Westward Expansion

Marathon, TX

When the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway pushed across West Texas in the 1880s, retired sea captain Albion E. Shepard came as a surveyor and stayed to build an empire of ranchland. He founded the townsite of Marathon — named, tradition holds, for the Greek valley its hills recalled — served as its first postmaster, and ran sheep by the tens of thousands on his Iron Mountain Ranch. Before 1887 he raised a two-story adobe Colonial Revival house facing the town square.

Nixon, TX

Named by veterans of Sibley's Confederate campaign in New Mexico, the community of Albuquerque grew up near an 1857 ranch, gaining a post office in 1869 along with businesses and a school. Its blacksmith shop was the scene of a famous frontier killing in 1873, when the gunman John Wesley Hardin shot DeWitt County Sheriff Jack Helm; the post office closed a decade later.

Dallas, TX

West Texas rancher William J. Lewis, a Maryland native, and his Dallas-born wife Willie built this residence in 1915–17, its design blending English Georgian and French Renaissance influences by architects Hal Thompson and Marion Fooshee. In 1921 the home passed to prominent banker George N. Aldredge and his wife Rena, active civic leaders and generous patrons of the arts. The house carries the name of the family that made it a center of Dallas cultural life.

Bastrop, TX

This Bastrop County home rose in stages on land the Mexican government granted in 1831 to a colonist of Stephen F. Austin's second colony — a reminder that Anglo Texas began as Mexican Texas. Farmer John Aldridge built the first portion in 1852, and after the Civil War a Confederate captain and plantation owner, J. W. Fitzwilliam, added the two-story section around 1872, naming the place 'Wexford' for his Irish birthplace.

Aledo, TX

This congregation traces its start to 1878, when Methodists acquired a share of a small frame hall in the settlement of Alma, considered the forerunner of Aledo. When the Texas & Pacific Railway crossed Parker County in 1879, the building was moved to the new town rising along the tracks, and the church grew through a century of expansions, mergers, and new sanctuaries. As the first congregation in town to own its own building, it became a cornerstone of Aledo's civic and spiritual life.

Dundee, TX

Alex Albright, born in Nebraska in 1861 and raised in the cattle business, came to Dundee in 1890 and opened a general store before building his 1,400-acre Elm Lodge Ranch. Starting with purebred Lincoln sheep, in 1910 he imported prized karakul sheep from Asia—reportedly with help from former President Theodore Roosevelt and the Czar of Russia—and bred a flock of 1,200 that won prizes worldwide. His second wife Marie assisted him in the ranching enterprise.

Carrollton, TX

In 1844 Alexander Wilson Perry and his wife Sarah left Illinois to join the Peters Colony, buying this North Texas land and raising a simple frame house by the late 1850s. The Perrys became civic pillars, donating ground for a church, a cemetery, a school, and the railroad. Their son later reused the old home's lumber and stone to build the surviving residence, which his family gave to Carrollton as a museum and park in 1975.

Alexander, TX

This burial ground has served southern Erath County since the late 1800s, when the railroad town of Alexander—first called Harper's Mill—was thriving. Confederate veteran Thomas Pinckney Tidwell established the cemetery after a Mexican family's child was refused burial in a local graveyard; he opened it to all, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and his family donated an ornate cross to mark the child's grave. Among its burials are community leaders and veterans of conflicts dating back to the Civil War.

Bryan, TX

The ground here was part of an 1832 headright granted by Mexico to George W. Singleton, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists, and burials are said to have begun by 1854 near an early schoolhouse. In 1856 Singleton's heirs deeded ten acres for the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Alexander Church rose beside the school as interments continued. With some three hundred marked graves, the cemetery remains open to burials and cared for by an association formed in 1941.

Dallas, TX

Alexander Cockrell arrived in the Dallas area in 1845, fought in the war with Mexico, and by 1852 had bought the remainder of the townsite from Dallas's founder, John Neely Bryan, building brickyards, a sawmill, and a Trinity River bridge. When he was killed over a debt in 1858, his wife Sarah Horton Cockrell took the reins, finishing the St. Nicholas Hotel, running the ferry, and adding a flour mill — becoming the first woman in Dallas to wield real economic power.

