Westward Expansion

Clarksville, TX

New Shamrock Cemetery was established in 1918 near Clarksville in Red River County, taking its name from the older Shamrock community it succeeded. Its Historic Texas Cemetery designation, granted in 2001, preserves it as a record of the families of this North Texas farming region in the early twentieth century.

Morgan's Point, TX

At the junction of Buffalo Bayou and San Jacinto Bay, Philadelphia-born Colonel James Morgan bought 1,600 acres in 1835 and laid out New Washington, working as merchant, land agent, and civic leader. Mexican troops burned the town during the Texas Revolution while Morgan served as a colonel, but it was rebuilt and flourished until nearby Houston outgrew it. Morgan's 1850s dream of a navigable channel along Buffalo Bayou was realized in 1876 when steamship magnate Charles Morgan dredged the Houston Ship Channel; the town, now Morgan's Point, was incorporated in 1949.

New York, TX

The Reynolds family arrived from Georgia in 1856 and, as devout missionary Baptists, gathered a community of worship that formally organized as a church in 1865. In 1873 the family deeded five acres for a two-story building shared by the Baptists, Methodists, the local school and the Masonic lodge. The congregation joined the Southern Baptist Convention in 1915 and, through revivals, singing and creekside baptisms, remained a center of community life for generations.

New York, TX

The New York Cemetery grew from a tiny 1870s burial ground beside the local Methodist church into a community graveyard sustained by the gifts of many settlers. Martha Dismuke gave an acre in 1883, Mary Walker half an acre in 1884 after her husband—founder of the community store and church—died, and later families added still more land. Circuit-riding minister-physician Dr. Thomas Hunt Hall and his kin are among the many families whose graves, more than 600 by century's end, chronicle the New York community.

Weatherford, TX

Robert S. Porter, who became newly organized Parker County's first county judge, settled this fertile ground in 1855 among a cluster of pioneer families. A Cumberland Presbyterian congregation took root in members' homes in 1871, and after Jim D. Newberry donated land in 1874 for a church and cemetery, the community itself came to bear the Newberry name. A church, a school, and a tabernacle followed, and the cemetery — its earliest grave a teenager drowned in the Brazos in 1879 — still chronicles the families who built the place.

Comanche vicinity, TX

Pioneers reached this stretch of Comanche County in the mid-1850s and named their settlement for the nearby South Leon River. In 1872 P.W. Brewer set aside land for a cemetery and church, and the oldest documented grave, that of Rosie E. McCurdy, dates to 1875. Renamed Newburg in the 1880s, the graveyard holds local pioneers and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Mexican War.

Newlin, TX

Newlin is a tiny farming community on the rolling plains of Hall County, in the Texas Panhandle country that opened to Anglo settlement only after the buffalo and the Comanche were gone. Its cemetery, laid out in 1904, gathered the pioneer families who broke this cotton-and-cattle land in the early twentieth century. In 2009 the State of Texas recognized it as a Historic Texas Cemetery, protecting it as a record of the people who settled here.

Sylvester vicinity, TX

Rancher Jim Newman, one of Fisher County's earliest settlers, established a spread here around 1879, and the community that grew nearby took his name when the county's first post office opened in 1881. By the early 1900s Newman had schools, churches, and a store, and its cemetery—set aside in 1906—holds sixteen veterans, including Civil War soldier R. L. Creswell. As population steadily declined, the churches and school closed one by one, leaving the still-active cemetery as the town's last trace.

Walker County, TX

Newport was founded in 1846 by Joseph Werner, a German emigrant who staked his hopes on the traffic of the Trinity River. Like many antebellum Texas river towns, its fortunes rose and fell with the water: when steamboat navigation on the Trinity declined, the town was left behind and abandoned.

Midlothian, TX

This family plot holds the Newtons, Peters Colony pioneers who reached the Ovilla area in the 1840s. Patriarch Larkin Newton, born in South Carolina in 1794, was a War of 1812 veteran who fought at the Battle of New Orleans and served as a county commissioner in three states before settling in Ellis County, where he built a schoolhouse for his family. The oldest grave is his own, from 1858, joined over time by his wife, children, and grandchildren.

