Westward Expansion

Cooper, TX

Built before 1850 by landowner Brig DeSpain and his neighbors where the Bonham–Jefferson Road crossed the South Sulphur River, this pioneer bridge of native oak and bois d'arc carried the region's cotton trade for some twenty years. The land traced back to Randolph DeSpain, a Texas Revolutionary soldier killed in the 1836 Goliad massacre. When floods washed the crossing out after 1870, the state replaced it, and the counties kept cotton and corn wagons rolling between the two regions for decades more.

Austin, TX

Established around 1874 in what is now northeast Austin, Dessau Cemetery served a farming community settled in the years after the Civil War, when German and other families worked the blackland prairie of Travis County. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery preserves it as a record of that early rural settlement.

Boise, ID

The Oregon Trail did not appear from nowhere — it followed routes long traveled by Native peoples, which emigrant wagons then adopted through the mid-19th century and beyond. As Western mining booms erupted, new roads pushed out from camps toward supply hubs like Boise and Salt Lake City. Freight wagons and stagecoaches worked these old emigrant paths until railroads finally displaced most of them.

Lyon County, NV

This rugged reef of rock was one of the most famous landmarks of Nevada Territory, guarding the narrow gorge through which thousands of prospectors streamed toward the Comstock Lode. Nearby in June 1850, John Orr and Nicholas Kelly found the first gold nugget ever unearthed in Gold Canyon, opening a decade of placer mining. During the brief Paiute War of 1860, Silver City's residents built a stone battlement and even a wooden cannon atop the eastern summit for defense.

Devine, TX

The earliest graves in this Medina County cemetery belong to settlers killed by Native American raiders in the early 1870s, including seventeen-year-old Isaac Galbreath, whose father — a Texas Ranger and Mexican War veteran — also rests here. The town of Devine grew up in 1881 when the International and Great Northern Railroad reached the area, and landowner P.C. Hattox deeded the original acreage for the cemetery in 1891. A cemetery association has cared for the grounds ever since.

Devine, TX

Chartered by the Grand Lodge of Texas in December 1884, Devine Lodge No. 590 first met above Josh Herring's store, with John Redus serving as its first Worshipful Master. An Eastern Star chapter followed in 1900, and after meeting at various sites the lodge settled at its present home in 1962. Its rolls came to include many of the area's clergy, doctors, merchants, and public officials.

Belpre, OH

In 1791 the Ohio country was raw frontier, and the settlers clustered near Belpre—many of them Revolutionary War veterans who had come west with the Ohio Company—needed a reliable way to turn grain into flour. Jonathan Devol, a resourceful millwright, answered by mounting a gristmill on two boats anchored in the Ohio River, letting the current itself drive the stones. Sheltered beside Farmer's Castle, the fortified stockade built during the Indian wars of the early 1790s, his floating mill ground 25 to 50 bushels a day and served families scattered across some thirty miles of riverbank.

Dew, TX

Families from Alabama settled this Freestone County prairie in the 1850s, calling it Avant and then Sunshine before a postal clerk's misreading of "Drew" fixed the name as Dew in 1885. Land donated in 1869 by settlers W. S. Compton and D. A. Self created this community cemetery, whose earliest graves include victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic and, decades later, the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. A cotton-market town of gins and stores, Dew now gathers each Memorial Day to tend the eleven-acre burial ground of some 1,000 graves.

Missouri City, TX

In 1845 Thomas Walters Dewalt journeyed from South Carolina to settle along Oyster Creek, where he built a plantation in the coastal plains of what is now Fort Bend County. In 1850 he set aside land for burials, and the graveyard has served his extended family for generations, formally deeded in 1931 and expanded in the 1980s. Still in use, it remains reserved for the interrelated families whose roots reach back to antebellum Texas.

