Westward Expansion

Jourdanton, TX

In 1909 two entrepreneurs—merchant Jourdan Campbell and Danish wool-and-mohair man Theodore Zanderson—laid out a town on their ranch and persuaded a land speculator to bring the railroad through; the first train arrived that September. Jourdanton quickly gained utilities, a bank, a newspaper and churches, and in 1910 wrested the county seat from Pleasanton. Oil and gas discoveries in the 1940s and later lignite mining kept the town growing well after the railroads stopped running.

Jourdanton, TX

When the railroad town of Jourdanton took shape in 1909, its Methodist congregation organized the same year, worshiping first in a tent before trustees bought a corner lot and raised a frame church in 1910. As the community grew, the congregation rebuilt in 1941, moved and replaced its sanctuary over the following decades, and spun off a lively network of women's, men's and youth societies. The present sanctuary dates to 1964.

Clay County, TX

The oldest church in the Joy community began in April 1881 as a Methodist Episcopal Church, South, when the settlement was still called Fannin Town. The founders met under an oak tree beside a log schoolhouse, ground now part of Joy Cemetery, and built their first sanctuary in 1891. From frontier camp meetings to modern outreach, the congregation has been a mainstay of rural life for well over a century.

Anahuac, TX

Juan Davis Bradburn, a Kentucky adventurer turned officer in the Army of the Republic of Mexico, was sent in 1830 to build a military post at the mouth of the Trinity River. His high-handed rule at Fort Anahuac—seizing supplies, arresting a land commissioner, and jailing colonists including William B. Travis and Patrick C. Jack—provoked the 1832 Anahuac Disturbances. Deposed by his own officers, Bradburn fled that July, and returned in 1836 with Santa Anna's army only to lose again.

San Elizario, TX

As Spain eyed both the mineral and missionary promise of New Mexico and worried over English rivals in the New World, King Philip II commissioned Don Juan de Oñate in 1595 to claim and colonize the region. In January 1598 Oñate led some 400 men and their families north across the Chihuahuan Desert to the El Paso area, where on April 30, 1598, he performed the ceremony called La Toma, taking formal possession of all the land drained by the Rio Grande for Spain. He then pressed north to found the province of New Mexico near present Santa Fe.

Seguin, TX

Born in San Antonio in 1806, Juan Nepomuceno Seguín was a Tejano leader who cast his lot with the Texan cause against Santa Anna. He raised Mexican-Texan companies, fought at the Siege of Bexar, carried dispatches during the siege of the Alamo, and shielded fleeing civilians as rear guard before joining the victory at San Jacinto. Later a senator of the Republic, he gave the Alamo defenders a military burial, and the town of Seguin took his name in his honor.

Seguin, TX

Nearly a century after Tejano hero Juan Seguín died in exile, the people of Seguin brought his remains home in 1974, and on July 4, 1976, the city reinterred him in a hillside plot overlooking the Guadalupe River Valley he knew well. His grave, near an old road and river ford he would have recognized, lies beneath a marble slab within the city park system.

Palo Alto, CA

This ground was once part of Rancho La Purísima Concepción, a Mexican land grant issued in 1846 to José Gorgonio, a former Santa Clara Mission Indian. The rancho soon passed to Juana Briones de Miranda, a remarkable Californiana who ran cattle, healed the sick, and became one of the region's few independent landowning women. The park now bears her name.

Austin, TX

Abner Lipscomb brought a distinguished legal career from Alabama — where he sat on its supreme court — to the Republic of Texas, serving as its secretary of state in 1841 and later as a justice of the Texas Supreme Court until his death in 1856. A Texas Panhandle county bears his name.

Falls County, TX

Albert G. Perry left an Alabama law practice for Texas in 1831, arriving during the tumultuous years before the Texas Revolution and marrying into the family of Jesse Grimes, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. He served as a frontier Ranger officer, sat on the Viesca Committee of Safety, and was a delegate to the Consultation of 1835 that set Texas on the road to independence. Later a county and district judge in Falls County, Perry lent his name to the railroad town that grew up nearby in 1883.

