464 haunted destinations cataloged across Texas, spanning 121 counties. The collection features museum, haunted hotel, and other dark tourism site — every listing verified with family ratings, accessibility info, and practical visit logistics.
Kerrville, TX
The Y.O. Ranch Hotel in Kerrville, Texas, takes its name from the historic Y.O. Ranch founded in 1880 by Charles Schreiner. The hotel offers 190 rooms with Hill Country and Old West design and houses the Y.O. Ranch Steakhouse. Although the hotel itself is a relatively recent build, it serves as a public expression of the Schreiner cattle and conservation legacy.
Austin, TX
The Neill-Cochran House is an 1855-1856 Greek Revival home in central Austin, designed and built by master builder Abner Cook for Washington Hill, who could not afford to occupy it. The house was leased to the Texas Institute for the Blind and served as a Federal hospital at the end of the Civil War before passing to Colonel Andrew Neill in 1876 and Judge Thomas Cochran in 1895. Since 1958 it has been operated as a house museum by The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Texas; it preserves Austin's only intact slave quarters.
Fort Worth, TX
Oakwood Cemetery is a 62-acre historic cemetery on the north side of the Trinity River, established when Fort Worth founder John Peter Smith deeded the land to the city in 1879. The cemetery serves as the burial place for cattle barons, mayors, gunfighters, gamblers, and bartenders from Fort Worth's frontier and Hell's Half Acre vice-district era. Oakwood was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018.
Houston, TX
The Rice Hotel opened May 17, 1913, as Jesse H. Jones's seventeen-story grand hotel on the site of the former Capitol of the Republic of Texas. It hosted six U.S. presidents and was the building where John F. Kennedy held his last Houston event on the evening of November 21, 1963 — attending a LULAC dinner and using a suite for meetings before flying to Fort Worth, where he spent his last night at the Hotel Texas. The hotel closed in 1977, sat vacant for two decades, and reopened in 1998 as luxury loft apartments now known simply as The Rice.
Fort Worth, TX
The White Elephant Saloon was founded in 1884 by gambler Luke Short in Fort Worth's Hell's Half Acre vice district. On February 8, 1887, Short killed former Fort Worth marshal Timothy 'Longhair Jim' Courtright in a street gunfight just outside the saloon — one of the most documented gunfighter killings of the Old West. After decades of dormancy, the saloon was reopened in the 1970s at its current Stockyards location on Exchange Avenue.
Fort Worth, TX
Thistle Hill is a three-story Georgian Revival mansion built 1903-1904 for Electra Waggoner — daughter of cattle baron W. T. Waggoner — and her husband Albert Buck Wharton Jr. Electra named the home Thistle Hill and lived there briefly before selling it in 1910 to Winfield and Elizabeth Scott. The house was saved from demolition in 1976 by the Save the Scott House group and now operates as a house museum stewarded by Historic Fort Worth, Inc.
San Antonio, TX
The Alamo Methodist Church was built in 1912 at 1150 S Alamo Street in the King William Historic District. It served as a church until 1968, stood vacant until 1976, and then became a dinner theater. Subsequent tenants included Casbeers at the Church (2008–2011) and FRANK restaurant (2016–2018). The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
San Antonio, TX
The Aztec Theatre opened June 4, 1926 as one of San Antonio's grand movie palaces, designed by Los Angeles firm Meyer & Holler with an elaborate Meso-American (Aztec and Maya) iconographic program. On May 4, 1932, the theater was hit by a sulfur (stench) bomb during a national wave of theater bombings linked to a projectionists' strike; six moviegoers were burned. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in October 1992 and is now operated by Live Nation.
San Antonio, TX
Brackenridge Villa sits on the University of the Incarnate Word campus in San Antonio at the headwaters of the San Antonio River. The original single-story Sweet Homestead was built in the early 1800s by Alderman J.R. Sweet. Colonel George W. Brackenridge purchased the estate in the late 1800s and added the three-story Victorian wing for his mother. In 1897 the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word bought the 283-acre Fernridge property as the site of their new Motherhouse, which was completed on the grounds in 1900. The Villa has subsequently served as a chaplains' residence, university offices, and currently as offices and meeting space for the Sisters of Charity's General Leadership Team.
San Antonio, TX
Brooks Air Force Base operated in southeast San Antonio from 1917 until 2011, training pilots including Lindbergh and Doolittle and serving as home of the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, dedicated by President Kennedy the day before his assassination.
San Antonio, TX
Herman Dietrich Stumberg, a German immigrant who became one of San Antonio's prominent merchants, built this two-story limestone structure at 212 S Flores St in 1870 as a general store. The building changed hands through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and eventually became the Cadillac Bar & Restaurant. A basement beneath the structure was sealed at some point in the building's commercial history and has not been accessible to the public.
San Antonio, TX
The Gunter Hotel stands on a site where hospitality has operated since 1837, when the Frontier Inn welcomed pioneers. The current Italianate structure opened November 20, 1909, designed by architect John Mauran and built by the San Antonio Hotel Company. At eleven stories with 301 rooms, it was San Antonio's largest building at completion. An expansion in 1926 added three more stories. The hotel underwent a comprehensive $57 million restoration completed in 2025 and now operates as a Marriott Tribute Collection property.
San Antonio, TX
The St. Anthony Hotel opened in 1909 on Travis Park as one of the first luxury hotels in Texas, financed by cattle ranchers and designed to attract wealthy tourists to a fast-growing city. It was the first hotel in the world reported to install central air-conditioning. The property has been rebranded over the decades and currently operates under the IHG Crowne Plaza flag.
San Antonio, TX
The Alamo National Bank Building at 105 South St. Mary's Street was completed in 1929 and rose 24 stories over downtown San Antonio. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006 as part of the San Antonio Downtown and River Walk Historic District. Drury Hotels converted the building to a hotel that opened in 2007, preserving the 40-foot lobby with its original stained-glass windows and an all-suite tower.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSan Antonio, TX
El Camaroncito was a nightclub operating on Old Highway 90 West in San Antonio that became the setting for one of the most widely circulated supernatural folk narratives in Texas history. On Halloween night 1975, a reported incident involving an unidentified male patron spread rapidly through the local community and has been retold in San Antonio press and scholarship for five decades.
San Antonio, TX
The Empire Theatre, now formally the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre, opened on December 14, 1914, as a European-style opera house designed by St. Louis firm Mauran, Russell & Crowe. Built by developer Thomas Brady on the site of the former Rische's Opera House, it was acclaimed as San Antonio's first modern theatre and the city's largest at the time. The building was damaged in the catastrophic San Antonio flood of 1921 and was restored in 1998; it sits directly adjacent to the larger Majestic Theatre and the two are operated as a single venue under the Majestic & Empire Theatres organization.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSan Antonio, TX
The Forgotten Dollhouse Museum has operated since 2016 with a mission to rescue abandoned vintage and antique dolls. It is located in a building on West Hildebrand Avenue described by the museum as an old haunted house, which Telemundo named one of the most haunted locations in San Antonio. The museum is a non-profit and has been raising funds for building renovation and future operations.
San Antonio, TX
Fort Sam Houston is one of the oldest continuously active Army installations in the United States. Construction on the iconic Quadrangle began in 1876, and the post became the headquarters of the Department of Texas. The Quadrangle is a National Historic Landmark, and the fifteen Staff Post officers' quarters along the parade ground were designed by San Antonio architect Alfred Giles in the early 1880s.
San Antonio, TX
Freeman Coliseum broke ground on November 17, 1947, and opened October 19, 1949, as San Antonio's largest indoor arena. Built at a cost of $1.75 million and designed by architects Bartlett Cocke and Phelps, Dewees & Simmons, the venue was renamed in 1958 for brothers Harry and Joe Freeman after a major philanthropic gift.
San Antonio, TX
Hot Wells Resort opened in the 1890s after sulfurous artesian water was struck during oil exploration along the San Antonio River. The property attracted prominent visitors and operated as a premier regional resort until fires in 1894 and 1925 destroyed the main hotel structure. Bexar County eventually acquired the ruins and opened them as a public park.
San Antonio, TX
The Gibbs Building was erected in 1909 as San Antonio's first office skyscraper, built on the northwest corner of the original Alamo compound. During excavation that year, workers uncovered five Alamo-era cannons in the basement. The building was converted to a hotel in 2006.
San Antonio, TX
Joseph Huebner, an Austrian jeweler who settled in San Antonio, built a one-story limestone home at what is now 6613 Bandera Rd in 1858 and operated it as a stagecoach stop on the line running between San Antonio and Bandera. Huebner died in 1882 under circumstances that local accounts describe as accidental poisoning — reportedly after mistaking kerosene for whiskey. The property was later acquired by the Onion family and is now a Texas historical landmark.
San Antonio, TX
The Institute of Texan Cultures opened in 1968 as the Texas pavilion for HemisFair, San Antonio's world's fair, commissioned to document the ethnic and cultural history of the state. After the fair it transitioned into a permanent museum under UTSA management and has operated continuously in the original HemisFair building. Among its collection is an 1898 Castroville horse-drawn hearse.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSan Antonio, TX
The Lona China Cemetery — historically called the Chinese Graveyard — is a private family burial ground on South Zarzamora Street in San Antonio's south side. A Guzman family member, Joey Guzman, confirmed to KENS 5 News in 2009 that the family has maintained the cemetery for more than 120 years. The majority of grave markers bear the Guzman surname; a smaller number on the right side of the grounds carry Chinese surnames.
San Antonio, TX
Designed by atmospheric-theater pioneer John Eberson for Karl Hoblitzelle's Interstate Theatres and opened June 14, 1929, the Majestic was the first fully air-conditioned theater in Texas. With 2,264 seats, an elaborate Mediterranean-village interior, and a star-and-cloud ceiling, it is a National Historic Landmark and is operated today by the Ambassador Theatre Group.
San Antonio, TX
Marion Koogler McNay was born in 1883, raised in Kansas, and made her fortune in oil. She established her Spanish-Mediterranean-style villa at 6000 N New Braunfels Avenue in San Antonio in 1927, designed by Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres. Upon her death in 1950, she bequeathed the estate, her art collection, and two-thirds of her wealth to create what became Texas's first modern art museum, which opened in 1954.
San Antonio, TX
William Menger, a German immigrant who had established the first brewery in Texas, opened the Menger Hotel on February 1, 1859, at 204 Alamo Plaza in San Antonio. Built adjacent to the Alamo ruins on the site of his brewery, it became the premier hotel in the American Southwest and hosted Presidents McKinley, Taft, Eisenhower, and Roosevelt. The hotel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
San Antonio, TX
The site at West Commerce Street was designated for use as a city cemetery in 1848, adjoining El Campo Santo Catholic burial ground. The cemetery closed by the 1860s as the population outgrew it, and most families relocated their relatives' remains. San Antonio formally established Milam Square in 1883 and dedicated it January 7, 1884. During a 1976 renovation, Benjamin Milam's remains—the Texas Revolutionary killed at the Siege of Béxar in 1835—were accidentally displaced, rediscovered in 1993, and reinterred under the 1938 Bonnie MacLeary bronze statue in 1994.
San Antonio, TX
Mission San Francisco de la Espada was founded in east Texas in 1690 as the first mission in the region before being relocated to its present site along the San Antonio River in 1731, the last in the chain of five missions established in the area. It was attacked by Comanche forces in 1826, and the surrounding area saw military activity during the Texas Revolution in the 1830s. The mission is now part of San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSan Antonio, TX
The building at 212 City Street dates to the 1890s in San Antonio's King William Historic District, one of the city's oldest residential neighborhoods. Over the decades it served as a physician's residence and medical practice, and at various points as a makeshift funeral parlor. Nat M. Washer Lodge No. 1270 was chartered December 5, 1935, and acquired the property in 1950 as its permanent home.
San Antonio, TX
The structure at 209 Washington Street began as a modest one-story residence built around 1857 by attorney Newton A. Mitchell. In 1881, the property was purchased by Louis Ogé — a Texas rancher who arrived in Texas in 1845 with Henri Castro's Alsatian colonial settlement at Castroville. Ogé commissioned architect Alfred Giles to transform the house into an imposing Neoclassical mansion with a third story and columned verandah. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places. It now operates as a ten-room bed and breakfast under Noble Inns.
San Antonio, TX
The Bexar County Jail at 120 Camaron Street opened in 1878 as a Romanesque limestone facility with an internal third-floor gallows where prisoners were dropped through a trap door for executions. It served as the county jail until 1962 and was later converted to hotel use in the early 21st century. Today it operates as the Holiday Inn Express San Antonio N-Riverwalk Area.
San Antonio, TX
Comanche Lookout Park preserves the fourth-highest point in Bexar County, San Antonio, with a surviving 1923 stone tower built by Colonel Edward Coppock. The hill served as a vantage point for the Coahuiltecan, Lipan Apache, and later the Comanche people over thousands of years. The City of San Antonio acquired the property in the 1990s and operates it as a public park.
San Antonio, TX
Our Lady of the Lake University was founded in 1895 in San Antonio by the Sisters of Divine Providence. The Catholic liberal-arts institution operates a residential west-side campus including the historic Main Building and the adjacent Sacred Heart Conventual Chapel, a Texas landmark of late-19th-century Catholic architecture.
San Antonio, TX
San Antonio State Hospital opened April 6, 1892, as the Southwestern Insane Asylum, the third state asylum in Texas. Built to house 250 patients on the south side of San Antonio, the facility almost immediately exceeded its design capacity and for much of its early history held two thousand or more patients under conditions that state inspectors and reformers repeatedly criticized.
San Antonio, TX
San Fernando Cathedral was founded in 1731 by 15 families of Canary Islander settlers sent by the Spanish Crown to establish the villa of San Fernando de Béxar. The cornerstone of the current church was laid May 11, 1738, and the building was dedicated in 1755. It was elevated to a cathedral in 1874 and is the mother church of the Archdiocese of San Antonio. The cathedral contains a marble sarcophagus said to hold remains of Alamo defenders including Travis, Bowie, and Crockett.
San Antonio, TX
San Pedro Playhouse traces its roots to 1912 as the San Antonio Dramatic Club, formally incorporating as the San Antonio Little Theatre on April 6, 1927. The organization moved to San Pedro Springs Park in 1929–1930, where a new building was constructed as a faithful replica of the 1858 Old Market House. Originally constructed with the intent to use salvaged stonework from the original building — which proved unusable — architects traced profiles and consulted old photographs to reproduce the design. A major renovation in 2001 modernized the facility; the main stage was renamed the Russell Hill Rogers Theater.
San Antonio, TX
San Pedro Springs Park, established as public land by Spanish royal grant in 1729, is the oldest park in Texas and among the oldest public parks in the United States. The 46-acre site sits over natural limestone springs that fed the Payaya people's village of Yanaguana and drew Spanish colonizers to found San Antonio in 1718. The park served as a Civil War prisoner-of-war camp, a U.S. Camel Corps stable, and a Buffalo Soldier training ground before becoming a municipal park.
San Antonio, TX
Santa Rosa Hospital opened in San Antonio on December 3, 1869 as the city's first private hospital, founded by three Incarnate Word Sisters who arrived during a cholera epidemic. Now Christus Santa Rosa, the downtown campus continues to operate as Christus Children's Hospital while the adjacent adult Medical Center is closing.
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San Antonio, TX
Schilo's Delicatessen was founded by Fritz and Laura Schila in Beeville, Texas in 1914 as a bar, relocated to San Antonio in 1917, and moved to its current downtown address at 424 E Commerce Street in 1942. That building had been a currency exchange bank; the original bank vault now serves as the restaurant's walk-in cooler. Fritz Schila died in 1935; his son Edgar ran the business until Bill Lyons purchased it in 1980. It remains the oldest restaurant in San Antonio.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSan Antonio, TX
The railroad crossing at Shane and Villamain Roads in south San Antonio became the subject of an urban legend claiming children killed in a bus accident push stranded cars to safety. Documented investigation found no such accident ever occurred at this location. The legend likely derives from a real 1938 school bus-train crash in Salt Lake City, Utah, that killed 23 students.
San Antonio, TX
The Spanish Governor's Palace was completed in 1749 as the Comandancia — the residence and offices of the captain of the Presidio San Antonio de Bexar. The keystone above the entrance bears the date 1749 and the coat of arms of Spanish King Ferdinand VI. The city of San Antonio purchased the building in 1928 and restored it as a museum; it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970.
San Antonio, TX
The St. Anthony Hotel opened on Travis Park in San Antonio in 1909, financed by cattle ranchers A. H. Jones and B. L. Naylor, who set out to build a luxury property to attract wealthy tourists to the growing city. Credited as the first fully air-conditioned hotel in the world after a 1930s renovation, the property has hosted presidents, film stars, and convention business for over a century and is part of Marriott's Luxury Collection.
San Antonio, TX
Lambermont, originally known as Terrell Castle, is a limestone residence in San Antonio's Government Hill district commissioned in the 1890s by attorney and diplomat Edwin Holland Terrell. Designed by English architect Alfred Giles, the castle takes its current name from Terrell's Belgian colleague, Baron Auguste Lambermont. The property currently operates as Lambermont Events, a wedding and event venue.
San Antonio, TX
Terrell Castle was built in the late 1890s for Edwin Holland Terrell, a San Antonio attorney who served as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium under President Benjamin Harrison. Terrell died at the property in 1910. The mansion was later converted to apartments during World War II and has operated as a bed-and-breakfast in its current incarnation.
San Antonio, TX
The Alamo began as Mission San Antonio de Valero in 1718 and was relocated to its current site in 1724. After secularization in 1793, the compound was occupied by Spanish and then Mexican military forces, and in 1836 it was the site of the 13-day siege and battle that ended on March 6 with the deaths of nearly all the Texian defenders. Today it is managed by the Texas General Land Office as a museum and shrine.
San Antonio, TX
The Crockett Hotel opened in 1909, built by the local Odd Fellows lodge on land just east of the Alamo that was part of the 1836 battlefield. A 1927 renovation by architect Henry P. Pheltz added a seventh story. The Odd Fellows sold the building in 1978, and it has operated continuously as a hotel since, becoming a Historic Hotels of America member in 2010.
San Antonio, TX
The Medical Arts Building opened on April 12, 1926 as San Antonio's tallest building at the time, designed in the Gothic Revival style with gargoyle exterior details depicting medical ailments including toothaches. Construction began in November 1924. Doctors operated private clinics throughout the tower while the upper floors served as a working hospital; the basement housed the building's morgue. The building was converted to offices in 1976 and became the Emily Morgan Hotel in 1984, now operating as a DoubleTree by Hilton.
San Antonio, TX
Victoria's Black Swan Inn is an 1867 Victorian-era house on 35 wooded acres along Salado Creek, in northeast San Antonio. The property sits on the site of the 1842 Battle of Salado Creek between Texan and Mexican forces, and is also associated with possible pre-colonial indigenous use. Today it operates as an event and wedding venue and a paranormal-tourism site, owned by Jo Ann Rivera.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSan Antonio, TX
Originally opened as Crossroads Mall in the 1970s, the property at 4522 Fredericksburg Road was a major retail destination in northwest San Antonio before declining anchor departures reshaped it. The center was later rebranded and redeveloped as Wonderland of the Americas, operating today as a mixed-use commercial complex.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPGalveston, TX
The two-story building at 423 25th Street was constructed in 1913 and operated as the Oleander Hotel during Galveston's era as a recognized open city — a period when the island was widely known as the 'Sin City of the Gulf' for its tolerated prostitution, gambling, and bootlegging operations. The building is now an antique warehouse and a documented stop on Galveston's commercial ghost tour circuit.
Galveston, TX
Ashton Villa is an 1859 Italianate brick mansion on Broadway in Galveston, Texas, built for James Moreau Brown — one of the wealthiest men in antebellum Texas. The house served as a military hospital and successive headquarters for Confederate and Union forces during the Civil War. Brown's daughter Bettie, known as the Texas Princess, became one of late 19th-century America's most-traveled independent women.
Galveston, TX
The Bishop's Palace, originally Gresham's Castle, was designed by Galveston architect Nicholas J. Clayton and built between 1887 and 1893 for attorney Walter Gresham and his wife Josephine. The American Institute of Architects ranks it among the 100 most significant buildings in the United States.
Galveston, TX
The Broadway Cemetery Historic District is a seven-cemetery complex in midtown Galveston, established between 1839 and 1939. It holds an estimated 36,000 burials across six city blocks, with the actual body count far exceeding the approximately 12,000 visible markers due to three-layer interment created by twentieth-century grade raises.
Galveston, TX
The Galveston Hurricane of September 8, 1900 killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in a single night, making it the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Galveston, then the largest city in Texas and fourth-busiest port in the country, lost roughly a third of its population. The storm made the recovery effort an improvisation of mass-casualty management: bodies were first loaded on barges and dumped at sea, then washed back to shore, and ultimately burned in funeral pyres across the island.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPGalveston, TX
The Broadway Cemetery complex in Galveston encompasses seven distinct historic burial grounds established between 1839 and 1939, collectively containing an estimated 36,000 or more burials. The complex includes sections dedicated to victims of the 1900 Great Storm — the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, which killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in Galveston — as well as yellow fever epidemic victims, Confederate deserters executed by firing squad, and a documented 1894 murder case involving a woman who poisoned her four children.
