Westward Expansion

Maypearl, TX

Archibald and Mary Greathouse settled here in 1848 and gave their name to a creek and the rural community that grew around a church, school, and cemetery. Settlers hauled lumber by oxcart from Waxahachie to build the Greathouse Missionary Baptist Church, and the little community even produced four ministers and a state appellate judge. When the railroad reached nearby Maypearl in 1904, families drifted away; the school closed in 1912 and the church around 1927, leaving the well-tended cemetery as the community's last witness.

Gonzales, TX

Green and Sarah DeWitt left Missouri for Texas in 1826 after Green won an empresario grant to settle 400 Anglo-American families southwest of Stephen F. Austin's colony. Sarah earned her own land grant, the Sarah Seely League, in 1831, and set aside this acre as a family burying ground. She is remembered for the defiant "come and take it" flag raised as the fight for Texas independence began, while her husband lies buried in Mexico.

Mount Pleasant, TX

This congregation was established in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, as Presbyterian settlers carried their faith and institutions into the piney woods of northeast Texas. A frontier church like this often doubled as the social and moral anchor of a scattered rural community, hosting worship, schooling, and gatherings long before towns fully took shape.

Wilson, TX

This cemetery grew alongside the farming community of Wilson, its land assembled after 1906 by promoter William G. Green and his cousin Lonnie Lumsden, who unlike the absentee Green settled here and spent his life boosting the town. The rows of graves read like a roster of the plains community: pioneer families, a Civil War veteran, World War II soldiers, and a mix of German American and Hispanic surnames that testify to who broke this ground. A cemetery association has cared for the site since 1930.

Temple, TX

Green Oaks Farm lies within the sprawling Maximo Moreno land grant of 1834, part of which passed to Moses and Barzilla Griffin and later to their daughter Cornelia Griffin Rich, who built a farmhouse here in 1882. The farm became a hub for early settlers: the Mount Vernon School opened nearby, the community of Echo grew on its edge, and a settlement trail crossed Friars Creek, whose waters served travelers and residents alike.

Cameron, TX

Built in 1847 of logs and locally made brick, this was among Cameron's earliest homes, raised by George Green, a surveyor who had fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Texas's 1836 fight for independence. As the frontier town matured, board siding went up in the 1850s and later owner R. L. Batte, Sr. added rooms while raising his own children and many orphans under its roof. The now-enclosed cabin survives as a layered record of two families and a young Texas.

Johnson County, TX

Constituted in 1878 with just seventeen charter members, Greenbrier Baptist Church rose alongside the pioneer families settling this stretch of Johnson County in the decades after the Civil War. Before either denomination could raise its own sanctuary, the Baptist and Methodist congregations shared the community schoolhouse — a common thrift on the Texas frontier. When the Greenbrier community was rechristened Greenfield in 1917, the church endured as a social anchor for well over a hundred years.

Madisonville, TX

In 1884 James C. and Lillis Jane Colwell deeded an acre for a community school, and when their four-year-old daughter Callie Lorena died in 1888, part of that land became a cemetery. A two-room schoolhouse stood beside the graves from about 1890 until the 1940s, when the Greenbrier community faded. The cemetery holds more than two hundred pioneer settlers and their descendants, along with veterans from the Civil War through the Korean War.

Carmichaels, PA · est. 1953

Established by act of the Pennsylvania legislature in 1810 and aided by a state grant and local subscriptions, Greene Academy brought advanced schooling to Carmichaels when much of western Pennsylvania was still frontier country. For half a century it stood among the leading academies west of the mountains, educating young people far from the older schools of the East. Its old building still stands nearby.

Waynesburg, PA · est. 1982

Formed from Washington County in 1796, Greene County was named for Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene, and its seat, Waynesburg, honors the fiery General Anthony Wayne. In the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, this was hard-won frontier country in the early republic. Waynesburg College was founded here in 1849, and the area near Ten Mile Creek gave rise to Governor Edward Martin.

