Westward Expansion

San Jose, CA

Harry George Wade's warehouse began as a store for hay and grain bound by boat for San Francisco, then found new life sheltering stagecoaches for the Alviso-to-Monterey lines and serving Wells Fargo and Company as a stagecoach repair shop. Its shifting uses trace the transportation history of early California, from bay schooners to overland stages. Standing near the old landing at Alviso, it recalls the days when goods and travelers moved by water and horse-drawn coach.

Bastrop, TX

H. N. "Man" Bell pinned on a peace officer's badge in 1882, at the height of Texas's bitter "wire cutter" troubles, when open-range cattlemen clashed violently with those who bought and fenced the land. Over more than twenty-one years of service, including two terms as sheriff, Bell kept order across Bastrop County through one of the frontier's tensest transitions. His long tenure spanned the closing of the open range itself.

Rio Medina, TX

In the 1840s, families from Oberentzen in Alsace, France—the Habys, the Gsells, and the Becks—settled a high bluff above the Medina River, part of the wave of Alsatian colonists Henri Castro drew to this stretch of the Texas frontier. Two Haby sons helped found nearby Castroville in 1844, and the clan earned the nickname the 'fighting Habys' as several joined the Texas Rangers to defend the settlement. They harnessed the perennial artesian springs they called Die Quelle with gravity-fed irrigation ditches, and their stone Alsatian homes and family farms endure today.

Hallettsville, TX

German immigrant Ludwig Eduard Neuhaus reached Texas in 1846 and drew fellow Germans, including his brothers, to settle northern Lavaca County along the Gonzales–San Felipe Road. By the 1850s Hackberry thrived with a saw mill, grist mill, general store, church, and dance hall, taking its name in 1861 from the hackberry trees on Neuhaus's land. When a railroad bypassed the town late in the century, it faded to a few remaining structures.

Plainview, TX

Twin hackberry groves once stood here, a landmark on an 1870s trail traveled by buffalo hunters, surveyors, and lawmen across the treeless South Plains. In the mid-1880s sheep rancher Zachary Taylor Maxwell and former Arkansas legislator Edwin L. Lowe staked adjoining claims and had a surveyor plat a town square from their land. Ranchers scoffed that nothing would ever be built, but settlers arrived, Lowe became first postmaster in 1887, and when Hale County organized in 1888 the new town of Plainview became county seat.

Industry, TX

Friedrich Hackfeld left Germany and, by the 1850s, had put down roots on this Austin County land, anglicizing his name to Hackfield when he became a citizen in 1860. What began as a single-room log cabin grew, room by room and generation by generation, into a full German-Texan farmstead—and Friedrich's skill at digging wells brought water to neighbors as well as his own family. The farm's evolving buildings and plantings capture a whole immigrant world settling into the Texas soil.

Nacogdoches, TX

A Virginia-born empresario, Haden Edwards received a contract to settle American families around Nacogdoches but fell into bitter conflict with Mexican authorities and existing residents. In 1826-27 he led the short-lived Fredonian Rebellion, an early and premature bid for Anglo independence in Texas that collapsed quickly. A decade later, during the Texas Revolution, he was sent to the United States to raise funds for the cause.

Houston County, TX

Kentuckian James Henry Hager brought his family to Texas in the 1840s and set up a blacksmith shop and mill in Houston County, beside the busy Nacogdoches-to-Navasota stage and mail road. His son opened a post office in 1891 and named the settlement Hagerville, and another son donated land for a schoolhouse that doubled as a church. As residents drifted toward the sawmills the post office closed in 1905, though the community kept its name.

Fayetteville, TX

When the Pustejovskys' infant daughter Klara died in 1899, they buried her on land held by their Krystinek relatives; later that year the family conveyed an acre around her grave as a cemetery for the growing Czech community of Roznov. The settlement took its name from John Halamicek's birthplace in the old country. The stones here read like a roster of the Czech families who put down roots in Fayette County.

Plainview, TX

Hale County was carved from older Texas territories and created in 1876, then formally organized in 1888 with Plainview as its seat. It bears the name of John C. Hale, a lieutenant who fell at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the fight that won Texas its independence. The county sits on the high, flat Llano Estacado of the Texas Panhandle.

