Westward Expansion

Grand Saline, TX

Creagleville took shape in the 1840s along the Dallas-Shreveport Road, a major route across northern Van Zandt County, and was named for German immigrant Henry Creagle, who settled here about 1847. A school appeared by 1854, and the farming community soon gained a church, cotton gin, gristmill, and cemetery. As families moved away the village faded — its school consolidated in 1941, its church closed in 1991 — but the cemetery, holding more than fifty Civil War veterans, endures.

Junction, TX

Creed Taylor took up arms in the Texas War for Independence, marching from Gonzales to Bexar in 1835 in the campaign that drove Mexican forces from San Antonio. In 1836 he served as a scout and courier during the decisive year of the revolution. His name endures in the Hill Country as one of the frontier soldiers who won Texas its independence.

Houston County, TX

Creek Cemetery began in 1889 with the burial of infant Sydney Hester, whose parents had two years earlier deeded land to the community—then called Georgia Camp—for a school. The burial ground grew alongside the settlement and today holds many of the area's pioneer families, along with veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars. Descendants of those early settlers still tend the grounds.

Port Bolivar, TX

James Crenshaw, a Virginia native and Civil War veteran, brought his wife Henrietta to the Bolivar Peninsula in 1872, where he farmed and ferried his produce to Galveston markets aboard a fleet of nine sailboats. Two young daughters who died in the 1870s and 1880s were buried in an oak grove near the family home. The house survived the catastrophic 1900 Galveston hurricane, and though the Crenshaws later left, descendants preserved the little cemetery, donating it in 2003 to the local school district.

Lower Windsor Township, PA · est. 1960

About 1730 the frontiersman Thomas Cresap settled along the Susquehanna on land that Maryland's Lord Baltimore claimed against Pennsylvania, making his fortified home a flashpoint in the bitter boundary dispute between the two colonies. In 1736 Penn's agents forcibly evicted him and burned his "fort," and Cresap moved west into Maryland, where he remained a restless figure in frontier affairs until his death around 1790. His stand gave the border quarrel one of its most colorful episodes.

Crews, TX

Settled in the 1880s and named for Ballinger businessman C. R. Crews, this Runnels County community organized quickly around its institutions—a school in 1890, a post office in 1892, and Methodist and Baptist churches by the mid-1890s. At its height Crews supported eleven businesses and a seven-teacher school. The post office closed in 1922 and the school consolidated away in 1948, but the churches remain active.

Henderson, TX

After migrating from Alabama to Rusk County in 1867 with nine grown children, Abraham B. Crim set aside an acre of ground as a family burying place, formalized in 1883. The earliest marked grave belongs to his wife Jo Anna, buried in 1882, and most of the oldest interments are Crim kin alongside other pioneers of the Crim's Chapel community. The cemetery preserves the footprint of one settler family's roots in post–Civil War East Texas.

Dallas, TX

Built in 1923, this Dallas house was first home to Dr. J.H. Cristler, who arrived in 1911 after helping organize Childress County in the Texas Panhandle. From 1938 it was occupied by his daughter Edna and her husband, J. Woodall Rodgers, mayor of Dallas from 1939 to 1947. Blending Prairie School and Mediterranean styles, the home stayed in the family until 1959.

Otto, TX

Criswell Cemetery grew from ten acres deeded by Marcus Thomas Durham in 1886 for a school, church, and burial ground, though graves already dated to 1873—among them Durham's own father. In 1950 a community association bought the nearby school and church and began an annual homecoming to fund upkeep of the grounds.

Crockett, TX

Founded in 1837 and named for David Crockett, who had passed through on his way to the Alamo the year before, Crockett grew into a hub of the young Republic of Texas frontier. Its fortified log courthouse sheltered settlers during conflicts with Native peoples, and by the Civil War the town hosted a camp of instruction. As a telegraph and stagecoach station, it tied the surrounding farming and timber country into the wider South.

Ozona, TX

Carved from Bexar Territory, Crockett County was created on January 22, 1875, and formally organized on July 7, 1891, with Ozona as its county seat. It honors David Crockett (1786–1836), the Tennessee congressman who died defending the Alamo. The marker records the county's founding and its namesake in a few spare lines.

