Westward Expansion

Cone, TX

Named for a white mesa that guided travelers on the Mackenzie Trail, Mount Blanco began in 1877 when frontiersman Henry Clay Smith built a two-story stone house — the first permanent homestead in the South Plains — after speculators failed to pay him and handed over the building instead. With his nearest neighbor 50 miles away, Smith's home became a way-station for prospectors and a magnet for settlers, and he later helped organize Crosby County in 1886. The community rose with a post office, school, and church, then faded through the 20th century until only a cotton gin and clubhouse remained.

Austin, TX

Rising 775 feet above the Colorado River, this limestone height is named for George W. Bonnell, who came to fight for Texas independence in 1836, served the Republic as commissioner of Indian Affairs, and died on the Rio Grande in 1842 after joining the ill-fated Texan–Santa Fe and Mier expeditions. Around it swirl Austin's founding-era legends—of Bigfoot Wallace, Mormon millers, and 1850s picnickers. The overlook has been a favorite lookout and gathering place since the Republic of Texas.

Mount Calm, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Limestone County in the 1850s, and the Mount Calm community soon gathered around a Masonic lodge, stores, a post office, school, and churches. Pioneer James Samuel Kimmel gave the land for this cemetery, where the first marked grave dates to 1870. When the railroad bypassed the village in 1881, residents packed up and moved north to found New Mount Calm along the tracks, leaving the cemetery as the settlement's only lasting remnant.

Dallas, TX

Pioneer families were burying their dead on this Dallas-area rise as early as the 1840s, the oldest known grave dating to 1847. In 1868 William Huffhines deeded two acres, including those first graves, to Mount Calvary Baptist Church, which met here until its congregation moved on in 1885. More land was added over the decades, and a cemetery association formed in 1924 still tends the nearly 800 graves.

Point Blank, TX

Widowed pioneer Sarah Washington Ricks Durdin Chrznowski gave land from her late husband's estate for this burial ground in the 1860s, on the piney edge of what became San Jacinto County. The cemetery took its name from the neighboring Mount Capers Baptist Chapel, and by tradition its first grave was that of Elisha Williams, followed by the donor's infant grandson in 1871. More than a century of burials — over a hundred graves — now rest here under community care.

Tulare County, CA

Mount George Stewart honors Colonel George W. Stewart (1857–1931), a Visalia newspaperman remembered as a leading advocate for the creation of Sequoia National Park in 1890. Stewart campaigned to protect the giant sequoia groves from logging at a time when the conservation movement was just taking root in America. The peak that bears his name overlooks the very forests his efforts helped save.

Keller, TX

This burial ground served a cluster of related families who came to North Texas from Missouri in 1847 as members of the Peters Colony, an empresario land grant meant to draw settlers to the young state. The group was led by the widow Permelia Allen, who lies here in an unmarked grave alongside her sons-in-law who first owned the tract. The homemade grave markers still reflect the hardscrabble pioneer life of the settlement.

Chester, TX

Mount Hope Lodge is the oldest continuously chartered Masonic lodge in Tyler County, tracing its roots to an 1834 land grant and a mid-1850s meeting hall that doubled as a Protestant church and schoolhouse on the East Texas frontier. Chartered in 1853 and later moved to the new town of Chester, the lodge drew notable Tyler countians over the years — including future congressman Samuel Bronson Cooper, lumber magnate John Henry Kirby, and Governor Allan Shivers, who spoke at its 1953 centennial.

Chester, TX

At a crossroads where the El Orcoquisac–Nacogdoches road met the old beef trail to the Trinity, the community of Mount Hope took root around settlers who arrived as Texas won its independence in 1836. Tradition holds that a traveling English Methodist missionary held an arbor meeting at James Barnes's home, giving rise to what may have been Tyler County's first Methodist church—housed, like many early East Texas buildings, with a school below and a Masonic lodge above. When the railroad bypassed Mount Hope for Chester in 1883, the town faded, though its 1910 church still stands with pews from Baker's Mill.

