Westward Expansion

Milam, TX

Las Boregas Creek marked the eastern edge of an 1794 Spanish land grant to Juan Ignacio Pifermo—the oldest grant in Sabine County—where El Camino Real, the main road into Spanish Texas, crossed the water. A well-used campsite grew up beside the creek, and around 1800 a Spanish army post was posted upstream to guard settlers and travelers. According to his journal, Stephen F. Austin, the 'Father of Texas,' spent his very first night in Texas near this creek in July 1821.

Ben Bolt, TX

José María Valadez, born in Tamaulipas, Mexico, bought land in this part of South Texas in 1864 and, with his wife Josefa, built a ranching enterprise raising cattle and sheep and growing corn and cotton. He named the place La Laguna de las Calaveras—the lagoon of skulls—for skeletal remains found there, thought to belong to Indigenous people lost in a great flood. The cemetery, whose earliest marked grave dates to 1878, has served the Valadez family and the Ben Bolt community for generations.

Brackettville, TX

Raised in 1878–1879 as the first county-owned courthouse for Kinney County on the far Texas frontier near Fort Clark, this sturdy building served the county for three decades. In 1911 it passed to the Las Moras Masonic Lodge, chartered in 1876, while its ground floor housed the Brackettville post office from 1918 to 1983. Across more than a century it has held courts, lodge meetings, mail, and county offices — a single building carrying much of a frontier town's civic life.

Brackettville, TX

Las Moras Spring, the largest in Kinney County and ninth largest in Texas, has drawn people for more than 11,000 years, from flint-knapping prehistoric hunters to Coahuiltecan, Apache, and Comanche peoples following trails into Mexico. Spanish expeditions recorded stops here, and in 1840 Republic of Texas troops destroyed a Comanche village at the spring. Fort Clark rose beside it in 1852, and the Army later walled the pool and built a huge WPA swimming pool in 1939.

Sandoval County, NM

The village of Las Placitas nestles against the Sandia Mountains, a range humans have occupied for thousands of years. The community traces to 1767, when Governor Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta issued the Spanish land grant known as La Merced de San Antonio de las Huertas, opening the fertile foothills to Hispano settlers. The 'little places' of scattered farm plots gave the village its name.

Las Vegas, NV

Artesian springs once rose from this desert floor, sending streams across the valley to water lush meadows — the vegas, or "meadows," that gave Las Vegas its name. For generations the oasis was the winter home of Southern Paiutes, and it became a vital resting stop on the Old Spanish Trail after Antonio Armijo's trading party passed nearby in 1829–30. John C. Fremont camped here in 1844 and mapped the site; Mormons founded a mission and fort in 1855; and in 1905 a railroad company acquired the water rights and platted the City of Las Vegas.

Las Vegas, NV

In June 1855, thirty-two Mormon missionaries from Utah arrived at this spring-fed valley and set to building a 150-foot-square adobe fort, planting fields and orchards in the desert. Most left by 1857, and the sturdy walls passed to rancher Octavius Decatur Gass, who ran cattle and supplied nearby miners. Helen J. Stewart later grew the ranch to 1,800 acres before selling it to the railroad, whose 1905 land auction founded modern Las Vegas. The old adobe remains Nevada's oldest building.

Lasara, TX

Carved from the old San Juan Carricitos Spanish land grant, Lasara was laid out in 1926 by developers W. A. Harding and Lamar Gill, who fused their wives' names, Laura and Sara, into the town's. Within that first year a post office, a Union Sunday School, and a schoolhouse all took root, and the school became the community's social heart. Once a cattle-shipping point, the town settled into its role as a hub for the surrounding ranch country.

Panhandle, TX

After 1880, Texas herds streamed north each season to fatten on northern grass, and in 1892 the N Bar N ranch organized the last of the great Panhandle drives from these headquarters. Under manager J.L. Harrison and trail boss Tom Coffee, one hundred cowboys pushed roughly 25,000 cattle all the way to Montana between April and September. The herds belonged to the Niedringhaus brothers, St. Louis tinsmiths who had poured an enamelware fortune into ranching before the range was fenced and sold off to smaller farmers.

