Westward Expansion

Edna, TX

This home was built in 1888 of cypress and Texas heart pine, fastened with square nails and wooden pegs in the sturdy vernacular manner of the period. It was restored by the L. A. Payne family in 1956 and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1967. The house stands as a well-preserved example of late-nineteenth-century Texas domestic building.

Newburgh, IN

"La Belle Rivière" — the beautiful river — was the French name for the Ohio, the great water highway that French explorers, traders, and Native peoples traveled through this country long before Indiana statehood. Newburgh rose on the river's bluff precisely because that waterway carried the commerce and settlement of the early frontier. The name recalls the French colonial presence in the Ohio Valley.

Lafayette, LA · est. 1975

The first church of Lafayette's parish, St-Jean du Vermilion, rose on this spot in 1821 on land donated by Jean Mouton. Three years later Mouton gave ground for a courthouse and founded the town of Vermilionville, which grew into the city of Lafayette. From that early French Catholic congregation descends today's Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist.

Fabens, TX

Established in 1910, La Isla Cemetery served the farming community of Fabens in the lower El Paso valley, where cotton and other irrigated crops were taking hold along the Rio Grande. The cemetery grew alongside the Mexican and Anglo families who worked this borderland during a period of rapid agricultural settlement. It is recognized today as a Historic Texas Cemetery.

Mission, TX

The lands of La Lomita — 'The Little Hill' — trace to a 1767 Spanish grant and were donated for church use in 1861, their farms and ranches supporting the priests and their charities. The original chapel rose in 1865 at a campsite on the Brownsville-Roma trail, was rebuilt over the years, and moved to this site in 1899. The nearby city of Mission took its name from this Rio Grande Valley landmark.

Mission, TX

In 1849 French priests of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate fanned out from Brownsville to minister across the lower Rio Grande Valley, and a Reynosa merchant named Rene Guyard gave them part of his Rancho La Lomita for a mission to serve his ranch hands. The first chapel rose here in 1865, and after Guyard's 1871 death the Oblates inherited the land, farming it to fund further missionary work. Though the farm proved a financial drain and most of it was sold in 1909, the little La Lomita Chapel gave its name to the nearby town of Mission.

Shafter, TX

La Morita was the third ranch that Milton Faver carved out of the Big Bend borderlands of Presidio County in the nineteenth century. A Midwesterner turned Chihuahua Trail merchant and freighter, Faver moved his family to the region by 1857 and built a ranching empire spanning thousands of acres of sheep and goat country. At La Morita, abundant springs fed a system of pools and ditches, and his hands raised adobe dwellings, stone fences, and corrals in the traditional style of the frontier Southwest.

Benavides, TX

This cemetery began in 1894 on land that was once part of Rancho La Mota de Olmos—'the cluster of elms'—settled by Francisco Bazán Villarreal, a native of Nuevo León who received the surrounding land grant in the 1870s. Many of those buried here were born on the ranch itself, and the graves include Bazán and Don Pedro Bazán, a well-known curandero, or folk healer. Still active today, the roughly 250-foot-square ground holds more than a hundred graves.

Linn, TX

Much of what is now Hidalgo and neighboring counties lay within two great Spanish land grants, San Juan de Carricitos and San Salvador del Tule, first awarded in the late 1700s. Through a business loan and later litigation, the Tule lands passed to the Cardenas family, who founded La Noria Cardenena Ranch in 1829, naming it for the fresh-water wells, or norias, of the region. Despite years of raids, the Cardenas and Cavazos families intermarried and built a durable ranching operation, leaving behind an old cemetery, ranch house, and chapel.

McAllen, TX

Older than the city of McAllen that grew up around it, this burial ground likely began as a small ranch cemetery in the 1800s, with its earliest known interment — Gertrudis Cavazos — in 1895. Much of the land came from the Arnold family, with other parcels acquired from the city. Its graves hold veterans of conflicts reaching back to World War I, some who served in foreign armies, amid religious iconography, Masonic emblems and Woodmen of the World markers, tended since 1930 by a dedicated association.