Cooper, TX

In the days of the Republic of Texas, settlers put down roots at Mount Joy, and by the 1880s it had grown into a bustling farming hub with steam-powered cotton gins, a gristmill, and stagecoach links to neighboring towns. Churches and the cemetery anchored the community, whose first recorded burial dates to 1873. When the post office closed and commerce moved on, the town faded, but its cemetery endures as a record of the families who built it.

Coldspring, TX

Chartered by the Grand Lodge of Texas in January 1848, Mount Moriah Lodge No. 37 first gathered in the Mount Pleasant settlement, meeting in a Fireman's Hill schoolhouse that was hauled to Coldspring in 1853. Its rolls carried many Republic of Texas pioneers and leading officials of Polk and San Jacinto counties. After an 1915 fire forced Coldspring to relocate, the lodge followed to the new townsite and built a fresh hall.

Goldthwaite, TX

Organized in 1899 with nineteen charter members in the tiny community of North Bennett, this Primitive Baptist congregation bought fifteen acres for a meetinghouse and cemetery and, like many rural Texas churches, doubled its building as a schoolhouse shared among denominations. The community thinned during World War II and the congregation dwindled, but its cemetery still holds early settlers and military veterans and continues to serve the surrounding countryside.

Fort Worth, TX

Spanning nearly 130 acres, Mount Olivet was founded in 1907 by Fort Worth businessman Flavious McPeak and his wife Johnnie, Tennessee transplants who modeled it on Nashville's famous cemetery of the same name. It became the first perpetual-care cemetery in Tarrant County and now holds over 47,000 burials. Among them are 594 victims of the devastating 1918 influenza epidemic and many of the county's founding pioneers.

Comanche vicinity, TX

This congregation began in October 1892 under a brush arbor, the humble open-air shelter of frontier worship, with twenty-one charter members and their first pastor, F. M. Herring. When Will Dewitt donated land that November, the community dedicated its first building the following spring. A tabernacle followed in 1906 and the present church in 1913, tracing the steady growth of a pioneer congregation.

Logan, TX

Chartered in 1880 with just eight members, this East Texas congregation was organized by Elders William H. Gresham and J. R. Alexander, with Gresham—a Confederate veteran—serving as its pastor until 1897. After years of meeting nearby, the members moved to this site in 1910, building a sanctuary whose second floor doubled as a Woodmen of the World lodge hall. For generations it has been a pillar of religious and community life in eastern Panola County.

Voca, TX

Established in 1884, this small burial ground reflects the settlement of the central Texas frontier country around Voca in the late nineteenth century. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2004, it preserves the resting place of the area's pioneering families.

Mount Vernon, TX

Named for George Washington's Virginia estate, this rural settlement served as the seat of Washington County from 1841 to 1844 during the days of the Republic of Texas. Its founder, John Stamps, was a large landowner who represented the county in the Republic's Eighth Congress, and at its height the town held a log courthouse and jail, homes, churches, and a school for some twenty families. An 1844 election moved the county seat to Brenham, and as new roads eased travel there, Mount Vernon dwindled—by 1900 only a few foundations remained, and the site returned to farmland.

Rockdale, TX

Mount Zion Baptist Church was formed in 1895 by the merger of Pleasant Grove Baptist, organized in 1872, and Fellowship Baptist of nearby Minerva, with the Rev. N. J. Dyer as its first pastor. Meeting in a relocated building on two acres, the congregation grew through the twentieth century, adding a Women's Missionary Union and, in 1982, a new sanctuary while sustaining missionary and educational work.

Alvord, TX

In 1833 early settler Andrew Jackson Jones set aside four acres for a church and cemetery, and the oldest marked grave dates to that same year. After fire destroyed the first church in 1893, the Mount Zion Baptist congregation met in the nearby Jones School until raising a one-room building in 1909, whose lumber was later reused for the present structure in 1950. Its tradition of mission work and annual brush arbor meetings has carried on for well over a century.

Linden, TX

Organized in 1851 with twelve charter members, the Mount Zion congregation first gathered in a log building. In 1885, on land donated by Isaac and Felix Grundy Lemmon, they raised the cypress sanctuary that still stands—its steeply pitched roof and double entry doors typical of plain rural Texas churches of the age. A cemetery dating to 1864 lies alongside.

