Westward Expansion

Valley Spring, TX

O.C.J. Phillips arrived as the first settler in 1853, and the crossroads communities of Whistleville and Bugscuffle eventually merged into Valley Spring, which gained a post office in 1878. The little Hill Country settlement's proudest native son was James Field Smathers (1888–1967), credited as an inventor of the electric typewriter. It is a place where frontier origins and modern invention meet.

Weches, TX

Set near ground once touched by 17th-century Spanish missionary efforts, this East Texas farming settlement took shape as families like the McLeans, Conners, Pattons, and Greggs arrived by 1840. First called Neches for the nearby river, it became 'Weches' after the Post Office reported the original name already taken. Alfred Monroe Gregg soon set aside land for a church, school, and cemetery — the familiar anchors of a rural community — though the post office finally closed in 1939.

Wrightsboro, TX

Wrightsboro was founded in 1851 by L. C. "Jack" Wright, an Alabama-born marksman and stock raiser, and gained its name from neighbors amused by his free-roaming burro. Wright served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, then returned to ranching and spent a decade as a county commissioner. At its height the town boasted numerous stores and a solid grain- and cotton-based economy, becoming a trade and social center whose Masonic lodge has met, off and on, since 1869.

Anson vicinity, TX

Compere Cemetery is the last trace of a farming community established in the 1880s on ranch land sold by the Compere brothers. When Daniel and Callie Palmer settled here around 1900, they deeded two acres for a burial ground, first used in 1904 for the infant daughter of the Ashby family. Its weathered stones record ordinary lives, community leaders, veterans, and a victim of the 1918 influenza epidemic that swept the nation.

Comstock, TX

Comstock sprang up in the early 1880s as a watering stop on the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway, taking advantage of a natural lake in the arid country west of the Pecos. Named for a railroad dispatcher, it replaced the earlier settlement of Sotol City and grew into a busy hub of the wool and lamb trade, even sheltering Texas Rangers for a time. After World War II, new technology and shifting economies thinned its population.

Ozona, TX

In the early 1900s these flagstone ruins were a working stage stand, the first stop on the mail-and-passenger run linking Ozona to the Southern Pacific railhead 80 miles away at Comstock. A stage leaving Ozona at 5:00 a.m. arrived here about 8:30 to find fresh horses already harnessed, while the agent's family lived in a tent floored with flagstone beside rock pens for livestock. The automobile made the whole operation obsolete around 1914, though the old wagon ruts still scar the land.

Paint Rock, TX

Concho County was created on the map in 1858 but not formally organized until 1879, a two-decade gap that reflects how thinly settled this stretch of West Texas long remained. Its name comes from the river the Spanish called the Concho — 'shell' — for the freshwater mussels they found in its waters. The name is a small survival of the era of Spanish exploration in the region.

Paint Rock, TX

Concho County's first permanent courthouse rose in Paint Rock in 1886, replacing a crude early structure, and was designed by the noted Ruffini brothers, F.E. and Oscar — the same architects behind the University of Texas's first main building. F.E. lived only long enough to draw the plans, leaving Oscar to complete it. Built in the French Second Empire style from rusticated stone quarried just miles away, its rough-faced masonry is unusual for that elegant style.

Sterling City, TX

When the Concho, San Saba and Llano Valley Railroad pushed a line into Sterling City in 1909, it was chasing the wealth of West Texas ranch country—livestock that needed a way to distant markets. A boxcar served as the first depot until this mission revival station rose to take its place, becoming the hub of a young ranching town. Highways and pipelines eventually siphoned away the freight, and the line went quiet in 1958, leaving the depot as the last witness to the rail era that built the area.

Greenville, TX

Concord Baptist Church was organized in 1844 by the Rev. Ben Watson beneath a tree near Shady Grove, making it, by the marker's account, the oldest institution in Hunt County. The congregation raised its first building near that spot and, after several moves, settled on this site in 1885. Along the way it helped organize the Texas Baptist Convention in 1848.

