Westward Expansion

Safety Harbor, FL

Odet Philippe, born in Lyon, France, in 1787, settled on the shores of Tampa Bay and became one of the earliest non-Native pioneers of what is now Pinellas County, dying at this site in 1869. He is widely remembered for introducing citrus—especially grapefruit—cultivation to the region, helping seed an industry that would define Florida. His homestead at Safety Harbor sat amid ancient Native American shell mounds along the bay. His grave marks the resting place of a genuine frontier settler whose influence outlived him by generations.

Jacksboro, TX

Built in 1867 from cottonwood cut in nearby river bottoms, this is one of five original officers' quarters at the Jacksboro army post and reputedly one of the last such structures standing in the country. Its style was typical of 19th-century western army posts. Among the officers quartered here was General Ranald S. MacKenzie, who led the campaigns that forced Native peoples onto reservations between 1871 and 1874.

Fort Clark Springs, TX

Fort Clark began in 1852 as a U.S. Army garrison of crude log and palisade huts, gradually rebuilt in quarried stone from 1857 onward. Built in 1873–74 as duplexes for two officers' families each, these eight stone residences—with three large rooms per floor, twin fireplaces, and fifty-five-foot porches—reflect frontier military design adapted to local stone and climate. The post was deactivated in 1946 and later became the private community of Fort Clark Springs, where the old quarters were eventually sold to residents.

San Miguel County, NM

Villanueva State Park sits in a red-sandstone canyon of the Pecos River beside the old Spanish colonial village of Villanueva, one of the small farming settlements founded along the river as Hispano families pushed into the fertile bottomlands of northern New Mexico. The valley's terraced fields and adobe traditions reflect centuries of Spanish colonial and later Mexican and American settlement in the Pecos country.

Magdalena, NM

The mining camp of Kelly sprang up after lead and silver strikes in New Mexico's Magdalena Mountains, tracing its beginnings to discoveries around 1866. Its greatest boom came in the early 1900s, when zinc carbonate once thrown aside as waste turned valuable to the paint industry. At its height Kelly's streets held stores, banks, saloons, schools, and churches before the ore gave out and the town faded.

Catron County, NM

This scenic historic marker in Catron County explains the origins of the Mogollon name, borne by both the mountains and the old mining town. It honors Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollón, Spanish colonial governor of New Mexico from 1712 to 1715, while noting the Puebloan peoples who left the region in the early 1400s and the Apaches who long inhabited these mountains. The name thus layers Indigenous, Spanish colonial, and later frontier history onto one rugged landscape.

Woodford County, KY

Standing on land first owned by early surveyor Hancock Taylor, this tavern grew from a log section dating to the 1780s-90s to a brick addition built by Horatio Offutt in 1802, which became a famous stagecoach inn under John Kennedy and William Dailey in 1804. Richard Cole, Jr. ran it from 1812 to 1839, and his line carried a notorious footnote: his granddaughter Zerelda Cole James was the mother of outlaws Jesse and Frank James. Later known as the "Black Horse Tavern," it served as a tollgate house before being restored by the Woodford County Historical Society.

Copperas Cove, TX

When Marsden Ogletree brought his family west from Georgia and took up an 1878 land grant, the stone house he raised became far more than a home. It doubled as a grain store and as a stopping place on the stage line running between Lampasas and Belton, and once the mail began arriving by coach, a post office opened here in 1879 with Ogletree as its first postmaster. When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad laid out a new townsite nearby in 1882, the community's center — post office and all — drifted toward the tracks, leaving the old stagestop behind.

Miami Township, OH

In the early years after Ohio joined the Union, settlers pushing into the Miami Valley of the state's southwest depended on rough overland routes like this one to move people, goods, and news between scattered homesteads and landmarks. Mad River Road ran toward the Mad River—a stream whose name the Shawnee and later settlers gave for its swift current—linking an established local point (Cunningham's) to that waterway and the mills and farms it fed. Roads like this were often little more than cleared traces following older Native American and animal paths, yet they became the arteries along which frontier Ohio grew.

