Westward Expansion

Bridgeport, TX

Robert and Molly Paschall settled near Salt Creek in 1876 and by 1902 had turned their home into the hub of a small farming community — housing the Paschall post office and the Paschall-Cottondale Telephone Company. Neighbors built a one-room schoolhouse called Gravel Hill and organized a Sabbath school, literary society, and Farmers Alliance chapter. Though the community faded in the early 20th century, the Paschall family has worked the land for six generations.

Enochs, TX

From the 1840s through the 1890s, Hispanic sheepherders from New Mexico known as pastores drove great flocks into the grasslands of the Llano Estacado and Bailey County, following La Vista de Vida Agua—the Trail of Living Water—from spring to spring. They borrowed routes first blazed by ciboleros (bison hunters) and Comancheros (traders) who had long done business with the Native peoples of the plains. Their stone corrals, boxed-in springs, and rock shelters still dot the land where the sheep industry endured into the 1930s.

Corpus Christi, TX

Patrick Francis Dunn, Corpus Christi-born son of Irish immigrants, became the great cattleman of Padre Island. From 1884 he grazed cattle down the long barrier island, using the Laguna Madre and the Gulf as natural fences and driving stock between corrals scattered along its 110 miles. In 1907 he built a two-story house from lumber and fine mahogany washed ashore from shipwrecks; a 1916 hurricane destroyed it, and after his death the Dunn family ranched the island until the last cattle were removed in 1970.

Uvalde, TX

Patrick F. Garrett, the lawman forever linked to the 1881 killing of the outlaw Billy the Kid, made his home on this site during his years in Uvalde. He had come from Alabama to Texas in 1869 and worked as farmer, cowboy, and buffalo hunter before serving as a sheriff and trying his hand at ranching, owning property here from 1891 to 1900. In 1908 he was killed in New Mexico following a dispute over land, an ending that many suspected was more ambush than fair fight.

Henderson, TX

In 1854 the three Patrick brothers led Presbyterian families out of South Carolina to settle this corner of Rusk County, first calling it Pleasant Springs. A six-room log house on the Shreveport-Douglass Road anchored a village that grew to hold a church, school, cotton gin, grist mill, store, and post office. The businesses faded by 1925 and the school closed during World War II, leaving only the church to mark where a thriving community once stood.

Guilford Township, PA · est. 2004

This Franklin County ground was the boyhood home of Patrick Gass, who left the Pennsylvania backcountry to become one of the most valued members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. A skilled carpenter and soldier promoted to sergeant in 1804, he helped build the winter forts that carried the Corps of Discovery across the continent and later published his own journals of the journey. He went on to serve in the War of 1812, fighting at the fierce Battle of Lundy's Lane, and lived to the remarkable age of 99.

Center, TX

Settlers reached the Patroon area of Shelby County by the 1830s, among them the Nethery family, who came from Alabama in the early 1840s. Their son A.M. began this cemetery on his own land when he buried his infant son John in 1861; while he served in the Civil War, his wife and baby daughter died of fever and were buried here in 1862. Around the growing burial ground rose a community with a post office, churches, and businesses, and generations of residents — leaders, farmers, and veterans reaching back to the Civil War — now rest here.

Lexington, KY

Robert Patterson built this small cabin around 1780, before his marriage to Elizabeth Lindsay, and over two centuries it served as home, servant's quarters, and tool shed while migrating across many sites, including a stint on his grandson's Ohio farm from 1901 to 1939. Patterson himself was a founder of cities: he chose the site of Lexington, helped erect its fort in 1779 and lay off the town, took part in founding Cincinnati and Dayton, helped charter Transylvania University, and served Fayette County in the legislature.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1953

In 1732, colonial surveyors mapped out a sprawling 1,272-acre tract along the Susquehanna for Thomas Penn, son of Pennsylvania founder William Penn, naming it Paxtang Manor. The proprietary Penn family reserved such "manors" as their private holdings across the province. In 1760 the land passed to three settlers — Thomas Simpson, Thomas Forster, and Thomas McKee — and today forms part of Harrisburg.