Newton, TX

Newton County was carved from Jasper County and organized in 1846, just as Texas joined the United States, and named for Sergeant John Newton, a hero of the American Revolution. Its county seat bounced between Newton and Burkeville before settling permanently at Newton in 1853. The naming honored a Revolutionary legacy even as a new American county took shape on the Louisiana border.

Newton, TX

Newton County's present courthouse, raised in 1902-03 from brick fired on nearby Caney Creek, followed earlier courthouses at Burkeville in 1848 and on this square in 1853. Contractors Martin & Moody of Comanche gave it a Second Empire design with a mansard roof, corner quoins, and an unusual truncated clock tower. The interior was altered in 1910 and 1925, a jail was added in 1936, and the building was restored in the early 1970s.

Town of Elmira, NY

In the late summer of 1779, the Sullivan Expedition swept through the heart of Iroquois country in what is now western New York. The village referenced here, christened "Newtown" by General John Sullivan's troops, was a Loyalist and Native settlement that lay in the army's path. After the nearby Battle of Newtown on August 29, 1779 — the campaign's only major engagement — Sullivan's forces razed villages and crops as part of a scorched-earth strategy ordered by George Washington to break the power of the British-allied Iroquois nations.

Banquete, TX

Born in 1835 in Alsace, Nicholas Bluntzer came to Texas at nine with the Alsatian families led by empresario Henri Castro. He rode as a scout on Robert E. Lee's 1856–57 expedition against the Comanche, fought for the Confederacy at Palmito Ranch—the war's last battle—in 1865, and afterward became an influential South Texas rancher and cotton grower, lending his name to the settlement of Bluntzer.

Galveston, TX

Born in Canada in 1802, Nicholas Descomps Labadie trained first for the priesthood, then for medicine, before coming to Texas in 1831 to serve as a post surgeon. During the Texas Revolution he served as surgeon and infantryman, and at the decisive battle of San Jacinto he interpreted Santa Anna's surrender to Sam Houston. He settled in Galveston, where he became a leading physician, businessman, and supporter of the city's Catholic church and charity hospital.

Smithfield Township, PA · est. 1947

Nicholas Depuy came to this stretch of the Delaware around 1727, among the very first Europeans known to settle the region. When the French and Indian War brought raiding to the frontier after 1755, his stockaded and garrisoned home was pressed into service as Fort Depuy, one of the fortified farmsteads that dotted the wartime backcountry. Such homes-turned-forts show how thin the line was between domestic life and frontier warfare.

Cahokia, IL

The Jarrot Mansion rose in the French colonial village of Cahokia around 1807–1810, built for Nicholas Jarrot, a young Frenchman who fled the Revolution and remade himself as one of the Illinois Country's richest merchants and landowners. Its Federal-style brick walls made it the finest house for miles in a raw territorial settlement, and it is widely regarded as the oldest brick building in Illinois. Jarrot outfitted militia, sold land to newcomers, and once hosted the explorers who passed through this Mississippi River crossroads on the eve of American westward expansion.

Rockne, TX

Born in 1804, Nicholas W. Eastland came to Texas in 1834 and, in the spring of 1836, joined Captain Horton's company under Colonel James Fannin during the Texas Revolution. When Fannin's command was captured and largely massacred after the Battle of Coleto, Eastland was among the fortunate few who escaped. He lived on until 1891, and the State of Texas raised this memorial to him in 1957.

Kerrville, TX

Rowland Nichols, a Kerr County commissioner born around 1805, was killed by Indians and buried in 1859 beneath a live oak on his own farm, just as he had wished. His grave became a gathering ground for the dead of a scattered frontier community, including J. C. W. Ingram, namesake of the nearby town of Ingram. For more than a century this shaded plot has held the region's pioneers.

Boerne, TX

In 1844, Bavarian-born civil engineer Nicolaus Zink was chosen to lead German immigrants to a Texas land grant under Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels and the Mainzer Adelsverein. Finding the granted land deep in Comanche country, Zink persuaded the prince to settle instead at the site that became New Braunfels, and his steady leadership carried the colonists through unrest, disease, and starvation. He later built homes across the Hill Country and helped engineer the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad bed to Kerrville.