Palestine, TX

Three Fitzgerald families settled Mound Prairie Creek in the 1840s, giving their name to the community that grew there. Fifteen charter members organized Concord Baptist Church at the local schoolhouse in 1871—naming it for a Louisiana community they had left—and worshipped in successive sanctuaries here despite a 1940 fire, with the adjoining cemetery holding early settlers and three Confederate veterans.

Crockett, TX

In 1889 Armistead Albert Aldrich gave three acres to the Concord Presbyterian Church for a sanctuary and graveyard in the piney woods of Houston County. The first burial came in 1895, and over the decades the wooded ground filled with the family names of the surrounding farm community, along with veterans and members of fraternal lodges. In 1963 the church handed the land to a cemetery association that still keeps lots reserved for descendants of those already resting here.

Quitman, TX

Settlers founded the Concord community in the 1870s, and early resident Hubbard Moseley gave land for a burial ground, a school, and a Baptist chapel. Velinda Wood, laid to rest in July 1875, has the oldest marked grave, though unmarked earlier burials lie among the roughly one thousand people from Concord, Hainesville, and nearby settlements interred here. Generations of caretakers and a cemetery association have tended the grounds ever since.

Bellmead, TX

The Concord Baptist Church organized in 1866, and the first burials in its adjoining cemetery came in 1869 with Elizabeth Parrish and her triplets. The graveyard is now nearly all that remains of Concord, a vanished town that once had a store, cotton gin, school, and church. Among the many veterans resting here is Elija Goodnight, considered the last U.S.-Mexico War veteran buried in Texas.

Kenney, TX

In the farmland of northern Austin County, Concord Cemetery opened in 1870 as the burial ground of the Concord Christian Church, its earliest grave holding a Confederate veteran and early settler. Around it gathered the pioneer families—Collins, Creath, McNutt and others—who had reached Texas in the 1830s, one of them serving with the baggage guard at San Jacinto. Confederate, Civil War and World War I veterans lie beneath its varied stones, a record of a rural community across a century of life. After decades of neglect, descendants cleared the overgrown grounds in 2010.

Troup, TX

Settlers drawn by cheap land and good water reached this part of East Texas in the 1840s, worshipping first in a brush arbor by Camp Ground Creek before building a church that doubled as a school. The Concord Cemetery grew alongside that congregation, its oldest documented grave dating to 1878, and land was deeded to it by the Martin family across the decades. Buried here are veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, tended each year in a cleaning tradition kept by pioneer families' descendants.

Belmont County, OH

Colerain Township holds the roots of Ohio Quakerism: the earliest Friends settlement and the first organized Friends Meeting in the state. A log meeting house rose in 1800, and after fire destroyed it, this sturdy brick building replaced it in 1815.

Whitley County, IN

This marker identifies the site of Concord Methodist Church, remembered as the first church site in Whitley County, Indiana. In the 1830s and 1840s, as settlers pushed into the recently opened lands of northern Indiana, a log or frame Methodist meetinghouse was often among the first community institutions raised, serving as both house of worship and social anchor on the frontier.

Robbins, TX

Organized in April 1855 by pioneer settlers before the community of Concord even took shape, this Missionary Baptist congregation raised a Greek Revival meetinghouse on land donated by Isaac Burleson, its first pastor the Rev. W. A. Walker. The church anchored its Leon County neighborhood for more than a century and a half. Tragedy struck on Labor Day weekend in 2011, when a wildfire swept through and destroyed the historic sanctuary.

El Paso, TX

On land once known as Concordia—home of Chihuahua trader Hugh Stephenson, whose wife Juana was laid to rest here in 1856—this ground grew into El Paso's great frontier burial place. By the 1880s townsfolk drove three miles out to inter their dead, and by 1890 the grounds had been parceled into Catholic, Masonic, Jewish, Black, Chinese, Military, Jesuit, and other sections, a mosaic of the borderland's peoples. Among the thousands who rest here is the notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, alongside pioneers, civic leaders, and war veterans.

