Westward Expansion

Palestine, TX

When Joseph Jordan and William S. McDonald donated some 500 acres in 1835 for the town of Houston—later Fort Houston—the plan set aside a "public burying ground" that survives as the community's last physical trace. Its oldest marked grave dates to 1840, and among those laid to rest are victims of disease and frontier hardship, two San Jacinto veterans in unmarked graves, and, in a soldiers' plot marked by a boulder, veterans of the Republic of Texas and a War of 1812 soldier, General Nathaniel Smith. Though the town was abandoned after Palestine became county seat in 1846, the cemetery remains in use today.

Ballard County, KY

In 1780, frontier commander George Rogers Clark built Fort Jefferson here as part of an ambitious plan conceived by Virginia's Governor Patrick Henry and carried on by his successor, Thomas Jefferson, to secure the young nation's western claims. The next year the Chickasaw, angered by settlement on their land, besieged the fort for five days until Clark arrived with reinforcements; the post was abandoned soon after. The strategic spot was resettled following the Jackson Purchase and later served as an important Union position in the Civil War.

Firestone, CO

Two hundred feet east of this point once stood Fort Junction, a sod enclosure thrown up in 1864 by settlers of the Boulder and St. Vrain valleys. In a year of rising conflict on the Colorado plains, frontier families gathered behind its earthen walls, garrisoned by local Home Guards, seeking protection amid the wars between settlers and the Plains nations. The fort was one of many hastily built refuges along the edge of Anglo-American settlement.

Ozona, TX

When Texas seceded and U.S. forts along the frontier were surrendered at the start of the Civil War, Fort Lancaster became part of the Confederacy's thinly held far-western line, garrisoned by the 2nd Texas Cavalry. It guarded the supply route feeding the 1861–62 Confederate campaign into Arizona and New Mexico—an ambitious bid to stretch the Confederacy from ocean to ocean. Between escorting supply trains and watching for Indian raids, soldiers passed dull hours with a camp newspaper and by shooting at coyotes.

Peters Township, PA · est. 1915

Fort Loudon was built by Colonel John Armstrong in the winter of 1756 to guard the Pennsylvania frontier during the French and Indian War, replacing the earlier post at McDowell's Mill. It became a key staging point for the campaigns of General John Forbes in 1758 and Colonel Henry Bouquet in 1763–64, and the base from which pack-horse trains set out for the west. In 1765 it was the scene of the defiant exploits of Captain James Smith and his 'Black Boys,' frontiersmen who resisted the arms trade with hostile tribes.

Masontown, PA · est. 1946

On the trans-Appalachian frontier of the 1770s, isolated families built their own defenses long before any army arrived. John Mason raised this blockhouse between 1774 and 1778, a stout log structure meant to shelter neighbors when danger threatened during the Revolutionary years. When the fighting passed, the timbers found a second life relocated to Main Street as an ordinary dwelling — the frontier fort quietly becoming a family home.

Mason, TX

When Texas seceded, Fort Mason and the newly established Camp Llano became links in a Confederate line of frontier posts, spaced a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Occupied first by the First Regiment Texas Mounted Rifles and then the Frontier Regiment, these troops guarded scattered settlers against raids while the war raged elsewhere. Locals took shelter at Fort Mason, and even a lone mail carrier crept between the posts by night, dodging raiders to keep the mail moving.

Cross Plains, TX

Between 1851 and 1861, the U.S. 2nd Cavalry and its supply trains moved along this route linking Fort Mason to Camp Cooper during the army's antebellum campaigns against the Plains Indians. Among the officers who traveled the road were men soon to become giants of the Civil War, including Robert E. Lee and George H. Thomas, the future 'Rock of Chickamauga.'

Mason, TX

The U.S. Army established Fort Mason on July 6, 1851, to shield the Texas frontier, naming it for Lt. George T. Mason, who had been killed near Brownsville in the war with Mexico. Between 1856 and 1861 it hosted officers of the famed 2nd U.S. Cavalry — Albert Sidney Johnston, George H. Thomas, Earl Van Dorn, and Robert E. Lee — many of whom would win fame or infamy in the coming Civil War. Federal troops abandoned the post in March 1861 and returned only after the war, garrisoning it until 1869.