Athens, TX

Shaded by pines and oaks, Payne Cemetery holds the pioneers who came to Henderson County in the 1870s seeking better lives. Among them was William K. Payne, a delegate who signed the 1861 Texas Ordinance of Secession, served in the Civil War, and gave his name to nearby Payne Springs. The first burial, in 1874, was a small child of the Cook family, and generations of the area's founding families lie here alongside veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Eustace, TX

For more than a century this church and cemetery have anchored the community of Payne Springs, first known as Mallard Prairie, where a sizable congregation was meeting in a log structure by 1880. The church doubled as a polling place and rally ground, and summer revivals under a brush arbor were as much social gatherings as religious ones. Local tradition holds the cemetery began with a child buried by a cedar tree; it now holds over 1,000 graves, tended through an annual July 4th workday turned fundraiser.

Geneva, TX

John and Margaret Payne came to Texas from Georgia about 1835, and John—a War of 1812 veteran—served Sabine County as a justice of the peace and state legislator. He set aside land for this family cemetery, where his son Epperson Duke Payne, a veteran of the Siege of Bexar and the Battle of San Jacinto, is also buried. Later interments include Civil War veteran Lewis Williams and his kin.

Wimberley, TX

This 1.7-acre cemetery, with its 23 known graves, is nearly all that remains of an early Hays County community. Settlement began with North Carolina native John Bennett Peal, who with his wife Mary bought 1,920 acres in 1872 and helped found Pleasant Valley Baptist Church in 1875; the church also housed the Valley Ford School. Children from the Burchett, Edwards, George, and other pioneer families made the schoolhouse the center of Blanco Valley life, and several of those family names rest in the cemetery today.

Abernathy, TX

When a 1.5-by-15-mile 'Strip' of land opened to homesteaders in the 1890s, settlers like William Houston Pearce built a schoolhouse that doubled as a place of worship, birthing Pearce Chapel Methodist Church. A cemetery followed in 1898, and a small post office, union church, and community grew up around it before nearby Abernathy drew the settlement away. The chapel and school were eventually moved, but the cemetery endures with veterans of the Civil War through World War II among its graves.

Pearl, TX

Organized in 1884 under pioneer missionary the Rev. E. Berry, this congregation began four miles west as the Bee House Missionary Baptist Church, worshiping in a Masonic hall that also served as the community schoolhouse. When it relocated in 1889 to land sold by rancher Charles T. Karnes, it took the name Mt. Olive, and the settlement once called Wayback was later renamed Pearl. A tabernacle built about 1908 on the line between the Baptist and Methodist properties long hosted revivals and summer brush-arbor meetings.

Pearl, TX

In the rolling country of Coryell County, the community first called Wayback—a clerical mangling of "Swayback"—took the softer name Pearl in 1890 for a postmaster's young cousin. Its cemetery grew out of grief and generosity when the Keeton family set aside land after burying fourteen-year-old Lillian in 1896, later deeding acreage for public graves. The ground holds pioneers, victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic including a doctor who died treating the sick, and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Pearl, TX

Worship in this corner of Coryell County began in the Bee House community around 1878 and moved to the first Pearl schoolhouse on Cowhouse Creek before the Church of Christ was organized in 1895. Members bought land, raised a sanctuary, and in 1904 built a tabernacle for the marathon summer revivals — days-long meetings running from sunrise to late evening — that it still hosts. More than a century on, the church continues to serve its rural membership.

Pearsall, TX

Pearsall's Presbyterians organized in 1884 in the home of Mrs. Mary Dorsey, electing elders and trustees and calling the Rev. W. S. Wright as their first pastor. Their church, dedicated in 1885, is the oldest church building in continuous use in Pearsall and still holds its original pulpit, communion table, and pews. In 1970 the congregation became ecumenical.

Margaret, TX

On this ground in December 1860, Texas Rangers under Captain L. S. Ross overtook a Comanche encampment and recaptured Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been taken as a child during a raid in 1836 and raised among the Comanche for twenty-four years. Torn from the family she had made—including her son, the future chief Quanah Parker—her recapture became one of the most famous and tragic episodes of the Texas frontier. The state marked the battlefield in 1936.

