Westward Expansion

Lampasas, TX

Built in 1861 of native white stone with lumber hauled in by wagon, the Old Cook Home stands near the county's first cemetery in early Lampasas. Its sturdy stonework reflects the self-reliant building methods of settlers on the Texas frontier.

Comanche, TX

Soon after Comanche County was created in 1856, the town of Cora was platted as its seat, and a tiny squared-log building barely twelve feet on a side served as its courthouse. When the county seat moved to Comanche in 1859, Cora withered, and the little courthouse was folded into a house around 1880 and shuffled from place to place over the years. It endures as the last trace of a vanished town and of the rough-hewn architecture of early Texas government.

Comanche, TX

Surveyed by Army engineers in 1850, the Corn Trail was the first wagon road to reach this part of central Texas, running fort to fort from San Antonio's district headquarters into the frontier. Its most common cargo was corn for Army horses and mules, which gave the road its name. The traffic drew settlers, and by Christmas 1855 there were enough of them to petition for the creation of Comanche County.

Bastrop, TX

This building began in 1850 as a humble frame cabin raised by John Cornelson in the young town of Bastrop, only a few years after Texas joined the Union. Joe Fehr enlarged it after 1854 using brick fired at the nearby Lottmans' kiln, giving the modest home its more substantial form. Recognized by the Texas Legislature as a historic shrine in 1954, it now houses the Bastrop County Museum.

Callahan County, TX

Old Cottonwood Cemetery grew alongside a Callahan County community founded on land granted to George Washington Glasscock, Sr. for his service to the Republic of Texas. Homesteaders arrived in the 1870s to good farming country, and the town of Cottonwood soon boasted businesses, churches, an academy, and two newspapers. The graveyard — its earliest known burials infants from 1877 — holds veterans dating to the Texas War for Independence and even two friends who killed each other in a frontier gunfight and share a common grave.

Palo Pinto, TX

Raised in 1880 from locally quarried sandstone, this jail replaced a crude log lockup and reflected the ambitions of a young frontier county. Its lower floor first held county offices and later a jailer's family, while the upper story confined killers, cattle rustlers, and rowdy cowboys—a snapshot of a still-lawless West. A hanging trap door installed in 1907 was never used, and after the building was vacated it was rescued as a county museum.

San Elizario, TX

Built around 1850 of adobe brick and cottonwood logs wrapped around steel cell blocks, this structure served as county jail while San Elizario was first, and later third, seat of El Paso County. Under one roof it held both the carcel and the juzgado—jail and courtroom together. Legend has it that Billy the Kid engineered the only successful escape from its cells, freeing his companion Melquiades Seguro.

Shippensburg, PA · est. 1947

Before Carlisle was chosen as the county seat, justice in the Cumberland frontier was dispensed at 'Widow Piper's Tavern' in Shippensburg, which hosted the county's court sessions in 1750 and 1751. Taverns often doubled as the civic centers of early settlements, serving as courtroom, meeting hall, and lodging all at once. The building endures today as the home of the Shippensburg Civic Club.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 1954

From 1804 to 1859, the first courthouse of Adams County stood in Gettysburg's old Center Square, on land given by town founder James Gettys. A county's first courthouse was the heart of its civic life — where justice was administered, records kept, and the young community governed itself in the decades of the early republic. The building is long gone, but the square it anchored remains the center of the town Gettys laid out.

Colorado City, TX

This ornate Victorian house, with spool-trimmed porch columns and decorative wooden window "awnings," was built in 1899 by rancher F.E. McKenzie in the West Texas ranching town of Colorado City. It passed among cattlemen before D.N. Arnett, retired manager of the great Spade-Renderbrook Ranch, bought it in 1912, and four generations of his family have since called it home.

Concan, TX

On the Dry Frio in Uvalde County, a one-room log cabin rose in an era of Lipan-Apache raids and roving outlaws, when a house doubled as a refuge. About 1884 cattleman L. C. "Clabe" Davenport enlarged it for his family of twelve, adding a second log room, a hall, and stone rooms at the rear. When he later prospered and built a frame home, the old cabin lived on as kitchen, dining room, and guest quarters.

Crosbyton, TX

Old Dewey Lake served as a key landmark for early surveyors of the South Plains, reportedly named for a land-office employee, Miss Dewey, after crews realized they had forgotten to name the site. Its shores hosted Texas Ranger Camp Roberts from 1879 to 1882 and the "Stag House" bunkhouse for cowboys of the Two Buckle Ranch. The lake itself vanished in the 1880s when eroding creeks cut a new channel and drained the basin.