Galveston, TX
The USS Cavalla (SS-244) and USS Stewart (DE-238) are permanently berthed at Seawolf Park on Pelican Island, Galveston. The Cavalla, a Gato-class submarine, sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Shokaku on June 19, 1944, during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The Stewart is the only surviving Edsall-class destroyer escort in the United States.
Galveston, TX
The Old City Cemetery was established in 1839 as part of Galveston's original town charter, making it one of the oldest continuously operating burial grounds in Texas. It holds victims of nine yellow fever epidemics that struck Galveston between 1839 and 1867, 1900 hurricane casualties, Civil War soldiers, Texas Republic founders, and the founder of Galveston himself. The Broadway Cemetery Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.
Galveston, TX
Galveston's Old City Cemetery is the island's oldest formal burial ground, established in 1834 before the city was incorporated. It holds epidemic victims from multiple yellow fever outbreaks, casualties from the September 8, 1900 hurricane, and notable figures including Elize Roemer Alberti, who poisoned four of her children in December 1894 and is buried in the same plot as her victims.
Galveston, TX
The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway opened its Galveston Union Station in 1913; the current Art Deco building was constructed in 1931–1932 with an eleven-story tower and north wing. At its peak the station processed over 40,000 travelers daily. The Santa Fe Railroad ceased passenger service in 1946, though trains continued arriving until 1949. The Moody Foundation acquired the property in the 1960s, spent two decades restoring it, and opened it as a railroad museum in 1983.
Galveston, TX
Trinity Episcopal Church was founded in February 1841 by Reverend Benjamin Eaton, making it the oldest Episcopal congregation in Texas. The church survived cannonball impact during the January 1863 Battle of Galveston, lost fifteen parishioners when the south wall collapsed during the Great Storm of 1900, and was subsequently raised 4.5 feet in 1925. The adjacent cemetery holds Civil War dead from both sides, including Lieutenant Commander Edward Lea.
Galveston, TX
The Strand Historic District in Galveston was established as the city's commercial core beginning in the 1840s and became one of the most important commercial centers in Texas by the 1870s. The surviving 1877-era iron-front commercial buildings along the Strand survived the September 8, 1900 hurricane that killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in Galveston and destroyed most residential structures on the island. During the recovery period, the Strand district buildings served as mass morgues, triage stations, and temporary housing for survivors, a role documented in local newspaper accounts from September and October 1900.
Galveston, TX
The Grand 1894 Opera House opened January 3, 1895, built on the proceeds of a $100,000 campaign led by theater impresario Henry Greenwall after his earlier Tremont Opera House closed. Designed by architect Frank Cox in the Romanesque Revival style, it seated over 1,000 and had one of the largest stages in the country at the time of construction. The building survived the 1900 hurricane with significant roof and rear wall damage, was rebuilt, and has operated continuously for over 130 years.
Galveston, TX
Hendley Row is Galveston's oldest surviving commercial building, constructed between 1855 and 1859 as the headquarters of the William Hendley & Co. shipping firm. The Greek Revival brick structure served as a military observation post during the Civil War Battle of Galveston and, after the catastrophic 1900 hurricane, was used as a temporary morgue where bodies were laid out on the floors while survivors searched for the missing.
Galveston, TX
Hendley Row was built between 1855 and 1859 by shipping entrepreneurs William and Joseph Hendley as the headquarters for their Texas and New York Packet Line. The oldest surviving brick commercial structure on the Strand, it was struck by Union cannon fire during the Battle of Galveston on January 1, 1863, and pressed into service as a morgue after the September 8, 1900 hurricane.
Galveston, TX
Hotel Galvez — now Grand Galvez Resort — is a Spanish Colonial Revival hotel on Galveston's seawall, opened in 1911 to restore tourism after the 1900 Storm. The site adjacent to the hotel was previously occupied by St. Mary's Orphan Asylum, where ten Sisters of Charity and 90 orphan children drowned during the September 8, 1900, hurricane. The hotel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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Galveston, TX
George Ball, John Henry Hutchings, and John Sealy commissioned architect Nicholas J. Clayton to design two adjoining commercial buildings for their commission and banking operations on Galveston's Strand. Built in 1895, the twin Neo-Renaissance structures are clad in grey and pink granite, red Texas sandstone, and buff terra cotta. The buildings survived the 1900 hurricane intact and remain commercial office space under Mitchell Historic Properties.
Galveston, TX
Jean Lafitte, the privateer who had previously operated out of Barataria Bay near New Orleans, established a fortified settlement called Campeachy on Galveston Island around 1817. His headquarters, the Maison Rouge, was a substantial structure with upper-story cannon ports, filled with plunder from captured Spanish ships. Under pressure from the United States government, Lafitte burned Maison Rouge and his entire village in 1821 before sailing south. An 1870 structure was later built over the original foundations. Texas A&M University at Galveston conducted the site's first archaeological soil sampling in 2026.
Galveston, TX
The Michel B. Menard House at 1605 33rd Street is the oldest surviving residence on Galveston Island, completed in 1838 by Michel Branamour Menard, one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Menard died in an upstairs bedroom in 1856. During the Civil War the house was used as a Confederate hospital, and multiple soldiers died there from yellow fever. The Galveston Historical Foundation has managed the property as a historic house museum and event space, maintaining it on the National Register of Historic Places.
Galveston, TX
The 1895 Moody Mansion at 2618 Broadway in Galveston, Texas, is a 30,000-square-foot Richardsonian Romanesque house designed by English-born architect William H. Tyndall. Built for grocery merchant Richard S. Willis's widow Narcissa, it was purchased by financier William L. Moody Jr. shortly after the 1900 Galveston Hurricane and remained in the Moody family for 83 years.
Galveston, TX
In 2000, Robert Durst — heir to a New York real estate fortune and a suspect in the 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen McCormack — disguised himself as a mute woman named Robert Peatman Durst and rented an apartment at 2213 Avenue K in Galveston. His neighbor across the hall was Morris Black, a 71-year-old retired merchant seaman. On or about September 28, 2001, Durst shot and killed Black and dismembered his body. Durst was acquitted of murder in 2003 but pleaded guilty to evidence tampering.
Galveston, TX
Built in 1838 for Samuel May Williams — Stephen F. Austin's secretary and the man who organized financing for the Texas Navy — the Williams House is the second-oldest surviving structure on Galveston Island and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Williams earned the sobriquet 'most hated man in Texas' for aggressively foreclosing on mortgages he held against land-poor colonists after the Texas Revolution.
Galveston, TX
St. Mary's Orphan Asylum was established in 1867 by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word and relocated to beachfront property at approximately 69th Street and what is now Seawall Boulevard by 1874. On September 8, 1900, the Galveston hurricane — the deadliest natural disaster in American history — swept the orphanage building from its foundation. All ten sisters and 90 of the 94 children in their care drowned. Three boys survived by clinging to a tree. The site is now a public seawall memorial.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPGalveston, TX
The Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word founded St. Mary's Orphanage in 1867 and relocated it to beachfront property at what is now the 6800 block of Seawall Boulevard in 1874. On September 8, 1900, the Galveston hurricane's storm surge, estimated at 15 feet, overran the orphanage's two dormitory buildings. All 10 sisters and 94 of the 97 children in residence drowned; only three boys survived, found clinging to a floating tree.
Galveston, TX
Stewart's Mansion is an 8,200-square-foot Spanish Colonial Revival residence built in 1926 on Galveston's West End. Industrialist George Sealy Jr. commissioned San Antonio architects Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres for the design and called the property Isla Ranch. Maco Stewart, founder of Stewart Title Co., bought the estate in 1933. After decades of decline, the mansion has been restored as part of the Bayside at Waterman's development.
Galveston, TX
The iron barque Elissa was built in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1877 and operated as a working cargo vessel for several decades across multiple oceans. She first called at Galveston in 1883, carrying general cargo. After decades of service under various flags and names, the ship was restored by the Galveston Historical Foundation beginning in 1979 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990. She is one of the oldest operational sailing ships in the world.
Galveston, TX
The Mansard House at 1101 23rd Street was built in 1912–1913 by George C. Smith and Louise Dowling Smith as a 27-room boarding house in Galveston's East End Historic District. The property passed through several owners after the Smiths, most notably Jessie Belle Cather Perry, who operated it as 'Perry's Place' from 1926 to 1951. After Norman Jones acquired and renamed it the Normandy Inn around 1996 and died before completing renovations, the building sat abandoned from 2007 to approximately 2023. Operators Michael and Ashley Cordray restored it and reopened as The Mansard House boutique hotel in March 2024.
Galveston, TX
Grand Galvez, originally Hotel Galvez, opened in 1911 as part of Galveston's recovery from the catastrophic 1900 hurricane. The Spanish Colonial Revival landmark on Seawall Boulevard is the only historic beachfront hotel on the Texas Gulf Coast and now operates as part of Marriott's Autograph Collection.
Galveston, TX
The Tremont House traces its name to an 1839 hotel that opened the same year Galveston was founded, making it as old as the city itself. The current building is the 1879 Leon & H. Blum dry goods warehouse, converted into a hotel in 1985 by preservationists George and Cynthia Mitchell as part of a Strand District revitalization effort modeled on Savannah, Georgia.
Galveston, TX
The Tremont House name has anchored Galveston hospitality since 1839, when the original structure opened the same year the city was founded. The current building is the third iteration of the hotel, established in 1985 inside the renovated 1879 Leon and H. Blum dry-goods building on Mechanic Street.
Galveston, TX
The cemetery at Trinity Episcopal Church in Galveston was established alongside the parish in 1841 and received additional land by 1844. It holds Civil War dead from the January 1, 1863 Battle of Galveston — including Lieutenant Commander Edward Lea, USN, buried beside his Confederate captain — along with victims of yellow fever epidemics, and fifteen parishioners killed in the Great Storm of 1900. The church itself was raised 4.5 feet in 1925 as a flood-mitigation measure still visible today.
Galveston, TX
USS Texas (BB-35) was commissioned March 12, 1914, as one of the U.S. Navy's first dreadnought battleships. She served in both World Wars, including convoy duty in WWI and as bombardment force flagship at Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Decommissioned April 21, 1948, she became the first permanent battleship memorial museum in the United States and is a National Historic Landmark. Currently undergoing a $35+ million structural restoration in Galveston with a projected reopening around 2027.
Galveston, TX
The Van Alstyne House at 3602 Broadway was designed by Galveston architect Nicholas Clayton and built in 1891 for Alfred Albert Van Alstyne and his wife Catherine Waelder Van Alstyne. The 6,310-square-foot Queen Anne residence — fourteen rooms, quarter-sawn oak woodwork, a cantilevered Grand Hall, a ballroom, and ornate exterior trim that earned it the 'Gingerbread House' nickname — was among the most elaborate private commissions of Clayton's career.
Dallas, TX
The Adolphus opened October 5, 1912, on Commerce Street as the flagship Dallas hotel of St. Louis beer magnate Adolphus Busch, founder of Anheuser-Busch. Designed in Beaux Arts style by Thomas P. Barnett of Barnett, Haynes & Barnett, the 22-story tower stood as the tallest building in Texas for a decade. The hotel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains an operating luxury hotel under the Marriott Autograph Collection.
Dallas, TX
On March 3, 1910, Allen Brooks, a 60-year-old Black laborer, was dragged from the Dallas County Courthouse by a rope while his trial was in progress. A mob estimated at 5,000 people carried him through downtown Dallas to the Elks Arch at Main and Akard Streets, where he was hanged from a telephone pole. No one was prosecuted for the lynching. The site went without any public commemoration for 111 years until the Equal Justice Initiative and Remembering Black Dallas placed a historical marker at Pegasus Plaza in 2021.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPDallas, TX
Coombs Creek Trail is a paved, publicly maintained trail in the Kessler Park neighborhood of Oak Cliff in Dallas. Phase I of the trail was completed around 2011, running approximately 1.5 miles from the Stevens Park Golf Course area toward the Trinity River, following Coombs Creek and Kessler Parkway. The Kessler Park neighborhood itself was developed from the 1920s onward as an early Oak Cliff subdivision.
Dallas, TX
Dallas Heritage Village is an outdoor history museum in the Old City Park neighborhood of Dallas, assembled from 21 historic structures relocated from across North Texas since the 1960s. The centerpiece is Millermore Mansion, built in 1855 by William Brown Miller — one of the oldest surviving houses in Dallas County. The collection spans domestic, commercial, and civic buildings representing Texas life from 1840 to 1910.
Dallas, TX
Dealey Plaza is a 3-acre public park at the western edge of downtown Dallas, designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1993 for its connection to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The motorcade turned from Main Street onto Houston Street and then onto Elm Street, where shots were fired. The former Texas School Book Depository building, from which gunman Lee Harvey Oswald fired according to the Warren Commission, anchors the northeast corner of the plaza.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPDallas, TX
Flag Pole Hill is a wooded public park on a hilltop adjacent to White Rock Lake in northeast Dallas. The land was part of military training grounds in the early twentieth century, and the hill takes its name from a flagpole once maintained there. It became a Dallas urban legend site tied to reports of invisible rock-throwing, with two competing origin legends explaining the phenomenon.
Dallas, TX
Freedman's Cemetery was established in 1869 as a burial ground for freed Black residents of Dallas, serving the community through the early 1920s. By the mid-1940s, city and state highway planners routed North Central Expressway (US 75) directly through the grounds, removing gravestones and filling the site with roadway and utility infrastructure. The cemetery was rediscovered in 1990 during TxDOT road-widening work when construction workers began encountering skeletal remains. Excavation documented over 800 marked and 1,200 unmarked graves. The site was designated a Dallas Landmark and Texas State Historic Site, and the Freedman's Cemetery Memorial opened in 1999.
Dallas, TX
The building opened in October 1925 as the Scott Hotel, built to accommodate passengers arriving at Union Station directly across the street. The ten-story, 160-room hotel was named for its original owner, hotelier George C. Scott. It later became the Hotel Lawrence and has since operated under a succession of brands including La Quinta and, currently, Holiday Inn Express. The building sits adjacent to Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.
Dallas, TX
Lake Highlands High School opened in the Lake Highlands neighborhood of northeast Dallas and houses a full-scale auditorium used for drama productions. The school is part of Richardson Independent School District. In the early 1970s, according to theater teacher accounts documented by the Lake Highlands Advocate, a student named Elizabeth fell to her death from the stage grid above the auditorium floor.
Dallas, TX
The Lawrence Hotel at 302 South Houston Street in Dallas opened in October 1925 as the Scott Hotel, a ten-story commercial brick structure designed by C.D. Hill & Co. to serve rail passengers arriving at Union Station across the street. It operated under several names — including Bradford Hotel and Hotel Lawrence — before being purchased by IHG and operating today as the Holiday Inn Express Dallas Downtown.
Dallas, TX
The Magnolia Hotel occupies the former Magnolia Petroleum Building, a 29-story Renaissance Revival skyscraper that opened in August 1922 as the headquarters of Magnolia Petroleum. Surpassing the Adolphus to become Texas's tallest building, it gained its enduring symbol in 1934 when Magnolia installed the rotating neon Pegasus on the roof. The building was converted into the luxury Magnolia Hotel in the late 1990s.
Dallas, TX
The Majestic Theatre opened in 1921 at 1925 Elm Street, designed by atmospheric-theater architect John Eberson in Renaissance Revival style for impresario Karl Hoblitzelle's Interstate Theatres chain. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it was the first Dallas building to receive that designation and today operates as a live performance venue managed by the City of Dallas.
Dallas, TX
The Majestic Theatre opened April 11, 1921 on Elm Street in downtown Dallas as the flagship vaudeville house of Karl Hoblitzelle's Interstate Amusement Company. Designed by atmospheric-theater architect John Eberson in Renaissance Revival style, it became the first Dallas building listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. The City of Dallas now operates the venue as a performing-arts space.
Dallas, TX
Millermore is a two-story Greek Revival home completed in 1861, originally built for the Miller family on their Dallas-area plantation. The same family occupied it for more than 100 years. In 1966, the Founders Garden Club relocated the structure to Old City Park, where it became the centerpiece of what is now Dallas Heritage Village — a museum preserving 38 structures from Dallas's 1840-1910 history.
Dallas, TX
Oak Cliff Cemetery was founded in 1846, predating the City of Dallas by several years. It is the oldest public cemetery in Dallas County, with roughly 2,500 marked graves and an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 additional unmarked burials. The cemetery's age, ground composition, and limited maintenance have combined to produce a documented phenomenon: heavy rainfall periodically causes skeletal remains to surface at or near grade level.
Dallas, TX
The 1892 Dallas County Courthouse — known as Old Red for its red-sandstone exterior — was designed by Max A. Orlopp Jr. in Romanesque Revival style and served as the sixth Dallas County courthouse after a sequence of earlier structures lost to fire. Restored in the 2000s, it housed the Old Red Museum of Dallas County History & Culture (2007–early 2020s) before the Texas Fifth District Court of Appeals reoccupied the building in 2024.
Dallas, TX
Old Parkland is the restored campus of Dallas's first public hospital, founded in 1894 and rebuilt in 1913 in the Classical Revival style. After closing as a hospital, the deteriorating complex was acquired by Crow Holdings in 2006 and reopened in 2008 as a private office campus and headquarters.
Dallas, TX
Pioneer Park Cemetery was established in 1849 in what is now the heart of downtown Dallas, making it one of the oldest surviving burial grounds in the city. The complex encompasses four distinct cemetery sections — Masonic, Odd Fellows, Jewish, and City — and contains the graves of six Dallas mayors and numerous founding civic figures. By the late 1800s the site had suffered severe neglect, with vandalized headstones and livestock permitted to roam the grounds.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPDallas, TX
Pleasant Grove Christian Church in Dallas, Texas traces its origins to a rural Union church that met as early as 1875. The first dedicated building was constructed in 1908 and was destroyed by lightning in 1913. Subsequent sanctuaries were built in the early 20th century and in 1950, with rebuilding after a 1965 fire. The congregation continues today and is the subject of a Texas Historical Marker.
Dallas, TX
The Renaissance Dallas Hotel is a full-service Marriott-brand hotel on the Stemmons Freeway corridor in Dallas. The hotel and its rooftop pool area have appeared in Dallas haunted hotel roundups based on local accounts of a man's death at the rooftop pool and subsequent guest and staff reports of paranormal activity on the upper floors.
Dallas, TX
The Turtle Creek Pump Station was built in 1909 to supply water to Dallas's rapidly growing Oak Lawn and Turtle Creek neighborhoods, making it Dallas's oldest surviving public building. The City of Dallas decommissioned it in the 1970s; the Meadows Foundation subsequently renovated it as the Sammons Center for the Arts, a performing arts hub that has operated since 1981. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Dallas, TX
Sinister Strolls is a ticketed walking tour company operating in downtown Dallas, covering documented violent crimes from 1910 through the present. Its route includes historically significant sites of racial violence, law enforcement tragedy, and serial crime within several walkable blocks of downtown.
Dallas, TX
The seven-story Dallas County Administration Building, built in 1901 as a warehouse, was leased to the Texas School Book Depository Company in 1963. On November 22 of that year, Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from a sixth-floor corner window at President Kennedy's motorcade on Elm Street below. The building was repurposed as a county government office and opened as a museum on February 20, 1989.
Dallas, TX
Snuffer's opened on Greenville Avenue in 1978, years after a violent death occurred at the building during its prior life as a biker bar. The restaurant became a Dallas institution for cheese fries and burgers, and its haunted reputation accumulated over decades of staff turnover, each generation passing along accounts of what they encountered in the building's back hallway.
Dallas, TX
Snuffer's Restaurant & Bar opened in 1978 at 3526 Greenville Avenue in Lower Greenville, Dallas, in a building that previously operated as a pool hall. Local historians believe the property sits on or adjacent to a 19th-century children's cemetery, predating both the pool hall and the surrounding neighborhood development.
Dallas, TX
Sons of Hermann Hall, at 3414 Elm Street in Deep Ellum, was built in 1910–1911 as a meeting hall for the Sons of Hermann, a German fraternal organization. The two-story wood-frame building is a Texas Historic Landmark and is described in local coverage as Dallas's oldest free-standing wooden structure. It remains active as a fraternal hall, bar, dance floor, and live-music venue.
Dallas, TX
The Stoneleigh opened in 1923 in Dallas's Uptown neighborhood as the city's second-oldest hotel. The high-rise is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is operated today as Le Méridien Dallas, The Stoneleigh. In the 1930s, the property was purchased by Colonel Harry Stewart, who converted the top floor into the first penthouse suite in Dallas.
Dallas, TX
The Sullivan House is one of more than two dozen pre-1910 Dallas structures relocated to Dallas Heritage Village, a living-history museum at Old City Park that opened in 1966. The Sullivan family — including Daniel F. Sullivan, Dallas's first Water Commissioner — occupied the house for nearly a century in the Cedars neighborhood before the structure was moved to the village. From 1936 to 1941, City Park was called Sullivan Park in his honor.