Crowell, TX

At the Battle of Pease River in 1860, Texas Rangers under Captain L. S. Ross attacked a Comanche encampment and took a woman they recognized as Cynthia Ann Parker, seized as a nine-year-old in the 1836 raid on Fort Parker. By then she had lived a quarter-century among the Comanche as Naduah, wife of Chief Peta Nocona and mother of the future leader Quanah Parker. Returned to her Anglo relatives with her infant daughter, she never adjusted, tried repeatedly to escape, and died in 1864.

Peaster, TX

The village of Peaster grew from land South Carolinian Henry H. Peaster bought in 1870 and the town lots he began selling in the late 1880s. He donated two acres for this still-active cemetery in 1893, and among its early settlers and war veterans rests John Alexander Fox, the artist who created the "Buster Brown" character for a famous shoe-advertising campaign.

Longview, TX

This East Texas congregation traces its roots to a Disciples of Christ church gathered near Camden in 1852, in the antebellum decades when scattered rural families built faith communities of their own. When that early church dissolved in the 1870s, its members regrouped, and the Peatown Christian Church took shape in 1871 with twelve charter members drawn from the settlement of Edwardsville—locally called Peatown—and nearby farms. For over fifty years they worshiped in the old building and baptized new members in a neighboring spring.

Dublin vicinity, TX

Dating to 1880, Pecan Cemetery was the main burial ground for the Purves Community, which grew up around James Purves's blacksmith shop in Erath County. Its oldest marked grave is that of infant Horace F. Adams, and a memorial stands for Civil War casualty Daniel Turney, though he is actually buried in Tyler. When nearby Friendship Baptist Church disbanded, its materials were used to build a tabernacle here where funerals and annual cemetery-working gatherings were held.

Dublin vicinity, TX

In 1884 J. W. McKenzie deeded three and a half acres in the Purves Community for a church and cemetery, though burials had begun there as early as 1880. When the Friendship Baptist Church disbanded in 1915, its lumber was reused in 1922 to build this open-air tabernacle—a well-preserved example of the group meeting shelters that hosted revivals and gatherings across rural Texas.

McKinney, TX

This ground began as a Republic of Texas land grant in 1845, just four years after Dr. William E. Throckmorton led his family from Tennessee to found the first permanent settlement in the area. By the 1850s it held its first burials, and public ownership followed in 1870; a shady stand of trees gave the place its name. Among those honored is Dr. James Webb Throckmorton—Confederate general, Governor of Texas, and long-serving congressman.

Hooks, TX

In March 1836, as Texas declared its independence from Mexico, an unusually large share of the convention's leading delegates came from Pecan Point, a Red River settlement in this corner of far Northeast Texas. Richard Ellis presided over the gathering that produced the young republic's declaration and constitution, while neighbors like Collin McKinney, A. H. Latimer, Samuel Price Carson, and Robert Hamilton helped draft the document and staff the new government. That a single frontier vicinity supplied five prominent founders speaks to how thinly settled but politically ambitious early Anglo-Texas was.

Fort Stockton, TX

Carved from Presidio County in 1871 and organized in 1875, Pecos County chose Fort Stockton as its seat and elected its first slate of officials that March. The names on that roll—Frazer, Torres, Rooney, Carrasco, Huffmann—reflect the mingled Anglo and Tejano leadership of the far West Texas frontier. Decades later, the 1926 discovery of oil in the Yates field transformed the county's fortunes.

Woodville, TX

Abram and Julia Pedigo came to Texas in 1857 and, with their eleven children, established a plantation near this site in the 1880s, running a grist mill, cotton gin, and sugar mill alongside their farming. The family cemetery began in sorrow in 1883, when their daughter Cordelia and one of her newborn twins died and were brought home for burial. Nearly all the Pedigo children came to rest here, and a native-rock chapel raised by the family was dedicated to these pioneers in 1938.

Richmond County, NC

Organized in 1755, the Pee Dee Meeting was an early Quaker community on the Carolina frontier, gathering Friends for worship in a region far from the colony's coastal centers. As families moved westward in search of new land, the meeting dwindled and had faded by the 1840s, leaving its cemetery a mile and a half to the west.

