Westward Expansion

Bellville, TX

Established in 1850, Montgomery Cemetery is among the oldest burial grounds of Austin County, dating to the first years of Texas statehood. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2007, it preserves the resting place of pioneer families who settled this stretch of the Brazos country. Graves from so early a date are a rare surviving record of antebellum frontier life.

Conroe, TX

Montgomery County was carved from Washington County on December 14, 1837, during the days of the Republic of Texas, and organized that same year. It was named for Richard Montgomery, the Continental Army brigadier general killed in the 1775 assault on Quebec. The county seat began at Montgomery in 1837 before shifting to Conroe in 1888.

Christiansburg, VA

This marker was dedicated in 1976 to celebrate Montgomery County's bicentennial, marking two hundred years since the county was carved out of Virginia's frontier in 1776 — the same year the colonies declared independence. The commemorative stone was taken from a bridge abutment of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, built between 1848 and 1855 to thread rail traffic through the rugged terrain of southwest Virginia. By preserving a piece of that early railroad masonry, the county tied its founding-era story to the transportation boom that later opened the region to commerce.

Conroe, TX

Montgomery County was the third county created by the Republic of Texas, established by act of Congress on December 14, 1837, in response to a settlers' petition, and its sprawling original boundaries later gave rise to several neighboring counties. The town of Montgomery served as the first seat, where log cabins and a wood building housed county government until 1889, when an election moved the seat to Conroe. A brick courthouse rose here in 1891, and the present Art Deco building was completed in 1936 amid the prosperity of the Conroe oil boom, later expanded as the county grew.

Danville, PA · est. 1952

Built in 1792, this house was the residence of General William Montgomery, a pioneer settler on the Susquehanna frontier and father of the man who founded Danville. Solid and dignified, it stood as one of the early anchors of a community pushing into the Pennsylvania interior in the years after the Revolution. Today it shelters the Montour County Historical Society, which keeps the region's past alive within its walls.

Garwood, TX

This family burial ground served pioneer planters James S. Montgomery, a veteran of the War of 1812, and George W. Thatcher, whose households fled the advancing Mexican army in the panicked 1836 flight known as the "Runaway Scrape." Returning after the Texas Revolution, both men prospered as planters, and Montgomery went on to represent the county in the Congress of the Republic of Texas. The earliest grave here is likely that of Montgomery's young son, who died in 1836.

Mount Pleasant, TX

The community of Monticello, named for Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, took shape in the 1850s and won a post office in 1857, growing into a small hub of mills, gins, a brick factory and a school. Its Baptist congregation appears in association records by 1878 and in 1919 moved to this site, where members donated pine trees, hauled the logs by mule wagon to a local mill, and raised a cross-gabled frame sanctuary in just three months. The church long served as the community's spiritual and social heart, and by the 21st century, as lignite mining and recreational lakes reshaped the land, it stood as one of Monticello's last historic landmarks.

Sterling City, TX

Montvale sprang up in 1884 when settlers relocated the earlier community of St. Elmo to a spot along the Shafter Military Trail, an old road running from Fort Concho. Within a few years it had a school, a platted townsite, a Methodist church, a hotel, a post office, and a cluster of stores and shops. But the creation of Sterling City as county seat in 1891 drained the town's fortunes, and today only a community cemetery marks where it stood.

Moody, TX

Soon after Moody was founded in 1881, settlers sought a burial ground nearer than the old cemetery at Perry, and bought this tract from J. Parker Naylor. It was first used in 1889 for the grave of seven-year-old Flora Welch, and hackberry trees were transplanted here from the Leon River in 1890. A women's federation, later the Moody Cemetery Association, cared for the grounds — Miss Rob McCauley presiding for thirty-five years — and many of the town's early pioneers rest here.

Moore, TX

Moore Catholic Cemetery began before its land was even formally donated, with the earliest known grave that of Christine Tehas, who died in 1894. Ben Duncan deeded the ground to the parish in 1902, and the headstones—mostly Spanish, but also English and German—reflect the mingled peoples who settled this South Texas frontier. Among those buried here are pioneer settlers, veterans of Indian conflicts and both World Wars, and a Virginia-born formerly enslaved man.

