Westward Expansion

Quanah, TX

When Quanah became the seat of Hardeman County, work began in 1890 on this sturdy native-stone jail, finished in early 1891. It was a two-in-one building: the sheriff's office and living quarters below, prisoners' cells above — a common arrangement on the Texas frontier, where the lawman and his charges shared one roof. Sheriff Malon C. Owens held the post here longer than anyone, from 1936 to 1964, and community effort later turned the old jail into a museum.

Muleshoe vicinity, TX

Harden A. Douglass came to the newly settling plains of West Texas in 1904, part of the wave of homesteaders who filled Bailey County in the early twentieth century. When the county formally organized in 1919 he was chosen its first sheriff and tax collector, an office he held for more than a decade during the raw frontier years of ranching and dryland farming. His long tenure helped bring order and civic structure to a county still finding its footing.

Belknap Township, MI

Recognized under Michigan's Centennial Farm program, the Hardie family farm has been worked by the same family since 1869 — more than 150 years. The designation, awarded by the Historical Society of Michigan, honors farms held continuously by one family for over a century, a testament to the agricultural roots that settlers put down across the Great Lakes country after the Civil War.

Kountze, TX

Hardin County was created on January 22, 1858, and organized that August, taking its name from the Hardin family of neighboring Liberty County. Five Hardin brothers—Benjamin Watson, Augustine Blackburn, William, Frank, and Milton—had come to Texas in 1825, among the early Anglo-American settlers of the region. The county seat sat at the town of Hardin until 1887, when it moved to Kountze.

Hardin, TX

This Liberty County congregation traces its roots to 1876, when the Rev. J. R. D. Taylor established a Methodist church called China Grove, holding early services in a nearby log building. A chapel went up in 1886 on land donated by businessman William F. "Bee" Hardin, and the church changed names over the years, becoming Hardin Chapel Methodist Church by 1910. Fire destroyed a 1939 sanctuary in 1958, but the congregation rebuilt and has remained active for more than 120 years.

Austin, TX

Mississippi-born Hardin R. Runnels rose through Texas politics as a member and then Speaker of the House before serving as lieutenant governor and, from 1857 to 1859, as governor of the state. His single term put him at the head of Texas government in the tense years just before the Civil War. This 1936 Centennial marker honors a leading figure of the young state's antebellum political generation.

Comanche, TX

John Wesley Hardin was among the deadliest gunfighters of the Old West, and it was here in Comanche in 1874 that he was first brought to justice for killing Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb. He served fifteen years in prison, where he studied law, then opened a practice in El Paso in 1894. A year later he was shot in the back and killed at age forty-two.

Seguin, TX

"Hardscramble" was home to the McCulloch brothers, Henry and Ben, and later to Nathaniel Benton and Elijah V. Dale — famed Texas Rangers and veterans of the Texas Revolution — between 1841 and 1871. From this Guadalupe County ground they helped guard the raw edge of the young republic and early state. The State of Texas raised this marker in 1936, the centennial of independence.

Wiergate, TX

This piney-woods burial ground began with the grave of Joseph Lane around 1850, and in 1853 his son set aside a small plot that grew over the decades into a two-acre family and community cemetery. Among those buried here is James Persinger Hardy, who served with Kentucky volunteers in the Army of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and later as a Newton County commissioner. Wrought iron, a handful of inscribed stones, and rows of iron-ore rocks marking unknown graves recall the settlers who wrested their living from the surrounding forest.

Jasper, TX

Built around 1840 of hand-hewn logs, chinked with moss and clay and warmed by a hand-built chimney, the Hardy Pace Home is a survivor from the earliest days of Anglo settlement in the East Texas piney woods. Later generations added an annex and siding in 1930, layering a century of family life onto the original frontier cabin, which was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Eastland vicinity, TX

North Carolina natives Larry and Mary Hargus came to Eastland County in 1879 and, in 1881, bought this tract from town founder C.U. Connellee. The family helped build a local Methodist church, sent a son into the Texas Rangers, and passed the working farm down through generations who raised large families on the land. More than a century later the property remained in Hargus hands.

