Westward Expansion

New York, NY · est. 1965

Edward Livingston lived on this Lower Manhattan site as a young man in the 1780s and 90s, at the start of a career that would carry him across the young republic. He served New York as congressman and mayor, then reinvented himself in Louisiana after the Purchase, returning to Congress and the Senate before becoming Secretary of State and minister to France. He is best remembered for drafting a pioneering criminal code, an early American attempt to reform and humanize the law.

San Augustine, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1801, Edward Oswald LeGrand cast his lot with the Texas independence movement, adding his name to the Texas Declaration of Independence and fighting at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He lived out his years in the new republic and later state, dying in 1870. The State of Texas placed this marker in 1936 during the centennial of independence to honor his role among the republic's founders.

Liberty, TX

A Virginia native, Edward Thomas Branch came to Texas in 1835 and settled in Liberty, fighting as a first sergeant at the Battle of San Jacinto the following spring. He went on to a long public career in the young Republic of Texas—congressman, district judge, postmaster—and later served as speaker of the House in the first state legislature after annexation. He married Anne Cleveland Wharton, daughter of statesman William H. Wharton, and helped charter the Liberty Masonic Lodge.

Longview, TX

Settlers began burying their dead on this ground by the mid-1850s, the earliest recorded being the infant Josephine Rucker in 1855. The cemetery took its name from James William Cartwright Edwards, who came to Texas from Tennessee with his parents around 1850 and set aside 1.6 acres as a family burial ground in 1912. His daughter Margie fenced part of it and endowed a trust for its upkeep before her death in 1962.

Rocksprings, TX

Spread across the Edwards Plateau and dipping into the scenic Nueces Valley, Edwards County was created in 1858 and organized in 1883 from the old Bexar district, taking its name from early Texas colonizer Haden Edwards. Ranching built its economy, and it once styled itself the Angora goat capital of the world. The county seat moved to Rocksprings in 1891, whose courthouse survived a fire in 1897 and, in 1927, a devastating tornado that killed 72 people.

Rocksprings, TX

Created in 1858 from Bexar County and organized in 1883, Edwards County was named for Haden Edwards, the empresario who led the short-lived Fredonian War of 1827 in an early revolt against Mexican authority. The county seat began at Leakey in 1883 and moved to Rocksprings in 1890. The marker records the frontier origins of this rugged Hill Country county.

Rocksprings, TX

Rising from rusticated limestone quarried in the Southwest Texas hill country, the Edwards County Courthouse was raised in 1891 by the Kerrville contracting firm of Davey and Schott, a stout Late Victorian statement of civic permanence in a sparsely settled frontier county. In 1927 a catastrophic storm—one of the deadliest tornadoes in Texas history, claiming some 70 lives at Rocksprings—tore at its roof, and the community rebuilt rather than abandon it. Named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1973, it still anchors the county seat.

Churchill County, NV

The springs and streams of Edwards Creek Valley made it a vital gathering ground for Native peoples, where Shoshone families moved seasonally for seeds and small game and wintered in camps later shared by Northern Paiutes. In 1854 Colonel John Reese found a route through the valley shorter than the Humboldt trail, and after surveyor James Simpson formalized it in 1859 it carried the Pony Express, the Overland Telegraph, and the overland stages. Serving too as a passageway to the 1862 Austin gold rush, it remained the region's principal commercial artery until 1880.

Plainview, TX

Edwin Lowden Lowe, born in Mississippi, studied law and served in the Arkansas legislature before heading to Texas in the 1880s, losing his wife along the way as the wagon train halted at Buffalo Gap. Joining his friend Z. T. Maxwell at Hackberry Groves, each man donated land to establish the county seat that became Plainview. Lowe served as the town's first postmaster and helped set it on its feet.

Egypt, TX

In 1838, during the Republic of Texas, William Jones Elliot Heard bought more than 2,000 acres in what became Wharton County and founded the Egypt Plantation, setting aside three acres for a family burying ground. Its oldest marked grave, covered like others by a brick crypt, belongs to Heard's young son George, who died in 1854, and his wife America was laid to rest here the following year. Still tended by Heard's descendants, including the Northington family, the cemetery holds many of his heirs and a number of unmarked graves.