Euless, TX

Alexander and Mary Dobkins came from Tennessee in 1852 as part of the wave of pioneers settling North Texas, taking up a 200-acre farm on this ground. Alexander was ordained a Baptist minister and served as postmaster for Estill's Station during the Civil War, and his 1869 grave is the earliest here. His son William, buried beside him, became a physician and civic leader for the growing community.

Bellville, TX

Alexander Glenn and his wife Sarah left Georgia for Texas, settling first in the Mill Creek Forks area before moving to Bellville in 1854 and buying one of the community's earliest homes. Glenn served as Austin County surveyor through the 1850s, a key role in a young county still measuring out its land. This small burial ground on that original property holds the couple and their daughter, tended today by the local historical society.

San Augustine, TX

Alexander Horton came to Texas in 1824 and served as an aide-de-camp to General Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto, the 1836 clash that won Texas its independence. A pioneer, soldier, and state legislator, he bought this land in 1837 and built his home beside what became the family burial ground. By tradition the first grave was that of his brother, a Texas Ranger who died in 1849, and the small plot still holds Horton and his kin.

Bryan, TX

Circuit rider Robert Alexander organized this Methodist congregation in 1854, and two years later early settlers raised its first sanctuary from hand-hewn logs on land donated by neighboring families. As the Brazos County community took hold, the humble log chapel gave way to larger frame churches in 1908 and again in 1939. The names recorded on its founding deed read like a roster of the district's pioneer households.

Caldwell, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1785, Alexander Thomson, Jr. became a leader in the Anglo colonization of Texas, partnering in 1830 with empresario Sterling C. Robertson to settle families in the Robertson Colony. When Mexican officials began requiring passports of immigrants, Thomson's party bypassed Nacogdoches and blazed a new route that became known as the Tennesseans' Road. He served as a convention delegate, colony surveyor, and executor of Robertson's estate, and fathered thirteen children whose descendants include a U.S. diplomat.

Maysville, KY

Born about five miles west of Maysville in 1808, Alexander W. Doniphan moved to Missouri and became a militia general known for restraint—famously refusing an order to execute Mormon leader Joseph Smith and others after the 1838 disturbances. His lasting fame came in the Mexican War, when he led the 1st Regiment of Missouri Mounted Volunteers on a remarkable 3,600-mile campaign, defeating larger Mexican forces with a poorly equipped command. His march remains one of the epic feats of American volunteer soldiering.

Mexia, TX

Alfonso Steel fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive clash in which Texian forces under Sam Houston routed the Mexican army in a fight lasting less than twenty minutes and won independence for the Republic of Texas. Wounded in that battle, Steel lived on for decades and became its last surviving veteran, a living link to the founding fight of the Texas Republic. The State of Texas honored him with this marker in 1962.

Graford, TX

Tennessee-born Alfred Lane came to Texas with his family in 1836 and settled in Robertson's colony before moving to the Black Springs area of Palo Pinto County in 1856, where he raised horses on the open range after marrying Elizabeth Goodnight. Brother-in-law to the famed cattleman Charles Goodnight, who called him "a splendid brave man," Lane scouted for the Texas Rangers during the Civil War and helped drive Goodnight's cattle west of Fort Belknap. He was killed by Indians while returning home and lies buried in nearby Crawford Cemetery.

Houston County, TX

Alfred M. Hallmark (1817-1880), born in Madison County, Alabama, came to Texas with his parents in 1834 and settled in present-day Houston County. He enlisted in the Texas Army on March 6, 1836, and fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that April, later farming and helping run the post office in the Mustang Prairie community. In 1842 he married his cousin Sarah, with whom he raised twelve children.

N.Richland Hills, TX

Alfred M. Hightower arrived near Smithfield from Illinois in 1858 to ranch, and though he opposed secession, he cast his lot with the South once war broke out. As a Confederate mounted rifleman he fought at Elkhorn Tavern (Pea Ridge) in Arkansas, one of the largest battles west of the Mississippi. He tried Kansas in the 1870s before returning to ranch here until his death, leaving his name on a nearby street.

Alice, TX

In the 1880s two rail lines crossed in what was then Nueces County, and a townsite sprang up at the junction. Known first as Bandana and then Kleberg, it settled on the name Alice when a post office was granted in 1888, and homes, schools, and churches followed. Texas Rangers based their south Texas operations here, and in 1911 Alice became the seat of the newly created Jim Wells County.

