Westward Expansion

Cooks Point, TX

Andrew S. Broaddus was already a Virginia legislator when, in 1854, he led a mile-long wagon train of some 200 people west to the Texas frontier, where the newcomers raised Salem Baptist Church as a piece of the home they'd left behind. A restless public man, he debated Sam Houston at a nearby campground, sat in the 1861 Secession Convention and several sessions of the Texas Legislature, and helped choose the site for what became Texas A&M. He closed his life as a district judge, father of thirteen, on the land near this spot.

Burkburnett, TX

A Tennessee-born steamboat captain who reached Texas in 1837, Gilbert built mills and was among the first to navigate the upper Trinity River before filing for land here in 1856. He raised his cabin by a spring, dug a trench to fend off buffalo herds, and endured repeated raids that drove his family away and back again; his daughter Hettie, born in 1860, is remembered as the county's first known white child, and the peach trees he planted long guided arriving pioneers.

New Braunfels, TX

At an ancient river crossing on the San Antonio–Nacogdoches Road, once traveled by Texas's earliest trail-blazers, about 200 German colonists ended a six-month journey from Europe. On Good Friday in 1845 they founded New Braunfels, naming it for the estate of Prince Solms-Braunfels, commissioner-general of the German Emigration Society. They were part of a wave of German settlers between 1844 and 1847 whose language, food, and customs left a lasting imprint on Texas.

Los Indios, TX

When French explorer René La Salle landed on the Texas coast in 1684, Spain feared its rival was seizing the region, and the Mexican viceroy dispatched Alonso de León to answer the threat. Across five expeditions from 1686 to 1690, de León crossed the Rio Grande, hunted for French intruders, and finally located and destroyed the ruins of La Salle's Fort St. Louis near Matagorda Bay. His 1690 march into East Texas planted the first Spanish mission, San Francisco de los Tejas, launching Spain's colonization of Texas.

Leakey, TX

This route was one of many Texas "feeder trails" that funneled longhorn cattle north to join the legendary Chisholm Trail above the Red River, driving thousands of animals to market in the years after the Civil War. The drives lasted months and were full of stampedes and the danger of Indian raids, and local settlers rode along, later spinning their experiences into frontier folklore. At times even herds of hogs were driven forty miles down the trail to market.

Farwell, TX

In 1540 Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led one of Spain's first great expeditions into the North American interior, chasing rumors of cities rich in gold. His route carried the party across the Texas Panhandle near present-day Parmer County before he pushed north with a small band. The fabled Quivira he reached in 1541 proved to be an ordinary Native American village, and the disappointed expedition turned back toward Mexico.

Seymour, TX

The Western Trail was the principal cattle highway from Texas to Kansas and beyond from 1876 to 1887, supplanting the Chisholm Trail after Dodge City eclipsed Abilene as the great beef market. Running about 100 miles west of the Chisholm route, it crossed the Brazos just east of Seymour—a major supply center—where herds bedded near Seymour Creek and watered at the Millett Ranch before pushing on to Doan's Store, the Red River, and Dodge City. Barbed wire and the Texas & Pacific Railroad finally ended its use.

Kingsville, TX

Capt. Richard King launched this hide-and-tallow works in 1866 to help his ranch recover economically after the Civil War. With beef herds worth little at distant markets, King salvaged value from cull animals by rendering their tallow for soap and saving their hides for leather, boiling the fat in iron vats eighteen feet long on Santa Gertrudis Creek. The plant ran only a few years, but its vats lingered for half a century, and the site is still called "Matanza" — slaughter — pasture, worked today by descendants of the original hands.

Merkel, TX

On February 15, 1870, Corporal Hilliard Morrow and five soldiers of Company E, 24th U.S. Infantry, rode from Fort Griffin to relieve the guard at the Mountain Pass mail station. Soon after they arrived, a Comanche raiding party estimated at seventy-five warriors besieged them, but the vastly outnumbered soldiers held their ground and drove off the attack, losing no men though the raiders made off with army mules and a horse from the mail company.

