Westward Expansion

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

This plaque marks the 1992 centennial of Matinecock Lodge No. 806 of the Free and Accepted Masons, a fraternal chapter chartered on Long Island in 1892. Its most famous brother was Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president, whose nearby Sagamore Hill estate in Oyster Bay was his beloved home and 'Summer White House.' Roosevelt was raised as a Master Mason in this very lodge in 1901, the same year he ascended to the presidency, and he remained a proud member until his death in 1919. Masonic fraternity ran deep in American civic life of the era, and Roosevelt often spoke of how the lodge let a president stand as an equal among his neighbors.

Lampasas, TX

Matt Smith came to Burnet County as a boy and built a career on the Texas frontier as a deputy sheriff and deputy U.S. Marshal. After marrying Rebecca Wells in 1891, the couple moved to Lampasas in 1896, where they ran the Lampasas Hotel with its restaurant and saloon. Around 1902 they built this Queen Anne cottage, with the scrolled brackets and cross gables typical of the style.

Hemphill, TX

Georgia-born Matthew Arnold Parker came to Texas from Louisiana in 1822, settling on land later confirmed as his headright grant in Sabine County. He served in the Defensive Sabine Volunteers in 1836, and that December President Sam Houston appointed him the county's first chief justice, a post akin to county judge. Parker later sat on a commission rooting out fraudulent land claims, married twice, and fathered sixteen children before his death in 1862.

Houston, TX

Matthew Burnett and his wife Sarah came from Arkansas in 1831 and settled on Cypress Creek near the Harrisburg Road. Their homesite became a waypoint of the Texas Revolution: the Republic's interim government paused here in March 1836, and on the evening of April 16 Sam Houston's army of some 1,100 men camped here, consuming the family's livestock and grain before marching on. Four days later that army won independence at San Jacinto, and the Burnetts—refugees of the Runaway Scrape—returned to make their home a well-known tavern on the road to Houston.

Corpus Christi, TX

Matthew Dunn arrived from Ireland and hitched his fortunes to the American army, enlisting as a sutler — a civilian supplier — with Gen. Zachary Taylor's troops, who landed at Corpus Christi in 1845 on the eve of the Mexican War. There he met Col. Henry Kinney, the town's founding promoter, who urged Dunn to bring his four brothers over from Ireland; between 1849 and 1868 they did, and Kinney deeded Dunn some of his land. From this frontier foothold the Dunns became one of South Texas's prominent families.

San Francisco, CA

This sculpture honors Hall McAllister, one of the towering figures of San Francisco's early legal community. Arriving in California around the Gold Rush, he built a reputation as a brilliant and combative courtroom advocate during the decades when the young state was still writing its laws and settling wild property and mining disputes. The book carved with 'LEX'—Latin for 'law'—and the tribute to a 'courteous foe' capture how a frontier bar prized both eloquence and honor.

New Diana, TX

Families from Alabama and Georgia settled this area in the 1850s, and oral tradition holds that enslaved people were among the first buried here, with the earliest recorded grave that of Milla Ann Greer Oliver in 1861. Deeded for a church and cemetery by William and Martha Greer in 1887, the "Old Family Cemetery" holds more than four hundred burials, including veterans of every conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam. A cemetery association formed in 1970 to care for the grounds.

Maud, TX

Organized as a mission in 1874 by a circuit-riding Methodist minister on a farm in the Three Springs community, this congregation built its first meetinghouse right away on the Ball family's land. Charter member Samuel D. Knapp went on to found the town of Maud and serve as its first postmaster, donating the site to which the building was moved in 1880. The mission became a full church in 1897, and after a tornado and several rebuildings the present sanctuary went up in 1940.

Ballinger, TX

Founded in the 1870s in prime ranching country, this community took the name of Samuel A. Maverick, who came to Texas in 1835 and fought in the war for independence. A signer and delegate at the 1861 Secession Convention, Maverick was such a figure that his refusal to brand his cattle gave the English language the word "maverick." His landholdings here in 1853 tied his name to this stretch of open range.

