Westward Expansion

Austin, TX

Cattle king Col. Jesse L. Driskill, who drove his fortune up from the open range after moving to Austin in 1869, built this grand hotel in 1885–86 and opened it at Christmas 1886 as the finest in the Southwest. Brick dressed in limestone, it boasted three monumental entrances—one the largest arched doorway in Texas—a separate "Ladies' Entrance," and busts of Driskill and his rancher sons crowning the arches. The colonel personally chose its rich furnishings before leasing the hotel out.

Teague, TX

Julius Driver came from Georgia in 1852, bought frontier headright land in Freestone County, and later set aside 4.5 acres for this burial ground, where his daughter-in-law became the first person interred in 1869. Driver also donated land for a nearby church and school, where Freestone County's Confederate veterans held their first reunion in 1890. A cemetery association has cared for the property since 1915, and hundreds now rest here.

Terrell, TX

This burial ground first served Turner's Point, a settlement founded by Elisha Turner in 1845 on the stage road running between Shreveport, Louisiana, and Dallas. When the town relocated a mile and a half southeast in the 1870s and took the name Poetry, the cemetery remained behind. Its 279 marked graves—the earliest that of Samuel Key, who died in 1871—carry the English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh names of the area's pioneer settlers.

Uvalde, TX

The families of Louis Bohme, Charles Jones, and the Heards came seeking new range land in 1875, giving Dry Frio Canyon its first settlement, post office, and school under the name Heard. In 1885 a well-digger struck mineral water prized for its medicinal qualities, and a promoter soon built a bathhouse and hotel to draw visitors to the springs.

Post, TX

In 1907, cereal magnate C. W. Post—the mind behind Post Foods—launched an ambitious colony on the dry, low-rainfall plains of Garza County that most people thought fit only for grazing. Applying new agricultural methods, he made cotton, milo maize, corn, and oats profitable, and experimented with fruits and vegetables besides. Post sold farms to men of modest means on easy terms, outfitting them with houses, fences, windmills, and electricity, and even built a textile mill so colonists could earn supplemental wages.

Dubina, TX

Named from the Czech word for "oak grove," Dubina was founded in 1856 by Moravian immigrant families who cleared farms in Fayette County. By 1900 the community had grown into a full village with a church, mill, cotton gin, blacksmith, store, and post office. A devastating 1909 storm and a 1912 fire broke its momentum, and the town never fully recovered — but it holds the distinction of being the first Texas settlement founded entirely by Czech-Moravians.

Dublin, TX

Drawn to Erath County in 1936, Madison Square Garden rodeo director Everett Colborn made Dublin a rodeo capital, staging its first "World's Championship Rodeo" in 1940 as a whole-community affair of parades, floats, and volunteers. The 1946 Colborn Bowl was the Southwest's largest outdoor arena, drawing thousands and celebrities like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

Caldwell, TX

In the 1880s Rudolph and Anna Duewall carved a family farm out of Burleson County, and their son Edward and his wife Lizzie raised six children on the land. In 1928 the family replaced the original farmhouse with this vernacular home, whose carpenter thriftily reused timber from the old house and from the county's second courthouse. Its exposed rafters and cross-gabled roof are hallmarks of practical Texas farm building.

Clairette vicinity, TX

On a Sunday in October 1878, elders A. W. Elledge, O. W. Hughart, and D. Shipman gathered seventeen charter members to found the Duffau Baptist Church. Members soon built a sanctuary here, holding services one weekend each month, and after fire destroyed the first building in 1935 they raised the present one. Membership peaked near 125 before the local school consolidated with Hico in 1960 and the settlement declined, leaving this as the community's only active church.

Clairette vicinity, TX

Duffau grew from the late-1850s arrival of settlers like Francis T. Duffau, taking its name and gaining a post office by 1860; it became a busy trade center before fires and a railroad bypass sent it into decline. Nearby mineral wells drew health-seekers to a small resort, and churches, a school, and a cemetery anchored community life for over a century. The graveyard's oldest recorded burial dates to 1865, and among its 950-plus graves lie veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and the Korean War.

