Westward Expansion

Kerrville, TX

Formally created in 1856 and named for Republic of Texas soldier James Kerr, Kerr County drew its first settlers — among them San Jacinto veteran Joshua D. Brown, who donated land for the public square and helped name the seat Kerrsville (the "s" later dropped). Anglo-American pioneers and German immigrants built the town into an important cattle-raising and shipping point by the 1870s. Incorporated in 1889 with Joseph A. Tivy as its first mayor, Kerrville soon added waterworks, electricity, and a fire department, growing into a hub of ranching, medicine, and tourism.

Taylor, PA · est. 1948

In 1769, three families led by Timothy Keys, Solomon Hocksey, and Andrew Hickman built the first European homes in what became Lackawanna County, settling along the creek that now bears Keys's name. The frontier peace did not hold: in July 1778, amid the violence of the Revolutionary borderlands, Keys and others were killed in an Indian raid. Their brief settlement marks the earliest European foothold in the valley.

Lampasas, TX

Built in 1870 of native rock hauled to the site by oxen, the Keystone Hotel served as a stagecoach inn on the routes crossing early Central Texas, its windows crowned by the keystone arches that gave it its name. Kept by J. L. N. Gracy, it stood amid the ordinary infrastructure of frontier travel — a wagon yard, a bell tower, quarters for employees, and, poignantly, the grave of a boy killed in an Indian raid. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

La Vernia, TX

In the 1860s a cluster of farming families settled this stretch of Wilson County, and by 1872 John James had donated land for a schoolhouse that also hosted church services. The Easterling post office opened in 1887 and was soon renamed Kicaster for a nearby creek, but it closed in 1906, the school was phased out by 1940, and the churches drifted away. Today only Kicaster Cemetery, in use since the 1870s, marks where the community once stood.

Dublin vicinity, TX

In 1873 several families settled the Green's Creek community, among them John M. Kiker, who arrived from Alabama with his wife Serena and their eight children. In 1878 Kiker and his brother-in-law John Holcomb built a steam-powered cotton gin, fueled at first by timber cleared from cotton fields and taken as credit against ginning bills, and later by coal and then oil. The gin was the community's main enterprise and doubled as an election precinct and meeting place, running until 1947.

Cass County, TX

As the Kildare area was settled, the Moor family — local plantation owners — donated the land that became this cemetery, with its earliest dated burial that of Risdon Moor in 1868. A later gift of ground in 1937 and an association formed in 1982 expanded and maintained the site. Since 1980 a Kildare Memorial Day ceremony has honored the veterans buried in this plantation-and-timber corner of Cass County.

Junction, TX

This hill country along the Llano was home to Jumano and Apache peoples when Spanish explorers passed through in the 1600s and 1700s, before the Comanche came to dominate the region by the mid-1800s. Frontier forts and the Texas Rangers guarded the area as Anglo settlement pushed westward, and the county was organized in 1876, named for an Alamo defender. Long troubled by outlaws until the Rangers restored order in the 1880s, it settled into a livelihood of sheep and goat ranching for wool and mohair.

Junction, TX

This is the third courthouse to serve Kimble County, designed by San Antonio architect Henry Truman Phelps, who created courthouses for more than ten Texas counties in the early 20th century. Though based on Classical plans, the building marks a shift in his style toward the Art Moderne of the late 1920s, seen in its geometric ornament, cast-stone pilasters, and stepped parapet. It stands as the civic centerpiece of a Hill Country county seat.

Junction, TX

Built in 1892 as Kimble County's third jail, this two-foot-thick hewn-stone building earned a reputation for being 'as secure as Huntsville State Prison.' Among its many prisoners was Gip Hardin, held here in 1896—brother of the notorious Texas gunman John Wesley Hardin. The fortress-like structure was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Taylor, TX

This modest family plot holds the graves of a pioneer Williamson County family, named for Daniel Kimbro, buried here in 1882. Kimbro had come to the Republic of Texas in 1836 — the very year independence was declared — settling first at San Augustine, then Bastrop where he crafted looms, spinning wheels, and wagons, before camping in a tent on Brushy Creek in 1846. A signer of the petition to create the county, he helped build the community whose descendants rest around him. Mid-twentieth-century farming damaged or plowed under many of the old stones.

