Westward Expansion

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

In 1751, when Carlisle was still a raw county seat on Pennsylvania's western frontier, the Penn family set aside this square for the Church of England, and the first church building rose the following year. St. John's Episcopal congregation has worshipped on the ground ever since, an unbroken thread of community life stretching back before the Revolution. The grant reflects the proprietors' careful planning of Carlisle as an ordered outpost of colonial society.

Era, TX

Settled in the 1870s in a fertile farming belt, the village of Era was platted by merchant J. N. Gist and got its post office in 1881, named for a young girl, Era Hargroves, who had recently died. It soon bustled with a blacksmith, cotton gin, hotel, stores, and three churches, and chartered the Era Institute in 1897 offering classes from primary through college level. Among its notable sons was Robert E. Thomason, later a U.S. congressman and federal judge.

San Antonio, TX

Erasmo Seguin (1782–1857), born in San Antonio, was a Tejano civic leader who helped found the city's first public school and served as its postmaster under Mexican rule. He escorted Stephen F. Austin's colonists to Bexar in 1821 and became a lifelong ally of the Anglo-American settlers. When Santa Anna turned dictator, Seguin joined the protests, aided the patriots in the 1835 siege of Bexar, lodged David Crockett, and provisioned the Alamo—before persecution by newcomers drove him to retire to his ranch, where he died in 1857.

China Spring, TX

Erath was one of McLennan County's earliest settlements, serving as a voting precinct by 1850 as settlers were drawn to fertile land between the Brazos and Bosque rivers. Named for surveyor and legislator George B. Erath, who laid out Waco in 1849, the community grew to hold churches, a school, cotton gins, a gristmill, and shops. Its post office closed in 1907 and its school consolidated away in the 1920s; by the time Waco annexed the area in the 1980s only a Baptist church remained.

Cooper, TX

Delta County takes its name from its triangular shape between the forks of the Sulphur River. Before Texas independence, a United States Indian commission oversaw Caddo, Delaware, Quapaw, and Seminole people living here, and after 1836 families from Kentucky, Tennessee, and elsewhere settled the fork. Residents petitioned for their own county, and the Texas Legislature created Delta County in 1870, naming its new county seat for legislator Leroy Cooper.

City of Rochester, NY

In the heart of Rochester, the Erie Canal once crossed the Genesee River on a great stone aqueduct — a water bridge carrying boats over a river. The 1842 structure marked here replaced an earlier, smaller aqueduct from the 1820s, reflecting the canal's enormous traffic and the city's explosive growth as the nation's first inland boomtown. Powered by the river's falls and the canal's commerce, Rochester earned its nickname as the "Flour City" by milling grain shipped along this waterway. The aqueduct later carried the city's subway and today underlies Broad Street downtown.

Honey Grove, TX

A Fannin County native, Erwin Evans Smith was captivated as a youth by the culture and folklore of Southwestern ranching. He studied art in Chicago and Boston hoping to become a Western sculptor, and through the early 1900s spent his summers on working ranches, sketching and photographing cowboys at their labor and leisure. Though he never realized his dream of sculpting, he left behind more than two thousand photographs that stand as a priceless record of life on the open range.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Long before highways crossed this brushy corner of South Texas, travelers on the old Presidio Road paused at Espantosa Lake, a reliable watering and camping spot on the earliest route linking Texas with the Mexican state of Coahuila. Generations of teamsters, soldiers, and traders knew the lake, and its lonely reputation gathered a thick crust of legend. In 1876 the spot saw real violence when Texas Rangers cornered and killed a band of outlaws here.

Brownsville, TX

This graveyard is named for Carlos Villarreal Esparza, whose family had ranched the surrounding land since the early 19th century. When flooding threatened the original burial ground, his widow Francisca moved his grave and others to this site in 1888, and family tradition holds that Carlos's parents rest here as well. The cemetery holds veterans of both World Wars, law officers, Texas Rangers, and civic leaders—a lasting record of the area's Mexican American pioneers.

