Westward Expansion

Novice, TX

Settlement of this Coleman County area began in the 1850s around Camp Colorado, a U.S. cavalry outpost held by Texas State Troops and Rangers during the Civil War. After the war, families from the South established farms and ranches and the Atoka community grew up with a store, a church-school, and a cotton gin. The 1880 cemetery holds early pioneers including former Texas Ranger and Republic of Texas soldier Rev. Hugh Martin Childress, his son the county's first sheriff, Civil War veterans, and workers killed in a 1910 railroad-bridge explosion.

Attapulgus, GA

In the flatwoods of far southwest Georgia, the little community of Attapulgus set aside burial ground beginning around 1850, when J. H. Gibson donated a lot that soon adjoined the Pleasant Grove Presbyterian Church cemetery of 1854. Generations of local families — Gibson, Chestnut, Cook, Pound and others — laid their dead here, and in the twentieth century their descendants established a perpetual-care foundation to keep the ground tended. The names and small bequests recorded on the marker are the quiet institutional memory of an antebellum rural congregation.

Cross Plains, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Callahan County even before it organized, and many more arrived after the Texas and Pacific Railroad came through in 1880. The town was named Atwell in 1898 for a U.S. district attorney, and in 1917 the Howells deeded land for a shared burial ground to the community's Baptist, Christian, and Methodist churches. Among the graves are military headstones, including two young men killed in France during World War I — quiet markers of a farm town that peaked with stores, a gin, and a school before fading after World War II.

Aubrey, TX

In 1858 Dr. George T. Key moved his family from Missouri to Denton County and built log cabins near present-day Aubrey, one of which served as both school and church — the Key School House that cradled one of the county's first Methodist congregations. After years of meeting in the schoolhouse and members' homes, the church accepted a free town lot in 1885 and completed a frame building in 1886. A 1918 tornado leveled that structure, but the congregation rebuilt in brick by 1919, adorning it with Pre-Raphaelite-style stained glass, and continues to serve Aubrey today.

Ellis County, TX

Pioneers began burying their dead at this Ellis County site as early as 1856, and in 1865 it became part of a tract that Confederate veteran Rezi Jarvis Banks deeded to the Methodist Church for a school and church. His wife Minerva lies among the earliest marked graves. In its heyday Auburn was a thriving farming community with four churches, stores, and a post office, but the lack of a high school and the railroad's bypass eventually emptied it, leaving the cemetery as its chief remaining link to the past.

Stephenville, TX

The Audie Murphy Arena began on the Euless property of car dealer Ray Woods, who met the famed war hero and film star Audie Murphy on a defense bonds drive and bonded over a shared love of horses. Murphy's appearances as a featured guest drew crowds of cowboys to the rodeos held there. In 1952 Woods bought a ranch in Erath County and moved the arena to Stephenville, where it hosted local rodeos and saw the founding of the Erath County Trail Blazers before being relocated again in the mid-1960s.

Alvord, TX

Platted in 1865 out of D. D. Shirey's farmland and named for the naturalist John James Audubon, this Wise County town thrived for a generation on the edge of the cattle country. Shirey's stagecoach inn grew famous for its lavish table and its wondrous lazy Susan, and by the 1870s the town had churches, a school, cotton gins, stores, and professional men. When the Fort Worth & Denver Railroad bypassed it in 1883, Audubon slowly faded, its post office closing in 1904.

Sierra Blanca, TX

August Fransal was one of the daring stage drivers who carried the mail across the perilous Ben Ficklin Overland line between San Antonio and El Paso, guiding his mule-drawn coach through country contested by Apache raiders. He served as a Texas Ranger in the early 1880s under Captain George W. Baylor and worked as a teamster at Fort Davis, later making his living as a hunter who sold fresh game in El Paso.

Grapeland, TX

In continuous use since the 1850s, this cemetery rests on four acres donated by Lucinda Sheridan Murchison, widow of an early landowner, with its earliest documented grave dating to 1854. Among those buried here are pioneers, children—including an unidentified girl who died passing through with a wagon train—victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars. A cemetery association formed in 1950 to care for the grounds.