West Columbia, TX

When the young Republic of Texas needed a seat of government in 1836, it turned to Columbia, and a modest story-and-a-half clapboard building near here — raised about 1833 by Leman Kelsey — became one of two structures housing the new nation. The first Republic of Texas Congress met in Columbia, Sam Houston took the oath as president, and Stephen F. Austin served as secretary of state before the government moved to Houston in 1837. The 1900 storm destroyed the original; the replica here dates to 1976–77.

Anahuac, TX

In June 1832, after fighting broke out at Anahuac over the heavy-handed rule of Mexican agent Juan Davis Bradburn—who had jailed colonists including the young William B. Travis—settlers gathered at Turtle Bayou. There they drafted resolutions condemning President Bustamante's violations of Mexico's 1824 constitution and calling Texans to the cause of civil liberty. Many who signed would fight in the Texas Revolution just four years later.

Dawson, TX

On the raw frontier of the Republic of Texas, Dr. George Washington Hill practiced medicine while helping build a fledgling nation. Trained at Transylvania University, he came to Texas in 1836, served as a surgeon at Fort Houston, and rose to sit in the Republic's Congress, act as Indian agent, and briefly serve as secretary of war. His home, Spring Hill, was the first settlement in Navarro County, and stood near the site where surveyors, including his own brother, met a violent end in a clash with the Kickapoo.

Del Rio, TX

On January 12, 1883, near the Pecos High Bridge, two great railroads met and were joined by a silver spike, completing a transcontinental line across the Southwest. The eastern portion had begun in 1850s Texas and was rechartered in 1870 to link Houston and San Antonio to the Rio Grande, while C.P. Huntington drove the Southern Pacific eastward from California. When Huntington and Texas magnate T.W. Pierce reached agreement, their tracks closed the gap.

San Felipe, TX

Near this spot in the old capital of Anglo-American colonization stood a town hall built about 1830 that became a cradle of Texas self-government. Within its walls met the Conventions of 1832 and 1833 and the Consultation of 1835, and the provisional government operated here until Texas declared independence in March 1836. As the Mexican army advanced weeks later, the building and the town of San Felipe were burned to deny them to the enemy.

Omaha, TX

Built in 1859 for pioneer J. G. Henderson, this East Texas house reflects the craftsmanship of the antebellum frontier, with hand-dressed pine floors and ceilings and oversized handmade interior doors. Later cared for by Mr. and Mrs. Ned Walker, it was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Lebanon, TN

This site on what became the historic Lebanon town square in Middle Tennessee traces its story to the frontier era before 1780, when the land and its gushing spring were claimed as part of a 640-acre tract and a settler's cabin was raised beside the water. As the claim passed to new owners in the 1790s, the spring-fed settlement grew into the seed of a Tennessee county town in the first years of American statehood.

Pittsburgh, PA

Alexander Negley was among the German-speaking immigrants of Swiss descent who streamed into eastern Pennsylvania in the 1730s and later pushed west toward the Ohio country. After serving in the War for Independence, he brought his family to the forks of the Ohio in 1778 and took up land along the wooded ridges that are now Pittsburgh's Highland Park — frontier ground when the Revolution was still being fought. His homestead helped anchor one of the early European settlements in what was then the western edge of American reach.

Waco, TX

Neil McLennan was born on Scotland's Isle of Skye in 1787 and came to Texas in 1834, joining the early Anglo and immigrant settlers pushing into the region's river country. He lived until 1867, and the central Texas county surrounding Waco bears his name. His wife, born in North Carolina in 1797, survived him by four years.

Hamlin vicinity, TX

Organized in July 1889 as the Baptist Church of Christ at Plum Creek, this West Texas congregation began with just thirteen charter members who first shared a community building with the Methodists and the Masonic Lodge. They raised their own sanctuary in 1894, built a second in 1904, and took the name First Baptist Church of Neinda. A twenty-year pastorate begun in 1916 helped root the church at the center of its farming community.

Hamlin, TX

After Jones County organized in 1881, ranchers settled west of Skinout Mountain and built a community first called Banner, renamed Neinda when its post office opened in 1890. A cemetery followed in 1891, but the town's fate was sealed in 1902 when the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway bypassed it to create nearby Hamlin. Though Neinda peaked in the 1920s with a school, churches, a cotton gin, and stores, little survived into the twenty-first century beyond its cemetery, a 1905 church, and a 1927 store building.

