Westward Expansion

Emory, TX

A Missourian by birth, Ambrose Fitzgerald settled in 1846 on land then part of Nacogdoches County, and as new counties were carved from it he became the first clerk for both Van Zandt and Wood counties. After serving in the Civil War he returned to hold nearly every clerical office in newly formed Rains County. A Baptist preacher as well as a public servant, he baptized James S. Hogg, who would go on to become governor of Texas.

Blanco, TX

Built in 1882–83 of native stone by Irish craftsman Laurence H. Wall for about $1,000, this house stood in the small settlement of Pittsburg, later absorbed by Blanco. In 1887 it was bought by John Wilson Baines and his wife Ruth Ament Huffman—later the grandparents of President Lyndon Baines Johnson—who named it Amenthal. It passed through several owners after the Baines family left in 1904, including county sheriff Andrew J. Wagner.

Sierra Blanca, TX

At Sierra Blanca in 1881, two rival railroads racing across the desert finally met, completing the nation's second transcontinental line and its long-sought southern route. Rather than build competing tracks, Jay Gould of the Texas & Pacific and Collis P. Huntington of the Southern Pacific struck a deal here to join their lines into one continuous road to the Pacific. Through service began that December, decades after statesmen like Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun first championed the idea in Congress.

Gainesville, TX

The colorful two-toned horses celebrated here descend from mounts brought by Spanish conquistadors and became a beloved staple of the western frontier under names like Paint, Pinto, and Piebald. Though largely shut out of North American breed registries in the early 20th century, sixteen dedicated horse enthusiasts met at Gainesville's Curtwood Motel on February 16, 1962, to found a registry of their own. Within a year they had registered 250 horses, and after a 1965 merger the American Paint Horse Association grew into the world's second-largest equine breed association.

Comanche vicinity, TX

When a boy died on the Comanche County frontier in 1878 with no cemetery nearby, his family's farmland became a community burial ground and gathering place, complete with a brush arbor for funerals and camp meetings. That summer local Baptists organized a congregation they named Amity—friendship—and the site grew into a graveyard of nearly 400 souls, still marked each June by a singing and homecoming begun in 1897.

West Columbia, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1810, Ammon Underwood came to Texas in 1834 after a young life of odd jobs, two shipwrecks, and wandering exploration. He fought in the 1835 Siege of Bexar during the Texas Revolution, then settled at West Columbia, where he ran a thriving mercantile business for fifty years and counted Republic of Texas president Anson Jones among his close friends. He lost a cotton fortune during the Civil War but later served in the state legislature.

East Columbia, TX

This house rose in the vanished river port of Marion during the Republic of Texas years, its first hand-hewn cedar rooms built about 1835 by colonist Thomas W. Nibbs. In 1838–39 the merchant, civic leader, and soldier Ammon Underwood bought and enlarged it, and the following year he married into one of Stephen F. Austin's original colonial families. President Anson Jones and other notables of the young republic were guests here.

Mont Belvieu, TX

Louisiana-born Amos Barber settled this rise—first called "Big Hill," then "Barber's Hill"—in 1849, hauling logs by ox-drawn sled to build a two-story dog-trot cabin surrounded by orchards and plantation land. Standing on the main road from Huntsville to Lynchburg, the Barber home welcomed travelers including Sam Houston and Ashbel Smith. Barber and his wife lie in the family cemetery still tended by their descendants, and the community that grew here became Mont Belvieu.

Washington, TX

Amos Gates, born in 1799, was among the settlers of Stephen F. Austin's first colony, the "Old Three Hundred" generation that established Anglo-American settlement in Mexican Texas. This marker also remembers his son William C. Gates, born in 1834, who served in the Confederate army before his death in 1877. Together they span the colony's founding and the Civil War era at Washington, cradle of Texas independence.

