Westward Expansion

Austin, TX

Gethsemane was the first Lutheran church in Travis County, organized in 1868 by Swedish immigrants under the leadership of Swante Palm. The congregation raised this 1883 building using stone hauled by wheelbarrow from the Texas Capitol that had burned in 1881, and later fitted it with ornate doors salvaged from the University of Texas's Old Main. Its form echoes the rural churches of the Swedish homeland its founders had left behind.

Burkburnett, TX

German immigrant Herman Specht amassed some 21,000 acres in northern Wichita County and in 1886 platted the town of Clara, naming it for his wife and its streets for Texas heroes. He recruited German colonists, raised wheat, and kept an experimental nursery, but drought, the 1900 Galveston storm, an inadequate water supply, and the coming of good roads and cars steadily drained the town until only the church, rectory, and cemetery remained.

Teague, TX

Settled before 1848, Cotton Gin took its name from the mule-drawn gin Dr. J. S. Wills built here, and it gained a post office in 1851 as Freestone County organized. Though Wills offered land for a courthouse, voters declined to make it the county seat, and the thriving town — with three churches, a school, a newspaper, and a Masonic Lodge — faded in the 1870s when the Houston & Texas Central Railroad laid its tracks a few miles west. Its businesses drifted toward the rails, leaving Cotton Gin a ghost town.

Mohave County, AZ

A few miles off this road lie the ruins of White Hills, a mining boom town that flared to life in 1892 and was largely gone by 1898. In just six years its mines yielded some twelve million dollars in gold and silver, with the original strike credited to a Native prospector. Today only foundations and scattered debris remain of the once-bustling camp.

Hereford, TX

Across the Texas Panhandle, the settlement map is written as much in vanished towns as in surviving ones, and Deaf Smith County is a vivid example. La Plata, once known as Grenada, was a bustling county seat and a key stop on the New Mexico–Amarillo Road in the 1880s and 1890s—until its buildings and county government were simply hauled off to Hereford in 1898. Nearby Ayr, Escarbada on the great XIT Ranch, Dean, Mirage, and Kelso each flickered into existence as post offices before fading away entirely.

Arlington, TX

James Gibbins left Arkansas for Texas in 1857 and bought land near present-day Arlington in 1863, later deeding part of it to his son Thomas Jefferson Gibbins, who enlarged the homestead. The family cemetery opened with the 1877 burial of Thomas's first wife, Amanda, and his second wife Martha kept the land for three decades after his death. The Gibbins family gave much to the growing community, including land for a public school and a local park.

Huntsville, TX

This Greek Revival home was built in 1862 for the family of Thomas Gibbs, part of a prominent early Huntsville family. After serving as a rental and student housing in the late 1800s, it was purchased in 1897 by Judge Ben Powell II. Retaining its square porch columns and transom-and-sidelight entry, the house opened as a local history museum in 1984.

Rendon vicinity, TX

In 1853 brothers Garrett and James Gibson and their kin settled 160-acre homesteads in what became the Gibson Community of Tarrant County. Each brother donated land here for a cemetery, first used in 1866 for Garrett's infant grandson, James Truitt. Of the seventy-three marked graves, many bearing only rough fieldstones, all but two hold members of the Gibson family, a lasting record of one of the county's earliest settlements.

Perrin, TX

Settled as New Hope City and later renamed Gibtown for merchant Burdett Levi Gibbins, this North Texas farming community grew up in the decades after the Civil War. Its cemetery, whose first marked grave belongs to Mary C. Stults (d. 1876), gathered the pioneer families, ministers, doctors, and county officials who built the town. Tombstones bearing Woodmen of the World and Masonic emblems record the fraternal life that bound the settlement together.

Brenham, TX

Jabez Deming Giddings, a Pennsylvania lawyer and civic leader, bought this Brenham land in 1837 and built a home of hand-hewn cypress boards—crowned by an unusual rooftop rainwater reservoir—before his 1843 marriage to Ann Tarver. Remodeled about 1870 and sold to the Wilkin family in 1871, it sheltered them until 1942. Slated for demolition in 1972, the house was rescued and restored by the county's heritage society.