Irving, TX

William Haley and his wife Lucinda Catherine came to Texas from Missouri in 1857, part of the wave of settlers building farms and small businesses in the young state. When Lucinda died in 1875, the family set aside an acre of their farm as a burial ground, and over the years more of the Haley and related families were laid to rest here. A granddaughter enlarged the plot in 1963, preserving it as a record of the area's founding families.

Rio Vista, TX

Thomas Haley reached Johnson County by 1852, built a race track along the Nolands River, and bred fine horses before serving as a captain in Parson's mounted volunteers during the Civil War; he died in 1865 of battle wounds, and his is the oldest marked grave here. The cemetery also holds Leonard Fisher, another Civil War veteran, and John Hubble, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence, among the county's pioneers. Since the 1990s a cemetery association has cared for the small burial ground.

Shiner, TX

Named for the crescent shape of its timber, Half Moon on Rocky Creek was a gathering place for Native peoples and travelers long before Spanish explorers noted it in 1689. Settlers arrived from the 1830s to trade and farm, and at its height in the mid-1880s the community boasted stores, a saloon, and a post office. When Henry B. Shiner donated land for a railroad in 1887, the rails bypassed Half Moon, and its people and commerce drained away into the new town of Shiner.

San Antonio, TX

Mayer Halff immigrated to Texas from Alsace-Lorraine in 1850 and, with his brother Solomon, built M. Halff & Brother into a leading San Antonio wholesale dry-goods house while amassing more than a million acres of ranch land and moving into banking. In 1893 he had this ornate Victorian home built, blending Eastlake and Richardsonian Romanesque styles. Threatened by construction of the 1960s HemisFair, the house was moved to preserve it.

Plainview, TX

On the Texas High Plains, settlers came seeking grass, soil, and water, and in the 1890s R. L. Hooper and his wife Ada Mae acquired the land that became a rest stop "halfway" between Olton and Plainview. With a windmill and camping ground, it drew ranchers, and after the railroad reached Plainview in 1906, irrigation turned the region into rich farm country. Hooper gave land for a school, a store and post office, churches, and a cemetery, seeding a lasting community.

Chireno, TX

Around 1840 Samuel Flournoy raised this two-story hewn-log house with a central dogtrot beside the El Camino Real, the old royal road linking Nacogdoches and San Augustine. As a Republic of Texas postmaster, Flournoy ran the mail for a fifteen-mile radius from these rooms, and travelers knew the place as a welcome halfway stop on the stagecoach line. Moved and then returned near its original site, the restored dwelling still marks a waypoint on one of Texas's oldest highways.

Crockett, TX

Joshua James Hall gave a corner of his Houston County land as a burying ground before the Civil War, and after emancipation the freedmen French Taylor, Bob Denby, and Alf Warfield asked his leave to lay their own dead there too. Hall agreed, and the cemetery became a rare shared resting place for both Anglo and African American settlers, its earliest marked grave dating to 1876. A 1997 survey found dozens of marked graves and more than a hundred unmarked ones, still tended by descendants.

Howe, TX

This burial ground sits on land patented under the Peters Colony, an immigration venture that received a huge Republic of Texas grant to draw settlers to North Texas. The cemetery began in January 1857 with the burial of Anderson White's daughter, and a week later her mother-in-law; White later reserved two acres and deeded them for a public cemetery. It takes its name from Benjamin F. Hall — minister, doctor, dentist, and lawyer — and holds the region's first settlers, Confederate veterans, and victims of the deadly 1896 Sherman tornado.

Luling, TX

Around 1860, Mississippi settlers John and Sarah Hall gave their name to a rural community that gathered in this corner of Caldwell County. When landowner J. R. Bishop deeded two acres for a school in 1882, part of the tract already held graves, so an acre was set aside as a community cemetery—its oldest documented burial an infant who died in 1873. The ground served both the Hall and nearby Wattsville settlements.