Laredo, TX

In March 1849, only months after the U.S.-Mexico War redrew the border along the Rio Grande, soldiers of the 1st U.S. Infantry threw up a star-shaped earthen fort on a bluff above the river and named it Camp Crawford, soon renamed Fort McIntosh. It anchored the young United States' newly won southern frontier, guarding river crossings and escorting travelers through contested borderlands. For decades the post housed troops through Indian campaigns, the Civil War era, and ongoing border unrest.

Beaver, PA · est. 1946

Built in 1778 during the Revolution, Fort McIntosh was the first military post the young United States raised north of the Ohio River, a foothold in contested Indian country. In 1785 it hosted the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, one of the early agreements by which the new republic pressed Native nations to cede lands in the Northwest Territory, and it also served as a base for surveying that opening frontier. The garrison was abandoned around 1790-91 as the line of settlement moved on.

Roosevelt, TX

Laid out in 1852 and reopened when the frontier forts were reactivated after the Civil War, this road ran north and south between Forts Terrett, Clark, and McKavett, its route chosen chiefly for the water along the way. It carried mail, freight, troops, and a trickle of settlers, and served as a line of march for Colonel Ranald Mackenzie's campaigns against Native peoples to the northwest. After the forts closed in 1883, ranchers used stretches of it to drive cattle to market.

Menard, TX

Twenty-one miles west of this marker stood Fort McKavett, occupied by Confederate cavalry after secession to guard the frontier against Indian raids, and in early 1862 used to confine Union troops trying to leave Texas. Permanent forces withdrew that April when the defense line pulled back eastward, but scouting parties of Confederate and state troops kept using the post—often supplying their own horses, guns, and food—to shield settlements. It formed one link in a chain of posts set a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, honored here by a 1963 state memorial.

Saint Joseph, MI

In November 1679 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, built a fort near the mouth of the St. Joseph River—then called the Miami—as a supply base for his ambitious push into the western Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. Fort Miami was among the earliest European outposts in what is now Michigan, a toehold in a vast Native homeland that La Salle hoped would open a French empire across the interior of the continent.

Marlin, TX

In the anxious first years of Texas independence, this spot served as the capital of Robertson's Colony, briefly called Sarahville de Viesca before it was renamed Milam late in 1835. As Anglo settlers pushed into the Brazos country, a ranging company threw up a fort here to guard families against raids. It stood as one of the frontier outposts that marked the contested boundary between newcomers and the Native peoples whose lands they were entering.

Cooks Point, TX

Fort Oldham was raised in 1836–37 by pioneers who sheltered with William Oldham, an infantry major in the Texas War for Independence. In seasons of Native raids dozens lived within its walls, and by 1838 it had a post office and stood on the Independence–Tenoxtitlan Road; Oldham himself later rode with the Somervell and Mier Expeditions, was captured by Mexican forces, and escaped to make his way home.

Groesbeck, TX

Built in 1834 by the Parker family — leaders of the first Predestinarian Baptist body to reach Texas — this private stockade sheltered several allied families on the Central Texas frontier. On May 18, 1836, a Comanche raid killed several of the men and carried off captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. She grew up among the Comanche, married Chief Peta Nocona, and bore Quanah Parker, who would become the last chief of the Comanche.

Marathon, TX

Established in 1880 in the rugged Big Bend country, Fort Peña Colorada guarded the water and passes near Marathon against raids across the Mexican border. Apaches struck the post in 1881 during the last years of the Indian Wars in far West Texas. With the frontier considered pacified, the fort was abandoned in 1893.

Hawley, TX

Fort Phantom Hill was established in 1851 as one of a chain of frontier posts, but its garrison abandoned it after barely two and a half years. The ruins found second lives—as a stop on the Southern Overland Mail before the Civil War and as a sub-post of Fort Griffin in the early 1870s—while a lively village grew up nearby, even serving briefly as Jones County's seat in 1881 before fading away.

