Westward Expansion

Winnsboro, TX

Five charter members gathered under a brush arbor in 1881 to organize this Wood County congregation, which by legend earned its name from doubts it would last even a year. Early converts were baptized in a neighbor's mill pond, land was donated by local settlers, and the fellowship not only survived but helped found a nearby sister congregation, serving the area for well over a century.

Jasper, TX

As Anglo settlers pushed into the East Texas Piney Woods in the late 1830s, traveling Methodist and Baptist preachers held services in a rough building that doubled as church and schoolhouse. A new structure went up in 1890, and the Little Hope Primitive Baptist Church was formally organized in 1893 under Elder Durham Richardson. Locals affectionately nicknamed the whole settlement "Seed Tick."

Lampasas, TX

When the nearby Gracy Hotel was finished in 1870, its builders used the leftover stone to raise this smaller companion, the "Little Hotel." It gave J. L. N. Gracy and his bride a private apartment upstairs while offering rooms to travelers below. Its mason, Charles Green, also worked on the larger hotel and on the Coleman County courthouse and jail, leaving his craftsmanship across the region.

Savoy, TX

Sid and Suzan Brown Pierce donated this ground as a burial place beside the Little Jordan Baptist Church, which served the community from 1850 until 1893. When former members formed the Ector Baptist Church, the cemetery eventually passed to the Savoy Baptist Church in 1953, and descendants of the original pioneers fenced the grounds in 1966. The little churchyard outlived the congregation that created it.

Gilmer, TX

Burials on this steep rise called "Little Mound" may reach back to the late 1860s, before residents of the pioneer village of Calloway organized Little Mount Baptist Church in 1878 in a former Union church and schoolhouse. Over the decades the congregation rebuilt three times, thriftily reusing the same lumber from one meetinghouse to the next. Among those buried here is Emma Sansom Johnson, remembered as a Confederate heroine who as a sixteen-year-old guided General Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops across a river in her native Alabama before later settling in Texas.

Maysfield, TX

Organized in 1849 with just eight members meeting in local homes and a small log cabin, Little River Baptist Church grew quickly as settlers poured into Milam County—seventy people joined after a single three-day revival in 1855. Like churches across rural Texas, it was the heart of community social life, with prominent members seated in the front "Amen Pews" and separate sides for men and women. The present building, finished in 1873 with the local Masonic lodge and enlarged in 1909, still stands beside its early cemetery.

Little River, TX

Seven Wilson brothers and the allied Huckabee and Thornton families came from Mississippi in 1867, fleeing the devastation the Civil War had left behind, and founded the Wilson Valley community. Family tradition holds that matriarch Easter Cobb Wilson wished to rest on a certain hillside, and after a three-year-old grandson was buried there in 1869 the plot became a family cemetery, formally deeded in 1893. Its graves — marked by high infant mortality and the deaths of the 1917–18 influenza epidemic — chronicle a community that faded as the railroad drew life toward nearby Little River.

Olney, TX

On May 16, 1869, a cattle roundup crew was attacked at their work and forced into an all-day fight against some fifty-seven Comanches. The twelve cowboys—drawn from Palo Pinto, Jack, Young, and Tarrant counties—held the raiders at bay until nightfall, when the Comanches withdrew. Nine of the crew were wounded, and three of them died of their injuries.

Austin, TX

George W. Littlefield came to Texas as a boy in 1850, rode with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War, and emerged a major who turned to the cattle business, amassing great ranches across New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. Settling in Austin in 1883, he moved into banking and served as a regent of the University of Texas, funding buildings, scholarships, and library collections. He built this Victorian residence in 1894 and left it to the university on his death.

Cooper, TX

An Illinois native and veteran of the Black Hawk War, Littleton Rattan came to Texas in 1839 and built a farm in what became Delta County. In the Republic era he rode as a Texas Ranger with three area militia companies, and during the Mexican War he served under the legendary Ranger Jack Hays. He was killed in battle with Native Americans on December 18, 1847, though the site of the fight and his grave remain unknown.