Austin, TX

Calvin Maples Cureton, born in 1874 into a noted Bosque County pioneer family, climbed through Texas government as legislator, first assistant attorney general, and attorney general before taking the bench. As Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1921 to 1940, he logged the longest service of the court's first century. He and his wife Nora built this Austin house in 1928.

Wharton, TX

Built in 1896, this double-galleried house passed the next year to Edwin Hawes, a Wharton County judge of the 1870s and 1880s who had also served as mayor of Kerrville before returning to the coastal plains. A large landowner and political leader, Hawes made the home a seat of local influence during the Gilded Age. It stayed in the Hawes family, passing to his son and daughter-in-law in 1944.

Austin, TX

Edwin Waller left Virginia for Texas and became one of the signers of the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence. Entrusted with laying out the new capital, he surveyed and platted the city of Austin and served as its first mayor. Waller County was later named in his honor.

Waller County, TX

Virginia-born Edwin Waller came to Texas in 1831 with Stephen F. Austin's colony and threw himself into the independence movement, fighting at Velasco, signing the Declaration of Independence, and helping frame the new republic's constitution. In 1839 the government sent him to lay out the townsite of Austin, the new capital, and the next year he became its first mayor. He later retired to a plantation near this spot, serving as county judge for many years; the county that surrounds the marker bears his name.

Georgetown, TX

Greenleaf Fisk left a New York minister's household for the Texas frontier, arriving in Bastrop in 1834 and fighting in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He served in the Republic of Texas Senate and, when Williamson County was organized in 1848, became its first chief justice, reportedly walking a dozen miles to hold court. A surveyor whose name marks countless land records, he later helped found Brownwood.

Cuero, TX

Trained at the University of Virginia, Henry Clay Pleasants moved to Texas in 1854 and served four decades on the bench of the 23rd District Court. Facing threats to his life, in 1876 he called in the Texas Rangers to break the lawlessness of DeWitt County during its notorious feud years. He later won election to the state's First Supreme Judicial District at Galveston, serving until his death.

Marshall, TX

Begun on an 1838 headright in the days of the Republic of Texas, this antebellum plantation house grew from squared-log cabins and a broad central hall into a Greek Revival crosshall home attributed to noted Republic-era architect Augustus Phelps. Tradition holds that Sam Houston stopped here on his way to court Anna Raguet in Marshall. A 1960s restoration earned it recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

East Tawakoni, TX

James Hooker came to Texas in 1840 and received a 640-acre headright from the Republic, helping organize his county and choose its seat. He built the area's first steam mill and served as first postmaster of the Hooker's Mill settlement, an important stop on the Clarksville-to-Austin road. Twice a legislator, he sat in the Secession Convention before his death in 1865 and lies buried on his own land grant.

Henderson, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1805, William Wright Morris taught school, studied law, and won election as a judge in Alabama before bringing his family — including his widowed sister and her children — to Henderson, Texas, in 1847. He built a fine plantation home, was elected district judge in 1854, served in the Texas legislature, and helped promote the first railroad in East Texas. In 1875 Morris County was named in his honor.

Cayuga, TX

Judson Baptist Church was organized in 1854 when the Fosterville Baptist congregation split to reach the growing settlements of Anderson County, with pioneers R.R. Morrow and J.H. Rowland leading its twenty-one charter members. The flock first met in a brush arbor by Hall Branch Creek before building a sanctuary on donated land. As farming families shifted across northwest Anderson County over the decades, the church moved and rebuilt to follow them.

Cayuga, TX

In the 1850s the pioneer community of Wildcat Bluff, later Cayuga, took shape in the East Texas backcountry, and its Judson Missionary Baptist Church, founded in 1854, anchored the settlers' spiritual life. The congregation moved to land donated by Martin and Nancy Haywood, and the graveyard that grew beside it recorded its first burial in 1863. Early interments were a shared labor: neighbors prepared the body, built the casket, and dug the grave, marking sites with cedar trees and fieldstones.