Enochs, TX

La Pista de Vida Agua — the "Trail of Living Water" — threaded across the Llano Estacado by stringing together lakes that had drawn travelers since prehistoric times. Comanchero traders followed it by the late 1700s, and in the 1800s it carried the Fort Sumner Wagon Road and a mail route that ultimately linked toward the Santa Fe Trail. Today the once-reliable lakes hold only spring seepage, but the route remains etched into the land.

Dallas, TX

This Church of Christ congregation began meeting in members' homes at the close of the 19th century and in 1907 bought property near what became Fair Park, worshipping in a white frame building for decades as street names—and its own name—changed around it. It helped found a sister congregation in Oak Cliff in 1949, relocated to Bruton Road in 1954, and followed its members to northeast Dallas, dedicating a new building on La Prada Drive in 1979. It preserves the Restoration Movement traditions of elder-led governance and a cappella singing.

Helotes, TX

This stone villa was the home of Miguel Menchaca, a descendant of the Canary Islanders who came to San Antonio in 1731 as some of Texas's earliest civil settlers. Built in the 1850s, its thick rock walls held gun-slits for observation and defense, and a spring beneath the house supplied water during times of siege on the frontier.

Dallas, TX

On this ground in 1854, European idealists founded La Reunion, a colony inspired by utopian social theory that drew French, Belgian, and Swiss settlers to the Texas prairie near the young town of Dallas. Though the ambitious experiment in communal living soon faltered, many colonists stayed on, enriching the region with their skills and culture. The Daughters of the American Revolution placed this marker in 1924 to remember them.

Dallas, TX

In the late 1850s a company recruited French, Belgian, and Swiss colonists to found La Reunion, an experiment in European settlement on the Texas prairie near the young town of Dallas. The venture failed within a few years, but a number of families—Loupots, Remonds, Reverchons, Santerres, and others—chose to stay, becoming business, agricultural, and cultural leaders in the growing city. This cemetery, holding early colonists like an aged French grenadier and a colony director's young child, remained in family use into the 1930s.

Cotulla, TX

Travelers had crossed this land on the old Presidio Rio Grande Road for centuries before the U.S. Army built and garrisoned Fort Ewell here in 1852 for protection. The first permanent settler, William A. Waugh, opened a rancho at the Cibolo Crossing in 1856, and in 1858 the county was created and named for the French explorer La Salle. County government organized in 1880, and Cotulla became the county seat in 1883.

La Vernia, TX

Founded about 1846–47 by Claiborne Rector, who built a stage stop and blacksmith shop to serve travelers on the Chihuahua Road, this Wilson County settlement grew up along one of early Texas's major trails—still traced by Main Street today. First called 'Post Oak,' it was renamed for the green oaks of the area when mail service began in 1856. Settled largely by Southerners seeking fertile land, it became a Civil War recruiting and officer-training center.

La Vernia, TX

The roots of this congregation reach to 1853, when circuit rider J. S. McGee held services at nearby Bethesda. La Vernia Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was organized in 1876, meeting by tradition in the Masonic Hall until a church was built in 1881; a storm destroyed it five years later, and the present sanctuary rose in 1887. In 1970 the older Post Oak Methodist congregation merged into La Vernia.

Hillsboro, TX

Dr. John S. Scofield gave the Indian name "Lackawanna" to the 2,500-acre tract he bought here in 1858 after moving from Kentucky, serving Hill County as a doctor and county judge. He introduced shorthorn cattle to the area, and his son Frank raised prize-winning shorthorns on the inherited ranch. After the first house burned, the present structure was built in 1917, and the ranch was sold in 1945.

Ladonia, TX

Settled around 1840 and first called McCownville after early resident Frank McCown, this Fannin County community was platted with unusually wide streets by carpenter-merchant James H. Cole. Local legend says the name changed in 1857 to honor Ladonna Millsay, a singer traveling by wagon train from Tennessee, and by 1858 a post office made "Ladonia" official. The arrival of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway in 1887 turned it into a booming cotton-marketing town of 2,000 before it slowly declined in the 20th century.