Brazos County, TX

El Camino Real, the 'Royal Road,' ran roughly a thousand miles from Saltillo in Mexico into present-day Louisiana, following ancient Indian and buffalo trails. Its oldest marked segment was blazed in 1691 under Domingo Terán de los Ríos to link the provincial capital with the Spanish missions of East Texas, and in 1820 Moses Austin traveled it to San Antonio to request the land grant that opened Texas to Anglo-American settlement. In 1918 the state and the Daughters of the American Revolution set granite markers every five miles along the Texas route.

Normangee, TX

The Camino Real—the Old San Antonio Road—was first blazed in 1691 by Domingo Terán de los Ríos, first provincial governor of Texas, guiding a mission expedition with Father Damián Massanet from the Rio Grande across a chain of rivers to the missions of East Texas. Generations of explorers, soldiers, and settlers followed the same route, among them Moses Austin in 1820, and the Republic of Texas later made the road a boundary for its land grants. This 1936 centennial marker honors that ancient highway of empires.

Benchley, TX

El Camino Real — the King's Highway, also called the Old San Antonio Road — was the great overland route by which Spanish colonization reached into Texas, formally marked by the first Texas governor in 1691 but following far older paths worn by buffalo, Native peoples, and traders. Over the centuries it carried explorers like La Salle and St. Denis, mission-founders such as De León and Massanet, and finally Moses Austin and the thousands of American settlers who followed him in 1820. Soldiers and supply trains moved along it through the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War.

El Paso, TX

El Camino Real, the 'King's Highway,' was the great royal road linking Mexico City to the far northern Kingdom of New Mexico across the vast Spanish empire. From 1581 onward, conquistadors, priests, merchants, and settlers passed this way, their ox-carts and mule-trains carrying the traffic of a new realm. For centuries the road was the artery of Spanish colonial life in the Southwest.

Seguin, TX

El Capote Ranch traces to Jose De La Baume, a French officer who came to North America with Lafayette, fought in the American Revolution, and later won a 27,000-acre Spanish land grant in 1806 that Mexico reaffirmed after independence. Virginia's Michael Erskine acquired it in 1840, raising cattle he drove to California and New Orleans and hosting notable travelers along the San Antonio–Gonzales road. Part of the land later passed to Edith Kermit Carow, Theodore Roosevelt's wife, and Roosevelt reportedly rode a ranch-bred horse at San Juan Hill in 1898.

Encino, TX

A magnificent live oak once spread its canopy over this stretch of the South Texas plains, growing in a hollow scooped out by sheltering livestock and eroding winds. "The Oak in the Hole" guided early trails and land grants, sheltered a stagecoach station, and gave the nearby town of Encino its name. An extended drought killed the great tree in the 1890s.

Shafter, TX

In the mid-19th century rancher Milton Faver built El Fortin de la Cienega, a fortified adobe compound on defensible ground along Cienega Creek, as the second headquarters of the vast Presidio County ranching empire he began in the 1850s. Natural springs watered the cattle, gardens, corrals and workers' dwellings, and Faver employed Mexican vaquero families to run the operation. After his death in 1889 the property passed to his son Juan and later to neighboring ranchers, remaining in their families until the 1980s.

Shafter, TX

Built in 1857, El Fortin del Cibolo was the fortified heart of Milton "Don Meliton" Faver's ranching empire in the Big Bend country. Guided to the area's dependable springs, Faver seized control of the region's only steady water, irrigating vast gardens and a peach orchard whose crops fed soldiers at Fort Davis and the miners of nearby Shafter. Its thick adobe walls, corner towers, and gun ports made it the first major outpost between Fort Davis and the Rio Grande.

Cestohowa, TX

In the 1700s the Spanish crown planted forts across its northern frontier to guard ranches and missions, and El Fuerte del Cibolo stood watch over the ranch country between San Antonio and La Bahía. Manned in two stretches between 1734 and 1782, its small garrison protected herds and settlers on land the King of Spain had granted to private ranchers. Remarkably, soldiers from this outpost helped drive cattle to the Gulf Coast to supply Bernardo de Gálvez's forces fighting the British — a Spanish contribution to American independence.