Iraan, TX

When mail, passengers, and freight still moved across West Texas by stagecoach, the San Antonio–El Paso line threaded the desolate Chihuahua Trail, or Lower Road. George H. Giddings took over the run in 1854 and built a string of stations; the one raised near the Pecos River's "S" crossing in 1858 offered adobe-and-limestone shelter, a corral of horses and mules, and water from a hand-dug well. Reported destroyed during Indian raids in 1862, the remote post's exact site stayed uncertain until 21st-century archeology pinpointed its foundations.

Snook, TX

Prussian-born Johann Joachim Giesenschlag brought his wife Anna and their children to Texas in 1855, settling first in Washington County before moving to Burleson County in the 1870s, where they bought more than a thousand acres. Giesenschlag set aside this tract as a family cemetery and was the first laid to rest here; in 1883 his family deeded the ground to a nearby Evangelical Lutheran church. For years a schoolhouse stood on adjoining Giesenschlag land beside this pioneer burial ground.

Okanogan County, WA

Gilbert is one of the small mining camps that dotted Washington's Okanogan high country during the hard-rock strikes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prospectors chasing gold and silver threw up cabins and outbuildings that lasted only as long as the ore did; today a surviving cabin, stone foundations, and ground depressions are all that mark the settlement. It is a classic Western boom-and-bust story, written now in weathered logs and rubble.

Dimmitt, TX

Tennessee native and local merchant Jeff T. Gilbreath brought his family to the newly settled Castro County in 1905 and built this house in 1909, soon selling it to county attorney Mark Cowsert. A fine example of early 20th-century vernacular architecture with its bay window and hipped, gabled roof, the house was preserved when the Castro County Museum acquired it in 1976.

Pecan Gap, TX

Established in 1877, Giles Cemetery is among the older burial grounds of Delta County, in the blackland-prairie country of Northeast Texas. Its founding in the decades after the Civil War reflects the wave of farming families who settled this fertile region during Reconstruction. The state recognized it as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016.

Liberty, TX

Dr. E. J. Gillard moved his family from Louisiana to Texas in 1845 and about 1848 raised this home of native woods on his plantation east of Liberty. Its Greek Revival lines carry Creole touches from his Louisiana background, along with unusual features like a traveler's room and an upstairs schoolroom. The house passed down through the Duncan and Welder descendants and was relocated to its present spot in 1980.

Fredericksburg, TX

Once crossed by the trails of roving Indian peoples, these Hill Country lands were settled by German immigrant pioneers in 1846, with a group of Mormons founding Zodiac the next year. The county was created and organized in 1848 and named for Richard Addison Gillespie, a Texas frontier defender and Mexican War captain who was killed at the Battle of Monterrey in 1846. Fredericksburg became its seat.

Oakalla, TX

Absalom Barton Gillum and his wife Hannah Emmaline came to Texas from Alabama in 1872, and by 1880 he had bought the land that became this cemetery. A Civil War veteran, Master Mason, cotton-gin owner, and postmaster of Oakalla, Gillum first buried his four-year-old son Willie here in 1882. The grounds went on to hold Woodmen of the World members and veterans from the Civil War to the present, tended today by a family association.

Gilmer, TX

Founded in 1846 and named for Thomas W. Gilmer — U.S. Secretary of the Navy and a fervent champion of Texas annexation — this East Texas town came of age just as Texas joined the Union. During the Civil War it served as a supply, training, production, and educational center for the Confederacy, and later thrived as a hub of farming, lumbering, and oil. Today it is perhaps best known for its long-running Yamboree sweet-potato festival.