Ladonia, TX

The chief burial ground of Ladonia grew from two sections—an I.O.O.F. (Odd Fellows) cemetery and a Presbyterian one—before their management merged around 1902. Among its earliest graves are an infant from 1866, the "Stranger's Tomb" of an unknown traveler who died in 1867, and Baptist pastor and Civil War veteran William Lovelace Foster. Over generations it gathered in Fannin County officials, early settlers, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Ladonia, TX

A Presbyterian congregation first organized in Ladonia in the mid-nineteenth century, and between 1910 and 1912 it raised this handsome brick sanctuary, awarding the $6,400 contract to builder W.H. Markley of Commerce. The design is an unusual example of Mission Revival style adapted to a church, prized for its fine detailing and simple, well-proportioned form. Though the congregation dissolved by 1976, the building endured, and its defining central parapet was rebuilt in 1997.

Lafayette, CO

This marker recognizes Lafayette's historic cemetery, a burial ground rooted in the coal-mining community that grew along Colorado's Front Range in the late 19th century. Its graves hold the founders, families, and laborers who built a working town on the northern coalfields, where immigrant miners and their kin made their lives above the seams. Placement on the local historic register affirms the ground as a keeper of that community's memory.

Gilmer, TX

The Lafayette community grew here in the 1850s, named by early settler Matthew F. Locke for his son Lafayette. In 1858 Locke deeded three acres to the Philadelphia Baptist Church for a burial ground that already held two family graves; the oldest documented is that of his brother-in-law T. E. Montgomery, who died in 1855. Though the community faded in the 1920s, the cemetery endures as a marker of the area's pioneer beginnings.

Lafayette, LA

This great live oak had already stood for roughly three centuries by 1800, when the surrounding land was given to the Catholic Church in the young settlement that would become Lafayette. Its estimated age of nearly 500 years means it took root long before French and Spanish colonists reached the bayou country of south Louisiana, quietly outliving the empires that traded the region back and forth. Heritage live oaks like this one became gathering points and landmarks for the Acadian and Creole communities who settled Acadiana.

Lagarto, TX

Lagarto Cemetery traces its origin to the early 1870s, when an unknown traveler died at the home of storekeepers Samuel and Mary Beall and was buried on their land; in 1876 they formally deeded two acres for a community cemetery. Among those laid to rest here are Texas Ranger Charles Fusselman, killed in Presidio County in 1890, and John Pollan, a veteran of the Texas war for independence. Though the ranching town of Lagarto declined after the railroad bypassed it in 1887, descendants of its pioneers have kept the cemetery in use ever since.

Hallsville, TX

Jacob LaGrone, a pioneer who settled here in 1837 as a citizen of the Republic of Texas, gave his name to this chapel, built about 1866 from timber sawed at Harleton's Mill and hand-dressed on site under T. B. McFarland's supervision with donated neighbor labor. The property was deeded to the Methodist denomination in 1870 by David McKinney, who had purchased land from LaGrone's estate.

Linn, TX

Macedonio Vela settled this stretch of brush country in 1867 and turned more than 4,000 acres into the flourishing Laguna Seca ("Dry Lake") Ranch, which eventually swelled to 80,000 acres. In 1871 his daughter Carlota planted the first orange trees in Hidalgo County from seeds a traveling priest had given her—an early spark for what became a major citrus region. A school, post office, and Catholic church soon followed, and the ranch remains in Vela hands generations later.

Churchill County, NV

Completed in 1915, Lahontan Dam is the centerpiece of the Newlands Project, which transformed the Lahontan Valley into one of Nevada's most productive farming and ranching regions and supplied electricity to Churchill County. The project was among the first authorized under the federal Reclamation Act of 1902, and its 1903 contract for Derby Dam and the Truckee Canal was the U.S. Reclamation Service's very first. Originally the Truckee-Carson Project, it was renamed in 1919 for Senator Francis G. Newlands, a champion of federal reclamation.

