Westward Expansion

Round Rock, TX

Settlement here began in the 1840s with Henry Rhodes and pioneers like Elisha Prewitt, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto. After the Civil War, Confederate veteran John G. Jolly established the community that bears his name, running a store and blacksmith shop and donating land for a cemetery and a school. The school served local children until it merged with nearby Pond Springs in 1903, and the area later grew as Austin's suburbs spread north.

Carthage, TX

Kentucky-born Jonathan "Old Shelby" Anderson came to this region while Texas was still Mexican territory, then took up arms in the Texas Revolution and fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. In 1848 he gave 100 acres to establish Carthage as the seat of the newly organized Panola County, and later served as sheriff and tax assessor-collector. The park on the old courthouse square was named in his honor in 1956.

Lott, TX

Born in Georgia in 1806, Jonathan Cochran Pool came to Texas as a boy in 1815 and grew up to enlist in the Texian Army, taking part in early skirmishes of the Texas Revolution at Anahuac, Nacogdoches, and San Antonio. He later scouted for Gen. Sam Houston before settling in Falls County in 1852 as a farmer and stock raiser. A Civil War veteran, he was buried here on his plantation.

Vernon, TX

A Quaker trader known for keeping peace on a violent frontier, Jonathan Doan came from Ohio into the hides trade of Indian Territory in the mid-1870s. In 1878 he opened a trading post at the Western Cattle Trail's Red River crossing — the famous Doan's Store — soon run by his nephew C. F. Doan. Respected by Indians, cattlemen, and frontiersmen alike, the Doans became fixtures of the great trail-driving era.

Palo Pinto, TX

Virginia-born Jonathan Hamilton "Ham" Baker reached Texas in 1858 and settled in Palo Pinto County, where he opened what is believed to be its first organized school and helped found its first Methodist church. On the exposed frontier he led local defenders against Comanche raids, rode with Lawrence Sullivan Ross in the 1860 recovery of Cynthia Ann Parker, and captained the home guard during the Civil War. He was also a trail-driving cattleman and tireless local officeholder whose decades-long diary preserves a vivid record of frontier Texas.

Rusk, TX

John R. Jones and his wife Mary came from Jackson County, Alabama in 1853, established a farm, and built a log cabin on land in Cherokee County. When John died in 1857 he became the first person buried in what grew into the family cemetery, joined by Mary in 1864 and by generations of descendants — farmers, ranchers, and veterans of both the Seminole Wars and the Civil War. The ground stayed in Jones hands as a quiet testament to a pioneering family's role in settling the area.

Utopia vicinity, TX

In 1879 the Rev. Irvin Jones deeded two acres of his homestead to the Utopia Methodist Church for a cemetery, and his wife Elizabeth was buried at its center in 1886. Early settlers of the Taylor and Utopia communities rest here, alongside several Civil War veterans and the Mexican War veteran and Texas Ranger Ben Highsmith. Also interred is George Barker, the teacher credited with giving Utopia its name.

Anson, TX

This corner of west Texas was crossed by an emigrant trail and a frontier military road guarded by Fort Phantom Hill, founded in 1851. The county was named for Anson Jones, a San Jacinto veteran and the last president of the Republic of Texas. Phantom Hill served as a Butterfield Overland Mail station in 1858-61 and then as a Civil War patrol point trying to curb frontier raids, before the county was fully organized in 1881 with Anson as its seat.

Anson, TX

Named for Anson Jones, the last president of the Republic of Texas, Jones County was created in 1858 but not fully organized until 1881—its founding delayed by the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the raw West Texas frontier. After a succession of modest courthouses, the county built its grand Beaux Arts landmark in 1910, crowned by a statue of Lady Justice atop a domed clock tower. Decorative painting later uncovered in the district courtroom reveals Arts and Crafts touches beneath the classical grandeur.