Dunbar Township, PA · est. 1948

Christopher Gist was a frontier surveyor for the Ohio Company who accompanied the young George Washington on his 1753 mission to warn the French at Fort LeBoeuf. He settled this plantation in the wilderness in 1753, but the following year the frontier war caught up with it: Washington paused his campaign here in 1754 before falling back to Fort Necessity, and pursuing French forces destroyed the place. It was one of the earliest English settlements west of the Alleghenies.

Utah County, UT

In the spring of 1865, the Given family settled and built a cabin on this stretch of central Utah frontier, plowing land amid rising tensions between Mormon settlers and Native peoples. On May 26th they were attacked; only two survivors ran for help that arrived too late, and the dead were buried in nearby Fairview. The episode came during the Black Hawk War, a bitter period of conflict in territorial Utah.

Gladewater, TX

Founded in 1827 as St. Clair a few miles east, the settlement moved to Glade Creek and the Texas & Pacific Railway in 1872 and took the name Gladewater. Its population exploded from 500 to 7,000 after oil was discovered in 1931, turning the farming and dairy town into a production and refining hub. The town became known for its East Texas Quarter Horse Show and a nationally known rodeo held in a converted salt-water disposal pit.

Garden City, TX

Glasscock County, created in 1887 and organized in 1893 with Garden City as its seat, honors George W. Glasscock (1810–68), a onetime flatboating partner of Abraham Lincoln in Illinois who came to Texas in 1834. He fought in the Texas War for Independence, built central Texas's first flour mill, and lent his name to Georgetown before serving in the state legislature. The marker also surveys how Texas's 254 counties were named — for patriots, revolutionaries, frontiersmen, statesmen, and Confederate figures.

Garden City, TX

Barely a month after Glasscock County organized in 1893, its first commissioners' court issued bonds for a combination courthouse and jail, completed in 1894 with the ground floor for court and the upper floor for the jail. As the county grew, a grander 2½-story Classical Revival courthouse rose in 1910, built of three-foot-thick native stone quarried from a local ranch and crowned with colossal Doric columns. That 1910 courthouse has served continuously ever since, while the original building continued as a jail into 1980.

Glazier, TX

Glazier sprang up in 1887 when the Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway reached the site, becoming a handy cattle-shipping point north of the flood-prone Canadian River. The Glazier Cemetery Association bought its ground in 1910, though the earliest burials date to 1906. The town endured hard blows—a 1916 fire that leveled its business district and a 1947 tornado that killed twelve—yet the cemetery still marks the community's history.

Glen Flora, TX

This house was built by a Mr. Sanford between 1860 and 1866, spanning the Civil War years in the plantation country of Wharton County. By 1881 it was home to W. H. Hood, who went on to found the town of Glen Flora in the 1890s. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Kerrville, TX

On October 15, 1894, a group of Kerrville citizens set aside a ten-acre tract near the Guadalupe River as Glen Rest, a community burial ground. Its directors and the thousands laid to rest here — some families reaching five generations deep, bearing names like Schreiner, Dietert, and Butt — read like a roll call of the Hill Country's founding families. A low native-limestone wall from the 1920s is said to reuse stone from the demolished 1886 Kerr County courthouse, binding one landmark's remains into another.

Glencoe, MN

Laid out in June 1855 by Martin McLeod, John H. Stevens, and other town founders, Glencoe rose quickly to become the seat of McLeod County. When the U.S.–Dakota War erupted in 1862, fear swept the Minnesota frontier and the young town threw up fortifications, garrisoning as many as four companies of soldiers behind its walls. The fort marked here embodied a settlement bracing itself amid one of the era's most wrenching conflicts.

Washington County, OR

This memorial ties Glencoe, Oregon, to Glencoe, Scotland, honoring the Scottish immigrants who helped settle the Oregon Territory in the mid-19th century. Dedicated in February 1985 and bearing the Clan MacDonald motto 'Per Mare, Per Terras,' it remembers pioneers who carried their names, clans, and traditions west.