Bullard, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, John Dewberry came to Texas in 1835 and by the mid-1840s had settled near Tyler, becoming a successful cotton farmer and helping to organize newly created Smith County in 1846. He began this Greek Revival house, which he named "Myrtle-Vale," in 1852 as the headquarters of his large cotton plantation. A rare surviving two-story antebellum residence in the county, it stayed in the Dewberry family until 1908.

Deweyville, TX

The site was first bought around 1886 — reportedly for a team of oxen — by Pierre Lavine from Bill Morrison, and was known as "Possum Bluff" before being renamed to honor Admiral George Dewey during the Spanish-American War. Its economy rose on lumber after the Sabine Tram Company built a sawmill in 1897, an operation later run by the Peavy-Moore Lumber Company from 1919 to 1943. The mill made Deweyville a working timber town in the East Texas pine belt.

Oxford, OH

Zachariah Price DeWitt, a New Jersey-born son of a Dutch family, migrated through Kentucky before settling with his wife Elizabeth near Four Mile Creek in the early 1800s, raising nine children and building the hewn-log homestead he completed in 1805. A sawmill operator, house builder, and War of 1812 rifle-company commander, DeWitt reportedly steered Miami University's founders to the nearby hilltop where the campus rose. His pegged-rafter house survives as the oldest building in Oxford Township and one of the oldest log structures in Ohio.

Nixon, TX

Methodist worship in the Sandies community began in 1842, and Sandies Chapel was formally chartered by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1857. When settlement shifted, the congregation moved a mile in 1897 to the new town of Dewville, building on land donated by Mrs. C. C. Vernor, wife of an early pastor. The church has remained an active center of local life ever since.

McGregor, TX

William Deyerle, a banker, rancher, and miller who came to Central Texas from Virginia, hired master stonemason Henry Wissman to build this limestone home, completed in 1892. Wissman quarried and hauled every stone himself, laying them to his own design beneath a hipped roof trimmed with arched windows and a bracketed cornice. After a family tragedy claimed Deyerle's widow and her second husband in 1926, the house passed to her sister and stayed in the Fall family until 1975.

Diamond Bar, CA

This windmill was a working fixture on the Diamond Bar Ranch from 1918 to 1957, an era when Southern California's vast cattle ranches still shaped the land that would later become sprawling suburbs. Erected by local Lions and the historical society, the marker preserves the memory of the ranching operation that gave Diamond Bar its name and brand. Windmills like this pumped groundwater essential to livestock across the arid West.

Whitesboro, TX

Founded in 1850 by brothers James R. and John Diamond—later joined by George, who started the paper that became the Houston Post—the Diamond Horse Ranch served from 1858 to 1861 as a station on the Butterfield Overland Mail. The Diamonds were political leaders active in frontier defense and Masonry, and James lies buried here.

Eureka County, NV

Long a gathering ground for Shoshone and Paiute people, Diamond Valley was first mapped by Captain John C. Frémont in 1845 as he charted routes for western migration. Colonel J.H. Simpson surveyed a path through here in 1859 that immediately became the Pony Express and Overland Telegraph route, while freight toll roads served the lead and silver camps booming in the 1860s. A limited livestock and dairy industry followed, and in 1957 a tapped underground lake brought irrigation water to the valley.

Elko County, NV

Jackson Lee Davis (1870–1949), known everywhere as "Diamondfield Jack," was a flamboyant gunman hired by cattle interests—including future Nevada governor John Sparks—to keep sheep ranchers off the ranges of southern Idaho and northeastern Nevada. Convicted in 1896 of murdering two sheepherders, he was sentenced to hang even after others confessed, and was finally pardoned in 1902. He remade himself as a successful mine operator in Tonopah and Goldfield before drifting into obscurity and dying in Las Vegas.

