Westward Expansion

Temple, TX

Built in 1895 by the sons and grandsons of Mary Margaret Messer, this modest farmhouse is a plainspoken example of vernacular Texas building — a Cumberland-plan house with board-and-batten siding raised by family labor rather than a hired architect. Purchased in 1920 by landowner F. A. Limmer of the nearby community of Alligator, the home and its outbuildings survive as a rare intact picture of the working farm complexes that once dotted Bell County.

Welllington, TX

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, most Collingsworth County communities were small settlements clustered around area ranches, and Methodist congregations sprang up among them under circuit-riding ministers. Worshipers gathered wherever they could—private homes, dugouts, schoolhouses, brush arbors, and shared Union churches. Over time the smaller groups disbanded and folded into larger ones, until by 1984 all had affiliated with the Wellington church.

Joshua, TX

Before the railroad created the town of Joshua in 1881, area Methodists worshiped in the older communities of Caddo Grove and Marystown. With help from the Marystown church, a congregation was organized in Joshua in 1883 as part of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and continues today as the town's First United Methodist Church. Its roots in those vanished settlements make it a living thread of Johnson County's early history.

Lexington, KY

Methodist preachers James Haw and Benjamin Ogden were sent to Kentucky in 1786, and in 1789 Francis Poythress organized the Lexington Society of Methodists—the first Methodist station in the state and among the first hundred Methodist congregations in the country. Now First United Methodist Church, the society built here in 1840–41, with the present sanctuary raised in 1907. The congregation gave rise to at least seven other churches and missions, including St. Paul AME Church, and five of its ministers became bishops.

Panhandle, TX

As settlers pushed onto the Texas Panhandle in the late 1800s, the town of Panhandle became a stronghold of Methodism, its first congregation—Northern Methodist, founded in 1889—drawing worshippers of every faith. A Southern Methodist congregation followed in 1903, and both served as gathering places on the open plains. The two rival branches reconciled and merged in 1919, eventually forming the First United Methodist Church of Panhandle.

Chappell Hill, TX

This Methodist congregation was organized before 1847 under Robert Alexander, a missionary who had labored in Texas since 1837, and raised its first church in 1853. The pine sanctuary was destroyed in the catastrophic 1900 storm and rebuilt the next year, with a memorial window honoring Alexander's long service. Chappell Hill's standing in Texas Methodism is shown by the six statewide conferences held here between 1847 and 1878.

Ben Franklin, TX

This Methodist congregation was founded in 1854 through the efforts of local preachers Dan Clower and John B. Craig, the latter a former law partner of John B. Denton. A circuit rider was assigned that December to serve the Sulphur Forks Mission, and settlers milled the logs, shingles, and rafters for the first building at a nearby sawmill. The present church was built about 800 yards from the original site in 1898.

Carson City, NV

Dedicated in 1867, the Methodist Church of Carson City serves a congregation that traces its roots to 1859, the dawn of Nevada settlement. Like many of the capital's early buildings, it was raised from stone quarried at the nearby State Prison, with much of the original construction guided by Reverend Warren Nims. Though altered over the decades, its octagonal porch posts and pointed-arch windows make it one of Nevada's oldest surviving religious structures.

College Mound, TX

In 1844, as Texas stood as an independent republic, a cluster of families settled this Kaufman County vicinity and organized a Methodist congregation the following year under its first pastor. A log meetinghouse gave way to a frame building in 1865, and the present structure rose in 1897 on land donated by one of the original settlers. The church traces an unbroken thread from Republic-era pioneers through the community that grew up around it.

Douglassville, TX

Area Methodists founded a church on this site in 1856, soon after Douglassville itself was established, replacing open-air arbors and campgrounds as the community's center of worship. Served at first by traveling circuit riders, the congregation bought land for a parsonage in 1870. The present building, raised in 1908, was later remodeled and enlarged.

Montgomery, TX

Montgomery became one of the first Methodist charges organized in Texas in 1838, during the days of the Republic, and built what is said to be the first parsonage of any Protestant church in the young nation. This second parsonage, serving the Montgomery congregation, was acquired in 1886. Together they trace an unbroken line of Methodist ministry in one of Texas's oldest towns.

Kingsville, TX

This camp on the Santa Gertrudis was a strategic waypoint during the Texas Revolution, hosting the northward march of General José Urrea's column of Santa Anna's army in early 1836. Among those who passed through were figures on both sides of the era's brutality — the merciful "Angel of Goliad" and Colonel Garay, alongside Colonel Portilla, who carried out the Palm Sunday execution of Texan prisoners at Goliad. After the Mexican defeat at San Jacinto, the same ground witnessed the ragged southward retreat of thousands of soldiers, camp followers, and captured livestock.