Alice, TX

When two railroads crossed three miles from the old Collins community in the 1890s, a new town called Alice sprang up at the junction, and Frederic B. Nayer—who had helped sell its lots—donated ground for a burial place in 1903. First called the Alice Fraternal Cemetery, it was renamed after a cemetery association formed in 1925 under its first president, Martha Fawcus, who led the planting of a hundred oaks that still shade the grounds. Prominent citizens, veterans, and Texas Rangers rest among generations of South Texas families.

Amarillo, TX

Built in 1906–1907 by local contractor J. D. Singleton, this home was raised for Alice Victoria Ghormley Curtis, widow of the prominent Texas Ranger and rancher W. R. Curtis. After her husband's death in 1901 she moved to Amarillo, where she raised her youngest child and a granddaughter in the house. A fine example of early twentieth-century classical revival, it features Tuscan columns supporting a classical entablature.

Houston, TX

The first permanent settlers here were Dr. John Magee and his wife Alief, who arrived in 1896; the community, briefly called Dairy, was renamed in 1897 for Alief Magee, its first postmistress. When the need for a burial ground arose in 1900, this property was deeded for a cemetery, and many of the pioneer settlers — including Alief herself — were laid to rest here. Roughly half the graves are those of infants, a stark record of the hardships of childbirth and disease on the early prairie, while the 1900 hurricane scattered many discouraged families before some returned to fight the area's floods.

Colorado City, TX

All Saints' began around 1882 as informal worship among West Texas settlers—many of them English sheep ranchers—on the dry plains near Colorado City. Organized in 1883 by Bishop A. C. Garrett, pioneer Episcopal bishop of Dallas, as the eight-communicant "Grace Mission," the congregation built its church in 1885 and consecrated it as All Saints in 1886. Its original bell still rings today.

Weatherford, TX

Founded as a small mission in 1876 with just five communicants, All Saints' Episcopal Church grew alongside the frontier town of Weatherford through decades of financial struggle and rebuilding. A stone church, a lost property, a generous parishioner's memorial gift, and a new 1920s sanctuary all mark its persistence; among its later members was noted portrait painter Douglas Chandor. Its long history mirrors the slow maturing of a North Texas community into a settled town.

Brenham, TX

Elijah Allcorn arrived in Stephen F. Austin's colony in late 1821 as one of the "Old 300," the first legal Anglo-American colonists in Mexican Texas, and helped name New Year Creek while camping on its banks on New Year's Day 1822. His family farmed, raised stock, and hauled freight to the frontier settlements clustered around Washington-on-the-Brazos. The main house, dated to about 1845, passed through the Allcorn, Wilkins, Samuel, and finally Kokemoor families, who held it for more than a century and layered on wings, a cistern, barns, and sheds that trace a farmstead's slow growth into the 20th century.

Meadville, PA

In 1815, when the country west of the Allegheny Mountains was still raw frontier, a Massachusetts-born minister named Timothy Alden set out to plant a college in the young town of Meadville, Pennsylvania. Chartered two years later, Allegheny College endured where many early frontier schools failed, and it holds the distinction of being the oldest college still operating under its original name west of those mountains. Alden, the school's first president, also designed Bentley Hall, the graceful early building that became the heart of campus administration.

Pittsburgh, PA

When Allegheny County was carved out of Westmoreland and Washington counties in 1788, its seat at Pittsburgh was already a generation old — laid out in 1764 at the strategic forks where the Allegheny and Monongahela join to form the Ohio, a gateway that had drawn soldiers, traders, and settlers pushing west. Incorporated as a city in 1816, Pittsburgh grew into one of the great engines of American industry, its furnaces and mills pouring out the iron and steel that earned the region its "Workshop of the World" reputation. The county's story runs straight from a frontier river junction to the smoke-and-fire heart of the nation's industrial age.

Shippen Township, PA · est. 1949

Long before roads crossed the mountains, travelers moving between the Susquehanna's West Branch and the Allegheny River faced a 23-mile overland carry that began at a "canoe place" near this point. Native peoples and later pioneers hauled their canoes north to Portage Creek, then took to the water again near present-day Port Alleghany. The route stitched two great watersheds together across the Pennsylvania wilderness.