Capon Bridge, WV

Capon Bridge grew up along the Cacapon River in Hampshire County, one of the earliest-settled corners of what is now West Virginia and, in its founding years, part of colonial Virginia's mountain frontier. A dwelling that carries a single family's name, as this one does, typically anchors the story of the farming households who put down roots along the river and gave the small crossroads its shape. Houses like it are among the tangible reminders of everyday life in the Appalachian backcountry.

Poteet, TX

Amphion grew up around Atascosa County's first courthouse, built near this spot at the county seat of Navatasco in 1857 on land within the vast ranch of Texas Declaration signer José Antonio Navarro. At its height the town bustled with stores, a hotel, cotton gin, tannery, churches, lodges, and a school. But when the railroads bypassed it in the early twentieth century, business drained away, and today only its cemetery—begun around 1870—marks where a thriving community once stood.

Cooper, TX

In 1875 the four Hobbs brothers left Mississippi for the Big Creek Thicket, where a settlement called Hobbs Thicket grew up around a two-room schoolhouse. When storekeeper Robert Nickolson sought a post office in 1894, the Postal Service rejected "Hobbs" and named the town "Amy" instead. Amy flourished into the 1920s with a store, gin, and churches, but the 1924 loss of its cotton gin began a decline that emptied the town, leaving only a homecoming tradition among former residents.

Caldwell, TX

After the Civil War, the Chisholm Trail carried Texas longhorns north to the Kansas railheads and eastern markets, and a branch of that famous route swung from Matagorda County up through Burleson County toward the main trail near present McGregor. Stores like James L. Dean's — later the town of Deanville — and the White Inn sprang up to serve the drovers, turning the cattle path into a commercial road. When rail lines reached the area in the late 1870s, the long drives faded.

San Augustine, TX

Founded as the Bethel Presbyterian Church at the Goodlaw School House by the Reverend Hugh Wilson on June 2, 1838, this early Republic-era congregation drew together settler families of San Augustine. Its charter roll named more than two dozen members, including the enslaved couple Jack and Hanna Sharp, recorded among the founders.

Anahuac, TX

Established in the early 1830s while Texas was still under Mexican rule, this burial ground—long known as the Old Mexican Cemetery—holds some of the first settlers of the fledgling community of Anahuac. The earliest documented interment is land-office agent and merchant Benjamin Freeman, who died in 1835, on the eve of the Texas Revolution. Many of the pioneers laid to rest here lie in unmarked graves, a common fate on a raw frontier where stone monuments were a luxury.

Poteet, TX

The Stiggins family emigrated from Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1882, among them Mary Jane, who had studied medicine, and her fiancé Thomas Whittet, a former sea captain who named the place Anchorage as the spot where he would "drop anchor." In 1896 the couple deeded land for a church and cemetery, and Mary Jane practiced medicine across the area, delivering many of its babies. A frame church served until 1958, and the cemetery association still tends the burial ground and its chapel.

Frankston, TX

Set on a spring near the Brushy Creek community, this ground was first settled in the 1850s and in 1873 was set aside by local Methodists as a religious campground, bought from a Galveston County owner for sixty dollars in gold. The following year worshippers raised a tabernacle of pine beams and sweet-gum piers fastened with wooden pegs.

Carthage, TX

On a tree-shaded hill southeast of Carthage lies the burial place of many of Panola County's founding settlers, named for Jonathan Anderson (1798–1890), who donated 100 acres for the town itself. A veteran of the Texas Revolution who fought at the Siege of Bexar and the Battle of San Jacinto, Anderson went on to serve as county sheriff. His first wife, Nancy Whetmore, was the first laid to rest here, followed by veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Palestine, TX

Anderson County was created from Houston County on March 24, 1846, and organized that July with Palestine as its seat, just months after Texas joined the Union. It was named to honor Kenneth Lewis Anderson, who had served as vice-president of the Republic of Texas in its final years.

Palestine, TX

Anderson County was carved out by the Texas Legislature in 1846 and named for Kenneth L. Anderson, the last vice president of the Republic of Texas. Justice was first dispensed in a log house at Fort Houston, and the county worked through four courthouses — a frame building, two brick ones, and finally the grand Beaux-Arts structure completed in 1913-14 after fire claimed its predecessor. With giant Ionic columns and a dome crowned by a statue of Justice, the present courthouse still anchors the Palestine square.

