Westward Expansion

Frankfort, KY

News of the Lewis and Clark Expedition reached the American public largely through newspapers, and Frankfort's papers played an outsized role. The Palladium and The Western World carried word of the explorers' long-awaited return, with The Palladium's October 1806 issues running the first printed accounts that the party had come back "in very good health." From these early notices the details of the journey were then circulated across the nation.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2008

On August 31, 1803, Meriwether Lewis eased a 50-foot keeled boat into the Ohio River near Fort Fayette, launching the journey that would become the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the newly acquired lands to the west, the three-year trek pushed all the way to the Pacific and back. Pittsburgh, at the head of the Ohio, was the practical starting line for that continental adventure.

Park City, MT

Near this spot on the Yellowstone River in July 1806, William Clark and part of the Corps of Discovery paused during the expedition's homeward journey to fell cottonwoods and build dugout canoes for the trip downriver. Clark's party had split from Meriwether Lewis to explore the Yellowstone, and their passage through this valley was among the first documented American ventures into what is now south-central Montana.

Leavenworth, KS

This marker along the Lewis and Clark Trail quotes from William Clark's journal describing the Corps of Discovery's passage near this spot on the Missouri River. In 1804 the expedition traveled up this stretch on its epic journey to the Pacific, mapping the land, recording its peoples and wildlife, and opening the West to American imagination. Clark's daily entries remain a vivid primary record of the young nation's reach across the continent.

Buckholts, TX

This burial ground reaches back to the 1830s colonies of Sterling C. Robertson, when Thomas Curry—whose late wife Satsa Vann was a Cherokee leader's daughter—brought his family to a league of land along Little River. His descendants married into the Lewis family, prominent in building the communities of Corinth, Buckholts and Cameron; Squire William Michael Lewis, a justice of the peace and Confederate cavalryman, was buried beneath a ranch oak in 1867, founding the cemetery. A typhoid epidemic a decade later added more graves to a plot whose burials mostly predate 1900.

Caldwell, TX

Virginia-born Lewis L. Chiles came of age in the era of Texas independence, taking his place among the volunteers who won the decisive victory at San Jacinto in 1836. He later founded the city of Caldwell, planting a town where a battlefield generation was busy building a new republic. He died in 1864, and this marker remembers him alongside his wife, Emily.

Frankfort, KY

Frankfort saw the Lewis and Clark story at both its triumph and its tragedy. In November 1806 Meriwether Lewis passed through the capital escorting the Mandan chief Sheheke and his family, along with a delegation of Osage Indians, on their way to meet President Thomas Jefferson in Washington. Three years later, in 1809, William Clark stopped in Frankfort while traveling east and there confirmed and mourned the death of his co-leader Lewis, discussing the loss with Kentucky leaders including Christopher Greenup and Charles Scott.

Lexington, TX

Chartered in 1854 when Lexington still lay within Burleson County, this Masonic lodge took its first name from Andrew Neill, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence. Its members did more than meet: they helped raise a building that doubled as a school, chartered in 1860 as the Lexington Male and Female Academy, and later sponsored an Order of the Eastern Star chapter. The lodge has remained a fixture of community life for well over a century.

Lexington, KY

In June 1775, frontiersmen led by William McConnell camped on a branch of Elkhorn Creek and, on hearing of the colonists' clash with the British at Lexington, Massachusetts that April, named their campsite Lexington to honor the Revolution's first battle. Fear of attack delayed permanent settlement until 1779, when Colonel Robert Patterson and his companions raised a blockhouse and stockade. The town of Lexington was formally established by the Virginia General Assembly in 1782.

Plano, TX

In the early 1850s, settlers on the north Texas frontier gathered to worship in Henry Cook's isolated log cabin, aptly nicknamed "Lonesome House." Out of those meetings, Liberty Baptist Church was formally organized in February 1850, with Elder Eli Witt as its first pastor. The congregation grew through a series of buildings — a log meetinghouse, an 1885 white frame structure, and finally a 1976 brick sanctuary — while remaining rooted on land first tied to local pioneers J.F. Purcell.