Buffalo Township, PA · est. 1947

In the tangled years before Pennsylvania's western boundary was settled, Virginia also claimed this corner of the Ohio Country and governed it as part of its own frontier district. In August 1776, as the Revolution was just beginning, the first court west of the Monongahela River convened here under that Virginia authority. The rival colonial claims to the same rich land would not be resolved until the Mason-Dixon line was extended westward.

Grapeland, TX

Probably built in the 1850s, this rural "union" church opened its doors to several denominations and doubled as the Augusta community's schoolhouse in its early years. Its fabric—shiplap siding, Greek Revival trim, Victorian-era shingled gables, and an early-twentieth-century steeple—records generations of change layered onto one modest frame building. It still gathers the community each year for homecoming observances.

Liberty, TX

Augustine B. Hardin, born in Georgia in 1798, was among the fifty-nine men who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. That document, adopted at Washington-on-the-Brazos as Santa Anna's army advanced, formally severed Texas from Mexico. Hardin lent his name to the cause and lived out his years in the Liberty County that his generation helped found.

Houston, TX

Augustus Chapman Allen was a New York-born schoolteacher and bookkeeper who came to Texas in the 1830s and threw in with the Texas Revolution, even funding a ship, the Brutus, to move troops and supplies. With his brother John Kirby Allen he bought marshy land along Buffalo Bayou after independence in 1836 and platted a brand-new town, naming it for the victorious general Sam Houston. When the young Republic's Congress accepted their offer and met there in 1837, a speculative real-estate gamble became a capital city.

Gonzales, TX

Augustus H. Jones took up arms during the pivotal year of 1835, when Texian colonists rose against the Mexican government and set the Texas Revolution in motion. He fought at the Storming of Bexar, the hard street-by-street fight that drove Mexican forces from San Antonio, and served in the Goliad area, another flashpoint of that struggle for independence. The state honored his service with a marker bearing the star and wreath, a tribute erected nearly a century and a quarter later.

Aurora, TX

Aurora Cemetery holds graves dating to the 1860s and grew after Confederate veteran Finis Dudley Beauchamp donated the site to a Masonic lodge in 1877. A deadly 1891 epidemic — likely a form of meningitis — added hundreds of graves, and one poignant child's epitaph is still widely quoted. The cemetery is also famous for the legend that an airship crashed nearby in 1897 and its pilot was buried here; bypassed by the railroad, the town faded but the burial ground endures with over 800 graves.

Lander County, NV

Austin sprang to life after William Talcott struck silver here on May 2, 1862, while hauling wood out of Pony Canyon below — a find that set off the famous "Rush to Reese." The nearby camp of Clifton flared briefly, but fast-growing Austin overtook it and became the Lander County seat in 1863, swelling into a substantial city of several thousand before its mines began to fail in the 1880s. From this high Great Basin outpost, prospectors fanned out to open many other important mining camps across central Nevada.

Waco, TX

Designed by prolific Southern architect R.H. Hunt and completed in 1925, this Waco church is a substantial essay in Gothic style, its brick mass rising from a raised basement beneath a prominent bell tower. Time and misfortune reshaped it: the tower's original tracery was gone by the 1940s, and a 1954 fire forced the replacement of the sanctuary's art glass. What remains is a landmark that has weathered the ordinary accidents of a long congregational life.

Waco, TX

As the 19th century closed, Waco's Fifth Street Methodist congregation had simply grown too large, so in 1900 the conference approved a new church for the city. Chartered the next year with 81 members, Austin Avenue Methodist built its first sanctuary in 1902 and grew alongside its neighborhood, eventually outgrowing that home and building anew a block away. Through the decades it sustained a steady tradition of community outreach.

Bellville, TX

Austin County traces its beginnings to the 1821 grant that brought Stephen F. Austin's first Anglo-American colonists to Mexican Texas, and its seat, San Felipe de Austin, served as the capital of Austin's colony and the cradle of Texas's provisional government during the 1835–36 crisis. Organized as a Mexican municipality in 1828, it became a county of the new Republic in March 1836, named for the empresario himself. Bellville has been the county seat since 1848.