Snyder, TX

Greene Springs has drawn people for centuries as the first live water flowing into the South Fork of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, its potholes fed by a steady sandstone-filtered flow. Native peoples left food-grinding holes and petroglyphs on the creek walls, and archeologists have since recovered stone tools, beads, and arrow points. In the 19th century, military expeditions under Capt. R. B. Marcy in 1849 and Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1856 camped here, followed by buffalo hunters and westbound emigrants; the springs were named about 1881 for rancher "Jim" Greene.

Brownwood, TX

Greenleaf Fisk, remembered as the 'Father of Brownwood,' gave the city five acres for a public burial ground in 1868, with the first known burial in 1873. Now the city's main cemetery of more than 22,000 graves, it holds pioneers and notables—from Noah T. Byars, whose shop hosted the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence, to pulp author Robert E. Howard—alongside veterans of every war, including Buffalo Soldiers.

Brownwood, TX

Known as the 'Father of Brownwood,' Greenleaf Fisk (1807–1888) was born in New York to English parents and abandoned ministry studies in 1834 to brave the Texas frontier. He fought at San Jacinto in 1836, held county offices, and served as a senator in the Republic of Texas, and as a government surveyor he mapped and came to love this region. Settling here on a Texas Revolution land grant, he donated 60 acres for the town and 100 for county use, then persuaded neighbors to relocate to the new county seat.

Greensburg, KY

Raised between 1802 and 1804 by a handful of local builders—among them Thomas Metcalfe, a future Kentucky governor—the Greensburg courthouse is one of the oldest public buildings still standing in the state. It served the county's legal business for some 135 years and later housed a library on its second floor. Its sturdy stone walls have watched over Green County's civic life for more than two centuries.

Miller Grove, TX

In 1839 the Rev. Green Weaver, a merchant, minister, and slaveholder, brought his family to this Hopkins County land and built a two-room log cabin along an old wagon trail from Shreveport. The family burial ground began in 1848 with the grave of the Weavers' infant daughter, placed close to home so her mother could walk to it, and opened to the public in 1878. A community grew up around the church and school that the Weavers' descendants helped establish, and the renamed Greenview Cemetery still holds more than 1,200 graves.

Greenville, TX

Created in 1846, Hunt County set its seat at a spot donated by surveyor McQuinney Howell Wright and named it Greenville for Texas independence veteran Thomas J. Green. Unusually for north central Texas, the county voted for secession, and Greenville endured hardship, violence, and federal occupation through the Civil War and Reconstruction. The arrival of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroad in 1880 transformed the town into a cotton-shipping powerhouse, complete with banks, streetcars, and Texas's first municipally owned electric utility.

Greenwood, TX

Settlers began arriving in this corner of Wise County as early as the 1850s, with the Greenwood and Hart families remembered among the first. The town that grew here gained a post office in 1877 and at its peak bustled with saloons, groceries, a hotel, a bank, a cotton gin, and its own newspaper, the Greenwood Gazette. It even supported the short-lived Greenwood Male and Female College, and three churches founded between 1872 and 1896 still anchor the area.

Midland, TX

Greenwood Baptist Church was organized in 1907 in an unused saloon in the West Texas community of Slaughter, taking its name from two missionaries, the Revs. Green and Wood. In its early years the congregation gathered in various schoolhouses before erecting a permanent building in 1926 on land donated by charter member and deacon John M. King. The story is a small, vivid glimpse of how faith communities took root across the ranching frontier.

Gonzales, TX

James Jackson Hodges, grandson of a delegate to the 1835 Texas convention at San Felipe de Austin, married Martha Pritchett in 1849 and settled this area, building a schoolhouse that doubled as a Cumberland Presbyterian church. The oldest grave here is Martha's uncle John Pritchett, a War of 1812 veteran buried in 1856; Hodges deeded the land as a community cemetery in 1896. Nine of the couple's twelve children rest here in what remains a chronicle of area pioneers.

Bells, TX

This cemetery served early settlers of Fannin and Grayson counties, and was long called 'Jenkins Cemetery' because access ran through John J. Jenkins's farm. Its oldest stones have been worn blank by weather, and the earliest legible date belongs to James P. Montgomery, who died in 1869. Formally deeded in trust in 1882, the neglected grounds—many wooden markers lost to a 1935 grass fire—were restored in 1972 by descendants of Jenkins.