Springtown, TX

Tennessee-born pioneer Hugh Nelson gave the first two acres of this Parker County burial ground, where the earliest dated stone marks his infant son, who died in 1864; still earlier graves were marked only with fieldstones. A cluster of children's graves recalls a deadly dysentery epidemic in 1884, the same year Nelson himself died. Once known as Walnut Creek Cemetery, the ground holds more than 700 graves of area pioneer families—Cruse, Helm, Nix, Osburn, Parker, and Peden among them.

Leggett, TX

Nelson Henry Rice and Sarah Ann Stanley married in Alabama in 1841 and, having buried several children there, brought the rest of their family to Texas in 1854, finally settling this land in 1865 on about a thousand acres. Local memory holds that Rice drove a stake into this very spot and declared it his burial place; he also deeded land for nearby Wilson Chapel and gave plots to his children, seeding the Rice community. Civil War, World War I, and World War II veterans rest among the more than 140 graves.

Gainesville, TX

Soon after reaching the area in 1861, Robert Carroll Nelson built this house of post oak logs with a chimney and foundation of hewn ironstone. He served as a county commissioner and justice of the peace, and he and his wife Elizabeth raised six children here. Its original materials and exposed logs preserve a fine example of pioneer craftsmanship.

Sulphur Bluff, TX

In December 1842 a wagon train from Warrick County, Indiana, led by two Hargrave brothers, reached the Sulphur River country, and settlement soon followed. The earliest burial came in 1843, and over decades several nearby graveyards—McFall, Hargrave, and the church plot at Pleasant Hill—merged into what became Nelta Cemetery when the community took the name of its 1882 post office. Trustees expanded the grounds through land purchases into the 1920s.

Marshall, TX

Twin brothers from Tennessee settled this area in 1847, and the family burial ground began in 1851 with the grave of one brother's wife. Susan Adeline Nesbitt, who often nursed sick neighbors when no community doctor was near, donated the land for the cemetery and later fenced it using the pension she drew from her late husband's Mexican War service. Descendants established a trust for its perpetual care in 1969.

Livingston, TX

Malachi Theophilus Nettles brought his family from Alabama to Texas in 1844 and settled near Livingston, and when Polk County was organized in 1845 he became its first county treasurer. This cemetery began on family land at the request of his son Stephen Joseph, who was the first laid to rest here beneath a beloved blackhaw tree in 1900. Of its thirty-eight graves, nearly all belong to Nettles descendants, and the family still tends the ground it incorporated in 1995.

Nevada, TX

Nevada grew from an 1830s land grant into a settlement founded by Missouri emigrant Granville Stinebaugh in 1852, incorporating in 1891 as the rich Blackland Prairie drew farmers. The arrival of the St. Louis and Southwestern (later Cotton Belt) Railroad in 1888 pulled the town toward the depot and filled its downtown with shops, hotels, and fraternal lodges. Then, before dawn on May 9, 1927, a half-mile-wide tornado tore through the west side of town, killing 27 and wounding 75, ending Nevada's rise.

Nevada, TX

Baptists worshiped around Nevada before the 1880s, and in 1890 thirty-five members of the Pleasant Hill church, led by the Rev. M.M. Wolfe, organized the Nevada Baptist Church. It grew quickly, replacing its first frame building with a brick sanctuary in 1919–20. When a devastating tornado struck Nevada in 1927, that sanctuary sheltered an emergency hospital and morgue.

Douglas County, NV

In the shadow of the Sierra, Carson Valley became the cradle of Nevada. Settlers founded Mormon Station in 1851 — renamed Genoa in 1856 — and with an early post office and local government it earned the title of Nevada's first town. Thousands of California-bound emigrants funneled through here, resting their livestock on river grass before the brutal mountain crossing, and Pony Express riders thundered along this route in 1860.

Carson City, NV

Completed in 1871, Nevada's Victorian-era Capitol was raised from sandstone quarried by Carson City's founder, Abe Curry. An octagonal annex followed in 1907 and the north and south wings in 1915. Its elegant interior boasts Alaskan marble walls and French crystal windows, a statehouse built to befit a young silver state.

