Westward Expansion

Palestine, TX

Settlers from the Brushy Creek country of South Carolina reached this part of Anderson County in the 1850s, carrying the name with them to the local streams and community. By 1858 a one-room building served as church and school, with an adjoining graveyard whose earliest marked burial dates to 1856. Among those interred are pioneer families and veterans, including James Eastland, who fought in the Mexican and Civil Wars and later sat in the Texas Legislature.

Weatherford, TX

Oliver Loving helped open the great post-Civil War cattle-driving era, blazing routes that carried Texas longhorns to distant markets. Partnered with Charles Goodnight, he was badly wounded on a drive toward New Mexico in 1867 and, after days without aid, died of his injuries. His dying wish was honored when his son and Goodnight brought his body 600 miles home by wagon for burial in Parker County.

Mentone, TX

Kentucky-born Oliver Loving came to Texas in 1845 to farm, freight, and deal in cattle, and in 1858 drove a herd all the way to Chicago—the first time Texas cattle reached a northern market. With Charles Goodnight after the Civil War, in which he served as a Confederate beef contractor, he blazed the route to New Mexico that bears their names. Wounded by Comanches on the trail in 1867, he died of gangrene at Fort Sumner; Goodnight packed his body home for burial, and Loving County was named in his honor in 1887.

Cleburne, TX

Oliver Perry Arnold's life traces the arc of frontier Texas: a South Carolina native who came west in 1847, chased the California gold rush for six years, then settled in Johnson County to raise livestock and a family of twelve. He took up arms in 1861 with a Confederate regiment and later kept the peace as county sheriff through the tumultuous 1870s, capping his career by founding the county's park and fair association.

Hampden Township, PA · est. 2018

A Scots-Irish immigrant, Oliver Pollock built a merchant fortune — in part through the slave trade — and poured the modern equivalent of millions into the American Revolution. Convinced that the young nation's future lay in the West, he worked to open trade along the Mississippi River, channeling arms and supplies to the frontier and financing George Rogers Clark's Illinois Campaign. The crushing debts he took on for the cause led to imprisonment and the loss of much of his wealth; he spent his later years, from 1792 to 1806, living here in Cumberland County.

Farwell, TX

The English-financed Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company — the syndicate behind the immense XIT Ranch — deeded ground for Olivet Cemetery in 1908, making it Farwell's first burial place. Among its earliest graves is XIT manager John Armstrong, shot by cattle thieves while loading stock at Bovina, and the cemetery holds the plot of the Hassell family, a mother and eight children murdered in 1926. Roughly a hundred interments include veterans reaching back to the Civil War.

Olton, TX

When the Soash Land Company laid out Olton in 1908, it set aside lots for a school, church and bank, and townspeople soon raised a Union church open to all denominations. About 1909 they hung this 950-pound steel bell, whose tones carried across the plains to call worshipers from miles around. After a 1928 tornado toppled the bell tower, the Methodist congregation bought the bell and moved it, and in 1958 it passed to the Church of the Nazarene.

Omaha, TX

Omaha grew up along the Seidicum Line, the old Bowie–Red River county boundary surveyed in 1840. When Thompson Morris laid out a townsite here in 1880, its post office bore the name "Gravett," and the dispute over what to call the place was famously settled by a drawing from a hat—yielding "Omaha," after a settler's old Alabama home. The town became a shipping point for plants and farm products.

Omaha, NE

In 1854 a band of pioneers crossed the Missouri River to found the town of Omaha on the Nebraska side, staking a claim that would grow into a major gateway city. A century later, in 1954, hundreds of committee members and thousands of Omaha's residents mounted a year-long centennial celebrating those founders. This monument commemorates both the crossing and the city it created.

Megargel, TX

After the Comanche lived from 1854 to 1858 on a state reservation near Camp Cooper, the U.S. government removed them and their goods north to Oklahoma. On August 3, 1859, the exodus camped near this spot on a head branch of Kickapoo Creek, escorted by a company of the 1st U.S. Infantry under Capt. C. C. Gilbert and Indian agent Matthew Leeper, while to the east Maj. George H. Thomas escorted more than a thousand Lower Brazos Reserve Indians on the same forced journey. Megargel was later founded here in 1910.