White Deer, TX

Each spring after 1880, Texas herds streamed north to fatten on distant grasslands, and in 1892 the N Bar N outfit staged the last of the great Panhandle drives from this headquarters. Under manager J. L. Harrison and trail boss Tom Coffee, a hundred cowboys pushed ten herds—25,000 head in all—clear to Montana between April and September. The cattle belonged to the Niedringhaus brothers, St. Louis tinsmiths who had poured an enamelware fortune into ranching, on range once leased from a British-backed syndicate.

Hart County, KY

In October 1792 — the very year Kentucky entered the Union — a party of travelers was ambushed at Oven Spring, leaving several settlers dead or carried off and their pack horses seized. Such raids were the grim punctuation of a decades-long struggle over the Ohio Valley, where Native nations fought to hold ground against the flood of settlers pouring through the Cumberland Gap. This marker records what local memory held to be the last such attack in the county, closing the violent frontier chapter of the region's early history.

Lathum, TX

This small burial ground holds four pioneer settlers of the San Saba County frontier. The first grave was that of young George Lathum, who died of a rattlesnake bite in 1863; nearby lies Chaney Couch, killed by Indians in 1864, along with Isabella Couch and Elizabeth Christian. Relatives of these families went on to found the nearby Deer Creek Cemetery and a school and chapel named for Isabella Couch.

Mission, TX

Laurel Hill Cemetery has served Mission, in the lower Rio Grande Valley, since 1913, when graves were relocated from the town's first, unsuitable burial ground. Among those interred are city founder John J. Conway, author and television personality Dr. Cleo Dawson, and the aviator and stuntman Floyd "Slats" Rodgers, along with pioneers and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. Its false crypts, mausoleums, and statuary reflect the region's blended traditions.

Coldspring, TX

Laurel Hill Cemetery took its name from the laurel trees ringing the baptismal pool of the local Baptist church, and its land was donated in 1848 by General James B. Davis, adjutant-general of the Republic of Texas army. Burials began in the 1840s; the oldest surviving stone marks two-year-old Frances California Snow, who died in 1854. Davis himself was buried here in 1859, and later neighbors donated additional strips of land as the grounds were fenced.

Hallettsville, TX

Lavaca County traces its roots to an 1842 judicial county created by the Republic of Texas, reestablished by the new state in 1846 after the judicial counties were ruled unconstitutional. This is the fifth building to serve as its seat of justice — earlier ones included a log courthouse and, after a fire, sessions held under a live oak in old Petersburg. Designed by noted Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner in Richardsonian style and built of Mineral Wells sandstone in 1897-1899, it was dedicated on July 4, 1899, and later listed on the National Register.

Lavon, TX

Drawn by the rich Blackland Prairie soil and Bear Creek's water, settlers reached the Lavon area in the 1850s, and the town proper took root when the railroad arrived in 1886. Originally called Thompson or Thompson Switch after early postmaster and merchant Elbert Thompson, it was renamed Lavon for his son to avoid confusion with another town. WPA crews built a school here in the late 1930s, and in the 1950s Lavon Dam turned the area into a fishing and boating retreat—one restaurant even appeared in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.

Langtry, TX

In this dusty building beside the Rio Grande, Judge Roy Bean dispensed his own brand of justice as the self-styled "Law West of the Pecos," holding court between pouring drinks and consulting a single 1879 statute book he rarely opened. Trials spilled onto the porch, drunks were chained to mesquite trees, and fines went straight into the judge's pocket. His notoriety peaked in 1896 when he staged a banned heavyweight title fight on a Rio Grande sandbar to outwit the Texas Rangers—and he named his saloon-courtroom the "Jersey Lilly" for an English actress he adored but never met.

Atlanta, TX

George and Martha Law, pioneers from Georgia, founded this congregation in 1853, making it the first Protestant church in the area. Members began worshipping under a brush arbor, then in a log structure, before joining the Methodist Conference in 1859 and starting their lasting building in 1869.

