Westward Expansion

Beeville, TX

Son of Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum, Lincoln Borglum assisted on the great carving and, after his father's death, oversaw its completion and served as the memorial's superintendent until 1944. He later settled in Beeville, where he became a beloved civic leader, sculptor, and cattle breeder until his death in 1986 — his lungs damaged by granite dust from the Rushmore blasting.

Austin, TX

James Loraine Dallas left Pennsylvania to join the fight for Texas independence, serving in the Army of Texas in 1836 during the revolution that created the Republic. He settled in Washington County, part of the wave of newcomers who staked their futures on the new nation. His grave marker preserves the memory of one of the many soldier-settlers of that founding generation.

San Saba, TX

Jim and Ellen Baker married in 1859 into families that had come to Texas during the Republic era, and Jim built one of the region's early cattle fortunes—driving 6,000 head into newly formed San Saba County in 1856. Their family survived a Comanche attack in 1861 that left Jim wounded, and after the Civil War he and his brother ran vast herds along the Goodnight-Loving Trail into Colorado and out to the Quitaque country of the Panhandle. In 1880 the brothers sold their 140,000-acre Quitaque Ranch and 20,000 cattle to Charles Goodnight, then returned to ranch quietly in their beloved San Saba.

Galveston, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, lawyer James Love came to Texas in 1837 and helped found the city of Galveston, becoming a political ally of Mirabeau B. Lamar. He served as a delegate to the 1845 convention that approved annexation to the United States and held several judicial posts. Though in his sixties, he enlisted in Terry's Texas Rangers during the Civil War and later became the first judge of the Harris and Galveston County Criminal Court.

Benbrook, TX

In 1876 James M. Benbrook, an Indiana native and Union Army veteran of the Civil War, brought his family to a Tarrant County settlement then called Marinda. He became a prominent farmer and landowner, and when the Texas and Pacific Railroad completed its lines and built a depot here in 1880, the company renamed the community in his honor. The town of Benbrook still carries his name.

Bryson, TX

Tennessee-born James Madison McCloud fought with an Alabama cavalry unit in the Civil War before bringing his family to Texas in 1881 and settling near Bryson. There he founded a church at Cottonwood Springs and began a remarkable fifty-three-year career as a Methodist circuit rider across northern Texas and southern Oklahoma. A farmer as well as a preacher, he ministered to scattered frontier congregations until his death in 1934.

Dallas, TX

Kentucky-born James Martin Patterson reached Dallas in 1846 and, with partner John W. Smith, pooled $700 to open one of the town's first stores. Ever the venturer, in 1851 the pair built a flatboat and tried to float cotton down the Trinity River toward the Gulf — a bold bid to give landlocked North Texas a route to market. Patterson went on to serve as county judge from 1854 to 1866 and managed extensive landholdings until his death at ninety-four.

Milford, TX

James McDaniel, born in Alabama in 1810, was among the men who served in the Texas army during the revolutionary year of 1836, when settlers won independence from Mexico. He and his wife Idabella lived out long lives on the Texas frontier, dying in the 1880s and 1890s. Their marker preserves the memory of an ordinary soldier-settler of the founding generation.

San Patricio, TX

This home is remembered as the residence of James McGloin, the County Sligo–born empresario who, with John McMullen, brought Irish colonists to South Texas and laid out the town of San Patricio in the 1830s. Recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, the house stands where one of the region's founding settlers made his home. It anchors the memory of the Irish colony that took root in Mexican-era Texas.

Strawn, TX

J. N. Stuart and his wife Sally built this house in 1874 from materials hauled by ox-wagon all the way from East Texas, joined with wooden pegs by a shipbuilder named Andrew Murdock. It was the first home in the area to boast milled lumber and glass windows, and the Stuarts raised four sons here who all prospered in business. Long a stopping place for circuit riders, officials, and travelers, the house passed to the youngest son and remained in the family.