Manchaca, TX

The original four acres of this burial ground included land donated by pioneers James M. Turley and Andrew Jackson Hammett, its oldest grave that of Turley's daughter and her baby, who died in 1874. A community church built nearby that same year doubled as a school from 1877 to about 1886, and settlers gathered each summer for ten-day camp meetings under an adjacent brush arbor. Enlarged by an eleven-acre gift from Herman Heep in 1948, the cemetery now holds about 1,600 graves.

Killeen, TX

Live Oak Cemetery near Killeen traces its beginnings to about 1875, when the Young family, traveling west from Alabama, buried a daughter who died of sickness along the way — soon followed by her father, Michael Young. First formally deeded for burials in 1901, the ground grew to hundreds of graves and gave its story to the nearby community of Youngsport. It remains in use and cared for by a local cemetery association.

Lott, TX

Springing up just after the Civil War, the Falls County community first called Camden and then Rupee grew into Live Oak — a crossroads of stores, a cotton gin, a post office, a Masonic lodge, and a Baptist church whose log cabin doubled as a schoolhouse. The Hodges brothers donated land for the church, school, and cemetery, and the earliest marked graves date to 1877. When rail lines bypassed the settlement in the 1890s it withered away, until only the cemetery remained to mark where a farming community once stood.

George West, TX

Carved from San Patricio and Nueces Counties in 1856 and named for its live oaks, this South Texas county grew up around ranching along old roads that once carried Santa Anna's army toward the Alamo. Its first seat at Oakville gave way in 1919 to George West when the railroad reshaped the map. Ranching, farming, and petroleum have long defined its economy.

George West, TX

Live Oak County was created in 1852 with its seat at Oakville, but the railroad era reshuffled the map: cattleman George Washington West, master of a 200,000-acre ranch, platted a new town and lured the county seat to it in 1919. He promptly deeded a full block, and the 1920 courthouse rose in dignified classical revival brick and cast stone—among the last works of noted San Antonio architect Alfred Giles, who died before it was finished. For more than a century it has hosted not only trials but weddings, rallies, and county celebrations.

Oakville, TX

Oakville rose beside a Nueces River crossing and served as the seat of Live Oak County from 1856 to 1919, a supply hub for freight wagons and the cattle ranchers who thrived after the Civil War. Joseph Bartlett's 1857 stone courthouse and log jail marked the town as a center of frontier authority, and by 1887 a two-story sandstone Italianate jail—designed by the Diebold Lock and Safe Company of Ohio—held everyone from bar fighters to horse thieves. When the town lost its railroad bid in 1919, the county seat moved to George West, and the jail became one of the last landmarks of the old town.

Houston County, TX

South Carolina native Thomas Lively put down roots in Houston County in 1850, and the farming community that grew up around his land took the family name. In the late 1850s he set aside this ground as a burying place for his neighbors, and its oldest surviving headstones date to the 1880s. Though Lively himself died in Grayson County after the Civil War, his wife Jane later returned to be laid to rest here among the pioneers who had settled the area.

Fredericksburg, TX

This dogtrot log cabin — two rooms joined by an open breezeway — likely predates 1852, when surveyor J. L. Ankrin sold the land to John Peter Keller, one of Gillespie County's first commissioners. It passed to Keller's son-in-law and then, in 1886, to Anton and Anna Loth, who built a two-story stone house nearby and demoted the cabin to a barn and corn crib. Restored in 1973, it survives as a relic of the county's earliest German-settled years.

Liverpool, TX

The community here began in 1837, in the days of the Republic of Texas, as a Chocolate Bayou shipping point renamed for the great English port of Liverpool. Burials in the cemetery began in 1875 on three acres donated by Thomas C. Nelson, part of which once held a building that served as both school and church. The grounds preserve the memory of one of Brazoria County's early settlements.