Allegany Township, PA · est. 1947

High in Potter County rises the modest headwater of the Allegheny, a river whose importance far outstrips its quiet source. For centuries it carried Native travelers, and later French and British traders and westward-bound settlers, deep into the interior. Winding hundreds of miles to Pittsburgh, it joins the Monongahela to form the mighty Ohio, one of the great arteries of the American continent.

Allen, TX

Fertile prairie and reliable water had drawn settlers here since the 1840s, but Allen truly began in 1876 when the Houston and Texas Central Railroad built a water stop on Cottonwood Creek and platted a town, naming it for railroad founder Ebenezer Allen. In 1878 an outlaw gang said to be led by Sam Bass robbed the depot in what is often called Texas's first successful train robbery. Interurban electric rail arrived in 1908, and late-century growth in the Dallas metroplex swelled the town past 19,000.

Cuero, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1804, Allen Caruthers fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 engagement that won Texas its independence. He and his wife Martha, a North Carolina native, were among the settlers who built lives in the young republic and state before his death in 1863. Their graves near Cuero mark the resting place of one of the veterans whose service is woven into the founding story of Texas.

Murchison, TX

The Murchison community grew up as a station on the Texas and St. Louis Railway, named for Confederate officer T.F. Murchison, and soon supported a school, post office, cotton gin, churches, and farms of corn, cotton, and peaches. This burial ground served residents from the late 1800s, with James Mack Pettiet's 1890 grave the oldest marked stone and the family of J.C. Allen giving it its name. Pioneers, farmers, ranchers, and veterans reaching back to the Civil War rest here under vertical stones and fraternal markers.

Wills Point, TX

This burial ground first served the pioneer families of the Turner community, its earliest marked grave that of Hiram White, who died in 1867. Named at first for the White family, it became Allen Cemetery after William J. Allen deeded the land to trustees in 1909; he and his wife Elizabeth Jane, who had come to the area in 1850, both rest here. Among the graves are military veterans, European immigrants, and the descendants of the region's first settlers.

Pasadena, TX

This busy commercial district was once the Allen Ranch, among the oldest and largest in southeast Texas, rooted in an 1824 Mexican land grant to Morris Callahan. Samuel William Allen and later his son Samuel Ezekiel Allen built it into a prosperous cattle operation of some 23,000 acres, shipping stock to eastern and foreign markets. In 1917 Rosa Allen sold 700 acres to Sinclair Oil for a refinery, and the ranch house was eventually moved to Galveston Bay to become an Episcopal camp.

Honey Grove, TX

In 1842, on land given by Wilson Allen, a Methodist congregation raised a log chapel and gave its name to the surrounding settlement of Allen's Chapel. Early circuit riders and founding families—Hamil, Ramsey, Wheeler, Stroud, and others—built the community's spiritual life for generations. Declining attendance closed the church in 1916, and former members later passed the building to a Baptist congregation, but the community cemetery endures as a marker of the early settlement.

Alleyton, TX

Beneath these oaks lie some of the earliest Anglo settlers of Texas, members of Stephen F. Austin's colonizing venture. Rawson Alley, a surveyor on Austin's 1821 expedition, was buried here in 1833, and his family had come west with the famed 'Old Three Hundred' in 1822. Though the cemetery wasn't formally deeded until 1881, its first graves—those of Dr. John Millar and his children, lost to smallpox in 1831—predate it by half a century, and generations of Alleys, including a Texas Revolution veteran and a Western Swing bandleader, followed.

Jefferson, TX

Built around 1851 by Daniel Nelson Alley, a founder of Jefferson, this Greek Revival house with its four-room central-hall plan stands among the earliest homes of Marion County. In 1884 it passed to Hector McKay, a Civil War veteran and one of the region's leading attorneys, whose family held it into the mid-20th century. The house survives as a rare antebellum landmark of a onetime riverport boomtown.

Alleyton, TX

Alleyton was once the oldest permanent settlement and largest town in Colorado County, founded by the Alley brothers—William, John, Rawson, Thomas, and Abraham—all members of Stephen F. Austin's original 300 colonists. Its prominence grew when it became the terminus of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railroad from 1860 to 1867.