Ozona, TX

Completed in 1902 as Crockett County's second courthouse, this American Gothic building was designed by San Angelo architect Oscar Ruffini and built of fine stone quarried nearby. In a remote ranching country, it doubled as the community's social center, hosting cowboy dances, box suppers, and roundup celebrations. In 1909 an arc light was mounted on its steeple to signal the sheriff and guide travelers into Ozona.

Ozona, TX

Built in 1892, just a year after Crockett County was organized, this stone jail was raised from rock quarried on nearby land. Its tower may have been meant for hangings, though no gallows was ever installed, and the lockup was never filled to capacity — its most notable guests were the 1954 robbers of the Ozona National Bank. In a homey frontier touch, the sheriff's wife once gave local children piano lessons in the family's quarters around 1915.

Honey Grove, TX

Late in 1835, frontiersman and former congressman David Crockett crossed into Texas along the Red River, camping near this spot where he found wild bees and honey in hollow trees and, in letters home, dubbed the place a "honey grove." Within weeks he died at the Alamo, but his nickname stuck. Surveyor Samuel A. Erwin settled here in 1839, and with Benjamin S. Walcott platted the town of Honey Grove, which grew to some 4,000 people by 1890 after the railroad arrived.

Ozona, TX

This marker honors David Crockett, the Tennessee frontiersman, soldier, and congressman whose life became American legend. Born in 1786, he fought in the Creek War, served in the Tennessee legislature and the U.S. Congress, and then set out for Texas in early 1836. He died that March defending the Alamo, and the county the marker stands in bears his name.

Dallas, TX

A South Carolina native, John M. Crockett came to the young settlement of Dallas in 1848 and opened one of its first law offices. He rose to serve as state legislator, mayor of Dallas, and lieutenant governor of Texas in the first years of the Confederacy, and even logged weather observations for the Smithsonian. His public life traces the arc of frontier Dallas from raw settlement toward established city.

Granbury, TX

Frontiersman and former congressman David Crockett came to Texas in early 1836, pledged allegiance to the provisional government, and died with the Alamo's defenders that March. For his sacrifice his heirs were granted nearly 1,300 acres, and in 1853 his widow Elizabeth and their sons arrived to claim the land, building cabins and farming here. Over later generations the tract passed through the hands of cattlemen, a Depression-era dairy, and a quarter-horse operation.

Mason vicinity, TX

This burial ground served the earliest citizens of Mason and nearby Koocksville, with its oldest recorded grave dating to 1856. Among those laid to rest here is the county's first sheriff, Thomas Milligan. The Crosby family bought the surrounding land in 1866, giving the cemetery the name it has carried ever since.

Crosbyton, TX

This state monument honors Henry Clay Smith — "Uncle Hank" — a German-born pioneer who, with his wife Elizabeth, built the famed Rock House in 1877 and became a byword for frontier hospitality on the Texas Plains. The couple settled at Old Emma above the Cap Rock, an escarpment marking the edge of the high plains, and the State of Texas raised this memorial to them in 1936. They lie buried near the home that made their name.

Crosbyton, TX

Crosby County was created in 1876 from the Young and Bexar territories and organized a decade later in 1886, taking its name from Stephen Crosby, a Commissioner of the General Land Office who came to Texas in 1845. Its county seat migrated across the plains from Estacado in 1886 to Emma in 1890 before settling in Crosbyton in 1911. The shifting seat traces the slow settlement of the West Texas high plains.

Crosbyton, TX

After Crosby County voters chose the new town of Crosbyton as their seat in 1910, disputed elections tied up the decision in court until 1912, clearing the way for a proper courthouse. Fort Worth architect M. L. Waller designed the Neo-Classical building—its full-height entry crowned by a pedimented, columned portico—and contractor S. Goodrum completed it in late 1914. It has served as the seat of Crosby County government ever since and is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Crosbyton, TX

Crosby County's seat wandered across the South Plains before settling down. It began in 1879 at Estacado, a Quaker colony where county offices worked out of dugouts, shacks, and wagons until the first courthouse rose in 1888. The seat jumped to Emma in 1890, then to Crosbyton after the Crosbyton-South Plains Railroad bypassed Emma in 1910 — and the present courthouse followed in 1914.