Bellville, TX

Declaring their old lockup "unsafe, unfit, and inadequate," the Austin County Court contracted in 1896 with the Pauly Jail Building Co. of St. Louis to erect this jail for $19,970. Its Romanesque Revival design—crenelated parapets, bartizans, and stone window arches—was made to harmonize with the county's 1886 courthouse, which later burned. The gallows, used only once in 1901, have since been removed and the jailer's quarters enlarged, but the original exterior survives.

Austin, TX

Master Masons met at surveyor Edwin Waller's home on October 11, 1839, just a week before President Mirabeau B. Lamar arrived to establish the government of the Republic of Texas in its new capital. Grand Master Branch Archer authorized Austin Lodge No. 12 that November, with Alexander Russell as its first worshipful master. Its rolls read like a roster of early Texas leadership — vice president Edward Burleson, whose 1851 Masonic burial was the first in the State Cemetery, and governors Edward Clark and Hardin R. Runnels among them.

Austin, TX

As Austin outgrew its older graveyards in the early 20th century, a private corporation bought farmland northwest of town in 1927 and opened Austin Memorial Park, recording its first burial in 1928. The city bought the grounds in 1941 to serve the public, though highways, a recreation center, and new construction later trimmed its edges. Among those interred are Pulitzer-winning novelist James A. Michener, legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, actor Zachary Scott, and famed University of Texas coaches Dana X. Bible and Harvey Penick.

Lander County, NV

The silver-mining boomtown of Austin raised three churches in quick succession during its heyday. St. Augustine's Catholic Church went up in native brick and stone in 1866, where Father Monteverde charged a dollar's admission to his first Christmas Eve mass to control the crowd; the Methodist church followed, financed by stock sold as far as the East Coast; and St. George's Episcopal Church was consecrated in 1878 after a rousing Easter sermon secured pledges, its organ shipped around Cape Horn. The young Emma Wixom attended Sunday school here before becoming the world-famous soprano Emma Nevada.

Authon, TX

This burial ground began as a family cemetery for Kentucky-born pioneer Isom Cranfill, whose 15-year-old son Linn Boyd was killed in an Indian attack near the family home in 1871. Sitting along the old Fort Worth–Fort Belknap Military Road, the site was later deeded to the Authon Church of Christ and remains a public cemetery holding many of the area's early settlers.

Avalon, TX

Organized on July 6, 1879, as Mt. Nebo Baptist Church, this Ellis County congregation began with two elders and sixteen charter members. Early worship took place in the Muscrat School and beneath a brush arbor before a sanctuary rose in 1924–25, followed later by Sunday school rooms and a parsonage. Renamed Avalon Missionary Baptist Church, it has served the community for well over a century.

Avinger, TX

Around 1876, to guarantee the East Line & Red River Railroad would cross his land, Dr. Hamilton J. Avinger donated ground for a depot, a Methodist church, and this cemetery, founding the town that bears his name. A South Carolina immigrant who had reached Texas in 1855, Avinger drew neighbors from older nearby settlements once the depot opened, and the town grew into a shipping point for lumber and produce. The cemetery's earliest known burial, a typhoid victim, dates to 1877.

Avoca, TX

This congregation grew out of an 1887 brush-arbor camp meeting led by Methodist circuit rider J. H. Wiseman in the Spring Creek community. When the railroad created the new town of Avoca, the church moved with the people and completed its sanctuary in 1906. After a storm destroyed the original steeple, a 1953 belfry was added to hold two railroad locomotive bells—a fitting echo of the railroad that had summoned the town into being.

Fort Worth, TX

In 1861 Benjamin Patton Ayres and his wife Emily bought a 320-acre farm and set aside two acres on this hillside as a family burial ground. Ayres, the second Tarrant County clerk and a founder of Fort Worth's First Christian Church, was the first laid to rest here. Beyond the fenced family plot lie an unknown number of graves — victims of spring fevers and Trinity River floods — whose fieldstone markers have long since vanished.