Lajitas, TX

Set beside a Rio Grande ford that people crossed for millennia, the Lajitas cemetery gathers the varied history of the Big Bend borderland into one flagstone-walled ground. Comanche and Apache raiders followed the crossing into Mexico, Spanish expeditions scouted it for a presidio in the 1740s, and one of the Army's experimental camel expeditions paused here in 1860. After rancher H. W. McGuirk opened a trading post in 1899 and troops manned the crossing in the 1910s, a small settlement grew—and its Hispanic and Anglo dead were laid to rest here in barrows and niche-topped grutas.

Fairfield, TX

Pioneers Simeon and Nancy Lake and their seven children settled here in the mid-1850s, clearing land and farming, and around 1856 a small church on their property gave rise to the Lake Chapel community. A schoolhouse and a two-acre burial ground soon followed; the earliest recorded grave is that of an infant granddaughter who died in 1874. Though the church and school were later moved, the cemetery grew over the years, holding members of the Lake and other pioneer families alongside veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam.

Scotland, TX

In the late 1800s this part of Archer County was open range, opened to settlers only after the U.S. government forced Native American tribes onto reservations in Indian Territory. Homesteaders and ranchers clashed over the land even as the county organized in 1880, and around 1900 the McDonald family buried a visiting relative—remembered only as Grandma Crisp—in what became the Lake Creek community cemetery. Deeded to the county in 1908 and later cared for by a descendants' association, it holds generations of area residents and military veterans.

Montgomery, TX

Long before Stephen F. Austin's colonists arrived, the Coushatta people traveled the Coushatta Trace, a trade road running from Louisiana into Texas across these lands. Settled beginning around 1831 within Austin's second colony, the Lake Creek Settlement became the earliest known Anglo-American community in what is now Montgomery County. In 1835 W.W. Shepperd opened the area's first store, and from it in 1837 he founded the town of Montgomery; a number of Lake Creek settlers, including John Marshall Wade of the 'Twin Sisters' cannons, fought in the Texas Revolution.

Iola, TX

In 1874 law partners Ben Goodrich and H. H. Boone—the latter a Texas Attorney General—donated four acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church for the scattered farm community of Lake Grove. Residents quickly raised a building used for both worship and schooling, and by 1900 a hundred students attended the Lake Grove School. The still-active cemetery, with stones dating to 1874, holds the grave of a Civil War veteran.

Bearinger Township, MI

This marker recalls the European discovery of Lake Huron, which French explorer Samuel de Champlain reached in 1615 by following the Ottawa River route to what the French called the "Freshwater Sea." One of the largest lakes on earth, Huron was the first of the Great Lakes seen by Europeans, though it would take the French another half-century to grasp the true scale of the inland seas.

Reno, NV

Built in 1877 by Washington J. Marsh, this handsome mansion was the home of Myron C. Lake, the toll-bridge and hotel keeper whose landholdings on the Truckee River gave rise to the city of Reno. Lake shrewdly donated land to the Central Pacific Railroad to ensure a townsite depot, and the settlement that grew around it made his fortune. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Crosbyton, TX

This site first held the Crosbyton Inn, a two-story frame hotel built in 1908 by the C.B. Livestock Company to lure land buyers and promote the region for cotton farming. A magnet for travelers on the South Plains, it was rebuilt over its original basement after an early fire and finally razed in the 1920s. In 1926 a brick office and apartment block rose in its place, later bought and renamed for W. P. Lamar in 1944.

Fulton, TX

This burial ground served the pioneers of Lamar, the coastal town founded by Irish-born Texas Revolution veteran James W. Byrne, who named it for his friend Mirabeau B. Lamar, president of the Republic of Texas. Its earliest grave belongs to Patrick O'Connor, a bookkeeper who had worked for Byrne in New Orleans. After the town of Lamar vanished by 1915, the neglected cemetery was rescued and restored in the 1940s.

Paris, TX

Carved from Red River County in 1840 and organized the following year, Lamar County honors Mirabeau B. Lamar, second president of the Republic of Texas and a champion of public education remembered as the 'Father of Texas education.' The county seat wandered in its early years — from Lafayette to Mount Vernon before settling at Paris, a town first known by the homely name Pinhook.