Dickens, TX

Dickens Cemetery opened in 1891, the very year the town was founded, when the wife of pioneer barber C. F. Jones died and was buried at the foot of a hill above the Croton Breaks. The landowner soon donated five acres around her grave for a community burial ground, and it grew to more than eighteen acres, gathering the town's early settlers, officials, and the man many called the "Father of Dickens," attorney W. C. Ballard. Among its graves lie veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Dickens, TX

Carved from Young and Bexar territories, Dickens County was created by the Texas legislature in 1876 as the state organized its vast western reaches for eventual settlement. It was not formally organized until 1903, once enough ranchers and townsfolk had arrived to run a local government, with Dickens City as the county seat. The gap between creation and organization mirrors the slow pace of settlement on the rolling plains.

Dickens, TX

Fed by upland aquifers draining through porous sandstone at the head of a canyon ravine, Dickens Springs has drawn people to its water since the earliest human occupation of the Rolling Plains. Nomadic peoples camped here for millennia, leaving a wealth of stone tools later studied by Texas Tech archaeologists, before pioneer settlers arrived in the 1880s and a town promoter turned the springs into a beloved public park.

San Augustine, TX

William and Lucinda Dickerson, who had come from Florida to settle at Grapevine in 1839, established this burial ground after their son Levi died in 1858. They opened it to neighbors and kin, and additional land was donated over time; a community church joined the site in 1946. Now a community cemetery marked by curbing, grave slabs, and upright stones, it holds veterans of conflicts dating to the Civil War.

Elkhart, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1812, Dickerson Parker fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence, before his death in 1844. His wife, Lucinda Eaton Parker, is remembered with him. Both were part of the earliest Anglo settlement of Anderson County.

Town of Lewiston, NY

Tucked into the Town of Lewiston near the Niagara frontier, Dickersonville Cemetery holds the graves of some of the area's earliest settlers, with burials dating to the years just after 1810. The names recorded here — Hannah Mills, Isaac Woolson, and Second Lieutenant John Farley — trace the lives of pioneers who took root in western New York during a turbulent era that included the War of 1812 along the nearby Niagara River. The marker was placed by the Town of Lewiston's Historic Preservation Commission to honor this early burial ground.

Dido, TX

Settlement here began in 1848, and by 1887 landowner Dempsey S. Holt had donated three acres for a school, church, and cemetery, with a Confederate veteran and pioneer physician later adding more. The little village took the whimsical name Dido, after the mythological Queen of Carthage, and thrived with a post office and stores until the railroad passed it by in the 1890s. Around a thousand graves remain, holding many of the area's founding families.

Avondale, TX

Dido was among the first communities in Tarrant County, homesteaded in 1848 within the Peters Colony along the stage road from Fort Worth to Decatur. Its school opened in 1854 under a Missouri-born teacher, and when he left to serve in the Confederate Army his wife carried on the classes. Railroads, a new lake, and a wartime Marine base later reshaped the area, drawing families away until the school closed in 1947.

Gonzales, TX

Miles G. Dikes emigrated from Georgia in 1829 to become an original member of Green DeWitt's colony, one of the earliest Anglo-American settlements in Mexican Texas. Around 1850 he established this family cemetery on his Gonzales County land, where the first known burial, his son Lovic, came in 1859. The graveyard holds about twenty marked graves and is still used by his descendants.

Peaster, TX

The earliest recorded grave here dates to 1883, and the burial ground soon anchored the Peaster community's Baptist families as they settled the Parker County countryside. Among those laid to rest was Sarah A. Dodson, who reached the Republic of Texas in 1839 and worked as a midwife while raising six children alone after her husband's death. Farmers, merchants, teachers, ministers, and veterans of many wars fill its acres, including two dozen anonymous graves marked only with rough stones.

Llano, 1400 Hickory Street, Llano Street Cemetery, TX

South Carolinian Dillard Cooper reached Texas in January 1836 with Captain Shackelford's Red Rovers and joined Colonel Fannin's command. Captured after the defeat at Coleto Creek, he was among the prisoners held at Goliad when Mexican troops massacred more than 300 men — and one of the few who escaped, traveling two weeks by night through enemy lines to reach Texian forces. Cooper lived out his long life farming in the Texas Hill Country, dying in 1896.