Post, TX

So prominent it became Garza County's earliest benchmark, this sandstone height was fixed in 1877–78 by the peg-legged surveyor Jasper Hays as he mapped the bounds of the Llano Ranch, the first property settlers occupied in the county. Tradition holds that a crew member who died was buried near the peak, giving it his name. Hays's original notes, recovered from Mason jars he buried on the summit, later anchored the surveys that laid out C. W. Post's farm colony—one landmark among a landscape of colorfully named local formations.

Seguin, TX

First called Cottonwood Cemetery, this burial ground served the pioneers of the Cottonwood community before it was renamed for H. A. Dugger, who with his wife Nancy gave land for both the cemetery and a school. Its earliest graves are those of Lee Dora Southern and her uncle Asa, killed by robbers while traveling through in 1872; Henry A. Seay added land in 1935. Curbing, grave slabs, and fraternal markers still mark the ground an association has tended since 1959.

Armstrong County, TX

William Miles Dye, born in Kentucky in 1864, came to Texas as a boy and put down roots in newly organized Armstrong County in 1891. He hauled rock from Palo Duro Canyon to help build the county's first jail and raised his family in a dugout, the lower portion of which is still visible. Such earthen dwellings were a practical necessity on the treeless Texas Panhandle, where lumber and stone were scarce.

Alvarado, TX

Dr. John Duke and his wife Martha moved to Johnson County in 1854 and established a farm in what became the Willow Springs Community. When their ten-year-old daughter Zilla died in 1870 they buried her on the family farm, and she was soon joined by siblings and a young relative. In 1879 Dr. Duke deeded the burial ground to the community, and it became the resting place of Willow Springs ranchers, farmers, teachers, merchants, ministers and soldiers.

Arcola, TX

The Duke Community grew from land granted in 1824 to three of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists—David Fitzgerald, who fought at Anahuac, Thomas Barnett, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, and Moses Shipman. Perched on a high bluff above Clear Lake with ample water for steam engines, the site drew railroads by mid-century and became the terminus of the Sugar Land Railway, loading sugarcane at a bustling depot named for storekeeper Duke Hessey. With its store, hotel, and sugar mills, Duke thrived until its post office closed in 1922; today only its cemetery remains.

Athens, TX

Dulcinea Ann Holland came from Athens, Georgia, to Henderson County as a girl in 1847, and local tradition credits her with naming the new town of Athens for her birthplace. Widowed during the 1860s and remarried in 1867, she raised a family, helped found the local Methodist church, and became a respected civic leader. Her life spans the pioneer settlement and maturing of a East Texas community.

Paris, KY

Raised in stone in 1788, when Kentucky was still Virginia's far frontier, Duncan Tavern stood at Paris as a gathering place where pioneers, travelers, and would-be statesmen swapped news over a fire. In the twentieth century the Kentucky Daughters of the American Revolution rescued and restored it, giving the old inn new life as a shrine, museum, and library. Its walls hold the everyday sociability of a frontier that was fast becoming a state.

Gonzales, TX

Scotsman Benjamin Duncan began his ferry across the San Marcos River around 1834, on the eve of the Texas Revolution. Tradition says Susanna Dickinson, a survivor of the Alamo, stopped at Duncan's home while carrying word of the fort's fall to Gonzales, whose men had died in the battle. On hearing the news, Sam Houston ordered the Texas army's retreat and had the town and ferry burned in March 1836; Duncan later rebuilt and ran the crossing until 1866.

Duncanville, TX

First settled by farmers and ranchers in the 1840s and 1850s, this area became "Duncan Switch" in 1881 when the Chicago, Texas & Mexican Central Railroad built a switching station, with local resident John Duncan securing the right-of-way. When a post office application under the name Duncan was denied, the town became Duncanville, opening its post office in 1882. Growth stayed gradual — barely 300 residents by the 1930s — until postwar suburban expansion from nearby Dallas transformed it into a fast-growing commercial center.