Crosbyton, TX

In 1892 young William Percy Lamar came with his parents from Tarrant County to a 160-acre homestead in Crosby County, and after marrying Sarah Elzina Henson in 1912 the couple prospered through farming, dairying, stock raising, and business. In 1957 Elzina established the Percy and Zina Lamar Foundation, whose gifts built and sustained the county's pioneer museum and community center along with a Masonic hall and Methodist charities. The marker stands as a tribute to the family and to all West Texas pioneers.

Olton, TX

Lamb County was carved from earlier territories and created in 1876, though it wasn't formally organized until 1908, with Olton as its first county seat. It honors George A. Lamb, a young second lieutenant who fell in the opening charge of the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 — the decisive fight that won Texas its independence. His name binds this High Plains county to the revolution that made Texas a republic.

Springlake, TX

This 130-mile chain of dunes is a natural landmark with deep human history: archaeological evidence shows people lived here some 6,000 years ago. Comanches later camped among the hills, drawn by game, vegetation, shelter from the wind, and water, and the old Indian trails they followed were adopted by Spanish explorers and, later, Anglo-American settlers. Early ranching left the dunes largely intact, though intensive modern farming and industry have since taken a heavy toll.

Lamkin, TX

Founded in 1870 on the Leon River and named for landowner George Lamkin, this Comanche County town weathered repeated floods and fires as its pioneer merchants stubbornly rebuilt. After the 1908 flood forced a move to higher ground, the arrival of the Cotton Belt Railroad turned Lamkin into a booming shipping center, with gins, banks, stores, and a school whose basketball team ran off four straight county titles. Fire in 1922 and the railroad's departure in 1936 finally emptied the town, leaving a ghost of its bustling heyday.

Elko County, NV

When heavy traffic stripped the grass from the main California Emigrant Trail along the Humboldt River, many wagon parties detoured along a Shoshone path around the Ruby Mountains to rest their livestock in the grassy Lamoille Valley before rejoining the river. John Walker and Thomas Waterman settled the area in 1865, and Waterman named it for a place in his native Vermont. A crossroads settlement grew up around a hotel, store, and blacksmith shop where wagons were repaired and supplies obtained, though those early buildings and the later hotel, creamery, and mill are now gone.

Lampasas, TX

Lampasas County was organized in 1856, formed from Travis and Bell counties as Anglo settlement pushed up the Texas rivers in the years before the Civil War. Its name derives from Lampazos, the Spanish name for the local river, said to refer to the cockle-burs that grew thickly along its banks. First settled around 1850, the county grew steadily and gained its first railroad in 1882, with the town of Lampasas as its seat.

Lampasas, TX

Raised in 1883 of native stone with Romanesque trim, this county jail was a substantial statement of law and permanence in still-young Lampasas County. Later stuccoed over, it still holds the supports of its interior scaffold. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Lampasas, TX

Beginning in the late 1880s with two hose-reel companies and a hook-and-ladder crew, the Lampasas Volunteer Fire Department became a fixture of the growing Central Texas town. Its members battled serious blazes and pitched in during several disastrous floods over the years. Each Christmas Eve, the department turned its big red trucks to a different mission, carrying food and clothing to families in need.

Temple, TX

Thomas Lancaster, a farmer and rancher who reached Bell County in 1851, set aside land beside Little Elm Creek as a community burial ground; his own 1867 grave is the oldest marked one among more than 175 documented burials. A cemetery association formed in 1977 to fence, improve and preserve the historic graveyard.

Jarrell, TX

This Williamson County burial ground first served Corn Hill, a settlement named by county judge John E. King for the cornfields around his home, which by the 1880s boasted a post office, cotton gins, mills, and a newspaper. Settlers Nicholas and Elizabeth Ann Land began the cemetery in 1863 with the burial of their son and soon opened it to neighbors; a cemetery association bought the grounds in 1886. When the railroad bypassed Corn Hill in 1909, the new town of Jarrell rose along the tracks, and its residents adopted the same cemetery—later scarred by the deadly 1997 F5 tornado.