Wabash, IN

In the autumn of 1826, at a flint-water spring the Miami called Kin-com-a-ong, federal commissioners and Miami leaders met to negotiate one of the treaties that steadily stripped Indigenous nations of their homelands across the Old Northwest. The council here opened land in the Wabash valley to canal-building and American settlement, part of the relentless push that would culminate in the removal of many Miami people west of the Mississippi a generation later. The spring, long a gathering place, became the stage for a transaction that reshaped who would live and farm this country.

Batesville, TX

William Davis Kincaid learned the cattle trade in West Texas before bringing his family in 1905 to land he bought southeast of Uvalde, building one of the region's notable ranches and serving as a bank and school-board president before his death in 1914. In his honor his family raised the Kincaid Hotel in Uvalde in 1927, which became the business and social hub where ranchers from across the region made "The Kincaid" their headquarters.

King, TX

This congregation began in 1875 when Baptists gathered to worship in the Stringtown log schoolhouse and baptized converts in Cowhouse Creek. A land gift from Monroe and Mary Puett in 1880 gave the church a home, and a new sanctuary rose in 1901 through volunteer labor; the congregation took the name King Baptist Church in the 1930s. Rebuilt again in 1974, it has served this corner of Coryell County for well over a century.

Gatesville, TX

This burial ground was already in use before it was formally deeded in 1880 to the Stringtown Baptist Church for church and school purposes, with a number of graves dating to 1873 and unmarked burials likely older still. For generations, residents of the King community gave their time and money to tend the site, and a cemetery association organized in 1960 to sustain the effort. Today descendants support a trust fund to preserve it.

Gonzales, TX

Perched on a hill above King Flats on the Guadalupe River, this burial ground has served the area since the 1830s, when John Gladden King—a member of the DeWitt Colony's governing council—and his wife Parmelia settled the land in 1830. The oldest marked grave belongs to two-day-old William G. Hall, who died in 1838, and seven generations of the King family rest here. Among the graves lie Texas Rangers and veterans of conflicts spanning the War of 1812 through the Korean War.

Guthrie, TX

Carved from the sprawling old Bexar County in 1876, King County was named for William King, who died at the Alamo. Ranching defined it from the start, and its famous cattle brands—the "6666," "Pitchfork," "SMS," and "Matador"—still signal that heritage. With just 173 people in 1890, formal organization in 1891 leaned on petitions padded with the names of itinerants and even favorite horses, and cowboys outvoted the ranchers to make Guthrie the county seat.

Guthrie, TX

Sparsely settled King County in the West Texas ranch country lost two courthouses in a row—one to a 1905 tornado, the next to an 1914 fire—before hiring Fort Worth architect Ernest E. Churchill to design a sturdier one that same year. His two-story concrete building, blending Classical Revival with Prairie-style lines, served as the seat of justice until 1982, when it became the county library. It still stands as a monument to the civic hopes of a thinly populated frontier county.

Seguin, TX

This burial ground holds one of Seguin's founding families, the Kings, who came from Tennessee during the days of the Republic of Texas. Brothers John, Henry, and William George King helped establish the town, and William—a Texas Ranger and veteran of the Mexican War—was one of several Rangers laid to rest here. The first burial, in 1852, was a six-month-old child, and generations of the family followed.

Uvalde, TX

King Fisher rose from teenage ranch hand to the undisputed power over a vast stretch of Southwest Texas known as "King Fisher's Territory," centered on Eagle Pass. Hired to guard herds from cross-border raiders, he imposed a rough order — his henchmen rustled cattle and terrorized some settlers while protecting others — and a roadside sign reputedly warned travelers to "take the other" road. Indicted many times but never convicted, he reformed after a Texas Ranger arrest in 1876 and was serving as acting Uvalde County sheriff when he and gunman Ben Thompson were killed from ambush in a San Antonio theater in 1884.

Whitney, TX

This Methodist congregation held its first meeting in 1875 in the Pecan Grove community, gathered by a circuit-riding preacher, the Rev. I. M. Reeve. When the railroad town of Whitney was founded in 1879, the fellowship built a sanctuary and became the Whitney Methodist Church, later renamed King Memorial in 1901 to honor pioneer and church member Capt. Newton J. King. Across the generations it has been a source of leadership and service to the town.