Eagle Pass, TX

Carved from Kinney County in 1856 and organized in 1871, Maverick County took its name from Samuel A. Maverick, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Its county seat, Eagle Pass, sits where the storied El Camino Real crossed the Rio Grande — the same road that carried Spanish missionaries, the explorer Louis St. Denis, Moses Austin, and generations of troops and settlers into Texas. The land holds Spanish mission ruins and old military posts, including Fort Duncan, which sheltered both U.S. and Confederate soldiers.

Eagle Pass, TX

Built in 1884–85 on land chosen by a citizens' committee, the Maverick County Courthouse rose as a fortress-like Victorian landmark on the Texas–Mexico border, its crenelated tower still keeping time with its original E. Howard works. Within its walls unfolded the sensational 1889 trial of Dick Duncan, convicted of murder on evidence gathered by Texas Rangers and hanged in 1891 in the county's only capital execution. The courthouse remains a striking monument to law and civic ambition on the frontier.

Killeen vicinity, TX

One of the oldest cemeteries in Bell County, this burial ground began in the 1860s serving the rural community of Pleasant Grove. When Frank N. McBryde, Sr. — who donated the land — secured a post office in 1883, the settlement took the name Maxdale. Its earliest documented grave is that of a young woman who died in 1867, and among those laid to rest here are pioneer settlers and veterans reaching from the Civil War through Korea.

Briarcliff, TX

James Edward Maxey brought his family from Arkansas to Texas in the 1850s, eventually settling in western Travis County where the Pedernales meets the Colorado. The cemetery began in grief: his three-year-old grandson Alfred died of a snakebite in 1873 and was laid to rest on a shaded knoll, the first of the family burials. Maxey later served as the first postmaster of the nearby 'Mud' post office, and the little community he helped anchor faded as its school and post office closed in the early twentieth century.

May, TX

Methodism reached this corner of Brown County with circuit-riding preachers in the 1860s, holding services in private homes before Mt. Zion Methodist Church was organized in 1882. The May Methodist Church formally took shape in 1886, gathering in a schoolhouse until members built their own one-room church in 1894 and later a brick sanctuary with stained glass. Fire destroyed that building in 2000, but the congregation's century-plus of service through depression, drought, and war endured.

Yoakum, TX

This sturdy dogtrot house of hewn logs and stone chimneys went up in the 1840s, the frontier years when Texas was passing from republic to statehood. Built for the family of John Joseph May and later home to the Hickeys, its open central passage was a hallmark of early Texas building, designed to catch the breeze in a hot climate.

Killeen, TX

This small graveyard dates to the late nineteenth century, though only one headstone — that of James Moses Cowan, who died in 1888 — remains legible among an estimated dozen to twenty burials. Other graves are marked with plain fieldstones or nothing at all, and local tradition places members of the pioneer O.M. Hood family here. The land was folded into Fort Hood in 1942, and the site took the name Mayberry Park Cemetery only in the mid-twentieth century.

Maypearl, TX

Maypearl sprang up on the International & Great Northern line in 1903, and when landowner William P. Wilemon died in 1907 and was buried on his farm, townsfolk resolved to make a proper cemetery. His widow Minnie sold four acres, including his grave, to trustees for the purpose, and the grounds came to hold the doctors, teachers, farmers, and fraternal members who built the town. Tombstones mark veterans of wars from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Maysfield, TX

Area Methodists were meeting as early as 1847, but this congregation was not formally organized until 1854, served by itinerant circuit-riding preachers who first gathered worshippers in a schoolhouse. A separate Maysfield circuit came in 1885, and a sanctuary was built in 1897 that stood until fire destroyed it in 1933. The congregation worshipped in the local Presbyterian church until 1952, when its present building was donated and moved in from Ben Arnold.

Rockport, TX

Tucked among hackberry, mesquite, and live oak on Texas's Coastal Bend, this family burying ground dates to the turn of the twentieth century, when Charles H. McLester—an engineer on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad—and his wife Eliza inherited the land in 1903. The McLesters were among the vegetable farmers of the nearby Sparks Colony, and the first grave, dug in 1909, held their thirteen-year-old son Bennie. Generations of educators, city officials, and veterans followed, and descendants still tend the plot.