Azle, TX

By local tradition, schooling in the Azle area began in the 1850s in log cabins and a Baptist church, persisting despite the disruptions of frontier raids and the Civil War. Over the decades the school grew by absorbing a string of tiny neighboring districts with names like Promised Land, Liberty, and Bluff Springs. That steady consolidation turned scattered pioneer schools into a single modern district.

Joaquin, TX

Alabama-born Benjamin Franklin Morris came to Texas in 1838 and settled the pioneer village of Sarat, becoming a prosperous farmer and rancher. In 1884 he gave the Houston, East & West Texas Railroad a right of way through 500 acres and provided a 100-acre townsite—named for his grandson Joaquin—on the condition that a depot be built and passenger trains stop daily. A Confederate veteran, Morris also donated land for the town's First Baptist Church.

Breckenridge, TX

Benjamin Tarver Brown, a former Confederate captain, came to Stephens County in 1866 and, in 1876—the year Breckenridge was founded as the county seat—raised this limestone ranch house. Its 18-inch walls were cut from stone quarried nearby, while other materials were hauled by wagon all the way from Fort Worth. One of the oldest buildings in town, it was later restored by owners who bought it in 1941.

Langtry, TX

Established around 1898 in the rugged country near Langtry in Val Verde County, Babb Cemetery holds the graves of families who settled this remote stretch of the lower Pecos during West Texas's ranching and railroad era. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes the burial ground as a lasting record of a small frontier community.

Chico, TX

This cemetery dates to September 1866 and the killing of Mrs. John S. Babb by Comanches, an attack that also carried off two of her children, Dot and Bianca, into a captivity that lasted two years before their father recovered them. It marks the violent frontier that North Texas remained in the years just after the Civil War, when raids and captivities were a constant fear for settling families.

Llano, TX

Local tradition holds that Baby Head Mountain took its grim name in the 1850s, after a child killed in an Indian raid was left on its slopes. A pioneer community grew up nearby in the 1870s, taking the same name, with homes, farms, and businesses. Today the cemetery — whose oldest documented grave is that of a child who died on New Year's Day 1884 — is the community's last physical trace.

Frisco, TX

Henry Cook, a War of 1812 veteran, arrived here in 1845 as a member of the Peters Colony, building a log house that became a landmark on the Shawnee Trail cattle route. He opened this family cemetery in 1847 to bury his young son Daniel, and his daughter Rachel Cook Baccus later deeded the ground to his heirs and gave land for the Baccus Christian Church. Named in her honor around 1915, the cemetery remains in use today.

Lubbock, TX

Built in 1916 for business and civic leader Warren A. Bacon and his wife Myrta, this two-story brick house rose in the Overton Addition, the first residential expansion beyond Lubbock's original townsite. Designed from plans by Amarillo architect W. M. Rice, it reflected the ambitions of a South Plains town coming into its own. The Bacon family kept it for more than sixty-five years.

Fredericksburg, TX

A German family immigrated to Texas in 1854 and, after moving about the central part of the state, settled roughly 120 acres in the Fredericksburg area in 1867. Their homestead centered on a house built of handmade clay-and-straw brick alongside a cluster of outbuildings. Their sons inherited the farm, and the family held it until 1937, when it passed to another German-Texan family.

Leander, TX

This burial ground opened in 1857 with the grave of three-year-old John Babcock, whose father later deeded the land to the community of Bagdad. Among its early graves lie a Civil War veteran and a colonel, marking a settlement that thrived until 1882, when the railroad ran instead through the new town of Leander and drew the living away. The two communities came to share the cemetery, which was enlarged in later decades.

Bloomfield Hills, MI

Completed in 1833, this frame building was the second home of Bagley's Tavern, first opened in a log cabin by Amasa Bagley in the 1820s. Bagley arrived in 1819 with his family and a handful of other settlers, among the first to put down roots in what became Oakland County, and later served as an associate judge. His tavern was a gathering place on the frontier edge of the young Michigan Territory.

Elysian Field, TX

Bailey Anderson (1754–1840) fought as a young soldier through eleven years of the Revolutionary War across Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas, losing his father and two brothers to the conflict. A restless frontiersman, he pushed westward across a lifetime — from Virginia and South Carolina to Kentucky, where he sat in the state legislature, then Indiana, and finally East Texas around 1818, weathering Spanish attempts to expel American settlers. He is buried in the nearby family cemetery on land granted to his son, a soldier of the Texas Revolution.