Canadian, TX

Thomas Stanley Jones, a Welsh-born rancher who rose to prominence in the Texas Panhandle, had this home built in 1910 for his wife Rosalie and their children. Designed by Amarillo architect E. Wellington, it was the first brick residence in Canadian, its Classical Revival grandeur, monumental Ionic columns, corner quoins, and Renaissance detailing broadcasting the family's standing. The mansion still speaks of Panhandle cattle wealth.

Geneva, TX

Around 1892 C. A. Jones milled pine from his own East Texas land to raise the first two rooms of this Sabine County home, hauling stone by oxcart for its chimneys as he enlarged it over the years. A storekeeper and shingle-mill operator, Jones eventually sold the house to his father-in-law, a prosperous farmer and Confederate veteran, and it has remained in the same family across the generations. The home is a quiet monument to the self-reliant timber economy of the Piney Woods.

New Boston, TX

When James W. and Laura Williams Jones built this home in 1883, they brought a piece of the Upper South with them — North Carolina architectural styling and garden plantings transplanted to the pinewoods of Bowie County. The house reflects the migration of settlers who carried regional tastes and traditions westward into Texas after the Civil War.

Honey Grove, TX

In the 1840s New Jersey natives John W. and Tamson Finley Jones settled in Fannin County, later joined by kin who had served as missionaries to the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. A community grew up around the family's flour mill and cotton gin, though decades later a rival mill built by the Self brothers shifted the population, and eventually nearby Honey Grove eclipsed them all. Today the Jones' Mill community survives only in its historic cemetery, with headstones reaching back to 1850.

Manchester, TX

On the Red River, Jonesboro was one of the earliest ports of entry into Texas for Anglo-Americans, in use by 1814 and busy by 1817, named for ferry owner Henry Jones. Claimed by both Mexico and the United States, it served as county seat of Arkansas's Miller County and counted some 2,350 residents by 1834. Sam Houston crossed into Texas here in 1832 and David Crockett in 1835 — but by 1840 the town had lost its trade and settlers to rival communities.

Jonesboro, TX

This Methodist congregation traces its roots to the late 1860s, when Jonesboro's early settlers gathered for worship in a shared church-school-Masonic lodge building. W. L. Jones donated land in 1871, and the congregation formally organized that same year, raising the first of several buildings that would follow over the decades. In time, Methodist congregations from the nearby communities of Ames, Pancake, and Turnersville merged into the Jonesboro church.

Jacksboro, TX

This cemetery carries the memory of Joplin, a small Jack County farming community named for settler Johnny Joplin, and of its school, Fairview. The earliest marked grave dates to 1881, and Joplin himself was buried here in 1899. When the local school district consolidated with Jacksboro in 1947, proceeds from selling the school building endowed the cemetery association that still cares for the grounds.

Arlington, TX

George Washington Jopling raised this log cabin in 1863 in the Johnson Station community for his wife Catherine and their large family. A farmer, cattleman, and cotton gin owner, Jopling helped organize the local Masonic lodge before deeding the enlarged cabin to his daughter Jane and her husband, blacksmith Z. T. Melear. Moved to its present site in 1970, it preserves the world of North Texas pioneer families.

Bertram, TX

Founded by families like the Faires and the Aters in the mid-1870s, this farming and ranching settlement was first called 'Pool Branch' for a waterfall pool that later powered a cotton gin and mill and earned the name 'Mill Pond.' A store, blacksmith, and even a home hat shop gathered around it, and land donated by the Danfords in 1881 secured a school and church — the community renamed itself 'Joppa' when a post office opened in 1891. Today only the church house and old schoolhouse, now a community center, remain.

Grand Prairie, TX

David Jordan, who came to Texas from Tennessee around 1859, built this house about 1860 from hand-hewn logs cut in the Trinity River bottomlands. A farmer, he also ran a store and a stage stand on the Dallas-Fort Worth Road in a time of frequent Indian raids — the outlaw Sam Bass gang was even suspected of an 1870 holdup nearby. Victor Bowles bought the property in 1886, keeping it in his family for 65 years, until Minnie Bowles remodeled it and donated it to the city in 1951 as a museum and meeting place.