Houston, TX

Glendale Cemetery began as a private family plot of John R. Harris, founder of Harrisburg (now part of Houston), with its first burial in 1839 — Judge John Birdsall, a former attorney general of the Republic of Texas. Growing without formal management, the grounds were tended for years by local women who formed the Glen Dale Cemetery Company in 1897, and after later neglect were restored beginning in 1952. Today it holds the graves of Texas heroes and pioneers of the Republic era.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

This burial ground began in the 1850s with the death of planter Julien Sidney Devereux, whose father and infant son were soon reinterred beside him. Known first as Devereux and Sand Field, it served the nearby Forest Hill community, home to an academy Devereux founded in 1850. When a post office opened in 1872 the settlement took the name Glenfawn, growing to include stores, a school, church, and Masonic lodge before fading away.

Tolar, TX

Though it sits in Hood County, Glenn Cemetery grew up to serve the Erath County community of Bluff Dale to the west. Andrew Jackson Glenn, its namesake, donated the land in 1897, but graves already dotted the property, the earliest dating to 1867. Many of Bluff Dale's leading early residents—and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War—rest here.

Del Rio, TX

Local contractor Daniel Glenn built this brick residence in 1900–01, working a band of decorative brickwork into its design, and sold it in 1901 to the widow Bessie Chisum. In 1906 she married Luke Dowe, a border peace officer who served first with the Texas Rangers' Frontier Battalion and later with U.S. Customs. The Dowes made the house their home for fifty years.

Beeville, TX

When Beeville's Evergreen Cemetery began to fill, local undertaker Christopher Rotzien bought adjoining land in 1901, and Margaret Ann Eeds became the first burial that April. Taken over by the Beeville Cemetery Association the next year and expanded over the decades, Glenwood grew into a landscaped resting place for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish citizens, including war veterans and the sister of Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie.

Crockett, TX

Glenwood Cemetery opened soon after Houston County was carved out and Crockett was named county seat in 1837, during the days of the Republic of Texas. As the town's oldest burial ground, it holds early Texas heroes and statesmen, a man who is said to have been visited by David Crockett on his way to the Alamo, a grandnephew of President Monroe, and the town's first elected mayor. Its weathered stones map the founding generation of this East Texas community.

Crockett, TX

This northern section belongs to Glenwood Cemetery, opened in the original townsite of Crockett soon after Houston County and its county seat were established in 1837. Among its burials are early Texas heroes and statesmen, a man said to have been visited by David Crockett en route to the Alamo, a grandnephew of President Monroe, and the town's first elected mayor. The grounds hold the founding generation of this East Texas community.

Glidden, TX

Before the rails arrived, this stretch of Colorado County launched cattle drives north to distant markets, and early settlers ranched, contracted, and built the mercantile houses that would last a century. The railroad changed everything: in 1882 T. J. Oakes sold land to the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio, which raised a depot, roundhouse, and turntable, and the townsite—named for railroad engineer F. G. Glidden—was platted in 1885. Scotch-Irish and English rail workers poured in, and Glidden grew into a busy rail center.

Gober, TX

On a summer day in 1889, the Rev. S.P. Clement and twelve charter members organized a Baptist congregation in the small Fannin County community of Gober. Early worship happened in the one-room schoolhouse and under a brush arbor before the members raised the town's first church building in 1893 on land donated by the Eads family. Larger sanctuaries followed in 1924 and 1953, and the congregation kept up an active missions program at home and abroad.

Paducah, TX

Built in 1896 when many townspeople still lived in dugouts, this ornate late-Victorian house belonged to Joe L. Gober, the first sheriff of newly settled Cottle County. Its lumber and fine gingerbread trim had to be hauled by wagon from the railheads at Childress and Quanah, years before Paducah gained its own rail line in 1909.

Montpelier, IN · est. 1989

Under the 1818 Treaty of St. Mary's, the United States reserved a 3,840-acre tract on the Salamonie River for Chief Francois Godfroy of the Miami Nation, at a place called La Petite Prairie. Such individual reserves let some Miami leaders remain on ancestral ground even as broader lands were ceded. Godfroy's reserve was itself sold off in stages in 1827 and 1836.