Marshall, TX

Begun in 1840 as the private burial ground of the Van Zandt family and formally dedicated in 1881, Greenwood Cemetery holds many of early East Texas's founding figures. Among them are Isaac Van Zandt and James Harper Starr, each honored with a Texas county named for him, and Confederate brigadier generals Matthew Duncan Ector and Alexander Travis Hawthorne. Even a grandson of Sam Houston rests here, tying the ground to the first generation of the Texas Republic.

Weatherford, TX

Greenwood took shape in the 1880s as a farming community on land sold to T. D. Wythe and W. J. Fain, gathering the institutions that gave frontier neighborhoods their life: a general store run by a transplanted Missouri sheriff, a cemetery, a school built in 1883 that doubled as a place of worship and social gathering, and several churches. Later came a home demonstration club, a community center, and a volunteer fire department. Though it never grew into an incorporated town, its arc from farmland to full community is a familiar chapter of Parker County history.

Decatur, TX

In 1895, local Freemasons petitioned the Grand Lodge of Texas and were chartered that December, making their home on the second floor of a wooden building at 147 Main Street above a bank whose vault still remains. Reached first by an exterior wooden staircase, later replaced in metal, the lodge kept its original wooden walls and ceiling and survived two town fires and a 1909 cyclone.

Shamrock, TX

Created in 1860 and organized at Old Mobeetie, Greer County grew rapidly in the 1880s into one of the largest counties Texas claimed, filling with schools, post offices, and tens of thousands of cattle. But its ownership was contested for half a century, a tangle rooted in an 1819 treaty whose flawed map misplaced the 100th meridian and showed only one fork of the two-forked Red River. When three survey commissions failed to settle it, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1896 that the land had belonged to the Union since 1819 — making it part of Oklahoma, not Texas.

Denton, TX

Darius Gregg came to Texas from Tennessee in 1827 and fought in the war for independence before amassing some 20,000 acres across this part of North Texas in the early 1850s. A surveyor and Houston realtor, he summered on the land his son later ranched through the 1870s and '80s. The ranch drew a colorful cast—among its hands was the notorious outlaw Sam Bass, and among its summer guests a member of the Swift meatpacking family—and a portion remains in Gregg descendants' hands to this day.

Gregory, TX

Gregory began in 1886 when the San Antonio and Aransas Pass railroad laid track through San Patricio County, and the rail company joined the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company to build a station at the junction where the line split toward Corpus Christi and Aransas Pass. Named by 1887 for Thomas W. Gregory — a Fulton family friend and future U.S. attorney general — the town grew fast with stores, hotels, banks, and up to seven trains a day. It got another lift when the pasture company moved its headquarters here and built the three-story Green Hotel in 1909, and it endured as a residential community even after the company later relocated to Taft.

Ft. Stockton, TX

Built in the 1880s as part of the settlement around Fort Stockton, the Grey Mule Saloon was a gathering place for cowboys and hotel guests in this West Texas frontier town. In later years the building served more sober purposes as a store and post office. It survives as a relic of the cattle-country West.

Town of Martinsburg, NY

Greystone Manor is the limestone mansion built between 1803 and 1805 for General Walter Martin, the pioneering settler and namesake of Martinsburg on the early frontier of New York's Lewis County. A civic, industrial, religious, and educational leader, Martin raised his Federal-style home in the opening years of American settlement here; Greek Revival wings were added around 1835 under his sons. Over two centuries the house served as a tavern, a convalescent home for Canadian soldiers of the First World War, and a nursing home before the Lewis County Historical Society acquired it.

Reagan County, TX

Grierson Spring rose out of the arid country of West Texas as an 1878 outpost of Fort Concho and a stage stand on the Fort Concho–Fort Stockton road. It honored General Benjamin H. Grierson, who commanded federal troops in the region during the Indian Wars and led the celebrated Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry. The post was abandoned in 1882 as the frontier moved on.

Fort Davis, TX

Completed in 1908 by B. H. Grierson Jr., this masonry home was built of local pink volcanic tuff, echoing the officers' quarters at the nearby military post of Fort Davis. After fire gutted it in 1912, rancher and county sheriff Franklin Sproul rebuilt the house, and under the Sproul family it became a gathering place at the heart of community life in this West Texas town.