McCamey, TX

Rising 3,000 feet as part of an uplift in the southern Permian Basin, King Mountain likely took its name from rancher Guy King, who drilled the first water well on its summit around 1900. The heights and their Rim Rock are tied to the oil fields that later defined Upton County, and many Indian relics have been found along the escarpment — traces of far older human presence.

Kingsville, TX

Founded in 1853 by Capt. Richard King, the King Ranch became a vital way-station on the wartime "cotton road" — the Confederacy's lifeline to the outside world. As the Union blockade choked Southern ports, wagons hauled cotton across South Texas to King's operation, then on to Matamoros, Mexico, where it was traded for guns, medicine, and coffee. The ranch fed and sheltered teamsters and Confederate troops alike, and drew both bandits and Federal raiders determined to cut the trade.

Stockdale, TX

This home was built in 1898 for Robert and Rachel Emma Smith, Rachel being the daughter of John R. King, an early Texas military and political leader whose descendants have held the house almost continuously since. Among later residents was Wade Lorenz, a former Texas Ranger turned Stockdale businessman and rancher. A variation on the traditional I-house plan, it is dressed with decorative woodwork on its porches.

Kosse, TX

Bardin and Elizabeth Susan King married in Alabama in 1842 and spent decades pushing west by wagon—through Louisiana, then across several Texas counties—before settling on 189 acres in Limestone County in 1870 to raise cotton and grain. Deeply woven into the Headsville community, Bardin preached as a Baptist lay minister and joined the Grange and Masons. When Susan died in 1879 she was buried on the farm, and in 1881 Bardin set aside an acre as a family graveyard; family tradition holds that an African American freedman named Speight also rests here in an unmarked grave.

Lincoln, TX

This marker commemorates the King's Highway, or Camino Real, the Spanish colonial road system that once linked the missions and settlements of Texas and stretched toward Mexico and Louisiana. Placed in 1918 by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas, it was part of an early-20th-century effort to trace and memorialize the historic route. The road carried soldiers, missionaries, traders, and settlers for well over a century.

Lincoln, TX

This marker, placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas in 1918, honors the old Camino Real — the King's Highway — that Spanish authorities blazed across Texas to link their missions and presidios with settlements to the south. Following older Indian trails, the route carried missionaries, soldiers, and later Anglo colonists through the region for well over a century. It remained one of the great arteries of early Texas travel and settlement.

Douglas County, NV

In the frantic years after silver was struck on the Comstock Lode, getting men and freight over the Sierra crest became big business. In 1859–1860 David Kingsbury and John McDonald secured a franchise from the Utah Territory and spent roughly $70,000 carving a sixteen-foot wagon road—braced in places by granite retaining walls—up what had been the Georgetown and Daggett Pass trail. The new grade shortened the haul between Sacramento and Virginia City and quickly filled with merchants and teamsters paying tolls to reach the Washoe mines.

Brackettville, TX

Kinney County's roots run from ancient Indigenous inhabitation through Spanish expeditions beginning in 1535 to the 1852 opening of Fort Clark, an Army outpost that anchored settlement along the San Antonio–El Paso stage line. The county organized in 1873 with meetings held first in a settler's home, choosing Brackettville as its seat. In 1911 the county occupied this Beaux Arts Classical courthouse—buff brick accented with red banding, an octagonal-towered design topped by a Seth Thomas clock—built by a Dallas architect and a Louisville contractor.

Booker, TX

Kiowa Cemetery holds a community of German-Russians—descendants of Germans who had settled the Russian steppe under Catherine the Great in the mid-1700s. Around 1910 several of these families settled along Kiowa Creek south of Booker, where they soon built a Lutheran church, and the burial ground took its first grave, Abraham Littau, in 1912. In 1916 the Littau family deeded the land for a cemetery still tended by the descendants of those buried there.

Valley View, TX

On January 5–6, 1868, a large Kiowa war party swept through the valleys of Cooke County, burning homes and killing thirteen settlers before a blizzard forced them back. Captives were taken, some escaping or ransomed, and the toll might have climbed higher had a settler named George Masoner not ridden ahead like a frontier Paul Revere to warn the scattered farms. The raid was one episode in the long, brutal struggle as Kiowa and Comanche bands answered the loss of their hunting grounds to encroaching settlement.