San Saba, TX

Founded in 1855 when the Harkey family moved from Arkansas, this San Saba County community grew famous for its horses and its racetrack—drawing crowds for half a century behind a fleet-footed mare Riley Harkey brought from Arkansas. A single street of stores, a blacksmith shop, a school, and a baseball diamond overlooked the racetrack flat. The track closed in 1907, the school consolidated in 1929, and the last store shut in 1954, leaving only a community hall to mark the town.

Harleton, TX

Settlers trickled into the country between Big and Little Cypress creeks in the 1830s, but Harleton truly took off when a railroad arrived in 1891 as part of a scheme by the Harle brothers and their backers to harvest the area's virgin forests. Their Hope Lumber Company built a depot, commissary, and band sawmill, and their well-stocked store so outclassed the nearby village of Grady that its post office moved over and took the Harle name. Timber wealth spurred farming and a cluster of thriving merchants, though the company closed its mill by the late 1890s once the nearby forests were cut over.

Harleton, TX

Methodist worship in this corner of Harrison County began in settlers' cabins in the 1840s, when East Texas was still raw frontier. By 1901 the congregation had land and a sanctuary of its own, and in 1914 they raised a brick church here under trustee R. W. Taylor. Long a shared civic space for other local groups, it became Harleton United Methodist Church in 1970.

Marquette, MI

Amos and Olive Harlow were among Marquette's founding pioneers, arriving by steamship on Lake Superior in 1849 as Michigan's Upper Peninsula iron country opened up. On this farm, which they named Eureka after Amos found iron ore nearby, they built a sawmill and raised produce to sell to the region's miners. Only this dry-stacked stone foundation, a few apple trees, and stone fence lines remain.

Somerset, PA · est. 1947

Harmon Husband arrived in the Somerset country as its first settler after fleeing North Carolina in 1771, where he had helped lead the Regulator uprising against colonial authority. Living for a time at his Coffee Springs farm, he never abandoned the cause of common people against government overreach, taking up his pen as a pamphleteer. In the 1790s he threw himself into the Whiskey Rebellion, the western Pennsylvania revolt against the federal excise tax, before his death in 1795.

Hankamer, TX

The Harmon family made saddles in East Texas from before the Civil War, when Joshua Harmon worked leather part-time in Orange as early as 1856. After moving to Chambers County, he partnered with another saddler—Harmon carving the wooden saddletrees, Bingle working the leather—and built a reputation among Gulf Coast cowboys and ranchers. His son Charles formally opened the Harmon Saddle Shop in 1896, and the business, prized for comfort and durability, stayed in the family for generations.

Newcastle, TX

Kentucky-born Peter Harmonson came to Texas in 1845 as a settler in the Peters Colony and helped organize Denton County, where he served as its first sheriff. In 1854 he moved his family west to establish a ranch near this site—Harmonson Rancho—and went on to help found Young County as its first chief justice. He died of a wound suffered in the Elm Creek Indian raid in 1865, and years later his old ranch was again the scene of a clash between Indians and cattlemen involving his son.

Navasota, TX

When John Moore McGinty and his wife Mary Loretta Brown settled the Grimes County prairie in 1853, they gathered their neighbors into a frontier congregation that soon met in a local schoolhouse and took the name "Harmony." The first church house rose in 1870, and the family later deeded the burial ground that had already served the community for years. The present building was finished about 1924, and services continued here into the 1930s.

Nacogdoches, TX

When James Norvel Pitts came to Texas in the 1870s, his wife, son, and a caravan of Pitts brothers and Mississippi friends followed by wagon to join him, founding the community they aptly named Harmony. Pitts donated land for a combined church-and-school building and this public cemetery, whose oldest marked grave dates to 1886. Families long gathered for an annual cemetery cleaning day, a tradition later carried on by a formal association, and among those buried here are veterans reaching back to the Civil War.

