Westward Expansion

Henrietta, TX

Clay County's early years were so hard that it was formally disorganized in 1862 amid Indian raids, not reorganized until 1873. Henrietta served as a base for buffalo hunters until 1878, and in 1875 William S. Ikard brought the first Hereford cattle in Texas here from Illinois. The county seat itself moved from Cambridge to Henrietta in 1874.

Kempner, TX

Oral tradition holds that six families organized this Missionary Baptist congregation in east Lampasas County in 1872, worshipping in a sanctuary on this site by the late 1870s under the Rev. Ambrose Elledge. Storms battered the building in 1912, revivals filled brush arbors and open-air tabernacles, and members were baptized in the Lampasas River until 1975.

Oakland, TX

The Clear Creek community took root in the 1850s along the Old Gonzales Road, the wagon route linking San Felipe, Columbus, and San Antonio. A Methodist church organized there, and the burial ground that grew beside it served the area for decades, holding more than a dozen Civil War veterans and members of the Sons of Temperance among its marble, granite, and local sandstone markers. When the railroad reached nearby Weimar in 1873, the community faded, but families kept returning to the cemetery, whose last recorded burial came in 1929.

Lockhart, TX

Clear Fork Cemetery dates to the 1850s, when Anglo settlement was spreading across the Caldwell County countryside, and its earliest graves reach back to those frontier decades. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2008, it preserves the resting place of the area's early settlers.

Clearfield, PA · est. 1982

Clearfield County, formed in 1804 from Huntingdon and Lycoming, drew its name from the open 'clear fields' that early travelers found in the wilderness. Through the second half of the 19th century it was a great timber county, its loggers felling the forests and running rafts of logs down the West Branch of the Susquehanna between 1850 and 1901. The county seat, Clearfield, was incorporated in 1840.

Lockhart, TX

Organized in 1848 with J. Isaac as its first pastor, Clearfork Baptist is the oldest church in Caldwell County. Its 1850 building rose from a hand-hewn oak frame morticed with pegs, its lumber hauled overland all the way from the coast at Port Lavaca. In 1857 John H. Hargis and Thomas L. Burkhead donated the land for the church and its adjoining cemetery.

Winnsboro, TX

In 1869, four years after the Civil War, the Rev. Elisha Blanton and nine neighbors organized a Baptist church in a home near a sawmill in this corner of Franklin County, where settlers labored over corn, potatoes, and cotton. The congregation followed the sawmill when it moved, worshiped in homes and the old Clearwater School, and finally built a sanctuary in 1888 whose upper floor housed a Woodmen of the World lodge. Fire and relocation forced repeated rebuilding, including a church moved to this site piece by piece in 1932.

Clifton, TX

Known as the "Father of Norwegian Immigration to America," Cleng Peerson left Norway in 1821 and spent decades guiding his countrymen to new homes across the eastern and midwestern United States. Reaching Texas in 1849, he scouted sites for settlers and in 1853 led a group to Bosque County, seeding the large Norwegian community that took root there. He lived out his years nearby and is buried at Norse.

Valera, TX

Sheep rancher George P. Cleveland built the first fine house in this part of Coleman County in 1880, using native stone and lumber hauled from Fort Worth by ox-wagon, giving it walls two feet thick. Its second owner was Billy Anson, an Englishman and son of the Earl of Litchfield who ranched in West Texas. The house was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1970.

Liberty, TX

Built around 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, the Cleveland-Partlow House is one of Liberty's oldest surviving buildings and a rare Texas example of late Greek Revival design touched with Italianate flourishes. Over more than a century it passed through three prominent local families — the Clevelands, Foscues, and Partlows — before being given to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in 1981. Its endurance offers a window into the architecture and social fabric of a small antebellum East Texas town.

Cline, TX

In 1870 Celeste Pingenot pushed into this stretch of the Uvalde County frontier, throwing up the first house on Turkey Creek and opening a stage stand, store, and inn he called Wallace. A small detachment of soldiers billeted nearby guarded the settlers, and when the railroad arrived in 1883 the community shifted to the north bank and took the name Cline after the storekeeper who became its postmaster.

Cuero, TX

Carved out of the Texas coastal plain in 1846 and named for empresario Green De Witt, whose colony had drawn early Anglo settlers, DeWitt County shuffled its seat of government among frontier hamlets before settling on Clinton in 1850. For a quarter century Clinton thrived as the county's civic heart, its courthouse a cluster of log and frame buildings. When the railroad-era town of Cuero took the seat in 1876, Clinton faded, leaving only a cemetery and a well to mark where a community once stood.