Dime Box, TX

The county's second-oldest community, Dime Box lay within Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colony and began as Browne's Mills. Its curious name came from the practice of leaving dimes in a box at Joseph S. Browne's mill so the postman could fetch goods from Giddings for local families.

Georgetown, TX

Erected in 1901 as a hotel, the Dimmitt Building rose just as Georgetown settled into a prosperous county-seat town. Over the decades it reinvented itself again and again, serving as mercantile stores, the town's first movie house, an auto dealership, a drugstore, a dental office, and a bus depot. A 1960 remodeling preserved its native-stone Spanish arches, columns, and turrets.

Georgetown, TX

John Jones Dimmitt built this limestone house in 1866, hauling the stone by ox-drawn wagon in the hard years just after the Civil War. A surveyor, lawyer, and railroad partner, Dimmitt was a civic force who helped bring Southwestern University to Georgetown. The home sheltered prominent citizens for more than a century and was preserved beginning in 1948.

Lagarto, TX

On this brush-country ranch in 1888 was born J. Frank Dobie, the folklorist who became one of the great chroniclers of the Southwest. A fierce individualist, he gathered and published more than thirty volumes of folk tales and legends, preserving the voices of the rancher, the miner, and the cowboy. His work gave the everyday people of South Texas a place in American literature.

Dublin, TX

This burial ground began in 1864 with the death of Ellen, daughter of J. H. Keith, and was donated by William "Big Bill" Keith in his aunt's memory with the condition that it serve for free public burials. Known simply as the Old Dublin Cemetery until an endowment renamed it in 1961, it holds roughly 1,400 graves. Nearly 300 of them are unnamed, marked only by field stones or funeral-home plates.

Kermit, TX

Winkler County's first post office opened near here in 1908 on the John Howe ranch, serving 300 people with mail twice a week. The Pueblo Investment Company promoted the Duval townsite nationwide, opening it in March 1910 with free lots, a picnic, and a cowboy tournament—but when Kermit won the county seat, Duval withered. After oil was struck in 1928 its townsite rights were canceled, leaving the ownership of many 1910 lots tangled to this day.

Pipe Creek, TX

J. W. English bought this land in 1878 and built the cabin around 1888 near a crossing of the Medina River; it was sold to T. S. Crist in 1906. Standing along a well-traveled route, the home offered food and shelter to a steady stream of passersby—wagon-train pioneers, charcoal haulers, and Texas Rangers among them. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Lincoln, TX

An old evergreen here is said to have sheltered the French explorer Louis de St. Denis in 1714 as he crossed the region that would become Texas, likely among the first Europeans to pass this way. More than a century and a half later, the same spot served as a site for pioneer court trials in the 1870s. The tree became a landmark linking two distant chapters of frontier history.

Memphis, TX

Memphis's oldest burial ground was carved from the corner of the town plat just months before the community was chosen as the seat of Hall County, out on the Texas Panhandle plains. J.C. Montgomery, remembered as the "Father of Memphis," rests in its oldest section, and the earliest marked grave belongs to Ben F. Taylor, who died in 1890. Among the notable dead is W.A. Johnson—newspaper editor, state senator, and lieutenant governor of Texas—whose grave reflects the town's early prominence.

Falcon, TX

In 1746 the Viceroy of New Spain commissioned Colonel José de Escandón to colonize this stretch of the Rio Grande, and the first settlers arrived three years later; an official 1767 survey converted their holdings into individual land grants, beginning private land ownership in the region. Around 1800 José Eugenio Ramírez founded the Ramireño ranch here, and the community that grew around it was renamed Falcon in 1915 for his wife, María Rita de la Garza Falcón. When Falcon Dam flooded the townsite in 1952, residents carried their history to higher ground at this relocated village.

Gruver, TX

Established in 1886, Old Farwell was meant to be the seat of Hansford County but lost the election to a rival town that has itself since vanished. It took its name from John V. Farwell and his family, Chicago department-store magnates who received three million acres, the vast XIT Ranch spread across ten Panhandle counties, as payment for building the Texas State Capitol. All that survives here are stones from the casing of a 200-foot well, dug by hand to bring water to a town now gone.

Amarillo, TX

Organized in 1889 by sixteen charter members, this was among the first churches in the raw new Panhandle town of Amarillo. The 1890 meeting house was frontier improvisation at its most vivid: a belfry of cedar posts, a baptistry filled by hand with water buckets and warmed by hot rocks in winter, and a Ladies Aid member whose horse knew the route so well it earned the nickname "John the Baptist." The restored building was rededicated during a Diamond Jubilee in 1964.