San Elizario, TX

In 1582 the Franciscan Fray Bernardino Beltrán organized an expedition from northern Mexico to search for two missionaries left behind in what is now New Mexico, escorted by the merchant-rancher Antonio de Espejo. Reaching the El Paso area by early 1583, they learned the friars had been killed by Indians; Beltrán turned back, but Espejo pressed on to investigate rumors of silver and rich pueblos. His party became the first Europeans to explore the country from the Pecos Valley to La Junta, where the Rio Grande meets the Conchos.

Austin, TX

In 1709, with Spain uneasy about its long-standing but thinly held claim to Texas, a small goodwill expedition set out from a Rio Grande mission: Captain Pedro de Aguirre with fourteen soldiers escorting the Franciscan fathers Isidro de Espinosa and Antonio de San Buenaventura Olivares. They came seeking the Tejas people but did not find them here, and lacking orders to cross the Colorado River, the padres sent an invitation to the East Texas Indians and turned back near this site. The trip reflected Spain's anxious response to news of French traders probing Texas.

Dickens, TX

Espuela began in 1870 with J.H. Parrish's dugout store on Duck Creek, serving travelers, buffalo hunters, and cattlemen as the last Native tribes left the region in 1876. The vast Espuela Land & Cattle Company soon fenced more than half a million acres, and the town it anchored grew into the county's largest, becoming the first seat of Dickens County. After losing the county seat to Dickens in 1892 and the railroad-era shift to nearby Spur, the town faded—today only its cemetery remains.

Lorenzo, TX

In 1878 Paris Cox, an Indiana Quaker, crossed the Llano Estacado with buffalo hunters and saw a place for a colony; he went home to advertise cheap farmland and drew settlers to the high plains. The community—first called Maryetta for his wife, then renamed Estacado—became the first county seat of Crosby County and even built a courthouse before the seat moved away in the 1890s. This cemetery holds Cox and many of the pioneers who first broke the sod of the Staked Plains.

Hallettsville, TX

John Hallett, a member of Stephen F. Austin's colony and a former sea captain, built the area's first home — a log cabin — in 1833. After his death, his widow Margaret gave land for the town in 1852, when it became the county seat and took her family's name. The state recognized the site as a Historic Landmark in 1967.

Brownsville, TX

On the ranchlands of the lower Rio Grande, María Estéfana Goseascochea de Cavazos y de Cortina — Doña Estéfana — set aside this burial ground by the mid-1800s on land she held from the Espíritu Santo grant. Widowed twice, she moved her family to Rancho el Carmen in 1848, building a house and chapel and anchoring a ranching community even as speculators stripped away part of her land despite a court in her favor. When she died in 1867, a Brownsville paper remembered her boundless philanthropy, and her son Juan Cortina became one of south Texas's most storied figures.

San Saba, TX

Elijah Estep, San Saba County's second tax assessor-collector, built this two-story building of locally quarried limestone facing the courthouse in the early 1870s, running a mercantile store nearby. Long mislabeled the "Burden Hotel," records show it was Estep's own construction on a lot he bought in 1871. It later served as attorney Leigh Burleson's law office and passed through other hands, narrowly escaping demolition in the 1990s before being donated and restored to its 1911 appearance.

Mansfield, TX

Estes Cemetery began as the private plot of Kentucky-born pioneers Sarah and James Estes, who settled in Tarrant County by the mid-1850s; Sarah's 1857 grave is the oldest marked burial. By 1867 the family opened the grounds to their neighbors, and as the communities of Webb, Gertie, and Britton grew nearby, they too laid their dead here. With its arched entry, old upright stones, and sloping ground, the cemetery still serves the descendants of southeast Tarrant County's first settlers.

Itasca, TX

Eureka Cemetery served a small farming community drawn to Hill County's rich blackland soil in the 1870s to grow cotton. The graveyard began, oral tradition says, with the burial of a young niece of landowner William R. Kimmons, though the earliest documented grave is that of an infant Kimmons son in 1887; of its twenty marked graves, thirteen belong to children under ten. With the old school and church long gone, the cemetery is the last physical trace of Eureka itself.

Blanket vicinity, TX

Local tradition holds that the settlers who founded nearby Blanket around 1870 named the town for a Native American blanket found on a creek bank. This cemetery served that rural community, its earliest marked grave belonging to Luperda Cox, who died in 1876. Among those buried here are many of the area's first settlers and several teachers from the vanished Eureka School that once stood across the road.