Grand Prairie, TX

This burial ground began in 1866 when David A. Jordan set aside land to bury his son-in-law, Robert A. Hight. What started as a family plot soon opened to neighbors and became a public cemetery holding members of many pioneer families of the area — the Bowles, Brannan, Robertson, Miller, Jordan, and Hight lines among them. A family association formed in 1955 to care for the grounds.

San Antonio, TX

Born in San Antonio in 1795, Jose Antonio Navarro was a Tejano statesman and one of the few native-born Texans to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. He devoted his life to the cause of Texas and the rights of its Mexican-descended citizens through the turbulent transitions from Mexican rule to republic to statehood. This marker, erected by the State of Texas in 1936, honors him and his wife, Margarita De La Garza Navarro.

Corsicana, TX

José Antonio Navarro was a San Antonio–born statesman who bridged Spanish, Mexican, and Texan governments across a revolutionary generation, serving in the legislature of Coahuila and Texas and then signing the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. He went on to help write the state constitution and sit in the Texas Senate, and he lent his name both to Navarro County and to Corsicana, which he called after his father's native Corsica. This 1936 centennial marker honors a rare native-born Tejano leader of the Republic.

Geronimo, TX

José Antonio Navarro was a rare Tejano statesman who bridged Mexican and Texan worlds, holding office under Mexico before championing Texas independence and signing its Declaration in 1836. In 1834 he bought ranch land along Geronimo Creek, and its house sheltered his family during his imprisonment by Mexican forces after the ill-fated Santa Fe Expedition. He held the ranch until 1853.

Rio Grande City, TX

In the mid-eighteenth century, the Spanish colonizer José de Escandón explored the country from Tampico to the San Antonio River and planted some two dozen towns, many of which survive today. He founded missions, opened roads, and settled families across what is now the lower Rio Grande borderlands, earning from the Spanish crown the title Conde de la Sierra Gorda.

Newcastle, TX

Kentucky-born and Louisville-trained in law, Joseph Alfred Woolfolk came to frontier Belknap in 1858 to survey Peters Colony land grants and soon served as a Young County official. He joined a home-guard Ranger unit and then the Confederate army, was captured in West Virginia in 1863, and spent the rest of the war imprisoned in Ohio. Back in Texas, he gained notoriety in 1871 when the court appointed him to defend the Kiowa chiefs Satanta and Big Tree at their murder trial after the Salt Creek raid.

Round Mountain, TX

Portions of this house reach back to the mid-1850s, when pioneers Joseph and Eliza Bird settled the Texas Hill Country. Two separate single-pen log cabins, built with different techniques, were joined under one roof to form a dogtrot cabin with limestone chimneys at each end, then expanded over the decades with a half-story addition and porches. Later cypress siding hid the original logs until a 1980s renovation revealed the pioneer construction beneath.

Egypt, TX

In 1823 the Newmans joined Rachel's parents among Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" — the first Anglo-American families to settle Mexican Texas under empresario contract. Granted a league and a labor of land by Mexico, they farmed and raised stock on the raw frontier that became Wharton County, weathering the hardships that thinned so many early colonies. Their ten children scattered into Texas history, most famously the notorious frontierswoman Sally Scull.

St. Thomas Township, PA · est. 1960

Joseph Armstrong settled this Franklin County land in the 1730s, on the contested edge of Pennsylvania's frontier. He served in the colonial Assembly and rose as a militia captain, and his home became a ranging station in 1757 for troops during the French and Indian War. It served the same purpose during Pontiac's War of 1763–64, when Native resistance again swept the backcountry.

Driftwood, TX

Joseph B. Rogers (1833–1912), son of settlers who reached Texas in 1831, rode with Terry's Texas Rangers during the Civil War before buying this Hays County land in 1869. In the early 1870s he hired local workmen to raise this native limestone house, built in the pioneer fashion with a central hall and a chimney at each end. His descendants preserved the home, replacing its wooden porch with concrete in 1916.