Caddo Mills, TX

Local legend holds that this graveyard began when an unknown cowboy was buried here with landowner James Massay's blessing, on ground he set aside for the community. Massay also gave a railroad right-of-way, and the town that rose along it — first Massayville, then Clinton — was named for a Cotton Belt Railway official. The earliest marked grave dates to 1859, and by 1998 more than 500 graves and a few scattered homes were all that remained of Clinton.

Rocksprings, TX

In 1871, while herding sheep near their Kendall County home, eleven-year-old Clint Smith and his younger brother Jeff were seized by Lipan and Comanche raiders. Adopted by Chief Tasacowadi, Clint lived among the Comanche for five years before he was given up in a trade for imprisoned Indians at Fort Sill; he later became a trail driver and Angora goat breeder, settling in Rocksprings in 1910.

Junction, TX

Built in 1879 for his family of fourteen by W.J. Cloud, a veteran of Terry's Texas Rangers, this stone house became an early social center of Kimble County. Its eighteen-inch walls were laid from stone quarried on a nearby mountain, while the lumber for its wide board floors was hauled in by ox-wagon all the way from Austin. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Junction, TX

Cloud Point is the cliff commanding the junction of the Llano River valley and Johnson Fork Creek, long a natural landmark for soldiers and travelers crossing this rugged Hill Country terrain. Its name honors the family of Civil War veteran William Johnston Cloud, who bought land nearby and made his home in view of the bluff. Beneath it once ran a web of historic routes—the Upper Presidio Road, the military road from Fort Terrett to San Antonio, and the transcontinental Old Spanish Trail—though modern highways bypassed it in the 1970s.

Quitman, TX

Families from Georgia and Alabama put down roots on this land in 1856, and the next year chose a hill blanketed in yellow clover for their Baptist church. The community cemetery began in 1868 with the burial of a child, soon followed by a stranger who died of smallpox. Older headstones, like that of Martha Benton, were moved here as families gathered their dead into one hallowed ground.

Clyde, TX

Organized in 1884, this Methodist congregation met in members' homes until it built its first church here in 1904. In 1936 that white frame building gave way to the present sanctuary, raised from stone donated by the congregation itself. Its steeply pitched roof, pointed-arch gable window, and round-arched entry lend it the flavor of English Gothic design in miniature.

Yorktown, TX

Yorktown owes its founding to two very different frontiersmen. Kentucky-born John York came to Texas in 1821 and served as a captain in the 1835 siege that drove the Mexican army from Bexar, later giving the land for the town before dying in a fight with Indians in 1848. German immigrant Charles Eckhardt, a veteran of the Texas independence struggle and the Mexican War, surveyed a trade route from the coast to New Braunfels, built the town's first house, and made Yorktown a link in his freighting network.

Junction, TX

Nick and Jennie Coalson opened this Kimble County ranch in 1866, scratching out a living by stockraising and hunting — their "bacon" was cured bear meat. In December 1870, while the men were away hunting, raiders attacked the cabin and killed ranch hand Joe Harris; Jennie Coalson, dressed in men's clothes, held them off until her husband returned. The Coalsons later sold to Civil War veteran and surveyor Dr. Asa Pullen, whose family's descendants still live in the county.

Thornton, TX

Brinkley Davis brought his family from Indiana in 1833 and received a Mexican land grant of some 4,500 acres in 1835, giving the surrounding 'Davis Prairie' its name. His daughter Mary Ellen married Alabama-born Pinckney Cobb in 1845, and the family cemetery was established on Cobb land in the 1850s, with Davis's 1852 grave the earliest marked. Its stones tell hard pioneer truths — many infants and children — alongside veterans of the Santa Fe Expedition, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War.

Fort Worth, TX

Built in 1904 on the bluff above the Clear Fork of the Trinity River, this Fort Worth home was raised for mortgage company president Lyman D. Cobb and his wife Emma. In 1919 Emma sold it to Judge Ivy Burney, a lawyer who specialized in the cattle industry. Its low-pitched roof, broad eaves, and casement windows show the influence of the Chicago Prairie School style.

Mansfield, MA

In June 1640, barely two decades after the Mayflower landing, the Plymouth Colony's military leader Miles Standish surveyed the bounds of an eight-mile land purchase, and this spot marked its northern corner. Local tradition — preserved by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who set this marker in 1941 — holds that Standish paused here while one of his men repaired a worn shoe, giving the place its homely name, 'Cobbler's Corner.'