Cypress Mill, TX

German immigrant Carl A. Goeth settled near the well-known Indian Spring in 1865 and, in 1882, raised this two-story limestone house in the sturdy building tradition of his homeland. Patriarch of a large and prominent family, Goeth also served in the Texas Legislature in 1887-88.

Aledo, TX

On land the Goforth family settled in 1857, a small family burial ground holds four graves, among them a two-year-old boy laid to rest in 1863 while his father was away serving in the 18th Texas Cavalry. Neighbors from the Chadwick family shared the plot as well. It is a quiet record of how sparse frontier settlement and Civil War service shaped early Parker County life.

Humboldt County, NV

Golconda began as a Utah Territory mining town and a welcome landmark on the California Emigrant Trail, best known for the hot springs that fed a swanky resort hotel staffed by doctors. Its fortunes rose with the rails: in 1868 it became an ore-shipping point on the new Central Pacific, and renewed mining in 1897 prompted a short narrow-gauge line running south to the Adelaide mine. The town swelled to some five hundred residents by 1899, only to slump the following year when the mine and mill closed and rail service to the mine ended.

Promontory, UT · est. 1957

Two railroads — one built east from California largely by Chinese laborers, the other west across the plains — joined rails at Promontory. The country could now be crossed in days instead of months.

Esmeralda County, NV

After two decades of decline that drained a third of Nevada's population, the state's fortunes turned overnight with rich strikes at Tonopah and, in December 1902, here at Goldfield. Nevada-born prospectors Harry Stimler and Billy Marsh found gold ore, and from 1904 to 1918 Goldfield boomed into the state's largest city, peaking near 20,000 people with a railroad linking it to Las Vegas. Before the mines gave out, they yielded more than $86 million in precious metals.

Goldsmith, TX

Goldsmith sprang to life as an oil field on June 14, 1935, when the discovery well gushed 1,140 barrels of crude a day and shacks and tents soon housed 350 people. First platted as Ector City by Harry L. Tucker in 1937 and later renamed for landowner C. A. Goldsmith, the boomtown quickly gained cafes, a hospital, movie theater, hotels, and a newspaper—though its lone bath was a 25-cent shower from an overhead tank. It endures today as a gas processing and distribution center.

Goldthwaite, TX

Three local men bought this ground for a cemetery in 1888, with Houston Roberts the first laid to rest. The Odd Fellows Lodge acquired and expanded it in 1894; among its stories is that of Watson Whittaker, killed in an 1898 train robbery and carried home by a funeral train that made headlines. The city took ownership in 1943, and community groups later added memorials honoring the area's veterans.

Goliad, TX

Completed in 1894 for just under $68,000, Goliad's fourth courthouse reused limestone and brick from an 1870 predecessor, standing as the seat of a county born with the Republic of Texas in 1836. It sheltered the injured after a devastating 1902 cyclone, lost its central clock tower to a 1942 storm, and was enlarged in 1964 with its carved staircases and walnut wainscoting preserved.

Goliad, TX

Freemasons first met in Goliad in 1851 and won their charter the next year, and since 1854 the lodge has gathered in this rubble-stone building—one of the town's oldest. Its ground floor long did double duty as the local post office and city hall, making the modest structure a hub of civic as well as fraternal life in a community steeped in Texas Revolution history.

San Antonio, TX

Laid out by Spain around 1720 as El Camino Real a La Bahía—the King's Highway to Goliad—this road served for a century and a half as a major route for emigrants, armies, and traders, later becoming part of the Chihuahua Road linking the Gulf Coast to Mexico. Soldiers of Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederacy marched along it, as did Native peoples, and near this spot it crossed Salado Creek on the approach to San Antonio. Its heavy traffic faded only when the railroads arrived.