Cuero, TX

They called James Norman Smith "Uncle Jimmy the Peacemaker," and his long life stitched together much of early Texas. Educated in North Carolina and a teacher in Tennessee — where one of his pupils was the future president James K. Polk — he came to Texas in 1840 and taught the first school in what became DeWitt County. He then surveyed the county, served as its first clerk, organized Presbyterian churches across the region and its first Masonic lodge, and at an 1857 rally introduced his old Tennessee friend Sam Houston to the crowd.

Coupland, TX

South Carolina–born James O. Rice reached Texas by 1835 and fought in its war for independence, then guarded the young Republic's frontier as a Texas Ranger. In an 1839 clash on the North San Gabriel River, his volunteers defeated Mexican forces under Manuel Flores and seized documents exposing the Cordova Rebellion, and he went on to join the Somervell, Mier, and Snively expeditions and serve in the Mexican War. Rewarded with land bounties, he became one of Williamson County's largest landowners, ran a store and post office at Rice's Crossing, and helped choose the county seat.

Van Alstyne, TX

James P. Dumas (1820-1875), a South Carolinian, married and moved to the Republic of Texas in 1841 and worked as a surveyor, helping map land that became part of Dallas. He fought in the Mexican War of 1846, served as Grayson County surveyor, and amassed holdings so vast he could ride the twenty miles to Sherman without leaving his own land, later helping found a Sherman bank in 1872.

San Augustine, TX

A North Carolina lawyer who arrived in Texas in 1836 leading a company of volunteers, James Pinckney Henderson swiftly became one of the young Republic's leading statesmen, serving as attorney general, secretary of state, and diplomat to Europe. When Texas joined the Union, voters chose him as the state's first governor in 1846. He then led Texas troops as a major general in the Mexican War, earning a formal vote of thanks and a sword from Congress, before a late turn as U.S. senator.

Johnson City, TX

Georgia-born and raised in DeWitt County, James Polk Johnson served in the Confederate army before joining his uncles in the Blanco County cattle business, which he bought and made his own by 1871. In 1879 he founded a new town on the Pedernales River — Johnson City — and worked to develop it, though his ambition to make it the county seat was not realized until 1891, six years after his death.

Johnson City, TX

Built by town founder James Polk Johnson, this versatile structure served Johnson City as a community hall, opera house, and meeting place for churches and civic groups, while also housing banks, stores, hotels, and offices. When the Blanco County seat moved to Johnson City in 1890, the building briefly served as courthouse and jail. Years later, former president Lyndon Johnson kept an office here for a time.

Weatherford, TX

A Tennessee native and Civil War veteran, James Robertson Couts brought his family to Parker County in the mid-1860s and, with the proceeds of a cattle drive to California, opened a bank in Weatherford that endures today. An influential civic figure, he left an endowment to Weatherford College in his will and now rests beside his first wife, Martha. His life bridged the cattle-trailing frontier and the settled world of banking and philanthropy.

Old Center, TX

James Rowe came to the Mexican frontier of Texas from North Carolina and took up arms in the 1836 revolution that won Texas its independence. A prosperous tanner, he helped organize newly created Panola County in 1846, served a term in the young state's legislature, and donated the ground where this cemetery now stands. His story is a compact portrait of the settler-soldiers who turned a contested borderland into an American state.

Sulphur Springs, TX

James Selen Stout came of age on the raw northeastern Texas frontier and, still a teenager, rode three months in the Republic of Texas cavalry in 1836 — service that earned him a 320-acre land grant. As a scout and explorer he helped draw settlers into the region, and decades later took up arms again for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He and his wife Elvira raised eleven children on land his family helped open.

Quitman, TX

This modest 1860s cottage was bought in 1873 by James Stephen Hogg, who honeymooned here with Sarah Ann Stinson while serving as editor-publisher of the "Quitman News" and the local justice of the peace. From these small-town beginnings Hogg rose to become the first native-born governor of Texas, serving from 1891 to 1895. Preserved by local clubs and later restored by his daughter Ima Hogg, the cottage survives as a memento of that ascent.