Crosbyton, TX

Crosbyton sprang up in 1908 on the ranch lands of the C.B. Livestock Company, which deliberately built a school, store, railroad, and inn to lure homesteaders onto the West Texas plains. The strategy worked: by 1911 the town claimed a thousand residents and the county seat. Once open range, the surrounding country became rich irrigated farmland.

Crosbyton, TX

Established in 1909, this cemetery was carved from a 90,000-acre spread run by the C. B. Livestock Company on the Texas South Plains. Part-owner Julian Bassett, who also donated the Crosbyton townsite, gave the land when a ranch cowboy named James Boggs was thought to be dying—though the first actual burial was that of 18-month-old Willie Oliver. Bassett and many other early settlers now rest among the graves.

McMullen County, TX

The community of Cross in McMullen County grew from one of the area's earliest permanent settlements, known over the years as Nopal, San Miguel, and Franklin before taking the name of Samuel C. Cross, who opened its store and became postmaster in 1924. The post office closed a decade later, but ranching sustained the area, and in 1953 a nearby gas well—then the largest in the state—tied this quiet ranch country to the Texas energy boom.

Cross Creek Township, PA · est. 1950

On the eve of the Revolution, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians pushing into western Pennsylvania first gathered for worship in 1775 at the shelter of Vance's Fort, a mile north. By 1779 they had raised their own church nearby and called their first pastor, planting a durable religious community on a still-contested frontier; the stone building standing today was erected in 1864. It is a portrait of how faith and settlement advanced together across the Alleghenies.

Brownwood vicinity, TX

Southern families settling here after the Civil War formed a community first called Cross Out, renamed Cross Cut in 1897 by a clerical error on a post office application. The cemetery began in 1879 with the burial of Caroline Pentecost Elsberry. An oil strike in 1923 briefly swelled the town, but by 1940 the dead outnumbered the living, and after the school consolidated in 1954 only a few buildings and this graveyard remained.

Fredericksburg, TX

Long an Indian signal point rising 1,915 feet, this limestone hill was recorded in 1847 by German geologist Ferdinand Roemer, who arrived as German colonists settled the Fredericksburg area. Settler John Christian Durst, finding an old timber cross on its summit, named it Kreuzberg, or Cross Mountain. Its Easter fires recall both a German folk tradition and the 1847 Meusebach treaty that made peace with the Comanche nation.

Cross Plains, TX

The land holding Cross Plains Cemetery was first granted to James Knight, one of Stephen F. Austin's original colonists, as reward for service in the Mexican-American War, before passing through a string of absentee owners. The first burial came in 1882 — the young son of "Uncle Johnnie" Laird — and in 1905 the Steele family deeded the ground to cemetery trustees. Today it holds the town's founding families, its first mayor, John A. Wagner, many military veterans, and members of its fraternal lodges.

Grand Prairie, TX

The Eastern Cross Timbers is a narrow ribbon of sandy woodland dividing the Blackland and Grand Prairies, and for centuries its springs, salt licks, grass, and game made it a natural gathering place. Wichita people of Caddoan stock roamed here in the 1700s, while Kiowa and Comanche wintered and traded along routes that carried southern flint northward; French traders arrived by 1720 and Spanish expeditions passed through toward their missions. Anglo-American settlement in the 1840s brought conflict, culminating in the 1841 Battle of Village Creek, after which the tribes withdrew westward.

George West, TX

From Spanish colonial days into statehood, travel across this part of Texas depended on rough dirt tracks, many simply called "ox-cart roads" for the wooden Mexican carts that lumbered along them. This site marked the junction of two such roads — one from Brownsville to San Antonio, the other from Laredo to Goliad and on to the coast at Indianola. Built entirely of wood and rawhide, the carts stood taller than a man, squealed so loudly that drivers greased their hubs with prickly pear, and for two centuries carried nearly all the freight in Texas.