San Saba, TX

On this ground in March 1847, twenty Comanche chiefs and German colonists led by John O. Meusebach agreed to a treaty of peace opening the Fisher-Miller land grant to settlement. Unusually for its time, the agreement was honored by both sides and, as the marker notes, was never broken. It stands as a rare, lasting accord between Native people and European immigrants on the Texas frontier.

Anahuac, TX

On this bluff first called Perry's Point, General Manuel Mier y Terán established a fort in 1830, naming it Anahuac after the Aztec name for Mexico City. The post was meant to halt Anglo-American colonization, but the imprisonment of settlers from Stephen F. Austin's colony provoked the first open rebellion against Mexican rule in 1832.

Nacogdoches, TX

For roughly a century a stone house stood on this Nacogdoches site, thought to have been built about 1779 by town founder Antonio Gil Ybarbo and sold by him in 1805. It later served as headquarters for Indian traders William Barr and Samuel Davenport and, over its long life, did duty as trading post, warehouse, town hall, fort, barracks, church, tavern, and saloon before being demolished in 1902. A reconstruction rose in 1936 on the college campus.

Banquete, TX

Fort Lipantitlán was a Mexican garrison thrown up in 1831 along the Nueces to choke off further Anglo-American colonization. When the Texas Revolution erupted, Texan volunteers under Ira Westover seized the earthwork in November 1835, and in 1842 a small garrison held it against a far larger force led by General Antonio Canales. The state acquired the ground in 1937 through a donation from the Bluntzer heirs.

San Felipe, TX

San Felipe de Austin was the unofficial capital of Anglo Texas, the seat of Stephen F. Austin's colony — and this was the only home Austin, the "Father of Texas," ever owned in the region. In March 1836, as Santa Anna's army advanced during the Texas Revolution, Texans deliberately burned San Felipe to deny it to the enemy, and Austin's house went up with the town. The scorched-earth retreat was part of the desperate "Runaway Scrape" that preceded the victory at San Jacinto.

Ozona, TX

Established by the U.S. Army in 1855 above the junction of Live Oak Creek and the Pecos River, Fort Lancaster guarded travelers and mail on the long overland road between San Antonio and the far West. Garrisoned by the Second Cavalry, it was abandoned in March 1861 after Texas seceded from the Union, then briefly reoccupied by federal troops in 1868. Nearby, the deep ruts of one of the most-used pioneer fords of the Pecos are still visible where wagon wheels dragged down the hillside.

Banquete, TX

This roadside marker points to the site of Fort Lipantitlán, a mile to the northeast, where Mexican soldiers garrisoned the Nueces frontier beginning in 1831. Texan volunteers under Captain Ira Westover captured the post in November 1835 during the Texas Revolution, and in 1842 it withstood an attack led by General Antonio Canales. The state raised the marker in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence.

Camp Verde, TX

Established by the U.S. Army in 1855, this frontier post became the headquarters of one of the nineteenth century's most unusual experiments: a herd of camels imported at the urging of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to test overland transport across the arid Southwest. The scheme proved impractical, and the post changed hands with the times — surrendered to the Confederacy in 1861, reoccupied by the U.S. Army in 1865, and abandoned in 1869.

Fieldton, TX

In the summer of 1872, Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie of the U.S. Army marched 240 men and eight officers along the draw near this spot as part of the Army's campaign to force Native peoples off the Texas frontier. His swift, secret movement toward New Mexico aimed to break up a network of traders who paid Indians to raid settlers' cattle and horses. The track his soldiers beat across the plains served later scouts and settlers and is still remembered as Mackenzie's Trail.