Alleyton, TX

Alleyton grew from the settlement of the Alley brothers around 1822 and became Colorado County's largest town after William Alley donated railroad right-of-way in 1859. Blocks marked as a graveyard on the 1860 town map were formally established as a cemetery by 1880, when an adjacent Colored Cemetery was also created for the community's African American residents. Burials here span a yellow fever epidemic of 1867 and veterans of wars from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Whitesboro, TX

Allison Cemetery took shape in the mid-1800s on three acres of North Texas prairie, its oldest dated grave marking a burial in 1865. Among those resting here are a family lost to influenza in the 1850s, several war veterans, and generations of the Dennis family and their neighbors—some in graves marked only by rough stones. Still tended by descendants, it remains in use today.

Carthage, TX

The Rev. Littleton Fowler, an early Methodist missionary in East Texas, is believed to have organized this congregation between 1837 and 1839, when Texas was a young republic. First called Bethesda Church, it worshiped on land given by Purviance Williams before taking its present name to honor Samuel G. Allison, who donated the building site in 1882. Tradition holds it the oldest active church in Panola County.

Elwood, TX

Ransom Allphin came from Illinois to Texas with his parents in 1829 and secured this land through an 1835 Mexican land grant, farming and running a grist mill on the frontier. In 1854, while digging a well, he struck clay and soapstone, abandoned the shaft, and donated five acres as a community burial ground—becoming its first grave that same year. Later burials, many from the 1918 influenza epidemic, layer generations of local history into the plot.

Alma, TX

Settlers reached this stretch of Ellis County as early as 1848, but the town of Alma was truly born in 1871 when the Houston and Texas Central Railroad laid track through the county. Landowner C.C. Hemming gave part of his property for the right-of-way and named the new town for his daughter. A busy farming center for decades, Alma faded after the 1950s when Interstate 45 was cut straight through its heart.

Houston, TX

In 1892 Illinois investors bought land near an old railroad line and platted the town of Almeda, marketing it as a citrus-farming community. When severe freezes killed the citrus dream, farmers turned to dairying by the 1920s and Almeda grew into a prosperous dairy town, with a school district that drew children from parts of three counties. The city of Houston absorbed Almeda in 1959, but its name and story endure in local memory.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1519 the Spanish crown sent Alonzo Álvarez de Pineda to trace the Gulf of Mexico coast in search of a water route to Asia. Over nine months he charted hundreds of miles of shoreline from western Florida to Veracruz—among the first European mapping of the Texas coast—before running afoul of Hernán Cortés and sailing north past a river likely the Rio Grande. Though he found no passage and likely never returned home, his map and report spurred the exploration that opened the Gulf to European colonization.

Beavercreek, OH

When Greene County was organized in 1803 — the same year Ohio entered the Union — this corner of the Miami Valley was still raw frontier, its scattered settlers clearing land along the creeks east of the future Dayton. Before any permanent seat of justice could be built, the county's earliest court sessions convened in the plainest of quarters, the kind of borrowed cabins and mills that served as government wherever the frontier outpaced its institutions. This marker fixes the spot near Alpha where Greene County's first courthouse stood, the humble starting point of local law and order in a country barely a generation old.

Town of Penfield, NY

This handsome dwelling rose in 1832 in the rolling farmland east of Rochester, in a New York that was booming thanks to the recently completed Erie Canal. Built by Alpheus Clark, it reflects the wave of settlement and prosperity that transformed Monroe County from frontier wilderness into a thriving agricultural region in the early 19th century. Homes like this one anchored the young communities of the Town of Penfield as they took shape during the early republic.

Port Lavaca, TX

Empresario Henri Castro contracted in 1842 to bring European colonists to Texas, and the first—mostly German-speaking Alsatians—arrived through Galveston in 1843 before sailing on to Lavaca, later Port Lavaca. From there they set out overland to Medina County to found Castroville, though many succumbed to coastal fevers along the way. Ships continued through 1846, and by the time Castro's contract expired in 1847 he had carried more than 2,000 colonists to Texas, most of them through Lavaca Bay.