La Vernia, TX

Concrete Cemetery grew out of the land of James Henry Newton, who brought his family from Mississippi about 1851–52 and set aside a burial ground when his brother Joel died in 1856, though an 1855 grave suggests earlier use. The surrounding community—first called Bethesda, then Concrete—took its name from an 1858 concrete building that served as school, church, and Masonic hall. Newton deeded the tract formally in 1875, and the cemetery came to hold both Anglo and Hispanic sections, with more than 800 burials of pioneers, veterans, and children.

Cone vicinity, TX

Cone Cemetery took its first burial in April 1897, when W. G. English was laid to rest on land his son J. P. English patented from the state later that same year. The burial ground gained its name in 1903 from a local post office honoring rancher Stanton J. Cone, and in 1910 the county formally acquired the property for public use. It stands as a record of the ranching families who settled the high plains of Crosby County.

Fort Davis, TX

This marker traces Jefferson Davis's ties to Texas: a Mexican War officer in 1847, then U.S. Secretary of War in 1855, when he strengthened frontier forts to open West Texas and famously experimented with imported camels for desert patrols and hauling. After the Civil War and his imprisonment, the former Confederate president returned to visit the state and its veterans. Jeff Davis County was named for him in 1887.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1947

In 1762 settlers from Connecticut planted their first community here on the Susquehanna Purchase, a tract the colony claimed under its sea-to-sea charter deep in what Pennsylvania considered its own territory. The fragile settlement was destroyed in an Indian attack on October 15, 1763, and the valley lay unsettled by the newcomers until they returned in 1769. The episode opened one of colonial America's most contested land struggles in the Wyoming Valley.

Liberty Hill, TX

Alabama native Sampson Connell, Jr. came to Texas as a boy in 1834 and, with his father and brother, fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, earning a land grant for his service to the young republic. He helped found a church in Milam County before settling in Williamson County as a farmer and stockman, and served in the Confederate army and local Home Guard during the Civil War. This family burial ground, also called Bear Creek, was part of his homestead, its oldest known grave his own 1873 cairn.

Brownwood vicinity, TX

William Connell brought his family to Texas in 1834 and lived through its most formative decades, serving in the Republic of Texas Army, the Texas Rangers, and later the Confederate Army. The cemetery that bears his name—thought to be among the oldest in Brown County—was likely in use before 1861, and when the Connells buried their son in 1866 they set what is believed to be its first headstone. Sixteen families and more than twenty unmarked graves lie here, a quiet record of the pioneers who settled this frontier.

Stanton, TX

Put up in 1882 as a two-room dwelling for Carmelite priests, this was the very first building in Stanton. After their 1902 marriage, Dennis and Mary Connell made it their family home, and it grew room by room as their eight children arrived, gaining porches, gables, and additions through the 1920s and 30s. When the last Connell daughter died in 1990, the much-expanded house passed to the local museum.

Pierce County, WA

In the autumn of 1855, as war flared between settlers and Native nations across Washington Territory, a party traveling from Camp Naches toward Fort Steilacoom was ambushed near this ground on October 31. Two of the seven men were killed in the fighting. The Washington State Historical Society erected this memorial in 1924 to mark the site of the clash during the Puget Sound Indian War.

Eastland, TX

Built in 1920 by C. U. Connellee, the 'Father of Eastland,' this theatre hosted road shows, musical performances, and plays as a regional showplace for years. Interstate Theatres bought it in 1946 and remodeled it into the Majestic movie house, adding a marquee to a stuccoed, Art Moderne facade fronted by a bank of six entry doors.

Corsicana, TX

Thomas Conner brought his family from Illinois to this part of Navarro County in 1856, and his son Edward bought 164 acres here in 1873. Family tradition holds that burials predate the first recorded interment of 1882, the year Edward formally set the cemetery aside. It has chiefly served the extended Conner family and holds the graves of at least four Confederate veterans, cared for today by the family's descendants.