Liberty, TX

After the Texas Revolution's decisive fight at San Jacinto in 1836, Mexican soldiers taken prisoner were held here on this rise from August 1836 until their release in April 1837. According to the marker, the kindness shown them by the plantation's owners, Judge and Mrs. William Hardin, so moved many of the captives that they chose to stay and become citizens of Texas.

Meyersville, TX

Meyersville grew from an 1843 settlement opened by Peter Bluntzer, who drew fellow immigrants from the French border region of Alsace to the DeWitt County prairie. Named for early arrival Adolph Meyer, whose home hosted the post office from 1851, the community anchored itself with Lutheran and Catholic congregations and, in time, a public school. It became known for its turkey farms and reached its height around 1923.

Geneva, TX

Mial Scurlock and his brother William left Mississippi in 1834 to settle in Texas, then part of Mexico, receiving a land grant in the Sabine District where they began farming. When the Texas Revolution broke out, the brothers joined the Texas army at San Augustine. Mial fought in the Siege of Bexar and then in the defense of the Alamo, where he was killed on March 6, 1836.

Miami, TX

The town of Miami took shape when the Santa Fe's Southern Kansas branch pushed through in 1887, and its cemetery followed close behind, with pioneer William T. Lard's reinterred grave among the earliest. In 1900 the Scottish-owned Cresswell Ranche & Cattle Company sold Roberts County several acres for a burying ground, deeded to Judge S.G. Carter for a single dollar. Shaded by cedar and cypress in the open Panhandle style, it holds Civil War veterans, soldiers of two world wars and Korea, and two Texas Rangers.

Miami, TX

When the Southern Kansas Railway Company of Texas laid track through Roberts County in 1887, the town of Miami sprang up at the end of the line as a workers' camp with a tent hotel and a field kitchen. The railroad sank a public water well and strung telegraph lines to nearby Fort Elliott, and passengers and supplies for the fort and the town of Mobeetie began arriving by rail. This depot was built in 1888, passed to the Santa Fe Railroad in 1899, and stayed in service until 1978.

Anderson, TX

Born in Tennessee, Michael Moore Kennard brought his family to Texas in 1830 as part of Robertson's Colony, likely pausing along the way to raise a crop. He received a large land grant in what is now Grimes County and earned still more land for his service in the Texas Revolution. His trading firm, Fanthorp, Womack & Kennard, was the county's first mercantile business.

Palestine, TX

Little is documented of Micham Main before his 1820 marriage to Elizabeth Van Winkle in Illinois, but in 1833 the lure of favorable Mexican colonization laws drew the family to the Nacogdoches District of what became Texas. He received a land grant in David G. Burnet's colony in 1835, farmed as required, and briefly served in the Republic of Texas army in 1836. When Anderson County was created in 1846, Main was one of three Illinois-Palestine men appointed to choose and name the county seat—Palestine—though later accounts credit fellow settler John Parker with the naming.

Galveston, TX

A French-Canadian trader, Michel B. Menard reached Texas in 1829 and settled on Galveston Island in 1833, then signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. As a founder of the Galveston City Company he steered the island's early development into a major port, and later served the Republic in its Congress. Menard County was named in his honor in 1858.

Rogers City, MI

Rogers City was founded in 1871 on the Lake Huron shore, and this Michigan Sesquicentennial marker honors more than 150 years of continuous municipal life. Settled during the post-Civil War push into Michigan's northern timber and limestone country, the town grew from a frontier lumbering venture into an enduring community. The marker records that long unbroken thread of local history.

Watertown Charter Township, MI

When Michigan organized as a state in 1835, Detroit remained its capital, just as it had been through the territorial years. After a drawn-out debate over where a permanent seat of government belonged, lawmakers in 1847 chose a more central, still-forested site that would grow into Lansing. The move helped pull settlement and commerce inland from the older Detroit riverfront.

Arlington, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1810, Middleton Tate Johnson became such a foundational figure in North Texas settlement that he is remembered as 'the Father of Tarrant County.' He served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas and left a wide mark on the region's early development. He died at Austin in 1866, and neighboring Johnson County was named in his honor.

Midfield, TX

Area Methodists worshiping at Hawley Methodist Church became charter members of a new Midfield congregation in 1907, first gathering at the Keller Hotel before building a sanctuary and parsonage on Junetta Street. As the surrounding population thinned, the congregation merged with Markham Methodist in 1970. In 1981 the members bought back their old building and reopened it as the Midfield Community Church.