Lyon County, NV

In July 1849, Abner Blackburn, a former member of the Mormon Battalion, made what is regarded as the first gold discovery in present-day Nevada near this spot, followed by William Prouse's find up Gold Canyon in 1850. Convinced California's riches were greater, most emigrants pressed on, but by 1851 some 200 placer miners—among them James "Old Virginny" Finney—were working the canyon. Their continuous presence at Gold Canyon's mouth made Dayton Nevada's first non-Native settlement.

Mount Pleasant, TX

The Nevill family came from Tennessee to Titus County in 1838, laying out a family burial ground on their headright survey, where the earliest grave dates to 1854. Among those resting here is James "Sam" Rowland, a Nevill son-in-law and one of the few men officially hanged in the county. Deeded to a Baptist church in 1906, the cemetery grew to more than 1,100 graves and became home to an annual decoration day begun in 1913.

Cut and Shoot, TX

This burial ground has served the crossroads community later known as Cut and Shoot since the early 20th century, when families settled near the Conroe-Cleveland and Willis-Waukegan roads. Annie Amelia Peel conveyed land here for a school, meeting house, and cemetery, though the graveyard sat unused at first for want of a fence to keep livestock out. By the 1930s, when floods cut off roads to other cemeteries, residents began burying their dead here—Evalyn A. Davis Kelley was the first, in 1934—and it grew into the community's principal graveyard.

New Braunfels, TX

New Braunfels was founded on March 21, 1845 by Carl, Prince of Solms-Braunfels, commissioner-general of the society organizing German immigration to Texas, and named for his estate on the Lahn River. His successor John O. Meusebach secured the colony's future, while officials, a pastor, and a teacher gave the new town its institutions. It became a cultural anchor of German Texas — home to Comal County, the New Braunfelser Zeitung (the state's oldest German newspaper, begun 1852), the first Staatssaengerfest, and, in 1856, the first special school tax collected in Texas.

Houston County, TX

This burial ground began during the Civil War era with the grave of an unnamed traveler on the land of Mary "Polly" Rice, its oldest inscribed stone marking Walter Ashmore in 1870. Over the years the Duren and Hill families deeded more acreage, and the cemetery served the vanished community of New Energy alongside a school and a union church, still tended by descendants of the area's pioneers.

Hondo, TX

This spot on the old San Antonio Road was long known as Soldaten Kemp — "soldiers' camp" — a rendezvous for frontier patrols and freighters before German immigrants made it home. Rev. John Schaper organized a Methodist congregation here in 1858, and by 1860 a church stood on the site. In 1871 members deeded land for a new building, which pastor and stonemason Jacob Bader raised from native stone with his parishioners' help; for years it served as the community's only meeting hall.

Clarksville, TX

Founded on land given in 1859 by George M. Sargeant for a church, school, and graveyard, New Haven Cemetery has gathered the settlers of Red River County for well over a century. Its first grave held a veteran of the War of 1812, and among the pioneer families rests the infant Dimple Dee Crockett, whose name lives on in the nearby Dimple community. Later gifts of land from the Jamison family expanded the burial ground alongside a Baptist congregation.

Mount Vernon, TX

Organized in 1875 by circuit rider the Rev. John J. Jones, this Franklin County congregation of thirty began meeting in members' homes and under brush arbors, holding baptisms in nearby Stout's Creek. Chronically short of funds, the church nearly disbanded in 1928 for want of a minister until the Rev. John H. Hayes stepped in to serve without a salary. Members built a new sanctuary from the old building's lumber in 1944, keeping the small rural congregation alive.

Mansfield, TX

Founded before 1886 by the Rev. D. F. Smith and fourteen charter members, New Hope Baptist Church first gathered once a month in the local New Hope schoolhouse. A charter member's son, J. J. Williams, donated land for a building in 1903, dedicated in 1905, and the congregation gradually moved from monthly to twice-monthly and finally full-time services by 1942. New sanctuaries in 1948 and 1972 kept pace with a growing membership.