Geneva, TX

Near here stood El Lobanillo, a Spanish rancho and pueblo tied to Gil Ybarbo, who left his ailing mother and other refugees here in 1773 when Spain forced colonists out of East Texas and western Louisiana. The land was formally granted in 1794 and passed in the early 1800s to John Maximillian, and the site is remembered as the oldest continuously occupied place in East Texas.

Anthony, TX

Named for the mountain pass that gave it life, El Paso has long been a gateway—first for Indigenous peoples, then for Spanish priests, gold-seekers, traders, and stagecoaches funneling through the Rio Grande corridor. Federal troops occupied this borderland longer than any other part of Texas during the Civil War, and the city grew into an agricultural, industrial, and military center dotted with Spanish missions.

El Paso, TX

El Paso's story runs four centuries deep, from the Indian peoples who lived here before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s through Spanish colonization, Mexican rule, and Anglo industrialization. The Rio Grande became an international border, splitting the old El Paso del Norte into what became Ciudad Juárez to the south and El Paso to the north. Fort Bliss in 1854, the Butterfield Overland Mail in 1858, and the railroads of the 1880s brought booming growth to this crossroads at the pass.

El Paso, TX

El Paso del Río del Norte — the Pass of the North — is the lowest snow-free route through the Rocky Mountains between the Atlantic and Pacific, and for that reason it became a great artery of continental travel. Through it run the trunk lines of telegraph and railroad that knit the modern nation together, and the city of El Paso grew up to mark the spot and carry on its name. This marker was placed in 1936 during the Texas Centennial.

El Paso, TX

The first ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in all of Texas was organized in El Paso in 1918, its members meeting in homes and later the Odd Fellows Hall until they could raise a building of their own. Completed in 1931, this Mission Revival chapel announced their permanence with a rose window, a Renaissance-style arcade, and an arcaded tower. It marks the church's earliest institutional foothold in the state.

Freer, TX

In 1868 English immigrant Edward Nixon Gray and his wife Rosa Garza-Garcia Gray began building El Rancho La Gloria, which through steady land purchases grew into one of south Texas's largest ranches—some 40,000 acres running thousands of cattle, sheep, and horses, with a 22-room mansion and its own school. Drought, disease, and economic depression brought its decline in the 1890s; Gray died in 1897 and his widow sold the homestead in 1901. Later owners undertook preservation of the site.

Hidalgo, TX

Born in New York City in 1806, Elder B. Barton threw in his lot with the Texas cause and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive clash that secured the Republic of Texas's independence. Settling along the lower Rio Grande, he married Santitos Balli of Matamoros, raised sixteen children, and parlayed his veteran land grants and a supply business into a lasting mark on Hidalgo County's frontier economy. He died on his ranch in 1884, a bridge between the Anglo republic and the older Mexican society of the borderlands.

Waverly Township, PA · est. 1948

Born in Connecticut in 1775, Elder Miller joined the stream of New England settlers who pushed into northeastern Pennsylvania's Abington region around 1800. On his own farm he hosted the township's first church and its first school, serving his neighbors as both preacher and teacher until his death in 1857. His homestead became the seedbed of community life on a raw frontier.

Patroon, TX

North Carolina preacher William Brittain and his wife Rosanna, drawn by the promise of frontier missions, migrated to the Republic of Texas in 1837 and raised a log cabin here. One room served as classroom and chapel for the settlers of the Sabine River steamboat port of East Hamilton. A pioneer Baptist leader, Brittain helped found several Shelby County congregations and served as moderator of the Sabine Association in 1847. When steamboat traffic ended the town faded, leaving only this cemetery on the site of the Brittains' home and chapel.

Gray County, TX

Established on March 20, 1886, Eldridge was the first post office in Gray County, sparing area ranchers a 20-mile ride to Mobeetie for their mail. First proposed under the name Elfin Grove, it stood near a blacksmith shop on McClellan Creek and shifted location more than once. About 1902 it moved south to the railroad, where Eldridge was reborn as the town of Alanreed.