Crosbyton, TX

In the early 1900s the flat, treeless expanse of the Texas South Plains was being carved into ranches and townsites as promoters raced to attract buyers and rail connections. Julian M. Bassett, a New York-born son of Texas migrants, helped run the C. B. Livestock Company and, to spur land sales, had the townsite of Crosbyton platted in 1907. His backing of the Crosbyton South Plains Rail Line helped the young town win the county seat in 1911, and he set aside this ground as a public cemetery.

Chappell Hill, TX

Built in 1854 for Julius Yanch by M. P. Munyan, a contractor who raised many of Chappell Hill's early buildings, this home is a fine example of pioneer Texas construction. Cedar framing, tongue-and-groove floors, and a chimney and underground cistern of native limestone reflect the resourceful craftsmanship of antebellum settlers. It stands in one of the state's most intact early Anglo-German settlement communities.

Reno, NV

At this crossing of the Truckee Meadows, one of pioneer Nevada's busiest crossroads took shape. By 1853 Junction House had become the valley's first permanent settlement and a stopping place for thousands of emigrants. It anchored a web of toll roads in the 1860s — the turnpikes to Washoe City and Virginia City, the Myron Lake Road, and the important Henness Pass route to California. Governor John Sparks later owned the property.

Frankfort, KY

Built in 1812, this was the Frankfort home of Thomas Todd, a Virginia-born jurist who served as clerk to the Danville conventions that brought Kentucky to statehood before rising through the young state's courts. President Jefferson appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served from 1807 until his death in 1826. His second marriage, to Dolley Madison's sister Lucy Payne Washington, was the first wedding ever recorded in the White House.

Justin, TX

The town of Justin sits where the Denton, Oliver, and Trail creeks meet in the North Texas prairie, long home to Native American peoples before white settlement. Its ground holds layered histories: the 1841 death of John B. Denton at the Village Creek Battle, an 1848 Icarian colony of French socialist immigrants that collapsed within two years, and Texas Ranger protection for settlers from Missouri and elsewhere. The town took its name from railroad engineer Walter Justin Sherman when the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway came through, and by 1914 it bustled with elevators, gins, and a flour mill.

Temple, TX

This Bell County family burial ground took its name when Keeton McLemore Jones was laid to rest here in 1890. A farmer and stage stop operator, Jones had fought in the Texas War for Independence, guarding the baggage camp opposite Harrisburg during the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto before moving his large family to the Howard community in 1865. His wife Laura Ann and a granddaughter rest beside him, making the plot a compact monument to one pioneering Texas clan.

Port Lavaca, TX

John William McKamey, born in Arkansas in 1878, graduated from Baylor University in 1899 and returned to Texas to help run his family's cotton farm. With relatives and a partner he acquired more than 8,000 acres that became the Kamey Community, moving there in 1912 to raise cattle, cotton, and grain sorghum with his wife Maude. A rail depot, a one-teacher school, a post office, and a long-lived general store grew up around the family, whose descendants still work the land.

Doss, TX

Karl Kensing was born in Germany in 1828 and immigrated to Texas with his family in 1845, three of the children surviving to settle in Fredericksburg by 1850. On their Hill Country property the Kensings set aside a small family burial ground, where Karl became the first known interment alongside his wife and later descendants. The graves, moving from traditional German inscriptions to simple English ones, quietly chart the passage from immigrant pioneers to their American-born children.

Karnes City, TX

Founded in the Christmas season of 1890 when Otto Buchel's partnership bought 1,000 acres beside the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad, the town was first named for Texas Ranger hero Henry W. Karnes before 'City' was added with its 1891 post office. It grew so fast that by 1894 voters moved the county seat here from Helena. In its railroad heyday six passenger trains a day rolled through a town built on ranching, farming, uranium, oil, and gas.