Lakeview, TX

Established in 1914, Liberty Baptist Church Cemetery served a small rural congregation and community in the Texas Panhandle during the early twentieth-century wave of farm settlement. Church cemeteries like this one grew alongside the country churches that were the social and spiritual centers of scattered agricultural neighborhoods. The state designated it a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2011, marking its value as a record of those early residents.

Cisco, TX

The cemetery preserves the memory of Liberty Hill, a once-thriving community with a school, two churches, stores, a blacksmith, and a cotton gin. Samuel B. Webb and his wife Amanda deeded the burial ground in 1899, and its earliest graves hold their daughter-in-law Viola, who died in childbirth in 1907, and her infant son. Confederate soldiers rest here alongside veterans of both World Wars and the families who settled this part of Eastland County.

Stephenville, TX

Marion D. and Harriet Pryor Kelley settled in the Liberty community in the mid-1880s and, in 1891, deeded land to Erath County for a cemetery and school. The oldest grave, dated 1890, is that of an infant son of the Handy family, and later burials include Civil War veterans John Bell Moring and A. Amariah Swanner and German immigrant Henry Hunt. The varied gravestones—granite, sandstone, marble, and limestone—bear emblems of the Masons, Order of the Eastern Star, and Woodmen of the World.

Edom vicinity, TX

Along the Tyler–Porter's Bluff Road, a main artery for pioneers streaming into Texas from the East and South, Liberty Cemetery grew from land pioneer David Riley obtained in 1851. Tradition holds Riley was a charter member of the short-lived Liberty Baptist Church, which may have shared the ground, though a missing volume of county deeds leaves the transaction unproven. The earliest documented grave dates to 1855, and unmarked native red sandstone markers along the western edge hint at settlers whose names are now lost; by the 21st century the cemetery held more than 450 graves.

Panhandle, TX

Established in 1907, Liberty Cemetery took shape as farming families settled the Texas Panhandle around Carson County in the early twentieth century, when the railroads and open plains were drawing homesteaders west. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016, it stands as a quiet marker of that pioneering community on the high plains.

Plainview, TX

In 1887 the Leach brothers homesteaded here after immigrating from Liberty, Kentucky, building sod houses and a windmill and naming their settlement "Liberty" for their old home. A schoolhouse rose by 1892, and when the Santa Fe placed a switch on William Finney's land in 1906, a second hamlet called "Finney Switch" took shape nearby. Irrigation, dairy farming and small businesses followed, but school consolidation in 1948 and changing agriculture drained away the population.

Liberty, TX

An old trail through this region, traveled and described by Spanish explorer Alonso de León in 1690, hardened into the 18th-century "La Bahía" or Lower Road. The first settlement, Atascocita, took root in 1757, and in 1831 Mexican authorities chartered a town with the sonorous name Villa de la Santísima Trinidad de la Libertad. When Texas organized the county in 1836, that town became the seat and lent "Liberty" its name.

West, TX

Liberty Grove was a scattered farming community in the far northeastern corner of McLennan County, its center marked by a Masonic lodge and a country school. Its cemetery holds settlers going back to 1850, including veterans of both the U.S.–Mexico War and the Civil War, and formally took shape when the Russell family began deeding land in the 1880s. When the railroad reached nearby West in 1881, the population drifted toward the tracks, the lodge and school followed, and the cemetery was left as the community's enduring reminder.

Liberty Hill, TX

Burials at this Williamson County site date to 1852, when the first settlers were building homes nearby, but the ground was formally deeded as a community cemetery in 1875 by John T. and Amelia Edwards Bryson. The Brysons and their neighbors enclosed it with a hand-built stone fence, and later gifts, purchases, and a neighboring Masonic cemetery expanded it past twenty acres. A cemetery association, incorporated in 1953, continues to steward the grounds.

Houston County, TX

George W. Wilson brought his family from Kentucky in 1835 to what became the Liberty Hill neighborhood of Houston County, joined by other pioneer families. The community never platted a townsite or won a post office, but it grew a school that doubled as a house of worship, Baptist and Methodist congregations, and a handful of general stores. As people left the countryside for cities after World War II, Liberty Hill faded, sustained afterward by an annual homecoming and a 1960s community center.