Eureka, TX

Settlement in this Navarro County area began in the 1840s, and in 1878 members of the local Richland Associate Reform Presbyterian Church received donated land for a church and graveyard. The first recorded burial, in 1885, was of infant Nellie E. Sloan, and the cemetery grew to about thirteen acres by 1995. It holds the graves of local religious, educational, and business leaders alongside veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to World War II.

Eureka, TX

Circuit-riding ministers served scattered Methodist settlers in this Navarro County area before the Civil War, and by the 1880s a formal congregation had formed. In 1881 the church acquired land from Mark H. Bird to build a sanctuary and establish a graveyard now known as Bird Cemetery. After winds destroyed the first sanctuary, the congregation moved to this site in 1902 and has served the community ever since.

Kosse, TX

Settled in the 1840s along the stage routes between Franklin, Springfield, Waco, and Marlin, Eutaw grew into a proper town with a post office, Masonic lodge, churches, school, and shops. Its young men rode off to the Civil War as the "Eutaw Blues" of the 12th Texas Cavalry. But when the Houston & Texas Central Railroad bypassed the town in 1870, its fortunes collapsed, and today only Salem Baptist Church marks the site.

Leona, TX

Settlers from the Old South began arriving on Mustang Creek around 1840, and the William P. Evans family gave the surrounding community its name after coming from Alabama in 1845. In the mid-1880s residents built both a school and, in 1886, a Methodist Episcopal Church, South on two acres donated by W. J. Cox. After fire damaged the original frame building in 1919, the congregation rebuilt an identical church that still stands.

Evant, TX

Evant grew from Langford Cove, a settlement founded in 1855 by Asa Langford, and from the arrival of Evan T. Brooks, who platted a townsite in 1881. The town took its name from combining Brooks's first name and middle initial, and the nearby Cove post office moved and was renamed Evant in 1885. A one-room plank schoolhouse of 1878 gave way to a stone building that served the district until 1976, the same year residents voted to incorporate.

Anahuac, TX

In the spring of 1832, Col. Juan Bradburn, commanding the Mexican garrison at Anahuac, jailed William B. Travis, Patrick C. Jack, and other American colonists and refused to hand them over for civil trial. Alarmed settlers rallied at Liberty and marched on Anahuac, and when Bradburn broke his promise to free the prisoners, they sent to Brazoria for men and cannon—precipitating the Battle of Velasco on June 26. The standoff ended when the Mexican commander from Nacogdoches released the colonists and arrested Bradburn.

Dallas, TX

This farmstead traces to the Peters Colony, the first organized settlement in north Texas, established under a land grant to help populate the young Republic of Texas. Everard Sharrock, Jr. built his homestead here in 1847; after the family left, the land passed to an Irish immigrant's family who added the 1872 farmhouse. Its log cabin, barn, and outbuildings, joined with hand-hewn v-notches, survive as the earliest known collection of log structures in the Dallas area on their original site.

Gustine, TX

The community of Evergreen took shape in the late 1860s, and this burial ground was set aside in 1885 when Mrs. W.F. Hampton became the first person interred here. When a post office opened in 1888 under Samuel Gustine, the town took his name. The cemetery holds generations of farming, freighting, and merchant families—the Boyds, Boltons, Couches, and others—along with Confederate and World War veterans, enduring even after the old Evergreen settlement itself faded away.

McGregor, TX

In 1860 pioneer settlers William and Margaret Oliver gave land near McGregor for a church, a school, and this cemetery. From 1866 to 1907 area families gathered here for camp meetings of worship and song, a tradition revived in 1941 as annual reunions of the pioneers' descendants. Their grandson, Major Fred N. Oliver, later endowed a trust for the cemetery's perpetual care.

Beeville, TX

On land donated in 1859 as Beeville's townsite took shape, this South Texas burying ground was formally purchased by the county in 1862 for use as a public cemetery. Over the following decades neighbors added strips of adjoining land and fenced the grounds, knitting the graveyard into the fabric of the growing frontier community. A 1970 restoration preserved the resting place of the town's pioneer families.

