading some 800 Native fighters of allied tribes against roughly 500 Texan troops. The clash marked the climax of the young Republic of Texas's campaign to expel the Cherokees and their allies from East Texas, the last major engagement between Cherokees and Texans. Bowles, an aged chief who had sought a permanent land guarantee, died on the field.

Rusk, TX

When Spanish and French explorers reached this region in the seventeenth century, they found Tejas and Hasinai peoples living here, and the Spanish planted missions among them. The Cherokee, driven from the United States, migrated to the area around 1822 and were present during early Anglo colonization before President Mirabeau B. Lamar's administration expelled them in 1839. Formally created from Nacogdoches County in 1846, Cherokee County filled quickly with farms and towns and has since produced two Texas governors, a Wyoming governor, and a Texas House speaker.

Chandler, TX

Pushed out of their eastern homelands by white settlement, Cherokee people migrated into East Texas and were established in the region by 1820, seeking in vain to secure legal title to their land from Mexico. The uneasy coexistence that followed collapsed in 1839 when Republic of Texas president Mirabeau B. Lamar ordered the tribe expelled. In a two-day battle northwest of here on July 15–16, two Texans and eighteen Cherokees fell, including the aged Chief Bowles, and the survivors were driven north into present-day Oklahoma.

Gilmer, TX

Around 1821, Cherokee people living near Nacogdoches blazed a trail north toward their kin in Arkansas, guided by a scout who set his course by dragging buffalo skins behind his horse while others marked the trees and planted Cherokee roses still seen along the route. Sam Houston, David Crockett, and thousands of settlers followed this road into Texas. The Cherokee were expelled from Texas in 1839 after Houston left the presidency, their chief killed in a two-day battle on the Neches River.

Longview, TX

In 1821 Cherokee people blazed this trace from the Nacogdoches area to their reservation on Arkansas's White River, slashing trees, clearing a path, planting Cherokee roses, and marking springs as camps. The trail became a thoroughfare for Sam Houston, David Crockett, other soldiers of the Texas Revolution, and thousands of immigrants. After Texas forces drove the Cherokees from the state in 1839, the very people who made the road departed over it into exile.

East Bernard, TX

The Chesterville community grew out of an 1890s land promotion, when the Southern Texas Colonization Company of Chicago bought tens of thousands of acres to draw settlers to Wharton and Colorado counties. Families like the Chesters and Andersons arrived from Illinois in the mid-1890s, and when patriarch Andrew Anderson died in 1898, promoter John Linderholm set aside this parcel beside the family land for a burying ground. A cemetery association has overseen the site since 1909.

Llano, TX

George Oliver Chew, born in West Virginia in 1832, came to Texas as a boy and settled in western Llano County in 1883, buying 320 acres where a family cemetery soon took shape around the graves of two young grandchildren. The Chews built a life on the land, running a school and later a cotton gin, and though they sold the property in 1927, the one-acre cemetery was later donated back. More than forty graves lie here, including both a Confederate and a Union soldier.

Alto vicinity, TX

In 1836 Sam Houston negotiated a treaty recognizing the Cherokees' right to the East Texas lands they occupied, where their leading figure was Duwali — known also as Bowl or Chief Bowles. But after the Texas Revolution the Senate of the new Republic voided the treaty, and in 1839 President Mirabeau B. Lamar ordered the Cherokee expelled. Learning of the order near this site, Bowles rallied his people to resist and was killed at the Battle of the Neches on July 16, 1839.

Livingston, TX

John Blount, son of a U.S. senator and a Coushatta woman, became principal chief of the Apalachicola Indians and won distinction guiding General Andrew Jackson during the First Seminole War. That friendship earned him a silver breastplate and, under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, special leave to lead his people to Texas rather than Oklahoma. In 1834 Blount set out with 256 followers on a grueling journey by river, sea, and land; barely 152 reached Polk County, where many of their descendants still live.

Ryegate, MT

On September 17, 1877, Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) forded the Musselshell River here during their extraordinary fighting retreat toward Canada. Driven from their homeland in Idaho's Wallowa country after refusing to cede it, hundreds of men, women, and children traveled more than a thousand miles pursued by the U.S. Army, only to be halted just short of the border.

Dalhart, TX

A Castilian-born Spaniard, Casimiro Romero moved from New Mexico to the Texas Panhandle in 1876 with his family in a coach, his goods in fourteen wagons, and 6,000 sheep. As a leader of the pastores, he spoke for the sheepherders who built eleven haciendas and plazas along the Canadian River, and in late 1876 he struck a pact with cattleman Charles Goodnight to protect their range. As railroads and cattle ranches encroached in the 1880s, Romero sold his Texas lands and returned to New Mexico in 1897; the nearby town of Romero bears his name.

Wallowa County, OR

This monument in Oregon's Wallowa Valley honors Tuekakas, better known as Old Joseph, a leader of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce and father of the famed Chief Joseph. He refused to sign away his people's homeland in the 1863 treaty, and after his death his son carried on the struggle that led to the celebrated Nez Perce flight of 1877. The valley he defended remains sacred ground to the Nez Perce.

Harrisville, UT

In September 1850, as Mormon pioneers were settling the Weber River valley, the Shoshone chief Terikee—known for his friendliness toward the newcomers—was killed here on Four Mile Creek. His death set off a tense confrontation: Shoshone bands threatened Ogden, militia rode north from Salt Lake City, and more blood was shed before Terikee's people carried his body away northward. The monument marks the event near where he fell, about 200 feet to the west.