Columbus, TX

Dilue Rose and Ira Albert Harris moved from Houston to Columbus in 1845, where Ira served as county sheriff and city marshal. Dilue drew on her girlhood during the Texas Revolution to write vivid reminiscences that were later published and became a treasured eyewitness account. In 1858 the couple built this unusual concrete house—with a rare basement—where they raised their nine children.

Columbus, TX

Dilue Rose Harris came to Texas as a child in 1833 and lived through the turmoil of the Texas Revolution, later setting her memories down in a 30,000-word "Reminiscences" published by the Texas State Historical Association. Married young to Ira Harris, she moved to Columbus in 1845 and raised nine children in the house built here in 1858. Her firsthand account remains one of the most valuable windows into everyday life during the birth of the Texas Republic.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Created by the Texas legislature in 1858 but not formally organized until 1880, Dimmit County honors Philip Dimmitt, a trader and captain in the army of the Republic of Texas who died in 1841. The long gap between creation and organization reflects how sparsely populated this stretch of South Texas remained through the mid-nineteenth century. Carrizo Springs became the county seat.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Named for one of the framers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Dimmit County was carved from four counties in 1858 and organized in 1880 with Carrizo Springs as its seat. Its courthouse, commissioned in 1883 and built by J. C. Breeding & Sons on plans likely drawn from architect Alfred Giles, wore an Italianate look until the booming county hired Henry T. Phelps to enlarge and recast it in restrained Classical Revival style in the 1920s. The transformation left a single building embodying two eras of Texas civic architecture.

Elko County, NV

Dinner Station began in the early 1870s as a meal stop that William C. "Hill" Beachey established for the Tuscarora and Mountain City stage lines, first known as Weilands and later as Oldham's Station. After a fire in the 1880s, a handsome two-story stone house, outbuildings, and a corral replaced the earlier frame structure. For a time it was among the county's most popular inns, serving both horse-drawn stages and early automobiles—until cars made such stops obsolete after 1910.

Mirando City vicinity, TX

This small family burial ground was established around 1878 by the Guerra family in the ranching country of Webb County, in the Spanish- and Mexican-descended borderlands of South Texas. Family cemeteries like this one dotted the region's ranches, marking where generations of settlers lived, worked the land, and were laid to rest. It was formally recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2000.

Columbus, TX

In 1837, when logs meant for the courthouse floated past on the swollen Colorado River and left the building unfinished, this oak stood in as a shade for Texas jurors. Presiding over the open-air court was Robert M. Williamson, famously nicknamed "Three-Legged Willie" for the wooden leg he wore beneath a drawn-up crippled one.

Robert Lee, TX

In 1896 the Smith and Chapman families set aside four acres on the divide between the Colorado and North Concho watersheds for a cemetery and an all-faiths sanctuary serving the scattered ranches around them. Callie Chapman, buried in 1897, was the first laid to rest here. Its roughly one hundred graves hold the region's earliest settlers and veterans of both World Wars and Korea, and descendants of those pioneers keep it in use today.

Barksdale, TX

Dixie Settlement took its name from Camp Dixie, a Texas Ranger post along the military road to Fort Inge, and grew up in a hard frontier where Indian raids were still a living danger. Its first settler was the widowed midwife Jerusha Sanchez, followed by pioneer families and by Lewis Barksdale, a veteran of the Republic of Texas wars who claimed a land grant here in 1876. When a post office opened in 1882 under Barksdale's name, the old name Dixie quietly disappeared.

Mason vicinity, TX

Dizenia Peters Todd came to Texas as a child in the 1830s and, with her husband George W. Todd's family, was among the earliest settlers and officials of Mason County in the 1850s. She was killed in an Indian raid near this site around January 1865, a period when frontier defenses had thinned during the Civil War, and was buried with a young Black servant in adjacent unmarked graves.