Midkiff, TX

Tucked where four West Texas county lines nearly meet, Midkiff began in the 1880s when railroads sold cheap land to lure settlers onto the ranching plains. Rancher John Rufus Midkiff opened a general store in 1902 and strung the area's only telephone line thirty miles to Midland along a barbed-wire fence. The sleepy ranch country roared to life after oil was struck in 1950, spawning an oil-camp town before the revived name of Midkiff took hold.

Andrews, TX

Chartered in 1916 by David Fasken's Midland Farms Company, the Midland and Northwestern ran sixty-five miles of standard-gauge track from Midland toward Seminole to ship cattle and lure settlers to the plains. It was a shoestring operation—an engine borrowed from the Texas and Pacific, aging equipment, and crews said to shoot coyotes from the cab to break the monotony. Flash floods that washed away its crossties helped finish it off, and the line was abandoned in 1923 as unprofitable and poorly located.

Midland, TX

Midland sits where old cattle trails once crossed and where, tradition holds, the last Comanche raid into Texas passed. The Texas and Pacific Railroad reached the spot in 1881, and its position halfway between El Paso and Fort Worth gave the town its name. Sheep and Hereford cattle came first, then farmers drawn by windmill-pumped water—until the 1928 Permian Basin oil discovery made Midland the headquarters of a booming petroleum empire.

Midland, TX

Midland County was created and organized in 1885, its name drawn from its position roughly halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso on the Texas and Pacific Railway — it was first called Midway. The railroad brought the settlers and commerce that gave the county life on the arid plains of West Texas. Midland would grow into a hub of the region.

Midland, TX

Sitting midway between El Paso and Fort Worth on the Texas and Pacific Railroad, the townsite took the name Midland in 1881, and Midland County was created in 1885. The area had been a crossroads of trails and the site of one of the last Comanche raids into Texas before cattlemen, sheepmen, and windmill-watered farmers moved in. The 1928 Permian Basin discovery made Midland an oil headquarters, and in 1954 the ancient "Midland Man" remains were found nearby.

Midland, TX

Built of concrete blocks in 1908 in the Western Ranch style, this was the first house in the young town of Midland, then a rough cattle settlement on the West Texas plains. It was home to Raymond and Edith Lawrence and stands as a tangible link to the community's earliest days.

Midlothian, TX

Midlothian grew out of the Peters Colony, an ambitious 1840s effort to draw settlers onto the north-central Texas prairie. The Hawkins family arrived in 1848 and set aside land for a church and, beside it, a cemetery whose earliest marked grave belongs to Mary Elizabeth Hawkins in 1873. As the town incorporated in 1888 and prospered, the burial ground grew alongside it, gathering mayors, pioneers, ranchers, farmers, and the anonymous poor into one shared record of the community's life.

Midlothian, TX

In the decades after the Civil War, American Presbyterianism was split between a northern branch (PCUSA) and a southern one (PCUS), and small Texas towns often supported a congregation of each. Midlothian brought its two together in 1911, and the united congregation raised a sanctuary just before the First World War. Generations of members have anchored the town through cooperative charities like Manna House and through national and global mission work.

Livingston, TX

Andrew and Mary McKee came to Texas in 1845 and bought this land in 1854; when Mary died in childbirth in 1857 she became the first person laid to rest here, at a spot she is said to have marked herself. By the close of the Civil War the burial ground served the whole Midway community. Its graves hold pioneer settlers and their descendants, former slaves, and veterans of American wars from the Civil War to Vietnam.

Midway, TX

Though its exact founding is lost to sparse records, the Midway Church of Christ is thought to have organized around 1854, with traveling preachers serving it until Joseph Addison Clark became its first settled minister in 1855. Many of its early members helped build up Midway and Madison County. The congregation has worshiped on this same site ever since, enlarging its meeting house over the years while its roots reach back before the Civil War.

Midway, UT

This Utah Historic Site marks the Midway Social Hall, a community gathering place in a mountain valley town settled largely by Swiss and other pioneer families. Social halls like this were the heart of civic life in 19th-century Utah settlements, hosting dances, meetings, and celebrations. Its designation recognizes its role in the town's pioneer heritage.

Frelsburg, TX

Tennessee-born Mike Muckleroy came to Texas in 1840 and, just two years later, joined the campaign that drove the Mexican general Adrian Woll's thousand troops out of San Antonio and back across the border. Settling in Colorado County on a Republic of Texas land grant, he farmed and built a two-story log house topped with a watchtower to guard against Indian raids. Beloved as "Uncle Mike," he served terms as county commissioner before his death in 1896 at nearly eighty-eight.