Huntsville, TX

Harmony Cemetery is a quiet ledger of frontier Walker County, its earliest known grave dug for pioneer Vincent Herlock in 1851. Known in turn as Herlock and Goolsby cemetery, the ground later anchored the Harmony Missionary Baptist Church after it relocated here in 1906. Church and graveyard tell the familiar rural rhythm of settlement, worship, decline, and revival by a caretaking association.

Weatherford, TX

Harmony Cemetery began as a community gathering place, its first grave that of Mary Green, buried here in 1869; her son Rufus, a Civil War veteran, and his wife owned the surrounding land. Rufus later sold a parcel including the burial ground to the DeBusk family, who deeded it to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Though no church was ever built on the site, it went on serving as the community burial ground for the Green family's kin and other pioneer settlers.

Fairfield, TX

Among the oldest church buildings in Freestone County, this sanctuary rose in 1876 to serve the Stewards Mill community, which had worshiped in homes and the schoolhouse before. Families with names like Awalt, Bonner, and Steward built it as a shared space, meant to host different denominations on different days, and Rev. Thomas Joel Bonner preached its first sermon that December. Its board-and-batten walls and paired transom-topped doors mark it as a fine survivor of nineteenth-century rural church design.

Williamsburg, OH

In 1800, the lands north of the Ohio River were raw frontier, freshly opened to American settlement after decades of contest. Major General William Lytle came to this corner of the Northwest Territory as a surveyor, a profession that made him one of the most influential men on the early frontier—those who measured the land often ended up owning much of it. Lytle platted and acquired vast acreage across what became Clermont County, and from this homestead he helped shape the young county's boundaries, settlement, and civic life.

Tatum, TX

The oldest grave here belongs to J. W. Hall, buried in 1844 beneath a large rock before John W. Kuykendall formally donated the first two acres in 1852. Maintained by a cemetery association since 1882, the grounds have grown through later gifts of land. Those laid to rest include the area's early settlers and county leaders alongside veterans of the Mexican War, Civil War, both World Wars, and Vietnam.

Pickton, TX

After landowner Jesse Odom brought an itinerant preacher to hold revivals for area settlers in 1877 and 1878, a congregation formed and built its first sanctuary in 1879 on land Odom donated, with the Rev. S. W. Jones as first pastor. A cemetery opened that year on an adjacent tract given by Henry P. Barron, whose 1880 burial is the earliest recorded. Local tradition holds that the goodwill and harmony during the sanctuary's construction gave the church and cemetery their name; the congregation dissolved in 1963, but the cemetery is still maintained.

Harper, TX

Founded in 1881 as the Barnett Spring Presbyterian Church, this Hill Country congregation began in a schoolhouse before moving to Harper in 1901, where members raised a simple frame church on donated land. A bell was hung in 1903, and over the decades the building did double duty—housing the Harper School in 1906 and again in the 1940s and welcoming other denominations to worship.

Haltom, TX

When Henry Jackson Harper moved his family from Tennessee to this corner of Tarrant County in 1894, the frontier still swallowed travelers whole. The cemetery began, as many did, with grief on the road: a passing family's child died and was laid to rest among trees on Harper's farm. Over the following decades the Harpers buried their own kin here, from grandson Henry Mayton to the patriarch himself in 1928.

Kingston, TX

In the 1850s the early settler Richard Harrell built cabins and a brush arbor here, creating one of Hunt County's first religious sites. Each summer, when crops were laid by and work was slack, Methodist families forded the Sabine River with milk cows, cook stoves, and wash tubs to camp for weeks of preaching, hymns, and scripture — a rare gathering in hard, lonely lives. Between meetings the camp often sheltered passing travelers, and its influence lasted half a century.

Round Rock, TX

Jacob and Mary Harrell came to Texas with Robertson's colony in 1833 and were among the first to settle the site that became Austin, where Jacob sold his homestead for the grounds of the State Capitol and served as mayor in 1847. In 1848 the family moved to Jacob's headright near this spot, helping organize the new Williamson County government. The cemetery holds Harrell family members and one of the family's enslaved people.