Sierra Blanca, TX

Sixteen miles southwest along the Rio Grande, on the old military and stage road from San Antonio to El Paso, Fort Quitman anchored the Confederate far western frontier after U.S. posts were surrendered in 1861. Occupied by Texas mounted rifles, it sat on the supply and communication line for the 1861–62 Confederate campaign to reach the Pacific through Arizona and New Mexico, and was briefly held by Union troops from California in 1862. From here, thinly manned camps a day's ride apart guarded a 2,000-mile frontier for the western Confederacy.

Jacksboro, TX

Established by the U.S. War Department in November 1867, Fort Richardson stood as the northernmost of a chain of posts guarding the Texas frontier against raids in the years after the Civil War. It was named for General Israel B. Richardson, mortally wounded at Antietam in 1862. As settlement pushed westward the fort's purpose faded, and it was abandoned in 1878; what stands here was partially reconstructed in 1936.

Jacksboro, TX

Built in 1899 by H. J. Hensley and L. A. Wilson on the site of the earlier Wichita House, the Fort Richardson Hotel served the frontier town of Jacksboro near the U.S. Army post whose name it borrowed. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967 and preserved by a Hensley descendant.

Vega, TX

First blazed in 1840 by trader Josiah Gregg seeking a southern route to Santa Fe along the Canadian River, this path was followed in 1849 by Captain Randolph Marcy, who guided some 500 California-bound emigrants west from Fort Smith, Arkansas. Cresting onto the Llano Estacado near here, Marcy found the plains "as boundless and trackless as the ocean," yet praised the ground as ideal for wagons and championed the route for a future transcontinental railroad. In time the automobile age laid U.S. Highway 66 and Interstate 40 close along the same corridor.

Borger, TX

In 1840 the trader and author Josiah Gregg blazed a shorter path between Arkansas and New Mexico, crossing this stretch of the Texas Panhandle as he returned from Santa Fe and Chihuahua. His popular 1844 account recommended the route, and within a decade thousands of California gold seekers followed it westward, some escorted by U.S. Army officers surveying it for a wagon road and even a railroad. By the late 1850s traffic shifted to a southern road, and the trail fell silent, its wagon ruts still faintly visible in the prairie sod.

Amarillo, TX

Faint traces of an old overland road still cross the land southwest of this marker—the route that linked the Arkansas river ports of Fort Smith and Van Buren with Santa Fe, a trade center since 1609. It was pioneered by Santa Fe trader Josiah Gregg, who first passed this spot in March 1840. A decade later, gold seekers bound for California poured along the same road, which in the days before barbed wire carried soldiers, hunters, and traders across the open plains.

Fort Stockton, TX

Fort Stockton guarded the West Texas frontier from its founding in 1859, was abandoned during the Civil War, and was reestablished in 1867, when this locally quarried stone guard house went up. Its lumber hauled by oxcart from distant Indianola, the building held a guardroom, arm and leg irons, and a dungeon for solitary confinement before the fort was abandoned in 1886.

Ft. Stockton, TX

When the U.S. Army rebuilt Fort Stockton in 1867 to guard the road to El Paso, it raised seven adobe-and-stone houses for officers' families facing the parade ground. Complete with corrals and carriage stalls, these quarters served until the fort closed in 1886. Three of the residences still stand today.

Ft. Stockton, TX

After Federal troops abandoned it at the start of the Civil War, Fort Stockton was occupied by the 2nd Regiment Texas Mounted Rifles as part of the Confederacy's far-western defense line and its bid to reach the Pacific through the Arizona–New Mexico campaign of 1861–62. Comanche and Apache activity centered on the area, and California Union troops came to dominate the region from 1862 to 1865. The post also drew Union sympathizers and others hoping to escape the war.

Caldwell, TX

In July 1830 the Mexican government established Fort Tenoxtitlan near here, naming it for the Aztec capital in a bid to halt the flood of Anglo-American settlers pouring into Texas. The plan failed: troops abandoned the post by 1832, and a town nevertheless sprang up after 1834 that drew many prominent early Texans. Like many frontier settlements, it faded from the map, gone by 1860.