Athens, OH

Ohio University was chartered in 1804 as one of the first institutions of higher learning in the Northwest Territory, and this sundial marks where its very first academic building rose in 1807 on the young Athens campus. In those early years the college was a frontier outpost of learning, drawing students to a settlement barely carved out of the Ohio wilderness. The dial now keeps quiet time over ground that launched two centuries of scholarship.

Saratoga, TX

Big Thicket pioneers settled here in the mid-1800s to farm and run hogs in the vast forest, and it was hog-tracking settler John Fletcher Cotten who discovered the sulphur springs he named Saratoga in 1860. His early attempt to drill for oil failed, but by 1901 wildcatters had ignited the Saratoga oil boom. Families who moved to a new townsite kept burying their dead 'down in the oilfield,' where headstones now mark pioneers, their descendants, and oilfield workers alike.

Conroe, TX

Local tradition holds that the settlement earned the name 'Oklahoma' when a man who announced he was moving to Oklahoma instead settled near here. George W. Snook and his wife Bonnie set aside the first acre for a burial ground after their young daughter Jessie died in 1894, choosing a spot near a storm-uprooted tree she had last visited. Her uncle John Henry Goodson donated another acre in 1903, and the cemetery has since doubled in size while chronicling the families of this corner of Montgomery County.

Farwell, TX

Carved from the storied XIT Ranch, the Oklahoma Lane community took its name from the many settlers who arrived from that neighboring state beginning around 1915, when the Capitol Reservation Lands Company started selling off ranch land. Farming and ranching families streamed in, and with children came schools — Sunnyside and Knox, later merged into the Oklahoma School. Methodist and Baptist churches and a 1925 cemetery rounded out community life.

Magnolia, TX

Pioneer farm families settled the Oklahoma community in the mid-to-late 1800s, shipping their crops and livestock from the nearby Hufsmith rail station. Valuing education, they built the first one-room school by 1880 with a small donation and family-donated land, using it as both schoolhouse and church. Successive buildings followed, and after students transferred to Tomball and then Magnolia in the 1930s and 1940s, the schoolhouse lived on as a community center and polling place.

Denton, TX

Burials here date to 1852, when pioneer daughter Rebecca Daugherty was laid to rest on family land. As neighbors and kin were buried alongside her, the site became a private cemetery in 1909. Nearby Alton served as Denton County's seat until 1856; once the seat moved to Denton the town faded, but families kept burying their dead here — more than 600 graves in all.

Jourdanton, TX

When Atascosa County moved its seat to Jourdanton in 1910, officials made do with a rented house for a jail before authorizing this reinforced-concrete, brick-clad lockup in 1915. Designed under courthouse architect Henry T. Phelps and built by San Antonio's Southern Structural Steel Company, it blended crenelated towers and hood-molded windows with living quarters for the sheriff's family. Its second-floor gallows room was built but never used for an execution.

Independence, TX

Organized in 1839 during the days of the Republic of Texas, this Baptist congregation at Independence holds a notable place in the state's history. It was here in 1854 that Sam Houston — hero of San Jacinto and former president of the Republic — experienced a religious conversion and was baptized in nearby Rocky Creek. The present church building was raised in 1872.

Texas City, TX

This ranch was established by Guy M. Bryan (1821–1901), nephew of Stephen F. Austin and one of the couriers who carried William B. Travis's famous appeal for help from the Alamo. Bryan went on to a long public career, serving in the Texas Legislature as Speaker of the House and in the U.S. Congress. During the Civil War he was a colonel and an aide to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Corpus Christi, TX

Old Bayview Cemetery was established in 1845, in the same era that Corpus Christi took root as a coastal settlement and Texas moved toward statehood. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery, it is among the oldest burial grounds in the region and holds the earliest chapters of the city's story. Its founding date alone anchors it to the very beginnings of the community it served.