Canutillo, TX

Bailey Cemetery near Canutillo dates to 1880, when the far western tip of Texas was still a sparsely settled frontier along the Rio Grande. Burial grounds like this one anchored the small farming and railroad communities that took root in the El Paso valley after the railroads arrived. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes it as a lasting record of those early settlers.

Muleshoe, TX

Bailey County carries the name of Peter James Bailey, a young Kentucky lawyer who died defending the Alamo in 1836. Carved from the vast Bexar Territory, the county was created on paper in 1876 but not formally organized until 1918, when enough settlers had arrived on the high plains to sustain a government, with Muleshoe as its seat.

Muleshoe vicinity, TX

When Mariah 'Aunt Rye' Long died in 1918, Emil and Anna Wellsandt gave a parcel of their land for a public burying ground—and it filled quickly, many of the first graves belonging to victims of that year's influenza epidemic. A cemetery association formed at once, and a 'Hill-Top' section was later set aside for the county's indigent dead. After decades of neglect and vandalism the association reorganized in 1996 to preserve the resting place of Bailey County's pioneers and veterans.

Santa Clara County, CA

This marker points to the nearby Bailey Fellows house, a historic structure at the south end of Calero Reservoir in Santa Clara County, California. The building survives from an earlier ranching and rural era in the hills south of San José, before reservoirs and parkland reshaped the landscape. Such farmhouses recall the agricultural roots of the Santa Clara Valley long before it became Silicon Valley.

Austin, TX

Bailey Hardeman, a Tennessee native, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836 and served as the first secretary of the treasury for the new Republic of Texas. He died later that same year on Caney Creek in Matagorda County. The State of Texas honored him with this marker during the 1936 independence centennial.

Bonham, TX

In 1837, Bailey Inglish moved his family from western Arkansas to this part of the young Republic of Texas, where he helped organize Fannin County and served on its land board and later as chief justice. To shield settlers from repeated Indian raids he built a fort on his land, and the settlement that grew up around it—first called Bois d'Arc—became Bonham. Through public service and gifts of land for town lots, a cemetery, and a female seminary, he shaped the community's early growth.

Magnolia, TX

Baker Cemetery took root around 1855, in the years when Anglo settlers were spreading across the pineywoods and prairies of what became Montgomery County, Texas. A burying ground like this one usually marks the anchor of an early rural community, the first permanent claim a family made on the land. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2008 recognizes more than a century and a half of continuous local memory.

Kemp, TX

When the Baker family's infant son William was buried in 1848, this Illinois-emigrant family plot was born. Over the decades it grew into a three-acre community cemetery of more than 800 graves. Among the dead are veterans of the Republic of Texas Army, the Civil War, World War II, and the Korean War.

Weatherford, TX

Settlement of this part of Parker County took hold in the 1850s, and when Josiah and Kate Baker arrived with their extended family in 1854, the community that grew around their homestead took their name. The Bakers gave land for a school that opened in 1872 and for a Baptist church organized the same year by pioneer minister Noah T. Byars, while a family grave became the seed of the Baker Cemetery.

Odessa, TX

With no public schools in rural Ector County, ranchers R.W. Smith and Teague Baker built an eight-by-ten-foot schoolhouse in Baker's pasture in 1906 and hired a teacher for $15 a month plus room and board, which they took turns providing. Such ranch schools taught not only ranchers' children but those of cowboys and 'nesters' — small farmers coming west to homestead cheap land. They served the isolated Permian Basin well until good roads and buses finally reached it.

Cleburne, TX

Tradition holds that a little girl who fell ill and died while traveling by wagon train in the 1850s was the first person buried on this ground. Church records suggest J. L. Baker first deeded land for the cemetery near New Hope Baptist Church, founded nearby in 1860, with the Lain family later adding more; the earliest dated stone belongs to Hixy Moore, who died in 1870. Generations of pioneers, veterans and Johnson County families rest here, tended still by their descendants.