Livingston, TX

Founded in 1846 as the seat of Polk County on a hundred acres donated by Moses L. Choate, Livingston grew into the trade, education, and social hub for the sawmill towns and Trinity River boat landings around it — Sam Houston himself is said to have danced at the nearby Old Andress Inn in the early 1850s. Texas's only Indian reservation, home to the Alabama-Coushatta tribe, lies close by. Long anchored in ranching and timber, the area saw major oil and gas development after 1930.

Amarillo, TX

Land for this Panhandle burial ground was donated in 1891, though the earliest known grave dates to 1888 — a child said by local legend to have been buried by her westward-traveling family. A cemetery association organized around 1901, and in 1929 the community rallied to build a mausoleum, the Llano Pancheon. It has long served as a regional resting place for Panhandle residents.

Llano, TX

Founded in 1856 as the seat of new Llano County, the town soon needed a burial ground, and by 1862 it held its first graves — a one-year-old child and a seventeen-year-old girl whose stones still stand. Trustees formalized the cemetery in the 1880s before deeding it to the city in 1907. Among those resting here is Frank Teich, the stonecutter remembered as the father of Texas's granite industry.

Llano, TX

The name Llano reaches back to 18th-century Spanish explorers, who applied it to the river running through this country—a name itself descended from a French term for the Lipan Apache. German colonists put down the first permanent settlements here around 1850, and in February 1856 the Texas legislature carved Llano County from Gillespie and Bexar, organizing it that August with Llano as county seat.

Post, TX

The Cap Rock Escarpment marks the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado, or "Staked Plains," one of the world's flattest and most complete plains regions, sloping upward from Texas into New Mexico. Shaped by ancient erosion of tough caliche caprock, it was crossed in 1541 by Coronado, whose expedition marveled at an endless sea of grass. Long shunned for its scarcity of water, the Llano later supported a great ranching empire and became a leading cotton and grain region.

Post, TX

Established in 1880 and spanning 192 sections, the Llano Ranch was known as the "Curry Comb" for its cattle brand. Its first shelter was a half-dugout roofed with buffalo hides, replaced in 1883 by a two-story frame house that became the center of local social life. A baby girl born here in 1884 marked the first recorded birth in Garza County, and her nearby grave the first recorded death.

San Francisco, CA

Lloyd Lake in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park honors Reuben Headley Lloyd (1835–1909), a pioneer California lawyer and park commissioner who helped shape the city's public recreational spaces. His work reflects the Gilded Age drive to carve green retreats out of a fast-growing western metropolis.

Jefferson, TX

Royal and Martha Lockett came to Texas from Georgia in the late 1850s with their eleven surviving children and the people they enslaved, and seven of their eight living sons went on to serve in the Confederate Army. The earliest marked grave is that of young Walter R. McGarity, a Lockett grandson who died in 1862. Family memory holds that a Union soldier who died on the Lockett Plantation was also buried here, and by 1999 the grounds held Confederate and World War II veterans among six generations of descendants.

Lockett Community, TX

Named for the Lockett families who settled here in 1888, this Wilbarger County farming community grew from a scattering of pioneer homesteads into a network of schools, churches, cotton gins, blacksmith shops, and general stores. Farming that began behind a yoke of oxen gave way over the decades to modern tractor equipment, and the Lockett Seed Company grew into a hub later acquired by Pioneer Hi-Bred as a cotton-breeding headquarters. Consolidating school districts and a Texas A&M agricultural research center capped the community's evolution across nearly a century.

Robert Lee, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1849, Locklin Bartholomew Murray came to Texas as a boy and, by about 1888, settled to ranch in the Yellow Wolf Valley near Sanco. In 1894 the citizens of Coke County elected him sheriff and tax collector, and he held the office through four straight terms until 1902, building a reputation as an honest and effective lawman. He and his wife Susan raised seven children to adulthood on the frontier.

San Gabriel, TX

This burying ground grew from the earliest days of Anglo settlement in Milam County, on land tied to a Mexican grant Abigale McLennan Fokes acquired in 1835. The first recorded burial, in 1844, was blacksmith Peter M. Mercer, and Fokes later set the site aside as a cemetery. Named for the family of pioneer William Lawson Locklin, it holds some 400 graves, including veterans of the Texas Revolution and the Republic of Texas Army.