Doan's Community, TX

In the 1870s the Western Trail carried longhorns north from deep South Texas to the railheads of Dodge City, Kansas, and near this spot drovers found a dependable ford across the Red River. In 1878 Ohio native Jonathan Doan opened a trading post here, becoming Wilbarger County's first permanent settler, and with his nephew Corwin logged the passage of hundreds of thousands of cattle. The place became simply Doan's Crossing—a landmark on one of the great cattle roads of the American West.

Doan's Community, TX

This monument marks the Red River ford where, between 1876 and 1895, some six million cattle and horses crossed on the Western Texas-Kansas Trail. It bears a characteristically wry blessing from humorist Will Rogers and honors George W. Saunders of the Old Trail Drivers' Association, the man credited with keeping the trail records straight. The stone stands where the great herds once churned the river's banks.

Doan's Community, TX

In 1878 Corwin F. Doan settled on the Red River in far North Texas, and by 1881 he had raised this sturdy adobe house beside his trading store. His post sat squarely on the Western Trail, and each season he stocked goods for the cowboys driving thousands of longhorns north toward the Kansas railheads. The little village of Doan's Crossing grew to more than a dozen buildings, and the Doan family famously entertained everyone from visiting English lords to Plains Indians under this roof.

Burnet, TX

The Dobyville Cemetery is the last trace of a small Central Texas community settled in the 1850s and named for the white adobe-rock hill on which it stood. More than 230 marked graves remain, with dozens of unmarked burials believed to be infants, the earliest documented being a young woman who died in 1857. Pioneers, local and state officials, and veterans of several wars rest here, and the ground still serves the surrounding area.

Independence Township, PA · est. 1947

Around 1773 John Doddridge raised a cluster of stockaded cabins on this frontier, strong enough to shelter neighboring families when danger threatened. Through the Revolutionary years such fortified homesteads were the settlers' refuge from raids along the western border. The place is also remembered as the boyhood home of Dr. Joseph Doddridge, later a noted chronicler of frontier life.

Hill County, TX

This burial ground in rural Hill County dates to 1859, on the eve of the Civil War and in the early years of Anglo settlement across the Blackland Prairie. Though its marker records only its founding date, the cemetery marks the presence of one of the area's pioneer communities.

Snyder, TX

Dr. J. C. Cornelius, a Confederate veteran and pioneer physician, built this Snyder-area house in 1883 with materials hauled by mule train from the nearest railroad at Colorado City. Its handmade cabinets, entrance hall, and two fireplaces survive as first built. Since 1894 the home has belonged to the family of A. C. Dodson, a former Tennessee schoolteacher, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

McMullen County, TX

Built in 1880 for $2,800, this was the first county jail in McMullen County, deep in the South Texas brush country then known as "Dog Town." Its earliest supplies tell the story of frontier justice: a couple of blankets, a pair of leg irons, and two sets of handcuffs.

Brackettville, TX

In 1833 the English-born empresario John Charles Beales — holder of a staggering land grant across present-day Texas and New Mexico — led fifty-nine colonists to this spot to found a town named for his Mexican wife. Drought and Comanche raids battered the fragile settlement, and when the colonists fled south during the Texas Revolution in 1836, most of one party was killed on the road. The town never recovered.

Fort Worth, TX

In the late 1880s this Fort Worth address housed Buck's Domino Parlor, a gaming house so notorious it was dubbed "the Casino of the Wild West," where high-stakes fortunes changed hands overnight. The area drew figures of Old West legend — outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid among them, alongside Luke Short, the gambler-gunman known for running honest high-stakes play. This was the raucous, cattle-town frontier of Fort Worth's famed "Hell's Half Acre."

Fredericksburg, TX

The oldest part of this stone building, with its vaulted-ceiling cellar, went up in the early 1850s on land owned by pioneer settler John Schmidtzinsky. Over the decades it served as a pharmacy and then H. R. Richter's jewelry store, where he also sold instruments and hosted concerts in the front room while his family lived in the rear. In more recent years it housed a cafe and a domino parlor.