Garland, TX

This cemetery opened in 1858 with the burial of William and Celia Anderson, Kentuckians who had lived on the Missouri frontier before joining their son in the raw new settlements of Dallas County. That son, John Lair Anderson, arrived in 1846 as a settler of the Peters Colony, one of the empresario grants that populated North Texas. Their family home once stood just southwest of these graves.

Andice, TX

The Rev. Freeman Smalley, one of Texas's earliest Baptists, preached in this area around 1850, and the congregation organized about 1851 in a log schoolhouse. Known over the years as Stapp, White House, and Pilot Knob Baptist Church, it moved to Andice in 1936—carrying the memory of a first pastor who is said to have hung his pistol on the oak-stump Bible stand while he preached.

Crockett, TX

Andrew Edwards Gossett (1812–1890) donated the townsite that became Crockett, the seat of Houston County, which was carved from Nacogdoches territory in 1837. Giving land from his own colonist's grant, he provided the young Republic of Texas county a central place to conduct its government. His gift literally put the town on the map.

Crockett, TX

Andrew Edwards Gossett (1812–1890) moved from Tennessee to Texas in 1833 with his wife Rhoda and a large Mexican land grant. He helped defend the frontier in the unsettled years after the revolution by serving in the Texas Army, and in 1836 he donated land for a townsite, naming it Crockett for his old family friend David Crockett—soon to die at the Alamo. Gossett went on to serve as a peace officer and county judge and raised eleven children by two marriages.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1999

Andrew Ellicott was one of the young republic's most accomplished surveyors, astronomers, and mathematicians, helping fix the boundaries of New York, Pennsylvania, and the new federal capital at Washington, D.C. While living in Lancaster and serving the Pennsylvania Land Office, he tutored Meriwether Lewis in surveying and celestial navigation in 1803—skills Lewis would soon carry across the continent on his expedition west.

Arlington, TX

A Tennessee-born Cumberland Presbyterian preacher, Andrew Shannon Hayter came to Texas around 1850 and eventually settled in Tarrant County, where he founded churches, a school and a Masonic lodge and earned his living as a surveyor. His frontier knowledge made him the natural choice in 1876 to help route the railroad and lay out a small town between Dallas and Fort Worth. Offered the honor of naming it for himself, he instead chose 'Arlington,' after Robert E. Lee's Virginia estate.

Round Rock, TX

Andrew J. Palm sailed from Sweden in 1853 with his mother and brothers and settled at Palm Valley, a Swedish community north of Round Rock, on land bought from immigration agent S. M. Swenson. About 1873 he hauled cypress and pine down from Austin to build this house, where he and his wife Carolina raised their eight children. The home was relocated to Round Rock in 1976 and recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Jacksonville, FL

Founded in 1822 on the St. Johns River, the settlement was named for Andrew Jackson, the general and future president who had just served as provisional governor of the newly acquired Florida Territory. Jackson never lived in the city that bears his name, but his role in bringing Florida under U.S. control tied his legacy to the region.

Cleveland, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1817, Andrew Jackson Isaacks came to Texas and fought in the Texas Revolution in 1835 before settling into the civic life of a young frontier region. He served as sheriff of Jasper County, raised a large family, farmed and ranched, and became the first postmaster at Tarkington Prairie in the 1850s. Buried where he died in 1864, his remains were reinterred at this site in 1970.

Stoneham, TX

Andrew Jackson Montgomery came to Texas around 1830 and took his place in the fight for its independence, serving in Captain James Gillaspie's company at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive victory that won the Republic of Texas its freedom. The marker, erected by the state in 1957, carries a supplemental plate offering differing dates for his birth and arrival, a reminder of how uncertain early frontier records could be.

