Westward Expansion

McKinney, TX

McKinney was founded in 1845 and named for Collin McKinney, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence—the same man who gave his name to the surrounding county. During the Civil War, future Texas governor J. W. Throckmorton raised Company K of the 6th Texas Cavalry here, a well-regarded Confederate unit. The town grew into a center of manufacturing, trade, and medicine for the region.

Waxahachie, TX

Henry McKinney rode a year with Company C of the Texas Rangers' Frontier Battalion before settling near Waxahachie, where he and his wife Viola bought a 71-acre tract in the fertile Blackland Prairie in 1903. In 1913 he hired local builder Jack Harris to raise this 2,000-square-foot Prairie-Style farmhouse, its wrap-around porch, dormers, and cedar-shake roof completed that August. With its original barn, corrals, and chicken house still standing, it remains one of rural Ellis County's few intact early-20th-century family farmsteads.

Hillsboro, TX

This Victorian house was built in 1896 by A. P. McKinnon, a Georgia-born lawyer who came to Hillsboro in 1873 and earned a wide reputation for his exacting ethics and busy practice. In 1903 it passed to banker Samuel Houston Anderson, who lived here 35 years, and since 1966 it has been lovingly preserved as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

McKinney, TX

This burial ground began in 1851 as a private grief, when settler John R. Jones laid his infant son to rest here, and it soon grew into a public cemetery for the pioneer families of the Wilmeth settlement. The McLarry family donated the land, and the community namesake J.B. Wilmeth lies among the graves. Generations of descendants still tend the site, making it a living register of Collin County's earliest settlers.

Rogers, TX

Established in 1885, McLean Cemetery served the farming families of the blackland prairie around Rogers in Bell County during the boom decades that followed the arrival of the railroads in Central Texas. Community cemeteries of the Gilded Age tracked the steady growth of settlement across the region. It holds a Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

McLean, TX

Organized in the early 1900s as settlers filled the Texas Panhandle, this congregation is thought to be the oldest denominational church in Gray County. Methodists in McLean met in a one-room schoolhouse under the first pastor, the Rev. G. R. Fort, until they built their first sanctuary here in 1904. Lay groups such as the Ladies Home Missionary Society gave the young town service and leadership, and descendants of the founders still worship here.

Waco, TX

McLennan County was created and organized in 1850, named for Neil McLennan (1787–1867), a Scottish-born pioneer who came to Texas in 1835 and settled on the Bosque River in 1840. He built the area's first dwelling, a log cabin, near what became Waco, the county seat. His name endures on one of Central Texas's most important counties.

Rosebud, TX

Scottish immigrant Neil McLennan built his home on this bluff above Pond Creek in 1835 on land granted through Sterling Robertson's colony, part of the first wave of Anglo settlement in central Texas. Frontier life was perilous: in 1836 his brother Laughlin's family was attacked, and the McLennans sheltered for years in the fortified town of Nashville. Neil later scouted the country that would bear his name, settling in McLennan County until his death in 1867, while Rosebud grew up on his old grant.

Geneva, TX

McMahan's Chapel traces its roots to 1833, when a "religious society" gathered at Colonel Samuel McMahan's home, becoming a Methodist congregation the next year and completing its first building in 1839 under the Rev. Littleton Fowler. It is remembered as the oldest continuously existing Methodist church in Texas. Established in the days of the Republic, it has rebuilt twice while never breaking its line of worship.

Murphy, TX

This medallion marks McMillen Cemetery, established in 1901 and later designated a Historic Texas Cemetery. Burial grounds like it anchored the small farming communities that dotted Collin County's Blackland Prairie in the early twentieth century, often outlasting the settlements they once served.

Nevada, TX

John W. and Evaline McMinn settled this Collin County prairie in 1849, and the community that grew around them took their name. They gave land for a cemetery in 1894, though burials here reach back to 1877, and residents added a church and school to anchor the settlement. When the railroad reached nearby Nevada, families drifted toward the town, and today the graveyard is nearly all that remains of the McMinn community.