Walker County, TX

John McAdams, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, brought his family to what became Walker County around 1840 and built a life as a rancher, planter, and mill owner; the community that grew around his land took his name. The cemetery began in 1849 with the burial of his first wife, Hester, and grew over generations to hold family, neighbors, and a separate section McAdams set aside for the people he enslaved. Maintained since 1937 by a cemetery association, it now spans nearly thirteen acres.

Walker County, TX

John McAdams III, a veteran of the Texas Revolution and the Republic of Texas Army, moved from the Sabine District to present Walker County and, with his first wife Hester White, built this home in the 1840s. A land speculator, planter, and rancher, he also ran a cotton gin and sawmill, and the surrounding area became the McAdams community, with a post office from 1888 to 1917. The house was moved here in 1968 from its original site a mile east.

Jackson Township, PA · est. 2018

In 1778, as the Revolution reached the Pennsylvania frontier, Col. William McAlevy — a pioneer settler and Revolutionary War officer — raised a blockhouse near this spot to shelter early settlers from raids. Decades later, in the 1840s, the entrepreneur Robert McBurney founded a village here and spent the following years developing it. Nearby 19th-century ironworks and mills fueled the community's growth, layering an industrial chapter atop its frontier origins.

McAllen, TX

Methodism reached the lower Rio Grande Valley by 1849, when circuit-riding preachers covered the long river country from Brownsville to Roma on horseback. When McAllen took root, the Rev. C. W. Godwyn arrived in 1909 to gather local Methodists, and a modest frame sanctuary went up that same year. Growth came quickly in the booming Valley town, prompting a larger building in 1913 and the present church in 1928.

McAllen, TX

Chartered in December 1915 by Master Mason R. M. Bounds and some thirty fellow Masons, this lodge first met in early downtown McAllen commercial buildings before erecting its own temple here in 1927. Its membership drew from many Masonic jurisdictions and included two men who rose to serve as Grand Masters. The lodge has remained an active force in the civic life of McAllen for more than a century.

Linn, TX

The McAllen Ranch reaches back to Spanish colonial Texas, when José de Escandón's Nuevo Santander opened the lower Rio Grande and José Manuel Gómez received the vast 95,000-acre Santa Anita grant in 1790. Through marriages and shrewd purchases, the grant passed to María Salomé Ballí, who with Irish immigrant John McAllen reunited and expanded the holdings to more than 160,000 acres, supplying beef and hides—and refuge—to both sides during the Civil War. Run under the SM brand by her descendants, it became one of the oldest Texas ranches in continuous family operation.

White Hall, TX

Around 1851 North Carolina native Dugald McAlpine settled the pioneer community of Wallace's Prairie and bought a large tract that included several early burial sites. His relative Malcomb was interred here in 1866, and McAlpine fenced the grounds as a family graveyard before his own death in 1876; descendants deeded three acres for cemetery use in 1886. Those buried here span former slaves, McAlpine kin, civic leaders, and veterans of wars from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Lometa vicinity, TX

Robert D. McAnelly arrived in this country in the early 1830s and worked as a surveyor mapping large tracts of the surrounding land, his homestead marking a threshold for the settlement of Lampasas and San Saba counties. McAnelly's Bend on the river took his name in 1858, and his son Cornelius was recorded as the first white child born in Lampasas County. The marker commemorates the family's role in opening this stretch of central Texas frontier.

Amarillo, TX

In 1903 pioneer settler David Nichols McBride quarried Alibates dolomite from the canyon rim and burned his own lime on site to raise this Panhandle ranch house, framing it with timbers salvaged from an old railroad bridge over the Canadian River. Having claimed his homestead in the heart of the vast, London-owned LX Ranch, McBride proved up his land under the patient terms of state settlement law. The house survived him and eventually passed to the National Park Service within the Lake Meredith recreation area.

Killeen vicinity, TX

When Mancel T. McBryde brought his family from Georgia to Bell County in the early 1860s, the Texas frontier was still a place where families made their own institutions—including where to lay their dead. Upon his wife Jane's death in 1885, he chose a rise south of the family home for her grave, beginning a burial ground that gathered McBryde and Hoover descendants, their graves facing east and the oldest ringed in stone. Kin still tend it today.