Clarendon, TX

James T. Patman served as sheriff of Donley County from 1905 to 1916, a time when the great Panhandle ranches were being broken up and sold off as farmland. Born in Sulphur Springs and a Methodist, he married Allie Graves, raised a son and a daughter, and died in Clarendon. He was remembered as an outstanding peace officer of that transitional frontier era.

Pattison, TX

At the crossing of the Atascosito Road and the San Felipe Trail, James Tarrant Pattison and his wife Sarah settled a Republic of Texas land grant that grew into a 5,000-acre plantation with its own grist mill, sawmill, and cotton gin. The homesite doubled as a stagecoach stop, and the Pattisons founded the community's first church and school. The town that grew up here took the founder's name, and his heirs still live on the land.

Milam, TX

James Taylor Gaines lived a frontier epic: surveyor of newly acquired Louisiana lands, Sabine River ferryman, and veteran of both the War of 1812 and the filibustering expeditions of early Texas. He represented the Sabine region at Washington-on-the-Brazos in 1836, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Republic's constitution, and served in its congresses. He later followed the Gold Rush to California, where he died in 1856.

Anahuac, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, James Taylor White drove cattle from Louisiana into the Texas coastal prairies in 1828 and built one of southeast Texas's greatest Longhorn herds. On his ranch in 1832 colonists drafted the Turtle Bayou Resolutions, an early protest against Mexican rule, and during the Revolution he sheltered fleeing settlers and supplied beef to the Texas army. His postwar cattle drives to New Orleans, over the Opelousas Trail, foreshadowed the great trail-driving era to come.

Daingerfield, TX

James Thompson served in the North Carolina militia in 1781, helping secure American independence, before joining the westward drift of pioneer families through Alabama and Mississippi to the young Republic of Texas, where he was revered as a patriarch. His kin carried that martial thread onward: a son-in-law fought in the War of 1812, and a grandson became a Texas Ranger and county sheriff, killed in an Indian fight. Thompson and many descendants rest in the Daingerfield Cemetery.

Grapevine, TX

Virginia-born James Tracy Morehead brought his family to the raw frontier of newly organized Tarrant County in 1852 and within two years was chosen its third Chief Justice. He is remembered for renaming the settlement of Dunnville "Grapevine" after the nearby Grape Vine Springs, and in 1858 he oversaw the elections that organized neighboring Parker County. His career traces the machinery of local government taking shape on the North Texas frontier.

Gonzales, TX

Indiana-born James W. Robinson came to Texas in 1833 and was elected the Republic's first lieutenant governor in 1835, briefly serving as governor before shouldering a musket as a private at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. He later settled in Gonzales, sat as a district judge, and served on the state Supreme Court. The office he first held became the second-highest in Texas, wielding broad power over the Senate and legislation.

Austin, TX

Born in Georgia in 1797, James Wales Jones was one of the Old Three Hundred—the first colonists Stephen F. Austin brought into Mexican Texas in the 1820s. He took up arms in the Texas War for Independence and lived out his days in the young republic and state he had helped to found, dying in 1847. His wife, Hetty Stiles Jones, survived him by more than half a century.

Brenham, TX

James and Catherine Walker settled on this Austin-colony land grant after July 1824, making their double-pen cedar-log house one of the oldest surviving log dwellings in Texas. As "Old 300" colonists, the Walkers raised sons who fought in the 1836 Texas Revolution and worked the family league of more than 4,000 acres. The house was moved twice, served for a time as a barn, and was carefully restored in 1986 using its own surviving structural evidence.

Bigfoot, TX

James Washington Winters fought at San Jacinto in the 1836 revolution that won Texas independence and later joined the Somervell Expedition. A loyal follower of Sam Houston, he refused to sign the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy at Oakville on July 4, 1861, yet served as a captain, provost marshal, and scout in the militia patrolling the country between the Nueces and Rio Grande. He spent eight years in Tuxpan, Mexico, and raised a large family with his wives Piercy Tullos and Elizabeth Wier.