Midlothian, TX

This quiet hill in Ellis County holds the layered memory of a vanished pioneer community. Its earliest graves — an unnamed Native man killed by his horse in the 1850s and settler Sarah Witherspoon in 1857 — predate the burial ground Alexander Jenkins formally deeded after his brother's death in 1861. Jenkins went on to help found the Mount Zion Presbyterian Church here in 1873, whose building doubled as a school until shifting population closed both in the early 1900s.

Fate, TX

John and Martha Dewees brought their seven children from Indiana to Texas in 1856, buying 300 acres along Camp Creek and helping found the Mount Zion community. A log church-and-schoolhouse rose on land they donated, and by 1859 a cemetery had taken shape, its first grave that of Julia McCrearby. Today more than 600 graves rest here — pioneers, a county official, and veterans of every war from the Civil War through Korea — with a sobering share belonging to infants who died before their first year.

Caddo, TX

This burial ground began on land owned in 1879 by Ezekel and Louisa McCleskey, when a visiting relative from Georgia died and, by family tradition, became the first laid to rest here. Growing up beside a combined church and school, the plot served the neighborhood before the McCleskeys formally dedicated it as Mount Zion Cemetery in 1907. A community association has cared for it since 1979.

Point Blank, TX

This burial ground grew from an 1849 land grant, when John R. Johnson deeded acreage to Mount Zion Methodist Church in 1850 on the edge of the East Texas piney woods. The frame church fell into ruin and was taken down in 1928, but the cemetery endured as the last tangible trace of several pioneer settlements. In 1958 descendants of those families began an annual homecoming among its roughly 250 graves.

Bertram, TX

The Jennings family came to this part of central Texas in 1851, and the settlement that grew around their farm took the name Jennings Creek. John Jennings helped organize the government of newly created Burnet County and served as a county commissioner, while the family burial ground that began with a daughter's grave in 1856 gradually welcomed neighbors as well. When a Presbyterian church rose nearby in the 1890s, the graveyard took the name Mount Zion, and today its more than five hundred markers include veterans of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War.

Alto, TX

Tradition holds that the Mount Zion Methodist congregation gathered on the eve of the Civil War, though few records survive from before 1871, when it raised a sanctuary here under the Rev. Jehu John Allen. Over the years the church sent several of its own into the Methodist ministry. Land deeded by William Collier, Wiley P. Cole, and H. N. Lusk between 1871 and 1882 became a community cemetery whose earliest marked grave dates to 1874.

Johnson County, KY

Mountain Homeplace recreates the world of a mid-19th-century Appalachian farm in the eastern Kentucky hills, where families wrested a self-sufficient living from steep, wooded land with plow, loom, and gristmill. It preserves the log dwellings, outbuildings, and daily rhythms of the mountain pioneers who settled the Big Sandy country generations before the coal era transformed the region.

Merkel, TX

For a few years before the Civil War, Mountain Pass served as a stage stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail — the first line to knit the east and west coasts together by mail and passenger coach across a still-wild West Texas. Coaches paused here from 1858 until secession snapped the route in 1861, and in the 1870s the site revived as a stop on a branch of the El Paso–San Antonio mail line.

Latimer County, OK

In the years before the Civil War, the Overland Mail Company routed its coaches along the Old Fort Smith–Boggy Depot Road through Choctaw Nation country, and this mountain pass lay on that line from 1858 to 1861. In 1866 a stage stand for changing horses and a toll road over the pass were established here. Marked by the Oklahoma Historical Society in 1959, the site recalls the rugged overland travel that knit the frontier together under Choctaw law.

Denton, TX

Robert Noble Mounts and his wife Nannie built this Queen Anne home in 1898 on land that had been part of the family's Denton County farm, settled after his father relocated the family mercantile to the county seat in 1857. His mother Mattie founded Denton's first Sunday school and first kindergarten. Robert himself became a leading cattleman—managing the vast Gregg Ranch and later owning an 84,000-acre spread near Hereford—helping open Texas cattle markets to the north.