Lexington, TX

Native peoples long used the reliable water at the Yegua Spring before English-born pioneer John Lewis Smith and his son Samuel settled here in 1848, dug out the spring, and gave it the family name. The Smiths had followed the American frontier from Virginia through Kentucky and Alabama into Republic-era Texas. The first person buried on the hillside was an enslaved man of John Lewis Smith who asked to rest beside him; graves of the Smith family, marked as Citizens of the Republic of Texas, and generations of area pioneers followed.

Florence, TX

Founded before the mid-1800s, this rural community took its name from early settler L. T. "Uncle Lee" Lawler, beloved for leasing his land free of charge so neighbors could build a school, church, and cemetery. Its first school, begun before 1872, honored land donor Edward Stevenson. Once a gathering point for pioneer families, the area is now given over to farms and ranches.

Terrell, TX

When the Texas and Pacific Railroad pushed through in 1873, a group of investors formed a colony association to promote the new town of Lawrence, named for one of their directors. The town's cemetery began the same year with the burial of a seven-month-old child and has since grown to hold more than four hundred graves, many of them the area's earliest pioneers.

Thrall, TX

Adam Lawrence, a Kentucky-born pioneer who received a Texas land grant in 1822, donated this tract for a cemetery in 1840. A farmer and cattle raiser, he fought in the Texas Revolution of 1836 and in numerous frontier conflicts, and legend held that he once leaped his horse twenty feet into a river to escape pursuers. The burial ground he gave still marks the community he helped found.

Dawson, TX

This family burial ground sits on an 1835 land grant to David McCandless, who came to Texas as a Robertson colonist in the last days of Mexican rule. The plot passed to his daughter Macca Orange and her husband Joseph Thompson Lawrence, and was opened in 1868 with the heartbreaking burial of their six-year-old daughter, Sarah Medora. Deeded formally in 1913, the cemetery is still tended by the family's descendants.

Mesquite, TX

Stephen Decatur Lawrence, son of an original Mercer colony settler, received about 640 acres on his twenty-first birthday and began building here in 1874, adding a T-plan clapboard house in 1882 that grew into a striking Victorian home with a central tower and steeply pitched roof. Barns, a smokehouse, a root cellar, and a wash house rounded out a working blackland-prairie farmstead where Lawrence raised eleven children across two marriages. The family held the land until 1995, when part of it became a city historical park.

Cass County, TX

This cemetery began as a family plot when Henry G. Law died in 1854, soon after his family moved to Cass County from Georgia. It grew into a community burial ground after his brother Richard donated six acres to the Laws Chapel Church in 1869, and was later shared with the nearby Piney Grove Baptist Church founded in 1887. Expanded in 1941, it still serves the area and holds generations of local pioneers, veterans, and families.

Willow Park, TX

Born into slavery in 1839 on a Kentucky plantation, Lawson Daniel Gratz enlisted in the Federal army in 1864 and rose to first sergeant in the 114th U.S. Colored Infantry, serving at the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond and standing at Appomattox when Lee surrendered. He later reenlisted with the 10th U.S. Cavalry — the Buffalo Soldiers — and kept serving even after an explosion cost him the sight in one eye. Settling at last in Parker County, he raised fourteen children and was remembered for his leadership and unbending devotion to duty.

Lazbuddie, TX

In 1902 Thomas Kelly bought more than 55,000 acres of the legendary XIT Ranch and built the Star Ranch, dotting the high plains with thirty windmills, corrals, and a schoolhouse. As the great ranch was carved into smaller farms, a community took root: D. Luther 'Laz' Green and Andrew 'Buddie' Sherley opened the Lazbuddie commissary in 1924, giving the town both its heart and its whimsical name. Post office, churches, schools, and grain elevators soon followed.

Murchison, TX

The Leagueville community grew from the Aaron York survey, and tradition holds its cemetery began beside an early schoolhouse on land donated by B.T. and Annie Roberts. That pioneer schoolhouse also hosted worship, and in 1880 the congregation that became Leagueville Baptist Church organized there. The oldest marked grave, that of Alabama native Jacob Colvin, dates to 1863, and pioneer families like the Reagans, Adairs, and Colvins rest among many unmarked early burials.