Caldwell, TX

Founded by Mexico in 1830 as a bulwark against Anglo-American immigration, Fort Tenoxtitlan took the ancient Aztec name for Mexico City, meaning "prickly pear place," and its commandant even dreamed of it becoming Texas's capital. The plan backfired as Mexican soldiers and Anglo pioneers became friends and the empresario Sterling C. Robertson funneled in settlers. After troops withdrew in 1832 the site passed to the Anglos, and among its residents were five signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, an Alamo martyr, and seven veterans of San Jacinto before it was abandoned amid Indian raids in 1841.

Chester, TX

In 1830 the Mexican government planted Fort Terán on the Neches to halt the tide of Anglo-American colonists pouring into Texas—the first white settlement in what became Tyler County. Named for General Manuel Mier y Terán, commander of Mexican forces in Texas, it was led in 1831 by the colorful Peter Ellis Bean. The garrison's mission reflected Mexico City's growing alarm at Anglo immigration, but the effort proved futile, and troops abandoned the post in 1835 on the eve of the Texas Revolution. Only the marked site remains.

Richmond, KY

In the spring of 1775, a party of settlers pushing along Daniel Boone's newly blazed Wilderness Road threw up a small stockade here — remembered as Fort Twetty, and claimed as the first fort built in Kentucky. It was raised in the dangerous, contested days of late March, when the road into the Kentucky wilderness was just opening and the founding of Boonesborough lay only days ahead. The little fort marks the very edge of American settlement at that moment.

Savoy, TX

Built in 1836 by Arkansas Indian trader Abel Warren to guard his trading post, Fort Warren was among the earliest settlements in Fannin County, its bois d'arc walls anchored by two-story corner guardhouses. Kiowa, Tonkawa, Caddo, Wichita, and other peoples came to exchange furs for knives, paint, and trade goods, and during the Civil War the post served as a supply center funneling provisions to Confederate troops and Indian refugees in the Territory to the north.

Defiance, OH

In the autumn of 1812, with the young United States again at war with Britain, Gen. William Henry Harrison ordered this fort thrown up at the confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee rivers in what was then contested frontier. Fort Winchester never saw a great battle; instead it did the quieter, essential work of war — stockpiling supplies, drilling troops, and marshaling men before they pushed north to the fighting at Fort Meigs. By 1815 the war had ended and the garrison marched away, but the fort's footprint lingered: the streets of Defiance, Ohio grew up along the lines it had traced.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth began in 1849 as a U.S. Army dragoon post named by Major Ripley Arnold for his old commander, General William Jenkins Worth, guarding the edge of Anglo settlement. After the fort's brief military life, the town it spawned boomed once millions of longhorns began fording the Trinity here on their way up the Chisholm Trail, earning the nickname "Cowtown." The railroad's 1876 arrival turned it into one of the world's great cattle markets, and later meatpacking, oil, and aircraft plants carried its growth into the modern era.

Amarillo, TX

The Fort Worth and Denver City Railway pushed across the Texas Panhandle in the late 1880s, and its arrival was the making of Amarillo — turning a cluster of buildings on the open plains into a shipping hub for cattle and, later, wheat. The depot marked here was the town's front door, where passengers, mail, and freight moved between the isolated Panhandle and the wider nation. Rail depots like it were the beating heart of frontier-era Texas towns.

Amarillo, TX

Chartered by Fort Worth citizens in 1873 but delayed by that year's financial panic, the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway became the first railroad to cross the Texas Panhandle. Grading began in 1881 under famed engineer G. M. Dodge, and as crews pushed the rails northwest, their camps became towns—Amarillo among them, born in 1887. The line's completion in 1888 opened a through route to Denver and helped transform the old buffalo range into an economy of cattle, grain, and petroleum.

Fort Worth, TX

In the late 1860s Fort Worth was a stop on the great cattle trails, and by the 1870s it had organized a market that would become one of the world's greatest cattle centers. This building, erected in 1902-03, housed the Stockyards Company, livestock commissions, and buyers as trading nearly doubled and small packing plants gave way to multi-million-dollar operations. Surrounded then by lawns, the exchange stood at the heart of an industry that earned Fort Worth its nickname, "Cowtown."