Liberty Hill, TX

Chartered in 1875, Liberty Hill Lodge No. 432 first met in the Methodist church before this native-stone building was finished in 1883 by Scottish-born mason John Munro, who ran a hardware store on the ground floor. The Masons bought the top floor and reached it by an exterior wooden stairway, later acquiring the first floor from Munro's heirs in 1945 and often opening it for community use. The building was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1976.

Liberty Hill, TX

Founded in 1854, this Methodist congregation began building a three-story native-stone structure in 1870 on land given by T. S. Snyder, sharing the space with a school and a Masonic lodge. The upper stories were later removed and wings and a vestibule added over the following decades, including a 1954 memorial window honoring the founding families. It remains a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Liberty, TX

Organized in 1848 and chartered the next year, the Liberty Masonic Lodge began with just eleven members meeting in a room of the county courthouse. Fire repeatedly claimed its halls, in 1858 and again in 1909, but the lodge rebuilt each time, moving to its present site in 1979. Its members over the generations included Texas Revolutionary War veterans, delegates to Republic of Texas conventions, legislators, supreme court justices, and a governor of Texas.

Liberty, TX

Late in 1840 the Rev. Hugh Fields preached the first Methodist sermon in Liberty inside the log courthouse, and the young Texas Conference named Liberty one of just 17 Republic of Texas communities to receive a minister. Worshipers met in the courthouse, homes, and brush arbors until they built a log church in 1846, then rebuilt after a storm. The congregation still rings a bell salvaged in 1873 from the sunken Trinity River steamboat Black Cloud.

Ogden Valley, UT

The Liberty Pioneer Monument stands in Utah's Ogden Valley, honoring the Latter-day Saint pioneers who settled the high mountain valleys east of the Wasatch Range in the mid-19th century. Drawn by grazing and farmland after the great Mormon migration to the Salt Lake basin, these settlers built irrigation ditches, farms, and the small community of Liberty out of rugged frontier country. The monument keeps their founding labor in local memory.

Esmeralda County, NV

Set in a valley long used as a gathering place by Shoshone and Northern Paiute people, Lida began drawing prospectors in the 1860s, and by 1872 a proper town had been platted amid the stores, stables, and post office of a working mining district. The richest ore was too valuable to trust to local mills and was hauled to Austin or Belmont for treatment. After 1880 the camp faded, flared briefly during the turn-of-the-century Goldfield rush, and dwindled to a tiny community that hung on until World War I.

Athens, TX

On a hill above the water, this family cemetery holds generations of Henderson County pioneers who arrived in the 1850s and 1860s to endure the hardships of early Texas life. Among them lie James Wilburn Miller, a Tennessee-born Civil War veteran, and his grandson Isadore, killed in action in World War I. Iron-ore rocks are said to mark several Indian graves, and the long-neglected burial ground was recently restored.

Davilla vicinity, TX

Originally called Oak Point, this Milam County farming and stockraising settlement grew up around the farm of dentist and planter Dr. John H. Graves, who arrived in 1858. It was renamed Lilac when a post office opened in 1883, and the Graves family gave land for a school, a Baptist church, and a Methodist encampment. At its peak Lilac boasted stores, a cotton gin, and a blacksmith shop, but flooding in 1921 and the Great Depression sent it into decline.

Davilla vicinity, TX

Dr. John Herndon Graves settled this Milam County area in 1858, and in 1880 his daughter and son-in-law deeded land for Lilac Baptist Church and its burial ground. The earliest marked grave, from 1870, belongs to Calvin McCormick, while Dr. Graves himself was the earliest-born of those interred. Among the graves lie veterans reaching from the Civil War and Spanish-American War through World War I and beyond, marking the community's service across generations.

Maysville, KY

Settled in 1784 by Edward and John Waller and George Lewis and renamed Maysville in 1787, the Ohio River landing first known as Limestone was one of the great gateways through which settlers poured into the trans-Appalachian West. It sat on lands linked to pioneer figures John May and the celebrated frontiersman Simon Kenton. From its riverbank, flatboats and travelers fanned out into the new country beyond the mountains.