Manchester, TX

Jane Chandler Gill was an Englishwoman who died in 1816, soon after settling at Jonesboro in what is now Red River County — decades before Texas independence, when the region was still a remote borderland of New Spain. Her grave is counted among the oldest marked European-American burials in Texas.

Houston County, TX

Jane Dotson Lively came from Alabama to Houston County in 1850 with her husband Thomas, for whom the surrounding community of Livelyville was named. She helped establish a church and school on the family's land and was remembered as a courageous pioneer and community leader. Mother of thirteen and twice married, she lived to be one hundred, dying in 1922.

Port Bolivar, TX

Born in Maryland in 1798, Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long followed her husband into the dangerous filibustering expeditions that sought to wrest Texas from Spain. Left to hold a fort on the Bolivar Peninsula through a brutal winter with her daughter and an enslaved woman named Kian, she gave birth there amid hunger and danger — the episode that earned her the honorary title "Mother of Texas." She later received her own headright of land in Austin's colony, unusual for a woman, and opened her San Felipe boarding house to the rallies and intrigue of the Texas Revolution.

Richmond, TX

Jane Wilkinson Long earned the name "Mother of Texas" through the winter of 1821, when—stranded at Point Bolivar with her small daughter and an enslaved girl named Kian while her husband's filibustering expedition marched into Mexico—she gave birth in a snowstorm and then rose to gather food and firewood for her family. In the decades that followed she ran two of the most famous boarding houses of the colonial and republic eras, hosting William B. Travis, Sam Houston, and Mirabeau B. Lamar. On this Richmond site she opened a house in 1837 that became a hub of Texas social and political life until her plantation prospered in the 1840s.

Walker County, TX

Robert and Jane Jardine Browne raised their first cabin here in 1849 from hewn pine logs on walnut posts, on land granted in 1835 to Jane's uncle and surveyed by the Republic of Texas. As the family grew, so did the house — a second log cabin, then a lean-to bedroom, dining room, and detached kitchen added by their Texas-born son. Purchased from the family's heirs in 1940, the homestead was restored in 1966.

White Hall, TX

Here in 1833 planter Jared Ellison Groce built the home known as "Groce's Retreat," and here he died on November 20, 1836, the year Texas won its independence. The Retreat name outlived the house, carrying on as a post office and village that grew up two miles east after the original home was torn down. Groce was among the wealthiest of Stephen F. Austin's colonists.

Jacksonville, TX

When Devereux and Polly Ann Jarratt came from Virginia to settle this East Texas ground in 1850, their sons set aside a burial plot in 1858 — its first grave that of a nameless transient worker known only as Mr. Watts. Added to by many hands over the following century, the cemetery became a shared resting place formally organized by descendants and neighbors in the 1960s.

Jarrell, TX

Jarrell was born of a railroad gambit: developer Orlando D. Jarrell persuaded executives of the Bartlett and Western Railway to route their line through leased land rather than the nearby town of Corn Hill, and in 1909 he began selling lots. When the tracks arrived in 1911, most of Corn Hill's residents — and even two dozen of its buildings — moved to the new town, which thrived on cotton until the crop's decline and the railway's 1935 closure shrank it. The town endured a devastating tornado in 1997 before incorporating in 2001 and entering an era of rapid growth.

Jasper, TX

Jasper County was one of the twenty-three original counties of the Republic of Texas in 1836, and its seat — the old Bevil settlement founded around 1824 — was renamed for Revolutionary War hero William Jasper. After an 1849 fire destroyed the first log courthouse, a succession of buildings followed, culminating in the 1889 red-brick courthouse whose clock tower, WPA annex, and later remodelings chart the county's changing fortunes.