Fort Worth, TX

By the 1870s, frontier settlements beyond the reach of the railroads still needed their mail, so the Post Office Department began contracting private "Star Routes" to carry it. On August 15, 1878, Route No. 31454 opened between Fort Worth and Yuma, Arizona Territory, under contractor J. T. Chidester, its stagecoaches largely retracing the old Butterfield Overland Mail line of the 1850s. The route lasted only until 1881, when the southern transcontinental railroad made it obsolete.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1947

Pennsylvania built Fort Wyoming in 1771 to press its claim in the Wyoming Valley, only to have it seized by the Connecticut settlers it was meant to check. Rebuilt in 1778, it served the following year as a mustering point for General John Sullivan's expedition against the Iroquois during the Revolution. The garrison held until 1784, when Continental and Pennsylvania troops withdrew and the works were destroyed.

Austin, TX

Martin Wieland, a settler from Dessau, Germany, built this sturdy home in the early 1850s on the Central Texas frontier, where it doubled as a place of refuge for neighbors in times of danger. Successive enlargements in 1873 and 1912 show how the household and community grew alongside it. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Forty Fort, PA · est. 1947

Forty Fort took its name from the forty Connecticut pioneers who came to the Wyoming Valley in 1769 and began the stockade the next year. It is remembered above all for the aftermath of July 3, 1778, when its surrender to a British, Loyalist, and Native force under Major John Butler was followed by the Wyoming Massacre, one of the war's bloodiest frontier episodes. The killing of settlers and prisoners shocked the young nation and hardened resolve against the Iroquois allies of the Crown.

Churchill County, NV

The Forty Mile Desert, beginning here, was a barren stretch of waterless alkali that emigrants regarded as the most dreaded section of the California Trail — many crossed it by night to escape the punishing heat. The Walker-Chiles Party first brought wagons through in 1843, and despite its horrors the route became the accepted path, splitting into the Carson and Truckee River trails. An 1850 survey tallied the grim toll: more than 1,000 dead mules, nearly 5,000 horses, thousands of cattle, and 953 graves.

Gladewater, TX

William Emmett and Mary Foshee bought this Upshur-country land in 1884 and raised their large family in a house built in 1890 from lumber sawn at John O'Byrne's mill, distinguished by a chimney of hand-hewn 'ironrock' from the creek that crossed the property. William wore many hats on the frontier — postmaster, farmer, lumber contractor, and justice of the peace. In the early 1930s one of the first wells of the great East Texas oil field came in on this ground, and the family's Ironrock Oil Company, named for that curious stone, was still operating when the marker was placed.

Sterling City, TX

Foster Cemetery began on the ranch of Robert West and Fannie B. Foster, early settlers and civic leaders of Sterling County, when their infant daughter Fay became the first burial here in 1883. Over more than a century it grew into the resting place of the county's founders—commissioners, mayors, early ranchers, and even a saloon keeper who doubled as a cattle inspector. Among them lies Ethel Foster, a president of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs.

Rosenberg, TX

The Foster community traces to 1821, when Randolph Foster pitched a permanent camp on an enormous land grant tied to his father John, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists. Foster kin fought in the Texas War for Independence, and the settlement thrived on sugar cane in the 1840s, later shipping its crop by a railroad Imperial Sugar built to the mills at Sugar Land. Schools, a store, and a post office followed, but by the end of World War II the failing sugar crop, the Depression, and shifting ownership drained the community away.

Wood County, TX

The community of Fouke took root in southeastern Wood County, Texas, in the years just after the Civil War, first known simply as "Center" and said to date to about 1866. As settlers gathered in the early 1870s, they raised a log building that did double and triple duty as church, school, and meeting place — a common pattern on the post-war Texas frontier, where one structure often anchored a whole rural settlement. Such communities grew up along the farms and lakes of East Texas as families sought land and a fresh start during Reconstruction.

Houston, TX

This Houston burial ground is recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery, a designation reserved for graveyards that have served their communities for generations. Such early cemeteries hold the remains of the settlers, veterans, and civic founders who built the city in its formative decades.