Jones Creek, TX

A short distance from here stood the home of Emily M. Perry (1795–1851), the only sister of Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas." After the town of San Felipe burned on March 29, 1836, during the turmoil of the Texas Revolution, Austin regarded Peach Point as his home. The plantation tied the family of Texas's chief colonizer to the coastal plains of Brazoria County.

Brady vicinity, TX

One night in 1866, five men from Richland Springs tracked stolen horses to an Indian camp near this spot and recovered them in a sharp encounter. A metal arrow struck a Mr. Lafferty and slid halfway around his skull; it was cut out with a pocketknife, and remarkably he survived. The grave of an Indian killed in the fight lies about thirty yards to the north.

China, TX

Named for one of the Atakapan-speaking peoples it once linked, the Opelousas Trail ran from La Bahia — later Goliad — to the Mississippi in Louisiana, a route worn by Native trade for centuries before Spanish soldiers and French traders followed it. After 1820, settlers streamed in from Louisiana and the South, and cattlemen like Martin de Leon and James Taylor White drove great herds along it to market in New Orleans. In 1836 Texas families fled down the path in the "Runaway Scrape," and later the captured Santa Anna was led along it as a prisoner of war; the Confederate Army used the road, and parts of it became U.S. Highway 90.

Austin, TX

When Austin was founded as the Republic of Texas capital in 1839, no Protestant church yet existed in the raw new town. That autumn the Rev. William Youel Allen rode over from Houston and, on October 13, 1839, preached in Richard Bullock's hotel and organized a Presbyterian congregation of six members. Bullock and James Burke, both former church elders, served as its first ruling elders.

Roby, TX

The Texas Legislature created Fisher County in 1876, but with no permanent settlers it was attached to neighboring counties for the courts. By 1885 enough people had arrived to organize the county, touching off a fierce rivalry between the rival townsites of Fisher, promoted by Wisconsin businessman E. D. Strang, and Roby, laid out by former Mississippi planters D. C. and M. L. Roby. An 1886 election made Roby the county seat, and with a courthouse underway the county's organization was complete.

Floydada, TX

Floyd County was carved out by the Texas Legislature in 1876, but which town would rule it was anything but settled. As railroad construction pushed westward from Wichita Falls and homesteaders poured in, rival townsites — Della Plain, Lockney, and finally Floyd City — jockeyed to become county seat. Voters settled the contest in May 1890 by choosing Floyd City, whose name changed to Floydada when its post office opened that September, and elected the county's first slate of officers.

Pecos, TX

Built of local red sandstone as a saloon in 1896 and opened as a hotel in 1907, the Orient billed itself as the finest lodging between Fort Worth and El Paso. In the booming years of Pecos Valley development it served as a headquarters for land promoters, traveling salesmen, and the families of arriving settlers. It survives today restored as the House West of the Pecos Museum.

Van Horn, TX

When raids spilling across the Mexican border prompted the organization of Culberson County in 1911, one of the first orders of business was a place to hold prisoners. The commissioners approved this sturdy red brick jail in 1912, and though inmates occasionally clawed their way through its walls, it served the remote West Texas county for more than half a century until a new courthouse jail replaced it in 1964.

Las Vegas, NV

Charles 'Pop' Squires, often called the 'Father of Las Vegas,' arrived in the valley in 1905 and lived at this site with his wife Delphine from 1931 until his death in 1958. He launched a lumberyard, hotel, real estate firm, and bank, brought electricity and telephone service to the new town, and in 1908 bought its only newspaper, the Las Vegas Age. Through that paper the Squireses championed the creation of Clark County, women's suffrage, and the river plans that led to Hoover Dam.

Benjamin, TX

This cornerstone comes from the rock courthouse erected in Benjamin in 1891, when Judge J. J. Truscott and a handful of commissioners governed newly settled Knox County. The stone building replaced a wooden courthouse of 1886 and served the county until 1935. It survives as a tangible fragment of the county's first permanent seat of government.