Mesa County, CO

At this arroyo, generations of travelers forded the Grand River—today known as the Colorado—along the North Branch of the Old Spanish Trail and the Salt Lake Wagon Road. Between roughly 1830 and 1880, this crossing was a vital artery for traders, wagon trains, and settlers pushing westward across the arid Colorado Plateau. Fording a major river was dangerous, seasonal work, and this spot became a known and trusted link in a vast overland network.

Celina, TX

East of Celina, a Baptist congregation gathered in 1882 on a acre-and-a-half tract that brothers Abiel and Edmond Stelzer had held in common, and the burial ground beside it already held graves reaching back to 1875. When the railroad arrived, the congregation followed it into the new town and became First Baptist Church of Celina, but the cemetery stayed put and remains in use today. Its official 2006 designation preserves one of the quiet fixtures of Collin County's farming country.

Crowley, TX

This burial ground began serving the settlers of the Deer Creek area soon after they arrived around 1848, its earliest marked grave that of an eight-year-old boy who died in 1857. Sarah "Sallie" Dunn deeded the land as a public cemetery in 1879, and when the town of Crowley organized along the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad about 1880, the old Deer Creek Cemetery took the new town's name. The grounds hold the pioneers who settled this corner of Tarrant County.

Pasadena, TX

As permanent settlers arrived near Buffalo Bayou in the 1890s, the new town of Pasadena needed a place to bury its dead, and this knoll overlooking Vince's Bayou became its community graveyard in 1906. Renamed Crown Hill after World War I, likely for the nearby Crown Central Refinery, it holds veterans of four American wars and generations of early settlers and community leaders. It also became a resting place for Mexican-American farm families beginning in the 1920s, earning it the name the Mexican Cemetery.

Marble Falls, TX

Backbone Valley's first public building rose slowly between 1859 and 1870 on land donated by the heirs of settler Jefferson Barton, and was named for the Rev. Arter Crownover, whose Methodist preaching opened its doors. The chapel soon doubled as a school, and a cemetery came into use nearby by 1872. Restored to its original appearance, it still serves as a church and community center.

Lincoln County, NV

Crystal Spring served as a watering place and campsite on an alternate branch of the Mormon Trail in the mid-1800s, and in 1866 it was named provisional seat of the new Lincoln County. That spring Governor Henry G. Blasdel set out from Carson City with more than twenty people to organize the county, but a harrowing crossing through Death Valley left them starving — one man died and the rest survived on lizards and desert animals before reaching the spring. Blasdel found too few voters to qualify the county, which was finally organized a year later at Hiko.

Hochheim, TX

Stretching forty-five miles along the Guadalupe River, the Cuero I Archeological District was defined in the early 1970s to study and preserve sites threatened by a proposed reservoir. Excavations in 1972-73 uncovered 352 significant sites spanning some 9,000 years of human occupation — from the camps of prehistoric nomads to those of historic Tonkawas and Comanches. Later sites mark the arrival of Anglo-American settlers under Green DeWitt's colony in the 1820s and 1830s.

Cuero, TX

Chartered in early 1872, the Cuero Land and Immigration Company set out to develop more than 4,000 acres carved from an 1833 Mexican land grant. Its founders were men of standing — among them civil engineer and congressman Gustav Schleicher and Fletcher S. Stockdale, who had briefly served as governor of Texas in 1865. By donating land to lure the Gulf, Western Texas and Pacific Railway, the company brought the first train in March 1873, touching off a land boom that made Cuero a thriving railroad terminus and civic center.

Van Horn, TX

Carved from El Paso County and organized in 1911, Culberson County took its name from David B. Culberson (1830–1903), a celebrated constitutional lawyer who served as a Confederate officer, a Texas legislator, and a longtime member of the United States Congress. The dusty town of Van Horn became its county seat. Its creation extended orderly government across the vast, arid reaches of far West Texas.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1982

Carved from Lancaster County in 1750, Cumberland County once stretched all the way to Pennsylvania's western frontier, a vast gateway for settlers pushing toward the Alleghenies. Its seat, Carlisle, was founded the following year and became a crucial staging point on the roads leading west. In the colonial and early national decades, this was the edge of English America, where the Great Wagon Road funneled families toward the interior.