Lubbock, TX

In 1888 the managers of the great IOA Ranch built the Nicolett Hotel on an open prairie, an imposing two-and-a-half-story landmark visible for miles and named for a hotel in Minneapolis. The original settlement of Lubbock gathered around it as cowboys, salesmen, and land promoters came to eat, meet, and scheme. When a new townsite was platted in 1891, the founders literally moved the hotel five miles south to the courthouse square, and the town moved with it.

Sabine Pass, TX

A New Yorker who came to Texas with Robertson's colony in 1834, Niles F. Smith fought in the Texas Revolution and then helped build the young Republic, serving as its first banking commissioner along with posts as customs collector and land agent. Settling at Sabine Pass in 1841, he erected Jefferson County's first steam sawmill and its first church, and backed annexation to the United States in 1845. He rests here beside his wife Abigail and their two sons.

Hale Center, TX

Swedish-born Nils Akeson came to the thinly settled Texas Panhandle from Iowa in the late 1880s and helped found the town of Hale Center as an officer of its townsite company. He rode for the legendary XIT Ranch, served as postmaster, opened the town's first store, and helped bring the Santa Fe Railroad through in 1909. As mayor, land developer, and school trustee, he shaped nearly every institution of the young town.

Fredericksburg, TX

Charles Henry Nimitz bought this property in 1855 and by 1860 was running a hotel that fed and housed frontier travelers while sheltering his own large family. An 1870s expansion gave it a whimsical steamboat-shaped facade, and it became a hub of community life. In 1964 the building became a museum honoring the founder's grandson, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and those who served with him in the Pacific during World War II.

Nacogdoches, TX

A frontier gateway for centuries, Nacogdoches has flown nine flags rather than the six familiar to Texas history. Beyond Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederacy, three short-lived banners rose from failed bids for independence: the emerald flag of the 1812-13 Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition, the star-and-stripes of James Long's 1819 republic, and the red-and-white flag of Haden Edwards's 1826-27 Republic of Fredonia. Each rebellion collapsed, but together they marked the town as a crucible of revolutionary ferment on the Texas frontier.

Llano, TX

In the fall of 1841, Texas Ranger captain John C. Hays was cut off from his company atop Enchanted Rock and surrounded by Comanche warriors, yet from the granite summit he held them off until they withdrew. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936 to commemorate the celebrated frontier fight. The great pink granite dome had long been a landmark and sacred place for Indigenous peoples before it entered Anglo-Texan legend.

Sipe Springs, TX

The community of Nineveh grew as Southerners moved west after the Civil War, and in 1886 Hezekiah Bellamy gave two acres here for a school and cemetery. A Harvard-educated young schoolmaster named both for ancient Assyria's Nineveh. Elizabeth McNeely (1804–1890) was the first person interred, and her descendants, the Dukes family, have long tended the roughly two dozen graves that hold members of several pioneer Comanche County families.

Lampasas vicinity, TX

Settlers reached this spot along the Fort Phantom Hill Road in the 1860s and founded Nix, where Harvey Wallace opened a store in 1875 and his wife Elizabeth served as first postmaster. The village grew with a cotton gin, blacksmiths, stores, and a school, and later leaned on rock quarries and cedar yards. After absorbing neighboring schools, Nix consolidated with Lampasas in 1952, and its old schoolhouse became a community center.

Sanger, TX

Illinois-born Noah C. Batis came to Texas young and, in 1881 and 1882, rode as a cowboy driving cattle north up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas. Settling near Sanger, he established the Sanger Stock Farm here in 1899, building a reputation for fine horses, mules, and livestock and — though untrained — providing veterinary care for his own and neighbors' animals. He also served as a county commissioner from 1919 to 1923.

Dobbin, TX

Noah Griffith and his wife Esther, born in the 1780s, came to Texas from New York in 1829 as members of Stephen F. Austin's second colony. After a time in the port community of Matagorda, they moved to this site in 1831 on land granted them by the Mexican government. A farmer and miller, Noah saw the family home serve as an early polling place for the fledgling community.

Sweetwater, TX

Long crossed by nomadic Indians, this region drew Anglo-American buffalo hunters and cattlemen in the 1870s, and Nolan County was created in 1876—named for Irish-born adventurer Philip Nolan, killed by Spanish soldiers while capturing wild horses in 1801. The town of Sweetwater grew from a general store into the county seat, then shifted two miles to meet the Texas & Pacific rail line in 1881. Additional railroads soon made it a regional hub, its economy built on ranching, cotton, and mineral production.