Groesbeck, TX

Limestone County was created in 1846, with Springfield as its first seat until boundary changes and a courthouse fire shifted the seat to Groesbeck in 1873. After several interim buildings, the county hired Amarillo firms to design and build this structure, completed in 1924 for $300,000. A classical revival design with Beaux-Arts touches — columned windows, balustrades, and elaborate moldings meant to be admired from every side — it was built with then-modern reinforced concrete beneath its brick and terra cotta.

Lockhart, TX

Garland R. Lincecum—a cousin of Alamo hero James Bowie—left Mississippi with his wife Emmaline to settle land he bought here in 1847, the same year he joined a petition to create Caldwell County. His 1853 death made him the first burial in this family plot, which knit together the pioneer Lincecum and Roberts families through marriage and shared frontier life. The last interment came in 1938, closing nearly a century of one settler kinship network's story.

Exeter Township, PA · est. 1947

In 1733 Mordecai Lincoln—great-great-grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln—bought land in Exeter Township and built a stone house that still stands a little over a mile south of here. He served as a Berks County justice of the peace and moved in the same circle as the Boone family, being a friend of George Boone Jr., uncle of the pioneer Daniel Boone. Generations later, Lincoln himself wrote of his forebears from Berks County, Pennsylvania.

Gatesville, TX

Shortly after the Civil War, freed people in Coryell County founded a community four miles west of Gatesville and named it Lincolnville in honor of Abraham Lincoln. Experienced farmers and ranchers, the founding families lived off the Leon River valley's catfish and game while building the institutions long denied them—Bethlehem Baptist Church, organized in 1872, and eventually Lincolnville School No. 62, which served the county's Black children until rural schools were consolidated in 1943. Despite racial strife and frontier hardship, the community endured, and a few descendants of its founders remain today.

Bowie, TX

Named for the Lindale School District, this Montague County burial ground was established in 1880 when the Gibbins family sold a single acre to school trustees for four dollars. The graves gather generations of the farming families — Cooper, Griffin, Thomas and others — who settled the Lindale community, along with veterans of both World Wars. By the close of the century more than 250 graves marked the site.

Lindenau, TX

German farmers put down roots on the DeWitt County prairie by 1891, and brothers Charles and Daniel Wild gave the place its homeland name, "Lindenau." A schoolhouse doubling as church and meeting hall anchored a full village—store, blacksmith, drugstore, post office, cotton gin, and a rifle club whose 1901 hall became the social heart of the community. When the railroad passed nearby in 1906, the whole town simply picked up and moved to meet it, a common fate before it faded after World War II.

Scott County, KY

Around 1790, as settlers pressed into the Bluegrass country, Anthony Lindsay built a fortified station near a branch of the Elkhorn named for the frontiersman Charles Lecompte, who had ranged this land as early as 1775. Sited along an old buffalo trace that ran north toward the Ohio River, the station became a dependable stop for travelers and traders threading the wilderness. Lindsay lies buried a hundred yards from where his station once stood.

Comanche, TX

Attorney and Confederate veteran Newton R. Lindsey built this limestone home in Comanche between 1881 and 1888, quarrying the stone nearby for walls up to eighteen inches thick. As county attorney he helped prosecute the notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin for the murder of Charles Webb, and over a long career he served as legislator, mayor, railroad right-of-way agent, and district judge. In 1941 the house passed to rancher Melvin 'Shorty' Gore, whose family kept it until 1998.

Randolph, TX

Tennessee native Thomas Lindsey brought his family to Fannin County in 1837 and, in the late 1840s, gave four acres for a school and cemetery — the first burial here being one of his enslaved workers, a stark reminder of slavery's reach into the antebellum Texas frontier. The one-room schoolhouse beside the graves doubled as a community church, and when the railroad town of Randolph rose in 1887, a wooden sidewalk linked it to the old grounds. Pioneers, farmers, doctors, a church-founding minister, and veterans of several wars all rest here.