San Saba, TX

Harris Cemetery was already in use by 1874, when A.J. and Ellen Crawford deeded five acres to local trustees for a burial ground, school, and place of worship. Its oldest marked grave belongs to N.M. Baker, born in 1819, and one relocated 1868 stone recalls a family whose remains were lost to a flood. Cared for by an association, the site endures as a tangible record of San Saba County's earliest settlers.

Mendoza, TX

Sidon H. Harris brought his family to Texas in 1851 and settled in this part of Caldwell County by 1856, buying land where the family cemetery began when he died in 1861. Two of his children were buried here in 1862, followed by his wife Amanda in 1866. Though descendants later sold the land, the graves were meant to be preserved; after the cemetery was destroyed in 1984 its markers were replaced.

Hughes Springs, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Cass County in the 1850s, and the community took its name after John T. Harris arrived in 1853 on land that already held a Methodist log church and burial ground. The church doubled as a schoolhouse, was rebuilt larger in 1859, and the cemetery grew alongside it, its oldest legible stone dating to 1859. Rebuilt again after a 1949 tornado, the church endures beside graves that include veterans from the Mexican War through Korea.

Houston, TX

Home to the Karankawa and Orcoquiza peoples and once eyed by Spain for a presidio, this region was permanently settled in 1822 by Stephen F. Austin's colonists. John R. Harris founded a village he named for his family and for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and it grew into one of the most influential colonial municipalities, playing a major role in the Texas War for Independence. The county was created in 1836, briefly held the Republic's capital, served as a Confederate command and ordnance center, and eventually grew into the world-commerce hub of Houston.

McLennan County, TX

Harris Creek Baptist Church began in the home of Aquilla and Delila Jones, who in 1872 gave 1.6 acres of McLennan County land for a church, schoolhouse, and cemetery. The congregation grew through the following decades, sharing its building with a Methodist congregation from 1932 to 1960 and dedicating a new brick auditorium in 1977.

Waco, TX

In the 1850s the Haley, Crain, Caufield, and Jones families settled along Harris Creek in McLennan County, founding a community that took the stream's name. The burial ground began with the 1865 grave of young Hattie Timmons and grew on land the Jones family formally set aside in 1872, part of it reserved for a church and school. Among those resting here is Joel Crain, who received the surrounding land as a grant for his service at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto.

Town of Clarence, NY

In 1807, pioneer Asa Harris settled this rise of land in western New York and opened a tavern along the frontier roads northeast of Buffalo, giving the area its enduring name of Harris Hill. When British forces burned Buffalo during the War of 1812, the hill's relative safety made it a refuge for families fleeing the destruction. The marker recalls both the area's earliest white settlement and a tense chapter when the young nation's frontier was a war zone.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1915

On the banks of the Susquehanna here stood the landing of Harris' Ferry, first granted to John Harris in 1733 and for half a century the name by which the future Harrisburg was known. It was among the most important crossings in early Pennsylvania, funneling settlers, traders, and pack trains westward into the interior and on toward the Ohio Valley. From this modest ferry grew the city that would become the state capital.

Wormleysburg, PA · est. 1947

Harrisburg began as Harris' Ferry, settled in the early 1700s by John Harris Sr. at a strategic crossing of the Susquehanna River. His son laid out the town in 1785, and in 1812 it became Pennsylvania's capital, cementing a role as a crossroads of travel and trade it had already held for generations. For over two centuries the site has funneled people and commerce through the heart of the state.

Fort Worth, TX

This one-acre burial ground began on the land of Tarrant County pioneer D.C. Harrison, its earliest known grave that of young Mary E. Harrison in 1871. In 1895 R.A. Randol, operator of the nearby Randol Mill, bought the tract and deeded it forever as a cemetery. Its roughly sixty graves gather early settler families, including Randol's brother John, killed in an 1894 mill accident.