Waco, TX

Begun in 1853 with the burial of an infant daughter of county judge John Allen Cobbs, this small family plot grew into a private cemetery in the years when central Texas was still a young frontier of the recently annexed state. Such family burial grounds were common where settlers put down roots far from established churchyards, marking both loss and permanence on newly claimed land.

Dallas, TX

Cochran Chapel Cemetery began in 1853 with the burials of Nancy Jane Hughes Cochran's infant daughter and husband. Among those laid to rest here are many Dallas County pioneers, including four of Nancy Jane's sisters and their husbands who had come from Tennessee in the 1840s and 1850s. The cemetery preserves the memory of the interlinked families who first settled the area.

Dallas, TX

In 1856 the widow Nancy Jane Cochran deeded the first land in Dallas County set aside for a Methodist church; two years later the men of the congregation raised a modest frame sanctuary from lumber hauled 150 miles by wagon from Jefferson. Rebuilt across the generations, the congregation traces its Sunday School to 1879.

Morton, TX

Cochran County was created in 1876 and named for Robert Cochran, a New Jersey native who died defending the Alamo in 1836. Settlement came slowly on this remote plain — the 1900 census counted just 25 cowboys — until the county finally organized in 1924 with Morton as its seat. Oil discovery and irrigated farming then drove rapid growth, and its Silver Lake had been known to early Spanish explorers as Laguna Quemado.

Buda, TX

Established in 1883, Cocke Cemetery is a rural burial ground in the Buda area of Hays County, dating to the settlement era of Central Texas. It was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016, a state designation that documents and protects burial places at least fifty years old.

Denison, TX

While David Harman Coffman served in the Confederate army during the Civil War, his wife Harriet and their four sons made their way from Missouri to North Texas. After the war he rejoined them and bought this land, and in 1878 the Coffmans deeded a one-acre plot to the county for a public cemetery and an adjoining acre for a school and Baptist meetinghouse. Among those buried here is J.K. Miller, the pioneer on whose land the city of Denison was laid out.

Anna, TX

This burial ground grew up around the mid-nineteenth-century community of Coffman, on land given by early settler John Coffman, whose son George farmed nearby. The oldest marked grave dates to 1876, and for more than a century the cemetery served as the community's primary resting place. Descendants of many families buried here still live in this corner of Collin County.

Azle, TX

Settlers began reaching this part of North Texas around 1849, among them James and Sarah Hoggard, whose daughter Nancy Jane married cabinetmaker and teacher John "Coho" Smith in 1861. The couple built a one-room cabin here that grew with their family and reportedly doubled as a school. Later digs uncovered a hand-dug well, root cellar, spring house, and rock walls hinting at a fortified structure.

Robert Lee, TX

Coke County was carved from Tom Green County and created in March 1889, part of the wave of county organization that followed the settlement of West Texas. It honors Richard Coke, the Democrat who served as governor from 1874 to 1876 and then two decades in the U.S. Senate. The county seat moved from short-lived Hayrick to Robert Lee in 1890.

Robert Lee, TX

Built in 1907 by the Southern Structural Steel Company of San Antonio, this jail replaced Coke County's original one-room lumber lockup of about 1891. At least seven early sheriffs lived on the ground floor and doubled as jailkeepers, tending an average of only about four short-term prisoners a month. The gallows built on the second floor were never used—the county never sentenced anyone to death.

San Antonio, TX

South Carolinian John "Jack" Coker came to Texas in 1834 and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, earning a large land grant along Salado Creek north of San Antonio, where he summoned his brothers to help settle. The cemetery began in 1857 with the burial of a six-year-old killed by a rattlesnake, his limestone headstone still the most prominent stone on the knoll. In 1873 the family set aside three acres for a church, school, and graveyard, and the church still stands beside the cemetery today.

Palestine, TX

Col. G.R. Howard, a merchant and public official, built this Palestine residence in 1851, in the years when East Texas was filling with new arrivals and commerce. His family held the house for well over a century before selling it to the city in 1965 for use as a museum. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark the following year.

North Strabane Township, PA · est. 1947

George Morgan was one of the most experienced Indian traders and agents on the early American frontier, and from 1796 to 1810 he made his home on this ground. It was here that Aaron Burr, the former vice president, came calling with a scheme to raise a private venture in the West. Morgan grew alarmed at what he heard and became one of the first to warn President Thomas Jefferson of Burr's designs.