Eden, NC

In 1728 William Byrd II, a Virginia planter, author, and surveyor, helped map the disputed boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. Taken with the fertile country he crossed, Byrd acquired a vast tract near here and named it the 'Land of Eden.' His witty account of the expedition became one of colonial America's most famous pieces of writing.

Detroit, MI

This monument commemorates the 1701 arrival of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who left Montreal in June with a convoy of some seventy-five canoes and, by late July, established the French settlement that became Detroit. Cadillac's fort on the strait—the "détroit"—anchored French control of the fur trade and the passage between the upper and lower Great Lakes. From that landing grew one of the great cities of the continent.

San Benito, TX

This house stands on the Concepción de Carricitos grant, land deeded by the king of Spain in 1781 to Eugenio and Bartolomé Fernández — a reminder of the Spanish colonial roots of the lower Rio Grande valley. Brownsville attorney Col. Stephen Powers acquired part of the grant as a legal fee and gave the site to his daughter Frances and her husband James Lambert Landrum, who completed the home in 1902. Generations of the Landrum family lived here, tying a modern residence to a land title nearly two centuries old.

Celeste, TX

Robert W. Lane's 1866 general store seeded a dispersed farming settlement that soon earned a post office, Methodist and Baptist churches, schools, and a cotton gin. Though burials had already taken place here, families formally dedicated a community cemetery in 1882. Among those interred is Jim Clymer, who used gold-rush wealth to buy the North Texas land that survives today as the Clymer Meadow blackland prairie preserve.

Clifton, TX

Pioneer settler Joshua McCuistion donated this Bosque County land for a Methodist chapel to serve the community of Hollis Prairie. Built about 1880 next to a schoolhouse by John R. Lane and his sons — for whom the settlement was later named — it held regular services until 1960. A memorial association now maintains the building and grounds, and a homecoming gathers here each June.

Langtry, TX

Langtry sprang up in 1882 as a water stop for the Southern Pacific's steam locomotives, built on land deeded by the Torres family and named most likely for a railroad crew boss. It gained lasting fame through saloonkeeper Roy Bean, the self-styled "Law West of the Pecos," who so admired British actress Lillie Langtry that legend tied her name to the town she eventually visited. Ranchers, a rock-crushing plant, and even tuberculosis patients seeking dry air passed through before a 1920s rail rerouting left it a quiet tourist stop.

Stanislaus County, CA

This marker locates the vanished town of Langworth, founded in 1860 by Henry Langworthy on a branch of the old Mariposa Road where it crossed the Stanislaus River at Islip's Ferry. The land had been part of an eight-square-league rancho granted by Mexico to A. B. Thompson in 1846. Once a stop tied to river ferries and overland roads, the town has since faded from the map.

Glen Rose, TX

After coming to Texas from Tennessee around 1870, William and Mary Lanham settled where the Paluxy River meets White Bluff Creek and helped petition the state to carve out Somervell County. By 1877 Lanham ran a grist mill on the Paluxy, adding a cotton gin a few years later, and a rural community of farms, churches, a school, and a cemetery grew up around the works until fire destroyed the operation in 1898. The settlement slowly faded, and today only the Lanham Mill Cemetery marks where it stood.

Fort Worth, TX

Clarence Lanius, a Bonham-born cattleman with ranches scattered across Texas, moved with his wife Myrtle into this fashionable Fort Worth home in the early 1920s. The house is a fine example of the Bungalow style then in vogue, with broad flared eaves, a wide porch, and a porte-cochere sheltering the drive. It stood in what was then the city's finest residential district as Fort Worth boomed on cattle wealth.

Mason, TX

Near the busy Fort Mason crossing of the Colorado River stands the home of Maurice Lappe, a Swiss immigrant who came to Texas in 1884. His house served as a seat of local court, and his property was among the first in Llano County to boast wire fencing and orchards.

Larwill, IN

Laid out in 1854 and first known as Huntsville, this Whitley County community owed its existence to the iron rails that were then knitting the Midwest together. The Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad gave the young town a lifeline to distant markets, and settlements like it commonly sprang up wherever the tracks ran. In time it took the name Larwill.