Orange, TX

Organized in 1857, this congregation is the earliest known religious body in Orange County, gathered first in a small schoolhouse near the Louisiana line. An 1865 hurricane destroyed that early meeting place, and the church rebuilt among sweet-gum groves before relocating to its present site around 1892 on land deeded by Joshua Cole. Longtime member F.A. Burton served the church for sixty-eight years until his death in 1925—and when Hurricane Rita took its sanctuary again in 2005, the congregation rebuilt once more.

Newcastle, TX

This powder magazine is the best-preserved original building of Fort Belknap, one in a chain of federal posts strung from the Red River to the Rio Grande to shield settlers after Texas joined the Union. Named for its builder, Brig. Gen. W. G. Belknap, the fort held sixteen stone and picket houses by 1853 on the edge of contested frontier country. The State of Texas restored the magazine in 1936.

Ft. Stockton, TX

This ground served as the burial place for soldiers of Fort Stockton and the civilians of the town that grew beside it after the post's founding in 1859. Troops here guarded the San Antonio–San Diego mail line and countered raids along the Comanche Trail, and the graves testify to a brutal frontier where few lived past forty. When the fort closed for good, the remains of 56 soldiers were reinterred at Fort Sam Houston in 1888.

Clyde, TX

Established in 1851 to move supplies between Austin and the remote outpost of Fort Phantom Hill, this road cut diagonally across the county from northwest to southeast. Though regular troops abandoned the fort in 1854 and the supply line closed with them, the route lived on, traveled by emigrants, soldiers, surveyors, and others pushing into the West Texas frontier.

Longview, TX

Fredonia was founded by empresario Haden Edwards, who in 1825 contracted with the Mexican government to settle 800 families in East Texas. A dispute soon led him into the ill-fated Fredonian Rebellion and flight to the United States in 1827, but the town lived on as a busy ferry crossing and cotton river port. Its warehouses, brick kiln, and homes prospered until the Civil War's aftermath and a railroad's bypass around 1870 emptied the townsite.

Pearsall, TX

Built in 1884 for $11,000, the old Frio County Jail is the oldest building in Pearsall, combining cells with a jailer's residence in a style typical of its era. A second story and added cells housed different classes of prisoners, and a well on the grounds supplied its water. It served the county until 1967 and even doubled as a storehouse for confiscated bootleg liquor during Prohibition.

Hillsboro, TX

Built in 1895 by noted attorney Greene Duke Tarlton, a Louisiana native, this Victorian home was among the finest in Hillsboro. Its refinements included hand-carved mantels, stained-glass windows, a speaking tube linking the kitchen to a third-floor bedroom, and a dumbwaiter, while the grounds held a stable, coach house, orchard and grape arbor. It was later restored and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1972.

Franklin, PA · est. 1947

By 1796 Fort Franklin had outlived its usefulness, and this new garrison rose at the foot of what is now Tenth Street to take its place, commanding both French Creek and the Allegheny River. U.S. troops held it until 1799, after which it found a second life as the first jail of Venango County. The original site now lies beneath the water.

Huntsville, TX

Thomas Gibbs opened this store in 1841, during the days of the Republic of Texas, and the present building went up in 1847 after Sanford Saint John Gibbs joined the firm. General Sam Houston was among its steady customers, and the partners drifted into banking after neighbors began storing valuables in their safe—an informal service that grew into Gibbs National Bank in 1890. It is celebrated as the oldest business in Texas under original ownership on its first site.

Fredericksburg, TX

When Gillespie County's commissioners hired San Antonio architect Alfred Giles to raise this native-limestone courthouse in 1881–82, they were giving civic permanence to a frontier German-Texan community barely a generation old. Its careful symmetry made it the county's second and grandest courthouse, serving justice until 1939 before a gift from the McDermotts restored it as a library and community hall. The stone itself, quarried nearby, ties the building to the Hill Country landscape it governed.

Houston County, TX

The Glover Community took root around 1879, and by 1895 landowner Arch Sloan had deeded ground for a cemetery, church, and school—the trio of institutions that defined a rural Texas settlement. The earliest grave belongs to an infant, Grady Holcomb, and among the many pioneers resting here is J.W. Glover, for whom the community was named. Still in use, the cemetery draws descendants back each May for an annual homecoming.

Sheffield, TX

This route began as ancient Indian trails and the Old Chihuahua Trail linking San Antonio to El Paso and Mexico, later extended to the Gulf port of Indianola so imported goods could be freighted inland and traded for silver, gold ore, and leather. In 1848 the U.S. Army recharted it, marking water holes and camps, and strung forts along it — Clark, Davis, Lancaster, Hudson, and Stockton — to guard the frontier. Settlers, gold seekers, and even the Army's experimental camel trains traveled it despite frequent clashes with Comanche, Apache, and Kiowa people, until safe passage was finally secured around 1870.