Tomball, TX

This house was built about 1860 by Eugene Pillot, a skilled builder trained by his father, an early Harris County settler. Standing originally near the Atascosita Trail south of Willow Creek, it was a place where General Sam Houston is said to have stopped as a guest. Owned by the Griffin family from 1920 to 1965, it was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1969.

Liberty, TX

Jackson Hawkins Griffin arrived in Liberty in 1835 and fought at the Siege of Bexar during the Texas Revolution, later opening his home as a boarding house for newcomers. When one of his lodgers died in 1846, Griffin set aside land for a burial ground that still bears his name. Griffin himself enlisted in the Confederate Army and fell at the Battle of Franklin in 1864, and the graveyard passed through Dr. James Cooke to the Methodist church before a 1981 restoration reopened it to the public.

Port Neches, TX

Joseph Grigsby brought his family from Kentucky to the Sabine country in 1827 and is remembered as perhaps the first cotton grower in East Texas. On a large grant along the Neches he built a wharf for sidewheel steamers and founded Grigsby's Bluff, serving in three congresses of the Republic of Texas. The town he started grew into present-day Port Neches.

Blessing, TX

Sea captain turned cattleman Richard Grimes opened this family burial ground in 1856 after the death of an infant grandson, on the WBG ranch he and his son had built near Matagorda Bay. The ranch was a school for the cattle trade, employing cowboys like Charles Siringo and Shanghai Pierce, and after the Civil War it launched major trail drives north to the Kansas railheads at Abilene and Dodge City. The family and its ranching legacy stretched into the twentieth century, and the cemetery remains in use today.

Jacksonville, TX

Benjamin Franklin Grimes came to Cherokee County in 1852 with his parents, married Mary Jane Wallace in 1859, and raised ten children while running freight wagons and serving in the Confederate army. In 1883 he buried his daughter Cassandra Gabriella on the family's land, beginning what became the Grimes Cemetery. Still in use, it holds more than 80 graves, including those of a dozen veterans.

Anderson, TX

The ground here carries layers of Texas history: a road used in 1690 by Spanish explorer Alonso de León, the 1821 arrival of settler Andrew Millican, and Henry Fanthorp's inn and post office of the 1830s. The town took its name from Kenneth Anderson, the Republic of Texas's last vice-president, who died at Fanthorp's inn in 1845. Organized in 1846 and named for Declaration signer Jesse Grimes, the county even ran a gun factory and supplied troops during the Civil War.

Bedias, TX

During the Republic of Texas years, settlers gathered here to form the Bethel community, and the burial of a smallpox victim in 1843 began what became Bethel Cemetery. Among those resting here is Sarah Bradley Dodson, remembered as the 'Betsy Ross of Texas,' whose 1835 Lone Star flag flew over Washington-on-the-Brazos at the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Her husband Archelaus later deeded the ground to a Presbyterian congregation, and in 1904 an adjacent section opened for the area's African American residents.

Anderson, TX

The third courthouse to stand on this Anderson square, this hand-molded brick Victorian building rose in 1891 on land granted by Mexico in 1824 and donated in 1850 by Henry Fanthorp, the county's first permanent settler. Its vault, salvaged from earlier buildings, twice survived fire. Local lore even records a Clyde Barrow gang member, tried here in the 1930s, cursing that he'd next see the court in the infernal regions.

Hempstead vicinity, TX

Jared E. Groce arrived in Texas in 1822 among the earliest Anglo settlers, his wagon train hauling elaborate plantation equipment into a raw frontier. He and his heirs built a string of cotton plantations with grand names — Bernardo, Groce's Retreat, Liendo — along with an early gin and ferry. On the eve of the Battle of San Jacinto the family fed and ferried Sam Houston's army, a direct contribution to Texas independence.

Groom, TX

Groom sprang up in 1902 when the Rock Island Railroad pushed west across the Texas Panhandle and landowner W. S. Wilkerson founded a townsite along the tracks. It took its name from Col. B. B. Groom, an 1880s cattle-company agent remembered as the first to attempt power farming on the High Plains. The town became the hub of a rich farming and ranching country.