Pine Grove, PA · est. 1994

Born in Pine Grove, novelist Conrad Richter spent his career giving voice to the American frontier and the sweep of the country's settlement, in works such as "The Town" and "The Waters of Kronos." A winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, he returned to his native region and lived and worked in this house from 1950 to 1968. His fiction turned ordinary pioneers into enduring American characters.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

Around 1750 a hewn-log trading post rose on this Berks County site, run until 1760 by Conrad Weiser — pioneer settler, judge, and above all the colony's indispensable go-between with Native nations. Fluent in the Iroquois tongue, Weiser negotiated treaties and interpreted at councils during the tense decades when Pennsylvania's fate hinged on its relations with the Six Nations and the Delaware.

Corydon, IN

In 1816, with Indiana on the verge of statehood, delegates gathered in Corydon during a sweltering summer and worked in the shade of an enormous elm to draft the young state's first constitution. The tree became a beloved symbol of the founding, and though the elm itself later died, its trunk is preserved here as a monument. Corydon served as Indiana's first state capital in these early frontier years.

Crews, TX

Tucked into the West Texas ranch country of Runnels County, Content Cemetery opened in 1883 with the burial of a cowboy named James Hanna, a fitting first for a landscape then given over to cattle and open range. Among those who followed was his kinsman John A. Hanna, a Confederate veteran of the 8th Texas Cavalry in the Army of Tennessee, laid to rest in 1889 alongside siblings, in-laws, and infant grandchildren. The dozen 19th-century graves gather a single frontier family across a generation of hard living.

Panhandle, TX

Conway's union church was built in 1912 by popular subscription, the whole community chipping in to raise a house of worship on the Carson County plains. For more than half a century it was the only country church in continuous use in the area, still serving the great-grandchildren of the pioneers who funded it. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Panhandle, TX

The town of Conway sprang up on the Texas Panhandle in 1905, and its scattered residents first worshipped together in a relocated schoolhouse before raising this union church in 1912. Non-denominational from the start, the building became the community's anchor for worship and gathering until services ended in 1968. Decades later former members and volunteers poured thousands of hours into restoring the structure and moving it to the Square House Museum Complex in 1991.

Lampasas, TX

Cook Cemetery is Lampasas County's oldest burial ground, begun as a community graveyard in the mid-1850s when the first marked grave was dug in 1854. It took its name from William and Cynthia Cook, Arkansas settlers who bought the land in 1861, and it fell out of use after an 1873 flood swept through the low ground.

Beeville, TX

John Cook, born in 1846 in a Texas-bound wagon train and a Civil War soldier at seventeen, married Frances Miller in 1866 and with his son helped build the South Texas cattle industry through fine registered Herefords. In 1897 he raised this Victorian house of select long-leaf pine, positioned to catch the Gulf breezes, with every room opening onto a porch and four fireplaces framed by mahogany, maple, and oak mantels.

Rusk, TX

Named for early Nacogdoches settler Joseph T. Cook, this site grew up around a frontier fort built by a military company under Captain Black—a stronghold, the marker notes, that was never attacked. James Cook added a store and blacksmith shop, and a village of some 250 people had gathered here by 1846. After the county seat was established at nearby Rusk, the residents moved away and the settlement faded.

Gainesville, TX

Created in 1848 and organized the next year, Cooke County honors William G. Cooke (1808–1847), a soldier of the Texas Revolution and the young republic. Cooke captained the "New Orleans Greys" in 1835, served as assistant inspector general at San Jacinto in 1836, joined the ill-fated Santa Fe Expedition of 1841, and held high offices including Secretary of War and Marine. Gainesville became the county seat.

Gainesville, TX

Settlement of the area now known as Cooke County began in late 1845, at the very moment Texas was joining the United States, and the county was formally created by the state legislature in 1848. It took its name from William G. Cooke, a Quartermaster General of the Republic of Texas who had fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in the 1836 war for Texas independence. The courthouse this marker commemorates stood at the civic heart of that new county seat, the place where a frontier community organized its government and law.