Junction, TX

Established in October 1877, the Old Bear Creek camp served as a patrol base for Company E of the Texas Rangers' Frontier Battalion, watching the Llano River country for Indians and outlaws. The region was a haven for cattle and horse thieves, but within weeks Lieutenant N. O. Reynolds and his thirty men had captured many; in 1878 they helped repel one of the area's last Indian raids. Their presence, maintained into the mid-1880s, opened Kimble and nearby counties to peaceful settlement.

London, TX

This crossing of the Llano River, once a gathering place for revivals, became a busy artery of the great cattle drives from 1867 into the 1880s. Captain C. A. Schreiner and his partners pushed herds up the Western Trail toward Abilene and Dodge City, and local cowboys rode along. Herds of up to 2,000 head took half a day to ford, throwing up so much dust that watching ranchers had to guard their own cattle from being swept into the passing drive.

Bryan, TX

In 1869 pioneer Mary A. Williams gave land to Bethel Church for a burial ground that has served the Harvey community ever since. It became known as 'Old Bethel' after the church itself moved away by the early 1900s, leaving the cemetery behind. The earliest dated grave, from 1870, belongs to Elizabeth H. Hudson, and among those resting here are early settlers, community leaders, and veterans of the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy and the United States, beneath vertical stones and Woodmen of the World monuments.

Canton, TX

In 1858, William and Nancy Palmer deeded five acres for a Methodist church and burial ground, and that same year an infant's grave became the cemetery's oldest. When the church building was moved away in 1895, the land became known simply as Old Bethel and went on serving the surrounding communities. Its rows of stones hold many of the area's earliest pioneers.

Blanco, TX

Designed in Victorian style by architect F. E. Ruffini and built in 1886, this was Blanco County's first permanent courthouse—but it served only four years before the county seat moved to Johnson City in 1890. Sold into private hands, the sturdy stone building led a remarkably varied life as a school, bank, newspaper office, opera house, union hall, and hospital. It now houses a museum of early western history.

Perryton, TX

Built around 1912 in the Panhandle town of Ochiltree, this home was designed by Mrs. John Blasingame in a nineteenth-century English and German idiom and constructed by Sam Whittaker from lumber and red brick hauled in from Glazier. It boasted an attic and full basement, heavy embossed moldings, and leaded stained-glass windows of Bavarian design flanking the living-room mantels. In 1961 the McLarty family moved the entire house to Perryton.

Boise, ID

Boise grew rapidly after 1863, when the discovery of gold in the nearby Boise Basin brought miners, merchants, and settlers to the new territorial capital. The Old Boise district preserves the brick commercial blocks that grew up around that boom, the city's original downtown core. This engraved stone marks the boundary of that surviving historic quarter.

Boone County, KY

A courthouse has stood on this Boone County site since 1799, and this third building — a Renaissance Revival design by Louisville's McDonald Brothers — was completed in 1889 for about $20,000. Its original clock tower proved too heavy and was removed in 1898, replaced by a cupola designed by the noted Cincinnati firm of Samuel Hannaford & Sons.

Walnut Creek, CA

Frank and Mary Borges built this ranchhouse in 1899 as the heart of a working cattle ranch in the hills above Walnut Creek. Five generations of the Borges family worked the land before the house was restored and reopened as a visitor center for a 2,600-acre open space preserve, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.

Walnut Creek, CA

The Old Borges Ranchhouse anchored a working cattle ranch in the hills above Walnut Creek, built in 1899 by Francisco "Frank" Borges and his wife Mary with their children. In an era when the East Bay was still open range and grazing land, families like the Borgeses turned Spanish- and Mexican-era rancho country into productive American cattle operations. The house sheltered five generations of a hard-working ranching family before the land became a public open-space preserve.

Old Boston, TX

Boston began while this land was still part of Mexico, a store and mail stop serving the plantations along the Red River, and took its name from W. J. Boston, its first storekeeper. A battalion formed here to fight in the Texas Revolution, and in 1841 the town became the first seat of Bowie County, its square lined with stores and a two-story brick courthouse, and home to three private schools and even two future Texas governors. When the railroad bypassed it in 1877 and the county seat moved away, the once-thriving town faded into "Old" Boston.