Lingleville, TX

Before permanent structures, summer revivals were held under brush arbors that had to be rebuilt each year—until Lingleville's Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations joined forces in 1913 to raise this sturdy tabernacle, complete with hand-made benches. Beyond religious gatherings, it became a community meeting place, and it still hosts the annual Lingleville Homecoming. The open-air tabernacle preserves a distinctly rural tradition of ecumenical worship and neighborly gathering.

Palestine, TX

This family burial ground began in July 1887 when John and Mary Otelia Link buried two young daughters, both dead of diphtheria within a week of each other; with no Catholic cemetery nearby and the summer heat making distant transport impractical, the children were laid to rest near home. John Link joined them in 1888. The graves preserve the burial customs of rural nineteenth-century Texas—cooling boards, saltpeter, locally made caskets, and neighbors gathering afterward to share food and sympathy.

Palestine, TX

This Palestine home was built and continuously occupied by the family of early physician Henry Harnsbarger Link and his wife, Hypatia McGee. The first rooms, raised in 1852 when Texas was barely a state, now form the front hall of the house. One of the couple's three sons, Dr. H. R. Link, remodeled the residence in 1912, and it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1972.

Paducah, KY

Linn Boyd (1800-1859) rose from the Kentucky legislature to become one of the most powerful men in antebellum Washington, serving as Speaker of the U.S. House from 1851 to 1855. He authored the resolution to annex Texas and was even proposed for Vice President at the 1856 Democratic Convention. Elected Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky in 1859, he died before he could take office.

Trawick, TX

This cemetery has served the Linn Flat community since the mid-nineteenth century, its land deeded by John Polk in 1849 with the stipulation that he lie at its center. The earliest burial, unmarked, dates to 1837, while the oldest marked grave belongs to Polk's wife, who died in 1855. The town of Linn Flat, named for its groves of linn trees, thrived until the railroad bypassed it in 1903, but families have kept the burial ground and its annual homecoming reunions alive for more than a century.

Dayton, TX

Founded in the 1850s to serve the people of West Liberty—now Dayton—this thirteen-acre burial ground grew informally, its sections known by family names like Smith and Alford, with a separately reserved area for Black residents now called Acie Cemetery. Many graves are unmarked; the earliest documented is that of six-day-old Joseph Monroe Linney in 1880. Those laid to rest here include pioneer settlers, elected officials, and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Orange, TX

Joseph Linscomb moved from Louisiana to Texas around 1835 and served in a volunteer militia during the Texas Revolution before settling with his family in what became Orange County. He set aside an acre for a family burial ground, and his wife Denise was the first laid to rest there. Still active and tended by descendants, the cemetery holds more than a hundred marked graves.

Lipscomb, TX

The Texas Legislature created Lipscomb County in 1876 for the early statesman Abner Lipscomb, and about a decade later J. W. Arthur built a sod-and-wood store and post office that gave the county seat its name. The community formally established its cemetery by 1887, when the infant Fred Mehlhop was buried in its first marked grave, though older unmarked burials may lie nearby. County judges, officials, teachers, ranchers, and farmers rest here, a tie to the settlers who first developed the northeastern Panhandle.

Higgins, TX

Carved from Young and Bexar territories, Lipscomb County was created in 1876 and organized in 1887 as settlement pushed into the northeastern Texas Panhandle. It honors Abner S. Lipscomb (1789–1856), a jurist and statesman who served as secretary of state in President Lamar's cabinet, sat in the 1845 Constitutional Convention, and became an associate justice of the first Supreme Court of Texas.

Lipscomb, TX

Lipscomb County, organized in 1887 with the town of Lipscomb as its seat, at first governed itself from a one-story wood frame courthouse. When farms, ranches, and population surged in the century's first decade, voters approved bonds for a larger building, and Amarillo's William M. Rice designed and built it in the Classical Revival style through 1916, with an arched doorway and a Doric-columned pediment. Though the railroad bypassed Lipscomb and kept it the county's smallest town, the courthouse still dominates the townsite and serves as the seat of government.

Lipscomb, TX

Soon after Lipscomb was founded around 1886, residents met in 1887 to organize a school district, and the first classes met in a former Dunkard Church bought by the trustees. A two-story frame schoolhouse followed in 1908, and after lightning burned it in 1922 a brick building rose in its place, complete with library, office, and auditorium. The high school graduated its last class in 1941 before consolidation and rural decline finally closed the school in 1975.