McCamey, TX

McCamey sprang up almost overnight in 1926 when a wildcat well came in, and within a year some ten thousand people had rushed to the new oil town. Named for driller George B. McCamey, whose discovery well opened dozens of fields across Upton County, it settled into a durable life of ranching—horses, sheep, and goats—once the boom cooled. Its parks and the Mendoza Trail Museum keep the memory of that frenzied birth alive.

Crockett, TX

John McCarter was born in Pennsylvania in 1813 and came to Texas in 1832, four years before the Republic itself was born, settling with his wife Jane and their nine children on a farmstead in Houston County. Like many pioneer families, they set aside a corner of their land as a burial ground, and John became its first occupant when he died in 1895. In 1907 Jane formally deeded the plot to the surrounding community, tying the graveyard to the schoolhouse settlement that grew up nearby. Descendants still gather each year to tend the graves.

Angelina County, TX

In 1860 Orange McCarty and his wife Mary Arrington bought a large tract in Angelina County, but their planned move from Mississippi stalled when the Civil War erupted and two of their sons died fighting for the Confederacy. The surviving family, joined by the Arringtons and McCalls, finally settled here in 1866 and built a log cabin above Jack Creek, setting aside this acre for burials that were in use by 1873. It endures as the resting place of a founding Angelina County pioneer family.

Beeville, TX

Erected about 1867 near Poesta Creek on the courthouse square, this is Beeville's oldest business building—a pioneer-western structure with southern porches that housed a general store, lodging house, and post office. It was built by G. W. McClanahan, the town's first merchant, who also served as schoolteacher, postmaster, county clerk, innkeeper, and Sunday school superintendent.

Flower Mound, TX

This small community burial ground dates to the 1850s, before Denton was even chosen as county seat. Here lie pioneers who came from Tennessee in 1855—the Boyd, McCombs, Nowlin, Sigler, and Rivers families—including Nehemiah Boyd, who died of pneumonia after being caught by a blue norther while raising a log cabin for his family. Archaeological evidence suggests as many as 100 people were buried here between the 1850s and 1890s, their graves once marked by native sandstone.

McCook, TX

McCook was settled in the 1920s by descendants of the Polish colonists who founded Panna Maria in 1854—the oldest Polish settlement in the United States. Urban Kotzur, his son Leon, and neighbor Frank Prukop bought land here in 1925, and the Kotzurs arrived in 1926 to clear the South Texas brush for farming. A post office, a school, and Immaculate Conception Catholic Church soon followed, extending a Polish-American community deep into the Rio Grande Valley.

Honey Grove, TX

Settlers farming the blackland prairie gathered in Ezekiel Phillips Warren's home in 1859 to organize a Methodist congregation, and in 1877 William Bain McCraw and others donated land for a church and cemetery. The grounds hosted ten-day summer camp meetings and even a school taught in the church building, becoming an anchor for the community. Though the congregation disbanded in 1966 and the building was razed in 1983, an annual homecoming still draws people back each May.

Dallas, TX

Mahulda Bonner McCree granted the first land for this cemetery in 1866, though burials had already taken place here during the Civil War years. Over time it grew to more than three acres, gathering the graves of Peters colonists, war veterans, and many families tied to the area's early Methodist and Baptist churches. It remains a well-documented record of early Dallas County settlement.

Brazoria, TX

Tanner John McCroskey came to Texas among Stephen F. Austin's 'Old 300' colonists and built this home to satisfy his 1824 Mexican land grant. Its later owners read like a roll call of early Texas: Oliver Jones, who chaired the commission that designed the Republic's flag and seal; district judge and legislator Robert J. Townes; and Asa Stratton, under whom the land became a sugar and cotton plantation. Nannie Stringfellow preserved the dwelling after 1945.

Bogata, TX

When the three McCrury brothers and their two sisters came down from Missouri in 1835, they were joining the thin scatter of Anglo settlers pushing into what was still Mexican Texas. The private burying ground on John McCrury's land opened with his own death in 1864 and slowly grew into the community graveyard for the surrounding McCrury area, gathering the pioneer families of Red River County. Formally recorded as a cemetery in 1953, it is still tended by a local association.