West, TX

The town of West grew from a wave of German and Czech immigrants who turned the McLennan County blackland into productive farms. Among them was August Groppe, Sr., who bought this land in 1874, helped found West's German community, and in 1886 hired local builder Joseph Huber to raise this barn. With its brace-frame timber construction, cross-gabled hay door, and angled cross-shaped opening, it is a fine surviving example of a late-19th-century immigrant farmstead.

Blue Ridge, TX

Grounds Cemetery was established in 1875, in the early decades of Anglo settlement in Collin County, Texas. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, it marks one of the small rural burial grounds that served scattered farming families of the era. Such graveyards are often the last physical trace of communities that have otherwise disappeared from the landscape.

Houston County, TX

George and Catherine Grounds settled this part of East Texas around 1829, near the earlier arrival of Catherine's brother Joseph R. Rice. The cemetery was established in 1860 with George's burial and legally set aside by 1883, and it holds mostly Grounds family members. George's original red sandstone marker was replaced with granite in 1993, but the graveyard remains a representative example of the historic family burying grounds of the region.

Leonard, TX

Grove Hill began when George W. Smith settled here in 1844, and by the 1850s a full community had risen with a post office, a Baptist church, and a schoolhouse doubling as sanctuary and Masonic hall. Its residents formed a Confederate home guard during the Civil War, and its cemetery holds pioneer settlers alongside at least one former slave, Jack Sudderth, who lived to nearly a century. The town faded in the 1880s once the railroad favored nearby Leonard, drawing away its lodge, school, and people.

Ireland, TX

Born in Walker County in 1846, Wiley Parker Grubb joined the Texas Rangers as a teenager in 1863 and was wounded at the 1865 Battle of Dove Creek, a bloody clash with Kickapoo people near present San Angelo. He later married, bought family land in Coryell County in 1874, and built a prominent ranch, his gravesite becoming a small public cemetery in 1937. His life spanned the frontier's ranging and its settling.

Gruver, TX

In 1907, Joseph Hezkiah Gruver moved his family from Missouri to settle this stretch of the Texas Panhandle, and the town that grew around them took his name. A post office arrived in 1927 and businesses followed; two years later J.B. Dulin donated ten acres for what became Gruver Cemetery. The first burial, in March 1929, was Willie A. Winder, and the granite and marble headstones beneath the junipers now chronicle the community's history.

Seguin, TX

When Texas was barely a decade removed from independence and only recently a U.S. state, Guadalupe County was carved out of Gonzales and Bexar counties in the spring of 1846 and organized that summer. Its name reaches back much further, to the river christened by Spanish explorer Alonso De Leon in 1689, while the county seat honors Juan Nepomuceno Seguin, the Tejano leader of the revolutionary generation. The marker layers Spanish colonial naming, Texas statehood, and local memory into a single origin story.

Pine Springs, TX

At 8,751 feet, Guadalupe Peak crowns a rugged corner of far West Texas where a sheer limestone escarpment—once part of the vast Capitan reef that formed beneath a Permian sea—rises above the Chihuahuan Desert. The range's hidden canyons sheltered people for a very long time: carbon-dated remains in its cliff caves point to human occupancy some 12,000 years ago, alongside the bones of Ice Age bison and dire wolf. In later centuries it was Apache country, and Spanish conquistadors and prospectors like Ben Sublett spun enduring legends of hidden gold in its folds.

Victoria, TX

Spanish explorer Alonso de León reached this vicinity on April 14, 1689, naming the river for Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico. The crossing here had been used since long before, in the days of the region's Native peoples. At this ford the Mexican empresario Martín de León founded the town of Victoria in 1824, planting one of the few Mexican-led colonies in Texas.

Houston County, TX

Guiceland Cemetery began about 1871 with the burial of the infant William Guice on family land, and it grew into the resting place of hundreds from the surrounding community. Its graves hold veterans of nearly every American conflict from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, alongside the settlers who farmed this corner of Houston County. A one-room building here once doubled as school and funeral chapel, later joined by a community tabernacle.