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Dallas, TX
The Texas Theatre opened in 1931, financed by Howard Hughes as part of a chain of Dallas movie houses. On November 22, 1963, 80 minutes after the assassination of President Kennedy at Dealey Plaza, Lee Harvey Oswald slipped into the theater without paying, was spotted by the ticket seller, and was arrested by Dallas police inside after struggling with officers and attempting to fire a revolver. The theater remains an active repertory cinema in the Oak Cliff neighborhood.
Dallas, TX
Dallas built White Rock Lake between 1910 and 1911 as a water-supply reservoir; the surrounding 1,015-acre park was developed beginning in the 1930s with major contributions from the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Lady of the Lake vanishing-hitchhiker legend has been published since at least 1943.
Austin, TX
The Austin Scottish Rite Theater at 18th and Lavaca was erected in 1871, the year Austin became the permanent capital of Texas, as a German opera house, biergarten, and gymnastics hall for a local German social organization. It functioned as a German opera house for roughly 40 years before the Scottish Rite Masons purchased the property in 1910 and have remained tenants since. It is Austin's oldest standing theater.
Austin, TX
Austin State Hospital is the oldest continuously operating psychiatric facility west of the Mississippi River, established in 1856 as the Texas State Lunatic Asylum. Over its first decades of operation the hospital maintained an on-site cemetery where approximately 3,000 patients were interred, the majority in unmarked or numerically identified graves. A relocation of the cemetery in the early twentieth century left the full disposition of remains uncertain, according to a CultureMap Austin investigation.
Austin, TX
Rudolph Bertram, a German immigrant who arrived in Austin in 1853, purchased the city block at 16th and Guadalupe and by 1866 had erected the limestone structure that still stands. The building housed a general store, saloon, blacksmith shop, and wagon yard. The Bertram family lived on the upper floor, and three of Rudolph's children died at the property. The Clay Pit Indian restaurant has operated here since 1998.
Austin, TX
The Commodore Perry Estate was built in 1928 for cotton entrepreneur and real estate developer Edgar Howard 'Commodore' Perry on a 10-acre site in Austin's Hyde Park/Hancock area. The Italian Renaissance Revival mansion was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in August 2001. After housing Saint Mary's Academy from 1944 to 1972 and several subsequent schools, the property was restored and reopened in 2020 as a 54-room hotel within the Auberge Resorts Collection.
Austin, TX
The Driskill opened on December 20, 1886, in downtown Austin as the grandest hotel in central Texas. Colonel Jesse Lincoln Driskill, a Tennessee-born cattle baron who had supplied beef to the Confederate Army and Texas Rangers, financed the construction. A harsh winter and drought devastated his herds and forced him to sell the hotel in 1888; he died in 1890.
Austin, TX
The Goodall Wooten House was completed in 1900 for Austin physician Goodall H. Wooten and his wife Ella Newsome Wooten, on land purchased from his father Thomas Dudley Wooten. The Greek Revival mansion stands at 1900 Rio Grande Street, four blocks from the University of Texas campus, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. After a 2013 restoration, it reopened as Hotel Ella, a 47-room boutique hotel preserving the original structure.
Austin, TX
The inn at 809 W Martin Luther King Jr Blvd was built in 1896 as the private residence of Judge Charles A. Wilcox and his family. After the original family's tenure the house fell into disrepair by the 1980s and was subsequently renovated into a bed-and-breakfast. The property is one of the older intact Victorian residential structures in central Austin.
Austin, TX
The Littlefield House is an 1893 Victorian mansion built for Confederate veteran, cattleman, and banker Major George Washington Littlefield and his wife Alice Tillar Littlefield on the edge of the original Forty Acres of the University of Texas. The architect was San Antonio's James Wahrenberger. The house has been owned by UT Austin since 1935 and is used for university functions and event space.
Austin, TX
The Millett Opera House opened on October 28, 1878 as an 800-seat opera house built by Austin lumber merchant Charles F. Millett to a design by Italian-born architect Frederick Ruffini. At the time of its opening it housed the largest enclosed performance space in Texas. The building has been the home of The Austin Club, a private social club, since 1981 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Austin, TX
Moonshine Patio Bar & Grill opened in 2003 inside the historic Waterloo Compound at 303 Red River Street in downtown Austin. The compound is a cluster of mid-1800s buildings — a mercantile founded by Mr. Hofheintz that gave the site its 'Waterloo' name (Austin's original 1839-era name), to which the Reissig family later added a saloon and domino parlor. Waller Creek runs immediately east of the compound.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPAustin, TX
The building at 412 E 6th Street dates to 1872, part of the historic Sixth Street commercial district that developed during Austin's post-Civil War growth. The Museum of the Weird opened in the early 2000s when artist Steve Busti formalized his collection of oddities and curiosities into a permanent exhibit inside his Lucky Lizard Curios and Gifts store.
Austin, TX
Oakwood Cemetery, originally known as City Cemetery, was established in 1839 as Austin's first municipal burial ground. Spread across 40 acres in central east Austin, it holds more than 23,000 interments dating to the founding of the city, including historically separate sections for Austin's Black, Latino, and Jewish communities. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
Austin, TX
The Travis County Jail was built in 1876 at the corner of 11th and Brazos Streets in Austin for $100,000. The two-story castle-style stone structure with two-foot-thick walls held nine men who were legally executed on the premises between 1879 and 1918, along with notable inmates including outlaw John Wesley Hardin and writer William Sydney Porter (O. Henry). The jail was demolished in the early 1930s; the Dewitt C. Greer State Highway Building, headquarters of the Texas Department of Transportation, opened on the site in summer 1933 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.
Austin, TX
The Omni Austin Hotel Downtown opened in 1986 at 700 San Jacinto Blvd, occupying a site with direct historical ties to Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second President of the Republic of Texas. Lamar's home stood on or near this ground before the Republic era gave way to statehood, and the lot changed hands through several development cycles before the modern tower was constructed.
Austin, TX
The Paramount Theatre opened on October 11, 1915 as the Majestic Theatre, a 1,200-seat vaudeville and movie palace on Congress Avenue in downtown Austin. It was renamed the Paramount Theatre in 1930 after acquisition by Karl Hoblitzelle's Interstate Amusement chain. The Paramount hosted Harry Houdini, Helen Hayes, Katherine Hepburn, and the Marx Brothers and remains an active live-performance venue under the nonprofit Austin Theatre Alliance.
Austin, TX
The land that became Pioneer Farms was granted to James O. Rice in 1844 and settled by Frederick and Harriet Jourdan in 1852, who developed it into a 2,000-acre farm. The Jourdan family donated the property to the Heritage Society of Austin in 1956; it formally became a living history museum in 1975 under the name Jourdan-Bachman Pioneer Farm.
Austin, TX
The Kreisle Building on Congress Avenue was constructed in the 1870s. On July 23, 1916, fire swept through the structure, killing two Southwestern Telegraph & Telephone employees trapped in an elevator and fatally injuring Austin firefighter James T. Glass, whose spine was crushed under a collapsing wall. Glass died August 17, 1917. Austin Fire Department retired his badge No. 13 permanently, and the department has maintained no Station 13 in his honor. The building has hosted live music continuously since Speakeasy Austin opened in 1997.
Austin, TX
St. Edward's University was established in 1877 on farmland south of Austin by Edward Sorin, the French-born Holy Cross priest who also founded the University of Notre Dame. The institution started as a high school for boys before becoming a college in 1885. Main Building — the campus's defining Gothic Revival limestone structure — was first completed in 1888, designed by Nicholas J. Clayton of Galveston. It burned in a mysterious fire in spring 1903 and was rebuilt by fall of the same year. A 1922 tornado caused additional damage. Main Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
Austin, TX
The Stephen F. Austin Hotel opened May 19, 1924, as the tallest building in Austin (other than the State Capitol) and as the city's first high-rise hotel. Funded by $600,000 raised locally, the ten-story structure was originally called 'The Texas' before Austin's Business and Professional Women's Club campaigned to rename it for the father of Texas. Architect Seth Temple designed it in a Neoclassical style. Five more stories were added in 1938, bringing it to fifteen stories. The hotel served as Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign headquarters when he won his first Congressional race in 1937. A full restoration in 2000 returned much of the original detailing. The hotel is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark and now operates as a Royal Sonesta property.
Austin, TX
The Texas State Capitol is the seat of Texas state government in downtown Austin, designed by Detroit architect Elijah E. Myers and constructed from 1882 to 1888 in the Italian Renaissance Revival style. At dedication it was the seventh-tallest building in the world. The Capitol houses the chambers of the Texas Legislature and the Office of the Governor and was the site of the only assassination of a sitting Texas statewide elected official inside the building.
Austin, TX
Colonel Jesse Lincoln Driskill, a Tennessee-born cattle baron who supplied beef to the Confederate Army and later the Texas Rangers, opened The Driskill Hotel on December 20, 1886. Its first event, two weeks after opening, was the inaugural ball for Texas Governor Sul Ross. Driskill sold the hotel in 1888 after severe drought devastated his cattle herds and died in 1890. The hotel has hosted every Texas governor's inaugural ball since 1887.
Austin, TX
Built in 1916 as the Enfield Grocery Store, The Tavern was designed by architect Hug Kuehne in the style of a German public house. During Prohibition the upstairs is alleged to have housed a bar, casino, and brothel. After repeal in 1933, it became an official bar — one of the first Austin establishments to advertise air conditioning.
Austin, TX
The Walter Tips House was built in 1876 in downtown Austin as the residence of Walter Tips (1841-1911), a German immigrant hardware merchant and Texas state senator. In 1975 the house was scheduled for demolition; Franklin Savings Association purchased the structure, moved it intact to 2336 South Congress Avenue, and reopened it as a branch office. In 2026 the building was rebranded as Walter's Tavern.
Houston, TX
The Alley Theatre company was founded in 1947 by Nina Vance in a repurposed Houston dance studio. The current building at 615 Texas Avenue opened October 13, 1968, designed by Ulrich Franzen in a Brutalist style with curved concrete walls and no right angles. On January 13, 1982, managing director Iris Siff was murdered in her office by Clifford X. Phillips, a former Alley security guard. A wrongful-death suit against the theater's security firm was settled in 1984.
Houston, TX
The building at 717 Franklin Street in downtown Houston was constructed in 1892 as part of the Houston Ice & Brewing Company, one of the city's major brewing operations of the late 19th century. During Prohibition it operated under the name Magnolia Brewery, finding legal workarounds to continue production. A worker identified only as William died when a stack of beer barrels fell on him at the facility in the 1920s. The building later became the Brewery Tap bar and restaurant.
Houston, TX
Between 1970 and 1973, electrician Dean Corll and two teenage accomplices — David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. — abducted, tortured, and murdered at least 28 boys in the Houston area. Corll's family had operated a candy company at the 505 W 22nd Street address in the Heights neighborhood, across from Helms Elementary School. The case was the deadliest known mass murder in U.S. history at the time of its discovery in August 1973.
Houston, TX
The Donnellan Crypt was built by the family of Timothy Donnellan, one of Houston's earliest pioneers, who died in 1849. The vault on the bank of Buffalo Bayou eventually held Timothy Donnellan, his son Henry Donnellan (killed in 1866 in a cannonball explosion while exploring Civil War-era wreckage at the bayou's foot of Travis Street), and Timothy's wife Emily Donnellan Dwyer (died 1867). A fourth occupant, Charles Ritchey, also died in the 1866 explosion. All remains were exhumed in late 1901 and reinterred at Glenwood Cemetery; the brick vault itself was incorporated into the bridge embankment and survives intact.
Houston, TX
On April 16, 1997, Doris Angleton was shot thirteen times in her home at 3031 Ella Lee Lane in Houston's River Oaks neighborhood. Her husband, Robert Angleton, was a prominent Houston bookie who had allegedly hired a hitman — his own brother, Roger Angleton — to kill her amid contentious divorce proceedings. The subsequent trials became one of Houston's most covered criminal cases: Roger was convicted and later died in prison, while Robert was acquitted of capital murder at trial despite the prosecution's contract-killing theory.
Houston, TX
The Niels Esperson Building (1927) and Mellie Esperson Building (1941) form a connected downtown Houston office complex designed by theater architect John Eberson. The Niels building was commissioned by Mellie Esperson as a memorial to her husband Niels, an oil and real estate tycoon who died in 1922; Mellie oversaw both buildings until her death in 1945. The Italian Renaissance-style towers remain Houston landmarks.
Houston, TX
The Bob Casey Federal Courthouse at 515 Rusk Street in Houston has served as the seat of the Southern District of Texas since 1962. Named after U.S. Representative Robert R. Casey, the building houses six New Deal-era murals painted by Jerry Bywaters and Alexandre Hogue in 1941, depicting the Houston Ship Channel — works rediscovered in 1976 after decades in storage.
Houston, TX
Founders Memorial Cemetery at 1217 W Dallas Street is Houston's oldest surviving burial ground, established in 1836 by Augustus and John Allen, the brothers who founded Houston that same year. They donated the land for use as a public cemetery shortly after platting the city. The cemetery holds more than 800 cholera victims from the epidemic waves that struck Houston in the late 1830s and 1840s, as well as a number of signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and other figures from the Republic of Texas period.
Houston, TX
Glenwood Cemetery was established in 1871 as Houston's first professionally designed cemetery, laid out in the garden-cemetery style that swept American urban planning in the mid-nineteenth century. It accepted its first burial in 1872 and quickly became both a burial ground and a weekend recreational destination. Notable burials include Howard Hughes Jr., Republic of Texas president Anson Jones, Hollywood actress Gene Tierney, and many other figures central to Houston business and political history.
Houston, TX
Hermann Park was donated to the city of Houston in 1914 by businessman George Hermann and opened in 1915 on land in the Medical Center area. The park's dark-history claim rests on the site's association with Civil War-era military activity — local tour operators and KHOU TV have described the area as tied to a field hospital and casualty ground from the Civil War period. The park is now a 400-acre public green space anchored by the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Houston Zoo, and Miller Outdoor Theatre.
Houston, TX
The Houston Zoo opened in Hermann Park in 1922 when the City of Houston moved its animals from Sam Houston Park to a larger site. Hans Nagel, a German-born lion tamer, was hired as the first zookeeper and acquired hundreds of animals during his tenure. On the evening of November 17, 1941, Nagel was shot six times and killed by Houston police officer Harold M. Warren in Hermann Park; Warren was acquitted on grounds of self-defense.
Houston, TX
On June 23, 1965, Houston police responding to a welfare check at 1815 Driscoll Street in the Montrose neighborhood discovered the dismembered remains of Fred Rogers (81) and Edwina Rogers (72) stored in their home refrigerator. Their son Charles Rogers — a seismologist, former Navy pilot, and private pilot who had lived with his parents — was last seen on the day the bodies were discovered and was never located. He was declared legally dead in absentia in 1975. The house was demolished in 1972; condominiums replaced it in 2000. The case remains officially unsolved.
Houston, TX
Jefferson Davis Hospital was Houston's first centralized public hospital, opening on March 15, 1925 atop the 1840 Houston City Cemetery. After decades of mixed use and vacancy, it was rehabilitated in 2003-2005 as the Elder Street Artist Lofts and listed on the National Register in 2005.
Houston, TX
Houston equestrian socialite Joan Robinson Hill died March 19, 1969, at age 38 from a massive infection of undetermined cause. Her husband, plastic surgeon John Hill, was indicted on the Texas charge of 'murder by omission' — the first such indictment in state history. His 1971 trial ended in mistrial. On September 24, 1972, John Hill was shot and killed by a masked gunman at the entrance to his River Oaks mansion at 1561 Kirby Drive. The contract killing was ultimately traced to Bobby Wayne Vandiver (shot by police in 1974) and linked by investigators to Joan's father, Ash Robinson. The intertwined cases formed the basis of Thomas Thompson's 1976 book 'Blood and Money.'
Houston, TX
The Julia Ideson Building opened in 1926 as the central library of the Houston Public Library, designed in Spanish Renaissance Revival style by Ralph Adams Cram of Boston. It served as Houston's central library from 1926 to 1976 and was renamed in 1951 in honor of Julia Bedford Ideson, the city's first professional librarian. It now houses the Houston Metropolitan Research Center.
Houston, TX
La Carafe occupies the oldest surviving commercial building in Houston — a two-story brick structure built in 1860 as the Kennedy Bakery, replacing an 1847 wooden building destroyed by fire. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it anchors the Market Square Historic District and has operated continuously as a public venue since the Civil War era.
Houston, TX
Built in 1926 by Houston investor Michele DeGeorge and designed by Houston architect Joseph Finger, the building opened November 21, 1926 as the Auditorium Hotel. It was renamed The Lancaster Hotel in 1983 and designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1984. The Lancaster is the longest continuously operated hotel in Houston and remains the leading hotel in Houston's Theater District.
Houston, TX
Market Square at Milam and Preston streets has been at the center of Houston civic life since the city was founded in 1836. Four successive city hall buildings occupied the block; three burned down in the 19th century, a pattern that shaped the site's reputation before any paranormal narrative attached to it. The block at 315 Capitol Street housed a city jail where public hangings were carried out. The park was extensively renovated in 2010 and remains an active downtown green space.
Houston, TX
Molly's Pub occupies a building at 509 Main Street in downtown Houston that dates to approximately 1890, making it one of the older commercial structures still operating in the city center. The property sits within the historic core of downtown Houston, a few blocks from Market Square, and has operated as a bar for many years. The building's New Orleans-style wrought-iron balcony along the Main Street facade is a period feature that distinguishes it from later commercial construction in the area.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPHouston, TX
During the Republic of Texas era (1836–1845), Houston served as the first capital of the new republic before Austin was designated as the permanent seat of government. Criminal justice in the Republic period was summary and local; the Harris County jail at 315 Capitol was the primary detention facility for the Houston area. According to Houston Press reporting and accounts gathered by the Houstorian preservation blog, a large live oak near the jail at Capitol and Bagby served as the execution tree for at least eleven men hanged during the Republic period.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPHouston, TX
Patterson Road crosses Langham Creek in the Katy area west of Houston, a corridor that saw Civil War-era tension between Confederate Texas and the large German immigrant farming communities of Harris and Waller counties, many of whom opposed secession. The nearby Magnolia Cemetery, established in 1900, contains Civil War soldiers among its burials. The bridge itself is an unincorporated Harris County road structure with no documented construction date in the available sources.
Houston, TX
On June 9, 2013, Ana Trujillo stabbed her boyfriend Stefan Andersson — a visiting professor at the University of Houston — 25 times with the 5.5-inch stiletto heel of her blue suede shoe inside their apartment at The Parklane on Hermann Drive in the Museum District. Trujillo claimed self-defense; a jury rejected the argument and convicted her of murder in March 2014. She was sentenced to life in prison. The case received national media coverage because of the unusual murder weapon.
El Paso, TX
Concordia Cemetery in El Paso, Texas has hosted burials since 1856, when it began as a family plot on a ranch owned by Don Hugh Stephenson. The first burial took place that year. The cemetery expanded to absorb 60,000 interments representing nearly every strand of El Paso's history: Buffalo Soldiers from the 9th and 10th Cavalry, Confederate and Union veterans, Texas Rangers, Spanish-American War veterans, and the many victims of smallpox and influenza epidemics.
El Paso, TX
El Paso High School opened in 1916 as a Greco-Roman building designed by architect Henry C. Trost, set on a hillside above the city. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1980. During World War II its basement briefly served as an overflow morgue for Spanish Flu casualties and combat deaths arriving in El Paso. The school remains an active K-12 campus.
El Paso, TX
The main downtown branch of the El Paso Public Library at 501 N Oregon St sits on land that, in the 19th century, was part of the old Fort Bliss cemetery. According to El Paso Times historical reporting, when the library was first established on the site (around 1904), remains were exhumed and reinterred at Concordia Cemetery, though local reporting notes persistent claims that some graves were never fully relocated.
El Paso, TX
The El Paso Museum of Art is a public art museum at Arts Festival Plaza in downtown El Paso, Texas. It emphasizes Latin American and regional collections and has been a free civic institution for decades. The building's specific construction history was not found during research.
El Paso, TX
The El Paso Playhouse is the longest-running community theater company in El Paso, founded in 1963 as the Festival Theater. The company has operated since at 2501 Montana Avenue in a building that was previously a church; the structure is reported to be more than a century old. The property was originally financed through the generosity of local businessman William Kastrin.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPEl Paso, TX
Two-story Art Deco brick firehouse on the northwest corner of Santa Fe and W Paisano (then 2nd Street), designed by the prolific El Paso firm Trost & Trost — specifically by Gustavus A. Trost — and opened September 18, 1930. The building is owned by the City of El Paso.
El Paso, TX
Lawyer Preston E. Gardner purchased the lot at 311 E Franklin Avenue for $36,000 in May 1921 and completed construction by May 1922 at a cost of $130,000. The three-story steel-framed hotel — advertised on opening as nearly fireproof — quickly filled to 90 percent occupancy and has operated continuously since, making it the oldest hotel in El Paso. Original room amenities included a live canary in every room, cared for by co-manager Mrs. Lake.