Austin, TX

The rugged Balcones Escarpment, curving through central Texas from Hill County to Uvalde County, shaped where people settled long before towns arose, its springs, wooded hills, and fertile prairies drawing Indian peoples and then Spanish colonists. Spanish explorer Bernardo de Miranda named the formation 'Los Balcones' in 1756, and part of El Camino Real, the King's Highway, followed the fault line past missions and presidios near San Antonio and Austin. Anglo-American settlers led by Stephen F. Austin arrived along the escarpment before 1830, and Austin—chosen capital of the Republic of Texas—grew up on its edge.

Bald Prairie, TX

When Tennessee-born Elijah Rains settled the Robertson County prairie in 1848, he set aside this ground so that his neighbors would have a place to bury their dead. The nearby Duck Creek and Prairie communities soon shared it, and its stones now trace the whole arc of a Texas farming settlement — from an uncertain early grave to the oldest surviving marker of 1872 and the veterans of the Civil War and later wars laid to rest here. A cemetery association formed in 1928 and an added acre in 1957 kept the ground in use, and roughly 600 marked graves are still honored each Memorial Day.

Rockport, TX

This coastal Queen Anne house, dating in its basic form to the 1880s, was home in the 1890s to Aransas County Judge W. H. Baldwin, a booster of Rockport as a deep-water port. From 1917 to 1942 it sheltered George A. Brundrett, Jr., a Confederate veteran and cattle rancher whose spread covered 15,000 acres on Matagorda Island; his wife Flavilla is remembered for turning the parlor into a makeshift hospital, and some 200 people are said to have taken refuge here during the deadly 1919 hurricane. With its front-facing gable, lacy corner brackets, and original windows and doors, the house shows the Queen Anne style adapted to the Gulf coast.

Grapeland, TX

Balis Edens, born in South Carolina in 1805, followed his family to Texas in 1838 and served in 1839 with a company of mounted rangers before settling to farm and build cotton gins. He eventually inherited land on Elkhardt Creek in Houston County, where the family cemetery was begun in 1873 with the burial of his son. Edens himself was laid there later that year, joined over the next decade by a dozen kin, the last in 1884.

Alvord, TX

This hilltop burial ground began on land owned by pioneer James Ball, Sr. (1789–1867), first serving as a resting place for his family and friends. In 1890 his descendants J. S. and Nancy Ball deeded the plot to the Audubon community, and it was formally incorporated as a cemetery association in 1962. The site remains a quiet marker of one of the area's founding families.

Donna vicinity, TX

This small graveyard is the last trace of a 7,000-acre cattle empire rooted in an 18th-century Spanish land grant to Juan José Hinojosa, confirmed posthumously in 1790. His great-grandson Antonio Balli Cavazos settled the land in 1839, named his Balli San Antonio del Esterito Ranch, and established the family cemetery, where burials continued into the 1950s. For roughly 120 years the ranch dominated this stretch of the Rio Grande Valley before fading away.

Victoria, TX

Built before 1885 on the Constitution Street side of Victoria's public square, this band stand hosted concerts and public gatherings for the growing South Texas town. In 1923 it was moved to the center of the square and set atop the foundation of the old standpipe, and it was fully restored in 1962. It remains a fixture of civic life in one of Texas's oldest towns.

Bandera, TX

The Bandera Cemetery has held the town's dead since the 1850s, its oldest grave dating to 1851, before Bandera itself was fully established. Among those buried are community leaders, fraternal-order members, and veterans reaching back to the Mexican-American War. The land traces to Hendrick Arnold, a free African American who scouted and spied for the Texas Revolution alongside his father-in-law, the famed Erastus "Deaf" Smith, and a group of seven women organized the cemetery association in 1907.

Bandera, TX

The Bandera area was a strategic point on the Indian frontier, where Rangers and Comanches clashed in 1843 amid the contested borderlands of the young Republic. Settlement came quickly thereafter: Elder Lyman Wight established a Mormon colony in 1854, Polish immigrants arrived in 1855, and the county was created and organized out of Bexar in 1856. The seat of Bandera had been founded in 1853 by John James, Charles de Montel, and John Herndon.