Stoneham, TX

Andrew Jackson Montgomery came to Texas in 1819 with the ill-fated James Long Expedition and, by 1823, opened a trading post where two Indian trails crossed — becoming the first known settler in what is now Montgomery County. The town and county both grew from that post and took his family name. He later fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, married Mary Mahulda Farris, and raised nine children.

Hallettsville, TX

Andrew Kent, a Kentucky-born carpenter, brought his large family to Green DeWitt's Colony in 1830, settling a league of land on the Lavaca River. As tensions with Santa Anna's government mounted, Kent and his son David took up arms at the Battle of Gonzales in 1835, the opening clash of the Texas Revolution. In February 1836 the two argued over who would answer the Alamo's call for help; Andrew sent David home and rode to San Antonio with "The Immortal 32" from Gonzales, dying in the Alamo's fall. Kent County was later named in his honor.

Lockhart, TX

A Tennessee-born settler, Andrew Lee Brock came to Caldwell County in 1848 and started married life on a Boggy Creek parcel gifted by his father-in-law, raising a log cabin and working cotton, grain, and a cotton gin. As his family and fortunes grew, he turned to shaping Lockhart itself, raising livestock and financing a dozen commercial buildings in the town's business district — many still standing today.

Gentrys Mill, TX

Andrew Miller left the Virginia mountains as a young man and pushed onto the Texas frontier, settling near the Hamilton–Comanche county line in 1856. He rode with the frontier Rangers who guarded scattered settlements against Comanche raids. A founder of churches and a donor of land for a church, school, and cemetery, he helped plant the roots of permanent community.

Gonzales, TX

Andrew Ponton came to Texas in 1829, settled in Green DeWitt's colony, and by 1834 served as alcalde—mayor—of Gonzales. When Mexican forces demanded the town's cannon in 1835, his delay in surrendering it helped spark the "Come and Take It" fight now remembered as the opening battle of the Texas Revolution. He also helped rally the Gonzales men, the "Immortal 32," who answered Travis's call and died at the Alamo, and he later served the Republic of Texas as a legislator and judge.

Washington, TX

Andrew Robinson Sr. was the first of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists to reach Texas, arriving in November 1821 with his family and later receiving title to over 9,000 acres. He co-founded the town of Washington, ran a ferry at the La Bahia Crossing, and kept a hotel and saloon. In 1835 he fought at the Battle of Gonzales, where his unit carried the original Lone Star flag sewn by Sarah Dodson.

Hallettsville, TX

Tied to the Hackberry community, this burial ground took its name from settler A.G. Andrews, who by 1866 had given land for a cemetery and Baptist church. Its oldest marked grave, from 1860, belongs to Mexican War veteran Alfred Morrow, and among those buried here is Joseph Lawrence, a veteran of the Battles of Plum Creek and San Jacinto who at his death in 1897 was believed the oldest living veteran of the Texas Revolution. A local association still tends the grounds and gathers for annual homecomings.

Frankel City, TX

Andrews County was created by the Texas legislature in 1876 and finally organized in 1910, its wide plains among the last parts of Texas to be settled. It honors Richard Andrews, remembered as the first man to fall in the Texas Revolution, killed at the Battle of Concepción near San Antonio on October 28, 1835. His name carried into the far West Texas frontier the memory of the fight for Texas independence.

Tiburon, CA · est. 1970

In 1775 the Spanish packet San Carlos became the first known European ship to enter San Francisco Bay, anchoring in this cove while Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala directed the bay's first survey and named the island Isla de los Angeles. Over the following centuries Angel Island served as a Mexican rancho, a U.S. military post, a bay-defense site, and both a quarantine and immigration station. Its layered history mirrors California's passage from Spanish frontier to American gateway.

Lufkin, TX

Carved from Nacogdoches County in 1846, Angelina County takes its name from the river winding through the region. In its early decades the county seat shifted restlessly from Marion to Jonesville to Homer before settling at Lufkin in 1890. The town of Homer even changed its own name to Angelina for a time, a reminder of how fluid frontier geography could be.