San Antonio, TX

This burial ground traces to Samuel McCulloch, Jr., wounded at Goliad in October 1835 in the opening weeks of the Texas Revolution and long remembered as among its first casualties. He received this land as a bounty for that service, and the earliest marked grave belongs to his father, who died in 1855. After McCulloch deeded acreage to a Baptist congregation in 1861, the site grew into a community cemetery holding area pioneers, Civil War veterans, and noted potter Louis Meyer.

Brady, TX

Created in 1856 from the vast Bexar territory, McCulloch County honors Ben McCulloch, a Texas hero who fought in the Revolution and in the Indian, Mexican, and Civil Wars. Frontier and Indian dangers slowed settlement so severely that two decades passed before the buffalo were hunted off and ranches took hold, and the county finally organized in 1876 with Brady as its seat. It holds the geographic center of Texas and the site of the 1831 Calf Creek fight, where James Bowie battled a much larger Indian force.

Brady, TX

McCulloch County was organized in 1876 as settlement pushed into the Texas Hill Country, with Brady chosen as its seat and a first courthouse raised in 1879. The present building, completed in 1900 by contractors Martin and Moodie, was a "turn-key" job that leaned on local hands and native sandstone quarried nearby. Its Modified Roman lines, arched vaulting, Victorian cupola, and pine woodwork made it the dignified heart of county government.

Brady, TX

Built in 1909–1910 by the Southern Structural Steel Co. of San Antonio, this red-brick Romanesque Revival building was the second to serve as the McCulloch County Jail. Sheriff T. L. Sansom was its first resident, living in the first-floor jailer's quarters while prisoners were held in cells on the upper two floors. When a new jail opened in 1974, the old building found new life as home to the Heart of Texas Historical Museum.

Laneville, TX

McCune Cemetery grew out of the Chinquapin community in the pine country of Rusk County, its roots reaching back to pioneer James L. McCune, who came to Texas in David G. Burnet's colony and took a land grant in 1835. His son married a local Cherokee woman, Delila Storm, in 1836, and their third child's 1852 burial opened the family graveyard. More than 200 graves now rest beneath hickories, oaks, and chinquapins on land still held by McCune heirs.

Lewisville, TX

The McCurley family came from Illinois to settle Denton County in 1852, and George Collins McCurley set aside land here for a burial ground, church, and school. His brother Abraham, who died in 1871, was the first family member laid to rest, and by 1877 neighbors were burying their dead here too. When Lewisville Lake was created in 1951, all 106 graves had to be relocated to this spot beside Old Hall Cemetery, where George McCurley himself is buried.

McDade, TX

Laid out in 1871 and named for Brenham lawyer James McDade, this Bastrop County town grew into a busy freight center and stagecoach stop, its school-church raised the following year. But prosperity came with lawlessness: a vigilante group organized in 1883 hanged three men on Christmas Eve, and the next day's reckoning erupted in a gunfight at the Rock Saloon, a building that survives today as a museum.

New Summerfield, TX

This community cemetery grew up on the 1850s homestead of William and Clarissa Johnson, with its earliest documented burials — two young daughters of a local doctor — dating to 1856. After Clarissa remarried in 1858, the land became the McDonald Farm, and by 1870 the small graveyard was serving the whole community as McDonald Cemetery. Today it holds more than 550 documented graves, plus many unmarked, spanning well over a century of Cherokee County life.

Klein, TX

In 1838 George McDougle brought his family to 100 acres carved from the John House survey, building a home and raising cattle on land his descendants would hold for a full century. This small burying ground reflects the 19th-century Texas custom of interring kin near the homestead; among its graves lie a Texas Ranger, a Civil War veteran who served as a Harris County commissioner, and several generations of the family.

Beaumont, TX

This classical revival mansion rose in 1906 on the homestead of William McFaddin, who had received land from the Republic of Texas for his service at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto and went on to build a sprawling ranching empire. Architect Henry Conrad Mauer designed the house for McFaddin's daughter, and it passed down through the family for generations. It stands amid the wealth generated by Southeast Texas ranching and the oil that gushed from nearby Spindletop.