New Braunfels, TX

Johann Carl Ludwig Jauer and Anna Caroline Alemeier married in 1851 and settled on land acquired through an 1847 contract with the German Emigration and Railroad Company's Fisher and Miller Colony. The burial ground was likely begun with the 1853 death of an infant daughter, and a single stone marks the graves of Ludwig, Anna, and their daughter Karoline. A prominent landowner, Ludwig remarried in 1880 and was ultimately buried elsewhere on his Clear Springs land.

Springtown, TX

Along an 1860s wagon route locals called Jay Bird Lane, a donation of three acres in 1883 preserved a camp-meeting ground that quickly became the center of rural community life. A frame building served the Union Grove school and hosted the Jay Bird Freewill Baptist Church, while a cemetery grew alongside from 1884 — the school, church, and burial ground bound together for generations of area families.

Galveston, TX

The notorious privateer Jean Lafitte made Galveston Island his base in 1817, sailing under the Mexican flag as he preyed on Spanish shipping in the Gulf. Here he built Maison Rouge, a red house doubling as a fort with an upper story pierced for cannon and furnished lavishly with plunder. Forced out by the United States in 1821, he burned his home, fort, and village and sailed for the Yucatán; the present structure rose in 1870 atop his old cellars and foundations.

White Pine County, NV

Between May and June of 1827, explorer and trapper Jedediah Strong Smith forced a route from California's Central Valley to Utah's Great Salt Lake Valley, becoming the first known European American to cross the entire expanse of present-day Nevada. Because his journal and map were lost, his exact path is uncertain, but historians trace him over the Sierra at Ebbetts Pass, southeast along the Walker River, and northeast across central Nevada's Smoky Valley toward Utah.

Fort Davis, TX

Carved from Presidio County and organized in 1887, this West Texas county was named in honor of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States. The town of Fort Davis, which had served as Presidio County's seat, became the new county's seat. The marker records the administrative birth of a mountainous, sparsely settled corner of the Trans-Pecos.

Fort Davis, TX

Erected in 1910–1911 to replace the county's original 1880 adobe courthouse, this Classical Revival building was designed by the Dallas firm of L. L. Thurman and Co. and built by a Louisville, Kentucky, contractor. A massive Doric portico fronts the concrete-and-stone structure, whose walls show alternating bands of locally quarried pink rusticated stone beneath a Beaux Arts clock tower fitted with a Seth Thomas timepiece. More than a century on, it still serves as the seat of Jeff Davis County government.

Fort Davis, TX

The town of Fort Davis grew up around the U.S. Army post established in 1854 to guard travelers on the San Antonio–El Paso Road, and it served as a county seat for both Presidio and, from 1887, Jeff Davis County. This crenellated, fortress-style jail was built in 1910–1911 alongside a new courthouse, designed by Dallas architect L.L. Thurman and disguised in scored plaster to resemble cut ashlar stone. Divided into an office, kitchen, jailer's quarters, and cell block, it held prisoners until 1978.

Port Lavaca, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1801, Jefferson Beaumont served as chief justice of Calhoun County from 1848 to 1856 during the early years of Texas statehood. It was in his honor that Jefferson County, Texas, took its name. He died in 1865 on the Gulf Coast he had helped govern.

Brookville, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1804 and named for the sitting president, Thomas Jefferson, this county spent its early decades administratively tethered to neighboring counties before it could stand on its own. Its wealth lay underground and in the forests: rich coal seams and vast stands of timber that fed the industrial appetite of a growing nation. Brookville, the county seat, took shape as a lumbering and mining town and was incorporated in 1834.

Louisville, KY

Begun around 1837 to designs by Gideon Shryock, this Greek Revival landmark stands at Louisville, the city George Rogers Clark founded in 1778 at the Falls of the Ohio and named for Louis XVI. Completed in 1860, it even sheltered Kentucky's legislature briefly during the Civil War. Over the years seven U.S. presidents have spoken within its walls.

San Antonio, TX

In 1871, nine-year-old Jeff Davis Smith and his eleven-year-old brother Clint were seized by Lipan and Comanche raiders while herding sheep near their Kendall County home—a fate that befell many settler children on the Texas frontier. By tradition Jeff was bought by the Apache leader Geronimo and made to live among the tribe until Mexican bandits captured him around 1878 to claim a $1,000 reward for his return. He later married and settled in San Antonio, living until 1940.