Galveston, TX

In 1841, during the days of the Republic of Texas, businessman Joseph Osterman brought oleanders from Jamaica to Galveston, where his sister, Mrs. Isidore Dyer, planted them in her yard on this spot. The surviving plant here is an outgrowth of that original Dyer planting, transplanted in 1939 when a new structure went up. From such beginnings the hardy, salt-tolerant oleander spread across the island.

Woodville, TX

Organized by early settlers including Thomas Rock, Milton McQueen and Mary Parsons, Bethel Baptist Church was the first congregation in Tyler County. Worshippers met in the courthouse until their own building went up in 1852. The last of that original structure came down in 1957, and the church's first bell is now mounted at this site.

Santa Fe, TX

Organized in a local hotel in 1895 with 26 charter members, this was the oldest congregation in Alta Loma and among the earliest Baptist churches on the Galveston mainland. Over the following decades it helped seed other congregations and knit together the scattered farming communities of the coastal plain.

Austin, TX

The First Baptist Church of Austin was organized in July 1847 by the Rev. R. H. Taliaferro, worshiping at first inside the Capitol and in borrowed frame buildings in the young frontier capital. The congregation built its first sanctuary on this site in 1857, remodeled it in the 1880s, and replaced it with a larger brick church in 1916. Many governors and prominent Austin families worshiped here before the congregation moved in 1970.

Austin, TX

On May 26, 1850, the Rev. William M. Baker and five charter members organized Austin's First Presbyterian Church, in the earliest years of the new state capital. Among the founders was Abner H. Cook — soon to design the Governor's Mansion — who donated this land and served as a ruling elder. The congregation raised a wood frame building here in 1851, enlarged it, and eventually built in stone, worshipping on the site until moving north in 1960.

Santa Barbara County, CA

These ruins mark the first location of Mission La Purísima Concepción, founded in December 1787 by Padre Fermín de Lasuén as the eleventh in California's chain of Spanish missions. The mission gathered Chumash people into its religious and agricultural community until a powerful earthquake destroyed the buildings in December 1812, prompting relocation to a new site. What remains here is the original footprint of that lost complex.

Lufkin, TX

The Episcopal presence in Lufkin began in 1893 with services led by the Rev. George L. Crocket, growing from a small mission into a permanent congregation that built this sanctuary in 1906. Adopting the name St. Cyprian's, the church later bricked its walls and, after a fire and relocation, left the original building standing as the oldest surviving church in Lufkin.

Houston County, TX

In 1828, when this stretch of East Texas was still raw frontier on the eve of the Republic, Joseph and Willie Rice raised a one-room log cabin here—she reportedly drove the team that snaked the logs to the clearing. Standing on the old San Antonio Road between Nacogdoches and Crockett, the cabin grew alongside a family of eleven children into a well-known place where travelers could find a meal and a bed. Later generations preserved it, and in the 1970s the log house was restored and moved to Tejas Mission Park as a relic of pioneer days.

San Angelo, TX

When it was created in 1874, Tom Green County sprawled across nearly 12,800 square miles of West Texas — more than ten times the size of Rhode Island — astride the California gold-rush trail and the old Butterfield Overland Mail route. Named for Confederate general and Texas statesman Thomas Green, it drew German colonists, cattlemen like the Tankersleys, and settlers who pressed in despite earlier resistance from Native peoples. Over the following decades the giant county was carved into more than a dozen smaller ones as the railroad and new towns reshaped the region.

Andrews, TX

When Andrews County was organized in 1910, the new town of Andrews rose on land homesteaded by Robert Madison "Bob" Means, who had begun ranching the West Texas plains with his father in 1899. In a colorful county-seat fight against rival Shafter City, Means famously deeded town lots to local cowboys so they could register as voters and swing the election. He served as county clerk and gave land and money to the growing town for the rest of his life, retiring comfortably after oil was struck on his land in 1934.

Tulsa, OK

Just a few years after Oklahoma became a state in 1907, booming young Tulsa built itself a proper county courthouse, completed in 1910 as a symbol of the oil town's rapid rise. It served the growing city for half a century before being torn down in 1960 to make way for newer construction. This marker fixes the spot where that early civic landmark once stood, noting even its exact elevation above sea level.