Leakey, TX

Dating to at least 1881 and once known as the Floral Cemetery, this burial ground sits on land John and Nancy Leakey sold for a dollar and a cemetery plot. Its oldest documented graves are those of Sara Catherine McLaurin and fifteen-year-old Allen Lease, killed in April 1881 in what is remembered as the last Indian raid in the Frio Canyon area. Among more than 900 burials lie pioneers, Civil War veteran John Colter Brice, elected officials, and countless children lost to measles, typhoid, diphtheria, and influenza.

Leakey, TX

When John and Nancy Leakey built a home and sawmill in the Frio River Canyon in 1856, they were the first to settle this remote stretch of the Hill Country—and their home soon hosted the circuit-rider services that grew into this congregation. From a schoolhouse meeting place to sanctuaries raised in 1890 and 1922, the church tracked the growth of the town named for its founding family. Easter sunrise and community Thanksgiving services have long knit it into local life.

Leander, TX

Leander began as a relocation of the older town of Bagdad, founded in 1854, after the Austin & Northwestern Railroad bypassed the original site in 1882. A new town was platted along the rail line and named for railroad official Leander Brown, and homes and businesses simply picked up and moved to it. The post office followed in 1882, and the school that opened in 1893 grew into the county's largest district.

Waelder, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1810, Leander C. Cunningham fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived out a long life on the Texas land his generation had wrested into a new republic, dying in 1896. He is remembered here alongside his wife Ann, who was born in Kentucky in 1808.

Burton, TX

Virginia-born Leander H. McNelly served as a Confederate soldier before Reconstruction Governor E. J. Davis named him one of four captains of the Texas State Police in 1870. Later, as a Texas Ranger, McNelly commanded a special force—the Washington County Volunteer Militia—sent to quell the violent Sutton-Taylor feud. He then took his men, who proudly called themselves the "Little McNellys," to the Rio Grande to fight cross-border cattle raiders in the so-called Las Cuevas War.

Leander, TX

This Methodist congregation was organized around 1860 in Bagdad, a Williamson County community a mile to the west. Early worshipers met with circuit preachers and missionaries in a log schoolhouse and a Masonic hall until they built a sanctuary in 1879. When the railroad drew settlement to Leander in 1901, the church followed, and the old Bagdad sanctuary was moved to land deeded by Sarah J. Walker.

Commerce, TX

This ground has served as a burial place since the 1860s, and pioneer settler Rebecca Hart Williams Little—who reached the area in the 1830s—formally deeded it for church and school use in 1871. Among those laid to rest are early settlers, infants and children, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars. A one-room school once stood alongside it until 1945.

Albany, TX

Georgia-born William Henry Ledbetter came to Texas in 1858 and built a salt works on Hubbard Creek during the Civil War, weathering raids on the exposed western frontier before relocating nearer the protection of Fort Griffin. In the mid-1870s he raised this picket house — walls of upright timbers set in the ground — a construction method common on a frontier short on sawn lumber. Ledbetter served as Shackelford County's first county judge, and the city of Albany moved and restored his home in 1953.

Celeste, TX

This burial ground took shape around 1860, in the years when families were still carving farms and communities out of the North Texas blackland prairie of Hunt County. A rural cemetery like this one served scattered settlers as both a resting place and a fixed point of community memory, long before the surrounding towns had churches or courthouses of their own. Its later designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes that continuity across more than a century of local life.

Quitman, TX

North Carolina natives Benjamin and Alice Lee arrived around 1853 and built up a cotton plantation of more than 1,230 acres worked by their large family and enslaved people. Benjamin became a community leader and county commissioner, and the family burial ground begun at his death in 1856 gradually opened to neighbors and grew into a thirteen-acre public cemetery. Its graves—including four Lee sons who served in the Confederate army, alongside bankers, a mayor, a doctor, and newspaper publishers—read like a roster of the community's history.

Giddings, TX

Straddling the Old San Antonio Road on land first surveyed for Moses and Stephen F. Austin's colony, Lee County became in 1854 the heart of Wendish settlement in America, when Pastor Johann Kilian led his Sorbian-speaking congregation from Central Europe to a new home here. Their school was the only one in the United States to teach in Wendish, a Slavic language that survives in the modern world chiefly here and in Australia. The county was organized in 1874 and named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee, with Giddings as its seat.