Bonham, TX

In late 1835 James Tarleton raised a company of 36 riflemen in his native Kentucky and set out for Texas, arriving to find San Antonio already liberated. Though an officer, he fought in the ranks at the victory of San Jacinto in April 1836. Having lost his wife Nancy in Kentucky that same year, he settled afterward in Fannin County with his son Robert.

Coffeeville, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1804 and seasoned in Tennessee, Col. John Hamilton McNairy came to the young Republic of Texas in 1837, settling first in Shelby County and reaching Upshur County in 1847. A year later his neighbors elected him the county's first representative. Father of eleven children, he died at Old Coffeeville in 1853, one of the founding figures of a frontier community.

Canyon, TX

After the Civil War, waves of settlers pushed west onto the Great Plains and clashed with the Native nations who lived there, prompting Army campaigns against the Southern Plains tribes. In 1872 Colonel John I. Gregg led Eighth Cavalry troops from New Mexico into West Texas hunting raiders, and on August 16 they skirmished with Kiowas near this spot. That fight, with the later Red River War of 1874-75, drove the subjugation of the Plains tribes and their confinement to reservations.

San Antonio, TX

Born in San Antonio in 1783, José Francisco Ruiz served as an officer in the Mexican army before casting his lot with the Texas cause, becoming one of the few native Tejanos to sign the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence. He went on to represent his people as a senator in the first Congress of the Republic of Texas. He died in 1840, honored in the city of his birth.

Mt. Calm, TX

Leonard Williams lived the turbulent frontier of Republic-era Texas, where relations with the Comanche shaped daily survival. Once a Comanche captive himself, he later served as a diplomat and Indian agent, earning a colonel's rank from his friend President Sam Houston. He settled near here in 1845 and built the area's first stock tank, scraping it out with a rawhide sled.

Austin, TX

Georgia native Lewis Washington came to Texas around 1835 and joined the revolutionary forces at San Antonio, serving on Colonel Fannin's staff with the Georgia Battalion at Refugio and Goliad. He held an office in Sam Houston's administration during the days of the Republic of Texas. Years later he was killed in Nicaragua while working as a news reporter in Central America; his body was never recovered, though his wife Rebecca is buried here.

Crockett, TX

Steward Alexander Miller came to Texas from Virginia in 1839, during the days of the Republic. In 1843 he joined the Snively Expedition, a Republic of Texas venture aimed at Mexican trade caravans on the Santa Fe Trail, and in 1846 he served in the first state legislature after Texas joined the Union.

Connellsville, PA · est. 1966

William Crawford was a frontier soldier and surveyor who settled near the Youghiogheny River after 1766, serving as George Washington's western land agent at a time when Virginia and Pennsylvania families were pushing across the Appalachians. During the Revolution he took up arms on the frontier, leading a 1782 expedition against Native villages along the Sandusky River in Ohio. The campaign ended in disaster: Crawford was captured and put to death, a killing that became notorious in the bitter borderland warfare of the era.

Denison, TX

Established around 1853 by Benjamin F. Colbert, this Red River ferry carried thousands of immigrants into Texas during the 1850s. From 1858 to 1861 it served the Southern Overland Mail Line, whose stagecoaches linked St. Louis and San Francisco with mail and passengers. The crossing endured until 1931, when a highway bridge finally spanned the river.

Denison, TX

About 1855, pioneers camped near a spring on William S. Reeves's land while awaiting their land grants built this one-room log schoolhouse. Their leader, William L. Holder, had migrated to Grayson County from Missouri, and his son Clinton later lived in the cabin as a home. In 1974 the structure was moved to Old Settlers Village and restored.

Coldspring, TX

This Methodist congregation traces to 1848, when Mr. and Mrs. F. H. Rankin gave land from an Austin Colony grant for a church built just to the north. The building was moved to a new site in 1917, and its bell has now tolled for well over a century. It is a living link to the frontier settlers who planted churches alongside their homesteads in the Republic-era Texas backcountry.

Crosbyton, TX

Handy P. Cole — foreman of the sprawling Spur Ranch and later sheriff of Dickens County — bought this West Texas property in 1897 and built the original house around 1900. In 1904 rancher James Calvin McNeill, Jr. acquired it and moved over from his father's adjoining spread, enlarging the home in 1917. It later passed to the estate of West Texas business leader Morgan Jones, with the McNeill family staying on.