Waco, TX

Missouri native Louis Moore came to Texas about 1834 and received title in 1835 to land on the east bank of the Brazos above the old Waco village. When his son John died in 1858 and his wife and infant daughter soon after, Moore buried them atop the highest hill on his estate, beginning what grew from a family plot into a community burial ground. Formalized by an association in 1921 and now spanning more than eleven acres, the cemetery holds veterans from the Texas Revolution to the present.

Moore, TX

Established on land deeded by Moses Veith in 1896, Moore Cemetery was the community's first public burial ground, replacing the scattered private plots and church graveyards of earlier years. Among those interred are pioneers and men who fought in frontier Indian conflicts and both World Wars. The town itself was named for R. B. "Mustang" Moore, an early Texan killed by Comanches in 1861, and was first known as Moore Hollow.

Dumas, TX

Carved from the Bexar Land District in 1876 and formally organized in 1892, Moore County took its name from Edwin W. Moore, commodore of the Republic of Texas navy. In its early days stagecoaches and freight wagons crossed a thinly settled Panhandle where ranching was nearly the only livelihood. That changed sharply after oil and gas were struck in 1926, and the county's economy grew into petrochemicals, helium, cattle feeding, and grain.

Dumas, TX

Louis Dumas donated this square and laid out the townsite in 1891, and Moore County organized its government the following year, raising its first courthouse in 1893. The original was replaced by the present brick building, erected by C. S. Lambie and Company for $155,000 and occupied by county officials in August 1931. Both courthouses have safeguarded county records and served as the civic heart of Dumas and the surrounding Panhandle.

Richmond, TX

John M. Moore built this Richmond house in 1883 for his bride Lottie, and as a prosperous rancher he went on to serve in the state legislature and in the U.S. Congress from 1905 to 1913. That same year he remodeled the home from its original Victorian design into the fashionable Neo-classical style. Richmond's First Baptist Church was founded within its walls, and cattlemen and politicians were frequent guests.

Big Spring, TX

In 1906 pioneers moved onto the frontier north of Big Spring to buy farmland from rancher Sid Moore, and a one-room school rose the same year, its first term serving fifteen students. School and community both took Moore's name, and the building became the hub of local life—even hosting a double wedding on its front steps. Hard years followed, including 1917's loss of young men to World War I and a devastating influenza epidemic, and a 1945 fire finally closed the school for good.

Austin, TX

Around 1850 the Irish-born merchant Martin Moore and his wife Elizabeth left their Austin business for a 521-acre farm north of town, raising five children in the log structures they built here. After Martin's death, Elizabeth sold the homestead in 1866 to Judge John Hancock, and it is believed his formerly enslaved man Orange and family lived on the land in the late 1860s. The sensitively restored cabins survive as a rare example of local pioneer farmstead architecture.

Bonham, TX

Alexander Moore and his wife Mary Jane brought their family from Missouri to this part of Fannin County in 1857, and in the mid-1870s donated two acres to a growing community for a cemetery, with neighbor Martha Cashion the first recorded burial in 1876. A Baptist sanctuary rose just to the north on land the Moores also gave, and church, school, and graveyard together became the community center known as Moore's Chapel. A grim cluster of infant graves from the 1880s and 1890s records a typhoid outbreak, while veterans from the Civil War through World War II rest among the pioneer families still tended by a cemetery association.

Paris, TX

Levin Vinson Moore brought his family from Tennessee to this area in 1836 and settled a farmstead beside a natural spring, soon joined by eleven other families from the southern states. The graveyard that began on the Moore farm holds burials dating back to 1873, including many of the Moores and their neighbors. In 1895 the family formally deeded a one-acre tract for burial purposes, cementing the cemetery in the county record.

Eustace, TX

This burial ground began on the farmland of Andrew and Nancy Moorehead, South Carolinians who reached Texas by the 1850s, and served their extended family before the surrounding land passed to the Melton family in 1884. In 1920 the Meltons formally set aside land for a community cemetery, though graves here predate nearby Eustace by decades, the earliest marked burial dating to 1870. Pioneer settlers and veterans reaching back to the Civil War rest here, and a family association still holds an annual memorial gathering.