Belton, TX

Ele Bright Baggett and his wife Mary Carolyn began this ornate Queen Anne house in 1892, its gable sunbursts and fish-scale shingles announcing the prosperity of a Bell County cattle family. Ele, his brother, and their father had come home from the Civil War to drive great herds north to the railheads of Kansas and Montana, and Ele parlayed the profits into land, cotton gins, and banking. His father Silas had been among Belton's founders, and the family home stood just across the street.

Clifton, TX

When newly organized Bosque County held its first election in August 1854, most of the ballots — 17 of the 21 cast in the whole county — were polled beneath this oak tree. Neighbors gathered here to choose their first judge, sheriff, clerk, and other officials, an intimate picture of democracy on a thinly settled frontier. In later years the spot, known as Pool Park, hosted the reunions of the county's Old Settlers Association.

Cat Spring, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1805, Elemelech Swearingen brought his family to Texas in 1831 and, when another applicant withdrew, became one of the very last additions to Stephen F. Austin's celebrated 'Old 300' colonists. He farmed near what became Millheim in Austin County, served as its first postmaster, and during the Texas Revolution fought as a second sergeant under Captain Amasa Turner before joining the ill-fated Mier Expedition. He and his wife Angelina raised nine children on the land where they are buried.

Reserve, NM

This monument honors Elfego Baca (1865-1945), the legendary lawman, gunfighter, and later attorney whose defiant stand in 1884 near Frisco, New Mexico became one of the great tales of the territorial Southwest. His quoted boast captures the swagger of a Hispano New Mexican who refused to be pushed around by Anglo cowboys in a tense frontier of shifting power. Baca went on to a long public career as sheriff, lawyer, and politician.

Elgin, TX

Organized in 1888 with the help of the Rev. B. B. Sanders, this Christian (Disciples of Christ) congregation drew its early membership from Elgin and the farming communities around it, worshipping in the local Presbyterian church until it raised its own sanctuary in 1892. The building and its replacement were both leveled by the devastating Gulf storms of 1900 and 1915, yet the congregation rebuilt each time, erecting a lasting home in 1916 and a modern one in 1965. More than a century of worship in a Central Texas railroad town is written into that cycle of loss and renewal.

Elgin, TX

When this congregation organized in 1874, Elgin was a young railroad town on the central Texas prairie, and these Methodists were the first to gather a church there. A modest frame sanctuary of 1882 gave way in 1906 to the Gothic Revival building that still stands, its stairstep gable corbelling, corner pinnacles, and memorial art-glass windows the work of local contractor J. C. Miller. It is a fine example of how growing Texas towns expressed both faith and permanence in brick and colored glass.

Gonzales, TX

Eli Mitchell was among the Anglo-American colonists drawn into the Texas independence movement in the 1830s, serving as a delegate to the 1833 Convention that pressed Mexico for reform. When fighting erupted at Gonzales in 1835 — the "come and take it" opening clash of the Texas Revolution — he took up arms and supplied the fledgling Texian army.

N. Richland Hills, TX

As Anglo settlers pushed into North Texas in the mid-1800s, small farming communities grew up around whatever church, school, or gin a generous neighbor could provide. Eli Smith, a Missouri native who came to Tarrant County in 1859, donated part of his farm about 1876 for a Methodist church and cemetery in the settlement then called Zion. Grateful residents renamed the place Smithfield in his honor, though Smith died suddenly just shy of his thirty-first birthday and lies buried here.

San Marcos, TX

Dr. Eli T. Merriman, a Yale graduate who came to Texas in 1838, built this hand-hewn timber house about 1846 as one of the three original owners of the San Marcos townsite and the area's first physician. He later lived along the coast at Brownsville, Banquete, and Corpus Christi, where his son founded the Corpus Christi "Caller." During the Civil War the family was famously divided, with Merriman and two sons serving the Confederacy while another son fought for the Union.

Nacogdoches, TX

A Georgia native who came west to Texas, Elias E. Hamilton took up arms in the Texas Revolution, fighting in the 1835 storming of Bexar and the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He died young, in 1840, in the East Texas community of Douglass. His marker was raised by the State of Texas in 1936 for the centennial of independence.