Nye County, NV

This spot on the 37th parallel began as a line drawn on a national map: under the Compromise of 1850 it divided Utah and New Mexico territories organized from land Mexico ceded in 1848. When Nevada Territory was carved from western Utah in 1861, the parallel became its southern edge, holding firm through eastward enlargements in 1862 and 1866. A final act of Congress, ratified by Nevada's legislature on January 18, 1867, annexed the Arizona lands south to the Colorado River, fixing Nevada's borders as they stand today.

Lincoln County, NV

Here the 37th parallel served as a boundary first drawn under the Compromise of 1850, separating the Utah and New Mexico territories organized from land ceded by Mexico in 1848. As Nevada Territory emerged from western Utah in 1861, this line became its southern limit and survived the enlargements of 1862 and 1866. Congress and the Nevada legislature completed the picture on January 18, 1867, adding the Arizona lands south of the parallel to give the state its enduring shape.

Marquez, TX

Around 1860, settlers on the Texas prairie near Marquez raised a single building to serve double duty — a schoolhouse for the community's children and a meeting hall for its Masonic lodge. In a thinly settled frontier county, such a structure was the civic heart of the neighborhood, hosting lessons, lodge business, and gatherings under one roof. The tradition endured in the annual Father's Day reunion that still draws descendants back to the site.

Brazoria, TX

In 1827 the Mexican government granted Brazoria this ground as a Catholic cemetery—which in practice meant it was open to everyone, since all of Austin's colonists were, by law, counted as Catholics. Generations of the colony's pioneer families were laid to rest here until the burial ground filled by 1930 and a new cemetery opened. It remains a roll call of the Anglo-American settlers of Stephen F. Austin's colony.

Angleton, TX

When Angleton won the Brazoria County seat in 1896, it needed a proper seat of government, and this courthouse rose the following year from plans first drawn for a neighboring county. Growth prompted a major enlargement and remodeling in 1927, but a 1932 storm damaged the building and pushed the county to erect a replacement. County offices lingered here into the 1970s, leaving the old courthouse as a landmark of the town's early civic life.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1953

After Harrisburg became Pennsylvania's capital, the state needed a proper home for its government. Architect Stephen Hills designed and built the first State Capitol here between 1819 and 1821, and lawmakers first gathered inside on January 2, 1822. The dignified brick statehouse served the commonwealth for three-quarters of a century until fire destroyed it in February 1897.

Bandera vicinity, TX

This ranch was settled in 1867 by former New Yorker Judge Edward M. Ross, a Mexican War veteran who had served in the 1850s at Camp Verde, the Army's nearby camel post. His hand-cut native-stone house passed to his daughter Kate, wife of Ebenezer Buck of a prominent pioneer family, who inherited it in 1901. In 1920 the Bucks turned the ranch into Bandera's first guest ranch, famed for its food and hospitality until their deaths in 1941.

Odessa, TX

This shallow depression is a surviving buffalo wallow, worn into the West Texas ground over untold years by bison rolling in the dirt to shed winter coats and drive off insects. Great herds once migrated across these plains between Canada and Mexico, sustaining the Plains Indians who followed them for food, clothing, and shelter. In the 1870s the herds were slaughtered en masse—encouraged by the army, settlers, and hide hunters—and had all but vanished by the time Odessa was founded in 1886.

Pecos, TX

Erected in 1929 by pioneer physician Jim Camp, this was the first permanent hospital in the vast Trans-Pecos region of far West Texas. "Dr. Jim," who arrived in Pecos in 1900 and once operated on kitchen tables for lack of equipment, spent decades pushing to build a modern facility and was named Texas Doctor of the Year in 1950. The building was converted to offices in 1954 and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Decatur, TX

This spot recalls the lawless years after the Civil War, when outlaws like Jesse and Frank James kept a chain of hideouts across Texas from the Rio Grande to the Red River, stashing stolen horses until posses lost the trail. The era produced a rogues' gallery—Cole Younger, Belle Starr, John Wesley Hardin, Sam Bass and others—who robbed and killed and vanished into wild country. Order returned only after the Texas Rangers were reorganized in the 1870s and given broad arrest powers.