Dew, TX

Founded in the 1850s with a mere dozen members on land donated by pioneer George Harrison, this Methodist congregation grew as settlers poured into the surrounding country. Its annual camp meetings drew worshippers from a wide area, a hallmark of frontier Protestant revivalism. The adjoining cemetery holds many of the region's earliest settlers, including numerous Confederate veterans, and the church itself relocated to Dew in 1870.

Marshall, TX

Harrison County was carved from Shelby County and created in January 1839, in the days of the Republic of Texas, and organized in 1842. It honors Jonas Harrison, a New Jersey–born statesman who came to Texas in 1820 and served in the 1832 convention at San Felipe before his death in 1836. The county seat, Marshall, was named for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall.

Marshall, TX

Long home to the Caddo people, this corner of East Texas drew Anglo settlers from the southern states in the 1830s, many taking Mexican land grants before Texas won independence in 1836. Organized in 1839 and named for revolutionary leader Jonas Harrison, Harrison County became the most populous and among the richest counties in antebellum Texas — a cotton economy built on slavery that, after emancipation, left it with a large Black population. The Texas and Pacific Railway later made Marshall a major rail center, its shops and offices anchoring the town's growth.

Marshall, TX

Completed in 1900 at a cost of $62,000, this was the third courthouse to stand on the site, following the log 'Little Virginia' of 1851 and a brick Gothic hall of 1889 that burned in 1899. Built of granite, brick, and marble in a Capitol-inspired classical Roman style, it was crowned with a clock dome, belfry, and a figure of Justice, and since 1964 has housed the Harrison County Museum.

Columbus, TX

This Columbus residence began in 1861 as a modest two-room house. Between 1877 and 1901 owner Jesse Joyner Harrison hired the prominent local builders Andrew Wirtz & Sons to enlarge it into a two-story central-hall home, its wraparound porches trimmed with fine milled woodwork. The Hastedt family acquired it in 1911 and kept it until 1989.

Woodville, TX

This East Texas burial ground grew up around a water-powered mill on Sutton Lake and became the resting place of some of Tyler County's earliest Anglo pioneers. Families like the Barclays and Bevils arrived as Texas moved from a Mexican province to an independent republic in 1836, and their leaders helped organize the young county's government and courts, with John Bevil even serving as a delegate to the 1835 Consultation that set the Revolution in motion. James Walter Barclay's role as agent to the Alabama, Coushatta, and Pakana Muskogee peoples marks the uneasy meeting of settlers and Native nations on this frontier. In 1929 descendants formally deeded the ground as a community cemetery, and their families tend it still.

Kountze, TX

Georgia-born brothers-in-law William Henry Hart and Hampton Jackson 'Hamp' Herrington moved their families to the East Texas community of Providence in 1853 and set aside part of their land for a cemetery. When Hardin County was created in 1858, Hart became county treasurer and Herrington its first chief justice. Hart's 1861 burial formally established the graveyard, believed to be the second in the county, where eight of the nine marked graves belong to the two founding families.

Porter Township, PA · est. 1946

Long before roads crossed these ridges, the Frankstown Path carried Native travelers and colonial traders through the region, passing the spot that became Hart's Log. The name came from a hollow log that the trader John Hart used between 1744 and 1755 as a feeding trough for his pack horses. The little settlement grew from that humble waypoint into the town later called Hartslog, and eventually Alexandria.

Hartley, TX

Carved from the vast Young and Bexar territories, Hartley County was created in 1876 and formally organized in 1891 in the Texas Panhandle. It honors brothers Oliver Cromwell Hartley and Rufus K. Hartley, both noted members of the Texas Bar. The town of Hartley became its county seat.

Channing, TX

Hartley County was organized in 1891, and its county seat see-sawed until XIT Ranch interests helped move it to Channing in 1896—where the old frame courthouse was dismantled and hauled to the new town. In 1906 a proper Beaux Arts courthouse rose in its place, its triumphal-arch entrance and paired Roman Ionic columns lit and watered by its own well and power plant. Vaults and jury quarters were added over the following decades as the Panhandle county matured.