Waxahachie, TX

Jefferson Madison Dunaway built this house in 1855 for his bride, Sarah Ann Brack, quarrying stone for the chimneys from nearby creek banks and framing the structure in cypress. The home stayed in the family for generations, sheltering the households of Jefferson Richard "Jeff" Dunaway and Richard Waldo Dunaway.

Gilmer, TX

One of three pioneer roads crossing Upshur County, the Jefferson–Quitman Road carried freighters and westbound settlers, along with cotton, hides, and produce bound for the busy inland port at Jefferson. Here it crossed the Cherokee Trace, the older path the Cherokee used traveling between reservation lands in Arkansas and their grounds near Nacogdoches. Nearby, the Mt. Gilead Primitive Baptist Church was organized in 1848 on land given by merchant Leonidas Cartwright.

Lockhart, TX

Abraham Roberts and his wife Cynthia Jeffrey brought their family from Alabama to Texas in 1838, and by 1840 had claimed land on Tinney's Creek. When their granddaughter died while visiting in 1847, the family made the first burial here, and neighbors soon adopted the spot as a community graveyard. Formally named Jeffrey Cemetery in 1938, it holds several hundred graves, including veterans reaching back to the U.S.-Mexican War, and still hosts family homecomings.

Southlake, TX

Jellico grew up around Robert Emmett Wilson's general store in the 1880s and took its name, and a post office, in 1898—borrowed from a Tennessee town the settlers had left behind. For a moment it had the full kit of a Texas farming village: cotton gin, blacksmith, grist mill, syrup press, and school. Falling cotton prices after 1907 hollowed it out, and by 1912 the store had closed and the school had merged away.

Brownwood, TX

Richardson Jenkins, one of Brown County's earliest pioneers, settled a farm northeast of Brownwood whose spring took his name and later served the local school and church. The county's earliest known graves here belong to four army surveyors ambushed and killed nearby, and Jenkins himself, who died in 1867, has the first marked grave; veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam also rest in the cemetery.

Clarendon vicinity, TX

Settlement of this stretch of Donley County began in the late 1800s, before the town of Jericho rose as a station on the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf line around 1902. Early burials took place in the open pasture, and the ground was eventually set aside in county deed records. Among those laid to rest here are Mattie Ray, the first documented burial in 1895, an infant who died in 1897, and later victims of smallpox and influenza epidemics alongside veterans and pioneers.

Commerce, TX

A Tennessee native and former Arkansas legislator, William Jernigin came to Hunt County in 1856 and, in 1872, opened a mercantile store beside a newly bridged trade route over the South Sulphur River. Because the settlement around his store had no name, he simply asked that goods be shipped to "Commerce" — and the name stuck. The town's later rise as a trading center grew directly from his pioneer venture.

Langtry, TX

From 1882 to 1903 this saloon doubled as the courtroom of Judge Roy Bean, the self-styled "Law West of the Pecos," who dispensed rough-and-ready justice in remote Langtry. Bean named the place the Jersey Lily after his idol, the celebrated English actress Lillie Langtry. The saloon-courtroom became one of the enduring emblems of frontier Texas legend.

Athens, TX

Jess Sweeten came off a steel-rigging job during the Depression and, spotted breaking up a brawl among transient laborers, was recruited into law enforcement in 1930. Descended from a line of U.S. marshals and an expert marksman nicknamed "Two Gun Pete," he was elected Henderson County sheriff in 1932 at age 26—then the youngest in Texas. He served through the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and late in life earned his GED and became a district criminal investigator before his death in 1980.

Austin, TX

Jesse Grimes was among the delegates who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, declaring the region free of Mexican rule, and he later served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas. Born in 1788, he lived out his years in the county that bears his name, a fixture of the generation that built a new nation on the frontier.