Austin, TX

Maine-born Joseph Baker helped launch the Telegraph and Texas Register at San Felipe de Austin in October 1835, giving the Texas independence movement a printed voice on the eve of revolution. He then took up arms, fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, and served the new republic as first chief justice of Bexar County and a member of its Congress before his death in 1846.

Round Mountain, TX

North Carolina native Joseph Bird brought his family to the land between Cypress Creek and the Pedernales around 1854, and for half a century helped build Blanco County as a frontier Baptist circuit minister, postmaster, rancher, and county judge. The settlement that grew up around him was first called Birdtown before being renamed Round Mountain, where a post office opened in 1857. Bird rode a preaching circuit, founded churches, and served as a Confederate first lieutenant during the Civil War.

Temple, TX

A Tennessee native, Joseph Dennis brought his family to Texas in 1849, just as Bell County was being carved from Milam County. He helped choose the site that became Belton, the county seat, and served as the county's first treasurer before relocating to Temple.

Killeen vicinity, TX

Joseph Dennis and his wife Isa left Arkansas for Texas in 1840, and when Bell County was organized a decade later he chaired the committee that chose Nolan Springs—today's Belton—as the county seat. He became the county's first treasurer, ran a grist mill and lumber yard, and assembled tracts of land including this acreage, long known as Elmore Ranch. The property has stayed in his family's hands ever since.

Greensboro, NC

Born in Guilford County in 1836, Joseph Gurney Cannon moved west and built a political career in Illinois that spanned nearly half a century in Congress. As Speaker of the House from 1903 to 1911, 'Uncle Joe' ruled with such an iron grip that a bipartisan revolt finally stripped the office of much of its power. His birthplace once stood about a mile and a half southwest of here.

Denison, TX

An Illinois livestock broker, Joseph G. McCoy (1837–1915) opened the first workable market for Texas cattle by securing rail cars and building loading pens at Abilene, Kansas — turning $5 longhorns into beeves worth $25 or more up north. He had part of Jesse Chisholm's trail surveyed and marked to guide the great drives through Oklahoma, over which some ten million cattle moved between 1866 and 1884. When the railroad reached Denison in 1872, McCoy moved here and helped launch a refrigerating company to ship dressed beef.

Lake Jackson, TX

Joseph H. Hawkins, a Virginia-born lawyer who served in Kentucky's legislature and Congress, befriended a broke and hesitant Stephen F. Austin in New Orleans. He urged Austin to carry on his late father's colonization plans, offering him work and, in an 1821 agreement, $4,000 in capital in exchange for half the lands Austin would receive as empresario. Hawkins sent boats of supplies and colonists to Texas but died in 1823 deeply in debt; years later Austin conveyed some 42,000 acres to his heirs, though none remained in Texas.

Huntington vicinity, TX

When Angelina County was organized in 1846, Alabama-born Joseph Herrington was among six men appointed to set its boundaries and choose Marion as the first county seat. Just twenty-two, he was elected the county's first chief justice and, across five terms, helped open trade routes and establish county school districts. An active Mason, he was laid to rest in the family cemetery here.

Wichita Falls, TX

An Ohio native, Joseph Hudson Barwise brought his family to Wichita County in 1880 and became one of its guiding figures. He earned the nickname "Father of Wichita Falls" by donating land to lure the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway through the area, ensuring the young town's growth. A three-term county judge and tireless booster, Barwise helped shape the community before his burial in Riverside Cemetery.

Webberville, TX

Joseph J. Manor came to Texas from Tennessee at twenty and settled at Webberville, where he built a store and cotton gin and gathered land along the Colorado River. He and his wife Caroline lie here among other early pioneers, in a burial ground that honors veterans of nearly every American conflict from the War of 1812 through Vietnam. A descendants' association formed in 1982 now cares for the site.

Washington County, OR

This marker stands on the land claim of Joseph L. Meek, the self-described "unlettered" mountain man who reached the Oregon Country in 1840 after guiding the first wagon over the stretch of the Oregon Trail from Fort Hall to Walla Walla. A trapper turned settler, Meek became a founder of Oregon's Provisional Government, the improvised American self-rule set up before the territory formally joined the United States. His life bridged the fur-trade frontier and the wave of overland emigrants who followed.