Orla, TX

Orla sprang up in 1890 as a stop on the Pecos Valley Railroad, growing during the era's land promotions into a town with a school, general stores, a hotel, and a livery stable. When the highway bypassed it, the last merchant and postmaster, Hal Olds, simply moved a quarter mile west to the new road in 1931. Today the site serves mainly as a gateway to Red Bluff Lake, the Guadalupe Mountains, and Carlsbad Caverns.

Moulton, TX

About 1853, Tennessee native Orin L. Winters built a two-room oak log cabin near the Lavaca River and lived in it for two decades. After it was dismantled around 1902, its timbers were reused for a barn and a blacksmith shop, and in 1973 the surviving barn was taken down, moved, and rebuilt as a cabin to honor Lavaca County's pioneer heritage. Community donors and Winters descendants funded the restoration, recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1974.

Post, TX

Founded on the open range in 1878, the OS brand was held by 1881 by R. H. Overall and acquired in 1901 by W. E. Connell, whose holdings ran to some 200 sections of land. The ranch house served as a community gathering place for barbecues, roundups, and parties, and in 1907 hosted the election that organized Garza County. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Crawford, TX

Settlers of the Osage community began burying their dead here around the mid-1870s, and the ground was formally platted as a cemetery in 1885. For decades it was privately owned by the Kimbell family before passing to a community association in 1970. Among its more than 800 marked and unmarked graves lie the area's pioneer founders and veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and the Korean War.

Weimar, TX

Osage grew up in the 1850s where settlers from Tennessee and Mississippi found spring-fed Harvey's Creek on the Blackland Prairie, carving a community out of the Henry Austin survey. Its cemetery holds monuments as old as 1860 — handmade sandstone crypts beside marble obelisks, Masonic emblems, and Confederate markers — and once cradled the remains of William B. Scates, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and San Jacinto veteran, before his 1929 reinterment at the Texas State Cemetery. A 2001 cenotaph names forty-six others known to lie here in unmarked graves.

Okanogan County, WA

Homesteads like this one traced the arc of the American West in miniature—beginning as a mining claim staked in the hopeful rush for mineral wealth, then settling into a working farm and family home by 1905. In Okanogan County, one of Washington's last frontiers, prospectors and settlers pushed into rugged north-central country where fortunes were sought underground before roots were put down in the soil.

Clifton, TX

Already a burying ground by the early 1860s, this cemetery took shape around the graves of pioneer children and of Captain Allen Anderson, a frontier scout interred in 1864 when it was known as the Clifton Graveyard. Deeded for public use and later renamed for a landowner, it welcomed burials of all races. Among its pioneers lie early settlers of old Clifton and several Civil War veterans.

Ottine, TX

Adolph Otto moved to this area in 1879 with his wife and eleven children, and with his sons built the family home along with a water-powered grist mill and gin. After Adolph's death, son J.A. Otto carried on the work of building a town — a river bridge drew settlers, and by 1892 the community took the name Ottine. The cemetery here holds burials dating to 1888 and remained in steady use as the town grew with a rail line and a brief oil boom, before a 1980s association revived the neglected grounds and moved the old school bell to the site.

Davis County, UT

In 1891 George Frary built a house on this 160-acre homestead on what was then a lonely stretch near the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Six years later his wife Alice died and was laid to rest on the land they had claimed together. The Syracuse Historical Society set this marker in 1990 to remember the family who made a home on that desert island shore.

Alpine, TX

Completed in 1892 as Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, this is the oldest church building in the far West Texas town of Alpine. It served its congregation continuously as a place of worship until 1942 and then as a parish hall into the 1960s. Its survival marks the early religious life of a remote Big Bend–country settlement.

Santa Maria, TX

A rare South Texas snowstorm greeted the cornerstone ceremony for this Gothic Revival church in December 1880. Built from bricks made at the nearby Rancho de Santa Maria and dedicated in 1882, it drew worshipers from Bluetown, Santa Maria, and surrounding communities—though a 1933 hurricane later tore away its wooden steeple.