El Paso, TX
Hotel Paso del Norte opened Thanksgiving Day 1912 as a 351-room luxury hotel financed by Zack T. White and designed by El Paso's prolific Trost & Trost firm. During the 1914 Mexican Revolution, guests reportedly watched firefights from the rooftop terraces. Operated by Camino Real Hotels for decades, the property was acquired by The Meyers Group in 2016, underwent a major renovation, and reopened October 8, 2020 as part of Marriott's Autograph Collection.
El Paso, TX
Antonio O. Flores opened Tony's Place at 3622 E Missouri Ave in 1927, operating it as a bootleg establishment during Prohibition with slot machines and liquor concealed in false walls. Cavalry soldiers from nearby Fort Bliss were regular customers. In 1968, Antonio's daughter Lilia and son-in-law John Duran renamed it L&J Cafe for their initials; after John's death in 1987, third-generation owners Leo and Frances Duran took over. The restaurant sits immediately adjacent to Concordia Cemetery, one of the oldest cemeteries in El Paso, where more than 60,000 people are buried.
El Paso, TX
Loretto Academy at 1300 Hardaway Street in El Paso opened on September 11, 1923, founded by Mother M. Praxedes Carty of the Sisters of Loretto. The campus was designed by El Paso architect Henry Trost and built on 19 acres in the Austin Terrace area, then open desert on a hilltop north of downtown. The school remains an active independent Catholic institution serving pre-K through grade 12.
El Paso, TX
The Magoffin Home is a 19-room, 8-fireplace adobe Territorial-style homestead built in 1875 for Joseph Magoffin, a former mayor of El Paso. The Magoffin family descendants lived in the home until 1976, when the City of El Paso and the State of Texas jointly purchased the property. It is now a Texas Historical Commission state historic site and museum.
El Paso, TX
Monteleone's Ristorante is a family-owned Italian restaurant opened by Gary Monteleone and his wife Laura in 2001 in a 100-plus-year-old central El Paso building at 3023 Gateway Blvd W. The neighboring building, into which the Monteleones later expanded, previously housed the Circulo Espirita San Pablo, a 1922-chartered congregation of the Texas Spiritualist Association.
El Paso, TX
The building opened between 1905 and 1907 as the Albert Baldwin Sanatorium, founded by David Gilmore Baldwin and named for his father, who had contracted tuberculosis and traveled to El Paso for the dry-climate cure. The facility later evolved into Southwestern General Hospital, which filed for bankruptcy and ceased medical operations in August 2007. The structure at 1221 N Cotton currently houses El Paso LTAC Hospital, an active long-term acute care facility.
El Paso, TX
The Plaza Theatre opened September 12, 1930 on Pioneer Plaza in downtown El Paso. Developer Louis L. Dent commissioned the Spanish Colonial Revival movie palace in 1927, and the inaugural night drew a crowd of 2,410. Its lavish interior was designed to evoke 'the fabled beauty of Old Spain and the charm of Old Mexico.' After decades of decline, the theatre was extensively restored and reopened as a performing-arts venue, now home to the Plaza Classic Film Festival and a wide range of touring performances.
El Paso, TX
The building at 110 E San Antonio Avenue was constructed in 1883 as the Fashion Saloon, the first establishment in El Paso to feature electric lighting. It changed ownership and names multiple times, becoming the Wigwam Saloon by 1889. In 1895 gunfighter and lawyer John Wesley Hardin purchased a half-interest in the Wigwam for approximately one month before selling it back. Hardin was shot dead at the Acme Saloon one block away on August 19, 1895. By 1909 the building had become a movie theater; architect Henry C. Trost redesigned it in 1912. It now operates as headquarters for the Paso del Norte Paranormal Society (Ghost915).
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPCorpus Christi, TX
Bill Witt Park in Corpus Christi sits on the site of a significant WWII-era structure. The airplane hangar, built in 1941, functioned as a training and housing facility during World War II. The Corpus Christi area hosted NASA tracking operations for the Mercury and Gemini space programs in the 1960s. The hangar was demolished in 2008.
Corpus Christi, TX
Blackbeard's on the Beach has operated at 3117 Surfside Boulevard since 1991, when the current owners acquired one of the oldest buildings on the North Beach spit. Founder Steve Bonillas ran the restaurant for over two decades before his death in 2012; his wife Paula has continued operating the business. The building has survived multiple Gulf hurricanes including Ike in 2008.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPCorpus Christi, TX
Calallen High School was founded in 1928 as a three-grade institution serving a rural cattle ranching community established in 1910 by early rancher Calvin Joseph Allen. The school was annexed by Corpus Christi in 1970 and continues to serve grades 9-12 as a standard public education facility.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPCorpus Christi, TX
On March 31, 1995, Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Perez was fatally shot in Room 158 of the Days Inn at 901 Navigation Boulevard in Corpus Christi by Yolanda Saldivar, the president of her fan club, who had embezzled from the singer. The motel building still stands and operates today as a Red Roof Inn.
Corpus Christi, TX
Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas is a public community college serving South Texas since 1935. The East Campus Memorial Classroom Building is a historically designated structure on the campus, notable for hosting meetings and speeches during the Chicano civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Corpus Christi, TX
The French-Galvan House was built in 1908 by A.M. French as a Colonial Revival residence. In 1942, Rafael Galvan purchased the home — Galvan was the first Mexican-American police officer in Corpus Christi and also established the Galvan Ballroom, a significant venue in the city's mid-century dance culture. The Galvan family owned the property until 1982, when it was incorporated into Heritage Park. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1986 and currently houses the Multicultural Center.
Corpus Christi, TX
Heritage Park at 1581 N. Chaparral Street in Corpus Christi, Texas contains eleven historic homes, several recorded as Texas Historical Landmarks, with the oldest dating to 1851. The Sidbury House, built in 1893, is the only surviving High Victorian structure in the city. Multiple homes now function as cultural museums operated by civic organizations.
Corpus Christi, TX
Built in 1851 by Walter Merriman, the Merriman-Bobys House is the second oldest structure in Corpus Christi and the oldest within Heritage Park. During the Civil War and the catastrophic 1867 yellow fever epidemic — which killed roughly a third of the city's population — Dr. Eli T. Merriman converted the home into a makeshift hospital. Merriman died of yellow fever himself after treating patients there. The house was moved from 801 South Upper Broadway to Heritage Park in 1982.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPCorpus Christi, TX
Old Bayview Cemetery was established in September 1845 when seven soldiers killed in the steamship Dayton boiler explosion needed immediate burial during Brig. Gen. Zachary Taylor's encampment on the eve of the Mexican-American War. Lt. Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock chose the site; the land was donated by Col. H. L. Kinney. Two yellow fever epidemics — in 1854 and 1867 — each killed roughly a third of Corpus Christi's population and contributed mass burials.
Corpus Christi, TX
Completed in 1914 at a cost of over $250,000, the Nueces County Courthouse served as the center of county government for 63 years before being abandoned in 1977 when a new courthouse opened. Designed by Harvey L. Page in the Classical Revival style, it survived the 1919 hurricane while the surrounding city was devastated by a 16-foot storm surge — and in the immediate aftermath, the dead were laid out in front of the building so families could identify them.
Corpus Christi, TX
The Sidbury House was commissioned in 1893 by Charlotte Cook Scott Sidbury, a rancher and civic leader who never personally lived in the home. It is the only surviving example of High Victorian architecture in Corpus Christi. The house was occupied for several years by Padre Island rancher Patrick Dunn and his family, during which time a child died of fever in the home. It was moved to Heritage Park in 1927 and restored by the Junior League in 1977.
Corpus Christi, TX
USS Lexington (CV-16) is an Essex-class aircraft carrier commissioned in February 1943. Nicknamed the Blue Ghost by Japanese propaganda broadcasters during World War II after multiple incorrect reports of her sinking, the carrier served through the Pacific campaign earning eleven battle stars. The Lexington was decommissioned in 1991 and opened as the Lexington Museum on the Bay in November 1992.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPCorpus Christi, TX
The Nixon Building opened March 27, 1927, as Corpus Christi's first skyscraper — a 12-story steel-framed concrete structure developed by J. Maston Nixon on a bluff that had previously held wealthy residences. Developer Sam E. Wilson later added a 17-story west tower in 1951, creating the complex now known as Wilson Plaza. The building closed in October 2024 due to unresolved maintenance citations.
Abilene, TX
The Paramount opened May 19, 1930, designed by Abilene architect David S. Castle in Mission/Spanish Revival style with a Spanish-Moorish interior. It closed in 1979 as downtown Abilene declined, was saved from demolition by the Abilene Preservation League, and reopened in 1987 after restoration funded by Julia Matthews and the Dodge Jones Foundation. Universal Pictures selected it to premiere the 1931 film Dracula two days before its national release.
Abilene, TX
Fort Phantom Hill was established November 14, 1851, when Lt. Colonel John J. Abercrombie arrived with Fifth Infantry troops at the Clear Fork of the Brazos River in Jones County. The fort was abandoned on April 6, 1854 — after only two and a half years — following the establishment of Indian reservations on the upper Brazos. Robert E. Lee commanded here in 1852. As the garrison departed, most of the fort's wooden structures were destroyed by fire; the circumstances remain disputed.
Abilene, TX
Fort Phantom Hill was established November 14, 1851, by Lieutenant Colonel John Joseph Abercrombie with five companies of the 5th Infantry Regiment. Built to protect westward emigrant routes through Comancheria, the post never saw significant combat; it was abandoned April 6, 1854, after just over two years, defeated by inadequate water, poor timber, and disease. The stone ruins were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
Abilene, TX
Lake Fort Phantom Hill is a reservoir north of Abilene, Texas, named for the nearby 1850s frontier fort. The fort was built in the early 1850s to protect westbound settlers and was occupied for only a few years before being burned and abandoned. The lake itself was created by impoundment of Elm Creek.
Abilene, TX
Built in 1909 by Colonel W.L. Beckham of Greenville, Texas, and named for his daughter, the Grace Hotel was Abilene's flagship lodging — the primary hotel between Fort Worth and El Paso — until it closed in 1973 after railroad traffic faded. Preservation efforts in the late 1980s saved it from demolition, and it reopened in 1992 as the Museums of Abilene.
Abilene, TX
Built in 1909 by Colonel W.L. Beckham of Greenville, Texas, the Grace Hotel served as Abilene's primary lodging between Fort Worth and El Paso until 1973. After decades of vacancy, the building was restored by the Abilene Preservation League and reopened in 1992 as the Museums of Abilene, later renamed The Grace Museum.
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Abilene, TX
H.O. Wooten, an Abilene wholesale grocer who had been in business since 1898, financed the 17-story Hotel Wooten in cash during the Great Depression — construction began May 1929 and the building opened June 6, 1930 with a celebration of more than 2,000 guests. At 208 feet it was the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso and held that distinction until 1984. Designed by Abilene architect David S. Castle in Art Deco/Gothic style, the hotel closed in 1960, reopened as Abilene Towers Apartments in 1963, and was fully restored in 2005. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
Abilene, TX
The USDA Weather Bureau constructed this brick building in 1909 to serve as both observatory and residence for the bureau chief overseeing Abilene's weather monitoring. A historic marker at the address (documented in the Historical Marker Database as M85796) records its construction and federal service history. The building no longer serves a federal function and is in private use.
Abilene, TX
William Gray Swenson, a first-generation Swedish-American, built this Abilene home in 1910 on 58 acres. Designed by architect William P. Preston, the Prairie-Style structure was substantially remade in 1928 in Spanish Colonial Revival style with features borrowed from Mission San José in San Antonio. Swenson led Citizens National Bank from its 1902 founding and built the Hilton Hotel in 1927. After his death in 1969 and Shirley's in 1974, the house was donated to the Abilene Preservation League in 1986 and is now managed by the Swenson House Historical Society.
Abilene, TX
The motel referenced in the Shadowlands report as 'The Travel Lodge Motel' in Abilene appears to correspond to the Travel Inn Abilene at 2202 West Overland Trail, just off Interstate 20 in west Abilene. The motel is a roughly fifty-room economy property serving the I-20 corridor between Dallas and El Paso.
Abilene, TX
The Abilene Hotel Company raised more than $350,000 in local stock subscriptions in 1926 and invited Conrad Hilton to operate the resulting 10-story, 260-room hotel, which opened in 1927. It became the second hotel to carry the Hilton name — the Dallas Hilton, opened in 1925, was the first. When Hilton's lease ended in 1945, the building was renamed the Windsor and continued operating as a hotel. It was subsequently converted to apartments and is now The Windsor Apartment Homes, owned by the National Development Council since a 1992 purchase and renovation.
Fort Worth, TX
The oldest part of the Castle of Heron Bay is a three-room stone farmhouse believed to have been built around 1860. The Charles Turner family owned the property from 1873 to 1894; the Oliver S. Kennedy family held it from 1904 to 1911, when it was sold to the City of Fort Worth for the Lake Worth project. Samuel E. and Mrs. Whiting subsequently acquired the property — reportedly won in a poker game from a prior owner named McPherson — and began construction of the castle-like expansion in the late 1920s. Construction was largely completed by 1938. The Vultee Aircraft Corporation leased it from 1944 to 1954 as a private club and guest facility. The property suffered a serious fire in 1939 and has been largely unoccupied since the late 1970s.
Fort Worth, TX
The structure locals call the Whiting Castle began as an 1860s rock farmhouse on the shore of Lake Worth, west of Fort Worth. Samuel and Bess Whiting acquired the property in the 1920s and oversaw a decade of renovations that added a crenellated round tower and rear keep. Mrs. Whiting named the finished house Inverness in 1938.
Fort Worth, TX
The building at 812 Main Street in Fort Worth was constructed in 1890 as an upper-class bathhouse on the edge of Hell's Half Acre — a 2.5-acre stretch of downtown Fort Worth notorious for saloons, gambling halls, and prostitution. The area was known as Fort Worth's 'Bloody Third Ward' and was cleared in the early 20th century.
Fort Worth, TX
Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed the Fort Worth Water Gardens, which opened in 1974 as part of the downtown urban renewal surrounding the Fort Worth Convention Center. The complex includes three distinct pools: the Active Pool, the Aerating Pool, and the Quiet Pool. The site gained international attention on June 16, 2004, when four people drowned in the Active Pool.
Fort Worth, TX
The Fort Worth Zoo opened in 1909 and is the oldest continuously operating zoo in Texas. It sits on 64 acres of Forest Park along the Trinity River. The zoo has consistently ranked among the top in the United States in independent reviews.
Fort Worth, TX
The Jett Building at 400 Main Street is a three-story commercial building on the corner of Third and Main, built around 1902 to serve as the Fort Worth ticket office and conductors' bunkhouse for the Northern Texas Traction Company — the interurban electric railway that ran between Dallas, Fort Worth, and Cleburne. The building is most famous for Richard Haas's 1985 trompe-l'oeil Chisholm Trail mural on its south facade, restored in 2013 when the Sundance Square Plaza opened to its south.
Fort Worth, TX
Log Cabin Village at 2100 Log Cabin Village Lane in Fort Worth is a living history museum comprising authentic 19th-century log structures relocated from North Texas sites. The Foster Cabin — built in 1853 near Port Sullivan, Texas — is the largest of its kind surviving from the mid-19th century and served as a plantation home before its preservation and relocation.
Fort Worth, TX
Miss Molly's Hotel opened June 15, 1910 above an Exchange Avenue storefront as the Palace Rooms, an upscale boarding house serving cattlemen and businessmen. During Prohibition it operated as a speakeasy called The Oasis; in the 1940s it became a brothel known as the Gayatte (Gayette) Hotel. It now operates as Fort Worth's oldest bed-and-breakfast, with eight themed rooms.
Fort Worth, TX
The Fort Worth Stockyards National Historic District developed around the 1902 establishment of the Fort Worth Stockyards Company on the Trinity River north of downtown. At peak operation in the early 20th century, the facility processed millions of cattle and hogs annually, making Fort Worth one of the largest livestock markets in the Southwest.
Fort Worth, TX
The Stockyards Hotel opened in 1907 as a three-story brick hotel in the heart of the Fort Worth Stockyards livestock-trading district. Originally built by Colonel T. M. Thannisch, it has hosted cattlemen, oilmen, rodeo performers, and — most famously — Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow during their 1933 crime spree. The hotel is a contributing structure to the Fort Worth Stockyards National Historic District.
Fort Worth, TX
The W.E. Scott Theatre opened in 1966 as part of the Fort Worth Community Arts Center on Gendy Street in the Cultural District. It was funded by a $3 million trust left by William Edrington Scott, a Fort Worth civic leader who died in 1961 before the theater was completed. The building served as a 468-seat public performing arts venue for nearly 60 years before the Fort Worth Community Arts Center closed in January 2025.
Laredo, TX
The Laredo Civic Center at 2400 San Bernardo Avenue served as the city's primary public performance venue for decades. In 2013, the City of Laredo sold the complex to the Laredo Independent School District for $15.9 million; the Civic Center Ballroom was demolished and the auditorium was renovated into the LISD Performing Arts Center.
Laredo, TX
The Hamilton Hotel began as a smaller structure in 1900 and was expanded to twelve stories in 1923, making it the tallest building in Laredo at the time. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, it was a commercial and social anchor of downtown Laredo through much of the twentieth century.
Laredo, TX
La Posada Hotel in downtown Laredo incorporates four historic structures spanning nearly two centuries. The primary building was Laredo High School, constructed in 1916 on the site of a Spanish Colonial government building, and converted to a hotel in 1961. Adjacent structures include an 1830s convent and the former capitol building of the Republic of the Rio Grande.
Laredo, TX
Lake Casa Blanca occupies land first settled in 1754 when Tomás Sánchez de la Barrera y Gallardo, the captain of Laredo, founded a settlement on two Spanish land grant parcels. The ruins of the original Casa Blanca structure remain within the state park boundaries. The ballroom referenced in the ghost legend was associated with social events at the lake through much of the 20th century.
Laredo, TX
Fort McIntosh was established on the Rio Grande bluff at Laredo on March 3, 1849, named in honor of Lt. Col. James Simmons McIntosh who died at the Battle of Molino del Rey during the Mexican-American War. The fort served as a military post through World War II and was decommissioned in 1946. Laredo Junior College was founded on the site in 1947 to serve returning veterans; it became Laredo Community College in 1993.
Laredo, TX
Mall del Norte opened in Laredo, Texas on August 10, 1977, designed by William Graves of Gordon Sibeck and Associates of Dallas. At 1.2 million square feet, it is the second-largest mall in South Texas and one of the largest in the state. The mall has undergone four major renovations, in 1991, 1993, 2007, and 2012.
Laredo, TX
John King Beretta, a San Antonio merchant who would become known as the Dean of Texas Bankers, opened a private bank in Laredo in 1892; the U.S. Treasury chartered the Laredo National Bank in 1895. The headquarters at 700 San Bernardo Avenue was rebuilt in 1979–1983 on the site of the former Robert E. Lee and Plaza Hotels. The bank merged into Compass Bank on March 13, 2008, ending more than a century of independent operation.
Laredo, TX
The Plaza Theater opened in 1946 at 1018 Hidalgo Street in downtown Laredo, designed as a 1,586-seat movie house by architect Harwood K. Smith. The building is the only surviving example of Art Moderne architecture in Laredo, notable for its hand-painted interior murals and vertical marquee. The City of Laredo acquired the theater from United Artists in 1999 and has pursued restoration funding since, with work ongoing as of 2025.
Laredo, TX
The building at 1005 Zaragoza St was constructed around 1830 and served as the executive headquarters of the Republic of the Rio Grande — a separatist republic that declared independence from Mexico in January 1840 and collapsed by November of that year. The city of Laredo later converted it into a museum focused on that brief but significant chapter of South Texas history.
Laredo, TX
San Agustín Cathedral stands on the east side of San Agustín Plaza in central Laredo, on a site designated for a church in 1767 — twelve years after the town's founding. The present Gothic Revival structure was built between 1866 and 1872 under Reverend Alphonse Souchon, designed by Pierre Yves Kéralum. Archaeological excavations in the 1990s found more than 90 burials of early colonial settlers near the second-church site.
Texarkana, TX
James Draughon, a Confederate veteran, lumberman, and early Texarkana mayor, built the house in 1885 with $10,000 that local tradition holds he won in a poker game with the ace of clubs. The 22-sided Italianate Victorian house changed hands twice before Olivia Smith Moore bequeathed it to the Texarkana Museum System in 1985. It opened as a museum in 1988.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPTexarkana, TX
A former school building at 12th and Spruce Streets in Texarkana, Texas was repurposed as a Bowie County health facility. Employees in the clinic have reported unexplained sounds associated with the building's prior use as a school.
Texarkana, TX
Texarkana straddles the Texas–Arkansas border and grew as a railroad junction city in the late nineteenth century. The downtown district along State Line Avenue and the surrounding blocks preserves a dense collection of late-Victorian commercial architecture including the Hotel Grim (1925), Union Station (1930), and the Perot Theatre (1924). The ghost walk, operated by the Texarkana Museums System, covers documented sites of violence, vice, and tragedy from the city's railroad and Prohibition-era past.