Brazoria, TX

A Vermont-born newcomer to Texas, Don Carlos Barrett sat on the General Council of the 1835 Provisional Government during the opening months of the Texas Revolution. That body named him judge advocate general of the army with the rank of colonel, placing him at the legal heart of the fledgling war effort. He died in Texas in 1838, having helped shape the institutions of the emerging Republic.

San Marcos, TX

In 1807, at the request of Spanish Texas's governor, the Army captain and rancher Felipe Roque de la Portilla led more than fifty settlers to found San Marcos de Neve where El Camino Real crossed the San Marcos River. The colony issued town lots and built homes around a plaza, but floods, missing supplies, and raids by Comanches and Tonkawas broke it; by 1812 Portilla led his people back toward the Rio Grande. He remained a prominent frontier leader, later helping establish another Texas colony.

Progreso Lakes, TX

On land his family held by Spanish grant, Don Florencio Saenz built his homestead in 1902 as the headquarters of the sprawling Toluca Ranch, which once reached seventeen miles north from the Rio Grande. From here he ran a mercantile store and championed cattle ranching and irrigated river farming as the future of the lower Valley. In 1915, amid the cross-border turmoil of the Mexican Revolution era, raiders tried to burn the house and were driven off by U.S. soldiers in a fight that cost a private his life.

Orange County, CA

In the summer of 1769, the Spanish soldier Gaspar de Portolá led the first European overland expedition through Alta California, marching north from San Diego in search of Monterey Bay. His party camped at spots like this one along the way, opening a route that Spanish settlement would soon follow. This bronze was placed in 1932 by the Native Daughters of the Golden West to mark the campsite.

San Antonio, TX

José Miguel de Arciniega entered the Spanish military as a teenager in 1810 and, after Mexico won its independence in 1821, rose through San Antonio's civic ranks as alcalde and political chief. He served as a land commissioner for Stephen F. Austin's colonies and, after the Texas Revolution, continued in judicial and border-security roles. Fluent in Spanish, French, English, and several Native languages, he remained a leader through every change of government Texas endured.

Port Lavaca, TX

After Mexico won independence from Spain, it used the empresario system to settle Texas with loyal colonists, and in April 1824 Don Martín de León secured a grant—second in success only to Stephen F. Austin's. Born in Nuevo Santander and a former captain in the Spanish military, de León established the town of Guadalupe Victoria and, by 1831, a colony reaching across much of modern Calhoun County west of Matagorda Bay. A port near present-day Port Lavaca gave the colony vital access to trade and supplies.

Victoria, TX

Born in Mexico in 1765, Martín De León secured an empresario grant in 1824 and founded the town of Victoria, planting one of the few largely Hispanic colonies of Mexican Texas. A cavalier, frontiersman, and stockman, he became known as the first great cattle baron of Texas before his death in 1833.

Goliad, TX

Born around 1800 to a Spanish family, Rafael Antonio Manchola came to La Bahía in 1822 and married into the powerful de León family, empresarios of the region. He rose to command the presidio, served as alcalde, and sat in the legislature of Coahuila and Texas, where he championed separate statehood, corresponded with Stephen F. Austin, and even secured the town's renaming from La Bahía to Goliad. He died of cholera in 1833, and years later his de León kin were driven from Texas by anti-Mexican sentiment during the Revolution.

Victoria, TX

Around 1800, when Texas was still the northernmost reach of Spanish and then Mexican territory, Patricia de la Garza de León crossed from Tamaulipas to join her husband Don Martín de León in his effort to plant a colony on the frontier. Raising ten children, she made her home a hearth of pioneer culture at the founding of Victoria. When the Texas fight for independence came, she stood with the patriot cause.

Bartlett vicinity, TX

Settlers put down roots along fertile Donahoe Creek in the late 1840s, and when Samuel Gibbs Leatherman arrived in 1854 he opened the first store, gave land for the cemetery, and brought in the first doctor. The little community grew to boast a town square, post office, telephone system, and its own school and church. When good roads drew people to larger towns, Donahoe faded until only its cemetery remained.