Texarkana, TX

Built in 1895 for Rachel Perry Godbold Moores, widow of a member of Texarkana's pioneer Moores family, this Neo-Classical residence was designed by architect Henry Koerner with fish-scale shingling and elegant parquet floors. It passed to Robert Emmett Burke in 1904 and later housed the Ragland family for nearly half a century. The house stands as a showpiece of a booming late-19th-century railroad town on the Texas-Arkansas line.

Mooreville, TX

Irish immigrant Robert Moore built a hilltop general store above Cow Bayou in the 1850s, and by 1859 enough families had gathered that the settlement took his name. After Confederate veteran Edward McCullough acquired the land in 1865, this community burial ground took shape, its earliest marked graves dating to 1866 and bearing the surnames of the area's founding families. Since 1973 a cemetery association of their descendants has tended the grounds.

White Township, PA · est. 1951

Around 1781, in the final years of the Revolution, pioneer Fergus Morehead built a fortified refuge here to shelter his family and neighbors amid the violence of the western frontier. Fortified homesteads like this were the frontline of settlement in the Pennsylvania backcountry, where isolated families faced raids and had no army to protect them. Moorhead's Fort anchored what became the first permanent settlement in this part of Indiana County.

Junction, TX

Meliton Morales was born in Mexico in 1837, kidnapped by Indians as a youth and held captive for nine years before making his way to Texas in 1855. In 1874 he drove 200 Spanish goats and 2,000 sheep into Kimble County and, in 1881, built the small rock house that still stands, raising nine children and serving on the county's first jury. His remarkable life crossed borders, cultures, and the violent frontier to plant a ranching family whose descendants still hold the land.

Moran, TX

Settlers reached this rugged West Texas country in the 1860s and, during the Civil War, built the temporary fortress settlement of Mugginsville on Deep Creek for protection. A branch of the western cattle trail once passed nearby, but the town truly took shape after the Texas Central Railroad arrived in 1881; Swope Hull opened a store and the 'Hulltown' post office in 1883, and the community was renamed Moran in 1892 for a railroad president. Incorporated in 1919, it boomed as a supply point during the oil and gas rush of 1910–30.

Moran, TX

After Hulltown—later Moran—was founded in 1883, the community elected trustees who in 1896 bought two-and-a-third acres for a public burial ground, the oldest marked grave being that of Lucy Brazell Snider. Over the following decades the cemetery grew to hold more than 1,800 people, including town pioneers and many military veterans, and a native-stone boundary fence was built in 1933 with Depression relief funds. A cemetery association formed in 1926 still maintains the grounds.

Los Angeles, CA

This sprawling Moreton Bay fig, planted around 1875, is a living relic of California's Gilded Age, when settlers imported the fast-growing Australian trees to shade streets and estates. Its massive buttressed roots and broad canopy earned it official recognition as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #19. More than a century on, it remains a landmark rooted in the city's early growth.

Grapevine, TX

This small, long-abandoned burial ground holds a single visible grave marked by the remains of a sandstone cairn, a common way of marking graves in the region between the 1850s and 1870s. With no written records surviving, its dead may have been members of the Peters Colony, pioneers who first entered the Grapevine area in 1844. Nearly erased by time, the site is one of the last traces of Tarrant County's founding generation.

Morgan Mill, TX

Tradition holds that the first person buried here was a young girl who died as her family traveled west in the 1870s; the oldest marked stone, for Amanda Counts, dates to 1880. In 1883 Isaac Henderson deeded about three acres to the people of Morgan Mill for a community burial ground, which has since grown past six acres. A cemetery association formed in 1926, and descendants still gather each May for a work day and reunion. Those interred include veterans from the Civil War through Desert Storm.

Morgan Mill, TX

The community of Morgan Mill, named for early settler George Bryan Morgan, dates to the mid-19th century and gained a post office in 1877. For years congregations gathered under a summertime brush arbor for revivals and meetings, until 1910 when this permanent tabernacle replaced it. Serving churches, the local school, and community groups alike, the structure remains a gathering place today.