Jones Creek, TX

Established around 1833, this Brazoria County burial ground dates to the last years of Mexican Texas, when Stephen F. Austin's colonists were settling the fertile Gulf prairies of the Brazos River bottom. Founded on the eve of the Texas Revolution, it is among the older cemeteries in a region that was part of the original Austin colony. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes that deep connection to the state's founding era.

Jones Creek, TX

Once part of the Peach Point Plantation of James Franklin Perry and Emily Austin Bryan Perry — Stephen F. Austin's sister — this pioneer cemetery has served their descendants and the community since 1829. Austin himself, the 'Father of Texas,' was buried here after his death in 1836, and his remains rested at Gulf Prairie until they were reinterred at the State Cemetery in Austin in 1910.

Longview, TX

Rooted in an 1842 landholding, this ground served as a family burial place from the 1850s before neighboring land was given for a school in 1870 and later a church. Named for a spring surrounded by sweet gum trees, Gum Springs became the heart of a farming community whose school, church, and cemetery shared the name. Among the roughly 800 graves lie Republic of Texas citizens and 58 war veterans, from a Mexican War soldier to men killed in World War II.

Lampasas, TX

In 1873, Lampasas was a raw frontier town where authority was thin and firearms were everywhere. When Governor Edmund J. Davis's Reconstruction-era State Police tried to enforce a ban on carrying sidearms, a confrontation inside Jerry Scott's saloon erupted into gunfire, leaving four state policemen dead. The killings drew in Texas's Minute Men companies and a manhunt for the Horrell brothers, who fled to New Mexico before returning to stand trial and win acquittal in 1876.

Breckenridge, TX

Gunsight began as a landmark on the wagon road from Fort Griffin to Stephenville, noted as early as 1858, though real settlement waited until the 1870s. By 1880 it was a bustling stage stop with a post office, school, two churches, a gristmill, general store, and cotton gin, sustained by cotton and cattle and later lifted by the 1920s oil boom. The town faded after World War II until only a few buildings and this cemetery remained.

Kosse, TX

William Williams 'Billie' Gunter came to Limestone County with his family after the Civil War and, with his wife Laura, raised thirteen children. The family burial ground began in 1893 with their infant son Evan and grew to hold several generations of Gunters active in the area's religious, business, and civic life. Also resting here are Jim B. Rankin and his wife, who worked for the Gunter family for a quarter century.

Gussettville, TX

Gussettville began in the 1830s when Irish Catholic settlers of the McMullen and McGloin colony put down roots in South Texas, first calling the place "Fox Nation" before renaming it for storekeeper N. Gussett in the 1850s. The community built the first Catholic church in Live Oak County in 1874 on land donated by Thomas and Anne Shannon, and thrived as a stop on the San Antonio–Brownsville stagecoach line. Like hundreds of similar towns, it withered once the railroad passed it by, leaving the church as its chief surviving landmark.

Gustine, TX

Settlers reached this part of Comanche County in the 1870s, some of them working land granted for Republic of Texas military service, and first gathered in a settlement called Evergreen. When a new road opened between Comanche and Hamilton in the 1880s, the whole town simply picked up and moved to sit astride the route, taking the name Gustine after its first postmaster in 1888. The arrival of the Cotton Belt Railway in 1910 brought a boom of gins, businesses, and utilities; when the line closed in the 1930s, State Highway 36 took over its right-of-way and kept the town on the map.

King County, WA

High in Washington's Snoqualmie Pass country, this site marks the mining cabin associated with early prospectors Denny and Guye, whose names still cling to peaks and claims in the area. In the late 19th century the Cascades drew hopeful miners chasing gold and other ores into rugged, timbered slopes, and cabins like this were the rough footholds of that effort. The marker preserves the memory of that frontier mining venture.

Albany, TX

When Henry Carter Jacobs raised this stone house in 1875 from local rock, Albany was barely a dot on the West Texas frontier. A Kentuckian, Civil War veteran, and surveyor, Jacobs did the unglamorous civic work that turns a camp into a town: he platted the streets, gave land for the courthouse and a church, championed a railroad, and even played cornet in the band. His restored home stands as the community's first permanent dwelling.