Hamilton Township, OH

In 1795 the Ohio country was raw frontier, freshly opened to settlement as the Northwest Indian War drew to a close. The lands here were part of the Virginia Military District, a broad reserve Virginia had set aside to pay its Revolutionary War veterans in acres rather than cash. William Mounts planted the first settlement of those military lands in Warren County just west of this spot, establishing a frontier 'station' — a fortified cluster of cabins where early families gathered for safety on the edge of American expansion.

Denton, TX

The Mounts family reached Denton County from Virginia in the 1850s, and W.H. and Mattie Mounts became pillars of the new county seat through farming, landholding, and business. After the original family home burned in 1893, Mattie commissioned this eight-room Queen Anne house in 1898, its wraparound veranda, fish-scale shingles, and diamond window showcasing the era's Victorian taste. The home stayed in the family for generations, raising the children of daughter Sena and her husband William Wright.

Burnet, TX

Jacob and Adeline Wolf came from Tennessee around 1850, took up a land grant in Burnet County, and settled at Dobyville, where pioneers had to supply their own buildings, provisions, medicine, and schooling. Living under the threat of Indian raids and recognizing the need for local government, Jacob helped organize Burnet County in 1854. Two of the couple's eight children went on to serve as county sheriffs, in Burnet and neighboring Lampasas.

Trickham, TX

William Patrick Williams and his wife Elizabeth left Mississippi during the Civil War, and after a brief stop in Cherokee County came by wagon train to this part of Coleman County. Their homestead became the heart of a small rural settlement and the site of an early school they helped found. Known as "Mukewater Bill" for a nearby stream, William led the community through hardships that included Indian raids and a smallpox epidemic.

Indianola, TX

Angelina Peyton Eberly came to Texas in 1822 and ran frontier inns and hotels through the turbulent years of the Austin colony and the Republic. In 1842 she spotted men quietly hauling the government's records out of Austin and touched off a cannon to sound the alarm, sparking the so-called "Archives War" that kept the capital—and its papers—in Austin. She later moved to the Gulf port of Indianola, and even her grave was later swept away by the flood that helped doom that town.

Dalhart, TX

Cordia Sloan Duke married into ranch life in 1907 when her husband became a division manager of the XIT Ranch, then the largest in the world at three million acres, and she "looked after" its 150 cowboys along with her own family. Sensing that a way of life was vanishing, she kept a diary of everyday ranch events and persuaded 81 others to do the same. Their collected record preserved an authentic, ground-level account of the working cowboy that might otherwise have been lost.

Richmond, TX

Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long, often remembered as a pioneer among Anglo-American women in Texas, made her home on this Fort Bend County site. She was the wife of Dr. James Long, who led an 1819 expedition aimed at freeing Texas from Spanish rule. Living through the turbulent years when Texas passed from Spanish to Mexican to independent hands, she became a lasting symbol of frontier endurance, memorialized here by the State of Texas in 1936.

Wortham, TX

Lucy Haggard Longbotham (1793–1873) was born in the raw territory south of the Ohio River that became Tennessee, one of nine children of a Virginia-born Baptist minister. She moved to the Alabama frontier around 1814, married in 1820, and eventually came to Texas — living, the marker notes, under nine different territorial, national, and state flags in a single lifetime, and raising nine children of her own.

Lost Prairie, TX

According to family tradition, Martha Rogers was born in the 1790s as a daughter of U.S. Army General James Wilkinson, and was said to have been disinherited when she married Benjamin Rogers in Alabama in 1809. The couple raised ten children before Martha, widowed, made the long move to Texas in 1847 with three of her grown sons. She settled at the Lost Prairie community, living out her years as one of the region's early Southwestern pioneers.

Houston, TX

Rebecca Lamar was the widow of John Lamar and the mother of Mirabeau B. Lamar, a poet, soldier, and second president of the Republic of Texas. She died at "Oak Grove" in Houston in July 1839, in the earliest days of the young republic.