Azle, TX

In April 1867 a band of about sixty Kiowa warriors, led by chiefs Satank and Satanta, struck the Walnut Creek home of William Hamleton while he was away, killing his wife Sally and carrying off their two daughters. Lavina was freed after six months, but young Mary was raised among the Kiowa, took the name To-Goam-Gat-Ty, and married another captive to become an accepted member of the tribe. The raid site now lies beneath the waters of Eagle Mountain Reservoir.

Kirk, TX

Settled in the 1870s and 80s as Elm Grove, this community was renamed Kirk when its 1887 post office honored local merchant Jepitha N. Kirk. Land donated for schools, churches, and a cemetery anchored a town that grew to several hundred people, with cotton gins, a telephone exchange, a two-story schoolhouse, and a community hall. The Depression began its decline; the school consolidated with Mart's in 1952, leaving little but a few homes and the cemetery.

Irving, TX

John W. and Jestine Gorbit farmed here by 1850, and a settlement called Gorbit grew up around them as a stop on a pre–Civil War postal route. After Ike Story opened a store and post office in 1889, confusion with a similarly named town led to the settlement being renamed Kit in 1894, and residents added a cemetery and schools. When the railroad town of Irving was founded nearby in 1903, Kit's businesses, churches, and post office drifted to the new townsite, and by the 1940s the community had faded into the growing metropolis.

Dallas, TX

The town of Kleberg took root in 1850 on the land grant of Robert Justus Kleberg, a veteran of the Republic of Texas army who had fought at San Jacinto. Beginning as a stage stop where two wagon trails met, it grew into a farming town that gained a post office, bank, and shops once the railroad arrived in 1881. Ambitious dams and locks on the Trinity River briefly brought jobs in the early 1900s, until a 1908 flood swept the work away.

Kingsville, TX

Kleberg County was carved from Nueces County in early 1913 and organized that June, with Kingsville named as its seat. It honors Robert Justus Kleberg, a pioneer German settler who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Texas's 1836 war for independence. The county lies at the heart of the vast South Texas ranching country made famous by the King Ranch.

Fredericksburg, TX

Johann Jost Klingelhoeffer left Europe in 1846 seeking freedom and opportunity, sailing to the port of Indianola and making his way through New Braunfels to Fredericksburg. Around 1854 he built his home in the German Fachwerk, or half-timbered, style—oak timbers filled with handmade brick and two ground-floor rooms divided by a dogtrot breezeway. Additions after the Civil War and again in 1955 reshaped the house, but it endures as an example of the distinctive Texas-German building tradition unique to the Hill Country.

Spring Branch, TX

German Catholic families settled the Honey Creek area beginning in 1845, worshiping first in a home and a log chapel. In 1878 Johann Adam Kneupper and his wife Margarethe gave the land and helped neighbors raise this one-room chapel from locally quarried stone, where services were held until 1892.

Knickerbocker, TX

Drawn by Dove Creek's water and irrigable land, farmers and stockmen settled this West Texas valley in the 1870s, beginning with the Baze brothers' 1875 irrigation ditch dug to supply nearby Fort Concho. In 1877 New York sheepmen named their ranch—and later the town—for Washington Irving's character Diedrich Knickerbocker, and by 1890 the community boasted stores, hotels, churches, and schools. Like many rural West Texas towns, it faded as automobiles and better roads pulled residents toward San Angelo.

Fort Worth, TX

First erected in 1881 and rebuilt after a fire in 1901 by the noted Fort Worth architects Sanguinet and Staats, this hall was the first Pythian Castle Hall built in the United States. Styled after a North European city hall or medieval guild hall, it still displays the seven-foot suit of armor that crowned the original building. In 1970 it became the first Fort Worth building listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Jefferson, TX

Built in 1852 by Col. Henry A. Mimms as a wedding gift for his daughter, Knightwood became known for its hospitality in antebellum Jefferson, then a bustling inland river port. It served as a gathering place for a Men's Harmony Club and a Ladies' Cooking Class whose weekly dancing parties enlivened the town's social season. Original honey-pine floors and cherry-wood mantels survive from its earliest days.