Odem, TX

Angelita was one of several rural communities that sprang up in San Patricio County after the Civil War, its 1880s schoolhouse serving as the heart of local life. When the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railroad arrived in 1904, a town was platted and its depot became a shipping point for cattle and crops. But when the post office and school moved to nearby Odem in 1916, Angelita dwindled and finally disappeared.

Spring Branch, TX

Anhalt began in the 1850s as a small German farming and ranching settlement whose name means 'stopping place.' In 1875 residents organized the Germania Farmer Verein to combat cattle rustling with a shared brand and to support members' families, and in 1879 they built Anhalt Halle as a meeting and social hall. One of the oldest and largest dance halls in Texas, it still hosts Maifest, Oktoberfest, and performances that carry on the community's German traditions.

Somerset, PA · est. 1954

In the years just after the Revolution, the frontier of southwestern Pennsylvania was being carved into towns lot by lot. When Ulrich Bruner first platted Milfordstown in 1787 and Peter Ankeny extended it in 1789, they set aside this ground for two of a young community's most essential needs — a place to bury the dead and a place to worship. By 1795 the growing settlement had taken the name Somerset, the county seat it remains today.

Aledo, TX

Community founder A. B. Fraser was a Confederate soldier who chose exile in Central America over swearing loyalty to the Union, and it was there his daughter Anneta was born in Honduras. Back in Texas by the 1870s, he built a store and freight station west of Fort Worth and named it for her; when the Texas and Pacific Railroad arrived in 1880 it adopted the name as Annetta. The cemetery that grew up here holds hundreds of graves — civic leaders, farmers, and, in a poignant testament to pioneer hardship, thirty-five infants buried between 1882 and 1910.

Ft. Stockton, TX

Built in 1900, the Annie Riggs Hotel was Fort Stockton's first hotel of real significance, an adobe building trimmed with "gingerbread" woodwork. Its wide verandas, dining room, parlors, and guest rooms welcomed travelers passing through the West Texas town. The hotel remains a landmark of the region's turn-of-the-century frontier hospitality.

St. Hedwig, TX

Beginning in December 1854, Polish families from Upper Silesia settled eastern Bexar County in a community first called Martinez, building a log mission church by 1857 and a cemetery beside it. The first known burial, in 1863, was of Rev. Julian Przysiecki, killed in a fall from his horse, leaving the settlers without a Polish-speaking priest. A new church to the Virgin Mary followed in 1868, the present cemetery was chartered in 1872, and the town was renamed St. Hedwig for Silesia's patron saint.

Danevang, TX

In the early 1890s the Danish Folk Society brought 93 Danish families from the Midwest to found the Danevang Cooperative Settlement on the Texas coastal plain. Deeply Lutheran, the settlers organized a congregation in 1895 with help from the Rev. F. L. Grundtvig, worshipping at first in Danish under pastors sent from Denmark. Their 1909 church held a painting of St. Ansgar and a 1,700-pound bell heard for miles, and after a 1945 storm they rebuilt using a reassembled army chapel.

Houston, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1798 and trained as a physician, Anson Jones came to Texas in 1833 and fought as a private at San Jacinto during the war for independence. He rose swiftly through the Republic—congressman, first Grand Master of Texas Masons, minister to the United States, secretary of state, and finally president in 1844. On February 19, 1846, he lowered the Lone Star flag and declared 'the Republic of Texas is no more,' earning his lasting nickname, 'the architect of annexation.'

Antelope, TX

The oldest tombstone in this Jack County cemetery dates to 1882, marking the burial ground of the small community of Antelope. In 1890 the site passed to the Antelope Methodist Church, which held it until deeding the tract to a cemetery association in 1954, with an added parcel given the following year.

Antelope, TX

Organized in 1879 on the North Texas frontier, this Methodist congregation hauled its building materials by wagon from distant railheads and shared its sanctuary with the local Baptists until they could complete their own. A Sunday school program followed within a few years.