Morgan's Point, TX

One of the oldest continuously used burial grounds in Harris County, this cemetery was founded by Colonel James Morgan, a soldier of the Texas Revolution, on land he bought in 1834 as part of an estate called The Orange Grove. The earliest marked grave, from 1838, belongs to his niece Sarah, a smallpox victim; his wife Celia followed in 1840, and Morgan himself in 1866. The family's grand tombstone was twice stolen and once found submerged in the bay, and the graveyard now sits ringed by industrial development.

Morgantown, KY

Founded as Funkhouser Hill, this Butler County seat was renamed Morgan Town in December 1810 to honor Daniel Morgan, one of the American Revolution's most gifted battlefield tacticians. The settlement grew from a nucleus of Revolutionary War veterans granted land for their service, mingling with pioneers streaming westward across early Kentucky. Morgan himself, born around 1735, rose from a French and Indian War teamster to the general whose double-envelopment of Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens in 1781 earned him a gold medal from Congress.

Omaha, NE

This 1953 state historical marker commemorates the Mormon Pioneer Trail, the route along which thousands of Latter-day Saints fled persecution in Nauvoo, Illinois, and trekked across Iowa and Nebraska toward the Rocky Mountains in the late 1840s. Driven from their homes by mob violence, they crossed the Mississippi and pressed west in one of the great organized migrations in American history. The bridge here honors that pioneer road across the Missouri River.

Bandera, TX

In March 1854 a band of Latter-day Saints led by church elder Lyman Wight settled near the year-old town of Bandera on the Medina River. Wight had broken with Brigham Young and brought a colony of 250 to Texas in 1846, moving from Austin to Fredericksburg—where they ran grist and saw mills—before founding "Mormon Camp." Here they raised houses with gardens between them, milled grain, and crafted native-wood furniture to sell back East. When Wight died in 1858 the colony scattered, though a remnant stayed on in Bandera.

Canton, TX

When Sarah Morris was laid to rest here in 1866, she had been in Texas less than a decade, part of the wave of Kentucky and Upper-South families who resettled the blackland country before and after the Civil War. Her son Elijah bought the surrounding farmstead in 1886, and the family plot grew into the community burying ground for the China Grove and Denman neighborhoods. Its stones quietly record the arc of a rural settlement — Confederate and World War I veterans, and the children and elders lost to the epidemics that swept such isolated communities.

Morro Bay, CA · est. 1958

Morro Rock is a towering volcanic plug at the mouth of Morro Bay, long used by mariners as a navigational landmark along the central California coast. When the Spanish Portolá expedition pushed north in 1769 in search of Monterey, its diarists — including the Franciscan Juan Crespí — noted the great rock as they camped nearby. The last of a chain of ancient volcanic peaks, it earned the nickname the "Gibraltar of the Pacific."

Morro Bay, CA

Morro Rock, the great volcanic dome rising from the California coast, has guided mariners for over three centuries and was chronicled by the Portolá expedition's diarists — including Father Crespí and the engineer Costansó — when they camped nearby in 1769 during their overland search for Monterey. Sometimes called the "Gibraltar of the Pacific," it served Spanish, Mexican, and American sailors alike as an unmistakable navigational landfall. Today it is a California Registered Historical Landmark.

Kaufman, TX

This burial ground began in 1853 with the grave of the Morrow family's infant son Alexander, marking one of the earliest settlements in the Kaufman area. In 1892 his mother Mary Elizabeth Morrow deeded the land to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which built a chapel named in her honor. After the congregation disbanded, the chapel served a local school district, and a cemetery association took up its care in the 1930s.

Richmond, TX

This ground began as a burial place in 1825, when Stephen F. Austin "Old 300" colonist William Morton laid a fellow Mason to rest and later built the first known Masonic tomb in Texas. Among those interred here are Mirabeau B. Lamar, president of the Republic of Texas, and Jane Long, remembered as "the Mother of Texas." Passing through Masonic and civic hands over more than a century, the cemetery ultimately took Morton's name and became a memorial to its founder.