Post, TX

This marker remembers Kate McCommis, who died in February 1884 on the very day she was born, attended only by her young cowboy father amid the hardships of frontier life. Recorded as a Texas historic landmark in 1968, her small grave stands as a witness to the isolation and peril of the open range. It speaks to the countless unrecorded losses that shadowed pioneer families.

Iola, TX

Katy Holland came to Texas in 1822 as a seven-year-old, part of Stephen F. Austin's celebrated "Old 300" colony of Anglo settlers. Her life laid bare the brutality of the frontier: twice widowed before she married William Cobb in the 1840s, she raised five children through hardship and loss. Her first husband was himself an Austin colonist, and her cousin Tapley Holland died at the Alamo.

Kaufman, TX

Created and organized in 1848 in the first years of Texas statehood, this county took the name of David Spangler Kaufman, a lawyer who reached Nacogdoches in 1837 and rose through the Congress of the Republic of Texas before winning a seat in the U.S. Congress. The marker stands in the county seat that also bears his name, a common frontier practice of anchoring a new county's identity to a favorite son. Kaufman's short life spanned the arc from independent republic to American state.

Kaufman, TX

This burial ground is part of a 600-acre poor farm that Kaufman County opened in 1883 to care for its indigent residents. It became the final resting place for poor-farm residents, jail inmates, transients, and paupers, and may first have received anonymous victims of an 1871 typhoid epidemic. Though most graves are unmarked, the earliest identified belongs to a poor-farm inmate who died the year the farm opened.

Kaufman, TX

The Love family settled near King's Fort in January 1845, and when they sold the surrounding land in 1849 they set aside a quarter acre as a graveyard—its first burial believed to be their son Robert. Among those interred are early county officials, a diarist whose firsthand account preserved the region's early landscape and people, and T. J. Johnson, thought to be the son of an African American couple tied to the Love family. Each headstone opens a window onto the founding generation of Kaufman County.

Farmers Branch, TX

Thomas and Sarah Keenan came to this area with the Peters Colony in 1842, and when their two-month-old son John died in 1843 they buried him here, founding one of the earliest cemeteries in present-day Dallas County. The many infant graves testify to the brutal hardships of pioneer life. The Keenans' log cabin also hosted the area's first Baptist congregation in 1846, and those buried here include settlers and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to Vietnam.

Keeter, TX

For more than a century, Keeter Cemetery has been the sole burial ground of the small community of Keeter, its earliest recorded grave that of infant Ida Mae Ryan, who died in 1882. Albert Lafayette Keeter, the settlement's namesake, donated the land for a cemetery in 1891 before moving away himself. Among those laid to rest here are Civil War and World War II veterans, tracing the community's span across generations.

Columbus, TX

Civil War veteran John Wilbur Keith and his wife Haseltine moved to Columbus in 1870 and built this house around 1871, selling it a few years later to merchant Charles W. Traylor and his wife Lura, granddaughter of an early Colorado River ferry operator. Children of both families were born in the house, and in 1896 a Keith son and a Traylor daughter were married there. Successive additions gave the home its Queen Anne detailing and late-Victorian center-passage character.

Keller, TX

After the Texas & Pacific Railroad pushed through, druggist H. W. Wood set aside 40 acres in 1881 for a townsite he called "Athol." Within a year it was renamed Keller for John C. Keller, a railroad construction foreman. Businesses, hotels, doctors, a newspaper, and a shared Union Church soon sprang up to serve the surrounding farms.

Keller, TX

Like many small Texas towns, Keller began with congregations sharing whatever building was available, until the Keller Methodist Church was formally organized in 1897 under Pastor W. K. Simpson. The church built its own home in 1913 and, by 1946, supported a full-time minister and a growing membership. Renamed the First United Methodist Church of Keller in 1968, it went on to sponsor community programs such as the Christian Community Storehouse and a preschool.