Giddings, TX

Completed in 1899, the Lee County Courthouse rose after fire destroyed the county's first courthouse in 1897. Designed by J. R. Gordon in the muscular Richardsonian Romanesque style—named for the influential Louisiana-born architect Henry Hobson Richardson—it echoes public buildings of its era with heavy stone and rounded arches. Its builders, a San Antonio firm, set it on the high ground dividing the Colorado and Brazos river basins, a commanding perch for the seat of county government.

Prosper, TX

In 1875 Masons around the Rhea's Mill community, tired of traveling to McKinney for meetings, won a charter for their own lodge from the Grand Lodge of Texas. When the Santa Fe railroad made Prosper the area's rising town, the members voted in 1903 to relocate and built a lodge hall there in 1904. The fraternity has remained part of Prosper community life ever since.

Caldwell, TX

Lee W. Henslee (1872–1927), a native of Burleson County, was named county sheriff in 1902 during an era when law and order were still hard-won. Known as "Mr. Lee," he seldom drew a gun, earning respect through quiet persuasion, and his family lived in the county jail. He later became the county tax collector in 1916.

Leesburg, TX

The Leesburg Cemetery has served this small Camp County community since 1870, its graves quietly recording the lives of the families who settled and sustained East Texas in the decades after the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, the grounds mark the endurance of a rural settlement whose story is written in its headstones.

Leesburg, TX

Established around 1870 on land donated by Dwight Hays Townsend, this graveyard grew into the resting place of a whole rural East Texas community. Its earliest burials are believed to be two children reinterred from the old Leesburg schoolyard, and its oldest marked grave dates to 1870. Generations of pioneers, community leaders, and war veterans lie here, a stone record of the people who built and defended Leesburg.

Leesville, TX

Organized in 1875 in the small Gonzales County settlement of Leesville, this Baptist congregation lost its first meeting house to an 1886 storm, then rebuilt across O'Neal Creek on land bought from pioneer settler N. H. Guinn, raising this plain frame church in 1887-88. Its steeple came down in 1924, and after a devastating 1936 flood the town itself picked up and moved three-quarters of a mile west to the new state highway. The church stayed put, becoming one of the last markers of the original townsite.

Harmony Township, PA · est. 1946

Through the winter of 1792-93, General Anthony Wayne drilled the newly formed Legion of the United States at this camp on the Ohio, turning raw recruits into a disciplined fighting force. The training paid off in 1794 when Wayne's army defeated a Native confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, breaking Indigenous resistance in the Northwest Territory. Legionville is remembered as one of the first formal basic-training encampments in American military history.

Ector County, TX

In 1833, while Texas was still under Mexican rule, Alexander LeGrande carried out a sweeping survey for empresario John Beales, whose land dealings gave him claim to a staggering 70 million acres and the title of Texas's greatest land king. LeGrande's route ran some 2,000 miles across West Texas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and eastern New Mexico, an effort dogged by hardship and tragedy and ultimately abandoned. His work preceded the better-known exploration credited to Captain R. B. Marcy of the U.S. Army by years.

Lemley, TX

The earliest grave here, dating to 1857, lies on land the Thomas B. Martin family settled in 1853 on the raw Texas frontier. After Martin sold the tract to the Lemley brothers, who had come from Illinois in the 1850s, the burial ground took their name and served family, friends, and neighboring settlers — including at least five Civil War veterans, with many graves marked only by native stones.

Corsicana, TX

Corsicana resident A. L. Lemon built this house in 1895 of Louisiana cypress, and in 1902 sold it to John Wesley Edens, a substantial landowner who farmed and ranched 2,400 acres and served locally as deputy sheriff, tax collector, and city councilman. The late Victorian home, dressed with Eastlake and Queen Anne detailing, stayed in the Edens family for more than forty years. It stands as a well-preserved example of the ornate domestic architecture that flourished in prospering Texas towns of the Gilded Age.

Guthrie, TX

Born in 1813, Leo Roark came to Texas in 1824 as a boy during the earliest years of Anglo colonization under Mexican rule, and grew up to take part in the Texas War for Independence. He was present at the disturbances at Anahuac, one of the flashpoints that helped spark the Texas Revolution. He lived a long life on the Texas frontier, dying in 1892, and the State of Texas honored him with this marker in 1962.