Victoria, TX

Victoria's earliest citizens resisted a public cemetery, preferring home burials even after an 1846 ordinance banned the practice, so a new burial ground took shape in the 1850s on land John McCrabb bought from a Republic of Texas grant. After the Civil War, graves were relocated here from the old city cemetery and from the razed St. Mary's Church, and in 1876 local women organized the Victoria Ladies' Cemetery Association to rescue the neglected plot, naming it "Evergreen" in 1883. Among its 9,000 graves lies Martín de León, the empresario who founded Victoria, alongside veterans of the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War.

Evergreen, TX

Founded around 1862 — seven years before San Jacinto County itself existed — this congregation began as Hickory Grove Methodist Church, later became Mickles Chapel in honor of a presiding elder, and finally took the name Evergreen. Settled on this site since the late 1870s, its building hosted early school classes and its members served as leaders of the surrounding community.

Everman, TX

Settlement of this Tarrant County spot, first called Enon, began around 1847. When the railroad arrived in 1903, residents picked up and moved to be near the tracks, renaming their town Everman for a railroad official. The cemetery here had already been founded in 1882 as the Morris family graveyard, after Rosa Morris was buried on the family farm, and it gradually became the community's shared burial ground.

San Antonio, TX

Claus and Johanna Evers brought their children from Schleswig-Holstein to Texas in 1855 and settled on this land in 1874. The family cemetery began in 1877 when a stranger passing through fell ill and died at their home, soon followed by the burial of an infant granddaughter. Several generations of Evers and Braendle descendants now rest here, a quiet marker of the area's German pioneer heritage.

Marshall, TX

In a quiet corner of southern Harrison County, this cemetery took shape when the Ewing Chapel Cumberland Presbyterian Church organized in January 1855, though its earliest confirmed burial dates to 1853. It holds many of the area's first settlers, at least fourteen men who formed volunteer units during the Civil War, early physicians, and the community's first schoolteachers. Annual reunion days drew descendants back to honor their ancestors from the 1870s into the 1940s.

Exeter Township, PA · est. 1979

Quakers established this Berks County meeting in 1725 as "Oley," renaming it Exeter in 1742, and raised the present stone meeting house in 1759 on the site of two earlier log structures. Among those buried in its ground are members of the Boone and Lincoln families—kin to the frontiersman Daniel Boone and to the ancestors of Abraham Lincoln. After closing in 1899, the meeting reopened for worship in 1949.

Masterson, TX

In 1845, just as Texas was joining the Union, the U.S. government sent West Point topographical engineer Lt. James W. Abert and a 33-man party to map the Canadian River. Camping near this spot, Abert was visited by Kiowa who said they were at war with Texans but welcomed him once he proved to be an American, and his maps and notes on the river's geography and its native peoples became valuable to the young state and nation.

Longview, TX

Built in 1871 for hardware merchant Franklin L. Whaley and his wife Mary Caroline Rogers, this was among the earliest homes in Longview, its lumber cut right on the site. The central-hall house shows off the era's craftsmanship — gabled pavilions, three dormers above the front porch, fine milled woodwork, and elaborate jigsawn railings. Five generations of the Whaley family have called it home.

Dallas, TX

Standing on a Peters Colony land grant of 1854, this frame Victorian farmhouse was built before 1885, when Francis Asbury Brown bought it with 200 acres of farmland. His son Ernest later ran a dairy farm from the home, and the family preserved it against the tide of Dallas's growth. It survives as a rare rural homestead amid the modern city.

Follett, TX

At the far northern tip of Texas—closer to six other state capitals than to Austin—Fairmont Cemetery outlasted the towns that made it. Settlers founded Ivanhoe in Oklahoma in 1901, moved it to the railroad as South Ivanhoe, then in 1917 dragged its buildings on skids across the state line to a new Santa Fe stop named Follett. The cemetery, deeded in 1910, holds its first burial the reinterred body of a mother of six killed by lightning, alongside the children of Mexican railroad workers lost to the 1918 influenza epidemic and more than a hundred military veterans.

Hemphill, TX

Families settled along South Prong Creek in deep East Texas as early as the 1850s, sustained by a post office that ran from 1854 into the twentieth century and a school that lasted until 1953. Burials likely began by the mid-1850s, though the oldest marked grave—that of Eli Elijah Smith, son of a Baptist pastor—dates to 1874. Fairmount Cemetery remains a quiet link to the pioneers and the churches, like Friendship Missionary Baptist, that shaped the community.