Mansfield, TX

This burial ground was first used shortly after the Civil War, its earliest legible stone marking Julia Alice Man, who died in 1868. Her husband Ralph S. Man and his brother-in-law Julian Feild founded the town of Mansfield, and in 1874 the site was deeded to the local Cumberland Presbyterian congregation. Among its graves are Civil War veterans and victims of the 1918-19 influenza epidemic, making it the oldest section of Mansfield Cemetery.

San Marcos, TX

Built by at least 1901, this San Marcos church blends the pointed Gothic Revival arches of a house of worship with the fish-scale shingling and octagonal towers of the Queen Anne style. Raised by the Cumberland Presbyterians and later renamed Fort Street Presbyterian, it passed through Lutheran and Pentecostal congregations before being rehabilitated for office and residential use in the 1990s.

Cumby, TX

Named for a grove of black jack trees atop the highest point in the county—once beside an Indian camping ground and trail—this settlement grew from a frontier crossroads into a thriving trading center. A post office opened in a settler's home in 1848, and by 1860 the town had stores, physicians, blacksmiths, and a log schoolhouse. Renamed in 1896 for a Confederate veteran and legislator, the town later faded as improved highways drew commerce elsewhere.

Bellville, TX

Rebecca Cumings and her three brothers came to Texas from Virginia in 1821 as members of Stephen F. Austin's famous "Old 300," earning a 20,000-acre grant by building and running a creekside mill. After deaths in the family in 1885, a descendant designed this stuccoed-brick vault for their reinterment, and fifteen Cumings now rest inside. It stands as a rare architectural relic of Texas's first Anglo colony.

Cuney, TX

This community began in 1870 when Andrew "Andy" Bragg and Nelson Sneed, former slaves turned farmers, settled here and were joined by other freedmen landowners and tradesmen. Promoted after 1916 by banker H. L. Price as a commercial and agricultural center for Black Texans, the town was renamed Cuney to honor the prominent leader Norris Wright Cuney and grew quickly with churches, stores, gins, sawmills, and a rail station. Falling farm prices after World War I sent residents elsewhere, leaving Cuney a quiet reminder of its founders' ambitions.

Comanche, TX

James and Susannah Cunningham arrived in the Republic of Texas about 1839–40 and put down roots in Comanche County in 1855, becoming a leading family that took part in frontier defense against Indian raids. In 1889 the couple and their twelve children held a first reunion; the gatherings grew into an annual summer tradition, with neighboring land later bought to keep them going. The marker commemorates a family celebration that has endured for generations.

Three Rivers, TX

When newspaperman Jim Cunningham's town of Oakville was bypassed by the railroad, he moved his family and the Live Oak County Leader seven miles west to the raw new settlement that became Three Rivers, where in 1913 he contracted the town's first permanent home. The five-room frame house blended Prairie, Foursquare, and Victorian touches, its long central hall and twelve-foot ceilings channeling coastal breezes through the rooms. From here the Cunninghams shaped the young town — publishing its paper, sitting on its first school board, and founding its first Baptist church.

Damascus Township, PA · est. 1947

In 1755, settlers from Connecticut led by Moses Thomas and Daniel Skinner planted the first colony on the upper Delaware, on lands the Native peoples called Cushetunk. Their arrival reflected Connecticut's sweeping and contested claims to lands stretching west across Pennsylvania. During the Revolution the little settlement was overrun — seized in 1778 by a force of Indians and Loyalist Tories — a casualty of the brutal frontier warfare that swept the Delaware and Susquehanna valleys.

Tontogany, OH

Near this spot stood the modest Ohio farmstead where Emanuel and Maria Custer raised their family between 1856 and 1865. Emanuel, a blacksmith and farmer of German descent, and his wife Maria are best remembered as the parents of George Armstrong Custer and his younger brother Thomas—young men who left rural Wood County to win fame, and ultimately meet their deaths, on the battlefields of the Civil War and the Western plains. During the very years this homestead stood, the Custer sons were rising through the ranks of a nation torn apart by war.