Mineola, TX

This fellowship began in 1864 as a Baptist Church of Christ and reorganized in 1890 as Stephen's Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, honoring an elder who had died the year before. A sanctuary rose in 1902 on Black Branch, a stream used for baptisms near New Hope Cemetery, and the congregation took the New Hope Baptist name in 1916 before moving to its present home the next year. Its shifting names and locations trace the movement of a Wood County farm community over half a century.

Caddo, TX

In 1893, thirty members broke away from the nearby Macedonia Baptist Church to organize New Hope Baptist Church #3, with the Rev. C.J. McDonald as their first pastor. They worshiped alongside their parent congregation until 1899, when they built a sanctuary on two donated acres, only to see it burn in 1902 and be rebuilt. For decades the church gathered just once a month before calling a full-time pastor in 1948, and it marked a full century of service to the rural LaCasa community in 1993.

Streetman, TX

Pioneers from Alabama, Florida, and Georgia settled this Freestone County locality around 1849, planting cotton and corn on land that soon held a school and a public burial ground. The Little Hope Baptist Church organized in 1872 under missionary J. M. Gambrell, worshipping in a schoolhouse dubbed "St. Elmo" after a popular novel of the day. In 1886 the congregation took the name New Hope and built its own church beside the cemetery, which today holds some eight hundred graves.

Wills Point, TX

To draw settlers to the community that became New Hope, Mexican War veteran William James set aside land after 1871 for a school, church, and cemetery, and is believed to be the first person buried here. The oldest surviving marker belongs to Frances E. Whitfield, who died in 1876, and another grave is thought to hold a woman who died while traveling the Dallas–Shreveport Road in 1880. Four Confederate soldiers rest here as well, including one who surrendered with General Robert E. Lee.

Stamford vicinity, TX

The Bean and Whitaker families were among the first to settle the New Hope community after arriving in 1883, and burials on Bean farmland began with the graves of an elderly relative and a string of infants and children in the 1890s. In 1899 William F. Bean deeded land nearby for a formal community burying ground, which grew to three acres taking in those earliest graves. Ministers, a schoolteacher, and generations of settler families rest here.

New Hope, TX

Pioneer settler Joseph Wren gave five acres here in 1875 for a community cemetery, and the local congregation—until then meeting in a log building two miles away—moved to the site later that year. Mattie Brookshire suggested the name "New Hope," and the cemetery's first burial, in 1876, was that of an infant girl, Mary Sudduth. A schoolhouse served the community here into the 1920s, and an annual homecoming still draws people back each May.

Cedar Park, TX

Though Baptist worship reached this rural Block House community as early as 1848, the church was formally organized in 1868 in the home of James and Elizabeth Trammell, with six charter members. Its cemetery opened the next year, and for nearly fifty years the church building doubled as the neighborhood's public school. Ministers raised here went on to serve as far away as Brazil and to help found the Texas Baptist Children's Home.

Milam, TX

Around 1818, Elder William Cook—who had emigrated from North Carolina to southwestern Louisiana—began preaching on both sides of the Sabine River, holding early services in a log cabin on the Chambers family land. Bethel Baptist Church was formally constituted in 1841 as part of the Pilgrim Church of Regular Baptists, later renamed New Hope about 1870. The congregation joined the Southern Baptist Convention in 1927 and built its present brick sanctuary in 1970.

Pittsburg, TX

When Mr. and Mrs. G. O. Hart gave an acre of land in 1892, the families of this East Texas neighborhood gained something they had long wanted: a church of their own, so they no longer had to make the trip into Pittsburg for Sunday worship. Organized that September with the Rev. J. H. Floyd as first pastor, New Mine Baptist Church stayed small and rural through the generations. Its pews have long held descendants of the original charter members.

Pittsburg, TX

George and Julia Hart deeded land to the New Mine Baptist Church in 1892, and for years the congregation buried its dead in neighboring graveyards before founding one of its own in 1930. The first grave was James Quillin's that year, and in 1937 George Hart himself was reinterred here at his family's request. The congregation has maintained the grounds ever since, gathering each year for a memorial service, business meeting, and dinner that doubles as a family reunion.