Memphis, TX

Carved from the vast Young and Bexar districts, Hall County was created in 1876 and formally organized in 1890 as settlement pushed into the Texas Panhandle. It honors Warren D. C. Hall (1788-1867), a figure of the Texas Revolution era who sat in the 1832 San Felipe Convention and served as second in command of the Texans at the Anahuac disturbances that same year. Memphis was named the county seat.

Memphis, TX

Hall County was created in 1876 and organized in 1890 with Memphis as its seat. Two earlier courthouses — a frame building and a brick one — served before the county commissioned this three-story Classical Revival building, designed by the Austin firm Page and Brother and completed in the early 1920s. Its cast-stone columns, pediments, and fluted composite orders gave the county a dignified civic centerpiece.

Sherman, TX

Missouri native and Civil War veteran Rufus Gaines Hall opened a Sherman dry goods store in 1868, prospering in part by sending thirty "notion wagons" to peddle supplies to farm families across thirteen North Texas counties. His son Dr. Hugh Logan Hall joined in 1872, and five generations of Halls ran the business here for a century. Built as two structures in 1876 and 1885 and joined in 1936, the building became a striking Art Deco storefront banded with black-and-ivory structural glass.

Dallas, TX

Built as the centerpiece of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas, the Hall of State was designed to be, in the legislature's words, 'Texanic in proportion and centennial in character.' A team of Dallas architects raised it from native Texas materials during the Depression, adorning it with ornamental scenes of the state's commerce and history. It endures as one of the finest examples of Art Deco architecture in Texas.

Crockett, TX

Marylander Joshua James Hall bought a Trinity River land grant in 1839 and, with his son James Madison Hall, opened a port and ferry that became a shipping point for Houston County's settlers. A community of stores, churches, a post office, and a school grew up around the crossing through the mid-19th century. Unreliable river shipping and the arrival of the railroads in the 1870s drained the port's traffic, and most residents drifted away.

Lyon County, NV

In the early 1850s Spafford Hall, the area's first permanent settler, built a station and trading post here to serve emigrants pressing on toward California. After a hunting injury in 1854 he sold out, and the post passed through several hands — becoming McMarlin's Station and later belonging to Major Ormsby, who died in 1860 at the first battle of the Pyramid Lake War. The site is also remembered as the place where the area's first recorded dance was held on New Year's Eve, 1853.

Hallettsville, TX

Hallettsville traces its founding to 1833, when John Hallett built a log cabin near the Lavaca River in what was then Mexican Texas. After his death the town took the name of his widow, Margaret Hallett, who donated the land when it became the county seat in 1852. It grew into a center of farming, livestock, and cotton marketing that still hosts a state high-school rodeo championship each June.

Hallettsville, TX

Hallettsville takes its name from Margaret Hallett, who donated the town site after the death of her husband John, a member of Stephen F. Austin's colony and a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto. Her gift established the community during the early years of the Republic and state of Texas. The marker was placed in 1936, the Texas Centennial year.

Hallsville, TX

Successor to the 1840s pioneer settlements of Fort Crawford and Ash Springs, Hallsville sprang up where the Texas & Pacific Railway's first train arrived on August 17, 1869. As a temporary western terminus and site of the railroad's shops, it drew ox-wagon freighters hauling wool, cotton, and buffalo hides in from the West. Named for the Kentucky brothers Elijah and Volney Hall, it was chartered in 1870.

Eustace, TX

Around 1900 a community grew up on land the Texas and New Orleans Railroad had bought from attorney Marshal Hamlet "Ham" Gossett, and the town took the name Ham in his honor. Farming and ranching drew settlers, and the town gained stores, a cotton gin, a cannery, a school, and a church. Renamed Pauline in 1912 after a postmaster's romantic gesture, the community faded through Depression hardship and typhoid outbreaks, and all but vanished after the tracks were pulled in 1976.

White Pine County, NV

The White Pine mining district, opened in 1865, exploded after major silver discoveries in 1868 into one of the most intense—and briefest—stampedes ever recorded, with some 10,000 people crowding huts and caves on Treasure Hill at elevations near two miles high. Hamilton was incorporated in 1869 and became White Pine County's first seat, sprouting a full town with a brick courthouse by 1870. A devastating fire in June 1873 gutted the main street, and the town never recovered; a second blaze in 1885 destroyed the courthouse and moved the county seat to Ely. Hamilton and its neighbors are ghost towns today.