Milam, TX

First described by Stephen F. Austin as he camped along El Camino Real de los Tejas in 1821, Milam is among the oldest towns in Texas, originally known as Red Mound and prized by settlers for its fertile land. Sitting close to the great road, it saw a steady stream of explorers, veterans, and pioneers before losing its county seat in 1858 and slowly fading.

Milam, TX

Founded in 1828 as Red Mound and renamed in 1835 for Texas Revolution hero Benjamin Rush Milam, this town served as an early seat of justice and a hub of the Republic of Texas, complete with an internal revenue post. During the Civil War it housed the Confederate quartermaster's department for Sabine County. It was the first Texas home of John S. Roberts, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and of John C. Hale, who died at the Battle of San Jacinto.

Milam, TX

Milam served as the first county seat of Sabine County, on land where Spanish explorers passed as early as 1539 and where Stephen F. Austin marveled at the rich red soil in 1821. Set on a high hill above the old settlement of Red Mound, the cemetery holds military veterans dating back to the Creek War and prominent pioneer families, and may be the oldest organized burial ground in the county.

Cameron, TX

Carved from Robertson's colony and the Mexican municipality of Viesca, this land was renamed Milam County in December 1835 to honor Benjamin Rush Milam, killed leading Texian forces at San Antonio. Once a sprawling district, it was whittled down as Burleson, Robertson, Williamson, Bell, McLennan, and Falls counties were cut from it. Cameron has served as the county seat since 1846.

Cameron, TX

The fourth building to serve as Milam County's seat of justice, this courthouse rose in 1891 with its cornerstone laid by the local Masonic lodge on Independence Day. Designed by Austin architect A.O. Watson, it once wore a fashionable Second Empire roof and a four-faced clock cupola, both lost when the Works Progress Administration remodeled the building in 1938. For more than a century it has stood at the center of county government in Cameron.

Lindale, TX

As Anglo settlers filled the Gum Springs area of Smith County in the 1850s, the growing community took the name Starrville and became a stop on the Dallas–Shreveport freight route, with a post office, school, Masonic lodge, and Baptist church. The Rev. Williamson Milburn, the church's pastor, built this house in 1855 of hand-picked, knot-free lumber over a peg-set foundation with solid oak walls. Later owned by the Gary family, who moved it in 1900 for better water, it was relocated once more in 1995 to preserve it.

Elkhart, TX

Miles Bennett came from Indiana to the fledgling Republic of Texas and took up arms in the Army of Texas in 1836, the year Texans won their independence at San Jacinto. He died young in 1849, but his widow Laura outlived him by more than seventy years, a common frontier story of short-lived soldiers and long-widowed wives. Markers like this one preserve the names of the ordinary men who filled the ranks during Texas's fight for nationhood.

Miles, TX

Almost as soon as the town of Miles appeared in 1891, its Methodists raised a willow-and-brush tabernacle beside a spring-fed pool called China Mott, tended by a circuit-riding preacher. The first permanent church section rose on this site in 1901, the same year the Women's Missionary Society began the fundraising that would shape the congregation's life. Rebuilt in brick after a 1963 fire, the church has kept its traditions alive with an annual return to China Mott and decades of fellowship nights.

Milford, TX

In 1853, pioneers W.R. Hudson and J.M. Higgins came west from East Texas and platted the townsite of Milford the following year, quickly building the schools, churches, and post office that anchor a frontier community. The burial ground that grew alongside the town holds generations of those early families, including soldiers of the Texas Revolution and veterans of every American war from the Mexican War through Vietnam. Nearly two hundred small graves of infants and children speak plainly to how hard survival could be on the 19th-century frontier.

Milford, TX

Organized in June 1855 with sixteen members, this Presbyterian congregation stood as one of only a handful within a vast frontier radius, served at first by circuit-riding pastors who traveled by horseback to tend several churches at once. It built successive houses of worship in 1860, 1896, and 1921 and repeatedly hosted regional church gatherings. Its bell, cast in New York and carried here by ship, rail, and ox-wagon, has summoned worshippers since 1871.

Gonzales, TX

When Gonzales was laid out in 1825 as the capital of Green DeWitt's colony, its plan followed the traditional Spanish town design mandated by the governor of Coahuila and Texas. Surveyor James Kerr, DeWitt's agent, and his assistant Byrd Lockhart platted the settlement's public squares, designating this one Military Plaza. The town would soon become famous as the site of the first shot of the Texas Revolution.