Floresville, TX

Fairview sprang up after the Civil War when Henry Hudson opened a store on the Old Oakville Road, gaining a post office in 1868 and growing into a cotton town with churches, a school, a gin, and a Masonic lodge. The boll weevil and other pests ravaged the cotton crop, and the community faded after World War I. Fairview's proudest legacy was its lawmen — twenty-seven peace officers including twenty Texas Rangers, among them Frank Hamer, who pursued and helped bring down Depression-era outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.

Clifton, TX

Organized in 1889 as Coon Creek Missionary Baptist Church, this congregation met for years in a schoolhouse on ground donated by settler "Gip" Smith before building a church of its own. The elevated school grounds gave the community its lasting name, Fairview, and the cemetery received its first burial in 1900. Local legend even claims the notorious outlaw Belle Starr once owned land nearby and used it as a hideout.

Center, TX

Founded in 1901 to add burial space alongside the older Methodist churchyard, Fairview became Center's second-oldest cemetery, organized by a seven-member association that bought land tracing back to the Jesse Amason headright survey. Kate Crisp Ricks, an early promoter of the project, was the first buried here in 1902. Its monuments mark many of the civic leaders who built the young town—among them Panzie Annie Rennick Bryarly, the first female member of the Texas Press Association—beneath tall memorials and a white gazebo at the cemetery's heart.

Midland, TX

In use by the spring of 1885, this ten-acre burial ground was accepted as a gift from the Midland Town Company at the newly organized county's first commissioners' meeting that August. Among the pioneers laid to rest here are veterans of both the Mexican War and the Civil War, men whose lives spanned the mid-century conflicts before they helped settle the West Texas plains.

Lipscomb, TX

Fairview Cemetery was established in 1924 in Lipscomb, in the far northeastern corner of the Texas Panhandle. Its founding reflects the settlement of this high-plains ranching and farming country, which came comparatively late to permanent Anglo settlement. The cemetery's 2004 designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery honors its place in the community's history.

Bastrop, TX

Laid out with the town of Bastrop between 1830 and 1832, this twelve-acre burial ground overlooking the colony is one of the oldest cemeteries of the Republic of Texas era. Among its graves is Crescentia Augusta Fischer, a German immigrant who caught yellow fever after landing at Galveston and died just five days after reaching Bastrop in 1841. Governors, congressmen, an early African American legislator, and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the War of 1812 all rest here alongside generations of ordinary townspeople.

Pampa, TX

Fairview Cemetery was established in 1904 in Pampa, a young community on the Texas Panhandle plains that grew in the era when railroads and homesteaders were settling the region's open grasslands. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2004, its grounds hold generations of the area's early families. The burial ground remains a tangible link to Pampa's founding decades.

Mt. Vernon, TX

In 1880 Kentucky-born cattleman Julian N. Kimberlin gave five acres for a Methodist church, school, Grange hall, and burial ground, and the first recorded burial came the next year. A building erected by 1885 served as both school and sanctuary until a 1913 storm destroyed it, after which the community built anew nearby and, in 1928-29, a fresh chapel beside the cemetery. The Fairview Cemetery today holds more than 300 graves, including pioneer settlers and a Civil War veteran.

Nacogdoches, TX

Before the Civil War, a small band of Methodists in the pinewoods of East Texas gathered to found a congregation they called Pine Grove. In the late 1870s they moved their log meetinghouse onto two acres donated by A.J. Muckleroy and renamed it Fairview, beside a burial ground whose earliest marked grave dates to 1851. Generations of families tended the plots by hand, formalizing their care through an annual homecoming and, later, a cemetery association. Today its stone cairns and curbed plots across roughly a dozen acres map the reach of a vanished rural community.

Fairview, TX

In the years just after the Civil War, a Methodist congregation took root in the little community of Fairview in Wilson County, meeting first in a schoolhouse before neighbors W. F. Mitchell and J. F. Prewitt donated a building site. The frontier's weather wrote much of the church's story: a small red-rock meeting house fell to an 1886 tropical storm, its frame successor to a 1942 storm, and each time the members simply built again. The congregation finally merged with the Floresville church in 1955, but families still gather each year for memorial services at Fairview Cemetery.