Fort Worth, TX

In the late 1840s the U.S. Army sought a new post on the Trinity River to guard the line between settlers and the Plains tribes. General William J. Worth planned it but died of cholera before it was built, leaving Major Ripley Arnold to scout and establish the fort in 1849 near Marrow Bone Springs with the help of local figures like Middleton Tate Johnson. Arnold named the post for Worth, the recently fallen Mexican War hero, and the barracks rose where the Tarrant County Courthouse now stands.

Asheville, NC

On April 16, 1792, in the mountains of western North Carolina, an act of the General Assembly creating Buncombe County took effect near a place called Gum Spring. Carved from a rugged, sparsely settled frontier that would later cradle Asheville, the new county extended orderly government into a remote corner of the young republic. The Colonial Dames of America placed this monument in 1922 to fix the founding site in public memory.

Covington, LA

John Wharton Collins founded the town of Wharton here in March 1813, naming it for his grandfather. Three years later the Louisiana legislature renamed it Covington in honor of General Leonard Covington, a hero of the War of 1812.

Georgetown, TX

According to local tradition, Williamson County's first commissioners gathered under a great oak here in May 1848 to choose a county seat. Landowner George Washington Glasscock offered a tract bounded by the tree and the San Gabriel River, and in gratitude the commissioners named the new town Georgetown in his honor. The landmark oak stood until a storm felled it in 1886.

West Liberty, KY

Edmund Wells settled this stretch of eastern Kentucky about 1814, running a mill, ferry, and tavern when it was still part of Floyd County. When Morgan County was created, its first court met at his home in 1823, and Wells gave the land for the county seat of West Liberty and built its first jail and courthouse. His grist mill, completed in 1816, anchored the settlement first known as Wells Mill and remained a landmark long after he sold it around 1838.

San Marcos, TX

In 1847, in the log home of John D. Pitts, circuit rider A. B. F. Kerr organized the first church in newly created Hays County. The small congregation worshipped in the cabin for two years before building its own house of worship nearby.

Marion, TX

Marion owes its existence to the railroad. When the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway pushed west of the Guadalupe to link inland Texas with Gulf ports, investor Col. Thomas W. Peirce bought land near a country store and platted a town, naming it for his daughter and securing a post office in 1877. Within a year its three-acre railyard was shipping in volume, and by 1900 schools and churches had made it a settled community.

West Point, KY

In 1796 James Young and Samuel Pearman laid out West Point on Young's land, naming it for its standing as the westernmost English-speaking settlement below the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville. Its position at the confluence of the Salt and Ohio Rivers made it a prosperous river town. Young ran an inn, operated a ferry across the Ohio to the Northwest Territory by 1797, and helped finance the Louisville-Nashville Turnpike that would one day become the Dixie Highway.

Freeport, TX

Four miles from this spot stood the original town of Velasco, one of early Texas's most consequential coastal sites. Here the schooner Lively landed the first immigrants to Stephen F. Austin's colony in 1821; here colonists and Mexican troops clashed in the 1832 Battle of Velasco, an early spark of Texan resistance; and here, in 1836, Presidents David G. Burnet and Santa Anna signed a peace treaty that Mexico never ratified. Few places hold so many turning points of the Texas Revolution in one stretch of shoreline.

Kaufman, TX

London-born physician Joseph Fox, who settled in early Kaufman County, set aside this ground as a burial place after his daughter Sarah became the first person laid to rest here in August 1852. Fox himself died in 1872, and many prominent pioneers of the young settlement are buried alongside him. Generations of descendants and friends have tended the grounds ever since.

McKinney, TX

Built in 1915 by George W. and Lula Fox, this house reflects the Prairie School style then sweeping American design, with its low hipped roof, deep eaves, boxed rafters, and a wraparound porch echoing the horizontal lines above. George Fox, descended from a pioneer Collin County family, worked as a local Realtor and county official. In 1922 the prominent Caldwell family bought the home, giving it the second half of its name.

De Leon, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1849, Frances Marie Sparks married Thomas Brown in 1865 and moved to a 410-acre farm near here around 1876. Through the 1880s and 1890s, "Aunt Fanny" served as midwife and lay doctor, often riding six to eight miles by horseback in the dark to deliver a baby. After her husband's death in 1912 she managed the farm, raised twelve children, and kept nursing her neighbors to the end of her long life in 1934.