Richmond, TX

Organized in 1850 and chartered the next year, Morton Lodge No. 72 took its name from "Old 300" colonist and Mason William Morton. Its early halls did double duty as community anchors — one 1855 building even housed the Fort Bend County courthouse before fire destroyed it in 1887. The lodge's succession of buildings, culminating in this 1913 structure, tracks the civic maturing of Richmond.

Richmond, TX

William Morton was among the "Old 300" — the first families granted land in Stephen F. Austin's colony — and operated Morton's Ferry here in the 1820s. The core of this house, built with hand-hewn braced-frame construction, dates to the mid-1830s, making it a rare survivor from Texas's earliest Anglo settlement. Later owners, notably the Dr. John McCloy family, reshaped it between 1873 and 1904 into the L-plan home seen today.

Moscow, TX

Settled by David Green during the days of the Republic of Texas, this Polk County town opened its first post office as Green's in 1847, renamed Moscow in 1853, and incorporated in 1856 as a stage stop on the Nacogdoches-Liberty Road. Proud of its schools, Moscow ran a free school system as early as 1851 and hosted early industries from a cannery to a factory making architectural pillars. Its arrival as a railroad town in 1881 brought the tiny Moscow, Camden & San Augustine, one of the shortest railroads in Texas.

Austin, TX

A Connecticut native who became a leading figure in the American lead industry, Moses Austin carried his ventures from Virginia into the Mississippi Valley and on to Spanish Texas. In 1820 he reached San Antonio de Bexar and, with the help of Baron de Bastrop, won Governor Antonio Martinez's permission to settle 300 Anglo-American families in the province. Austin died in 1821 soon after learning his petition had been granted, and his son Stephen F. Austin carried out his dying wish by leading the "Old 300" into Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Connecticut-born Moses Austin came to San Antonio in 1820 and petitioned Spanish authorities for the right to bring three hundred families to settle Texas. The hardships of that journey broke his health, and he died in Missouri in 1821, just after learning his petition had been granted. His dying wish was that his son Stephen carry out the plan—which Stephen F. Austin did, becoming the 'Father of Texas.'

Independence, TX

A grandson of Moses Austin, whose 1821 contract opened Texas to Anglo-American settlement, Moses Austin Bryan came to Texas in 1831 and worked alongside his uncle Stephen F. Austin. He fought at San Jacinto in 1836, served the Republic as a diplomatic secretary, joined the 1842 Somervell Expedition, and rose to major in the Confederate army during the Civil War.

Brenham, TX

Born in Ireland, Moses Baine emigrated to the United States in 1819 and, with his wife Cecilia, joined Stephen F. Austin's colony at San Felipe in 1830. He fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto and afterward built a permanent home near Brenham in 1837, later serving in the Somervell Expedition as a soldier of the Republic of Texas. Returning home in 1843, he prospered as a stock raiser and farmer.

Town of DeWitt, NY

In the years just after the American Revolution, surveyors and settlers pushed into the Military Tract of central New York—lands set aside to reward Revolutionary War veterans. Moses De Witt was among the earliest and most energetic pioneers of this frontier region, serving both as a major of militia and as a judge of the county courts. He died young, at only 27, in 1794, but left enough of a mark that the town of DeWitt carries his name today.

Shelbyville, TX

Born in Tennessee, Moses Fisk Roberts came to Texas in 1836 and lost his right eye fighting in the Texas Revolution. A farmer whose beloved fox hounds earned him the nickname "Dog" Roberts, he became a respected public servant in Shelby County — serving in the Congress of the Republic, the State Legislature, and as justice of the peace and county judge.

Lampasas, TX

Moses Hughes built this home in 1856 among the earliest settlers of the Lampasas area, on a frontier where the threat of Indian raids was constant. According to tradition, the family kept a mule tied to a live oak in the yard, trusting its braying to warn them of an approaching attack.