Tilden, TX

McMullen County was carved out of the South Texas brush country in 1858 and organized in 1862, only to be abandoned during the Civil War when bandits ruled its thickets; it was reorganized in 1877 with Tilden as its seat. It honors John McMullen, an empresario who, with James McGloin, planted the Irish colony at San Patricio and served in the provisional government on the eve of the Texas Republic. The marker also surveys how Texas's 254 counties got their names, from Alamo defenders to Confederate figures.

Huntingdon, PA · est. 1955

David McMurtrie built this substantial house in 1817, when Huntingdon was still a young town on the Juniata. The McMurtries were a pioneer family who took the lead in local politics and business during the early republic. Fittingly, the mansion now shelters the Historical Society and the Library of Huntingdon County, keeping the community's memory under the same roof that once housed its founders.

Luling, TX

Founded about 1867 on land deeded to the Soda Springs Methodist Church by early settler Margret Hinds, this cemetery took its first recorded burial—Henrietta Gant—in 1868. Once known as Soda Springs Methodist Cemetery, it was renamed McNeil sometime before the church disbanded in 1919. More than 390 graves hold the area's early settlers and their descendants, and an association still cares for the grounds.

Crosbyton, TX

In 1882 Brazoria County rancher James Calvin McNeill bought 8,000 acres in Crosby County to grow his cattle operation, later expanding it to more than 18,000 acres. Managing two far-flung ranches proved hard, so in 1890 his cousin George M. Williamson arrived to help, and in 1902 his son James Calvin McNeill Jr. took the reins. When the elder McNeill divided the property among his children in 1930, the ranch had already become a fixture of the region's cattle country.

San Augustine, TX

In 1882 a group of worshippers near San Augustine, dismissed from the town's First Presbyterian Church, organized a new congregation at a place called Union Church. First named for Hugh Wilson, organizer of the first Presbyterian church in Texas, it was soon renamed McRae in honor of the North Carolina minister who helped found it and served as first pastor. Captain T.W. Blount deeded land for a church and the adjoining cemetery, whose oldest marked grave predates the congregation to 1866; though the church dissolved in 1969, the cemetery remains active.

Milam, TX

Virginia-born Dr. Richard A. Meador and his wife Mary Ann came to Sabine County in 1844, when Texas was still an independent republic, and built a home near this site. When their young daughter Sarah died in 1850, they buried her in the family garden for want of a public cemetery, and the plot grew into the Meador Family Cemetery as later generations were laid to rest there. Roughly forty graves remain, tended by a family association.

Meadow, TX

Meadow began in 1904 on open land grazed by the L-7 Ranch, then moved in 1917 to meet the Santa Fe Railway line — settlers famously arriving in boxcars, livestock in one end and furniture in the other. A boxcar first served as the station until this depot, built in 1911 far to the northeast at White Deer, was moved here in 1923 and used until 1965. Preserved in a park in 1967, it survives as a relic of the town's railroad beginnings.

Meadow, TX

Methodist services reached this corner of West Texas as early as 1904 through pioneer circuit rider the Rev. J. A. Sweeney, and in 1920 the Rev. J. W. Baughman formally organized the congregation with seventeen charter members. Worshippers met in the schoolhouse and the Baptist church until they built their own sanctuary in 1922. Long tied to the Plains Circuit, the church welcomed its first full-time pastor in 1951.

Meadville, PA

In 1788, David Mead and a small band of settlers pushed west from Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley to plant a settlement on French Creek, in country only recently opened to American pioneers. The town they founded grew quickly enough to become the seat of Crawford County by 1800, and it went on to leave two very different marks on the nation: in 1842 it staged what is remembered as the first direct primary election in the United States, and decades later it became a cradle of the 'hookless fastener' — the humble zipper — turning a frontier outpost into an unlikely engine of American invention.