Texarkana, TX
William Rhoads Grim, a banking, railroad, and timber magnate, built the hotel in 1924-1925 at a cost of $1 million. The eight-story structure was the second tallest building in Texarkana at opening and featured a marble lobby, rooftop garden, and 250 guest rooms. The hotel closed in October 1990 and sat vacant until a $42.7 million rehabilitation converted it to 93 residential units, reopening as the Lofts at the Grim in November 2024.
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Texarkana, TX
The theater opened November 18, 1924, built by the Saenger Amusement Company as its Texarkana flagship, designed by architect Emil Weil in Italian Renaissance style. After closing in 1977, it reopened in 1979–80 following a $2.5 million restoration, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a Texas State Landmark, and was renamed for Texas billionaire Ross Perot.
Texarkana, TX
The Perot Theatre opened November 18, 1924, as the Saenger Amusement Company's Texarkana flagship, designed by architect Emil Weil in Italian Renaissance style. After restoration in 1979-80, the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a Texas State Landmark. It is operated by the Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPTexarkana, TX
Founded in 1874 as City Cemetery, Rose Hill is one of Texarkana's oldest active burial grounds. The cemetery holds prominent local figures and a section dedicated to victims of the 1882 Paragon Saloon disaster, when a severe storm collapsed the building and sparked a fire that killed several patrons.
Texarkana, TX
Texarkana Union Station was built in 1928 and opened for business April 17, 1930, designed by Missouri Pacific chief architect E. M. Tucker in Renaissance Revival style. The 44,000-square-foot building was constructed by a joint trust of four railroads and uniquely straddles the Arkansas-Texas state line by congressional mandate. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and remains an active Amtrak station.
Texarkana, TX
Built in 1924 in Art Deco style, the Texarkana Municipal Auditorium stands on State Line Avenue and has served as the city's primary civic and entertainment venue for a century. It hosted touring performers across multiple decades and remains in active use.
Waco, TX
The Amicable Life Insurance Company Building — now known as ALICO — was completed in 1911, designed by the Fort Worth and Dallas firm Sanguinet and Staats at a cost of $755,000. The 22-story, 282-foot Beaux Arts tower was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River until the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas surpassed it in 1912. It survived the May 11, 1953 Waco F5 tornado, which killed 114 people downtown, by swaying several feet without collapse.
Waco, TX
Cameron Park, a 416-acre urban park, was dedicated May 27, 1910, in memory of lumber baron William Cameron. Flora B. Cameron donated 125 acres to Waco in his honor, with subsequent additions in 1917 and 1920 extending the park from Proctor Springs along the Brazos and Bosque Rivers to Lover's Leap. The park remains one of Texas's largest municipal parks and includes the 52-acre Cameron Park Zoo.
Waco, TX
The Dr Pepper Museum occupies the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company building, completed in 1906 in Romanesque Revival style and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The building operated as a Dr Pepper bottling plant until the 1960s. On May 11, 1953, the catastrophic F5 Waco tornado struck downtown; a worker at the plant known as Shorty — the chief mechanic — was killed when the coffee warehouse across the street collapsed on him as he sought shelter.
Waco, TX
East Terrace House was built in 1872 in Italianate villa style for Tennessee-born entrepreneur John Wesley Mann, who made his fortune in Texas cotton and real estate. It is now a house museum managed by the Historic Waco Foundation.
Waco, TX
On May 15, 1916, Jesse Washington, a seventeen-year-old Black farmhand, was seized from the McLennan County Courthouse, dragged to Waco City Hall, and publicly burned alive before an estimated 15,000 spectators. The NAACP's subsequent investigation called it 'The Waco Horror.' A Texas Historical Commission marker was dedicated at 300 Austin Ave in February 2023.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPWaco, TX
Lindsey Hollow Road runs through Cameron Park's wooded ravine. A legend documented in the Waco Daily Times-Herald as early as 1920 records that vigilantes extrajudicially hanged horse thieves from the trees along the hollow in the nineteenth century.
Waco, TX
Oakwood Cemetery was founded in 1878 on the grounds of a former horse racing track to relieve overcrowding at Waco's First Street Cemetery. The 157-acre site has been managed since 1898 by the Oakwood Cemetery Association — whose bylaws require a women-only board of directors — on land owned by the city of Waco.
Waco, TX
The Waco Hippodrome opened February 7, 1914, designed by Waco architect Roy E. Lane and Dallas architects Otto Land and Frank Witchell. Managed by entrepreneur Earl Henry Hulsey, it was known locally as 'Hulsey's Hipp.' A fire in the production booth in 1928 destroyed the forward section; it was rebuilt in 1929 in Spanish Colonial Revival style and reopened as the Waco Theatre.
Brownsville, TX
The Cameron County Courthouse was completed in 1914 in a Romanesque Revival style and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It has served as the seat of county government for over a century. In 2004, work on the courthouse parking area broke through into Brownsville's original municipal cemetery — the Campo Santo Viejo — exposing more than 700 graves dating to 1848.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPBrownsville, TX
Camp Lula Sams was founded in the 1920s by local philanthropist Lula Sams to provide outdoor recreation for children. The camp operated as a Girl Scout facility from the 1950s through the 1980s, serving as a cherished destination for generations of South Texas youth. In 2015, IDEA Public Schools purchased the property and established Camp RIO, which operates summer programming while preserving the historic site's cultural heritage.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPBrownsville, TX
Brownsville's original municipal cemetery, the Campo Santo Viejo, was established at the town's 1848 founding and remained in use through approximately the 1870s, when it was abandoned and eventually built over. In 2004, construction at the Cameron County courthouse parking lot broke through into the cemetery, revealing more than 700 graves. Academic archaeologists documented the site, confirming the cemetery's extent and confirming that the surrounding area had been known locally as 'Pasto de las Animas' — Field of the Spirits — after residents in the 1880s reported mysterious lights.
Brownsville, TX
Built around 1915, the Colonial Hotel was part of downtown Brownsville's early commercial development along E Levee Street near the Rio Grande. Over decades of operation, the hotel accumulated a reputation centered on Room 101, where several deaths reportedly occurred. The Brownsville Historical Association now includes it on their annual ghost-walk tour.
Brownsville, TX
Fort Brown, originally Fort Texas, was the first major United States military post on the Rio Grande, built by General Zachary Taylor in 1846 across from Matamoros. The post was the site of the May 1846 Siege of Fort Texas, the first active combat of the Mexican-American War, during which Major Jacob Brown was mortally wounded; the fort was renamed in his honor. The site is part of Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park interpretation today.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPBrownsville, TX
The Old Brownsville City Cemetery was established by the early 1850s and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It contains burials from some of the most turbulent decades of South Texas history, including victims of yellow fever epidemics, cholera outbreaks, Civil War-era casualties, and fatalities from the lawless gunfight culture that characterized the Rio Grande border town in the nineteenth century.
Huntsville, TX
Austin Hall was built in 1851 as the main building of Austin College, one of the earliest colleges established in Texas. When Austin College relocated to Sherman in 1876, the building was absorbed into what became Sam Houston Normal Institute — now Sam Houston State University. Long described as among the oldest surviving academic buildings west of the Mississippi River, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPHuntsville, TX
Martha Chapel Cemetery in Walker County, Texas, is the surviving burial ground of an 1830s Methodist settlement established by Reverend Littleton Fowler. The cemetery takes its name from Martha Palmer, the wife of a church trustee, who was buried behind the chapel in 1854. The Texas Historical Commission placed a marker at the site in 1990.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPHuntsville, TX
Established in 1847, Oakwood Cemetery spans 102 acres and serves as the burial ground for Sam Houston, Joshua Houston (his formerly enslaved associate who became a politician and businessman), nearly 1,500 Confederate soldiers, Yellow Fever victims from 1867, and approximately 150 enslaved persons whose unmarked graves were discovered in 2004.
Huntsville, TX
The Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville preserves the final chapter of Texas's most prominent statesman. The Steamboat House — built in 1858 and named for its distinctive steamboat-deck porch design — was the home where Houston died on July 26, 1863, at age 70, after refusing to swear loyalty to the Confederacy cost him the Texas governorship. The complex also includes the 1847 Woodland Home and the museum building housing Houston's personal effects.
Huntsville, TX
The Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville documents the history of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which traces its origins to the state's first penitentiary established in 1848. The museum's most significant artifact is 'Old Sparky,' the electric chair used to execute 361 men and women at the Walls Unit between 1924 and 1964, when Texas switched to lethal injection. The Walls Unit, where those executions took place, continues to carry out lethal injections less than three miles from the museum.
Huntsville, TX
The Walls Unit opened in 1848 as the first prison in Texas, constructed by convict labor using locally made bricks. It has been in continuous operation for over 175 years. The facility served as the site of Texas's electric chair executions from 1924 through 1964 — Old Sparky, the electric chair, is now displayed at the nearby Texas Prison Museum. The Walls Unit remains the location of all Texas lethal injection executions.
Lubbock, TX
The Pioneer Hotel at 1200 Broadway Street was constructed during the 1920s as a premier eleven-story lodging establishment during Lubbock's economic boom period. The building served as the city's flagship hotel for decades. Following periods of decline and extensive renovation, the structure now houses the Pioneer Pocket Hotel and mixed-use retail spaces, preserving its distinctive renaissance revival architecture.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPLubbock, TX
The former Santa Fe Railroad trestle crossing Yellow House Canyon at Dunbar Park in southeast Lubbock has stood for over a century. The structure is adjacent to Lubbock City Cemetery and carries documented history including at least one confirmed suicide by hanging, earning the local name Hell's Gate.
Lubbock, TX
The City of Lubbock Cemetery was established in 1892 with the burial of Cochran County cowboy Henry Jenkins. It now holds more than 60,000 graves across roughly 350 acres, ranking as the third-largest cemetery in Texas. Among its most-visited graves is that of musician Buddy Holly, who died in the February 1959 plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.
Lubbock, TX
The National Ranching Heritage Center on the Texas Tech University campus in Lubbock preserves over 20 authentic historic ranch structures transported from their original locations across Texas. The structures span nearly two centuries of ranch architecture, from an 1780 Spanish colonial-era building to mid-20th century ranch homes.
Lubbock, TX
The 11-story Pioneer Building at 1200 Broadway in downtown Lubbock was constructed in 1925 and remains one of very few pre-World War II high-rises still standing in the city. The fourth floor acquired a grim reputation across the mid-20th century from a documented series of deaths, culminating in a 1958 double murder in which a Nebraska couple was found bound to their bed.
Lubbock, TX
On December 4, 1967, Sarah Alice Morgan, a custodian working the night shift in the Science Building at Texas Tech University, was murdered by graduate student Benjamin Lach, who had broken into the building to steal examination answers. Lach was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to 40 years in prison. The case is the subject of a 2018 book published by Texas Tech University Press.
Denton, TX
Sam Bayless purchased a 10-acre Denton property in 1894 and expanded the existing farmhouse into a two-story Queen Anne Victorian by 1898. On November 22, 1919, his sharecropper Joe Spears fatally stabbed Bayless during a confrontation over the unauthorized sale of cotton. Spears was acquitted on a self-defense claim after a locally prominent trial covered by the Denton Record-Chronicle. The house was relocated to the Denton County Historical Park in 1998 and opened as a museum in 2001.
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Denton, TX
The Campus Theater opened October 4, 1949, with Cary Grant's 'I Was a Male War Bride,' the first film extensively shot in Europe. Built by Interstate Theatres for over half a million dollars with 30 tons of steel, it was designed by the Dallas firm Pettigrew-Worley & Co. in Art Moderne style. After closing as a cinema in 1985, it sat dark until the Greater Denton Arts Council purchased it in 1990 and reopened it in July 1995 as a multi-discipline performing arts center.
Denton, TX
The Campus Theatre opened in 1949 on Hickory Street in downtown Denton, Texas, as a single-screen movie house. After decades of operation and periods of closure, it was saved by the Denton community and now operates as the Denton Film Society's home venue, hosting independent cinema, film festivals, and community events.
Denton, TX
The Denton County Courthouse-on-the-Square was completed in 1896, designed by architect W.C. Dodson in Romanesque Revival style using limestone and sandstone. The building served as the active county courthouse until a new courts building was constructed nearby, after which it was restored using the original blueprints and opened as a free public museum in 2004. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Denton, TX
Emily Fowler served as Denton's head librarian from 1943 to 1969, guiding the library's growth from a basement room in the county courthouse to its first standalone building at 502 Oakland Street, which opened July 30, 1949. A 1969 expansion designed by architect O'Neil Ford quadrupled the library's size. Fowler retired in 1969 and the expanded building was named in her honor; she died in 1971 at age 72.
Jefferson, TX
The Excelsior House Hotel in Jefferson, Texas, dates to the 1850s and is recognized as one of the oldest continuously operating hotels in East Texas. The property is operated by the Jefferson Historical Society and has hosted Ulysses S. Grant, Oscar Wilde, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Lady Bird Johnson.
Jefferson, TX
Jefferson, Texas was the sixth-largest city in the state between 1845 and 1872, when it functioned as a major riverport. The Army Corps of Engineers' 1873 clearing of the Red River Raft dropped water levels and ended commercial river traffic, stalling the city's growth. The preserved antebellum downtown — including hotels, commercial buildings, and homes — gives Jefferson one of the densest concentrations of nineteenth-century architecture in East Texas, and a corresponding density of documented historical violence and tragedy.
Jefferson, TX
The Jefferson Palace Hotel occupies the oldest building in Texas still operating as a hotel, constructed in 1851 by Jefferson's founder, Allen Urquhart. Before its current use, the structure housed more than 40 different businesses over 170 years. Jefferson, Texas was a major 19th-century port city on Caddo Lake before the Army Corps of Engineers redirected the waterway in 1874.
Jefferson, TX
The Kahn Saloon was built in 1865 during Jefferson's peak as a river-port city and operated as a saloon and brothel for decades. The building is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark and was converted to a hotel in 2016.
Jefferson, TX
Frank and Minerva Stilley built this house in 1861 as a Greek Revival and French Creole hybrid on land originally granted to Jefferson's co-founders. It gained its darkest chapter in October 1868 when a mob of 70 to 100 hooded men overpowered Union guards, seized carpetbagger George W. Smith and four formerly enslaved men who had come with him, and hanged the four men along Moseley Street. In 1885 Charles 'Charlie' Young, a barber born into slavery, purchased the home. His son James hanged himself on the back porch in 1908. The house remained in the Young family until 1983 and was acquired by Mitchel and Tami Whitington in 2002.
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Nacogdoches, TX
The Fredonia opened April 1, 1955, built by the Nacogdoches Community Hotel Corporation — a citizen-funded venture in which more than 1,100 local shareholders each purchased $100 stakes to raise $500,000. Designed by Dallas architect J. N. McCammon and built by W. S. Bellows Construction, the six-story International Style tower with a semi-circular cabana wing was the most visible civic project in postwar Nacogdoches.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPNacogdoches, TX
Griffith Hall opened in 1968 as a co-ed residence hall on the Stephen F. Austin State University campus in Nacogdoches. SFA itself was founded in 1923 and grew into a regional university serving East Texas; Griffith is one of several dormitories constructed during a mid-century campus expansion.
Nacogdoches, TX
Mays Hall served as an infirmary for the military training facility that preceded SFA's full peacetime operation, and later functioned as a campus hospital with a working morgue in its basement. When the building was converted to student housing, the basement — which also contains the remnants of a 1940s bomb shelter — was sealed off and locked.
Nacogdoches, TX
Stephen F. Austin State University was established in 1923 in Nacogdoches, Texas, named for the principal Anglo-American empresario of early Texas settlement. The campus has accumulated several long-running pieces of campus folklore tied to residence halls, the auditorium, and the theater building over its century of operation.
Nacogdoches, TX
The Griffith Fine Arts Building houses the W.M. Turner Auditorium, named for Dean William M. Turner who led the SFA College of Fine Arts from 1965 to 1978. The building underwent a major renovation and expansion from 2020 to 2023, reopening with updated acoustics and technical facilities as part of the Micky Elliott College of Fine Arts.
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Arlington, TX
The Arlington Theater opened February 10, 1950, with a Shirley Temple double feature and seating for 1,200. It operated as a first-run movie house until closing in August 1974, sat vacant, then served briefly as a church before Johnnie High purchased and renovated it in 1994 for his Country Music Revue. The city designated it a Local Landmark after High's death in 2010.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPArlington, TX
The Berachah Industrial Home for the Redemption of Erring Girls opened May 14, 1903, in Arlington, Texas, founded by Reverend James T. Upchurch and his wife Maggie May Upchurch. Distinctive among similar institutions, the home required residents to care for their infants for at least one year before any adoption arrangement. The campus grew to include a chapel, print shop, infirmary, and school, housing as many as 129 residents by 1924. Deaths from childbirth complications, a measles epidemic circa 1914–1915, and other causes filled the cemetery over the home's three decades of operation. The home closed in 1935; the buildings were demolished by the late 1960s, and the only surviving physical remnant is the cemetery.
Arlington, TX
River Legacy Park is a 1,300-acre urban park along the West Fork of the Trinity River in northern Arlington, Texas. The park borders the historic Mosier Valley community, one of the earliest freedmen's settlements established in Texas after emancipation, and includes the River Legacy Living Science Center.
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Arlington, TX
Six Flags Over Texas opened August 5, 1961, in Arlington — the first theme park in the Six Flags chain. Entrepreneur Angus G. Wynne Jr. conceived it as a larger, more accessible alternative to Disneyland, organized around the six national flags that have flown over Texas. The park sits on land through which Johnson Creek once ran.
Bryan, TX
The Carnegie History Center building is one of downtown Bryan's oldest structures, operating as a Carnegie-funded public library in the early 1900s and then housing the Hood's Brigade Association from 1913 to 1933 — a Confederate veterans' organization. It now operates as a history center and runs official ghost tours.
Bryan, TX
The LaSalle opened in 1928 as Bryan's tallest building and most prominent downtown hotel. From 1959 to 1975 it operated as a nursing home. It closed and fell vacant before reopening as a hotel in 2000.
Bryan, TX
Operating since the early 1920s as a city hall, movie theater, opera house, and performance venue, the Palace Theater on Bryan's Main Street anchored the city's cultural life for six decades before a storm altered it permanently in 1986.
Bryan, TX
The Schulman Theater was a movie theater in Bryan, Texas, part of the Schulman family's long-running Central Texas cinema operations. The building was later converted and is now part of Blinn College's Bryan campus, known as the CPC Building.
Goliad, TX
A live oak on the north side of the Goliad County Courthouse served as the de facto courthouse for Goliad County from 1846 to 1870, with legal proceedings held under its canopy and capital sentences carried out immediately by hanging. During the 1857 Cart War — a campaign of violence by Anglo teamsters against competing Mexican freight haulers along the Indianola–San Antonio road — approximately 70 Mexican workers were killed, some hanged from this tree, before Texas Rangers halted the attacks. A Texas Historical Commission marker has stood at the site since 1964.
Goliad, TX
Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga was founded in 1749 near the San Antonio River and became one of the most productive ranching operations in colonial Texas. The mission closed in 1830, fell into ruin, and was reconstructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1935 and 1941. Texas Parks and Wildlife now administers the site as Goliad State Park.
Goliad, TX
Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga was established in 1722 by Franciscan priests to Christianize the Karankawa people and secure the Texas coastline from French expansion. Relocated three times, it reached its permanent site on the San Antonio River near Goliad in 1749. By 1788, the mission operated over 15,000 head of cattle — a figure that may have reached 40,000 at peak production.
Goliad, TX
Presidio La Bahia in Goliad, Texas, is one of the most significant sites of the Texas Revolution and one of the best-preserved Spanish colonial forts in North America. Founded in 1749 on its current site, it was the location of the Goliad Massacre on March 27, 1836 — the execution of approximately 341 Texan prisoners of war by the Mexican Army on the orders of General Antonio López de Santa Anna.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPGranbury, TX
Granbury State Historical Cemetery is Hood County's oldest active burial ground, home to Confederate General Hiram Bronson Granbury and other 19th-century figures. Its most-visited grave belongs to J. Frank Dalton, who died in Granbury on August 15, 1951, and whose death certificate was filed under the name Jesse Woodson James — the culmination of his three-year campaign, beginning in 1948, to be recognized as the outlaw whose supposed death in 1882 had long been disputed by James family associates.
Granbury, TX
The Granbury Opera House opened in 1886 on the town square. Ground-floor storefronts originally housed a saloon, a saddle shop, and a grocery store, while the upper floor hosted vaudeville and theatrical performances. After decades of decline, the Granbury Opera Association acquired the building in 1972. A $3.5 million renovation completed in 2012 restored the theater to operational condition, and it has been home to the Granbury Theatre Company ever since.
Granbury, TX
The Hood County Jail was constructed in 1885 from local limestone and served as the county's only holding facility for both city and county prisoners from 1886 until 1978. Its distinctive square tower was designed to accommodate a potential gallows, though a change in Texas law eventually transferred all capital punishment to the state; no executions took place at the site. The Hood County Historical and Genealogical Society now operates the building as a museum.
