The Camino Real de los Tejas, which led from Saltillo, the state capital of Coahuila, to Villa de Béjar (San Antonio), crossed the Rio Grande at a ford at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Río Escondido. Spanish explorers in the seventeenth century,...
Franciscan monks established a settlement on Las Moras Creek in the eighteenth century, and traders on the Chihuahua Trail between Indianola and Ciudad Chihuahua, along with numerous U.S. Army expeditions, stopped here. Recognizing the settlement...
A community called San Felipe del Rio grew up starting in 1868, but when the post office opened here in 1872, the name was shortened to Del Rio. It became the county seat when Val Verde County was organized in 1885, and the town also became the county’s...
Rocksprings was designated the seat of Edwards County (formed from Bexar County in 1858) in 1891. Although natural springs provided a plentiful source of water, farming the rocky soil was difficult, and instead settlers raised sheep and angora goats. In 1940,...
The Texas legislature formed Crockett County from Bexar County in 1875, naming it for American frontiersman and Alamo martyr David Crockett. Surveyor and landowner E. L. Powell platted a town site in 1891 called Powell Well and attracted residents with...
Oilman Ira Yates and two partners struck oil here in 1926. The field included Yates Well 30-A, the world’s largest gusher, producing 200,000 barrels of oil a day. Yates developed a town to accommodate the people who flooded in to work in the new field. A contest was...
Pecos, the second-largest county in Texas (4,764 square miles), is marked by mesas and arroyos. Fort Stockton was the first Anglo-America settlement in the county, a U.S. Army outpost established in 1859 at what was called Comanche Springs, a watering hole (...
The settlement that became Alpine started as a major stop along the Chihuahua Trail. Silver-carrying ox teams from the Mexican interior watered at Kokernot Springs. With the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1882, the town was established to gain access...
Farmers of the Cochise culture grew corn near the present town of Presidio more than 3,500 years ago, dwelling in adobe pueblos. The first documented Mexican settlement on the Texan side of the Rio Grande occurred in 1830. Presidio has the...
In 1882 the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway reached Presidio County, and the railroad’s township company platted Marfa, which became the county seat in 1885. Marfa’s economic mainstay in the first half of the twentieth century was the U.S. military,...
Fort Davis, the seat of Jeff Davis County and named for Jefferson Davis, then the secretary of war, is centered in the Davis Mountains. Following U.S. acquisition of the Trans-Pecos region as a result of the Mexico-American War, the U.S. Army’s...
Valentine was founded in 1882 as a watering stop on the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway, on Valentine’s Day according to local legend. As a regional shipping point, Valentine grew to a population of 629 by the early 1930s but has...
Midland was founded in 1881 halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso along the path of the Texas and Pacific Railway. Initially named Midway Station, the town’s name was changed to Midland in 1884 when a post office was established (the name Midway was already taken...
Neither Spanish, Mexican, nor Texas Republic pioneers explored what is now Ector County. Even the Comanches never stayed in the area because it had no dependable surface water sources. Odessa was established when the Texas and Pacific Railway was built through the...
At only 836 square miles, Ward County, formed in 1892, is one of the smallest counties in West Texas. Monahans was established in 1881 as one of several water stations along the Texas and Pacific Railway. Barstow was the county’s first seat, but economic development...
In 1881, the Texas and Pacific Railway built through Reeves County, setting up section houses that it named Pecos and Toyah; these quickly developed into communities. A historical marker at the Rodeo Grounds (U.S. 285 at Walthall Street) claims that the world’s first...
El Paso County occupies the westernmost 1,057-square-mile wedge of Texas and is the driest county in Texas, with only around 9 inches of rain yearly on average. The city of El Paso is 17 miles closer to San Diego, California, than to Houston. The city is...
Mainly celebrated for its glorious topography, Utah is sometimes thought of as a place devoid of history before the 1847 Mormon colonization. But it has been inhabited on and off by Native people for at least 12,000 years. Its first inhabitants did not build much. They lived in caves in the winter and in...
For most Virginians the legacy of their Commonwealth, or, as it is nicknamed, the Old Dominion, is not simply local, but of paramount national significance. As an editorial cartoon from a 1939 number of the Richmond News Leader graphically asserted, the...
This section covers Arlington Municipal County and the counties of Fairfax and Prince William. Treated under a separate section is the city of Alexandria. Adjacent to Washington, D.C., these three counties (and Alexandria) are the most populous area of Virginia with more than...
Best known for the Civil War battles fought nearby, Manassas began in 1852 as a junction stop on two local railroads, the Manassas Gap and the Orange and Alexandria. The railroad brought the two armies together in 1861 and 1862, and great portions of the town were destroyed....
Originally a tavern stood at this crossroads, then known as Providence. The Virginia General Assembly moved the county seat here in 1798, when it became apparent that Alexandria would be incorporated into the District of Columbia. The town retained the name of...
Alexandria was named for Scotsman John Alexander, who in 1669 purchased a site on the Potomac River for “Six thousand punds [ sic] of Tobacco and Cask.” The Virginia Assembly established a town there in 1749, and John West, Jr., surveyed the site and laid out the gridiron plan...
For much of their history the Northern Piedmont counties of Loudoun and Fauquier were largely rural and agricultural, a gentle, rolling landscape of fertile fields, riverine valleys, and small hills that rise to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The English settled there in the early...
The principal city of the Northern Piedmont, Leesburg, is also one of the most cohesive and best preserved. It was established in 1757 as a courthouse town, about three miles southeast of the Potomac River. Laid out on a gridiron plan, it is intersected east-west by Market...
A town of major architectural interest, Warrenton is a farming center for the region, a crossroads town, and a social center for a number of large equestrian estates in the region. The county seat of Fauquier County (formed 1759), it was known as Fauquier Courthouse before...
The word “Piedmont” derives from the Italian for “foot of the mountain.” In the case of Virginia it is a rather broad foot, of about sixty miles, from the Blue Ridge Mountains on the west to the fall line on the east. For the purposes of this guide, the Piedmont area is defined as the...
Culpeper County was formed from part of Orange County in 1749. The county seat, originally named Fairfax but changed to Culpeper in 1870 to avoid the obvious confusion with the Northern Virginia town and county, was established and platted in a gridiron pattern in 1759. The...
Charlottesville, named for Queen Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of George III, is sited on a low plateau in central Albemarle County. The Rivanna River, a major transportation route, lies to the southeast. The city was platted in 1762 when the...
A portion of Main Street is the Mall (1972–1975, Lawrence Halprin), a concept which has proven successful in Charlottesville, in spite of problems with it elsewhere. The large department stores have departed for the greener pastures of suburban...