Andrews, TX

When a circuit-riding preacher gathered seven charter members in 1907, Andrews County had its first church. For years the little flock met in the schoolhouse until a rancher's gift helped raise a one-room sanctuary in 1912, open to worshippers of every denomination. Fire took that building in 1944, but the congregation rebuilt, growing by the 1950s into a sanctuary seating hundreds.

Odem, TX

Col. William Marshall Means, a veteran of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, settled here in the 1850s and served as county sheriff, and a Methodist-built two-story hall became the heart of Meansville. The community's promise collapsed after 1876, when a shooting spree by the colonel's sons led to a deadly manhunt, the killing of Means and a sheriff, and finally a Texas Ranger order forcing the family out. Nearby Kaleta rose and faded in turn, its school and post office gone and the town wiped from the map by the great storm of 1919.

Medicine Mound, TX

The area's earliest inhabitants were Comanche and Kiowa people who camped around four dolomite hills—the Medicine Mounds—prized for their healing properties. After the land was deeded to a railway in 1854 and Anglo settlers arrived in the 1870s, a small village grew, then relocated 2.5 miles north in 1908 when the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway came through. At its peak Medicine Mound held 22 businesses and 500 people, but the Depression and a 1933 fire that burned the whole town drove its decline, and the last business closed in 1966.

Hondo, TX

Carved from sprawling Bexar County in early 1848, Medina County took its name from the river winding through it and was organized that same summer, just as Texas settled into its first years of American statehood. Castroville served as the original county seat before Hondo claimed the honor in 1892. The land was, and remains, a country of farms and ranches.

Hondo, TX

When Medina County reorganized its seat of government from Castroville to Hondo in 1892, the commissioners moved fast, letting a contract to build a fitting courthouse almost at once. Completed in 1893 from a slightly yellow limestone quarried on the nearby Decker Ranch, the Classical Revival building — with its rusticated walls, columned portico, and Eastlake stone detailing — anchored the young town. Two-story wings added between 1939 and 1942 drew on the same ranch quarry, tying the expansion to the original.

Beeville, TX

Spaniards named this creek 'Medio'—middle—around 1800 for its position midway between the San Antonio and Nueces Rivers, and explorers, padres, soldiers, and settlers crossed it on three ox-cart roads running from Mexico to Mission La Bahía at Goliad. The freight route sparked the 1857 Cart War between Texan and Mexican teamsters, and Mexican drivers' mesquite-bean feed helped seed the brush that lines the banks today. A downstream community rose and fell here—the town of Candlish, founded in 1909, became a ghost town—while nearby fossil beds later yielded a new species of mastodon.

Graham, TX

Raised in 1882 from sandstone quarried a mile away and set with mortar burned from local lime rock, this little chapel was among the first houses of worship in Young County. Its pews came the hard way, hauled by ox wagon all the way from Sherman, and a local family later deeded the church and its land to the congregation.

Roanoke, TX

In 1847 Charles Medlin and his wife Matilda led a wagon train of some twenty families from Missouri to claim land grants on Denton Creek. After floods scattered their first settlement, the group moved to higher ground and seeded the town that became Roanoke. When Charles's daughter Mittie Ann died in 1850, she was buried on a hill she had admired, opening one of Denton County's oldest cemeteries—where her parents, thirteen siblings, and generations of neighbors now rest.

Elgin, TX

This modest cabin of quarter-notched cedar logs was raised in 1854 by Nathan Meeks, with the help of Thomas Hughes, during the first wave of Anglo settlement across central Texas. Hand-built log dwellings like this one were the practical starting point for pioneer families carving farms out of the Bastrop County landscape.

Megargel, TX

In the 1880s Archer County drew settlers including Irish native James Colgan and numerous families of Bohemian descent bearing names like Kulhanek, Bohac, and Pechacek. When the GT&W Railroad arrived in 1910, the town of Megargel was founded, and that same year Dr. W.T. Webb buried his infant son here in the first grave of what became the community cemetery. Maintained by an association, it holds settlers and military veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War.