Liberty, TX

This Methodist burial ground was established in 1846, in the first years after Texas joined the Union, when Liberty County was still a sparsely settled corner of the young state. Church-affiliated cemeteries like this one anchored frontier communities, serving as gathering places of faith and memory for pioneer families. It carries a Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

Cooks Point, TX

Cooks Point took root about 1840 where a colonial road from the southeast met the old San Antonio Road, a natural crossroads in the earliest years of the Republic of Texas. Settler Gabriel Jackson kept a two-story log cabin trading post here, and the community took its name from surveyor Silas L. Cooke, who mapped much of the surrounding land. It endures today as a rural village.

Canton, TX

Cool Springs was named for the dozen springs and seeps around a spot that also divides the Trinity, Sabine, and Neches watersheds. After 1850 it became a favored resting place on the road from Canton to Athens, drawing settlers to a nearby gin, and by the late 1800s it supported churches, a school, stores, and a post office under the name Tundra. Shifting agriculture eventually hollowed the community out, and its residents have dwindled to a memory.

Valley Mills, TX

The Coon Creek community grew out of the older Cyrus settlement, the earliest in southeastern Bosque County, where Temple Spivey bought Brazos River land in 1853. Within a few years John Jackson Smith established a plantation, a school opened in a one-room log cabin, and a shared cemetery took root. By 1883 the settlement split into Smith Bend and Coon Creek, and its school, church, and the two-story "Pie" Bonds house still knit the community together.

Denton, TX

Baptists in the Cooper Creek community were gathering to worship as early as 1872, near where the church stands today. In 1916 L.F. "Tom" Collins donated land for a sanctuary completed the next year; a new steeple and entrance came in 1961, and the present sanctuary rose in 2000 on the original site. For well over a century the congregation — which still counts descendants of the founding families — has anchored the community.

Denton, TX

Begun by settlers such as the Farris and Skaggs families who reached northeast Denton County in the 1860s, Cooper Creek Cemetery was formally deeded in 1878 and is one of the last traces of a vanished rural community. Its earliest marked grave dates to 1872, and it holds early trustees, a Confederate cavalryman, and a decorated World War II airman. Notably, the burial ground was never segregated by race or religion — Hispanic families like the Menchacas and Villanuevas rest beside their Anglo neighbors.

Woodville, TX

Built in 1850, this Woodville home belonged to Samuel Bronson Cooper (1850–1918), who rose to serve as a United States Congressman from Texas. In 1903 the house passed to S. H. Reid, and the Reid family lived in it continuously for generations before it was restored in the twentieth century. Recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1968, it links a small East Texas town to national politics. The home stands as a well-preserved example of mid-nineteenth-century Texas domestic architecture.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

The Cooper and Ellis families came from Tennessee and settled this Titus County land in the 1850s. William Cooper deeded two acres around the earliest graves for a church and cemetery, and a modest frame sanctuary — hipped roof, double-door entry — served the Cooper's Chapel Church of Christ from the 1890s until 1980. A springtime "Decoration Day" begun early in the community's life still draws hundreds each year, honoring pioneers and veterans of wars from the Civil War to Vietnam.

Copeville, TX

Kentucky-born John Miles Cope settled in Collin County in 1848 and helped organize this farming community—first called Black Spot—in the 1850s, becoming its first postmaster in 1878. When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad arrived in 1886, the town shifted a mile northeast to trackside, becoming a shipping point for farm produce and prized bois d'arc timber. Copeville grew to about 300 residents and in 1921 gained one of the nation's early female postmasters, Elizabeth Pearce.

White Pine County, NV

The great open-pit copper mines of eastern Nevada, including the Liberty Pit — the largest in the state — lie just south of this point, and through the first half of the twentieth century the district produced nearly a billion dollars in copper, gold, and silver. The huge mounds on the landscape are waste rock stripped away to reach the ore. Two miles east, near Lane City, the Elijah became the first mine of the Robinson Mining District; Lane City, first called Mineral City, was settled in 1869 and grew to some 400 people, with a hotel, a stage station, and the Ragsdale Station.