Castroville, TX

In 1842 the empresario Henri Castro brought his first colonists to the land west of the Medina River, most of them from the Rhine country and many from Alsace on the French-German border. Two years later he laid out a townsite the settlers named Castroville, which became the heart of Alsatian culture in Texas. They built white-washed, single-story limestone houses in the European manner and carried over farming, winemaking, cuisine, and customs that still flavor the region.

Santa Fe, TX

Organized in 1897, this cemetery served the ranching and farming community of Alta Loma, a town whose Spanish name means high land, laid out by a Colorado investment company in the 1890s. The first settlers arrived in 1894, and the burial ground holds early pioneering families who raised longhorn cattle, along with teachers, preachers, immigrants, and veterans of conflicts dating to World War I. A cemetery association organized in 1904 has maintained the grounds ever since.

McKinney, TX

The Altoga Cemetery has gathered the dead of this corner of Collin County since 1881, beginning with the graves of a three-year-old girl and an early settler woman that November. A 1914 tabernacle, raised by local men with funds from ice cream socials and pie suppers, still hosts a Decoration Day observance each May. Among its 720-odd graves lie pioneer families and veterans from the Civil War through the Korean conflict.

Bastrop, TX

In 1828, families answering Stephen F. Austin's call to colonize Mexican Texas arrived from Missouri and settled along Alum Creek. After the widowed Sarah Cottle received her land title in 1831, the community took shape, and in 1857 her descendants deeded ground for a cemetery and a Methodist church that also served as a school. The earliest marked graves date to 1875, with many older burials marked only by fieldstones.

Alvarado, TX

Alvarado grew from David Mitchell's late-1840s trading post as colonists of the Peters empresario grant settled the area. William Balch, the "Father of Alvarado," had the townsite surveyed in 1854 and donated land for a cemetery, school, and union church; the town was named for Alvarado, Mexico. The arrival of two railroads in 1881 and 1884 sparked a boom, and by 1885 Alvarado boasted churches, schools, gins, an opera house, a bank, a newspaper, and about 2,000 residents. Its community school evolved from the 1875 Masonic Institute into Alvarado High School by 1908–09.

Alvarado, TX

In the 1870s, two pioneer families — the Campbells and the Sansoms — buried their dead on a rise of North Texas prairie, the earliest a seven-month-old child laid to rest in 1876. When the railroad reached Alvarado in 1881, newcomers poured in and buried their own kin beside those first family plots, and by 1896 the Knights of Pythias and Odd Fellows had added lodge burial grounds. During the Great Depression the city took over care of the combined grounds, known ever since as Glenwood Cemetery.

Amarillo, TX

Amarillo rose on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle after 1887, taking its name from the Spanish 'Arroyo Amarillo,' the yellow creek nearby. Chosen as the seat of Potter County and incorporated in 1892, the town grew into the transportation, financial, cultural, and medical hub of the region. From here travelers still reach Panhandle landmarks like the Alibates Flint Quarry, Palo Duro Canyon, and Lake Meredith.

Amarillo, TX

When the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad pushed through the Panhandle in 1887, Colorado City merchants led by J. T. Berry platted Amarillo to serve their South Plains trade, and cowboys elected it the seat of newly organized Potter County. Ranchers J. F. Glidden and H. B. Sanborn of the Frying Pan Ranch soon lured residents to a new townsite addition, and from 1892 to 1897 Amarillo was the nation's largest rural cattle-shipping point. Sanborn's maneuvering to win a key rail junction in 1898 sealed the town's future as the commercial center of the Texas Panhandle.

Amarillo, TX

This market grew up to serve ranching, the Texas Panhandle's first permanent industry, in a region transformed between 1874 and 1878 as Native peoples were forced out, buffalo herds destroyed, and cattle ranches established. Longhorns were once trailed to Dodge City, but the railroad's arrival in 1887 made Amarillo the nation's largest rural cattle shipping point. The Western Stockyards, founded in 1904, evolved into the Amarillo Livestock Auction, which opened in 1935 and grew into one of the country's busiest cattle auctions.

San Bernardino County, CA

Rising from the Mojave beside old Route 66, Amboy Crater is a near-symmetrical cinder cone about 250 feet high and 1,500 feet across, born of one of the youngest volcanic fields in the United States. Ash and cinders flung up by eruptions built its cone above the surrounding lava flows. Long a curiosity for travelers on the Mother Road, it was recognized as a National Natural Landmark.