Menard, TX

This hourglass-shaped pass where McDougal Creek meets the San Saba River was a favored Native American campground long before it entered written history in 1732 as the site of a Spanish-Apache battle. Over the following generations it saw mustang hunters, Indian fighters, German settlers, and gold-seekers pass through, and it became a stagecoach station named—so the story goes—for a one-legged land commissioner. Its nearby 'Robbers' Roost' gained notoriety for hold-ups, and the crossing later served the Great Western Cattle Trail.

Frost, TX

Founded by Black families after 1866 and first called Forks of the Creek, Pelham was one of the freedmen's communities that took root in Texas after emancipation. Its residents organized churches — Wesley Methodist, Brown's Chapel A.M.E., and Union Baptist — the first of which also housed the community's school. Renamed Pelham when it won a post office in 1898, the town peaked at 350 people in 1926; though its stores, gin, and schools are gone, its heritage endures.

Center Point, TX

The Penateka, or "honey eaters," were the southernmost band of the Comanche, ranging across the Edwards Plateau and following the buffalo on which they depended for food, clothing, and shelter. Renowned horsemen, they made settlement west of this area perilous for decades. Pressure from Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army's Second Cavalry, reservation removals, and the Red River War of 1874–75 forced the Comanche onto reservation lands, where the breakup of holdings in 1901 scattered the people — who have since worked to rebuild their shared culture.

Sidney vicinity, TX

William and Emaline Pendergrass left Tennessee for Texas in 1849 and put down permanent roots in frontier Comanche County by 1873. A community builder, William helped found churches and a school, and in 1883 gave a plot of his land to bury a stranger found nearby—the first grave in what became the family cemetery. He deeded the acre to the community in 1888, and generations of descendants now rest among its more than five hundred graves.

Town of Newcomb, NY

In the early 1800s the rugged Adirondack interior around Rich Lake was still raw frontier, its dense forests and cold, thin soils daunting to would-be settlers. Nathaniel Pendleton, a veteran of the Revolution who had gone on to serve as a judge down in Dutchess County, gambled on this wilderness in 1808, buying 5,000 acres and raising water-powered mills along the lake. His mills gave the first farming families a place to grind grain and saw timber, and by selling off lots he seeded the small community that would become Newcomb.

Temple, TX

Known as Pendletonville in the 1880s, this Bell County community was renamed in 1904 for George C. Pendleton (1845–1913), a local resident who rose through Texas politics with rare speed. He served in the state House, became its Speaker, and then as Lieutenant Governor became the first elected official to preside over both legislative chambers before going on to Congress.

Cisco, TX

Velzie Penn built this Cumberland-plan farmhouse in 1898–1899 with help from his brothers and neighbors, the kind of collective labor that raised many a frontier home. He and his wife Addie lived here more than fifty years and raised four sons born in the house. Enlarged over time and clad in local fieldstone in 1933, it endures as a record of a farming family's life.

Duncanville, TX

Two springs feeding a natural pool made this a vital watering place, first for Native peoples and later for the wagon trains and cattle drives moving along the Shawnee Trail. Major John Penn of Illinois settled his family here in the 1850s after first visiting in 1848, and on July 4, 1882, the springs hosted a Confederate reunion of Parson's Texas Cavalry. The Penns held the land until 1895 as Duncanville grew around it.

Pennington, TX

Eight settlers gathered in 1860 to form the Salem Baptist Church, with Elder R. A. Clifton as first pastor. After Daniel Dailey laid out the town of Pennington in 1866, the congregation bought this land and rebuilt, taking the name Pennington Baptist Church at an 1869 conference. Successive buildings in 1913 and 1955 traced the community's endurance across nearly a century.

Georgetown, TX

John Parker Pennington was born in Fannin County during the days of the Republic of Texas, came of age amid the dangers of frontier Arizona Territory, served in the Civil War, and brought his family back to Texas in 1867. This family burial ground opened in 1872 with the grave of his sister, and it holds Pennington, his two wives, and their descendants. The cemetery reads as a compact record of a restless nineteenth-century family's travels across a still-forming West.