Lexington, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Central Texas in the 1850s, and in 1860 sixteen of them organized a Baptist church whose first building doubled as the community's schoolhouse. The congregation weathered the Civil War and, over the decades, shifted cemeteries and sanctuaries as it joined and helped organize regional Baptist associations. Depression-era out-migration nearly emptied it, but a 1972 revival and volunteer builders gave it new life.

Benjamin, TX

Created in 1858, reconstituted in 1876, and finally organized in 1886, this county honors General Henry Knox, the Continental Army's chief of artillery and the nation's first Secretary of War. A hero of the Revolution, Knox lent his name to a county on the distant Texas frontier long after his death. Benjamin serves as its county seat.

New Summerfield, TX

In 1854 Tennessee native Thomas Norman and partners platted the town of Knoxville, selling lots and setting aside ground for a community church. Stores, a mill, a distillery, a blacksmith, and a school soon followed—though residents proudly noted the town never had a saloon, even as every store sold whiskey. When the International Railroad bypassed it in 1872, business drained away to Troup, and today only the Knoxville cemetery marks the spot.

Jefferson Precinct, NE

Albert Kobs left Germany in 1867 and his future wife Henrietta followed from the same homeland in 1870; the couple married and bought a Nebraska farm in 1874, raising most of their children on that prairie land. The small pioneer cemetery that bears their name preserves the memory of an immigrant family that helped settle Douglas County. Their short lifespans—both died young—speak to the hardships of frontier homesteading.

Ft. Stockton, TX

In the cattle-and-railroad West of 1870s Texas, a sturdy field-stone building rose in the frontier outpost of Fort Stockton, hard by the old military road and springs of the Trans-Pecos. By 1884 Herman Koehler had turned it into a one-stop hub of frontier commerce — a saloon at one end and a general store and bank at the other — later crowned with a second story as the town grew. Buildings like this were the true civic centers of remote Texas towns, where a rancher could wet his throat, buy provisions, and settle accounts under one roof.

Round Top, TX

German immigrants Konrad and Elisa Joh made their home in this hand-hewn live-oak cabin, chinked with mud, straw, and sand and built around 1848 near the old Galveston-to-Bastrop road. In 1875 the couple used oxen to haul the entire structure some 300 feet uphill, and later the Paetzold family lived within its walls. It stands today as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Mason vicinity, TX

Settlers began arriving in this Mason County locality in the 1850s, but the community took its name from William Koock, a German immigrant who built a one-room log store here in 1867. Koock's enterprise grew into a two-story rock building that served as the headquarters for area cattle and sheep ranchers, who bought supplies, took credit, and even deposited their gold for safekeeping there, while dances filled its second floor. Koocksville had one of the county's earliest schools and a grist mill and cotton gin, but after Koock died in a riding accident in 1890 the store closed and the town declined into a scattering of stone ruins.

Art, TX

Heinrich Conrad Kothmann and his wife Ilse sailed from Germany to the Texas coast in 1845, joining the wave of German immigrants who helped settle the Hill Country around Fredericksburg. Granted 640 acres in Mason County, the cabinetmaker-turned-rancher moved to the Art community in 1856 as one of its first families. All that remains of the original ranch is the small family cemetery, begun with Heinrich's burial in 1881 and still tended by his descendants.

Kountze, TX

This Church of Christ congregation gathered in 1886, a year before Kountze became the Hardin County seat, worshipping first in the Masonic Hall and the courthouse. In 1891 it raised a permanent building on land donated by Judge and Mrs. W. W. Cruse, calling worshippers with a church bell cast back in 1819. For well over a century the congregation has been woven into the fabric of Kountze's history.

Kress, TX

Kress Cemetery has served the High Plains community of Kress since 1907, when residents of the nearby town of Wright relocated after a railway was built through the area. Banker F.T. Skipworth deeded the land, and the oldest known grave, that of Mary F. McMillam, dates to 1910. Bankers, ranchers, farmers, and community leaders have been laid to rest here under the care of an association incorporated in 1945.

Mahoning Township, PA · est. 1948

The Kuskuskies Towns were a cluster of Native villages that once stood along the Shenango and Beaver rivers near present-day New Castle. This marker recalls the last of them, still occupied in 1785 when Gen. William Irvine surveyed the surrounding 'Donation Lands' — tracts the state set aside as bounties for its Revolutionary War soldiers. His tour came just as the old Indian country was about to be carved up and handed to veterans, a quiet hinge between two worlds.