Alpine, TX

Early settler F. H. Nolte built this house in 1890 in Murphyville, now northwest Alpine, using 20-inch adobe walls made from bricks molded right at the site. He sold it in 1893 to John Rooney, the county's second sheriff, and its exterior still looks much as it did when new.

Belton, TX

Norman Austin's long life traced the arc of early Anglo Texas. A New York-born wanderer who farmed and clerked his way south, he was ranching in Matagorda County when the Texas Revolution broke out in 1835. Riding with Horton's cavalry attached to Fannin's command, he was one of only a handful who escaped the fate of the more than 300 men captured and executed near Goliad in 1836, and he spent his later decades as a Belton merchant hauling goods by oxcart.

Hutto, TX

First settled around the mid-1800s by Mexican War veteran Daniel Kimbro, this Williamson County farming community was first called Avery. It took the name Norman's Crossing after M. B. Norman, who arrived from Alabama in 1872, farmed a large tract along Brushy Creek, and helped build and run the local cotton gin. By 1914 the little village had a store, school, church, and machine shop, and descendants of the settlers still live nearby.

Norse, TX

Norwegian immigrants settled this corner of Bosque County after 1854, and most worshipped in the community's Lutheran churches. That changed after young Ole T. Nystel—captured by Comanches in 1867 at age fourteen and held three months before being ransomed—was later baptized a Seventh-day Adventist and helped organize this congregation in 1880. Its 1913 building is the oldest standing Seventh-day Adventist church in Texas, and the adjoining ground holds Nystel, his family, and a grandson killed as a Marine in World War II.

Jasper, TX

Jasper County pioneer Ehud Norsworthy bought 405 acres here in 1859 and built a homestead complete with house, barn, smokehouse, well, and outbuildings. After his death in 1864, his widow Sara married Confederate veteran Edwin Irwin Kellie — founder of the "Jasper News-Boy" and later a riverboat captain — who named the place "Glorianna." The family worked the land until abandoning it around 1900.

Goldthwaite, TX

Named for a creek that homeseekers followed into central Texas, this burial ground began about 1857 when death overtook a traveler at a nearby campsite. Through the 1870s a farming community grew up around it, complete with a schoolhouse that doubled as a church. Local leaders formally deeded the land and organized a cemetery association in 1895, and pioneer families continue to be buried here to this day.

Suffolk, VA

This boundary marker stands where two of America's foundational colonies meet, each summarizing its origin story on stone. Virginia points to Jamestown in 1607, the first permanent English colony, while North Carolina reaches back to the ill-fated 1585–87 Roanoke ventures before its own permanent settlement around 1650. The marker also notes North Carolina's Halifax Resolves of April 1775, when it became the first colony to formally authorize its delegates to vote for independence.

Groveton vicinity, TX

North Cedar Community took root in 1856 as pioneers like Abner Womack and the Burke family carved farms from the East Texas woods—some reportedly sleeping in tree houses for fear of animals while their cabins were built by enslaved laborers. After the Civil War it became a small enclave of Confederate supporters, many fleeing the ruined states of the Deep South, and slowly gained a church, a cemetery, and Womack School. Lumber companies, then the Civilian Conservation Corps, shaped its later years, but by the twenty-first century only a few scattered houses remained.

Milam County, TX

Settlers from Alabama began arriving at North Elm in 1867, among them John George Lagrone, whose 1870 stone is the oldest here. Land was deeded for the cemetery beginning in 1883, with later additions. The graves include fourteen Confederate soldiers and two Texas Rangers, brothers Ellzey and James Perkins—a roll of the pioneers and veterans who settled the area.

Georgetown, TX

Part of the Brazos River system, this stream drew Native peoples to its fish- and game-rich banks long before it received the name San Gabriel. Spanish priest and explorer Fray Isidro Felix Espinosa christened it the Rio de San Xavier in 1716, and by the time Williamson County formed in 1848 settlers knew it as the San Gabriel. Anglo families established four major crossings along it — Booty, Russell, Box, and Hunt — that gathered mills, schools, churches, and cemeteries, most later submerged beneath Lake Georgetown.