Lipscomb, TX

After J. W. Arthur founded Lipscomb in 1886 and it became the county seat, residents organized the non-denominational Lipscomb Union Church in 1908 under its first pastor, the Rev. George A. McKee. The congregation first met in a one-room wooden building that a 1917 tornado shook partly off its foundation, only for members to repair it quickly. Through a century of a small and stable town, its women's Ladies Aid and youth Crusaders kept the church active in local and international relief work.

Lipscomb, TX

Founded in 1886 by settlers betting on a proposed Santa Fe railroad across the Panhandle, Lipscomb boomed almost overnight—seven businesses opened in its first month, and it became the seat of the newly organized county in 1887. It was named for Abner S. Lipscomb, a jurist and secretary of state of the Republic of Texas. A hotel, courthouse, school, and stores soon filled the young town, whose fortunes always hinged on the rails.

Dallas, TX

In 1870, two landowners gave five acres for a church and burial ground at Lisbon, then a small pioneer town south of Dallas. A combined church and school rose the next year, and after the school closed and the churches moved away, the site endured purely as a cemetery. Descendants of the founding families organized to preserve it in 1948.

Lissie, TX

This congregation began in 1906 as the Evangelical Association with nineteen charter members, dedicating a sanctuary and parsonage the following year. Through mergers over the decades it became an Evangelical United Brethren church and finally, in 1968, Lissie United Methodist Church, serving its small Wharton County community throughout.

Rusk, TX

In the winter of 1819–1820, Chief John Bowles led about sixty Cherokee families from Arkansas into East Texas, and near this site a leader named Little Bean founded a small settlement. The community lived here for two decades until 1839, when the Republic of Texas forced the Cherokee to remove to Indian Territory in present Oklahoma; Little Bean, who died that year, is believed to be buried nearby, and the land was later opened to Anglo settlers.

Duncanville, TX

This burial ground opened in 1856 with the graves of two small children and grew on land a pioneer donated in 1860 beside a small church later moved to Cedar Hill. Among those interred are relatives of John Neely Bryan, the first settler of Dallas, tying the cemetery to the earliest days of the region's Anglo settlement. It became a perpetual-care memorial park in 1966.

San Augustine vicinity, TX

By 1880 families named Erwin, Crocker, Zeagler, Woods, and Harvey were farming this part of San Augustine County, worshipping first under a brush arbor before raising a one-room log church they called "Little Flock." The cemetery began in 1883 with the burial of six-year-old Carrie Bell Hawkins, who died while visiting the Erwin home, and the Erwins formally donated land for church, school, and cemetery in 1914. More than 400 graves now rest here, including charter church members and veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Temple, TX

In the frontier decades before and after the Civil War, families like the Moores anchored rural Bell County with a gristmill, a cotton gin, and a burial ground open to strangers and neighbors alike. The first grave, dug about 1860 for an unknown traveler who died on the road between West Texas and Arkansas, captures how perilous overland movement was in early Texas. Named for a verse in Luke, Little Flock became a camp-meeting ground where seven congregations gathered each May for worship and the old rite of foot washing.

Canton, TX

Organized in 1893, the Little Hope Baptist Church first gathered in the Farmers Alliance Hall before raising its own sanctuary in 1894 on land deeded by Louis Manuel Parsons. Successive buildings in 1916, 1954, and 1981 marked the congregation's steady growth in rural Van Zandt County. Through it all the church kept up a long tradition of aiding neighbors in need and supporting missionary work.

Jasper, TX

This graveyard began in sorrow on land granted to pioneer settler Samuel Goode in 1838, when his wife Frances was buried here in 1844. Samuel joined her two decades later, and their unmarked graves lie among the earliest burials in what grew into a community cemetery. The oldest marked stones date to 1884, and the grounds also hold victims of the influenza and diphtheria epidemics that swept East Texas in the early 1900s. Little Hope Cemetery remains a quiet witness to the settlers who built Jasper County.