Melissa, TX

This cemetery has served the Melissa community for generations, tracing its roots to the pioneer Sherley family whose oldest graves date to the 1850s. Formally established in 1889, it gathers early settlers—including a Confederate captain and veterans of conflicts from the Mexican War through World War II—into a single burial ground. A related family plot that once held enslaved people became the nearby St. Paul Cemetery, a reminder of the community's divided past.

Melissa, TX

This North Texas congregation grew out of religious gatherings held in a local schoolhouse as early as 1868, raising its first sanctuary near this spot in 1878. After a 1921 tornado leveled that building, local contractor W. N. Osburn led church volunteers in erecting the present structure in 1924, giving it modest classical touches like entrance pediments and a dentil cornice. Many worshippers today descend from the church's charter members.

Marietta, OH

This ground has anchored Marietta's Presbyterian congregation for well over a century. A church rose here in 1865, and in 1897 the grander First Presbyterian Church was built alongside it. The original 1865 building was removed in 2014, and two years later a Memorial Garden took its place, incorporating surviving elements of the old church's foundation.

Victoria, TX

Laid out in 1824 when Martín de León founded Victoria in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, this square was the town's oldest public burial ground. Pioneers, Texas Revolution soldiers of 1836, and later citizens of a cholera epidemic were interred here, along with soldiers under General Zachary Taylor and, during the Civil War, Confederate dead. After the war some occupying Federal troops destroyed headstones, leaving most graves unknown, and since 1899 the ground has been set aside as Memorial Square.

Marietta, OH

Marietta was founded in 1788 by veterans of the Continental Army, who carried their Revolutionary service into the wilderness of the new Northwest Territory. Raised by the Marietta Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, this memorial honors those soldiers laid to rest in the town, and the pioneering men and women who built the first organized American settlement beyond the Ohio River.

Livingston, TX

The community here traces to 1833, when Michel B. Menard — later a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence — and his brother Pierre settled along Menard Creek. A Baptist congregation built an early sanctuary before mid-century, and after the Civil War a donated tract gave the settlement a combined church and schoolhouse that taught local children for decades; one early teacher went on to the state senate. The school closed with consolidation in 1935, but the church served into the 1980s, and the cemetery — holding veterans of three wars — is still cared for today.

Menard, TX

Carved from Bexar County and created in 1858, Menard County honors Michel Branamour Menard (1805–1856), a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, a member of the Texas Congress, and the founder of Galveston. Organized after the Civil War in 1866, the county took the name of this early Texas statesman, with the town of Menard as its seat.

McCamey, TX

In 1683–1684, Lt. Gen. Juan Dominguez de Mendoza led a party of 35 across the future Upton County on a Spanish expedition to explore the Pecos Plains, gather river pearls, and bring Christianity to the Jumano Indians. Setting out from below El Paso, the group founded San Clemente Mission where the Concho met the Colorado. Two centuries later, cattlemen following the Goodnight-Loving trail retraced part of Mendoza's route.

Rio Vista, TX

This site marks the long-running reunion of the Menefee family, begun in 1890 and held here since 1891. Their Texas ancestor, William L. Menefee, arrived in 1830, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, helped choose the site of the capital at Austin, and served six terms in the Congress of the Republic. The gathering honors a lineage the marker traces back to colonists reaching America in 1623.

San Antonio, TX

German-born William and Mary Menger opened a boarding house and brewery here in 1855, replacing it in 1859 with a stone hotel on Alamo Plaza that became San Antonio's finest. Cattlemen like Richard King lodged here during the great cattle drives, and guests ranged from Generals Grant, Lee, and Pershing to writers O. Henry and Sidney Lanier. In 1898 Theodore Roosevelt recruited his Rough Riders at the Menger for the Spanish-American War.