Coleman, TX

Coleman County occupies land where Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa people once camped and kept lookouts from its hills. White settlement began in 1857 around Camp Colorado, a U.S. 2nd Cavalry post on Jim Ned Creek; the county was created in 1858 and named for Robert M. Coleman, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and San Jacinto veteran. In 1862 cattleman John Chisum arrived to raise beef for Confederate troops, and the county formally organized in 1864.

Coleman, TX

Erected in 1890 to replace a small 1879 structure on the courthouse lawn, this was Coleman County's second jail — a sturdy example of Victorian jail design with Romanesque Revival touches and decorative belt courses between its floors. The jailer and family lived on the ground level while maximum- and minimum-security cells filled the upper story. In all its years, only one man, a convicted murderer, was ever hanged here.

Taft, TX

Organized in 1879 from an earlier cattle partnership, the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company ran 167,000 acres of South Texas range and pioneered fencing the open range and shipping cattle by boat from its own wharves. Financial troubles passed control to Ohio investor David Sinton, whose son-in-law Charles P. Taft lent the ranch its name; under manager Joseph F. Green it became one of the state's largest and most innovative operations. The company town of Taft, platted in 1904, outlived the ranch, whose enterprises were sold off by 1928.

Colfax, TX

A. L. Kellam donated five acres in 1883 to help establish this cemetery, whose first burial in 1884 was Elisha Tunnell, founder of the chapel and community that became Colfax. The surrounding land held three schoolhouses and two churches over the years and hosted revivals and summer camp meetings. Today the cemetery holds roughly a thousand graves of the area's pioneers and their descendants.

Junction, TX

In 1880, as the Hill Country town of Junction City took shape, A.J. Bush led seventeen men and women in forming a Church of Christ, meeting first in the county courthouse. Members raised their first sanctuary in 1882, and in 1883 John S. Durst began a 42-year ministry that spanned the congregation's growth. Successive buildings rose on this site in 1890 and 1929 as the church became a fixture of frontier Junction's religious life.

Collegeport, TX

In 1908 the Pierce brothers hired developer Burton D. Hurd to carve a town from 9,000 acres of ranch land, promising a college and a port on Trespalacios Bay. Advertised in northern newspapers for its mild climate and rich farmland, Collegeport drew settlers, and by 1912 it boasted a bank, churches, the county's first free public library, its first Boy Scout troop, and a women's club. But a hard freeze in 1914, then drought and livestock disease, drove families away, and the venture faded—its old rail depot later rebuilt as the town library.

Collegeport, TX

Founded alongside the town of Collegeport in 1908, this cemetery served area residents from its earliest days, with some graves marked simply by Roman numerals set in shell concrete. The King's Daughters, a women's charitable organization, tended it from 1921 until a cemetery association formed in 1958. Hurricane Carla destroyed most of the records in 1961, but the community has always cared for the grounds.

Austonio, TX

Collin Aldrich, born in 1801, fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in the war that won Texas its independence, then served as the first chief justice of Houston County from 1837 to 1841 under the Republic of Texas. He died in 1842, and the State of Texas erected this memorial to him in 1936, the centennial of independence. His life bridged the battlefield and the founding of civil government on the Texas frontier.

McKinney, TX

Carved from Fannin County and created in April 1846, Collin County was named for Collin McKinney — land surveyor, signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and member of the Congress of the Republic of Texas. The county seat began at Buckner in 1846 before moving to the town of McKinney, also named for him, two years later. The county was organized in the same summer it was created, just as Texas was joining the United States.

McKinney, TX

Born in New Jersey in 1766, Collin McKinney lived to the remarkable age of 95, dying in this very house in 1861. In between he became a fixture of Texas's fight for nationhood: one of the five men who drafted the Texas Declaration of Independence and among its fifty-nine signers on March 2, 1836, before serving in the House of Representatives of the young Republic. In gratitude both the county and its seat carry his name.

Wellington, TX

Collingsworth County was carved from the sprawling Young and Bexar territories in 1876 and formally organized in 1890 with Wellington as its seat. It honors James Collinsworth, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, a soldier at San Jacinto, secretary of state under President Burnet, and the Republic's first chief justice. The county thus links the far Texas Panhandle to the founding figures of the Republic.

Plano, TX

This medallion marks Collinsworth Cemetery, established in 1895 and recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery. Cemeteries of this era served the farming families who settled Collin County's fertile Blackland Prairie in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.