New Waverly, TX

Born in Virginia in 1778, Elijah Collard lived the westering life of his generation, settling successively on the Kentucky and Missouri frontiers and fighting in the War of 1812 before migrating to Texas in 1833. He threw in with the Texas independence movement, winning election to the 1835 Consultation at San Felipe and serving on the General Council, then helped organize Montgomery County as one of its first commissioners in 1837. He moved to Walker County in 1840 and died there in 1847, leaving a large family with his wife Mary.

Charco, TX

Alabama native Elijah Ray first came to Texas in 1847 and, during the Civil War, purchased this property and built a home for his family. Like many early Texas dwellings, it featured a central hallway and a two-story porch trimmed with decorative brackets. His son George later took over the homestead and, beyond ranching, became a noted oilman and banker — a family arc that tracks the region's shift from open-range stock raising to a diversified economy.

Edna, TX

Elijah Stapp, born in Virginia in 1783, put his name to the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, joining the founders who severed the young colony from Mexico. He lived out his final years in Jackson County, where he died in 1843. Though the marker records only the barest outline of his life, it fixes his place among the signers of a new nation.

Seguin, TX

This marker honors Elijah Valentine Dale, a veteran of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto—the decisive fight in which Texian forces under Sam Houston secured independence from Mexico in a stunning eighteen-minute rout. Born in Georgia in 1807, Dale was among the settlers who tied their fortunes to the young Republic of Texas, and he lived on into the 1890s in Seguin alongside his Ohio-born wife, Jane. Their shared gravestone quietly binds a family's story to the founding of a nation-state.

Euless, TX

Elisha Adam Euless left Tennessee for Tarrant County in 1867 and became one of the men whose enterprise shaped its rural map. A successful cotton-and-corn farmer and elected constable and later sheriff, he bought land around a two-story grange hall whose lower floor served as school and church, and later acquired a tract with a cotton gin. The community that grew up around the gin and grange took his name, and a post office opened as Euless in 1886.

Bartlett, TX

A Louisiana native who came to the Texas coast as a boy, Elisha Allen joined the revolutionary army and fought at the Siege of Bexar in December 1835. He later explored the frontier with a survey party, raised a family of eight, and helped build a church and schoolhouse in Bell County—a pioneer whose life spanned Texas's transformation from Mexican province to settled statehood.

Crockett, TX

The son of an American Revolution veteran, Tennessee-born Elisha Clapp came to Texas in 1822 and served in a cavalry company at the Battle of San Jacinto during the Texas Revolution. He captained mounted rangers on the frontier and, in 1837, was among the petitioners who organized Houston County, later receiving a captain's commission from President Sam Houston. He also helped found and served as an early trustee of Trinity College in the Alabama community before moving on to Leon County, where he died in 1851.

Winona, TX

Elisha Everett Lott came to Harrison County in 1840 and was elected to the Congress of the Republic of Texas in 1842, working to open East Texas to settlement. After moving to the area in 1845, he helped organize Smith County in 1846 and choose Tyler as its seat, promoted steamboat navigation on the Sabine River, and won a state senate seat in 1853. A Confederate veteran, he died at his Starrville home in 1864.

Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947

Elisha McCurdy was a leading Presbyterian revivalist of the frontier, serving this congregation for forty-six years and lying buried where he preached. In November 1802 he helped lead the great camp-meeting revivals at Cross Roads and Upper Buffalo, drawing thousands from far and near. These gatherings were part of the sweeping religious awakening that swept the western settlements in the early republic.

Round Mountain, TX

Born in Virginia in 1830, Elitha Smith Martin came to Texas in 1856 and, widowed in 1869, moved to Round Mountain with her younger children and built a two-story hotel, a livery stable, and a general mercantile store. Appointed postmaster in 1879, she kept the post office in her store and served in that role for nearly seventeen years.

Elizabeth, WV

This West Virginia town traces its beginnings to 1796, when William Beauchamp settled here in the years just after the Revolution and named the place for the wife of David Beauchamp. But the ground held older significance: in 1752, the frontier scout Christopher Gist passed through on behalf of the Ohio Company, a land venture that dreamed of planting British colonies across the trans-Allegheny west. That dream collided with French claims on the same territory, and the resulting French and Indian War froze the company's plans before they could take root.