Asheville, NC

Joseph Lane was born near this spot before rising to national prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. He won fame as a major general in the Mexican War, then became the first territorial governor of Oregon and later a U.S. Senator. In 1860 he ran for vice president on the Southern Democratic ticket with John C. Breckinridge, on the eve of the Civil War.

Lee County, VA

In the 1770s, the rugged country of far southwestern Virginia stood at the gateway to the Wilderness Road, the route Daniel Boone blazed through the Cumberland Gap toward Kentucky. General Joseph Martin, a frontiersman, soldier, and Indian agent, established Martin's Station near here, one of the westernmost outposts of colonial settlement and a vital waystation for pioneers pressing into the trans-Appalachian frontier. This monument honors Martin alongside the more than 200,000 settlers who braved that hard country to push the boundaries of the young nation.

Clifton, TX

The Joseph Olson family sailed from Norway in 1858 and settled among fellow Norwegian immigrants in Bosque County's Norse community. In 1866 Olson raised a log cabin on his small farm, where the family lived until a stone house replaced it in 1872. The cabin stayed in the family for generations and was moved and reconstructed on this site in 1985 to honor the area's Norwegian heritage.

Palo Pinto County, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1823, Joseph Peter Davidson came to Palo Pinto County around 1856 and set up a trading post near this site. In 1865 he started a ranch in what became Eastland County and helped organize that county, serving as its official surveyor and helping found a Methodist church and Masonic lodge. Married three times, he fathered fourteen children and lies buried with many descendants in the family cemetery near his homestead.

Grapeland, TX

A native of Louisiana, Joseph Randolph Yarbrough served in the Texas War for Independence, standing guard at the camp opposite Harrisburg during the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He and his father signed the 1837 petition that created Houston County, and after marrying Phebe Clementine Crawford in 1840, he settled near Grapeland and raised a family of eleven children. His life traces the arc from revolutionary soldier to founding settler.

Houston County, TX

Joseph and Willie Rice came from Tennessee to the Texas wilderness, settling into a log cabin near this spot by 1828—well before Texas won its independence. Together they raised a large family whose births and deaths, carefully recorded on the marker, span the hard decades of frontier life. Many of the Rices rest in the family plot here, rooted to the ground they helped settle.

Lancaster, PA · est. 2006

In the mid-1700s, Lancaster sat on the edge of the British colonies' expanding frontier, a bustling inland hub where traders outfitted expeditions toward the Ohio country and beyond. Joseph Simon, a Jewish merchant, built a far-reaching network of trade and land ventures that reached as far as the Mississippi, and when the Revolution came he helped arm the Continental cause. His home doubled as one of the earliest gathering places for Jewish worship west of Philadelphia.

Great Bend Township, PA · est. 1947

In the years before 1830, the young Joseph Smith spent time in this part of the Susquehanna Valley, where — according to Latter-day Saint tradition — much of the translation work that produced the Book of Mormon was carried out. The site, a few miles from this marker, became one of the formative locations in the origins of a distinctly American religious movement. The land is preserved by the church that grew from Smith's work.

Oakland Township, PA · est. 1948

In the late 1820s a young Joseph Smith lived in this stretch of the Susquehanna valley, where his wife Emma's family had roots. Here, at a house nearby, he carried out much of the work he described as translating the golden plates into the Book of Mormon, the founding scripture of the movement he would lead. An infant son of his is buried in this cemetery.

Houston County, TX

Joseph T. Bowman came to Texas in 1835 as the son of Jesse B. Bowman, who would die defending the Alamo. That December he signed the Goliad Declaration of Independence calling for Texas to break free, and after the revolution he served in the army of the Republic of Texas. He settled with his family in the Houston County area around 1845.