Kyle, TX

Kyle was born in 1880 when the International & Great Northern Railroad pushed its line between Austin and San Antonio, drawing settlers from older nearby communities. Fergus Kyle and the Moore family donated 200 acres, and the first town lots were auctioned beneath a live oak. In a striking chapter, 1940s voters elected an all-woman municipal government led by write-in mayor Mary Kyle Hartson, Fergus Kyle's daughter, whose brother Edwin became a Texas A&M dean and U.S. ambassador to Guatemala.

North Las Vegas, NV

Established by Conrad Kiel in 1875, this was one of only two major ranches in the Las Vegas valley through the 19th century, and its early years were steeped in violence — rancher Archibald Stewart was killed here in a gunfight in 1884, and two of Kiel's sons were found murdered on the property in 1900. After a railroad bought the land in 1903, Las Vegas banker John S. Park built the elegant white mansion, and later owners turned it into a cowboy ranch and even a dude ranch catering to divorce seekers. In 1976 the City of North Las Vegas preserved 26 acres of the original ranch as a historic site.

Kyle, TX

On October 14, 1880, a giant live oak shaded the public auction that founded the town of Kyle along the International & Great Northern Railroad. State representative Fergus Kyle and the Moore family had given the railway 200 acres, free rides brought bidders out to the townsite, and nearly every lot sold that day. The railroad soon set aside four acres around the tree for a short-lived school, and the oak itself has been preserved as the town's founding landmark.

Kyle, TX

Colonel Claiborne Kyle, one of Hays County's first settlers, buried his adopted son here in 1849 — the earliest recorded interment, though local lore claims a man hanged from a live oak on the grounds came first, giving rise to 'the hanging tree.' Kyle is said to have set aside land for a community burial ground, formalized when his son Polk deeded five acres in 1877 and further parcels were added into the next century. Among the pioneers and family members resting here are veterans of the Civil War and every major conflict through Vietnam.

Denison, TX

L. A. Washington, Jr. was a grandnephew of George Washington, whose own father had been raised under the first president's guardianship. A physician, he came to Texas in 1849 carrying family treasures — Washington's inaugural suit and personal letters — while his wife, Martha, hailed from a noted West Virginia family. The marker, recorded in 1968, honors the couple's place in the region's early history.

Comanche, TX

The two oldest rooms of this Comanche home were built in 1877 of rubblestone hauled to the site by ox wagon. Texas pioneers L. B. and Alice Beeman Russell bought it in 1886 and added rooms as their family grew, and descendants live here still. L. B. Russell wore many hats — lawyer, judge, mayor, editor, historian, fiddler, and Mason — earning the fond title 'The Grand Old Philosopher of Comanche.'

Canyon, TX

Buffalo hunter turned cattleman L. T. Lester settled the high plains near Canyon in 1889 and opened its first bank in 1900. In 1904 he built this comfortable home—its fireplace mantels and marble lavatories hauled from Kansas City—which became a hub of political, social, and church gatherings. Active in civic life, Lester helped bring what became West Texas State University to Canyon in 1910.

Brenham, TX

La Bahia Road began as an east-west Indian trail—perhaps older still an animal path—crossing southeastern Texas and Louisiana, and grew into one of the earliest overland routes European explorers used in Texas. La Salle likely walked it in the 1680s, the Spaniard Alonso De León followed in 1689, and over the next century and a half it carried the Gutiérrez-Magee expedition, the "Old 300" colonists of 1821, and troops of the 1836 Revolution, near which Fannin's men were massacred at Goliad. In the twentieth century its path helped guide the surveyors who mapped modern Texas highways.

Navasota, TX

Long before wagon wheels cut its ruts, this was a Native footpath threading southern Texas and Louisiana. In 1690 Alonso de León and the Franciscan Father Massanet marched a small army of men, horses, and pack-flour along it to found the Mission of San Francisco de los Tejas near the Neches—naming the church, and eventually the state, for the 'friendly' Tejas people. By the 1800s the same corridor had become the Opelousas Road, driving Texas cattle to distant markets.