Henderson, TX

Henry T. Lockridge settled in Rusk County in the 1850s and, after serving in the Confederate Army, bought the land in 1863 where he and his wife Jane spent the rest of their lives. The family cemetery on that property holds its oldest marked grave from 1881, though earlier burials are believed to lie there. Long inactive after the 1940s, it saw new burials again beginning in 2004, and much of the surrounding land is still owned by Lockridge descendants.

Manor, TX

This cemetery lies on land settled in 1833 by Gordon C. Jennings and his family, who came from Missouri as part of Stephen F. Austin's "Little Colony." Gordon became the oldest defender to die at the Alamo in 1836, while his young daughter Catherine earned lasting local fame for riding to warn neighbors as the Mexican army advanced during the Runaway Scrape. Catherine later married Sylvester Lockwood, and their descendants still tend the graves of these Texas pioneers.

Albemarle County, VA

Locust Hill, a plantation in the Virginia Piedmont near Charlottesville, was the 1774 birthplace of Meriwether Lewis. Raised in Albemarle County not far from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Lewis became a soldier and later Jefferson's private secretary before the president tapped him to lead the Corps of Discovery. Together with his friend William Clark, he set out in 1804 on an epic transcontinental journey to the Pacific and back, returning in 1806.

Dallas, TX

At the "Three Forks" of the Trinity River, colonists of the Peters Colony began arriving after 1841, drawn by land grants that required them to farm a few acres and raise "a good and comfortable cabin." The surrounding forests of oak, cedar, walnut, and bois d'arc supplied the timber, and John Neely Bryan's 1842 cabin marked the beginnings of Dallas. Within a decade milled lumber and brick were replacing logs, and an 1860 fire swept away most of the town's original cabins.

Burnet, TX

Logan Vandeveer came from Kentucky in 1833 and was badly wounded fighting for Texas independence at San Jacinto in 1836. Settling in Burnet County to sell beef to nearby Fort Croghan in 1849, he helped organize the county and served as the town's first postmaster. In the early 1850s he built this house near Hamilton Creek for a daughter; the Burnet County Historical Society moved it here in 1973, flooring its porch with stones from an early county courthouse.

Athens, TX

The first recorded burial at Lollar Cemetery was the 1867 interment of John S. Partin, infant son of Samuel and Elizabeth Partin, on land then owned by Asa Dalton. The cemetery is thought to be named for neighbor John Lollar, whose farm lay just across the Van Zandt County line, though whether he rests here is unknown. Serving families such as the Fanchers, Brannans, Drivers, and Lewises for more than seventy-five years, it received its last burial—Eli Lollar Fancher—in 1944.

Tilden, TX

Settlers began moving into this stretch of McMullen County ranch country in the early 1880s, naming the place Loma Alta for its high hills. A school opened in 1896 and moved several times before consolidation in 1943, while a post office operated only from 1910 to 1921. Together the two institutions anchored a large, sparsely settled ranching area.

Rio Frio, TX

In 1868, just after the Civil War, the Lombardy Irrigation Company dug a two-mile ditch by pick and shovel to bring water to more than 800 acres of the Frio River valley. Beyond irrigation, the ditch powered a cotton gin and grist, flour, and shingle mills, and the settlement that grew around it was simply called "The Ditch" until a post office gave it the name Rio Frio in 1875. For a century afterward the same channel watered lands held by descendants of its founders.

Lometa, TX

Lometa owes its existence to the railroad: in 1885 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe pushed northwest from Temple and planted a depot in open ranch country. Platted in 1886 and renamed Lometa, from the Spanish for 'little mountain,' the town drew residents away from nearby Senterfitt and became a thriving trade center for cotton, cattle, wool, and mohair. Rail branches and, later, state and federal highways kept goods and travelers flowing through the town for generations.