Kaufman, TX

Frances A. King came to the Republic of Texas alongside her husband, founder of King's Fort in 1840, and pioneered on the frontier with notable courage. After his death in 1846 she—by then Mrs. Tabor—campaigned to make Kingsborough the seat of the newly organized Kaufman County and won. In April 1851 she deeded 75 acres for the townsite and a matching timber tract to the county commissioners, and the fort's settlement grew into the town that shares the county's name.

Mount Calm, TX

A spring here was a favorite camping stop for travelers crossing this stretch of Limestone County, and by 1846 it was already being used to bury those who died passing through. After Ezekiel and Kitty Ann Billington arrived from Kentucky in 1854 and organized the Mt. Antioch Baptist Church, a small community grew around church and graveyard. The congregation later drifted north to Mt. Calm, but descendants have kept the pioneer cemetery in use ever since.

Wolfe City, TX

This burial ground began in 1852 as a family plot when "Uncle Billy" Williams set aside a few acres for his two-year-old niece; the oldest stones mark his parents, born in the 1780s. First called Williams Cemetery, it took the name Mt. Carmel from a nearby Methodist church built in 1883, and a chapel from 1920 still stands on the grounds. From that single child's grave it has grown to nearly forty acres and some ten thousand burials.

Annin Township, PA · est. 1949

In 1805 Thomas McKean—a signer of the Declaration of Independence and then governor of Pennsylvania—purchased a 299-acre tract here, and the county was later named in his honor. The estate's name, Mt. Equity, reflected a bare-knuckle land struggle: Pennsylvania sought to strengthen its claim to lands that settlers from Connecticut also claimed, part of the long Pennamite dispute over the Susquehanna country. Buying in gave Pennsylvania greater "equity of power" in the contested region.

Dripping Springs, TX

Pioneer rancher Joseph "Grandpa" Gainer settled here in 1858, and the high point on his land gave its name to the farming and ranching community that grew along the south fork of Onion Creek. By the early twentieth century Mt. Gainer had general stores, mills, churches, a school, and a farmers' union that anchored its social life. After the school consolidated with Dripping Springs in 1944, the village faded, leaving only rock fences and a few buildings behind.

Hays County, TX

Mt. Gainer was once a thriving rural Texas settlement, complete with its own school, that slowly emptied as the twentieth century wore on. By 1998 only fragments remained — a school cistern and steps, a teacherage, native rock fences, and a scattering of buildings on private land — the quiet skeleton of a community that had faded away. It stands among the many small crossroads settlements that rose and vanished across the Texas Hill Country.

Copperas Cove, TX

Chartered in 1884, Mt. Hiram Lodge No. 595 gathered the Masons of frontier-era Copperas Cove, first meeting in a two-story building it shared with the town's public school. In those early years its members joined a local company of Minutemen and worked to build up the area's economy. The lodge moved to quarters above a Main Street mercantile in 1894 and to its present home in 1970.

Wells, TX

Joseph and Mary Bowman brought their family through Missouri and Mississippi to Texas as part of Stephen F. Austin's colony, and their sons Joseph, John, and James fought for Texas independence from Mexico. In 1875 James H. Bowman offered a hundred acres to draw the Rev. W. D. Lewis to establish a Methodist church at Mt. Hope, giving adjacent land for this cemetery. The first burial came that November; when the railroad passed through Wells in 1886, the church moved to town and Bowman himself was laid to rest here.

Wells, TX

Mt. Hope Cemetery began in 1875 when James H. Bowman, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence, offered land to the Rev. W. D. Lewis to establish a Methodist church and burial ground in the Mt. Hope community. Margaret "Ruby" Hicks was the first interred that November, and though the congregation later followed the railroad to nearby Wells, the cemetery remained a fixture of local life. More than eighteen hundred people rest here, including over two hundred military veterans and eight Confederate soldiers.

Van Zandt County, TX

Farming families from Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia settled the Mt. Pisgah area in the 1860s and 70s, and their first shared institution was Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church, organized about 1870. In 1877 Wade H. Walters deeded land for a church building and a school, and a cemetery grew up beside the church to serve the neighborhood for generations. Like so many rural communities, Mt. Pisgah thinned out when residents left for wartime employment during World War II.