Granbury, TX
The Nutt brothers — David Lee, Jesse, and Jacob — established a mercantile business in Granbury in 1874. Their limestone building became a hotel in 1910 and moved its rooms to the second floor in 1916. David Lee Nutt's granddaughter, Mary Lou Watkins, managed the hotel from 1967 until 1983 and was instrumental in securing Granbury Square's listing on the National Register of Historic Places. A March 2023 fire substantially damaged the building during renovations; it reopened in November 2024 as an eight-room boutique hotel.
New Braunfels, TX
The Brauntex Theatre opened in January 1942 in downtown New Braunfels, debuting with the Bing Crosby film Birth of the Blues. Designed by architects Jack Corgan and W.J. Moore in the Moderne style and built by Edwin A. Hanz, the theater was the most technically current in the region when it opened, replacing two downtown cinemas that had recently burned. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (2008) and was restored and converted to a performing arts venue by the Brauntex Performing Arts Theatre Association, which acquired it in 1999.
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New Braunfels, TX
Gruene Hall was built in 1878 by Heinrich D. Gruene as part of the cotton-farming community his father Ernst had established in the 1850s. The hall served the Gruene community through its cotton-boom decades until the boll weevil infestation of the 1920s and the Depression collapse of the cotton market left the town largely abandoned. It was restored in the early 1970s and has operated continuously since, earning National Register of Historic Places status in 1975 and a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark designation in 1988.
New Braunfels, TX
John Sippel built the Phoenix Saloon at 193 W. San Antonio Street in New Braunfels in 1871. The establishment operated through the German-Texan community's frontier era and gained two documented fatalities: barroom-fight victim Walter Krause in 1885 and owner John Sippel himself, who died by suicide from a gunshot wound in 1900 following the collapse of his marriage to Johanna Gruene. William Gebhardt devised his commercial chili-powder formula in the back-room café in 1894. The building closed during Prohibition in 1918, converted to other uses, and reopened as the Phoenix Saloon on March 5, 2010.
New Braunfels, TX
The Faust Hotel opened in 1929 as the Travelers Hotel, built by businessman Walter Faust in New Braunfels's downtown German-heritage district. It was renamed the Faust Hotel after Walter's death in 1933. The four-story brick boutique reopened in spring 2026 after renovations reduced the room count from 64 to 45 and added new dining concepts.
San Angelo, TX
Fort Concho was established in November 1867 at the confluence of the North and South Concho Rivers to protect West Texas frontier settlements. It served as the principal base of the 4th Cavalry from 1867 to 1875 and the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry from 1875 to 1882. Designated a National Historic Landmark District on July 4, 1961, the fort is operated as a museum by the City of San Angelo.
San Angelo, TX
The property at 415 W Beauregard Avenue in San Angelo, Texas originally operated as a Howard Johnson Inn and is now an Econo Lodge. No documented historical incidents at this specific address were found during research.
San Angelo, TX
Records confirm that the second floor of 18 E Concho Ave in San Angelo operated as a brothel from approximately 1936 until Texas Rangers shut it down around 1946. The popular 'Miss Hattie' founder narrative — a romanticized madam origin story — has been identified by researchers as a later fabrication; the actual operation was a documented brothel business with no confirmed named madam from that era. The building opened as a museum in the 1970s and has run guided tours since.
San Angelo, TX
The corner of Chadbourne Street and Concho Avenue in San Angelo has seen a hotel burn three times. The first structure, built in the 1880s, was destroyed by fire in 1893 following a kitchen murder. The Landon Hotel, its replacement, burned on August 11, 1902, killing Rosa Landon and seven other guests when a stove explosion trapped them on upper floors. A rebuilt hotel on the site was the Naylor Hotel, constructed in the 1920s and 1930s as a six-story structure, which closed in 1983 — the building's operating entity shut down for failure to meet fire codes.
San Marcos, TX
The Pike House, originally Fisher Hall, was constructed in 1903 as a boy's dormitory for Coronal Institute in San Marcos, Texas. The building served multiple functions over its 104-year existence: dormitory, WWI barracks, Military Academy, hospital, Baptist Academy dorm, and finally a Phi Kappa Alpha fraternity house. In 2007, the building was destroyed by arson and later demolished.
San Marcos, TX
Old Main is the oldest building on the Texas State University campus in San Marcos, completed in 1903 and designed in Victorian Gothic style by architect Edward Northcraft. It was the sole campus building until 1908, originally housing classrooms, administration, and a second-floor chapel with an open balcony. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1988 a floor was added at the balcony level, enclosing the open third-story space.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSan Marcos, TX
San Pedro Cemetery was established in May 1909 by Pedro Carrillo and a group of Mexican American farm laborers who organized a mutual aid society to secure burial rights for their community. Cemeteries in Hays County were segregated at the time, and the founding families — including Luis Rosales and Antonio Sanchez, who served as first president — pooled annual dues of one dollar to fund maintenance and assist families unable to cover burial costs. The original mutual society grew to over 300 members by 1915.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSan Marcos, TX
Thompson Island sits where the San Marcos River forks in southern Hays County. Before the Civil War a cotton gin operated on the island with commercial success. After the war the gin was abandoned and the island was gradually overtaken by cypress trees. The road bridge spanning the river forks serves as both a local landmark and the focus of the Confederate soldier legend.
Weatherford, TX
Angel's Nest is a Victorian-era home built in the 1890s in Weatherford, Texas — county seat of Parker County and a historic stop on the cattle-drive routes west of Fort Worth. The property was constructed for a prominent local family and later adapted for use as a bed and breakfast. Its operating history as a B&B is undated in the available sources.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPWeatherford, TX
Greenwood Cemetery was established in Weatherford in 1863 and serves as the burial ground for some of the most historically significant figures in Parker County and Texas history. Its graves include cattle drover Oliver Loving — whose death on a trail drive inspired part of the 'Lonesome Dove' source material — Texas Governor S.W.T. Lanham, and Civil War Medal of Honor recipient Chester Bowen.
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Weatherford, TX
The Parker County Courthouse in Weatherford is the county's fourth courthouse. Designed by architect W.C. Dodson and completed in 1886, the three-story Second Empire limestone building replaced two predecessor structures that burned under suspicious circumstances during the Reconstruction era. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and comprehensively restored in 2005.
Weatherford, TX
The Texas Pythian Home opened March 1, 1909, as a 52-room residential facility for widows and orphaned children of Knights of Pythias members. The Moorish-influenced brick structure in Weatherford was funded by the fraternal order and served as both school and home for over six decades before transitioning to its current use as a senior-living community.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPAlpine, TX
Sul Ross State University was founded in 1917 as Sul Ross Normal College and became a four-year university in 1969. Named after Texas Governor and Confederate General Lawrence Sullivan Ross, the institution opened operations on June 14, 1920. Fletcher Hall, named after the institution's early president Thomas J. Fletcher, served as a residential facility housing 110 students (110 residents, both male and female) and continues to operate as both primary and overflow housing for contemporary students.
Alpine, TX
Brewster County was created in 1887 from the eastern portion of Presidio County, with Alpine (formerly Murpheyville) as the county seat. The courthouse was constructed between 1887 and 1888 by contractor Tom Lovell at a cost of approximately $15,000 to $27,000, in a locally distinctive interpretation of Second Empire style. On April 7, 1923, 21-year-old Harvey Hughes was hanged on the courthouse lawn after being convicted of murdering a brakeman in January 1922 — the county's first legal hanging and, by contemporary accounts, one of the last legal public hangings in Texas.
Alpine, TX
John R. Holland built the original Holland Hotel in Alpine in 1912 as a prominent cattleman's headquarters near the Southern Pacific line. His son Clay later commissioned Henry Trost to design the current 1928 Spanish Colonial Revival structure at a cost of $250,000. The hotel anchors the north end of Holland Avenue — the street where Crystal Holland Spanell, John Holland's daughter, was shot and killed on July 20, 1916, by her husband Harry Spanell, alongside U.S. cavalry officer Matthew C. Butler Jr. Harry Spanell was tried and acquitted.
Amarillo, TX
The Natatorium opened in July 1922 as an indoor swimming pool designed by architect Guy Anton Carlander. In 1926 J.D. Tucker converted it to a dance palace by installing maple flooring over the pool; in the early 1930s Harry Badger rebranded it 'The Nat Dine and Dance Palace' with a castle-themed facade. The venue sat on Route 66 and hosted major Big Band performers through the 1940s before closing as a public dance hall in the 1960s. It was designated a National Register contributing property in 1994.
Amarillo, TX
Built in 1905 for cattleman and Amarillo mayor Lee Bivins, this brick-and-stone classical home stood at the center of Panhandle society for decades. Mary Elizabeth Gilbert Bivins later bequeathed the property to the city of Amarillo, and it was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.
Amarillo, TX
Cornelius Taylor Herring (1849–1931) financed and built the hotel that bears his name, completing the 14-story Art Deco tower in 1927 after two years of construction at a cost of $1 million — roughly $14 million in current dollars. It was the tallest building in Amarillo at opening and served as a hub for the Panhandle's oil-boom dealmakers. Its basement Old Tascosa Room featured pine-paneled walls and murals by local artist H. D. Bugbee. The hotel closed in 1966 and has been vacant since 1978; in November 2025, restoration plans were announced to reopen it as a luxury hotel by 2029.
Bastrop, TX
Maxine's Café operates from a 1920s-era building on Bastrop's historic Main Street. At some point in the building's past, a man named Jack Black fell from the roof to his death — the specific date is not recorded in accessible historical sources. The café staff learned of the death through local oral history and have since named their resident ghost 'Jack,' keeping a photograph of the man on the wall.
Bastrop, TX
The Bastrop County Jail was built in 1892 in a distinctive tan-and-red-brick design and served as the county's primary detention facility until 1974. The structure included a second-floor gallows where at least three people were executed, including one man reputed to have killed thirteen others. The building has since been converted for use as the Bastrop Area Chamber of Commerce.
Bastrop, TX
Built around 1960 as a roadside service station on Texas Route 304 south of Austin, this Bastrop County property gained national significance when Tobe Hooper chose it as a primary filming location for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). After decades of intermittent operation and neglect, the station was purchased in 2014 and reopened as a barbecue restaurant, motel, and dedicated horror memorabilia destination.
Georgetown, TX
The Georgetown Palace Theatre was built in 1925 by A. C. Moore of Bartlett, Texas. It opened in February 1926 as a silent-film venue and operated continuously as a movie house until 1989, making it the oldest continuously operating movie theater in Williamson County at that time. A 1936 remodel by the Englebrecht family added the Art Deco facade — the only such facade in Georgetown. The nonprofit Georgetown Palace Theatre, Inc. purchased the building in 1991 and reopened it as a live theater in 2001.
Georgetown, TX
Williamson County built its fourth jail in 1888–1889, spending $22,000 on a French Bastille-style limestone structure at 312 Main Street designed by Waco architects Dodson and Dudley. The building served as the county jail for a full century, closing in 1990.
Georgetown, TX
Southwestern University in Georgetown was chartered in 1840, making it Texas's first institution of higher learning. It emerged from a merger of four Methodist colleges in 1873 and was renamed Southwestern University in 1875. The 700-acre campus includes the 1898 Hugh Roy and Lillie Cullen Building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the 1908 Mood-Bridwell Hall, named for F. A. Mood, the university's founder.
Grapevine, TX
Grapevine Lake is a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoir on Denton Creek, a tributary of the Trinity River, in northeast Tarrant County, Texas. Construction of the dam began in January 1948; impoundment of water began on July 3, 1952. The lake serves as a flood-control and water-supply reservoir for the Dallas-Fort Worth region.
Grapevine, TX
Grapevine's calaboose — a small single-cell lockup — was built in 1914 on Barton Street as the town's first permanent jail. The structure was moved to its current location at Franklin and Main in 1994 as part of historic district preservation. Its historical profile includes proximity to the area where Barrow gang associates were detained following the Easter Sunday 1934 murders of Texas Highway Patrolmen H.D. Murphy and E.B. Wheeler on nearby Dove Road.
Grapevine, TX
The Palace Theatre opened November 21, 1940, in downtown Grapevine, designed by architect Raymond F. Smith in the art deco style popular for movie houses of that era. The building operated as a cinema for decades before transitioning to arts and community use. It now operates as the Grapevine Palace Arts Center and celebrated its 85th anniversary in 2025.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPHarlingen, TX
The corner building at Jackson Ave and 2nd St in downtown Harlingen served as the Palm Hotel, then Day's Pharmacy, then a physician's office before becoming Frank's Collection & Antiques — a sequence of occupants spanning the better part of a century that has left the building with layered associations.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPHarlingen, TX
The Arcadia Theater opened in Harlingen before 1928 and became the city's largest movie house. On June 2, 1970, it burned to the ground in a fire covered by the Valley Morning Star. The surviving structure was later occupied by Grimsell Seed Store.
Harlingen, TX
Built in 1915, this brick commercial building is believed to be the oldest surviving commercial structure in Harlingen's downtown district, predating the city's formal incorporation and serving the community through more than a century of growth along the South Texas border.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPLufkin, TX
Jack Creek crosses FM 2497 in Angelina County about 16 miles northwest of Lufkin. The site's dark reputation traces to a stormy night in the 1970s when, according to documented local accounts, a woman and her infant drowned after their car left the road and went into the creek.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPLufkin, TX
Largent Cemetery in Angelina County's Bethlehem Community has been in active use since at least 1862. William J. Largent, born 1800, is the earliest documented burial, having died August 18, 1862, followed by his wife Martha in November 1865. Adjoining land was formally deeded to the cemetery by G.W. Dunn and W.E. Dunn in 1916. The cemetery spans approximately 4 acres.
Lufkin, TX
The Pines Theater opened in 1925 as a Moderne-style movie house in downtown Lufkin. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, it went dark as a commercial cinema in the 1950s and sat largely dormant through subsequent decades. A restoration effort completed around 2009 to 2012 returned the building to active use as a performing arts and events venue.
Mansfield, TX
The Farr Best Theater opened October 10, 1917, as the first theater in Mansfield, built and operated by Milton May Farr, one of the city's most prominent early citizens. Farr and his family ran the theater continuously for 58 years. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 and purchased by the City of Mansfield in 2017 for preservation.
Mansfield, TX
Ralph Sandiford Man was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1825 and arrived in Texas by 1850. He partnered with Julian Feild to build the first steam-powered mill in Texas at the site that became Mansfield, and began constructing his homestead in 1866; the house was completed in 1870. Man's first wife, Julia Alice Boisseau, died in 1868; he married Sarah Jane Stephens in 1870. Man died November 15, 1906, and is buried in Mansfield.
Mansfield, TX
The building at 108 N Main St in downtown Mansfield was the site of two documented 19th-century killings: attorney John Guess was shot on its interior staircase by his own nephew, and Constable Robert Emmett Morison was assassinated by a hired gunman outside the building after pursuing bootleggers. Morison's case was documented by the Officer Down Memorial Page.
McAllen, TX
The Casa de Palmas opened in 1918 as McAllen's first luxury hotel, built in a Spanish colonial style during one of the most violent periods in South Texas history — the so-called Bandit Wars and the La Matanza era on the Texas-Mexico border. The hotel survived a lightning-caused fire in 1973 and has operated continuously for more than a century, now as a Trademark Collection by Wyndham property.
McAllen, TX
The Boccaccio 2000 nightclub operated at this McAllen location until Good Friday 1979, when a widely witnessed and extensively documented supernatural incident — and a subsequent fire — became the origin point for one of the Rio Grande Valley's most persistent urban legends.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPMcAllen, TX
McAllen's first hospital opened at this site in 1928 and served the Rio Grande Valley for over six decades before demolition in 1993. The current City Hall was subsequently constructed on the same ground.
Mineral Wells, TX
The Baker Hotel opened in 1929 in Mineral Wells, Texas as a 14-story, 450-room Spanish Colonial Revival resort hotel built by T.B. Baker around the town's mineral springs. It was the first air-conditioned hotel in Texas and one of the first with an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The hotel hosted celebrity guests through the 1930s and 1940s, declined with the mineral-springs tourism economy, and closed in 1972. It sat abandoned until a $65 million restoration began in 2019 to reopen the property as The Baker Hotel and Spa.
Mineral Wells, TX
Camp Wolters opened in 1925 as a Texas National Guard training site for the 56th Cavalry Brigade. During World War II it was the largest U.S. Army Infantry Replacement Training Center, peaking at 30,000 men. In 1956 it became the U.S. Army Primary Helicopter School; nearly every helicopter pilot who flew in Vietnam trained at Fort Wolters. The base closed in 1973.
Mineral Wells, TX
Haunted Hill House at 501 NE 1st Street in Mineral Wells, Texas was established in 1880 as an A-frame home belonging to one of the founding families of Mineral Wells. From 1880 through early 1929, the property functioned as a makeshift hospital for the region. During and after that period it became associated with illegal activity including gambling, bootlegging, and prostitution.
San Elizario, TX
The Adobe Horseshoe occupies a restored adobe structure in San Elizario, a settlement with territorial roots dating to the 16th century. San Elizario served as a county seat and witnessed the 1877 Salt War—a violent dispute over salt deposit rights that claimed several lives. The structure itself likely dates to the 19th century.
San Elizario, TX
The building served as a private residence from 1821 to 1848 before becoming El Paso County's official jail in 1850, when San Elizario was the county seat. The Commissioners Court installed a prefabricated iron cell from Chicago capable of holding twelve prisoners. In 1876, during the Salt War period, William H. Bonney — then going by Billy the Kid — arrived before dawn, posed as a Texas Ranger, and freed his companion Melquiades Segura from custody, locking the guards inside. The structure is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
San Elizario, TX
The Spanish military established a presidio at this location in 1788 to protect travelers along the El Camino Real. The current chapel was constructed between 1877 and 1882 after earlier structures were destroyed by Rio Grande floods. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972, the chapel survived floods, Apache raids, and a 1935 fire. An attached convent — now a private residence — yielded a disturbing discovery when renovators found infants and stillborns buried inside the adobe walls.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSpring, TX
Blue Light Cemetery in Spring, Texas, is a historic burial ground with roots extending to the 19th century. The cemetery's distinctive name derives from unexplained luminous phenomena reported by visitors over decades. The location has accumulated a reputation as one of Texas's paranormally active cemeteries.
Spring, TX
The Spring Historical Museum was established in 1995 and occupies a building completed in 1948 that previously served as a church and later as a courthouse. The structure is designated as a Texas Historic Landmark. The museum preserves artifacts, documents, and photographs from the North Harris County railroad community of Old Town Spring, which developed in the 1880s around a Southern Pacific rail junction.
Spring, TX
Brothers Charlie and Dell Wunsche opened the Wunsche Brothers Saloon and Hotel in 1902 on Midway Street in Spring, Texas, building the structure from lumber milled at their own family sawmill. The hotel served railroad workers traveling the International-Great Northern line through Spring. It is the oldest surviving building in Old Town Spring.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPTyler, TX
Camp Ford operated from August 1863 through May 1865 as the Confederacy's largest prisoner-of-war camp west of the Mississippi River, holding over 5,300 Union soldiers at its peak in July 1864. More than 350 US Army personnel died there from starvation, exposure, and disease.
Tyler, TX
Built in 1881 by Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner and builder Henry Kane, this structure served as Smith County's jail until 1916, when a new facility replaced it. It was then used as a hotel until 1986, after which attorney Randy Gilbert purchased it in 1993 and converted it to law offices. The building carries a Texas Historical Commission marker recognizing its architectural and civic history.
Tyler, TX
The Tyler Pipe foundry on East Oakwood Street operated from the 1930s through 1973, earning the nickname 'The Mangler' for a documented pattern of industrial accidents and worker deaths. A catastrophic fire in the 1970s killed several workers. The property later became the site of a homicide when a homeless man was found beaten to death with a cinder block.
Waxahachie, TX
Completed in 1897 at a cost of $130,000, the Ellis County Courthouse was designed by San Antonio architect James Riely Gordon in Richardsonian Romanesque style. It features 21 carved stone faces by craftsman Harry Herley — the subject of a popular but historically disputed love legend involving a local boarding-house resident named Mabel Frame. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Waxahachie, TX
Reindeer Manor traces its origins to a 1920 brick estate built by oilman James Sharp in what was then Red Oak, Texas. The property passed to his son Matthew, who raised racehorses on the land until financial ruin following the 1929 stock market crash led to a family tragedy. In 1974 the property began its second life as a haunted attraction, operating for nearly 50 years in Red Oak before relocating to Waxahachie.
Waxahachie, TX
The current Rogers Hotel building opened in 1913, the third structure on the site after two earlier hotels burned. Designed by architect C.D. Hill and built at a cost of approximately $100,000, the four-story reinforced-concrete structure was marketed as 'absolutely fireproof.' Its most unusual feature was a basement swimming pool installed to accommodate the Chicago White Sox during spring training.
Wichita Falls, TX
Frank Kell, one of the two principal entrepreneurs behind early Wichita Falls, built this Victorian-Neoclassical mansion on Bluff Street between 1908 and 1910. Kell and his brother-in-law Joseph A. Kemp developed much of the city's commercial infrastructure — mills, railroads, and real estate — in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. The home served the Kell family for decades; five funerals were held inside it, including those of Kell's widow Lula Kemp Kell, who died there in 1957, and their daughter Willie May. The Wichita County Heritage Society established the museum in 1980.