San Marcos, TX

Tennessee native Joseph W. Earnest came to Hays County with his family in 1854 and grew up to serve in both the Texas Rangers and the Confederate army before making his mark as a merchant and cattleman. In 1892 he hired local builder Charles Sinz to raise this Victorian home in San Marcos, where his niece Mary Cock was reared and which later passed to her and her husband Irvin Rylander.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Arriving from Tennessee in 1845, Joshua Foster Johnson settled near the future Mount Vernon and helped found the town—first called Keith—in 1848. In the Third Texas Legislature he sponsored the bill establishing the Mount Vernon Male and Female Academies, an early step toward public schooling, and he sat in both the 1861 Secession Convention and the 1875 Constitutional Convention. A Baptist pastor as well, he helped organize the Mount Vernon Baptist Church.

Pineville, KY

Bell County, formed in 1867 from parts of Harlan and Knox counties, honors Joshua Fry Bell (1811–1870), a congressman, Kentucky secretary of state, and state legislator. In 1861 he served as a commissioner to the Peace Conference that sought, in vain, to head off civil war. He was a great-grandson of Dr. Thomas Walker, who had explored the Kentucky wilderness back in 1750.

Hungerford, TX

Josiah Dawson Hudgins, born in 1852 to a pioneer family that reached Texas in 1839, grew from a country storekeeper into a leading rancher of Wharton County. He and his brothers bought land and cattle, ran a cotton gin and gristmill, and moved their community to the new railroad town of Hungerford. In 1906 J.D. imported Brahman cattle suited to the humid Gulf Coast and, with his son Walter, helped develop and organize the American Brahman breed.

West Columbia, TX

One of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, Josiah Hughes Bell was a South Carolina-born hatter who befriended Moses and Stephen Austin in Missouri and served in the militia during the War of 1812. Granted permission to settle Austin's colony in 1821, he served as alcalde, constable, and judge, at times handling Austin's duties during the empresario's travels to Mexico. Bell laid out two towns, developed a sugar plantation, built the area's first hotel, and completed a family home that Stephen F. Austin often used as an office until his death in 1838.

Commerce, TX

Kentucky-born Josiah Hart Jackson reached Texas in 1839 and, in the 1850s, opened a store that seeded a village he called "Cow Hill," complete with race track and blacksmith shop. As postmaster he renamed the place Ashland in 1873, then moved the post office to nearby Commerce at that town's founding. His trading post traces the way a single frontier merchant could conjure a community.

Cuero, TX

Josiah Taylor's life traces the violent birth of Texas across three decades. He first rode into the province in 1812 with the Gutiérrez-Magee filibuster, an armed bid to pry Mexico from Spanish rule, and was wounded repeatedly at the disastrous Battle of Medina. Returning with his family in the 1820s, he took a headright in Green DeWitt's colony, and by 1842 five of his sons were riding with Jack Hays' Rangers against a Mexican invasion.

Haskell, TX

Belgian immigrant Victor Josselet joined his brothers in coming to America in 1873, working as Chicago coal miners before farming in Texas, and in 1900 bought a large tract near Haskell to ranch and raise a family of nine. When the Wichita Valley Railroad reached Haskell in 1906, Josselet sold the line a strip for a siding, and "Josselet Switch" became an important cattle-shipping point to the Fort Worth and Kansas City stockyards. The switch gained a depot, store, and fuel station, and much of the original land is still worked by his descendants.

Jourdanton, TX

Jourdan Campbell, son of Campbellton founder John Campbell, grew up in Atascosa County and became a county commissioner in the 1890s. In 1907 he and Col. T. H. Zanderson bought the 33,760-acre Tobey Ranch, part of which became the town of Jourdanton, where Campbell served as bank vice president and lobbied hard for a railroad. His efforts helped make Jourdanton the county seat in 1910 and pushed a highway project linking the county's towns.

Elgin, TX

Georgia-born Jourdan Smith came to Texas in 1836 to fight in its war for independence, earning land from the young Republic for his service. A carpenter and professional builder, he settled in the Young's Prairie community, served as justice of the peace, and passed down land his descendants still hold today.