Capon Bridge, WV

Capon Bridge grew up where the road to the west crossed the Cacapon River in Hampshire County, one of the oldest corners of what is now West Virginia and a frontier settled by Scots-Irish and German families in the eighteenth century. A congregation like this old Christian Church would have been a cornerstone of that small mountain community — a place for worship, weddings, funerals, and the ordinary business of neighbors keeping faith together across generations. Churches bearing the plain 'Christian Church' name grew out of the Restoration Movement that swept the American frontier in the early 1800s, calling for a simple, unifying faith.

Capon Bridge, WV

Capon Bridge sits in the Cacapon River valley of Hampshire County, one of the oldest corners of what is now West Virginia and part of Virginia's colonial backcountry. Presbyterian congregations like this one followed the Scots-Irish and other settlers who pushed into these Appalachian valleys in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and the meetinghouse typically doubled as the community's spiritual and social anchor. An 'old' church of this kind marks generations of local worship, weddings, and burials in a rural crossroads that grew up around the river ford and bridge that gave the town its name.

Abbott, TX

D. C. Carr established this ranch in 1854 on land straddling Hill and McLennan counties, part of the early growth he and his brother J. C. brought to the towns of Abbott and West after arriving in Texas in 1840. A log cabin on the property served triple duty as store, post office, and stagecoach station until 1881. The land still holds traces of an earlier Indian camp and burial mound near a cave formed along the Balcones Fault.

Vincennes, IN

This plaque records the 1976 placement of Vincennes' Old Cathedral and its complex on the National Register of Historic Places, done by the U.S. Department of the Interior with Indiana's Division of Historic Preservation. The designation recognizes one of the oldest and most storied Catholic sites in the old Northwest.

Vincennes, IN

This cemetery holds the mostly unmarked graves of some 4,000 early residents of Vincennes, among them Revolutionary soldiers who aided George Rogers Clark. On its ground stood the log church where townspeople swore allegiance to Virginia and the United States in 1778, and where in February 1779 Clark and British commander Henry Hamilton negotiated the surrender of nearby Fort Sackville.

Wheelock, TX

The Cavitt homestead began as a log cabin raised in 1836, the year Texas won its independence, and grew into a fine hand-finished house completed in 1854. Standing on the road between Nacogdoches and San Antonio de Béxar, it served through the 1840s and 1850s as a stage stop. The Cavitts were political allies of Sam Houston, who was a frequent guest and gave a desk to Volney Cavitt.

Sherman, TX

Settled in 1848 by Grayson County pioneers who reclaimed land from wilderness amid Indian raids and frontier hardship, Old Cedar quickly needed a cemetery—still holding some 400 graves, including one Union and eighteen Confederate veterans. As the community took root it built Cedar Academy in 1871, where students learned to make ink and split goose-quills alongside their lessons, and organized the Cedar Methodist Church the same year. Camp-ground revivals under brush arbors drew families from miles around each summer.

Celina, TX

Founded near this spot in 1870 by settlers from Celina, Tennessee, the town of Celina left this cemetery behind when the community picked up and moved to the railroad around 1900. W. J. Bounds donated the land as a community burying ground after Elizabeth McWhorter's death in 1885, and its oldest grave holds a child who died in 1884. A cemetery association formed in 1918, and the grounds now hold some 600 graves.

Paris, TX

On land once owned by George Washington Wright, founder of Paris, this was the town's primary burial ground from 1845 to 1865, its oldest grave said to be that of a free Black man who worked for Wright. When the newer Evergreen Cemetery opened in 1866, many graves were moved, yet Wright himself was buried here in 1877, and a granite marker honors soldiers of the 9th Texas Infantry, C.S.A., who died in a measles epidemic in 1862. Of roughly 325 graves, about a hundred stones survive, most from 1870 to 1910.

Carthage, TX

Old Center Cemetery began in 1856 on land donated by community pioneer James Rowe, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence whose own 1868 grave is among its oldest. The earliest marked burial, that of Arminta C. Cash, dates to 1865, and the grounds hold some 400 marked graves alongside many unmarked ones. Descendants of the original donor have expanded its boundaries over the generations.