Sulphur Springs, TX

No record fixes this Baptist fellowship's founding, but a revival led by Elders B. H. Elder and G. L. Smith at nearby Tarrant reorganized the congregation in 1875. Its late-1890s frame church, first called Liberty Baptist, added 'North' in 1946 to distinguish it from a neighboring church of the same name, and the building itself was relocated here in 1952. The Debord family, longtime stewards of the land, deeded it to the congregation in 1966.

Bunker Hill, MI

This stone marks a corner of the Michigan Meridian and Base Line, the master survey lines laid out in the early 19th century from which nearly all of Michigan's land was measured and sold. Under the federal Public Land Survey System, surveyors ran a principal meridian north–south and a base line east–west, then divided the wilderness into the orderly townships and sections that still define property lines today. Points like this one were the literal starting places for turning frontier into deeded farmland.

Denton, TX

Denton County's fair tradition dates to 1885, when the Denton County Blooded Stock and Fair first celebrated local livestock and crops. The modern North Texas State Fair grew from the Denton County Fair chartered in 1930, settling at its present grounds in 1949 and adding permanent buildings — including Fair Hall, moved from a World War II German POW camp near Gainesville. From cowboy contests to the arrival of professional PRCA rodeo, the fair has long showcased the ranching and farming heritage of rural North Texas.

Follett, TX

For 79 years the exact northeast corner of Texas—defined in 1850 as the meeting of the 100th meridian and 36°30′ latitude—defied the surveyors sent to find it, with nine surveys yielding almost as many answers. Blocks of land shifted between Texas and Oklahoma, and one man joked he went to bed in Oklahoma and woke in Texas. Only in 1929 did the U.S. Supreme Court order a final survey that fixed the point for good.

New York, NY

This monument marks lower Manhattan ground where the Congress of the Confederation sat in the 1780s, when New York City served as the young nation's capital. On July 13, 1787, that Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, a landmark law organizing the vast territory north and west of the Ohio River. It laid out how raw frontier land would be surveyed, settled, and eventually admitted to the Union — and famously encouraged schools and the spread of knowledge across that new country.

Runnels County, TX

In the rolling divide between Oak and Valley creeks, Runnels County ranch land gave way to a small farming town after George W. Norton bought the surrounding country around 1882. A post office opened in 1894 in the postmaster's home before the community pulled its stores, cotton gins, and blacksmith shops into a townsite platted in 1903, adding a high school by 1906. Churches and a Masonic lodge soon rounded out a typical West Texas farm town.

San Antonio, TX

Once part of the lands of Mission San Antonio de Valero and later a Spanish grant, this parcel was purchased in 1869 by merchant Russel C. Norton, who began building in 1876. The house grew grandly over time, gaining a second story, an ornate Victorian gallery, and an Italian Renaissance Revival tower. Later owners included the rancher Edwin Polk and famed trail boss and cattleman Ike T. Pryor, before business leader Walter N. Mathis restored the mansion in 1968.

Clifton, TX

When Norwegian emigrants began crossing the Atlantic in the 1830s, a share of them found their way to the wooded, hilly Bosque County country that reminded them of home. In 1854 Ole Canuteson founded what became the largest Norse settlement in Texas, and along the Gary Creek valley families kept their language and old-country customs alive well past 1900. Their farms and folkways left a distinctly Norwegian imprint on rural central Texas.

San Augustine, TX

In the 1840s, W. C. and Eliza Norwood left North Carolina for the East Texas piney woods, bringing nine children and extended kin to found this rural community in San Augustine County. Eliza's brother, a San Jacinto veteran and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, joined the household, while W. C. helped build the county's early roads as commissioner. The community grew into a self-sufficient cluster of cotton gin, grist mill, syrup mill, sawmill, store, church, school, and cemetery, and Norwood descendants still hold ancestral land here.

San Antonio, TX

Edward Miles arrived in Texas in 1829, when the region was still a far northern frontier of Mexico, and threw in with the Anglo colonists who would soon fight for independence. He was present at Anahuac and at San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 battle that won the Republic of Texas, then went on to serve in the frontier Indian conflicts, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. A Natchez-born settler who became prominent in civic life, his long career spans nearly every armed struggle that shaped nineteenth-century Texas.