Dunn, TX

Dunn began about 1881 as a change station where freighters resting their teams hauled goods north after the Texas & Pacific Railway reached Colorado City. A blacksmith shop and store sprang up to serve the wagon traffic, mail was dropped at the Dunn family home, and a post office named for them opened in 1890 with the first school built the same year. A community well, windmill, and trough once stood in the middle of the road—covered over only when the highway was paved in 1938.

Wheelock vicinity, TX

This burial ground grew from the homestead of James and Isabella Dunn, part of a group of Irish families who sailed to America in 1821 and, after stints in Charleston and Alabama, made the ox-wagon trek to Sterling C. Robertson's Texas colony in the winter of 1833. The cemetery opened in 1836 with the burial of the Dunns' infant child and has served the pioneer families' descendants ever since.

Coon Rapids, MN

Before railroads reached the northern plains, Red River ox-cart trails and the U.S. Military Road carried freight and travelers across what is now suburban Minnesota. The Dunn House stood at this corner as a hotel and stopover where those weary trail users could rest and resupply. It marks the everyday infrastructure of frontier travel in territorial-era Minnesota.

Eureka, TX

James and Isabella Dunn brought their family to Texas in 1832, and their son James Dunn, Jr., moved to Navarro County in 1850 with his wife and his cousin David J. Johnston. A log building known as Dunn's Schoolhouse rose nearby in that decade, and the cemetery began with the 1865 burial of James Jr. on his own property. His wife and members of the Johnston family, several in unmarked graves, joined him here among the area's earliest settlers.

Jones Creek, TX

Carved from Stephen F. Austin's 1828 Mexican land grant, Durazno—Spanish for "peach"—passed on Austin's death in 1836 to his sister Emily Austin Bryan Perry and then to her son William Joel Bryan, who built it into a cotton and sugar plantation. Its grounds held a main house, offices, barns, and a number of slave cabins, and it stayed in the family until 1928. The plantation's wealth, like so much of the antebellum South, rested on the labor of the enslaved.

Mullin, TX

Philip David Duren bought 390 acres here in 1876 and raised a log home, bringing his family from Houston County. His infant daughter Willie Lee, buried in 1878, was the first laid to rest in what became the community cemetery. Duren deeded land for a school that ran until 1947 and, in 1912, guaranteed free burial plots and a church open to all denominations; Pompey Mountain Church still serves the area.

Tool, TX

Durham Avant left North Carolina for Texas in 1834, arriving with his wife Susan during the restless years just before the Texas Revolution. Serving as a Texas Ranger, he helped survey and site the seat of newly formed Henderson County and later opened a hotel in the county seat of Athens. Late in life he enlisted in the Confederate army alongside his son, and died in 1862 not long after joining up.

Hamilton, TX

John Jefferson Durham built this two-story rock residence in 1873, a substantial home on a landholding of several thousand acres in Hamilton County. A Civil War veteran, Durham was the first to teach school in Hamilton and made his mark as a merchant, builder, and community leader. The colonial-style stone house reflects the standing of one of the area's most influential early settlers.

Nacogdoches, TX

This East Texas dwelling sits on land held since the days of Spanish Nacogdoches, owned by the family of a 1779 settler and sold in 1827 to Joseph Durst, then the town's alcalde. Its gable-end chimneys, tapered columns, and paneled shutters mark it as a traditional Anglo settler house, likely built during Durst's tenure in the Mexican-Texas years. Its later owners read like a roll call of Texas history — a San Jacinto veteran, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a Confederate congressman — before a Civil War veteran's family held it for over a century.

Fredericksburg, TX

Carl Durst arrived in the German settlement country of the Texas Hill Country in 1873 and started with a single-room cabin, adding on as his family and fortunes grew. The house expanded room by room over the decades—including an 1896 stone addition that sometimes housed teachers for the nearby Cherry Mountain School, on land the Dursts had donated. What survives is less a single building than a family's life told in wood and stone.