Jasper, TX

This cemetery sits on the original townsite of Zavala, a colony founded in 1834 and named for the Mexican statesman and empresario Lorenzo de Zavala, who would soon help create the Republic of Texas. Settlers drawn to Thomas Huling's land built one of Jasper County's oldest communities along the Old Beef Trail and the Angelina River. Republic-era Texans are buried here, among them John Hamilton, a Republic defender whose grave carries a Daughters of the Republic of Texas medallion.

Hamilton, TX

Hamilton County was first created in 1842 from Montgomery and Houston counties, then recreated in 1858 and organized that August as central Texas filled with settlers. It honors General James Hamilton, a lawyer and governor of South Carolina whom President Mirabeau Lamar named the Republic of Texas's diplomatic agent to Europe. The town of Hamilton became its county seat.

Hamilton, TX

Before this limestone courthouse, Hamilton County justice was dispensed in stores, a livery stable, a two-story building, and even briefly a saloon, with fire destroying two early improvised courthouses. Outlaws were so common that guards were hired to protect visiting judges. The county's first permanent courthouse of 1878 burned in 1886; this 1887 replacement, built of native limestone quarried two miles east of town, stood unchanged until a 1931 remodeling.

Hamilton, TX

Organized in 1858, Hamilton County counted just 489 people when the Civil War came, yet its 1861 secession vote ran 86 to 1. Sixty farmers formed the part-time Hamilton County Minutemen while others marched to Vicksburg and Shiloh, and those left behind lived a spare frontier life of log homes, homemade tools, and eggshell lamps. The war also bred hardship at home — cattle feuds, two men fleeing to join the Federals, and deserters living by theft along the creeks.

Round Top, TX

North Carolina native Hamilton Ledbetter and his wife Jane Amanda settled in Texas in 1839, moving to Fayette County by 1845, where he built this home for his large family. His plantation hosted the Round Top Academy from 1854 to 1867, and Ledbetter served as town marshal and as a state senator in the 1870s. The house was relocated about a mile to its present site in 1959 and named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1979.

Corsicana, TX

William Harvey Beeman claimed a 640-acre Mercer colony grant in Navarro County and brought his family here in the 1840s, when the region was newly opening to Anglo settlement. In the 1850s he and neighboring pioneer Samuel Hamilton each donated an acre to establish this cemetery, whose first burial — Hamilton's infant son — came in 1859. Both founders lie here, and later gifts of land have expanded the grounds to more than 47 acres.

Corsicana, TX

The James Hamilton, Jr. family set out from Tennessee for Texas around 1841, but after James died in Arkansas, his widow Elizabeth pressed on with their children, reaching Navarro County about 1846. This family burial ground holds Elizabeth, her daughter Julia Hamilton Bragg and Julia's husband Joseph, and several of their children, with the earliest known grave dating to 1855. It remains a quiet record of one pioneering frontier family.

Town of Hamilton, WI

This marker honors Hamlin Garland, the author who grew up amid the coulees and farms of western Wisconsin and turned that hardscrabble world into literature. In 'Main-Travelled Roads' and his 'Middle Border' memoirs, Garland gave an unsentimental voice to the toil of pioneer farm families settling the upper Midwest. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922.

Pasadena, TX

Established in 1851, this burial ground dates to the earliest years of Anglo settlement around what became Pasadena, when families claiming land along the Texas coast set aside private plots for their dead. Its combined family names reflect the intermarried settler households that founded the community. The state recognized its historical value with a Historic Texas Cemetery designation in 2010.

Hamshire, TX

Built in 1859 of Louisiana cypress on land patented to William H. Smith, who died at the Alamo, the Hamshire House is a fine example of the ranch dwellings of early Southeast Texas. It was raised for Emil Broussard, and here grew up J. E. Broussard, who went on to build the first rice mill in Texas — a crop that would transform the coastal prairie. The widowed Azema Broussard later married Lovan Hamshire, and the couple donated the land for the area's first Catholic church.