Harlingen, TX

Lon C. Hill built the first home in Harlingen in 1904—and, in a sense, built the town itself. A tireless promoter of railroads and irrigation, he helped transform the lower Rio Grande Valley from arid brushland into productive farm country. His climate-adapted Victorian house became a gathering place where valley pioneers met to plan the developments that would shape the region.

London, TX

Laid out around 1878 as the hoped-for courthouse square of a proposed county, this town took the name London after the postmaster's first choice honoring his wife was rejected by postal authorities. Sitting astride the Western Cattle Trail, London counted trail drivers among its residents and sold supplies to crews pushing longhorn herds north, supporting a blacksmith, stores, a cotton gin, churches, and a school. A future Texas governor spent part of his childhood here.

Lone Oak, TX

Organized in 1858, Lone Oak Baptist Church gathered a small circle of Hunt County pioneers around its first pastor, Thomas Hooker, on land donated by the McBride family. The original building later burned, and the congregation raised the present church in 1899. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1970.

Kemp, TX

In 1858, passing strangers lost a son to sudden death, and settler Weaver A. Cotton befriended them by providing a grave beside a tree near the log school-and-church building. He later gave the community a burial ground, deeded in 1883. Cotton, his family, and many other pioneers rest here.

Mart, TX

This McLennan County burial ground began as land bought in 1880 by trustees of the Lone Oak School for a church and school. It was pressed into use as a cemetery by September 1881, when the infant son of the Goodman family was laid to rest here. Confederate veterans and a lone Union veteran of the Civil War also lie among the pioneer dead.

New Summerfield, TX

Founded before the Civil War with the earthy nickname "Skin Tight," this community took the name Lone Star when its post office opened in 1883 and blossomed into a center of trade, education, and culture. At its height it boasted businesses, a public school, four churches, two lodges, and the Lone Star Institute. A devastating 1893 fire, a railroad that passed it by, and disappointing oil prospects each drained away its future.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1851 Corpus Christi founder Henry L. Kinney launched the ambitious Lone Star Fair to boost his young town's economy and lure new settlers — while quietly recruiting men for General José M. J. Carbajal's revolt in northern Mexico. Kinney went deep into debt building racetracks and pavilions, enlisting former governors to promote it, and staged bullfights, circus acts, and stock shows when the fair opened in May 1852. He hoped for 30,000 visitors; barely 2,000 came, and the failure bankrupted him.

Denison, TX

Chartered on June 6, 1874, just a year after Denison itself was founded, Lone Star Masonic Lodge grew alongside the young railroad town. Its members met in several locations before raising this brick hall, built in two stages in 1900 and 1915 and topped by a distinctive bracketed eave. The completed hall was dedicated on New Year's Eve 1915, with ceremonies carrying into the first day of 1916.

Hermleigh, TX

Named for the Kiowa chief Lone Wolf, whose people ranged across this stretch of West Texas until the 1870s, this community took root when settler John Mahoney donated land for a cemetery and school. A one-room schoolhouse rose in 1901, doubling as a church, and a store, post office, and scattered farms soon followed. The little settlement gradually faded as its school consolidated, but its pioneer cemetery, with graves dating to 1892, still serves area families.

Loraine, TX

This mountain bears the name of Lone Wolf, a Kiowa chief held as a hostage by General Custer following the Washita campaign and later released. After his son was killed, Lone Wolf vowed revenge on white settlers, and a clash occurred along the El Paso Road north of Fort Concho near this landmark. The chief died in 1879.

Rising Star vicinity, TX

Long Branch Baptist Church was formally organized on July 16, 1885, holding its first services in an old schoolhouse on land given by R. B. Covington. Thirteen charter members were led by the church's first minister, W. B. Cobb, and missionary pastors kept up monthly services in the years that followed. The congregation built its first sanctuary on this site in 1905–06 and long served the surrounding Long Branch community.