Mineola, TX

One of the oldest fellowships in Wood County, this church began in 1853 as the Holly Springs Baptist Church of Christ, meeting first in the home of pastor J. D. J. Davis with a tiny circle of charter members. Early worship moved from a log building to a chapel at Liberty Hill, now Pine Mills, and a new sanctuary went up here by 1860. The congregation, renamed Mt. Pisgah in 1865, counted many of the county's early leaders among its members.

Oakwood, TX

Though records don't fix its beginning, the Mt. Pisgah Cemetery's earliest marked grave belongs to a child who died in 1854, and local tradition holds that older unmarked burials lie among the pioneers here. Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church was organized in 1855 beside it in a hewn-log building called the Board Shanty, and the graveyard holds veterans of the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, and both World Wars, along with victims of an early influenza epidemic.

Lamar County, TX

Deeded to the Mt. Pleasant Church trustees for a single dollar in 1895, this two-acre burial ground already held graves — the earliest marked stone belongs to four-year-old Sammie Bryan, who died in 1874. Its 449 markers read like a ledger of the farming community of Deport: victims of a 1908 tornado, the dead of the 1918 influenza pandemic, veterans of the nation's wars, and generations of local families.

Montgomery, TX

Pioneers who settled this Montgomery County area as early as the 1850s rest in this community cemetery, the oldest marked graves belonging to Clara and William Fridge, who died in 1870 and 1872. Trustees of the nearby Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church acquired the deed in 1894, and among the unmarked graves lie seven victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic. A cemetery association reorganized in 1928 to keep the grounds.

Whitesboro, TX

Alabama natives Burrel and Harriett Scarbrough settled north of Whitesboro before the Civil War, and in 1878 Burrel deeded 8.5 acres atop a hill for a community cemetery, named Mt. Tabor for the biblical mount of the Transfiguration. The earliest dated grave belongs to I. E. Lindsey in 1868, and Burrel himself was buried there months after the deeding. Cared for by the Scarbrough family and the Sandusky community for over 140 years, its curbed plots and ornate fencing shelter veterans of four twentieth-century wars.

Woodford County, KY

On June 6, 1822, a small band of Baptists in Woodford County entered into a covenant to organize this church, with James Fishback serving as its first pastor. The congregation built a meeting house that served until 1903, when it was razed and replaced by a new sanctuary dedicated in 1905 and still in use today. In 1872 the church helped establish nearby Midway Baptist Church.

Coleman, TX

Established in 1891 on land donated at the base of Robinson's Peak, this rural Coleman County cemetery grew up alongside the Mount View School to serve the families who settled the area. The oldest marked grave dates to that first year, and more than a hundred of those buried here were born before 1900. A cemetery association formed in 2005 to protect and formally preserve the grounds.

Carthage, TX

This burial ground began on land owned by pioneer settlers Richard and Polly Golden, whose daughter and son-in-law buried a child here in the 1840s before deeding the tract to the Mt. Zion Methodist Church and Cemetery in 1850. More land came from the local farmers' Grange when it disbanded, and the cemetery—still in use—holds many of Panola County's early leaders and veterans of American military service. The site is a layered record of frontier settlement, faith, and civic organization in East Texas.

Burton, TX

This five-acre burial ground lies on land granted in 1831 to Robert Clokey, a colonist in one of Stephen F. Austin's colonies. Its first grave, an infant's, dates to 1852, and some unmarked graves may hold victims of the yellow fever epidemic that swept the area in 1867. Named for the Mt. Zion Baptist Church that stood here from 1857 to 1882, the cemetery holds 132 marked graves representing 55 pioneer families.

Cumby, TX

Faith came early to this corner of northeast Texas: the Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal congregation organized here in 1846, even before Hopkins County existed, and in 1849 the Rev. Anthony Travelstead gathered thirteen members into a Cumberland Presbyterian church. After years of worship in oak groves, brush arbors, and homes, the two congregations jointly built a church in 1861 on land given by local settlers. The Methodists moved away in 1914, but the Presbyterian congregation—and the cemetery—endure.