Dublin vicinity, TX

This burial ground, once called North Bolton Cemetery, holds its earliest marked grave from 1876, dating to the era when the Franks family owned the land. After passing through the Bolton and Caudle families, it took the name of Benjamin T. and Elizabeth Hancock, settlers who arrived around 1887. Many of the roughly fifty people buried here were kin to the Hancocks, families who helped found the nearby communities of Alexander and Purves.

Lampasas, TX

When the first Anglo settlers arrived in the 1850s they found Native people already using these curative waters, and a town quickly grew up around the springs on the routes of stagecoaches, freight wagons, and cattle drives. Around 1882 Santa Fe Railway promoters built the lavish 200-room Park Hotel with a boardwalk to the springs, and it won fame as the South's finest health resort. The hotel later housed Centenary College until fire destroyed it in 1895, and the area is now a city park.

Teville, TX

John J. Handley, a Confederate veteran who had lived in Georgia and elsewhere in Texas, settled in this West Texas country in 1892 and gave the land for its cemetery. He lived long enough to watch farming rise to rival ranching on the plains, and the tiny community of Teville—named for a road junction—rose and faded with him, its post office open only from 1906 to 1910. Four generations of the Handley family and their neighbors now rest in the ground he provided.

Arlington, TX

When the Texas and Pacific Railroad reached this area in 1876, a community quickly took root and needed a burying ground. Handley Cemetery's earliest marked grave, that of Jane E. Thomas, dates to 1878, and a church stood on adjacent land here for nearly half a century. The town took its name from Civil War veteran Maj. James M. Handley, and though several early residents were later reinterred at nearby Rose Hill, burials continued here until 1967.

Fort Worth, TX

A settlement first called Turkey Knob took the name Handley after 1876, when the Texas & Pacific Railroad built a depot and section house nearby. Local Protestants worshiped together in a union building until 1905, when J. Dan Thomas invited about twenty-two neighbors into his home to organize the Handley Church of Christ. The congregation soon outgrew that start and has kept to this location since 1919.

Donna, TX

Thomas J. Handy came to the lower Rio Grande as a Union cavalryman during the Civil War and stayed to build a life on the border. In 1866 he married Angelita Cavazos at her family's ranch along the old military highway, and together the couple became substantial landowners, joining an Anglo newcomer's fortunes to a rooted Tejano ranching family. Handy farmed, ranched, and served as a U.S. Customs inspector, and the family's holdings shaped the land around present-day Alamo for nearly a century.

Comanche, TX

In 1874 a mob used this oak to hang Joe Hardin and Tom and Bud Dixon, kinsmen of the notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, in reprisal for the murder of Deputy Charles Webb. The grim episode captures the vigilante violence that flared across the Texas frontier when formal law was thin and feuds ran deep.

Lampasas, TX

In the Texas Hill Country, the bubbling mineral springs first glimpsed by "Hopping John" Burleson in 1847 became the seed of the town of Lampasas, laid out in 1855 around a hotel at Scott's White Sulphur Springs. Under later owner John L. Hanna the resort took his name and drew health-seekers who believed the mineral waters could cure their ailments. A grand pavilion-turned-opera-house even hosted the 1892 State Democratic Convention before the fashion for spa towns faded and the grounds fell to brush, until the site was given to the city in 1994.

Lampasas, TX

These sulphur springs, first developed by John Hanna of a prominent local family, drew hundreds who came to camp and take the healing waters in early Lampasas. As the resort's fame grew, the Central Texas Town Company formed in 1884 to promote the park and built a convention hall. There, the 1892 State Democratic Convention backed Grover Cleveland for president and nominated James Hogg for governor — both of whom won — before the hall became an opera house and the resort faded after 1900.

Hempfield Township, PA · est. 1946

Just east of here stood Hannastown, established in 1773 as the seat of Westmoreland County and the first county seat west of the Allegheny Mountains. Its citizens gathered in 1775 to adopt a bold declaration backing the Revolutionary cause, an early frontier voice for independence. In 1782, near the end of the war, a raiding party burned the town, and it never fully recovered.