Wheeler, TX

The banks of Sweetwater Creek lay in the heart of the Comancheria, where Plains peoples wintered in country rich with buffalo. In the winter campaign of 1868-69, George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Cavalry and Kansas volunteers to recover two Anglo women captured from Kansas settlements. Rather than open fire on a large Cheyenne village and risk the captives' lives, Custer detained several chiefs, opened tense negotiations with the Cheyenne leadership, and by ultimatum won the women's release in March 1869.

Monterey, CA

Built by the Mexican government in 1827, Monterey's Custom House collected duties on foreign shipping when the town was the capital of Alta California, Mexico's far northern province. U.S. consul Thomas O. Larkin contracted to enlarge it in 1841, and on July 7, 1846 Commodore John Drake Sloat raised the American flag over the building, signaling California's passage from Mexican to U.S. rule. Later restored, it stands today as California's first registered historical landmark.

Paducah, TX

The CV cattle brand dates to 1850, and the herd it marked passed through the hands of famed cattlemen — including Charles Goodnight — before reaching Cottle County. Established in the 1880s across 47,000 acres, the CV Ranch was later broken up and sold as small farms in the late 1920s, giving rise to the community of Cee Vee with its stores, churches, school, and cotton gin. Drought, the Depression, and World War II thinned the population until only a handful of families remained by the 1990s.

Cypress, TX

The Cypress region of northwest Harris County took shape after Attakapas and Akokisa peoples gave way to Anglo settlers like the Burnetts and Simmonses in the 1830s, with Matthew Burnett running an inn and serving as first postmaster at Big Cypress. German immigrants seeking land and religious freedom arrived in the late 1840s, and the Houston and Texas Central Railway reaching Cypress Top in 1856 turned scattered farms into a thriving depot community of stores, hotels, and dance halls.

Leakey, TX

Begun in the 1870s, Cypress Creek Cemetery served a scattered community of pioneers along Cypress Creek before the town of Leakey existed, on land belonging to settler John Bunyan Stidham, Sr. Its earliest graves reach back to the late 1870s, and its markers tell hard stories, including Laura Stidham and her young son Alonzo, killed when a tornado destroyed their home in 1927 and buried together beneath plain stones. More than seventy-five marked graves, many unmarked ones, and ten veterans lie among the descendants of the region's first families.

DeLeon, TX

A blacksmith by trade, Cyrus Campbell migrated to Texas in 1828 and did various work for the young Republic—including forging leg irons for the captured Mexican general Santa Anna after the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto. Active in the Methodist Church and remembered for choosing the site of the De Leon Cemetery, he moved to De Leon in 1883, where his became the first grave in the burial ground he had helped locate.

Abbott, TX

Drawn from Fayette County and from Moravia in Austria-Hungary, Czech immigrants became one of Hill County's largest and most influential groups, many fleeing compulsory military service, political limits, and the imposition of German in their schools. Lured by cheap land and rich soil, the first arrivals came in the 1870s and drew others as the railroads opened the region, making Abbott the informal capital of Czech settlement. Neighbors admired their thrift and tidy farms, and for generations they kept their language and old-world customs.

Novice, TX

David Absalom Parker, an Ohio native born in 1849, came to Coleman County in 1876 with his wife Nannie and soon built this two-story stone home. He rose to prominence as a cattleman and, when rail lines reached the area in 1910, helped found the town of Novice. Owner of a general store and cotton gin, he was central to organizing its school, church, and post office.

Fredericksburg, TX

Pioneer David Crockett Riley built this stout stone house in the early 1870s near the Crabapple community, and four generations of his family lived in it. Its 24-inch outer walls were laid up from stone quarried a mile north, its timbers hewn from trees on the farm, and its milled lumber hauled ninety miles from Austin. Lacking store-bought hardware, Riley's shop forged the door locks by hand — and his workmen earned fifty cents and a pint of his home-distilled whiskey for a day's labor.

Loraine, TX

Born to enslaved parents in Victoria County in 1860, Daniel Webster Wallace became a cowboy at fifteen, driving cattle from Mexico to Kansas. Riding for rancher Clay Mann—whose "80" brand gave him his lifelong nickname—he took Mann's advice, bought land, and even returned to school past the age of twenty-five. He built his own ranch in 1891 and prospered on cattle, crops, and oil, and his devotion to education saw a school named in his honor.