Brookshire, TX

Platted in 1893 by John G. Kellner, who donated the right-of-way and station site for the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, Kellner was the first town in this area. Its rich Brazos River watershed lands produced rice, cattle, peanuts, pecans, and later natural gas. The town was eventually renamed Brookshire, though Kellner's old home still stands nearby.

Waco, TX

Virginia-born Edward Kellum served in the Tennessee Militia during the War of 1812 before marrying Karen Tabor and moving west through Alabama and Mississippi, finally settling along the Brazos River in McLennan County in 1854. He established a farm and, before his death in 1863, chose this ground as the family graveyard, becoming its first burial. Twenty-five graves, most now marked only by illegible sandstone, hold several generations of Kellums; Mary Elizabeth Jurney Kellum, the last buried here in 1895, left provisions in her will to maintain the plot.

Kelsey, TX

In 1898 two brothers bought timberland in this corner of East Texas and, with church endorsement, planted a Latter-day Saint colony that took shape over the next few years. A Sunday school, a laid-out townsite, a store-based post office, and a one-room building serving as both school and church all followed by the early 1900s, and the first church was raised in 1909. The Kelsey Branch became a hub, sponsoring congregations across a wide swath of East Texas towns before consolidating in 1958.

Enon, TX

In the late 1890s the Edgar brothers and other Latter-day Saint families from Alabama settled along Kelsey Creek, and by 1901 church officials had founded the area's first branch and school. Upshur County created Kelsey School District No. 45 in 1907, and a two-story brick schoolhouse rose in 1911, drawing students as smaller nearby schools closed. Failed crops and the Great Depression thinned the population, and the school closed in 1943.

Kemah, TX

The land beneath Kemah began as an 1824 Mexican grant to Michael Gouldrich, one of Stephen F. Austin's original three hundred colonists. By the 1890s the Kipp and Bradford families held the tract, and when the railroad pushed through in 1898 they founded a townsite called Evergreen. Rebuilt after the devastating 1900 storm and renamed Kemah when it won a post office in 1907, the little Galveston Bay town grew on boat building, commercial fishing, and tourism.

Kemp, TX

Kemp's story begins in 1851 with a U.S. post office and its first postmaster, Levi Noble, anchoring an agricultural settlement that served surrounding farm families before the Civil War. A traveling Presbyterian preacher founded the Kemp Academy in 1867, but it was the Texas Trunk Railroad in the 1880s that truly spurred growth — by 1882, a year before the tracks even arrived, the town already boasted dry-goods stores, a saloon, blacksmith, three churches, and a steam gin and mill. Kemp incorporated, dissolved in 1910, and reincorporated in 1922 as it settled into life as a farm-trade center.

Boerne, TX

Kendall County was carved out and organized in early 1862 and named for George Wilkins Kendall, a journalist and author who co-founded the New Orleans Picayune and survived the ill-fated Santa Fe Expedition. Beyond his newspaper fame, Kendall became the most successful sheep rancher in the Southwest. The county seat was fixed at Boerne, in the German-settled Hill Country.

Boerne, TX

Built in 1869–1870, this is the first and only courthouse Kendall County has ever had, raised seven years after the county organized. Its early officials were a colorful lot: first county judge Joseph Graham later became U.S. Consul to Argentina, and first sheriff Capt. John Sansom was a Texas Ranger and Indian fighter. Early dockets brimmed with frontier cases—horse theft, cattle rustling, and illegal liquor sales—before additions and remodeling in 1909 and 1954.

Kendleton, TX

This Fort Bend County ground carries layers of Texas history: a Mexican land grant to settler Elizabeth Powell, whose home served as a frontier stage stop, and a spot where Santa Anna's army camped during the 1836 Texas Revolution. The community that endures here, though, was born of Reconstruction, when William E. Kendall sold parcels for as little as fifty cents an acre to help formerly enslaved people establish their own farms. When the railroad arrived in 1884, the freedmen's village took Kendall's name.