Whatcom County, WA

In the farming town of Lynden, in Washington's Nooksack Valley, pioneer Hans C. Berthusen and his wife Lida left their homestead land to the public as a permanent park upon Hans's death. The inscribed verse—'All that a man has when he comes to die is what he has given away'—captures the early-20th-century civic-philanthropy spirit that turned private homesteads into shared green space. The stand of old-growth timber they preserved became one of the region's cherished public grounds.

Spearman, TX

This was the first burial ground set aside in Hansford County, its earliest grave that of Mrs. Alfie P. Magee, wife of the first sheriff, in 1890. Among those interred are the Cator brothers, founders of the Zulu Stockade, and the Wright brothers, early ranchers of the Texas Panhandle. It served as the county's only official cemetery until 1928 and remains in use today.

Spearman, TX

Carved from earlier territorial claims and created in 1876, Hansford County took its name from John M. Hansford, a Republic of Texas figure who arrived in 1837, served in the Texas Congress, and sat as a judge of the Seventh Judicial District. Formal organization did not come until 1889, a reminder of how sparsely settled the Texas Panhandle remained decades after the county lines were drawn on paper.

Spearman, TX

Bob Martin came to newly settling Hansford County in 1906, bought land, and ran a livery stable that gave land-seekers from the north and east their only real way to travel the raw Panhandle. Chosen sheriff in 1908 for his standing as a good citizen — as many frontier lawmen were — he was, like his neighbors, a cowboy and farmer. In 1911 he was killed while helping a U.S. marshal make an arrest in a boundary dispute.

Proctor, TX

Hanson Cemetery grew from a settlers' pact: tradition holds that hunting companions William Hanson and M. Walton agreed the first to die would be buried beneath the oaks along Sowell Creek, and the cemetery would bear his name. Hanson's worn marker dates his death to 1870 or 1871, and the burial of his wife formally began the graveyard that served the scattered community of Roch. By the time the Walton family deeded land for it in 1925, more than fifty people already rested there, and later generations added a veterans memorial in 1998.

Happy, TX

The Happy Cemetery Association formed in March 1912 and bought five acres from local businessman James F. White, setting aside adjoining grounds—one section reserved for Catholics. The oldest recorded grave is that of William T. King, and for decades a small frame house on the grounds hosted annual Decoration Day gatherings until it was razed in 1985 to make room for more plots. Among those laid to rest here are numerous pioneers and veterans, including both Confederate and Union men who had once faced each other in the Civil War.

Plainview, TX

Drawn by cheap land and a healthful climate, families like the Matslers, Pearsons, and Neils began settling this stretch of Hale County around 1890, ranching and raising feed and hauling supplies by rail from Amarillo. In 1897 they built a single room that served at once as school, church, and community center, and chose the hopeful name Happy Union. Cotton gins, a store, and a grain elevator followed, and irrigation later made it a prosperous farming area that kept its close-knit identity even as growth stayed modest.

Bastrop, TX

This home in Bastrop carries a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark medallion, the state's designation for structures of architectural and historical significance, but bears no interpretive inscription beyond that mark. Bastrop is among Texas's older towns, settled in the era of Mexican Texas and the early Republic, and its stock of historic residences reflects that long continuity. Without a transcribed text, the specific history of the Haralson family and their house is not recorded here.

Quanah, TX

Created in 1858 and finally organized in 1884, Hardeman County honors two brothers of the Texas independence generation: Bailey Hardeman, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Jones Hardeman, a member of the Texas Congress and Legislature. The county seat moved from Margarette to Quanah, a town named for the Comanche chief Quanah Parker. That pairing captures the frontier's transition, as land once dominated by the Comanche opened to Anglo settlement.

Quanah, TX

Hardeman County was created in 1858 but not organized until 1884, when growth allowed a formal government; the county seat moved from Margaret to Quanah in 1890 after the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway laid out the new townsite. A 1906 bond funded a grand replacement courthouse, designed by architect R. H. Stuckey with a domed cupola, Ionic columns, and glazed tan brick over an Indiana-limestone basement. Completed in 1908, the Neoclassical building has anchored county government and downtown Quanah ever since.