Old River-Winfree, TX

This small graveyard on the banks of Old River began with a tract granted to Texas immigrant Robert Wiseman in 1831 and sold in 1853 to Dr. Edward Hartman, whose first wife was likely its earliest burial. Now marked mostly by shallow depressions, handmade brick crypts, and a few stones, the cemetery preserves rural Texas burial customs—including bricks probably fired at a nearby 1870s brickyard. A separate slave cemetery is believed to lie on adjacent land.

Wallis, TX

Established in 1899, Hartsville Cemetery serves a community near Wallis in Austin County at the close of the 19th century. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2006, it preserves the graves of the farming families who settled this part of the Brazos bottomlands. Such burial grounds often survive as the clearest record of vanished rural hamlets.

Albuquerque, NM

Beginning in 1883, the Fred Harvey Company recruited thousands of young women from the Midwest and East to staff its restaurants and hotels along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Known as the Harvey Girls, they brought clean, orderly, high-quality dining to raw railroad towns across the Southwest, working under strict rules and living in company dormitories. Many stayed, married, and settled — becoming, in the popular phrase, the women who "civilized the West."

Houston, TX

Harvey Homan arrived in Texas in January 1836, at the very outset of the revolution, and that spring fought at San Jacinto in Captain Richard Roman's company—the decisive battle that won Texas its independence. Born in Kentucky in 1806, he made his life in the new republic's rising city of Houston, where he died young in July 1846.

Haskell, TX

Haskell County was created in 1858 and finally organized in 1885, named for Charles Ready Haskell, a young Tennessean shot alongside Colonel Fannin's men in the 1836 Goliad Massacre during the Texas Revolution. Captain R. B. Marcy crossed this country in 1849 while surveying a wagon route to California, and the first settlement at the future county seat came in 1882.

Port Lavaca, TX

This burial ground served the family of Captain Sylvanus Hatch, a Cape Cod–born builder who served in the War of 1812 as an adjutant under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans before later joining the Texas War for Independence. The Hatch family reached the Chocolate Creek area by 1842, and the captain established the cemetery in 1850 when his wife Pamela died of cholera—an outbreak that also killed German immigrants who had landed at Indianola and lie buried here. Hatch and two Confederate-veteran sons are interred among other pioneering families.

Rusk, TX

Hubbard G. Hatchett came to Texas from Tennessee in 1846 and settled near the Angelina River in the Cherokee County community of Atoy, building a double-pen log cabin of the kind he had known back home. In 1850 he leased the Rusk Ferry, and the family soon expanded the house into an inn where river travelers could lodge. Among those who crossed at his ferry was Gen. Sam Houston in 1857, and the operation continued until a county bridge replaced it in 1888.

Washington, TX

This 1853 house of brick, white pine, and cedar was built by enslaved workers for Basil M. Hatfield, a soldier of the Battle of San Jacinto whose steamboat worked the Brazos River trade. His nearby store in Washington had served the Republic of Texas for its meetings and hosted the Republic's last inaugural ball before Texas joined the Union. The home was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

La Joya, TX

The community of Havana stands on Porcion 46, land granted by the Spanish crown to Don Jose Matias Tijerina in 1767, who is said to have named it for the Cuban city where he had stopped on his voyage from Europe. Early families settled here, among them a Civil War Union soldier, Patricio Perez, and in 1891 they built a frame church dedicated to St. Joseph. Descendants of those pioneers still live in the area, and many are buried in the Havana Cemetery.

Galveston, TX

Kentucky native Edwin Hawes was a prominent attorney and politician who served as Wharton County judge and mayor of Kerrville. After marrying Lizzie Milburn Rust in 1881 and raising seven children, the family became summer residents of Galveston, where Hawes bought this lot in 1907 and had a summer home built. The two-story Colonial Revival house, with shingled gables and a full-width porch, stayed in the family until 1991.