Edna, TX

Built around 1860 in the town of Texana and later moved to Edna, this home sheltered many of the area's first families and typifies the modest frame dwellings of antebellum Jackson County. Its relocation echoes the fate of Texana itself, a river town that faded when the railroad passed it by. The house endures as a recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

San Diego, TX

Created by the legislature in 1858 and organized in 1879, Duval County took shape as settlers arrived — first from Mexico in the mid-19th century, then Anglo pioneers in the 1860s — building an economy on ranching and farming. The railroad's arrival in the late 1870s swelled population and employment, and the early-1900s discovery of oil, gas, and uranium brought a fresh wave of settlement. Its layered history reflects the blended cultures and resource booms of South Texas.

Saint Jo, TX

The Dye Mound community took shape in the late 1850s, named for a trapper who kept a trading post at the foot of the hills. Cemetery trustees bought more than three acres in 1889, and the growing cotton town raised its first church by 1890. Decline set in by the late 1920s, and by 1956 only a ghost town remained—though the cemetery still serves the area.

Moscow, TX

Built in 1856 by a craftsman known as "Daddy Poe," the E. C. Matthews Home is a striking survivor of early Texas building ingenuity. Its columns were fashioned from hollowed pine trees and it features an unusual swinging upstairs porch—vernacular solutions born of local materials and frontier resourcefulness. The home was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Snyder, TX

Built in 1908 as a rancher's town home in Snyder, the E. W. Clark House was a social center outfitted to last, with solid brass hardware, beveled-glass doors, and embossed leather wainscoting. Such in-town residences let West Texas ranching families enjoy the comforts and society of the county seat while their operations ran out on the range. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Colorado City, TX

Built in 1890 in the young ranching town of Colorado City, this West Texas home later became the birthplace of Martin Dies Jr., the influential congressman who chaired an early House committee investigating un-American activities. It was also home to the colorful ranching couple G. W. and Alice Garrett Plaster, Mitchell County stockraisers for more than half a century. The house links pioneer ranch life to national politics.

Clute, TX

Eagle Island was the Brazoria County home of William Harris Wharton and his wife Sarah Ann Groce Wharton, and it served as a gathering place for the leading figures of the Texas independence movement. William Wharton was a delegate to the 1832 convention, president of the pivotal 1833 convention, a senator in the Republic of Texas Congress, and the young republic's first minister to the United States. Here the political currents that carried Texas from Mexican province to independent republic ran through the parlor.

Eagle Pass, TX

Eagle Pass got its first post office in 1849, the same year the Army established Fort Duncan on this stretch of the Rio Grande border. After several moves, the postal service completed this Renaissance Revival building in 1912 to a design by supervising architect James K. Taylor. When a new post office opened in 1964, the well-preserved structure found a second life as the city's public library.

Oglesby, TX

Organized in 1858 by the Baptist missionary John McLain from an older fellowship known as the Church of Onion Creek, Eagle Springs Baptist grew as its namesake community thrived, baptizing new members in the waters of the Leon River. By 1880 the surrounding settlement boasted grocery stores, doctors, a post office, and a school, but families drifted away in the new century, the school closed in 1935, and the congregation disbanded in 1948. The church building endured for reunions and remains one of the few structures left of the vanished community.

Allamoore, TX

For nearly three decades this remote West Texas spot served as a station on the Overland and Chihuahua trails, where stagecoaches and wagon trains paused on the long haul between the settled East and the far frontier. From 1854 to 1882 it offered mail, passengers, and supplies to travelers crossing one of the loneliest stretches of the American Southwest.

Carson City, NV

Sitting between Nevada's early settlement at Genoa and the silver riches of the Comstock Lode, Eagle Valley — today's Carson City — became a crossroads of westward travel and communication. The Carson branch of the California Emigrant Trail funneled overland pioneers through here, and the same corridor carried the first overland telegraph in 1859, the Pony Express, the Butterfield-Wells Fargo stages, and eventually the Virginia & Truckee Railway in 1906.

Langtry, TX

Near the dramatic confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande, people have crossed this rugged land for centuries. A pair of golden eagles nesting on the far cliff gave their name to the canyon, the river crossing, and the railroad camp that grew on this bank—a crossing used over the years by Native tribes, ranchers, soldiers, and Texas Rangers. The settlement later became Langtry, but the eagle's nest across the water long remained a familiar landmark.