Roanoke, TX

Settled in the early 1860s, the town of Elizabeth grew into a trade center with stores, churches, a school, and a Masonic lodge. Tradition holds that William Perry Harmonson donated the acre-and-a-half graveyard in 1867 upon his mother Anna's death. When the Texas and Pacific Railroad bypassed the town in 1881 it began to fade, and today the cemetery — enlarged in 1949 and holding nearly 400 graves — is all that survives of the once-thriving village.

Caldwell, TX

The first Methodist congregation in Burleson County began as a Sunday school in the home of early settler Isaac Addison and later met at the home of Mrs. Elizabeth Scott. Organized around 1839 by the pioneer minister Robert Alexander, it soon raised a small hand-hewn frame building named for Mrs. Scott, whose son Phillip deeded the church and cemetery land in 1878. Membership peaked at 165 in 1885 before the congregation merged with the Cooks Point church around 1907.

Acton, TX

This stone marks the grave of Elizabeth Crockett, second wife of frontier legend David Crockett, who died at the Alamo in 1836. Widowed by his sacrifice, she came to Texas years later to claim the land granted for his service, settling near Acton where she lived out her days. Her simple gravestone, at what is said to be the smallest state historic site in Texas, honors a pioneer woman who followed her husband's legacy to the frontier.

Axtell, TX

Martin and Elizabeth Harper arrived from Tennessee with their five children in 1855, joined by other Scots-Irish families from the American South, and built a cabin, a schoolhouse, and a farm that gave the settlement its first name, Harper's School House. Czech and German immigrants began arriving around 1885, opening a cotton gin and reshaping the community, which took the name Elk when its post office was established in 1894. Over the years Elk boasted stores, a blacksmith, a gristmill, and fraternal lodges, and St. Joseph's Catholic Church, founded in 1925, still stands at the heart of this Czech and German farming community.

Ridgway, PA · est. 1982

Created in 1843 from parts of McKean, Clearfield, and Jefferson counties, Elk County was named for the great herds that once ranged its densely wooded hills. Its seat, Ridgway, dates to a settlement begun in 1824 in this rugged corner of the Pennsylvania Wilds. In 1920 the county became home to the first State Game Lands in Pennsylvania, an early milestone in American wildlife conservation.

Elkhart, TX

Shaded by oak, pine, and crepe myrtle, this Elkhart burial ground took its first grave in 1887 but was not formally established until the Fuller family donated two acres in 1906. Among those resting here is E.V. Douthit — Civil War veteran, town postmaster, and co-owner of Elkhart's first store — alongside veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War to Desert Storm. A cemetery association organized in 1962 has cared for the grounds ever since.

Elkhart, TX

Myrtle Springs Cemetery is the last visible trace of an early Anderson County farming community that grew up around a church, a school, and the myrtle-fringed springs that gave it its name. The land traces to John A. Box, an original settler of David G. Burnet's colony who received his grant from the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas in 1835. Deeded to a cemetery association in 1927, its graves — the oldest dated 1903 — hold generations of the county's settlers, veterans, and community leaders.

Brownwood vicinity, TX

This burial ground began in 1876, the year pioneer minister Noah T. Byars helped found Live Oak Baptist Church and Civil War veteran Silas H. Wood settled his family here from Mississippi. Wood deeded the graveyard to the church in 1884, and it grew alongside a community known first as Gholson and later Elkins. Interments paused during World War II when Camp Bowie displaced the town, then resumed after the camp closed in 1947.

Elko, NV

Elko was born of the railroad at the very end of 1868, when Central Pacific crews staked out lots that filled almost overnight, and within two years thousands of people made it a bustling freight and passenger gateway to the mining country north and south. It even hosted the University of Nevada from 1874 until the school moved to Reno in 1885. By the 1870s Elko had become the marketing heart of northeastern Nevada's vast rangelands, home to cattle barons and governors alike, and it remains the region's economic hub and host of the celebrated Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

Canadian, TX

Also known as Prairie Dell Cemetery, this burial ground has served eastern Hemphill County since 1895, when the infant Dora Calhoun was laid to rest on land donated by George W. Little. Later owners continued to allow the community to use the grounds until the Eller Flat Cemetery Association bought the property in 1912. A nearby schoolhouse, built in 1917, tied the cemetery to the everyday life of the Prairie Dell settlement.