Wichita Falls, TX
Flora Charlotte Kemp was born in 1890, the daughter of Joseph Alexander Kemp — a prominent Wichita Falls businessman and the brother-in-law of Frank Kell. She died in 1910 at age twenty while visiting Detroit, Michigan with her family. The cause was typhoid fever. Her remains were returned to Wichita Falls for burial at Riverside Cemetery, where her family erected a marble statue of a young girl descending stairs, inscribed 'Little Sister.'
Wichita Falls, TX
Dr. Frank S. White, a former superintendent at Austin State Hospital, opened this private sanitarium in 1926 as a more humane alternative to state asylums — providing patients communal living, a library, and card games. The facility employed electroshock therapy and lobotomies. It closed after flood damage in the 1950s and sat vacant for over fifty years before recent conversion to private apartments.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPBelton, TX
Built in 1899 for the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway (the Katy), the Belton depot served the region's rail traffic through the early twentieth century. According to local legend reported by US 105 FM, a Temple Chief of Police was shot and killed at the depot by a Bell County officer as he stepped off a train — an event said to have sparked lasting institutional tension between the two cities.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPBelton, TX
Presser Hall was built in 1929 as the music building for the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas, and has housed music instruction and practice facilities since its construction.
Big Bend National Park, TX
The Chisos Mountains rise from the Chihuahuan Desert in the center of Big Bend National Park, their volcanic peaks reaching 7,825 feet at Emory Peak. The name 'Chisos' is linked to the Chisos band of the Limpia Mescalero Apache, who used the mountains as their primary refuge territory. Their last chief, Alsate — known also as Arzate and Pedro Múzquiz — was lured into a Mexican army trap at San Carlos around 1878–1879, escaped, was recaptured, and was executed by firing squad at Ojinaga, opposite Presidio on the Rio Grande, around 1881 or 1882.
Big Bend National Park, TX
Joseph Oscar Langford arrived in the Big Bend in 1909 seeking relief from malaria contracted in Mississippi. He homesteaded the hot spring site on the Rio Grande, built a limestone bathhouse and small resort, and operated it as a curative destination through 1912, when border unrest forced the family out. They returned in 1927 and ran a motor court until 1952. The Langford family conveyed the property to Texas in 1942 for Big Bend National Park; the bathhouse was demolished by the NPS in the early 1950s. The stone pool foundation and several building ruins remain on the National Register of Historic Places, designated in 1974.
Canyon, TX
Palo Duro Canyon — 120 miles long and up to 800 feet deep — was the last refuge of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne bands who had left their assigned reservations during the Red River War of 1874. On September 28, 1874, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie led the 4th U.S. Cavalry in a surprise dawn attack on the canyon encampments. He captured approximately 1,200 horses and had them slaughtered in nearby Tule Canyon to prevent the tribes from reclaiming them and continuing resistance. The loss of their horses, shelter, and winter stores forced most bands back to Fort Sill reservation by November 1874, effectively ending organized resistance in the Texas Panhandle. Texas established the state park in 1934.
Canyon, TX
The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum is the largest history museum in Texas, located on the West Texas A&M University campus in Canyon. Its collection includes the World War I-era Red Cross horse-drawn ambulance wagon known locally as the Sarah Jane wagon, on display for decades and currently in storage.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPCollege Station, TX
Francis Hall was built between 1913 and 1918 as the original home of Texas A&M's veterinary school, constructed in Romanesque Revival style. It remains one of the older surviving academic buildings on the core campus.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPCollege Station, TX
On November 14, 1959, Roy Lee Simms, a long-serving Texas A&M meat locker foreman, severed his femoral artery while cutting meat in the basement laboratory of the Animal Industries Building and bled to death before help could arrive.
Denison, TX
The Katy Depot at 101 E Main Street in Denison was built in 1872, the same year the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (MKT, known as the Katy) founded the city. Denison was established as a planned railroad town when the Katy crossed the Red River into Texas, and the depot anchored the commercial district that grew around it.
Denison, TX
The Rialto Theater at 424 West Main Street in Denison has stood in downtown for nearly a century, surviving the economic shifts that have reshaped the city's commercial district. It remains one of the older intact theater buildings in North Texas.
Fort Davis, TX
Fort Davis National Historic Site preserves a frontier U.S. Army fort that operated from 1854 to 1891 along the San Antonio-El Paso Road in West Texas. After the Civil War, the post became home to the all-Black 24th and 25th Infantry and 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments — the Buffalo Soldiers. The site became a National Historic Site in 1961.
Fort Davis, TX
Fort Davis was a U.S. Army post in West Texas from 1854 to 1891, stationed to protect travelers along the San Antonio-El Paso Road and the Chihuahua Trail. Today it is operated by the National Park Service as Fort Davis National Historic Site, and the restored Post Hospital, completed in 1875, is one of the best-preserved frontier-era army hospitals in the Southwest.
Fredericksburg, TX
The National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas — formerly the Admiral Nimitz Museum — occupies the site of the historic Nimitz Hotel, where Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet during World War II, was born and raised. It is the only museum in the United States dedicated exclusively to WWII Pacific theater history.
Fredericksburg, TX
The 1885 jail was the fourth Gillespie County lockup, built after the third burned the same year. It held prisoners from December 1885 until August 1939, when a newer facility opened. The two-story limestone structure with original steel-clad cells is now part of the Pioneer Museum complex and is maintained by Gillespie County.
Hurst, TX
The Belaire Theatre opened in a Hurst strip mall location; the Artisan Center Theater company began using the space after relocating from North Hills Mall when that facility closed in early 2005. The theater grew into a significant community arts organization producing approximately twenty shows per year on two stages. In March 2024 the landlord locked the building over overdue rent. The theater mounted a benefit performance that raised over $25,000 but it was not enough; the final production ran August 4, 2024.
Hurst, TX
The Belaire Theatre opened April 8, 1966 at the Belaire Plaza shopping center in Hurst, Texas as one of the first new Interstate Theatre cinemas in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in nearly two decades. It was twinned in 1976, expanded to four screens in 1987, and closed as a movie theater in 2000. From 2005 through March 2024, the space housed the Artisan Center Theatre, which presented family-friendly live theater in the round.
Lockhart, TX
Caldwell County's castellated brick jail was completed in 1908 to a design by prominent Texas courthouse architect James Riely Gordon. It housed prisoners from across Caldwell County for decades and served as the site of at least one public execution — the 1921 hanging of convicted murderer Albert Howard — before being converted to a museum in 1986.
Lockhart, TX
The Caldwell County Jail at 315 East Market Street in Lockhart was constructed in 1908 to serve as the county's fourth detention facility, replacing earlier log and frame jails dating to 1855. The five-story Norman castellated structure held detainees until 1983, when a new facility replaced it. The Caldwell County Historical Commission took ownership in 1986 and operates it as a public museum.
Longview, TX
On May 23, 1894, four men robbed the First National Bank of Longview in the Dalton Gang's last major operation. The getaway attempt triggered a prolonged downtown gunfight that left George Buckingham dead, saloon keeper J.W. McQueen fatally wounded, and Charles Learned with an amputated leg. Outlaw Jim Wallace (alias George Bennett) was killed at the scene. Bill Dalton escaped but was shot dead by a posse in Oklahoma three weeks later.
Longview, TX
The Gregg County Historical Museum operates in downtown Longview, Texas, preserving the history of the region from East Texas oil boom through the twentieth century. The museum sits steps from the site of the May 1894 Dalton Gang bank robbery that killed two people and wounded several others in a downtown gunfight.
Marfa, TX
Hotel Paisano was designed by Henry C. Trost of El Paso's Trost & Trost firm and opened in 1930 in Spanish Revival style, with a U-shaped plan centered on a courtyard fountain. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (1978) and is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark (1979). In summer 1955, director George Stevens and more than 300 Warner Bros. cast and crew occupied the hotel during production of Giant — the film adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel shot on Presidio County ranches nearby.
Marfa, TX
In 1883, cowhand Robert Reed Ellison first documented the lights while driving cattle through Paisano Pass, describing them as a flickering glow he initially took for an Apache campfire. The phenomenon has been studied by researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas (2004) and Texas State University (2008), both concluding that at least some observed lights correlate with vehicle headlights on US-67. The Texas Department of Transportation constructed a dedicated viewing facility in 2003.
Mission, TX
La Lomita Mission is a small stone chapel built in 1899 by Oblate priests on a Rio Grande hilltop five miles south of what is now Mission, Texas. The Oblate Fathers received the property as a bequest in 1861 and used it as a circuit-riding waystation for decades before the residential headquarters of a new Oblate mission district was established here. When the city of Mission was founded in 1908, it was named in the chapel's honor.
Mission, TX
La Lomita Chapel is a 19th-century Oblate mission site near Mission, Texas — the city from which Mission takes its name. The chapel served the Rio Grande Valley Catholic community through the late 19th century before its primary structure was destroyed by fire. The remaining grounds are near the Rio Grande and Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park.
Odessa, TX
The Barn Door Steakhouse opened in Odessa in 1963 and grew into one of West Texas's most recognizable dining institutions. The Pecos Depot — an authentic 19th-century wooden train station from Pecos, TX — was moved to Odessa in 1950 and integrated into the restaurant's bar area in 1972, giving the space an additional layer of documented West Texas railroad history.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPOdessa, TX
The Copper Rose Building, originally built as the Odessa National Bank in 1949 at the height of the Permian Basin oil boom, later served successively as a courthouse, funeral home, and church before being converted into a nearly 16,000-square-foot event venue in downtown Odessa.
Palestine, TX
Built in 1878 by merchant Henry Ash and his wife, this Victorian Italianate house at 301 S Magnolia Street is listed as a National Texas Historic Landmark. In 1984 Andrew Bowers Jr., a former mayor of Palestine, shot and killed his wife Mary inside the home, then shot himself as police arrived. The property later came to host commercial paranormal investigations run by Haunted Rooms America.
Palestine, TX
Built in 1931 on the footprint of an 1800s Anderson County jail in Palestine, Texas, the facility served as the county's primary lockup until 1988, then as a juvenile detention center until 1996. Among its more notorious residents was Monty Delk, convicted of murder through a classified ads scheme and executed in 2002 at age 35.
Paris, TX
The original Lamar County Courthouse, a Romanesque Revival structure, was gutted during the catastrophic Paris fire of March 21, 1916. The fire burned for over 10 hours, destroyed approximately 1,400 buildings across 260 acres, and caused an estimated $11 million in damage — making it one of the worst urban fires in Texas history. The rebuilt 1917 courthouse incorporated pink granite salvaged from the original structure.
Paris, TX
Built in 1927 in Art Deco style and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the building now operating as the Paris Community Theatre began its life as the Plaza Theatre. It has anchored the northeast corner of the Paris town square for nearly a century and remains an active performing arts venue.
Rio Grande City, TX
Fort Ringgold was established October 26, 1848, at Davis Landing on the Rio Grande by Captain J.H. La Motte as Ringgold Barracks, named for Major Samuel Ringgold who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Palo Alto in 1846. One of the southernmost installations of the post-Mexican War western fort chain, it operated for nearly a century before decommissioning in 1944. Since 1948, the campus has been used by the Rio Grande City school district.
Rio Grande City, TX
French merchant Francois LaBorde commissioned this residence in 1893, completed in 1899 in Rio Grande City. Architect Leo M.J. Dielmann added a second story in 1917 to convert it into a hotel. That same year, LaBorde died of a gunshot wound — circumstances never definitively determined. The building entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and reopened as a hotel in 1982 after full restoration.
Round Rock, TX
Round Rock Cemetery was established in the 1850s, making it one of central Texas's oldest surviving burial grounds. It became nationally known through its connection to outlaw Sam Bass, who was mortally wounded in the July 19, 1878 gunfight with Texas Rangers and died two days later on his 27th birthday. Adjacent to Bass's grave is a designated half-acre section containing 40–50 marked interments of enslaved people, many identified only by hand-grooved limestone rocks.
Round Rock, TX
On July 19, 1878, outlaw Sam Bass and members of his gang arrived in Round Rock to rob the Williamson County Bank. Deputy Sheriff A.W. Grimes spotted the armed men and approached them; he was shot and killed. A gunfight with waiting Texas Rangers followed, during which Bass was critically wounded. He died two days later — on his 27th birthday — and was buried in Round Rock Cemetery. The downtown block where it happened is memorialized with historical markers.
Sherman, TX
Sherman, Texas was founded in 1846 as the seat of Grayson County and grew into one of North Texas's significant commercial and county seat towns through the railroad era. The Haunted History Tour, run by Sherman Main Street, draws on documented local history to trace strange events and unexplained phenomena from the city's first century through the present.
Sherman, TX
On May 9, 1930, a mob estimated at 5,000 people stormed the Grayson County Courthouse in Sherman, Texas. George Hughes, a Black farmhand being held in the building, died in the courthouse's fireproof vault as the mob burned the structure. The mob then desecrated Hughes's body and destroyed the Black business district on Mulberry Street. The rebuilt 1936 courthouse replaced the burned original. A historical marker dedicated in March 2025 commemorates the Sherman Riot as one of the worst episodes of racial violence in Depression-era Texas.
Sugar Land, TX
The facility that became known as the Central Unit opened in 1909 as the Imperial State Prison Farm on land that had been a sugar cane plantation in Fort Bend County. It was integral to the Texas convict lease system, using predominantly Black incarcerated labor for agricultural work on former plantation fields. The Central Unit became the location of Texas's electric chair — called 'Old Sparky' — which was used in 361 executions between 1924 and 1964. The facility documented riots, violent incidents, and suicides over its 102-year history, and closed in 2011. The 2018 discovery of 95 unmarked graves on adjacent property renewed attention to the site's history.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSugar Land, TX
The Old Imperial Farm Cemetery was established in 1912 to bury prisoners who died at the Imperial State Prison Farm, which operated on the site of a former sugar plantation using the post-Civil War convict lease system. In 2018, construction crews building the new Lakeview Elementary School campus in Sugar Land unearthed 95 additional unmarked graves. Forensic analysis determined the remains were predominantly African American men and boys, some as young as 14 years old, who died under the convict lease program in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The city designated the original cemetery as a memorial park in 2006.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSulphur Springs, TX
Aiguier Cemetery was established in the late 1850s in the Addran community north of Sulphur Springs, Hopkins County, Texas. The cemetery is associated with the early Anglo settlement of the area and is believed to contain a high proportion of infant burials, reflecting the mortality rates common to nineteenth-century rural Texas communities.
Sulphur Springs, TX
The building at 111 Gilmer Street in downtown Sulphur Springs houses the Magic Scoop ice cream parlor and general store. The second floor of the building was the site of a documented murder, the details of which remain locally known but not extensively published. The structure is part of the historic Hopkins County commercial district.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPAlexander, TX
Around 1860, Charlie and Jenny Papworth settled near Green's Creek in Erath County. While Charlie was away, Jenny and her infant disappeared. A neighbor, W.P. Brownlow, was long suspected; on his deathbed around 1885, he reportedly confessed to killing Jenny and the infant because she had witnessed him meeting with cattle rustlers. The first documented account of the ghost story was written by Joe E. Fitzgerald, a nurseryman born in 1876 near the site, whose articles appeared in the Nolan County News in 1934 and the Paris News in 1942.
Andrews, TX
Shafter Lake was a short-lived West Texas boomtown platted in 1907 on the north shore of an alkali playa lake. It briefly served as a rival for the Andrews County seat, peaked near 500 residents around 1910, then collapsed after losing the county-seat election and is now a ghost town with a small cemetery.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPAnson, TX
The Anson Lights are a long-documented 'ghost light' phenomenon on a dirt road beside Mount Hope Cemetery just outside Anson, the seat of Jones County in West Texas. The light has drawn carloads of visitors for decades and was featured on the TV series Unsolved Mysteries.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPAthens, TX
The Monkey Bridge legend in Athens, Texas centers on a circus that traveled through the early town. In the most plausible version of the story, a circus wagon overturned near the bridge and some monkeys escaped into the surrounding woods. The full elaboration — including a man named Reverend Fuller who allegedly collected the monkeys for dark purposes and underground pentagram tunnels — has been thoroughly debunked by local researchers and geologists.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPBaird, TX
Belle Plain Cemetery is the most-intact surviving feature of the lost West Texas town of Belle Plain, established in 1870 in Callahan County and abandoned within 25 years. Belle Plain was the county seat from 1877 to 1883 and home to Belle Plain College, one of the first institutions of higher education in West Texas. The drought of 1886 to 1887 effectively ended the town's viability.
Bandera, TX
Bandera Pass is a natural hill country divide separating Kerr County and Bandera County in South-Central Texas. The pass sits along roads that formed part of the 19th-century frontier corridors between San Antonio and the Texas hill country settlements, and it was the scene of documented violent encounters between settlers, Apache raiding parties, and mail riders during the 1800s.
Beaumont, TX
John Jay French, a Connecticut-born tanner and merchant, settled in Southeast Texas and built this two-story pioneer house in 1845 on what became French Road in Beaumont. French established the region's first commercial tannery on the property, making him one of the earliest commercial operators in what would become Jefferson County. The Beaumont Heritage Society now operates the fully restored house and grounds as a museum.
Beeville, TX
The building at 207 W Bowie St in Beeville has housed at least two successive bars — first the Dog & Bee Pub, now K&E Seafood Lounge — and gained public notice when KIII-TV reported on employee accounts of unexplained activity.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPBlooming Grove, TX
Lone Oak Cemetery is a small rural burial ground located approximately two miles off a dirt road outside Blooming Grove in Navarro County, Texas. The cemetery serves the rural community and is accessible to the public. No documented construction date or historical records for the cemetery were found in available sources.
Boerne, TX
Erastus and Sarah Reed built this limestone stagecoach stop and inn in 1859 — Boerne's only such facility at the time — and it has operated as a hotel continuously ever since. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, it is among the oldest continuously operating hotels in Texas.
Brackettville, TX
Fort Clark was established on June 20, 1852, at Las Moras Springs near present-day Brackettville, Texas, to protect the southern border and the wagon road to El Paso. The post served as a major cavalry installation through World War II and was home to the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts beginning in 1872. The fort is now a private residential community with an active museum.
Brady, TX
The McCulloch County Courthouse in Brady, Texas was completed in 1900 by contractors Martin and Moodie on the site of an 1879 courthouse that developed structural failure within two years. The present three-story building was designed in the Richardson Romanesque style with native local sandstone, featuring a Victorian cupola, flanking turrets, and arched windows. A 2004-2009 restoration culminated in rededication on September 5, 2009.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPBrazoria County, TX
Bailey's Prairie is named after James Briton Bailey, a quarrelsome North Carolina-born settler who joined Stephen F. Austin's colony in Texas. Bailey received land rights along the Brazos River despite chronic conflicts with Austin's authority. He died of cholera on December 6, 1832, at approximately age 53. The area retains his name to this day.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPBrownwood, TX
Lake Brownwood is an artificial reservoir on Pecan Bayou, authorized in 1929 after a devastating 1900 flood and developed by the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1934 and 1942. The lake opened with Lake Brownwood State Park in 1938. The Flat Rock area on the south shore operates as a public recreation site with boat ramp, camping, and swimming.
Buffalo Gap, TX
Buffalo Gap Historic Village preserves original 19th-century Taylor County structures, including Hill House — the residence of Tom Hill, Abilene's first city marshal — and an original county jail. The village is located in Buffalo Gap, which served as the first Taylor County seat before Abilene assumed that role in 1883. The Abilene Preservation League has conducted annual ghost tours at the site since at least 2014.
Bullard, TX
The Killough Massacre occurred on October 5, 1838, near Larissa in northwestern Cherokee County, Texas, when 18 members of the Killough family settlement were killed or abducted. The Killough family had emigrated from Alabama in 1837 and settled on land in disputed Cherokee territory. Later historical investigation established that the attack was conducted by white, Mexican, and Indian renegades from Nacogdoches — not by the Cherokee, who have long maintained their non-involvement.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPBurleson, TX
Bethesda Road in Burleson, Texas, is primarily known as the location of an urban legend rather than documented historical events. The folklore claims a school bus collided with a train on these tracks, killing most of the children aboard. No historical records in Burleson verify this specific incident.
Caldwell, TX
Caldwell High School is a 4A public secondary institution located in Caldwell, Texas, part of Burleson County. The Caldwell Independent School District was established in 1923. The current high school building is relatively modern, constructed within the last thirty years, and serves grades 9-12 in the rural agricultural region.
Carrizo Springs, TX
The Dimmit County Courthouse in Carrizo Springs, Texas, is a layered structure: an 1884 Italianate building by J.C. Breeding and Sons, enclosed in 1926 by a Classical Revival remodel designed by Henry T. Phelps. The courthouse remains the seat of Dimmit County government and was restored under the Texas Historical Commission's courthouse preservation program.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPCason, TX
Slaton Cemetery, locally known as Blue Light Cemetery, is a small rural burial ground in Morris County, East Texas, near the community of Cason. The cemetery has a longstanding regional reputation for a blue floating light reported at night among the graves.