O'Donnell, TX

New Moore rose in 1924 on the old Singleton Slash L Ranch, after a Dallas buyer carved 17,000 acres into quarter sections and sold them cheap to families hungry for land. Life in the little farming community turned on its schools, general store, church, and cotton gin, but the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the crushing drought of 1953 wore the settlers down. When the New Moore School closed that same year, families drifted toward the cities and the community faded away.

Churchill County, NV

When John Butterfield's Overland Mail & Stage Company began running the Central (Simpson) Route between Salt Lake City and Genoa in July 1861, this stone station—roofed with bundles of willow twigs—was a key stop for watering and changing teams. Because the hillside spring was too weak for both people and horses, a support ranch a mile west kept the station functioning. The transcontinental railroad soon doomed the stage line; Butterfield sold to Wells, Fargo in 1866, and Central Route operations ceased in 1869.

Pike County, IL

Frank McWorter was born enslaved, bought his own freedom, and in 1836 founded New Philadelphia on the Illinois frontier — the first known town platted and legally registered by an African American in the United States. He used the earnings from his land sales to purchase sixteen members of his family out of slavery. The town he built was a rare interracial community in the decades before the Civil War.

Klamath County, OR

New Pokegama existed only from 1903 to 1909 as the end of the line for the Klamath Lake Railroad running up from Thrall. Here freight and passengers were transferred to wagons for the overland haul into Klamath Falls, making the little settlement a busy transfer point in south-central Oregon's timber and travel economy. When the rails pushed on, the town's brief purpose ended, and it faded — a marker placed by the Klamath County Historical Society in 1976 keeps its short life on record.

Henderson, TX

New Prospect Baptist Church and its cemetery were established in the 1850s by settlers who had migrated to East Texas from Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and named the congregation for a church back home. Organizers Thomas Ballenger and B. F. Montgomery secured the first property here in 1855 from Miles Yandle, son-in-law of the surveyor Hansel Wright. The burial ground still holds many of the region's pioneer families.

Longview, TX

This Gregg County cemetery grew up around the New Providence Missionary Baptist Church, founded in the 1880s, with its first recorded burial in 1896. Fire, windstorm, and lightning destroyed the church, and the congregation disbanded—reorganizing only briefly to tend the graves. Among the fifty-eight burials rest veterans of five American wars, a former county judge, and a former district judge.

Maysfield vicinity, TX

Constituted in 1866 with eight charter members just after the Civil War, New Providence Primitive Baptist Church first met in a Maysfield schoolhouse under its founding elders. Members received this property in 1899 and built a white frame sanctuary the same year, worshipping in it into the twenty-first century. The grounds still serve as a family gathering place, and the congregation continues to follow its founders' doctrines.

Benton County, IN · est. 1966

In October 1818, commissioners Lewis Cass and Benjamin Parke, with Governor Jonathan Jennings, negotiated the Treaty of St. Mary's, extinguishing Native land claims across a vast swath of central Indiana. The cession—the 'New Purchase'—opened roughly a third of the modern state to survey and settlement. The boundary it drew reshaped the map of frontier Indiana almost overnight.

Red Rock, TX

Settlers reached the Red Rock area by the 1850s, and by the mid-1870s the community supported a post office and the Red Rock Male and Female Academy. When the MK&T Railroad laid track about a mile east in 1890, residents picked up their homes and businesses and moved to the rails—and in 1913 established this cemetery on land given by L. A. and Adrienne Turner. Families have donated ground repeatedly since, and the cemetery association still tends it today.

Honey Grove, TX

Settlers reached this Fannin County area in the mid-1840s, among them Philip Greenleaf Williams, who built a water-powered gristmill near Bois D'Arc Springs. When he drowned in the Red River in 1848 while bringing his family from Virginia, they buried him here beside a child said to already rest at the spot—his stone bears the cemetery's earliest date. The grave markers of the Self family, for whom the community was named, and many other pioneer households fill the burial ground.

Decatur, TX

In April 1893, Reverend Josephus Wesley Ford and several families organized this Freewill Baptist congregation southwest of Decatur. Ford, who had earlier pastored in Missouri, led the church until his death in 1898. Meeting at first only once a month, the congregation grew and eventually settled into a former schoolhouse after the Perrin School consolidated into Decatur's district.