Alvarado, TX

In the unsettled years after the Civil War, this stretch of Johnson County was plagued by outlaws, among them Benjamin Bickerstaff, a former Confederate soldier wanted for murder in Louisiana, and his associate Josiah Thompson. When the pair rode into Alvarado on April 5, 1869, organized townspeople shot them dead. Both were buried in the old Alvarado cemetery.

Dallas, TX

When North Carolina native Aaron Overton and his sons crossed to the west side of the Trinity River in 1844, they were among the very first families in what would become Dallas County, raising one of the county's earliest frame houses and running a grist mill famous for its hospitality. The land itself had passed through the hands of a Mexican War veteran who received it as bounty from the Republic of Texas before it was deeded to the Overtons for back taxes. The family cemetery, begun in 1870, holds Overtons alongside neighbors, a doctor, and, by tradition, three Confederate veterans nursed in the family home and buried in unmarked graves.

Ovilla, TX

One of Ellis County's oldest communities, Ovilla began in 1844 as a fortified settlement on upper Red Oak Creek, adding a Presbyterian church in 1847 and its first schoolhouse in 1849. By 1900 it boasted a post office, banks, stores, and a cotton gin, serving as a marketing hub for area farmers. Bypassed by the railroads and scarred by fires in 1918 and 1926, the town faded—until suburban growth revived it in later years.

Ovilla, TX

The Ovilla community grew from Peters Colony families who settled here in 1844, and in 1886 Benjamin and Erixna McFarlin deeded four acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for a burial ground. The earliest marked grave, from 1884, belongs to Rebecca Summers McElroy, and more than 440 people now rest here, among them early settlers and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam. The cemetery reads as a roll call of the community's founders.

Athens, TX

David Allen Owen came to Henderson County in 1851 from Alabama, having lost his first wife on the journey, and rose to serve as the county's chief justice from 1860 to 1869. A pioneer Primitive Baptist, he settled in the Mill Run community and set aside part of his land as this cemetery, first used for his son's burial in 1873. The graves of Owen, his family, and neighbors — many marked only with rocks — make the site a record of the area's early settlers.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2001

Owen Wister, born in the Philadelphia area in 1860, drew on his travels in the American West to write "The Virginian" in 1902, the book that set the mold for the Western novel. Its taciturn cowboy hero and famous line, "When you call me that, smile!", helped fix the image of the rugged, honorable frontiersman in the popular imagination. Though a lifelong easterner, Wister did as much as anyone to turn the cowboy into an American folk hero.

Inyo County, CA

On the alkali flats of Owens Lake stand the remains of a 19th-century slag furnace, a relic of the smelting works that once cooked raw ore into bars of bullion. During the Eastern Sierra mining boom, wagon roads and even lake steamers carried ore down to furnaces like this, whose piles of glassy slag still mark the shore. It is a rare survivor of California's rough, fuel-hungry industrial frontier.

Helena, TX

Long a path of buffalo and Indians, this trail from San Antonio toward the Texas coast entered recorded history with the Alarcón Expedition of 1718 and became a great artery of Spanish, Mexican, and Texan travel. Conquistadors and priests, Stephen F. Austin, Alamo defenders, and waves of German and Polish settlers all passed along it, while ox-carts, prairie schooners, and mule-drawn freight wagons hauled a rich trade in gold, silver, and hides. The bloody Cart War of 1857 between Texan and Mexican teamsters flared near Helena before the railroads finally rendered the old road obsolete in 1886.

Llano, TX

The community of Oxford took shape in 1880 when Confederate veteran A. J. Johnson laid out a townsite in Llano County, and a year later neighbors set aside ground nearby for a burial place. Among those resting here is Johnson himself and James R. Moss, who captained the 1873 Packsaddle Mountain fight—one of the last engagements that drove raiding Native peoples from the county. The cemetery preserves the memory of a frontier settlement now largely gone.