Fairy, TX

This community was first called Gap, then Martin's Gap after a traveler named Jim Martin was reportedly killed by Indians, before residents chose the name Fairy in 1884 to honor Fairy Fort Phelps, the petite daughter of pioneer settlers. Fairy and her father taught local children in their home, and her family gave land to area churches. The cemetery holds pioneer settlers, dozens of victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic, a Texas Ranger, and veterans reaching from the Civil War through the Korean War.

Falfurrias, TX

Falfurrias was founded in 1904 as a cattle-shipping point by rancher Edward C. Lasater, who took the name from a village on land he had bought in 1893. When the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad reached the area, Lasater platted the townsite and built its hotel, store, water and power plants, and cotton gin, then opened the region to truck farming, citrus, and dairying — founding South Texas' first creamery. Later oil and gas discoveries added yet another chapter to the boomtown's growth.

Jefferson, TX

This East Texas home took shape in the antebellum years, its original four rooms and hall expanded by a long ell in 1866 as the household grew. It served as the residence of Eloise Amoss for sixty-two years before passing to the Koontz family in 1961, and was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965. Its layered additions read like rings in a tree, marking the generations who lived within its walls.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1948

In the 1730s, waves of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians pushed west of the Susquehanna into the Cumberland Valley, carrying their faith and their meetinghouses with them. Falling Spring's congregation dates to 1734, and the stone sanctuary standing today rose in 1803 as the community matured from frontier outpost into settled town. Presbyterian churches like this one anchored the earliest permanent European settlement of the Pennsylvania backcountry.

Marlin, TX

Carved from Limestone and Milam counties in 1850, Falls County took its name from the falls of the Brazos River tumbling through its heart. Anglo settlers had arrived before the Texas Revolution, only to flee in 1836 as Santa Anna's army advanced; among those who returned was John Marlin, namesake of the county seat. Farming, dairying, and an early railroad fed steady growth, while Marlin's mineral springs later drew visitors to it as a health resort.

Marlin, TX

Falls County was created in 1850, and its seat at Marlin has seen a remarkable succession of courthouses — a log cabin, a white-cedar building that burned, and several more lost to fire and storm. The present fifth courthouse, begun in 1938 with a Public Works Administration grant, was designed in the Art Moderne style by Dallas architect Arthur E. Thomas. Faced in Austin shellstone with pink granite steps and a soaring central entry tower, it was completed in 1939.

Marlin, TX

The falls of the Brazos, where the river once dropped about ten feet over a rocky ledge, long served Native peoples and settlers as a landmark, meeting point, and campsite. In 1834 colonizer Sterling C. Robertson founded Sarahville de Viesca here, abandoned in 1836; later came Fort Milam and the town of Bucksnort. As the only hard-bottom crossing for 200 miles and the head of steamboat navigation, the falls gave Falls County its name in 1850 before the river shifted course in 1866.

Wells, TX

Around 1870 the Texas veteran James H. Bowman offered a hundred acres to the Rev. W. D. Lewis, Sr. to plant a Methodist church at Mt. Hope, and by 1875 the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was organized there. When the railroad created the town of Wells in 1885, the congregation followed, joined by Dr. J. C. Falvey and his wife Matilda. Between 1948 and 1950 their son built a new church here in their honor, and the Falvey Memorial congregation still serves the Mt. Hope and Wells communities.

Albany, TX

During the Civil War, with most able-bodied men away in Confederate service, the scattered families of the Texas frontier faced raids with little military protection. Encouraged by authorities, they "forted up" — crowding into hastily built stockades of dirt-floored log cabins linked by pickets, with a blockhouse for women and children during attacks. The best known nearby was Fort Davis on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, where some 120 people endured the war's last year on little food and long distances from help, yet still managed schooling, weddings, and worship.

Edna, TX

On July 17, 1835, months before open revolution, settlers from the Lavaca and Navidad river country gathered at William Millican's cotton gin to air their grievances against the Mexican government. With Gonzales founder James Kerr in the chair, the meeting adopted formal resolutions protesting the mistreatment of Texas colonists. It stands among the earliest organized public protests that pointed toward the Texas Declaration of Independence the following March.