Pineland, TX

In one of Texas's oldest settled regions, the farming community of Centerview took root in the 1840s around a stagecoach stop, post office, store, church, and school. Its community cemetery holds a dozen or more unmarked graves alongside the oldest dated burial — an infant, Merle Taylor, laid to rest in 1899 — plus community leaders and veterans of every war from the Civil War through Vietnam. Wooden markers, curbed plots, and an arched entryway survive, tended each year by descendants.

La Vernia, TX

The Old Chihuahua Road ran from central Mexico to the Texas coast at Indianola, a cart route worn by traders, raiders, and newcomers alike. Alsatian, German, Polish, and Irish immigrants followed it inland seeking a fresh start, even as it doubled as a path for Indian raiding parties. After 1835 it carried gold and silver bound for export, and by the 1850s it served as a route for army travel.

Cuero, TX

On April 1, 1866, some 1,800 longhorns gathered by Crockett Cardwell moved out from near this DeWitt County site on the first great trail drive from the area to northern markets, with local man Thornton Chisholm as trail boss. The route joined the famous Chisholm Trail — marked in part by scout Jesse Chisholm — winding past Austin, Georgetown, and Red River Station into the Indian Territory. In the first postwar year alone, 260,000 Texas cattle went up the trail, and over three decades at least ten million followed, driven north by Texas cowboys in the greatest movement of livestock in history.

Alvin, TX

This was Alvin's first cemetery, acquired by the city in 1892, its oldest legible stone dating to 1889 over the grave of pioneer and Civil War veteran G. W. Durant. Many of the town's earliest settlers rest here, along with several victims of the devastating 1900 hurricane. The burial ground was renamed Oak Park in 1953.

Caldwell, TX

Laid out in 1840, the same year the town of Caldwell was platted, this burial ground was set aside as a "Grave Yard and Church lot" in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas. Town founder Lewis L. Chiles rests here, and its oldest legible stone, from 1843, marks Margarette A. King and her infant daughter. The cemetery is now maintained by the city.

Livingston, TX

This graveyard opened in 1840 with the burial of a four-year-old child of Moses Livingston Choate, a Kentucky pioneer who had received a Mexican land grant and founded the town he first called Springfield. After Polk County formed in 1846, Choate donated land for the county seat and renamed the town Livingston, setting aside a block that grew from a family plot into the community cemetery. Among its graves lie Republic of Texas citizens, Mexican War veterans, and dozens of Civil War soldiers.

Weatherford, TX

Formally established by Weatherford's town council in 1863, this cemetery gathered earlier burials that had been scattered in the town's unmarked streets. By the 1920s a civic league and cemetery association—led notably by its women members—had beautified and secured the neglected grounds. Among its estimated thousand graves rest Civil War Medal of Honor recipient Chester Bowen, famed trail drivers Oliver Loving and Bose Ikard, and Texas Governor S. W. T. Lanham.

McKinney, TX

Collin County was carved from Fannin County in 1846 and named for Collin McKinney, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. After the county seat moved to a more central site donated by William and Margaret Davis, the growing town of McKinney replaced two wooden courthouses with this substantial stone building, completed in 1876 to a design by Sherman architect Charles Wheeler and celebrated with a grand ball. Enlarged in the 1920s and used as a courthouse until 1979, it endures as a symbol of the county's early growth.

West Columbia, TX

This burial ground was given from the grant of Josiah H. Bell, among the first land deeded to one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists. It holds the graves of many who fought in the Texas Revolution of 1836. Deeded to a Presbyterian congregation in 1852, it has been tended since 1933 by a cemetery association.

Burnet, TX

Built in 1873, this Victorian home boasted a large bay window, a solid walnut staircase, and three fireplaces, and though later remodeled it kept its original floor plan. In 1890 it was bought by Judge J.G. Cook, a noted lawyer, and stayed in the Cook family for generations. It stands as a fine example of the substantial homes prominent citizens built in early Burnet.