Muncy Township, PA · est. 1947

By 1799 enough members of the Society of Friends had settled this stretch of the West Branch valley to build a proper meeting house for worship. Quakers were among the earliest organized communities to plant themselves on the central Pennsylvania frontier, and their plain meeting house anchored a growing settlement in the decades after the Revolution.

Lancaster Township, PA · est. 1947

The long, slender flintlock famous as the "Kentucky Rifle" was in truth a Pennsylvania creation, refined by German-American gunsmiths around Lancaster during the 1700s. Accurate at ranges that stunned European soldiers, it became the tool of the frontier hunter and, later, a weapon of legend in the Revolution — a piece of American craftsmanship carried far beyond the state that perfected it.

Peoria, TX

Peoria Cemetery was established in the 1830s as this small Texas community formed, its first plot donated by J. R. DeArman and later grants made across four generations of the William Thomas Hill family. Tradition holds that a child fatally bitten by a rattlesnake was the first laid to rest here, joined over the years by many rural residents and travelers in unmarked graves.

West Columbia, TX

Stephen William Perkins and his wife Anna came to Texas in 1840 and settled near Velasco, where they built a home and started a small family graveyard after the death of a child around 1843. Four of their five children, their mother, and a number of enslaved people were interred here. Perkins served the Republic of Texas Congress and later the state legislature and senate, spent twelve years as Brazoria County's chief justice, and captained a Texas volunteer company during the Civil War.

Redmond, WA

A planted willow marks Perrigo Springs, a natural water source that quenched the thirst of Native people long before it served the early settlers of Redmond, Washington. Placed by the Daughters of the American Colonists in 2004, the marker points to a spot where the region's history flowed—literally—through a shared spring. In the days before wells and pipes, such springs decided where trails ran and where towns took root.

Decatur, TX

In 1853 William and Charlotte Perrin left Rock Castle, Kentucky, joining the westward stream into the Peters Colony near Dallas before pushing on to Wise County on Christmas Eve 1854. On the banks of Martin's Branch they built a two-room dogtrot log cabin, a classic frontier form, sometime between 1855 and 1861. The Perrin family lived in it continuously until 1990, and a 2007 restoration used the original stones, chinking, and v-notched logs to bring it back.

Carrollton, TX

When the Texas prairie town of Carrollton was still finding its footing, the death of Sarah Huffman Perry in 1896 gave the young community its first true burying ground. The next year her husband, A. W. Perry, deeded the land beside the Union Baptist Church, and scattered graves from private plots were gathered here to rest together. Most of its 482 graves belong to the pioneer families who broke this ground in North Texas.

Perry, TX

This Methodist congregation was organized in 1872 in a settler's home by a circuit-riding preacher, one of the itinerant ministers who carried the faith across the Texas frontier. Its Victorian Gothic Revival sanctuary, built in 1884-85 of pine and cypress hauled from Houston by ox-wagon, was dedicated in 1885 and has served the community ever since. In its first century, thirty-seven pastors led the flock.

Forestburg, TX

The oldest marked grave in this Montague County burial ground belongs to an infant who died in 1862, and its early plots read like a chronicle of frontier hardship: a well-digger killed in an 1863 Indian raid, and two former Confederate soldiers who had been captured at Lookout Mountain. In 1883 Levi Perryman — himself a Confederate veteran, Indian fighter, and sheriff — bought the site and deeded it to the county. Still in use, the cemetery keeps the memory of the district's pioneers.

Winnsboro, TX

In June 1884 five Wood County neighbors gathered to organize the County Line Missionary Baptist Church, calling their first pastor a month later. For years they worshiped in the local schoolhouse until a church building was raised, and the congregation took the Perryville name in 1908, revised to Perryville Baptist Church in 1925. Descendants of the charter members remain active in the church today.

Winnsboro, TX

Thirty-eight charter members organized this rural East Texas congregation in 1879 as the Marvin Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, with the Reverend A. K. Hughes as first pastor. A donation of land in 1887 gave it a permanent home, and church buildings rose in 1887 and again in 1915. For generations the church anchored the Perryville area as a place of revivals, Sunday singings, and community gatherings.