Port Lavaca, TX

Born in Virginia and educated in New Hampshire, Dr. Moses Johnson moved from Illinois to Port Lavaca around 1837 and then to Austin in 1840. A physician and active Mason, he served as mayor of Austin and as treasurer of the Republic of Texas under his friend President Anson Jones. He died of yellow fever and was buried on his ranch alongside his wife Olivia.

Port Lavaca, TX

Virginia-born Dr. Moses Johnson arrived on the young Texas coast around 1837, then moved to Austin to practice medicine and plunged into public life, winning election as alderman and mayor. A prominent Mason, he was close enough to President Anson Jones of the Republic of Texas to be named its treasurer in 1844, only to see his home and the treasury records burn the next year. He returned to Port Lavaca and died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1853.

San Antonio, TX

On October 20, 1838, Moses Lapham—a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto that had won Texas its independence—was killed near here along with three companions, and seven more died the next day trying to recover them. Erected by the State of Texas in 1936 for the independence centennial, the marker recalls the violent frontier that persisted even after the Republic was founded, as settlers and Native peoples clashed over the land.

McMullen County, TX

Moses William Hindes brought his wife and six children by ox-wagon to sparsely settled South Texas in 1855, chasing water enough to raise cattle along the Ash, San Miguel, and Frio. During the Civil War he and his son George served as Confederate scouts while Indian raids swept the region, stealing horses and children. When raiders struck at daybreak on August 1, 1865, Hindes was killed defending his homestead; buried first in a local boothill, he was later reinterred at Pleasanton, and his descendants remained on the land he died for.

Rockdale, TX

This family burial ground dates to the 1850s, on land formally set aside in 1902 "to be used exclusively as a burying ground." It is named for Matthew Moss—a Virginia-born War of 1812 veteran and Red River steamboat man who brought his family to Milam County around 1845—and his son-in-law James Ragsdale, a veteran of the Texas Revolution and the first person buried here. Several Confederate veterans and members of the extended Moss family lie nearby, close to the vanished townsite of San Andres.

Matador, TX

Carved from earlier Young and Bexar territories, Motley County was created in 1876 and organized in 1891, with Matador as its seat. It honors Dr. Junius William Motley, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence who served as an aide to General Rusk and was mortally wounded at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. The county's name misspells his—Motley for Mott—an error preserved in law.

Matador, TX

This two-story stone jail went up in 1891, the very year Motley County was organized on the rolling plains of the Texas Panhandle, built by local contractors under the county's first judge and commissioners. Cells filled the upper floor while the jailer and his family lived below. The county's first courthouse, raised the same year, later burned, leaving the jail as one of the oldest surviving symbols of the county's frontier beginnings.

Douglas County, NV

When Hiram Mott and his son Israel settled here on the emigrant trail in 1851, their homestead became a stage for a string of Carson County firsts. Israel's wife, Eliza Ann Middaugh, is remembered as the first European-descended woman settler; she opened the area's first school in her kitchen in 1854, and the family saw the first such child born and the first burial that seeded the region's earliest cemetery. That little graveyard is all that now marks Mottsville.

Moulton, TX

Moulton was founded in the early 1850s a couple of miles from its present spot, then relocated after 1887 when the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad ran its line through and placed a station here. Brothers Sam and Will Moore led the building of a notable school in 1901, and the town has remained an agricultural and shipping center ever since.

Moulton, TX

Meeting first in July 1866 and chartered the next year with eighteen members, this Masonic lodge grew alongside the German- and Czech-settled country of Lavaca County in the years just after the Civil War. Its early members built their first hall in cooperation with a local church and, over the decades, shared their quarters with other community groups before following the town to New Moulton and raising a new hall in 1910. The lodge's story tracks the resettling and shifting of a central Texas farm town across the late nineteenth century.

Palestine, TX

The earliest marked graves here date to the late 1850s, though the Mound Prairie community—home to a Baptist college known as Mound Prairie Institute—was settled considerably earlier. As the town declined late in the nineteenth century, this cemetery became one of its few surviving reminders. Many pioneer settlers and their descendants lie here alongside several Confederate veterans, some beneath rock cairns or hand-hewn stones.