Brownfield, TX

On August 3, 1903, nine worshippers gathered under a wagon-sheet tent to organize this Baptist church, led by the Rev. J. R. Miller and meeting monthly in the Gomez schoolhouse. A one-room sanctuary built in 1909 was later moved when the town of Gomez itself was relocated for highway construction, and a larger church rose in 1936. The congregation gained its first full-time pastor by 1942 but was disbanded in 1992, its fortunes tied to the fading town of Gomez.

Brownfield, TX

Established in 1902, this cemetery served Gomez, the first settlement in Terry County, which then stood a half-mile to the west. Pioneer settler H. F. Adams deeded the original four-acre tract to the Gomez School trustees in 1906, and some of the area's earliest homesteaders were buried here. When the county seat shifted, many graves were moved to Brownfield in 1918.

Gonzales, TX

Here on September 29, 1835, Mexican troops arrived to reclaim a small cannon the government had lent the colonists of Gonzales for defense against raids. The Texians stalled for two days while reinforcements gathered, then flung back their famous answer — "Come and Take It." The standoff over that little gun helped ignite the Texas Revolution.

Gonzales, TX

At this spot in a peach orchard, the colonists of Gonzales buried their contested cannon to hide it from 150 Mexican dragoons sent to seize it in September 1835. Two days later they dug it up, mounted it on ox-cart wheels, loaded it with chains and scrap iron, and fired what is remembered as the first shot of the Texas Revolution.

Gonzales, TX

Gonzales County was organized in 1837, in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas, and after its first courthouse burned in 1893 this second one was raised between 1894 and 1896 at a cost of $64,450. Serving as a gathering place for Texas leaders and the setting for consequential court decisions, the building has anchored the civic life of a town already famous in Texas history. It remains a proud landmark of the county seat.

Gonzales County, TX

When Green DeWitt planted his colony on the Guadalupe River in 1825, he ordered a road cut to link his capital at Gonzales with San Antonio, and surveyor Byrd Lockhart opened the eighty-mile route in 1827—its mileage notched into roadside oak trunks. Settlers, traders, and Mexican travelers braved the road despite the danger of raids. A decade later it became a thoroughfare of the Texas Revolution: the 'Immortal 32' marched down it from Gonzales to reinforce the Alamo, and Santa Anna's army followed after the fort fell.

Denton, TX

In the 1850s pioneers from Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, and beyond were drawn to this North Texas prairie by its rich soil and reliable water, forming the Rue Settlement that later took the name Good Hope. The cemetery holds the community's dead, with the earliest legible stone dated 1870 and more than eighty nineteenth-century burials that testify to the hardships of frontier life. As churches closed and the school shut in 1949, the settlement faded, leaving the graveyard as one of the few reminders it ever existed.

Valley Mills, TX

When W.H. Everett claimed 320 acres of central Texas prairie in 1846, death arrived before permanence did — he set aside this ground after four-year-old Sarah Hornbeak died in 1851. Two years later he brought his widowed sister Nancy Goodall and her eight children west from Arkansas, and one of those children, W.B. Goodall, bought the land and lent it his name. The burial ground holds about forty graves, a small record of the families who settled the McLennan County frontier.

Athens, TX

Named for a pioneering family that migrated from Alabama in the 1850s, Goodgame Cemetery has served Henderson County since the Civil War era, its first recorded burial a young girl who died in 1863 while her father was away at war. Floyd Crockett Goodgame's sons became Confederate officers, and one, a schoolteacher, returned to teach and help found the community of Turkey Creek. The ground was formally deeded in 1901 and holds veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Korea, marked by Woodmen of the World stones and family curbing.

Childress, TX

During the dangerous frontier years of 1866–71, this was a stretch of the great cattle trail blazed by Col. Charles Goodnight, carrying thousands of Texas cattle north to U.S. forts in Colorado and New Mexico. Herds watered at this spot on the drive. The site later became the town of Childress in 1886, and the old watering hole is now a lake in Fair Park.