Sarita, TX

Kenedy County was carved from Cameron, Willacy, and Hidalgo counties in 1921 and named for Mifflin Kenedy, who came to Texas in 1846 aboard U.S. Army supply boats and went on to become a leading commercial navigator of the Rio Grande. Kenedy built a steamboat and ranching empire along the lower river before his death in 1895, and the tiny town of Sarita serves as the seat of the sparsely peopled county that bears his name. The county's late creation reflects the slow settlement of the vast South Texas ranchlands.

Gonzales, TX

James B. and Anna Jones Kennard built this Queen Anne–style house in 1895, and it remained in the Kennard family until 1963. Its ornate lines reflect the exuberant Victorian architecture that prosperous Texans favored at the close of the nineteenth century. Recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967, it was carefully restored in the mid-1960s.

Anderson, TX

Kenneth Lewis Anderson rose through the young Republic of Texas as a district judge, Speaker of the House, and finally its last Vice President before his death in 1845, the year Texas moved toward statehood. The town of Fanthorp was renamed Anderson in his honor, and this state-erected memorial also remembers his wife, Patience Burdett Anderson. His career spanned the brief, turbulent life of an independent Texas nation.

Jayton, TX

Kent County was carved from older Texas territories in 1876 and formally organized in 1892, taking its name from Andrew Kent, one of the defenders who fell at the Alamo. Its county seat first sat at Clairmont before moving to Jayton in 1952. The State of Texas erected this marker during the 1936 centennial of independence.

Whitewright, TX

First settled in the 1830s as Annaliza, this Grayson County community was renamed by Kentucky emigrants in 1858 and laid out in an unusual pattern meant to guard against raids on the frontier. A stop on freight and stage routes, it became a cradle of "Sacred Harp" shape-note singing and, during the Civil War, a rendezvous for the notorious Quantrill guerrilla band. Its layered history packs settlement, culture, and wartime lawlessness into one small crossroads.

Simpson County, KY

This marker reflects on the origins of Kentucky itself, tracing the name to an Iroquois word and recalling that Native peoples ranged across the region long before white settlement. The first permanent settlement came at Harrodsburg in 1774, and Kentucky became the second area west of the Alleghenies to be settled — and in 1792 the first to enter the Union as a state.

Whitewright, TX

Founded in 1853 by Kentuckians who rolled into North Texas by wagon train, this congregation is a marker of the great overland migrations that carried Upland Southern families west before the Civil War. The settlers named their new community for the home state they had left behind, and the present sanctuary went up in 1904.

Kermit, TX

Kermit rose on the far West Texas plains as the seat of Winkler County, organized in 1910 in ranch country near the New Mexico line. The town carries an unusual namesake: Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had visited a nearby ranch. What began as a ranching center was transformed by the discovery of oil and gas, making Winkler one of the state's leading energy-producing counties.

Kermit, TX

Built in 1910 by the county clerk — the very year Winkler County was organized — this modest dwelling is recognized as the oldest home in Kermit. It later passed to the Mosley and Baird families and stands as a survivor from the town's earliest days.

Kerrville, TX

Carved from sprawling Bexar County and organized in the spring of 1856, Kerr County took its name from James Kerr (1790–1850), a pivotal figure in early Anglo-Texas settlement. Kerr was the first American settler on the Guadalupe River, general manager of DeWitt's Colony, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and a congressman of the young republic. The county seat bounced between Kerrsville, Comfort, and finally Kerrville as the region took shape.

Gonzales, TX

In the 1820s, Mexico opened Texas to Anglo-American colonists through empresarios like Green DeWitt, who was granted land to plant a colony. James Kerr, a former Missouri state senator, was commissioned to lay out its capital and settled with six other men along this stream, which has carried his name ever since. A destructive Indian raid in 1826 forced the fledgling settlement to be abandoned.