Leona, TX

Leon County was carved from Robertson County in 1846, the very year Texas joined the Union, and organized within months. It honors Martín de León, the Mexican empresario who founded Victoria and brought settlers to the region before the Republic. The county seat began at Leona before moving to Centerville in 1850.

Centerville, TX

Built in 1887 of locally made slate brick, the Leon County Courthouse is one of the oldest Texas courthouses still standing in its original form. The county dates to 1846, and its seat moved from Leona to Centerville in 1850, where two earlier courthouses stood on this same ground before it. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Leonard, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Fannin County in the 1840s and 50s, among them Solomon L. Leonard, a Confederate sympathizer who amassed 10,000 acres around Wildcat Thicket — a tangle of brush where fugitives and outlaws, and figures of the bloody Reconstruction-era Lee-Peacock feud, took cover. When the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad arrived in 1880, Leonard's heirs platted a townsite and auctioned lots at a picnic on this very square, an event still held every year. A saloon, hotel, post office, newspaper, and school followed, and Leonard became the market town of a rich farming district.

Mount Joy, TX

Born in Virginia in 1840, Leroy Nelson DeWitt came to this corner of North Texas with his parents in 1854 and put down deep roots as a merchant and farmer. He married Mary Collier in 1861 and, the next year, joined the Confederacy to serve on the frontier through the end of the Civil War. Afterward he became a recognized leader in the area's civic, church, and business affairs until his death in 1918.

Georgetown, TX

In the 1880s Georgetown was a growing Central Texas county seat, and its limestone commercial blocks reflected a new prosperity. This Italianate storefront, raised in 1884, housed a drugstore that served townsfolk for three-quarters of a century, passing from Sanders & Lesesne to the long-running Stone's pharmacy. Its arched windows and pressed-metal cornice mark the era's confident Main Street architecture.

Dallas, TX

Clement LeTot, a Frenchman and Crimean War veteran, put down roots in northwest Dallas County in 1874 and by 1881 had founded the little rail-line town that bore his name. Following the frontier custom of the day, he set aside part of his land as a family burial ground, first for two young sons in the mid-1880s and eventually for himself in 1907. Long since absorbed into the sprawl of Dallas, the cemetery is one of the last tangible traces of an immigrant-founded community.

Louisville, KY

Louisville and the Falls of the Ohio were a launching point for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Here William Clark enlisted the first members of the Corps of Discovery, and here Lewis and Clark met on October 14, 1803, before leaving the area later that month; they returned to Louisville in November 1806. A brother of Revolutionary War general George Rogers Clark, William Clark had come to Kentucky as a boy, served in the militia and army, and after the expedition remained in government service, moving to St. Louis in 1808.

Hopkinsville, KY

As the Lewis and Clark Expedition made its way west and back, its leaders repeatedly passed through Kentucky's river country. William Clark—by 1807 a militia brigadier general and chief Indian agent for the Louisiana Territory—stopped with his family at Allsbury's Tavern in Hopkinsville in 1809. The tavern's keeper, Thomas Allsbury, was himself an early Hopkinsville figure who raised a company and served as a captain in the First Regiment of Kentucky Mounted Militia during the War of 1812.

Lexington, KY

Lexington, an early cultural hub of the trans-Appalachian West, hosted both leaders of the Corps of Discovery. In January 1808 Meriwether Lewis, newly appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory, was honored at a dinner at Wilson's Inn where locals raised twenty-two toasts. The following year William Clark and his family stayed at Traveler's Hall, and Clark visited expedition member George Shannon, then a student at Transylvania University.

Paducah, KY

In November 1803, as Lewis and Clark led the nucleus of the Corps of Discovery down the Ohio River toward their rendezvous with the West, they passed through what is now McCracken County. Camping near present-day Paducah and stopping at Fort Massac just across the river in Illinois, they recruited men for the journey, including the skilled interpreter George Drouillard. Years later, in 1827, William Clark returned to establish the town of Paducah itself.