Cumby, TX

In the late 1830s, Texas Rangers camped in a grove of blackjack oaks west of present-day Cumby, and settlers gathered nearby for protection at a place called Black Jack Grove. To the south, James M. and Mary Long settled along Turkey Creek in the 1850s, reportedly setting aside land around 1860 to bury a girl who died as her family passed through. The oldest marked grave belongs to John M. Webb (d. 1869), and among later burials rest Civil War veterans and Woodmen of the World members.

Lometa, TX

Founded in 1876 as Sims Creek Baptist Church by the noted early Texas minister Noah T. Byars, this congregation of eight charter members grew under a succession of itinerant preachers. For decades it worshipped in the Long Cove schoolhouse, which doubled as the community's social hub until fire claimed it in 1925. A wooden sanctuary followed, but by 1981 the dwindling flock voted to disband, leaving a cemetery holding Civil War and World War II veterans among the rural pioneers.

Granbury, TX

Also called Temple Hall Cemetery, this burial ground is the last trace of two vanished pioneer settlements—Temple Hall and Center Mill—that grew up along Long Creek in the mid-1800s. Its earliest known graves are the Haley children, who died in 1864 and 1865, and it holds judges, county officials, mill builder Thomas Parkinson, and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. A cemetery association has tended the grounds since about 1909.

Sunnyvale, TX

Long Creek Cemetery grew out of the mid-19th-century Mercer Colony settlement, where Black Hawk War veteran Capt. A. Webb established a homestead and was joined by his father-in-law, War of 1812 veteran Benjamin Crownover. The first burial came in 1855, when Crownover's daughter Leona Caldwell was laid to rest beneath a pecan tree; Webb later deeded land for a school, church, and public burial ground that became the heart of the Long Creek community. Generations of area families, ministers, teachers, and members of fraternal orders lie here, and an association formed in 1910 still tends the grounds.

Marquez, TX

Named for the pioneer Long family, this Leon County settlement of farm families centered on a school built in the 1880s that doubled as church and community hall. When it burned in 1918 neighbors rebuilt it larger together, and a store so small that customers were served through a window kept the community supplied — until the school consolidated with Marquez in 1929 and the little store closed with it.

Lampasas, TX

Pleasant C. Cox first saw this land in the 1830s and returned by wagon train from Missouri in 1851, settling here and helping petition for the creation of Lampasas County in 1856. Most of the dozens of graves on his patented land are unmarked, the earliest belonging to a Cox child; his widow, Martha Jane, was the last laid to rest here in 1912. Limestone markers, fieldstones, and interior fencing still record a founding pioneer family.

Kerens, TX

In 1870 Lawrence S. Taylor sold five acres for school and church use, and the site soon served the Long Prairie community as schoolhouse, Methodist church, and graveyard together. The first burial, in 1872, was a child, Sallie K. Burt. Fraternal emblems and veterans' graves—reaching back to the Civil War—still mark the ground, also known as Alligator Cemetery.

Santa Maria, TX

The Longoria family were among the first Spanish colonists to settle the lower Rio Grande in the mid-1700s, helping found communities such as Reynosa and bringing the cattle-ranching techniques of southern Spain to the region. In 1831 Irineo Longoria expanded the family's holdings north of the river, and generations of Longorias ranched, farmed, and built early irrigation works around Santa Maria. This cemetery, holding an estimated 371 graves, was restored by descendants to preserve their heritage.

Westhoff, TX

Established in 1879, this DeWitt County burial ground served the rural families who had settled the surrounding ranch country in the decades after the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, it preserves a quiet record of the community that took root here in the late nineteenth century.

Lorena, TX

Lorena Cemetery was set aside in 1881 by pioneer Daniel Aerl just as railroad financier Gen. Grenville M. Dodge bought sixty acres and platted a town along his Missouri, Kansas and Texas line. Dodge named the village for Lorena Westbrook Robertson, a local landowner's daughter who is buried here, and the ground fills with the graves of pioneer families, community founders, and veterans, its earliest burials the infant Lemuel Crook and young Jacky Pool.