Bleakwood, TX

Family tradition holds that Colonel Thomas S. McFarland set aside this ground as a family burial place around 1840, when he and his father William were figures of standing in the young Republic of Texas. The land later passed to the Wilson family, whose members began to be laid here in the 1890s. Descendants still tend the graves, keeping alive the memory of two pioneer East Texas families.

Crane, TX

Crane County's oldest house was built in 1909 by pioneer rancher R. D. McGee, on land he had homesteaded more than two decades before the county was even organized. Its classic 'dog-trot' plan—two rooms flanking an open central passage—was a practical answer to the West Texas heat. Hauling the lumber from Odessa took wagons three full days across the open range.

San Marcos, TX

This spot marks where the Camino Real—the King's Highway from Nacogdoches to the Rio Grande—forded the San Marcos River. The French explorer St. Denis traveled it in 1714 to open trade with the Spanish, and the Austins likely crossed near here during their 1820–21 colonization efforts. Thomas McGehee settled on the east bank around 1846, and the family's long association gave the crossing its name.

Alice, TX

Sons of a Mississippi family, the McGill brothers built one of South Texas's notable ranching operations, purchasing the Santa Rosa Ranch in 1916 and rising to lead the Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. In 1941 Frank McGill erected this office building for the family's ranching enterprise, reportedly patterning it after San Antonio's Alamo, which had impressed him on a visit. With its corbelled stone parapet and Greek touches, it later passed to a museum corporation as a South Texas landmark.

Tarkington, TX

Established in 1861, McGinnis Cemetery began at the very outset of the Civil War, when the farming families of rural Liberty County were being drawn into the conflict that would reshape Texas. Frontier cemeteries of this era often gathered pioneer settlers and the war generation side by side. It carries a Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

Milam, TX

McGown Cemetery opened with the 1842 burial of pioneer Anne Kyle, just five years after Sabine County was organized. Its namesake, George Washington McGown, served as a justice of the peace during the Republic of Texas era and became the first of his family laid to rest here in 1859. Civil War veterans followed, among them his son Andrew, a four-term county sheriff, and members of the prominent Browning family.

Saint Jo, TX

Allen R. McGrady and his wife Elizabeth Cox McGrady moved to this area along Clear Creek in 1859, settling on 160 acres. The cemetery began in the 1860s after a McGrady employee was killed by Indians and buried on the family farm, and an acre was set aside as a graveyard for family and neighbors. Allen and Elizabeth, who both died in September 1899, are buried here among the pioneers of Montague County.

Nelsonville, TX

In the early 1850s a close-knit band of Scottish immigrants—McGregors, Carmichaels, McLeans and more, many from the isle of Lismore in Argyllshire—settled western Austin County by way of North Carolina. They founded Galatia Presbyterian Church and, in 1868, opened this graveyard with the burial of Mary McGregor. When the last interment came in 1900, the cemetery remained as the community's final trace.

Wills Point, TX

Thomas J. McKain came to Texas from Florida in 1870 and, four years later, built this house for his bride Mattie Cornelia Bagby — the first couple married in the young town of Wills Point. The lumber traveled by ox-wagon all the way from Longview. A merchant who promoted immigration to Texas, McKain served repeatedly as mayor along with stints as alderman and school trustee, helping shape the community in its formative decades.

Richardson, TX

Long before European or American settlers reached North Texas, Native peoples camped around the natural spring now called McKamy Spring, one of the few above-ground springs still surviving in the area. Early settlers of Breckenridge—the community that preceded Richardson—used it as Bowser Spring until the railroad drew the town elsewhere. Richardson's first mayor, Thomas McKamy, later drew on the spring to supply water for wells and even the construction of the Central Expressway, bought the surrounding land, and placed a marker there honoring the Native Americans who had used it before him.

Groesbeck, TX

This burial ground lies in what was once McKenzie Prairie, named for Joseph S. McKenzie and his family, who settled here in 1853. Its oldest grave belongs to Elizabeth Etemon and her infant daughter, who died passing through in 1865; the McKenzies gave land for the burial and marked it with a sandstone stone that Elizabeth's grieving husband carved before continuing his journey. From that single act of kindness the one-acre plot grew into a community cemetery for the McKenzies, their neighbors, and their descendants.