Newcastle, TX

In 1851 a military road ran past this point, linking Fort Belknap with Fort Worth across the North Texas frontier. Roads like this one carried the troops, travelers, and supply wagons that kept the chain of frontier army posts alive in an era when the U.S. Army was pushing settlement westward. These rough tracks were the lifelines of a thinly held borderland.

Newcastle, TX

An Army officer surveyed this route in 1849 under War Department orders to find the best path from the Red River to El Paso, and for a few years in the early 1850s the road linked the frontier posts of Fort Belknap and Fort Phantom Hill some seventy miles apart. Later in the decade it carried the coaches of the Butterfield Overland Mail on their long run between St. Louis and San Francisco.

Newcastle, TX

In 1851 Lieutenant Francis T. Bryan of the U.S. Army blazed a military road past this point, connecting Fort Belknap with San Antonio across the Texas frontier. The route carried troops, supply trains, and settlers pushing into the western reaches of the state. Such roads formed the framework of army logistics and westward migration in the decade before the Civil War.

Baird vicinity, TX

In the mid-1870s the U.S. Army strung a telegraph line across this stretch of West Texas to link Fort Griffin and Fort Concho, part of a wider web wiring the frontier forts together. The line let commanders coordinate patrols and supply across vast, thinly settled distances during the last decades of the Indian wars on the Southern Plains.

Burkeville, TX

Settlers crossing from Louisiana into Texas near Toledo Bend on the Sabine River founded a community and this cemetery along Mill Creek in the early 1840s, with Tandy Key Martin's the first marked grave. Its more than fifty unmarked burials speak to the hardship and poverty of those pioneer families. As work drew people away in the twentieth century, the community faded, but descendants formed an association in the 1980s to preserve the site.

Cumby, TX

This graveyard has served the Miller Grove community since before Hopkins County was even formed in 1846, beginning as a family plot said to be donated by the Pippin family and growing into a community cemetery. Its stones include the distinctive tree-stump monuments of the fraternal Woodmen of the World and the graves of veterans reaching back to the Civil War. A cemetery association founded in 1965 still tends the historic ground.

Cumby, TX

Methodists at Miller Grove first gathered under circuit-riding preachers who reached the community once a month as early as 1860. Formally organized in 1870, the congregation worshipped in the local schoolhouse until it built its own sanctuary in 1900 on land donated by the Corbet family. The building long doubled as a home for other denominations and community gatherings before the church took the United Methodist name in 1968.

Dallas, TX

Hewn from cedar logs in 1847 and caulked with clay, this cabin was the first Texas home of settler William B. Miller, who later built the antebellum mansion Millermore. In its single room, a dozen local girls and their teacher gathered for one of the earliest schools in the Dallas area, boarding under the same roof. Moved to its present site in 1964, it survives as a rare glimpse of pioneer Dallas.

Junction, TX

In 1874 two families settled a small colony in the newly organized ranch country of Kimble County, joining the frontier militia and helping stand up the county's first courts and juries. Their patriarch, remembered by the nickname his neighbors gave him for his integrity, served as a justice of the peace, while a member of the allied family held county office longer than anyone before him. Descendants still live in the county today.

Anderson Township, OH

When Ichabod Benton Miller bought his 440 acres in the spring of 1796, Anderson Township sat on the raw edge of the new American frontier—Ohio was still part of the Northwest Territory and would not become a state until 1803. The log house he raised that year was the kind of hand-hewn dwelling that turned wilderness claims into working homesteads, built from the timber cleared to make its own fields. Remarkably, it sheltered families for more than 170 years, outliving the frontier era, the steamboat age, and two world wars while the farmland around it gave way to suburban Hamilton County.

Donegal Township, PA · est. 1947

Jacob Miller built his blockhouse around 1780 as a gathering point and refuge for the scattered settlers of the Dutch Fork country. On March 31, 1782, in the closing months of the Revolution's frontier warfare, the post came under attack, and Ann Hupp rallied its defenders in a heroic stand that entered local legend. Such fortified strongpoints were the difference between survival and abandonment on this exposed border.

Denison, TX

When J. K. Miller bought this homesite in 1866, its spring watered his household, his neighbors, and travelers passing on the nearby ferry road. As the town of Denison took shape, the civic-minded Miller gave the city alternating business lots along with sites for its early churches, its first public school, and Forest Park. The humble spring anchored a settlement that Miller helped deliberately build into a town.

Waelder, TX

R. L. Miller and Sons erected this store in 1900–1901, carrying on a family mercantile business first established in 1866 and still owned by their descendants four generations later. A distinctive bannister features wooden balls hand-carved by the contractor known as "Cap" Smith. Bullet holes in the awning remain as physical testimony to the rowdy, rough-edged early days of the frontier town of Waelder.