Greeneville, TN

Greene County was among the earliest counties organized on the East Tennessee frontier, and Greeneville grew into its bustling county seat. A county gaol — the old spelling of 'jail' — was a cornerstone of that civic order, holding the accused and enforcing the rule of law in a young settlement far from established courts. This surviving jail building recalls the everyday machinery of justice in a formative Tennessee town.

Marshall, TX

In 1848 William McKinney gave land here for a community school, later joined by a Union church, and the spot became the heart of the far-flung Grover farm settlement. The cemetery appears in records by the 1850s, its oldest marked grave that of Susan Green, a Tennessee migrant who died in 1875. Grover faded in the 1920s and its school and church were gone by 1930, leaving the burial ground as the settlement's last physical trace.

Lewisville, TX

In the 1840s the Republic of Texas granted colonization contracts to promoters like W. S. Peters, whose Peters Colony drew families into what became Denton County. Among the 1844 arrivals were the Holford families of Missouri, who settled the prairie that took their name, and by 1855 a two-story hall there housed a Masonic lodge above a floor used for school and church. The adjoining Old Hall Cemetery holds more than 125 nineteenth-century burials, many of them infants and children.

Romney, WV

Romney is among the oldest towns in West Virginia and has long served as the seat of Hampshire County, the region's first organized county. A combined sheriff's residence and jail like this one was a familiar fixture of 19th-century county seats: the elected sheriff and his family lived in the front rooms while prisoners were held in cells behind or above them, blending domestic life with the daily work of enforcing local law. Such buildings anchored the courthouse square and stood as the visible face of order and government in a small county community.

Kountze, TX

Founded in 1859 as the first seat of newly created Hardin County, Old Hardin thrived until the Sabine & East Texas Railroad bypassed it in 1881, a fatal turn for many 19th-century towns. A suspicious fire destroyed its courthouse in 1886, and the next year voters moved the county seat to Kountze, which sat on the rail line. Old Hardin faded as the railroad town rose in its place.

Matagorda County, TX

Established in the late 1830s as Deming's Bridge Cemetery, this coastal Texas burial ground grew alongside a frontier community anchored by an early Baptist congregation and one of Matagorda County's first post offices. Land donated by the Savage family and later Jonathan E. Pierce shaped the settlement that became Hawley around 1900. Among those buried here are the celebrated cattlemen Jonathan and Abel 'Shang' Pierce, along with dozens of war veterans.

Helena, TX

When Karnes County organized in 1854, a simple frame courthouse rose in the middle of Jefferson Square in the frontier town of Helena. After storm and fire destroyed that first building in the Civil War years, a sturdier rock courthouse replaced it in 1873. The county seat moved on to Karnes City in 1894, but the old stone hall found a second life as a schoolhouse until 1945.

Hico, TX

On the banks of Honey Creek in 1856, a cluster of pioneer families founded what became Hico, in the Central Texas cross timbers. Settlers such as the Andersons, Fullers, Malones, and Steens broke the first ground, and merchant John R. Alford became the first postmaster in 1860. When the community later shifted, the rocks of the old mill's ruins were gathered up to build this memorial to the original townsite.

Hidalgo, TX

Built in 1886 by S. W. Brooks, who also raised the nearby courthouse, this two-story jail with handmade brick and a corbeled cornice served Hidalgo County through years still troubled by outlaw raids along the border. Its rooms also housed the county's first newspaper, "The Hidalgo Advance," from 1904 to 1908. The jail's working life ended that same year, when the county seat moved to what is now Edinburg.

Edinburg, TX

Erected in 1909-1910, this Spanish-style building with its red tile roof and white walls was among the first structures in Edinburg after the county seat moved there from Old Hidalgo in 1908. After a new jail replaced it in 1922, it served in turn as a community center, meeting place for civic groups, and city hall until 1966 before becoming the Hidalgo County Museum. Its tower still holds a hanging trap used only once, in 1913.

San Augustine, TX

I. H. Hollis put up this building in 1889 on a site with deep San Augustine roots, where the imposing "Yellow House" of merchant John P. Border had once stood and where K. L. Anderson, the last vice president of the Republic of Texas, had kept an office. The structure notably survived the great fire that swept the town in 1890. Over the years it sheltered a long succession of businesses, including the post office in 1911.