Roans Prairie, TX

Anthony Drew Kennard, born in Tennessee in 1788, served in the Army of Texas in 1835 during the struggle for Texas independence, and lies buried here with his wife Sallie Moore Kennard. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936, the centennial of the Republic, to honor his service. His grave ties this quiet Grimes County spot to the revolution that made Texas a nation.

Tyler, TX

Antioch Baptist Church was established in 1851 in the rural Sand Flat community, when members first gathered in homes and the local schoolhouse before raising their own sanctuary in 1857. Served only by part-time pastors, the faithful kept Sunday School and youth meetings going even when no preacher could come. New buildings in 1939 and 1953 marked the congregation's endurance across a century of rural life.

Fairfield, TX

Antioch Cemetery grew up alongside the Turlington community and its Baptist and Methodist congregations, in a well-watered stretch of Freestone County that drew settlers arriving by steamboat up the Trinity River from Galveston. Established in 1877 beside a church founded in 1870, it holds pioneers like Samuel G. Wells — a veteran of the Texas Revolution and a founder of Anderson County — alongside Civil War veterans and Conrad Henry, a German-born immigrant whose headstone towers over the rest. With its oldest graves at the center and 'deer tongue' flowers said to have been carried in by the first settlers, the ground reads like a map of the community's growth.

Blanket, TX

Antioch Cemetery grew out of a late-19th-century farming community in Brown County, on land the Grazier family deeded to the county in 1880 for schooling and burials. A combined church-and-school building nearby made the site a hub of frontier community life before the district eventually folded into the Blanket schools. Its earliest marked graves date to 1881, and among those interred are Civil War veterans and other pioneers who built the settlement.

Lovelady, TX

Begun in the era of a vanished village first known as Neville's Prairie, this East Texas burial ground took the name Antioch in 1890 when a new post office rechristened the settlement. Its more than a thousand graves hold both enslaved people and pioneer settlers, a record in stone of a community that had faded away by the 1930s. The oldest documented burial dates to 1870.

Carthage, TX

Though its oldest tombstone dates to 1849, the land here was not formally set aside as a cemetery until 1875, when Thomas Jefferson Miller deeded it soon after his son Theo's death. Miller and his second wife are buried here, alongside members of the Holmes, Williamson, Donald, Poss, Capps, Hudson, and McDaniel families. For many years the graveyard was tended by the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.

Teague, TX

Shortly after the Civil War, Edward Ezell, Sr. and his wife Frankie gave about two acres for this burial ground, later expanded by the Antioch Cemetery Association. It served the Luna community—a village of 250 with a church, grist mill, school, blacksmith, and store—until the railroad bypassed Luna in 1906 and the settlement declined. Today the cemetery is all that remains.

Bastrop, TX

This burial ground is the last trace of a farming community that thrived in Bastrop County before the Civil War. In 1882 the cemetery and its church-school building were relocated to this spot along the historic Gotier Trace, and the earliest marked grave here—an infant's—dates to that year. Among its roughly one hundred graves lie pioneer families, Confederate veterans, and many children lost to disease.

Biardstown, TX

Founded in the first years of Texas statehood between 1846 and 1848, this was the first Church of Christ in Lamar County, organized by Elder Thomas Barrett with the pioneer family of Rebecca Stone Biard, who had come from Alabama to start the Biardstown community. William W. Biard donated his 20-foot log cabin—outfitted with split-log seats and a stick-and-dirt chimney—for the first sanctuary, and at his mother's death in 1848 he gave the land for the cemetery, where her grave was the first. Both the log church and its successor doubled as community schools, and though the congregation disbanded around 1920, burials continue to this day.

Tolar, TX

Now a quiet rural locale, Antioch began as a ranching and farming community in western Hood County in the 1870s, near where the county's last Indian fight—the Battle of Lookout Point—occurred in 1869. Settlers established a church, school, and cemetery, and the graves here include Confederate veterans George Washington Brown and Austin Musick. As church and school closed through the mid-20th century, the cemetery remained as the community's historic heart.