Ponder, TX

Noah and Susan Eakins brought their family from Kentucky to Denton County in 1855, part of the wave of settlers filling north Texas before the Civil War. The cemetery on their land began around 1855-58 with the burial of neighbor Angelina Rayburn, fatally burned cooking over an open fire, followed by an infant of another pioneer family in 1861. It grew into a community burial ground that still serves the rural area today.

West Lake Hills, TX

Established in 1874, Eanes Cemetery gave travelers and residents of eastern Travis County a resting place when they had no family graveyard of their own. The land came from early settlers William and Sophia Teague, who also deeded ground nearby for a church and a school. Some graves are marked only by rough fieldstones, while the earliest legible stone — that of Mike M. Teague — dates to 1895.

Austin, TX

Alexander Eanes moved from Mississippi to Texas in 1845 and had acquired this Travis County ranch by 1857, later selling it to his brother Robert, who came west after the Civil War. A log cabin on the ranch became the first Eanes school, and the surrounding community took the family name as well. In 1883 the ranch passed to Robert's son-in-law, Hudson Boatner Marshall, who moved the ranch house to a site by the nearby creek.

Jacksonville, TX

In 1858 Elijah Earle set aside this land as a burial ground, reportedly choosing his own plot and marking it by carving his initials into a tree. The cemetery became a resting place for East Texas pioneers and their descendants, including a veteran of the Texas Revolution, soldiers of the Civil War and both World Wars, and victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic. Expanded over more than a century, it remains cared for by a community association.

Jacksonville, TX

The Earle's Chapel community grew from families who settled Prairie Branch in the late 1830s and 1840s, including a veteran of the Texas War for Independence and pioneer Elijah Earle, who built a mill and gave land for a school and church. A log church rose here in 1859, burned in 1875, and was promptly rebuilt as the Earle's Chapel Society organized with twenty-five charter members. A new building followed in 1889 and, though battered by a 1987 tornado, still serves descendants of those first families.

Belton, TX

A two-story log jail first stood on this site in 1854, replaced in 1873 by this building of native limestone. In 1874 vigilantes gathered from across Texas raided the jail and executed nine men held on charges of murder, robbery, and horse theft—an act contemporaries credited with helping end the region's lawlessness. The building later served the city of Belton before being sold, and was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Rio Vista, TX

Texas had been famed for beef since Republic days, and during the Civil War its herds fed much of the Confederacy—civilians and soldiers alike—along a web of trails running to Vicksburg, Natchez, Mobile, Little Rock, and beyond. Drovers swam cattle across rivers as wide as the Mississippi, and the hazards ran to mistaken arrests: one officer and his son died in prison on such a drive. Johnson County supplier Meredith Hart, a veteran of 1836, kept sending beef even after being cheated with counterfeit money.

Lexington, TX

The Methodist Episcopal Church South bought this cemetery site in 1850, though some burials predate it. Among those resting here are San Jacinto veterans — including Lexington's founder, Capt. James Shaw, and William Hawkins — Civil War soldiers, an early county judge's wife, and, in a set-apart section, enslaved people.

Graham, TX

Built in 1885 on land donated by town founder Col. E.S. Graham, this red-brick church first served the First Baptist congregation, organized in 1880 and dedicated with a sermon by Elder W.M. Farmer. When the Baptists built anew in 1908, the building passed to the Church of Christ, which has since worshiped here longer than any other congregation in town. Its original bell tower and unpainted brick marked it as one of the young frontier community's earliest permanent institutions.

Llano, TX

In 1756, under commission from the governor of Spanish Texas, Bernardo de Miranda led a party of 23 from San Antonio to examine Cerro del Almagre, a red-ochre hill rumored to be rich in silver. Reaching Honey Creek and the junction of the Llano and Colorado rivers, Miranda gathered ore that assayed at only ten ounces of silver per hundred pounds. That meager yield, combined with transport difficulties and the threat of Native raids, led Spain to abandon plans for further mining.