El Reno, OK

In 1891 twenty-seven charter members organized Mennoville as the first Mennonite church in Oklahoma Territory, raising their sanctuary in 1893 just two years after the great Land Run opened the region to settlement. The congregation drew Swiss, German, and German-Russian farmers, some tied to the nearby Mennonite mission school for Cheyenne and Arapaho children at the Darlington Agency. Services continued for 61 years, and in 1997 the historic building was moved to Heritage Square in El Reno.

Mentone, TX

Mentone is the seat of Loving County, the last-organized and most sparsely populated county in Texas, and in 1931 it took its name from an earlier town said to have been christened by a French surveyor after his home on the Riviera. With a population of just forty-two and no water system—water is trucked in—the town has no bank, doctor, newspaper, or cemetery. Its country runs on oil, cattle, and farming amid the scattered traces of earlier inhabitants.

Mentone, TX

Mentone is the only town in Loving County — the last-organized and most sparsely populated county in Texas — and serves as the smallest county seat in the state. Established in 1931 and named for an earlier settlement that legend traces to a French surveyor homesick for the Riviera, the town has famously done without a water system (water is hauled in), a bank, doctor, hospital, newspaper, or cemetery. It endures on oil, farming, and cattle in a corner of West Texas so empty the county records only two graves.

Columbus, TX

Beginning in the 1830s, German immigrants seeking land beyond the formal colonization schemes filtered into this stretch of the Colorado River country near Cat Spring. Two focal points grew up: Mentz, whose predominantly Roman Catholic settlers named it for their homeland and founded St. Roch parish by 1858, and Bernardo, a community on the prairie route from Houston to the interior. Once distinct, the two settlements merged into a shared German-flavored rural life still carried on by descendants.

Mercer, PA · est. 1983

Mercer County was established in 1800 from Allegheny County when this corner of western Pennsylvania was still thinly settled frontier, home to just over three thousand people. It honors General Hugh Mercer, the Revolutionary War officer mortally wounded at the Battle of Princeton in 1777. Rich in iron ore and coal, the region became an early center of industry, and the county seat of Mercer was incorporated in 1814.

Fruitvale, TX

In 1844 Charles Fenton Mercer secured a contract to settle 500 families across a vast tract of north-central Texas spanning parts of eighteen present-day counties. Legal tangles complicated the venture and Mercer withdrew in 1852, but land certificates were issued and settlers put down roots; this marker fixes the eastern edge of that ambitious colony.

Sherman, TX

Founded in 1872 with $150,000 in capital, this was one of the oldest banks in North Texas, replacing Sherman's informal "Pecan Tree Bank" where traders had literally hung gold-filled saddlebags in a tree for 22 years. Serving ranchers, farmers, and traders across North Texas and the neighboring Indian Territory, it helped fuel the young city's growth and became a national bank in 1884.

Athens, TX

After North Carolina's Eber Meredith settled his family here in the 1850s, a Methodist congregation gathered under a brush arbor in 1876, and by 1878 Meredith had deeded ten acres for a church and open-air tabernacle. The annual summer camp meetings grew famous across East Texas, drawing crowds of up to 2,000, while the adjoining cemetery gathered generations of settlers and veterans; the present tabernacle, with its distinctive stepped hipped roof and cupola, dates to 1890.

Rio Vista, TX

Built in 1856 by Meredith Hart—an Indian fighter, cattleman, and Texas Ranger—this early home was raised with enslaved labor, its timbers carted by oxen from Louisiana. The hand-hewn, pegged frame used no nails, a testament to frontier craftsmanship. It stands from the last years before the Civil War, when Johnson County was still a raw edge of settlement.

Salt Lake City, UT

This monument marks the Salt Lake Base and Meridian, the fixed reference point from which the public-land surveys of Utah were laid out. Established in the mid-1850s as Mormon settlers organized the valley, the base and meridian anchored the grid of townships and ranges that would define land ownership across the territory. Nearly every property line and road alignment in the region traces back to this single surveyed origin.