Perryton, TX

As Texas sold public school lands to spur settlement, families like the Wambles and Taylors carved out a community in southeastern Ochiltree County around 1901. Located halfway on the Ochiltree–Glazier Road, the settlement gained a school, a general store with gas pumps, and in 1920 a post office named Notla—'Alton' spelled backward, since Alton was taken. As automobiles and better roads reshaped the region, the post office closed in 1944 and the school burned in 1966, leaving mostly memory behind.

Granbury, TX

Nubbin Ridge Cemetery was established in 1878, in the years when farm and ranch families were settling the North Central Texas countryside around present-day Hood County. Rural burial grounds like this one anchored scattered communities, serving as gathering places and lasting records of the settlers who broke the land. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery marks it as a keeper of that local heritage.

Corpus Christi, TX

Nueces County takes its name from the 'River of Nuts' that forms its northern border, a country touched early by Spanish explorers and marked by the frontier post of Lipantitlan. The area passed into Anglo-American hands during the Texas Revolution, and in 1845 U.S. Army forces camped here on their way to the fighting of the Mexican-American War. The county itself was created in 1846 and organized the next year with Corpus Christi as its seat.

Corpus Christi, TX

Nueces County was created and organized in 1846, in the first months of Texas statehood, with Corpus Christi as its seat. It takes its name from the Nueces River, which the Spanish explorer Alonso de León is said to have called "Nueces" — nuts — in 1689 for the many pecan trees along its banks. The county's name thus carries a Spanish colonial memory into the era of the young American state.

Corpus Christi, TX

The first courthouse on this block went up in 1853, when Nueces County stretched from Corpus Christi to the Mexican border and lawlessness prompted a seat of order; the land was bought for $300 from city founder Henry Lawrence Kinney. A second courthouse followed in the 1870s, and in 1914 this neo-classical building was completed for $250,000 to designs by Washington architect Harvey L. Page. Its top two floors held the jail, set off by an air space to muffle noise, and during the great storms that battered Corpus Christi hundreds of refugees sheltered within its walls before county offices moved on in 1977.

Corpus Christi, TX

Henry L. Kinney, founder of Corpus Christi, laid out Nuecestown in 1852 at the first ferry crossing on the Nueces River, luring English and German immigrants with cheap land and cattle. Nicknamed "The Motts" for its clumps of trees, the town gained a hotel, a packery, and one of the county's earliest cotton gins, and after the Civil War became a rendezvous for cattle drovers pointing longhorns north. On Good Friday 1875 raiders plundered and burned much of the settlement; when the railroad bypassed it around 1905, Nuecestown withered, and its post office closed in 1927.

Corpus Christi, TX

This cemetery is nearly all that remains of Nuecestown, a community established in 1852 by trader Col. Henry Lawrence Kinney on land he later deeded to settlers. First called "The Motts" for its grove of trees, the town once held a stagecoach inn, ferry, meat-packing plant, cotton gin, school, and churches. Its graves—Confederate veterans, a World War I soldier, a 1919 hurricane victim, and men kidnapped in an 1875 raid—trace the full arc of a frontier settlement that has otherwise vanished.

Corpus Christi, TX

On March 26, 1875, amid Reconstruction-era tensions between Anglo settlers and Mexicans along the Nueces River, a band of raiders attacked farms and marched captives toward Nuecestown. When they reached Thomas and Mary Noakes's general store, they wounded a customer and burned the building, though the family escaped by hiding in defensive trenches and fleeing to the river. The raid ignited waves of retaliatory violence in which many innocent Mexicans were killed, and it took Texas Rangers to restore order to the Nueces Strip.

Corpus Christi, TX

Nuecestown grew up along the Nueces River after Colonel Henry Lawrence Kinney's 1839 trading post seeded the settlement that became Corpus Christi. Its public school, established before 1885, was among the county's largest by 1893, and this one-room building — raised after two earlier schoolhouses burned — accommodated every grade under a single hipped roof. When district officials closed the school in 1913, its students moved to nearby Calallen, and the schoolhouse survived as one of the settlement's last relics.