Bellville, TX

The roots of Bellville Methodist Church reach back to 1822, when Thomas B. Bell arrived among Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred and donated fifty acres for a church and camp meetings between Piney and Caney Creeks. Frontier revivals took hold there, and at an 1835 gathering the future Alamo hero William Barret Travis spoke and pledged to help bring Methodist preachers to Texas. After decades of camp-meeting worship, proceeds from the land's sale built a German Methodist Episcopal church in Bellville in 1882, and a new sanctuary rose on this site in 1886.

Galveston, TX

Long a crossroads for Native peoples, privateers, and Spanish and French explorers, Galveston Island briefly became the seat of the Republic of Texas in 1836. As Santa Anna's army pushed east, President David G. Burnet's improvised cabinet fled Washington-on-the-Brazos and sheltered here until the Texan victory at San Jacinto. From this port the fledgling Texas Navy, later reorganized under President Lamar and Commodore Edwin W. Moore, guarded the coast against Mexican invasion until U.S. annexation in 1846.

Junction, TX

Carved from Bexar County in 1858 and named for a young lieutenant who fell at the Alamo, Kimble County waited until 1876 to organize itself formally — its very first district court convening the next spring beneath a live oak north of here, with Texas Rangers on hand to keep order on a raw frontier. The early government struggled to hold onto a home: fire destroyed its first frame courthouse and all the county records in 1884, and a second stone building burned partially in 1888 before the present courthouse rose in 1929.

Bastrop, TX

Long home to the Tonkawa and Comanche, this stretch of the Colorado River became strategic when Spanish explorers blazed part of El Camino Real, the King's Highway, across it in the years after 1691. A fort and community rose here in 1805 to guard the road, and by 1825 the site was one of the first settlements in Stephen F. Austin's colony, first called Mina and then renamed Bastrop in 1837 for the influential land agent Baron de Bastrop. Its founding families went on to serve in the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War, and the town became county seat and home to a noted military academy.

Edna, TX

Organized in 1837 and named for President Andrew Jackson, this region holds layers of early Texas history: it was homeland of the Karankawa people, crossed in 1528 by the shipwrecked Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca, and site of La Salle's ill-fated Fort St. Louis of 1685. Most of the county later fell within Stephen F. Austin's grant, where members of his "Old 300" founded the town of Santa Anna in 1832—renamed Texana and, in time, succeeded by Edna.

Livingston, TX

Long before roads were surveyed, the Creeks, Alabamas, Coushattas, and Kickapoos of this region laced it with trails for trade and travel, including Long King's Trace and the Coushatta Trace reaching toward Mexico. After Anglo settlement began in the 1820s, these Native paths hardened into stagecoach roads, while Trinity River boats served some twenty landings along Polk County's riverfront. Roads and river together carried the county's produce and people for generations.

San Felipe, TX

When Stephen F. Austin was planting his colony in the mid-1820s, travel meant following wagon ruts and notched trees through the Texas wilderness. Within a decade San Felipe had become a crossroads from which eight or more roads radiated, tying into great arteries like the San Antonio Road and the Atascosita Road to the United States. Yet even the main routes were dust in summer and impassable bog in winter — a reminder of how hard-won overland travel was before the modern highway era.

Cayuga, TX

When Anderson County organized in 1846, the land west of Catfish Creek was thinly settled, and community life gathered around a few key figures. On his own land, Georgia native Charles Gilmore hosted the first polling place, school, and church meetings, later donating ground for a cemetery and sanctuary and serving as the area's first postmaster in 1852. Nearby Wild Cat Bluff thrived as a Trinity River ferry crossing until the river became unnavigable after the Civil War, and over time these early communities faded as activity shifted elsewhere.

Bethel, OH

This burying ground holds the founding generation of Bethel, a village laid out in Ohio's Clermont County during the young republic's push across the Appalachians into the Northwest Territory. Among those at rest is Obed Denham, who donated the plot and platted the town, and Thomas Morris, who rose from the frontier to the United States Senate. The presence of "The Unknown Hunter" — a wanderer Denham befriended and the first person laid to rest here — is a reminder of how thin the line still was between settlement and wilderness in these years.