Merit, TX

Merit began as an Upland South farming settlement on the rolling Blackland Prairie of Hunt County, its Methodist congregation organized in 1871 and its name drawn from a visiting judge, William W. Merritt. The railroad's arrival in 1886 spurred cotton, stores, lodges, and a newspaper — and in 1912 robbers famously blew the bank vault open with nitroglycerin for $4,500. The community cemetery, deeded by Dr. Alexander Murchison in 1907, still holds veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam and is one of the county's few surviving swept-grave burial grounds.

Corsicana, TX

Born in Kentucky to a wealthy farming family, Meritt Drane set out for Texas in 1858, drawn by "the fire of youth." Unable to serve in the Confederate army because of a disability, he instead helped manage the affairs of soldiers' wives during the Civil War, then built lasting success in farming and stock raising in Navarro County's rich Blackland soil. As a Corsicana civic leader he sold farm machinery, served on the school committee that opened the town's first public schools in 1882, and helped establish the State Orphan Home—so respected that a post office was named "Drane" in his honor.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2003

With William Clark, Meriwether Lewis led the transcontinental expedition of 1803–1806 that opened the newly purchased Louisiana Territory to American knowledge. Philadelphia, then the young nation's scientific capital, was where Lewis prepared for the journey and where he later deposited many of its precious specimens, journals, and artifacts. The city's naturalists and institutions helped translate the expedition's discoveries into lasting science.

Dallas, TX

Elder Eli Merrell, a Disciples of Christ minister born in 1787, settled 640 acres near Bachman's Branch in 1844, and his was the first marked grave in this cemetery on his own land. It became the resting place of pioneers from the surrounding area, including members of the historic Peters Colony. The Strait family, who arrived in 1853, are also buried here; their sons rode with Merrell's in the 19th Cavalry during the Civil War, and their descendants served Dallas as commissioners and police chief.

Dallas, TX

John Merrifield led a Kentucky family west to the Dallas County area in the late 1840s and bought this farm in 1851, part of which became a family burying ground by the late 1860s. Only he and his second wife Elizabeth lie beneath marked stones, but more than twenty unmarked graves surround them. The little cemetery survives as a tie to the pioneers who first opened this region to settlement.

Austin, TX

Captain Nelson Merrell settled here in 1837, opening a store and post office and giving his name to the Merrilltown community. He deeded land for a church, a school, and this burial ground, served as a Travis County commissioner, helped build Congress Avenue in Austin, and led a company of Rangers guarding the settlement. The cemetery's graves—marked by obelisks, fraternal-order stones, and curbing—hold community leaders and veterans reaching back to the Civil War.

Ranger, TX

Begun around 1873 as a community graveyard just as Eastland County was organized, this cemetery holds early settlers, flu victims from the 1916–17 epidemic, and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to Korea. The 1917 oil strike on nearby land triggered a boom, and speculators reportedly offered a large sum to lease the burial ground for drilling—an offer the local congregation refused, preserving the site's sanctity.

Mertens, TX

In June 1884, a handful of Baptist families on the central Texas prairie gathered to organize a congregation, first calling it Richland Baptist Church and worshiping inside the Richland School. When the community shifted a few miles northwest to the young town of Mertens in 1892, the church moved with it and took the town's name. For generations it anchored the religious and social life of this corner of Hill County.

Marietta, OH

Built in 1868 for Conrad Biszantz, this Marietta residence takes its name from the Merydith family, who owned it from 1897 until 1963, after which it passed to the Thomas and Gammon families. Its long line of stewards mirrors the settled prosperity of the Ohio River town in the generations following the Civil War.

Mesquite, TX

This ground was already a burial place before the Texas and Pacific Railroad founded the city of Mesquite in 1873, its earliest marked grave dating to 1859. In 1890 local builder and civic leader Louis C. Ebrite laid out the cemetery in the grid of driveways still used today, and it was formally deeded for cemetery use two years later. It continues to honor area veterans and the generations of families who built Mesquite.