Lovelock, NV

This lush valley — the Big Meadows — was a vital rest stop on the Humboldt Trail, the route that carried some 165,000 emigrants west in the 1840s and 1850s. Travelers gathered water and grass here before facing the dreaded Forty Mile Desert, the trail's cruelest stretch. Mining began in the 1850s, merchant-rancher George Lovelock lent his name to the county seat, and the railroad's arrival in 1869 brought fresh growth; Pershing County itself was carved from Humboldt County in 1919.

San Jacinto, TX

This burial ground near the San Jacinto battlefield holds the remains of Lorenzo de Zavala (1789–1836), the statesman who served as the first vice president of the Republic of Texas, along with generations of his family. It also received figures caught up in the 1836 revolution, including the Mexican general Manuel Fernández Castrillón, who fell at San Jacinto, and other men who died that pivotal year. The recorded roll of names spans from the republic's founding into the early twentieth century.

Groesbeck, TX

Benjamin D. Person, Sr. founded this Limestone County town in 1854, and by 1915 it bustled with a bank, hotel, twelve mercantiles, drugstores, doctors, and a Masonic lodge chartered back in 1861. A fire razed the town in October 1916; it was rebuilt but soon dwindled, and the post office finally closed in 1952. Today only the townsite behind the marker remains.

Meyersville, TX

Peter Bluntzer, an Alsatian immigrant, reached Texas around 1843 and settled at Coleto—present-day Meyersville—after his wagon overturned and injured his wife en route to Castroville. Devoted to his new home, he made two return trips to Alsace to recruit families to join him, and in 1859 he donated land for Sts. Peter and Paul Church, the first Catholic church in DeWitt County. The marker also recalls how his young daughter, taken by Indians, was found unharmed months later.

Petersburg, IN

This marks the original cabin of Peter Britton, the settler whose name the surrounding town of Petersburg carries. In the early 1800s, as Indiana passed from territory to statehood, a single pioneer homestead could anchor a whole community, giving a county seat both its first buildings and its name.

Belton, TX

Peter Hansbrough Bell's life reads like a roll call of the Texas frontier's founding decades. He charged with Sam Houston's army at San Jacinto in 1836, rode with the Texas Rangers and mounted volunteers through the Mexican War, then traded the saddle for the statehouse as Texas's third governor before serving in the U.S. Congress. This granite monument was raised by the state in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence, to honor a man who helped both win and govern the young republic.

San Jacinto, TX

Peter Jefferson Duncan, born in New York in 1799, took part in the capture of San Antonio in 1835 and served in the army during the 1836 campaign for Texas independence. He lived out his life in Harris County, where he died in 1870. His marker commemorates one of the volunteers who fought to establish the Republic of Texas.

Burnet, TX

A Pennsylvania native and one of Stephen F. Austin's 'Old 300' original colonists, Peter Kerr took part in the 1836 war for Texas independence and made and lost several fortunes before buying a league of Burnet County land in 1851 that included Fort Croghan. Grown wealthy as an army beef contractor, he gave 100 acres and the town square for the county seat and willed a fortune in land and cash to found a college — a bequest later broken in court, leaving the town only a small school site. Neighbors said 'he never refused to help when he observed its need.'

Okeechobee, FL

Peter Raulerson was among the pioneer settlers of the Lake Okeechobee frontier, and this marker honors his service as mayor of the newly organized City of Okeechobee in 1915-1916. The town took shape in the early twentieth century as the Florida East Coast Railroad pushed south, opening the rich lands north of the great lake to cattle ranching, fishing, and farming. Serving in the city's first years of incorporated government, Raulerson helped steer a raw frontier settlement into an organized municipality.

Tivoli, TX

Tennessee-born Peter Teal (1812–1854) took up arms in the fight for Texas independence, serving in the Army of the Republic in 1835 and 1836. The State of Texas placed this marker at his grave in 1936 as part of its centennial remembrance of the men who won the Republic.