Cleburne, TX
The Liberty Hotel was built in 1924 by A.J. Wright as a 69-room luxury property serving travelers on the Santa Fe Railway line through Cleburne. The hotel declined after labor strikes disrupted rail traffic in the 1930s and eventually fell into disrepair before a 2004 restoration returned it to operating condition.
Colorado City, TX
The Baker Hotel, originally called the Colorado Hotel, opened on March 12, 1927, at a cost of $225,000. The structure represents the architectural ambitions of the 1920s, designed as a luxury hotel with five stories. The building operated until 1970, when it ceased accepting guests and began its long decline into abandonment.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPCombes, TX
Orphanage Road takes its name from a small orphanage that operated near Combes, Texas, in northern Cameron County after World War I. Regional accounts describe an orphanage assigned to care for Black children of the Rio Grande Valley during a period of social isolation following the Civil War. A small cemetery survives in a grove of trees off U.S. 77 near the road's exit.
Copper Canyon, TX
Old Alton Bridge is a historic iron truss bridge built in 1884 by the King Iron Bridge Manufacturing Company to carry traffic over Hickory Creek between what are now Denton and Copper Canyon, Texas. It served vehicle traffic until 2001, when a modern parallel bridge replaced it; the old bridge is now a pedestrian crossing. Locally it is known as 'Goatman's Bridge,' a nickname rooted in a Jim Crow-era lynching legend. The bridge is recognized as a Denton County historic landmark.
Corsicana, TX
The Navarro County Courthouse in Corsicana, Texas was completed in 1905, designed by architect James E. Flanders in the Beaux Arts style. The building serves as the active seat of Navarro County government. Local lore connects a political shooting on the courthouse steps — the County Sheriff allegedly killing the District Clerk over a political dispute — to the footsteps subsequently reported descending from the upper floors.
Coupland, TX
The building at 101 Hoxie Street in Coupland, Texas was constructed in 1904 and operated variously as a bordello and speakeasy before being purchased and reopened as a dance hall in 1992. Texas Dance Hall Preservation has documented the venue as part of Williamson County's historic dance hall tradition.
Crockett, TX
The Downes-Aldrich House at 206 N 7th Street in Crockett was built between 1891 and 1893 for merchant Thomas Jefferson Downes. The Eastlake-Victorian structure is considered one of the finest examples of late-19th-century domestic architecture in East Texas and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The house operated as a private residence through much of the 20th century before coming under the stewardship of the Houston County Historical Commission as a museum.
Crosbyton, TX
The Crosby County Courthouse in Crosbyton, Texas was completed in late 1914, designed by Fort Worth architect M. L. Waller in the Neo-Classical style. It is the third courthouse to serve Crosby County, following county seats at Estacado and Emma, and was built after Crosbyton won an election to become the new county seat in conjunction with the arrival of the Crosbyton-South Plains Railroad.
Edinburg, TX
This corner house at 18th Street and Shunior in Edinburg has served as a residential rental for decades. Its primary distinction lies not in architectural heritage or documented historical events, but in a persistent pattern of tenant departures.
Fischer, TX
The oldest structure on the Devil's Backbone Tavern property is a stone room built in the late 1890s as a blacksmith shop, stagecoach stop, and mail distribution point on the San Marcos route. After Prohibition ended, a tavern was built in 1933 just over the Hays County dry line in Comal County. The dance hall was added in 1951.
Fort Bliss, TX
Fort Bliss is an active United States Army installation in El Paso, Texas, established in 1849. Spanning over 1.1 million acres across Texas and New Mexico, it is one of the largest Army posts in the country. The 1st Armored Division and Fort Bliss Museum on post traces the installation's history from its frontier-era origins through World War II, the Cold War, and the present.
Fort Sam Houston, TX
Building 1000 at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio housed the original Brooke Army Medical Center from 1937 through 1996. After patients transferred to the new BAMC facility on April 13, 1996, the historic hospital sat empty for several years before becoming the headquarters of U.S. Army South.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPGraford, TX
Camp Constantine sits on the shores of Possum Kingdom Lake in Palo Pinto County, Texas, occupying 385 acres with six miles of waterfront. The region was settled in the mid-1850s by pioneering cattlemen including Oliver Loving, Charles Goodnight, and Reuben Vaughn. Possum Kingdom Lake was impounded by the Morris Sheppard Dam (completed 1941), becoming the first water supply reservoir in the Brazos River basin.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPGrand Prairie, TX
Estes Cemetery was established in 1857 when James Estes set aside one acre of his Tarrant County land for the burial of his wife Sarah, who died on April 16, 1857. The cemetery is a documented pioneer family burial ground designated a Grand Prairie Significant Landmark, with over 140 burials from fifty known families.
Greenville, TX
The Washington Hotel was built in 1926 as a landmark property in downtown Greenville, Texas, serving as the premier address for visitors to Hunt County. During its decades of operation it hosted prominent guests including Frank Sinatra and President Lyndon B. Johnson. The hotel was subsequently renamed the Cadillac Hotel before closing in 1986 due to maintenance problems.
Helotes, TX
Mary Howell founded Grey Moss Inn in 1929 in what is now Grey Forest, on the Scenic Loop northwest of San Antonio. The restaurant opened the same October the stock market crashed, yet by 1940 Howell had been honored by the San Antonio Light as one of the most professional and influential women in the city, and the restaurant attracted notable guests including John Jacob Astor and silent film actress Colleen Moore. Howell died in 1976. The restaurant changed hands several times over the following decades, most recently reopening in 2023 under new ownership with a Northern Mexican menu.
Hillsboro, TX
The Tarlton House at 211 N Pleasant Street in Hillsboro, Texas was built in 1895 by prominent local attorney Green Duke Tarlton for his growing family. The 7,000-square-foot, three-story Queen Anne Victorian is the largest historic home in Hillsboro and features seven coal-burning fireplaces rimmed in imported Italian tile and a paneled two-story entry staircase carved from imported European wood. The house now operates as a seven-room bed and breakfast.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPHutto, TX
Jake's Hill Bridge spans Brushy Creek on County Road 137 at the Williamson-Travis County line between Hutto and Pflugerville. It is named after Nelf Jacobsen, an early 1900s Hutto-area resident. The road and bridge have carried the Jacobsen family name through generations of local lore. A documented 1950s car crash in which three teenagers died at the bridge anchors a real tragedy to the site.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPKaty, TX
Magnolia Cemetery is Katy's founding burial ground, established around 1900, containing headstones of the town's founding families and Civil War soldiers. Barbara A. Snyder (born December 27, 1834 in Pennsylvania; died November 7, 1911 in Houston) was a German immigrant who settled in the Katy area and is buried here beneath a distinctive granite sphere.
Kingsville, TX
The Edward N. Jones Auditorium was built in 1942 on the campus of what is now Texas A&M University-Kingsville, serving as the primary performance venue for a South Texas university that has occupied its Kingsville campus since 1925.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPLampasas, TX
Lampasas grew up around its sulphur and mineral springs along Sulphur Creek, which made it a noted nineteenth-century health resort in Central Texas. One of the town's springs is the setting for 'The Spook of Sulphur Springs,' a ghost legend formally recorded by folklorist Haldeen Braddy in the Journal of American Folklore in 1946.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPLlano, TX
Baby Head Cemetery, designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1991, sits on Highway 16 about nine miles north of Llano in the Texas Hill Country. It is the surviving trace of a pioneer community that took shape in the 1870s and took its unnerving name from a story — documented on the state marker but marked as oral tradition — about an event said to have occurred in the 1850s.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPLos Fresnos, TX
Leonardo 'Leo' Aguilar Jr., fullback for the Los Fresnos Falcons, collapsed during football practice on September 29, 1970, and died twelve days later at Mercy Hospital in Brownsville. He was 17. In 1988, the Los Fresnos CISD Board of Trustees renamed the facility to Leo Aguilar Memorial Stadium in his honor, and his jersey number 44 was retired.
Luling, TX
Edgar B. Davis Memorial Hospital was built in 1966 in Luling, Texas on the site of one of philanthropist Edgar Byram Davis's former homes. Davis (1873-1951), a shoe-industry and rubber-plantation investor turned Texas oilman, donated at least $5 million to charity in his lifetime. His gravesite remains on the hospital grounds. The hospital is now Ascension Seton Edgar B. Davis, a 24-bed critical access facility.
Marathon, TX
Alfred Stevens Gage arrived in Texas at 18 with little money and built a ranching empire exceeding 500,000 acres in the Big Bend region. He commissioned El Paso architect Henry Trost to design a hotel at the Marathon railhead, and the Gage Hotel opened in April 1927. Gage died the following year, in 1928, just over a year after the building he paid for received its first guests. JP Bryan purchased the property in 1978 and undertook the restoration that returned it to operation.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPMarshall, TX
The road was opened in the late 1850s by William Bradfield as a stagecoach route connecting Marshall to Shreveport, Louisiana. Regular service began by 1850 with three departures weekly from Marshall. The soft East Texas clay eroded under horse hooves and wagon wheels over decades until the roadbed now runs more than ten feet below the surrounding ground.
Maxdale, TX
Maxdale Cemetery, established in the 1860s in Bell County south of Killeen, is one of the older pioneer burial grounds in Central Texas. The earliest documented grave belongs to Louisa Marlar, who died in 1867 at age 18. The cemetery holds Civil War veterans alongside veterans of World Wars I and II and the Korean War, reflecting the community's military generations.
Mesquite, TX
The Motley family migrated from Kentucky to Texas in 1856, acquiring thousands of acres in what is now Mesquite and Dallas County. Their family cemetery, established in 1863, now sits on the grounds of Dallas College Eastfield Campus and was designated a Texas Historical Commission landmark in 1976.
Midland, TX
Midland oil broker Fred Turner and his wife Juliette commissioned the Colonial Revival mansion at 1705 W Missouri Avenue in 1936–37. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On November 11, 1963, James Lee Marion broke into the residence and bludgeoned 66-year-old Juliette Turner to death in her upstairs bedroom. Marion was convicted of murder and sentenced to death; the sentence was later commuted to life in prison. After Juliette's death, the estate was donated and opened as the Museum of the Southwest in 1966.
Mineola, TX
Erected sometime in the late 1880s in Mineola's commercial district, the Beckham Hotel is a three-story brick structure that operated through eras of East Texas boom and bust. A man named Beckham purchased it in the 1920s, adding a ballroom and coffee shop. In 1993 musician John DeFoore converted the building into a guitar school whose students included Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves. Connie and Ron Meissner acquired it in 2012 and began restoration, operating Taste Buds Candy and Coffee Cafe on the ground floor while reopening rooms as a hotel.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPNorth Richland Hills, TX
Sam Bass was a Texas outlaw who arrived in Denton County in the fall of 1870 and became notorious for robbing Union Pacific trains and, in 1878, staging four train robberies within 25 miles of Dallas. His gang operated throughout North Texas. Bass died on July 21, 1878, after being shot in a failed bank robbery in Round Rock. The North Richland Hills area falls within the North Texas territory his gang frequented.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPOakalla, TX
The Ozone is a local name for a winding section of RR 963 west of Oakalla, a small community in Burnet County in the Texas Hill Country. The road mirrors Rocky Creek and has a long-standing reputation as a haunted drive, tied to road fatalities and lore about a school-bus crash.
Pecos, TX
Two adjacent buildings form the museum: an 1896 red sandstone saloon where gunfighter Barney Riggs killed two men in a single confrontation, and the 1904 Orient Hotel, a three-story concrete-block structure that gave the region one of its more darkly specific terms of art.
Pflugerville, TX
Cinemark Tinseltown 20 in Pflugerville, Texas opened on December 19, 1997, and has operated as a 20-screen multiplex ever since. The theater serves the Pflugerville community and north Austin suburbs. It has since been rebranded as Cinemark Pflugerville 20 and XD.
Plainview, TX
The Old Hilton Hotel in Plainview, Texas opened on July 3, 1929 — the sixth hotel built by Conrad Hilton, with 125 rooms, a ballroom, and private dining rooms. It left the Hilton chain in 1946, closed in 1983, and sat abandoned for more than thirty years. In 2020 it reopened as Conrad Lofts, a 29-unit affordable housing development.
Port Aransas, TX
The Tarpon Inn was built on Mustang Island in 1886 by boat pilot and assistant lighthouse keeper Frank Stephenson, using surplus lumber from a Civil War barracks. The original structure burned in 1900, the second was destroyed by the 1919 hurricane, and the current 1925 reconstruction was engineered with twenty-foot piling-reinforced corners. The Tarpon Inn was added to the National Register of Historic Places in September 1979.
Port Bolivar, TX
The Bolivar Point Lighthouse first lit November 19, 1872, replacing an 1852 cast-iron predecessor. Standing 116 feet, it is constructed of brick clad in cast-iron sheets. Keeper H. C. Claiborne served from 1894 to 1918, overseeing the structure through both the 1900 Galveston hurricane — when 125 people sheltered inside as the peninsula submerged — and a 1915 hurricane that brought 61 more refugees. The lighthouse was decommissioned May 29, 1933.
Port Isabel, TX
The Port Isabel Lighthouse was completed in 1852, commissioned to guide vessels approaching the mouth of the Rio Grande. During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate forces used the tower as a lookout position. The last major battle of the Civil War — the Battle of Palmito Ranch — was fought nearby on May 12-13, 1865, more than a month after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. The lighthouse was decommissioned in 1905 and transferred to the state of Texas, which manages it as a state historic site.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPPort Neches, TX
Sarah Jane Road is a low marsh road in Port Neches, in Jefferson County's industrial Golden Triangle. It is the setting of one of Southeast Texas's most retold ghost legends, but the name actually honors Sarah Jane Sweeney Block, a real local woman who lived to age 99.
Richmond, TX
The Old Fort Bend County Jail at 600 Preston Street in Richmond, Texas was completed in 1897 as the third county jail. The Romanesque Revival building, designed for both incarceration and the sheriff's family residence, served until 1955 and was renovated in 1996 to house the Richmond Police Department. A Texas Historical Commission marker was installed in 1985.
Roby, TX
Roby has served as the county seat of Fisher County, Texas, since the 1880s, and the county's first stone jail was built in 1892. A brick jail replaced the original stone structure in 1926, then served as the primary detention facility until 2016, when a new modern jail opened. The 1926 brick jailhouse was subsequently designated a historic landmark and remains part of the active Fisher County Sheriff's Office complex.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPRoma, TX
In the early 1950s, a vehicle traveling on old Highway 83 approximately seven miles north of Roma, Texas struck a concrete guardrail during a severe thunderstorm, plunging into the swollen La Minita Creek. The driver pulled his unconscious wife from the water but could not reach his eight-year-old daughter, who was not recovered. The creek flows into the Rio Grande River.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSabine Pass, TX
On September 8, 1863, Confederate Lt. Dick Dowling and 47 men of the Davis Guards held Fort Griffin at Sabine Pass against a Union invasion force of four gunboats and 5,000 troops. In under an hour, accurate artillery fire from the fort sank or disabled the USS Clifton and USS Sachem, killing over 55 Union sailors and forcing the entire expedition to withdraw. It was the most lopsided Confederate defensive victory of the war. The Union dead were buried in a mass grave at the site.
Salado, TX
Construction began in 1852 on what became the Stagecoach Inn in Salado, Texas, built as a waypoint on the Chisholm Trail and later named the Shady Villa Hotel. It is the second-oldest continuously operating inn in Texas and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.
San Juan, TX
The San Juan Hotel was built in 1920 and became one of the central commercial properties in San Juan, Texas. In the 1940s, two men were killed during a robbery at the hotel — the shootings are the most-documented violent incident in the building's history. Former long-term resident Tom Mayfield, who served as a Hidalgo County deputy sheriff in 1915, is associated with the building's history and paranormal reputation.
San Patricio, TX
Old San Patricio is the original site of San Patricio de Hibernia, an Irish Catholic colony founded in 1829 under Mexican empresarios James McGloin and John McMullen. The former county courthouse here was the site of the 1863 hanging of Josepha Chipita Rodriguez, recognized by Texas as the only woman legally executed in the state. A 2010 historical marker stands at the site.
Sanger, TX
Trail Dust Steakhouse has operated in Sanger, Texas, since 1973. Now operating as Parker Bros. Trail Dust Steakhouse at 1200 S Stemmons Street, the restaurant is known for fresh-cut daily steaks, live music, and a signature tradition of cutting the ties of business-attired customers. The Sanger location is one of multiple Texas Trail Dust operations.
Saratoga, TX
Bragg Road is a historic dirt road in the Big Thicket forest of Southeast Texas, running north-south from near Saratoga to the ghost town of Bragg Station. The road follows the path of a former railroad line operated by the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway from 1902 until the rails were removed in 1934.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPScottsville, TX
Scottsville Cemetery, about four miles east of Marshall in Harrison County, is regarded as one of the oldest and most beautiful private cemeteries in Texas. It is associated with the town's founding Scott family and is known for its 1904 Youree Chapel and a famous weeping-angel monument.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSeabrook, TX
The Scott Mansion, built in 1910 by Southern Pacific Railroad executive William Scott on Galveston Bay in Seabrook, was described by the Texas Historical Commission as the most distinctive mission-style residence in Texas. The three-story concrete house featured six bedrooms, six bathrooms, and multiple screened sleeping porches. The San Jacinto Girl Scouts Council purchased the property in 1958 and demolished the mansion in 1992, establishing Camp Casa Mare as a youth facility.
Seguin, TX
The Magnolia Hotel in Seguin is generally regarded as the oldest continuously operating hotel in Texas. James Campbell built the original two-room log structure in 1840 as the town's first stagecoach station. The substantial limestone and concrete section was added around 1846–1853 by Dr. William Read, using an early formula of 'Park's concrete' developed by chemist John Park. The property is a contributing structure in the Seguin Commercial Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places.
Smithville, TX
Scream Hollow opened in Bastrop County, Texas as a seasonal Halloween attraction on a 20-acre rural property outside Smithville. It expanded over the years to five haunted houses and a tractor hayride. Artist and collector Jayme Holderby established the Texas Halloween History Museum on the property — a curated collection of vintage costumes, horror memorabilia, funeral-industry artifacts, a real human skeleton, and documented materials from a serial killer's home, promoted as the only museum of its kind in the world.
Southlake, TX
On April 1, 1934 — Easter Sunday — Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker pulled off Dove Road near Grapevine and killed two Texas Highway Patrol troopers, H.D. Murphy and E.B. Wheeler, who had stopped to investigate their parked car. The murders were among the most notorious in the Barrow gang's two-year crime spree and contributed to the federal pressure that resulted in the ambush killing of Barrow and Parker six weeks later. A 6-foot historical marker was unveiled at the site in 1996.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSt. Hedwig, TX
Woman Hollering Creek is a named waterway in Bexar County, Texas, running east of San Antonio near the community of St. Hedwig. The creek's English name is a direct translation of a Spanish name rooted in La Llorona folklore — the legend of a weeping woman who drowned her children and wanders waterways in eternal grief. The creek gained national literary recognition when San Antonio writer Sandra Cisneros used it as the title for her 1991 collection.
Sweetwater, TX
Mulberry Manor is the historic Trammell House, a Mission Revival-Prairie School residence built between 1911 and 1913 by rancher, banker, and railroad promoter Thomas Trammell in Sweetwater, Texas. The home served as the city's only hospital from 1923 to 1936 before returning to residential use, and was purchased and restored in 2018 to operate as a bed and breakfast and event venue.
Terlingua, TX
Howard E. Perry established the Chisos Mining Company on May 8, 1903, beginning commercial mercury extraction from the cinnabar-rich rock around Terlingua Creek. At its peak in 1917, the mine produced 7,200 flasks of quicksilver and employed 125 workers around the clock. The company became insolvent on October 1, 1942, and the site was abandoned. The cemetery on the slope below the company town holds burials from 1903 through the mid-twentieth century, including those who died from mercury exposure and the 1918–19 influenza epidemic.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPTexas City, TX
On April 16, 1947, the French cargo vessel SS Grandcamp, loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer at the Port of Texas City, caught fire and exploded at 9:12 a.m. The blast triggered a chain reaction that destroyed the adjacent SS High Flyer and its cargo, leveled warehouses and industrial facilities along the port, and killed an estimated 581 people — including all 27 members of the Texas City volunteer fire department who had responded to the initial fire. The disaster remains the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPVictoria, TX
Hopkins Park is a public park operated by the City of Victoria, Texas. The park features a playground, BBQ pit, pavilion, restrooms, and tables.
Yorktown, TX
Yorktown Memorial Hospital was built in 1950 and opened in 1951 as a Catholic medical facility operated by the Felician Sisters of the Roman Catholic Church. The 30,000-square-foot building served DeWitt County for 35 years, initially focusing on alcohol and drug rehabilitation before expanding to general care including surgery, labor, and delivery. The hospital closed around 1986 when a new facility opened in nearby Cuero. Subsequent use as a rehabilitation center ended in the 1990s.