Gustine, TX

Founded in 1854 as Troy and later renamed Cora, this vanished town became Comanche County's first seat in 1856, its government run from a log-cabin courthouse. When the county seat moved to Comanche in 1859, Cora emptied out, and today only its cemetery—the oldest in the county—remains. It stands as an example of the many once-important Texas towns erased by shifting boundaries, railroads, and changing economies.

Castroville, TX

In 1844 the empresario Henri Castro planted a colony of Alsatian immigrants on the Medina River west of San Antonio, and Castroville still wears that Old-World heritage in its steep-roofed stone cottages. Jean Baptiste Cordier, one of those first settlers, raised this dwelling from local limestone with three rooms below and an attic above — a modest but sturdy piece of the frontier. Over the decades it passed through the hands of a blacksmith, a shoemaker, and the Tschirhart family, its shared occupancy a snapshot of how tight-knit these pioneer households were. Restored by later descendants, it earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1976.

Jacksonville, TX

Organized in June 1881 through the efforts of Obediah Meador and his family, this Cherokee County congregation began with a dozen members and his son, the Rev. John Benjamin Meador, as its first pastor. Charter members deeded land in the 1890s, and the first sanctuary rose around 1900 as the church wove itself into several Baptist associations over the decades. The congregation still worships in the building it raised in 1950.

Grand Saline, TX

In the piney farmland of Van Zandt County, Corinth grew up in the mid-1800s as a self-contained frontier community, complete with gin, grist mill, blacksmith, sawmill, stores, and a log schoolhouse that also sheltered the Baptist congregation. A school stood here as early as 1849, and a post office served the town from 1888 to 1906. Today only the church and cemetery remain, the latter holding early settlers and several Civil War veterans, including the congregation's first recorded pastor, Rev. Thomas McAdams Post.

Stephenville, TX

In 1880, North Carolina native Dr. William Wallace McNeill and his wife Elizabeth Ann deeded land to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for a church, school, and cemetery. The burial ground is the last surviving trace of the vanished Corinth community, with an unknown number of unmarked graves from the late 1800s. Its oldest marked grave is that of Confederate soldier F. J. Simpson, who died in 1899, and later burials include twice-honored Texas State Artist Ethel Lewallen.

Grand Saline, TX

Land for this cemetery was deeded in 1886 by James Richardson, on whose grant the Corinth community had grown, with the oldest legible stone dating to 1874. Among those buried here are six known Civil War veterans and members of the founding families whose fieldstones and cedar trees still mark the earliest graves. The renowned aviator Wiley Post grew up in the Corinth community, and his parents, grandparents, and other kin — including his circuit-preacher grandfather, Rev. Thomas M. Post — rest here.

Parker, TX

Pioneer settler C.A. McMillen founded the Corinth Society Church on August 2, 1846, and it is thought to be the oldest continuing congregation in Collin County. Charter families like the Murphys, Wilkinses, and Maxwells first met in a schoolhouse, then in homes after the Civil War, before building successive churches and finally a 1923 sanctuary on land donated on Parker Road. Refurbished in the 1980s, the church has served the Parker area for more than 150 years.

Denton, TX

Soon after the Civil War, physician and lay preacher Thomas Ball and his family came from Missouri and settled land that became Corinth. They donated a graveyard already in use to the Primitive Baptist Church at Shiloh, where William Garrison's 1870 grave is the earliest marked. Native sandstone markers and creek-harvested mussel shells still distinguish the old burial ground.

Jarrell, TX

Corn Hill was among the earliest communities in Williamson County, named by county judge John E. King for the hilltop home and cornfield he built in 1852. A stop on the stage line from Georgetown to Fort Gates, it gained a post office in 1855 and grew into a farming village with academies, a college, churches, cotton gins, and even a telephone company. When the Bartlett Western Railway bypassed it in 1909, steam engines hauled homes and businesses two miles north to the new town of Jarrell, leaving Corn Hill a dispersed reminder of its agrarian past.