Jefferson, TX

This Jefferson residence was raised about 1858 by Dan M. Alley, the developer who laid out the city's "Alley addition," and became home to early citizen George Keese. Dating to the boom years when Jefferson was a thriving East Texas river port, the house survives as a modest witness to the town's antebellum growth. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Bandera, TX

Raised of native stone in 1873 by contractor B. F. Langford, Sr., this building is the oldest in Bandera, a Hill Country town settled largely by Polish and German immigrants. For more than thirty years W. J. Davenport ran it as a general store — the kind of frontier establishment that doubled as a town's economic and social center. Fire damaged it in 1936, but it was restored soon after.

Lampasas, TX

Raised in 1855 from native stone and cedar, this Lampasas landmark was built with enslaved labor in the years before the Civil War. Later known as the "Snap" Bean Ranch House, it survives as one of the area's early substantial dwellings. Its walls testify both to antebellum craftsmanship and to the coerced labor that produced it.

Muleshoe, TX

Old Hurley was born of optimism in 1907, promoted by a land company that surveyed a townsite, plowed furrows to mark future streets, and named it for New Mexico political figure Patrick J. Hurley. A store, hotel, livery, post office, church, and school soon followed as settlers arrived. But when the railroad bypassed the town in 1913 and Muleshoe won the county seat in 1918, Hurley withered and died.

Independence, TX

This burial ground took shape in the early 1820s on land held by Judge J. P. Cole, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists who first brought Anglo settlers into Mexican Texas. Donated by his daughter, the cemetery became the resting place of statesmen, physicians, educators, and veterans who helped build the community of Independence. Its weathered stones read like a roster of the founding generation of Anglo-Texas.

Ingram, TX

Settlers reached this Hill Country valley before the Civil War, but the town took shape in 1879 when the Rev. J. C. W. Ingram, a Church of Christ minister from California, bought land here and opened a general store and post office. A community grew around the store and thrived for fifty years as a commercial center, until a new highway in the 1930s pulled businesses away and the original townsite was abandoned. Today Old Ingram lives on as an arts colony of studios and galleries.

Edna, TX

When Edna was young in 1879, the J. C. Traylor place stood out as the first home in town built of fresh-milled lumber rather than salvaged or rough materials. In the neighborly custom of a small frontier town, the household kept a spare room and an extra plate at the table for country neighbors who came in for their yearly trading. It's a small window into the hospitality that held early Texas communities together.

Jacksboro, TX

This cornerstone and bell are relics of Jack County's third courthouse, a building of native limestone quarried right in Jacksboro and praised in its day for fine workmanship. When that courthouse was razed in 1885, the cornerstone was saved, and in 1966 townspeople mounted it here; local firemen later set the old clock-tower bell nearby. Together they preserve a piece of the county's frontier civic life.

Bandera, TX

Built in 1881 of local stone with cypress floors, this building held Bandera County's offices — jail and courthouse together — until 1890. In a young Hill Country county, a single sturdy stone building often had to serve as the whole seat of government. It remained in public use for some 57 years.

Bastrop, TX

Raised around 1836 for Sarah Jenkins—widowed once by a frontier killing and again by the fall of the Alamo—this Bastrop-area home sheltered seven generations of a single family. Its men answered the call in nearly every American conflict from San Jacinto through both World Wars, and rode with the Texas Rangers besides. Few dwellings so completely fold the sweep of Texas and American military history into one household's story.

Wortham, TX

Warren Allegre, who came to Wortham in 1869 and ran a nearby drugstore, built this Victorian house about 1895 while also giving music lessons, dispensing legal advice, and serving as justice of the peace and mayor. The home features handmade brick foundations and fireplaces, hand-carved woodwork, and two octagonal rooms, and was restored in 1968. It reflects the settled, small-town prosperity of Freestone County at the turn of the century.

Clairemont, TX

Raised in 1894 from red sandstone quarried nearby, this jail served the raw frontier of Kent County, where its most frequent guests were horse and cattle thieves, murderers, and moonshiners. Reputed to be one of the hardest lockups in West Texas to break out of, it never saw a successful escape. The stout little building is a relic of an era when law had to be built as solidly as the crimes it aimed to hold.

Irving, TX

Near the forks of the Trinity River, mid-1800s settlers built the little community of Gorbit, later renamed Kit, complete with a store, a post office, and the merchant-postmaster Ike Story. The cemetery began in 1896 when a family passing through buried their sick child in a grove on David Britain's land, and Britain donated the ground for a community burial place and an adjoining church lot. Early settlers stepped off their own plots by eye, and today Civil War–era veterans, immigrant French, German, and Belgian families, and pioneers like Aunt Kit King rest here as Irving has grown up around them.