Local History
Texas Yellow Fever Historical Markers: The Epidemics That Emptied Cities
Four Texas historical markers trace yellow fever from the Galveston quarantine stations to the mass graves at La Grange. Real addresses for every stop.
Photo: R. du Plessis / Unsplash. New Braunfels, Texas.
Texas has more than 16,000 official historical markers, and a handful of them record the worst summers the state ever lived through. RoadHistorical is a Texas historical preservation platform that tells you when you're passing one. This guide covers four real markers that trace yellow fever across Texas. It starts at the Galveston docks where the disease arrived and ends in the cemeteries where it stopped.
Nobody knew what caused it. Carlos Finlay proposed in 1879 that mosquitoes carried the fever, and Walter Reed confirmed Aedes aegypti as the culprit in 1900. Every marker below was written about people who had no idea what they were fighting.
Galveston Tried to Stop the Fever at the Waterline
The Galveston Quarantine Stations marker sits at Seawolf Park on Pelican Island. It went up in 1993, and it covers 80 years of Texas trying to hold a virus offshore.
Unregulated immigrant arrivals through Galveston in the late 1830s fed the island's outbreaks. The city passed quarantine measures in 1839. In 1853 it built the first quarantine station in Texas, out on the eastern tip of Galveston Island. Ships suspected of carrying infected crew, passengers, or cargo weren't allowed into port.
Storms kept taking the stations out. A larger one built in 1870 fell to hurricane winds in 1875. The state built again in 1879 and 1885. The 1900 Storm destroyed a station the state had put on Pelican Island in 1892. Texas built its last one at the Fort Point site in 1902, and it merged with federal operations in 1919.
The federal facility completed on Pelican Island in 1915 ran until 1950. In 35 years it inspected roughly 30,000 ships carrying an estimated 750,000 immigrants into Texas.
700 Pelican Island Causeway, Galveston, TX 77553
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
La Grange Lost a Fifth of Its Population in Ten Weeks
The 1867 epidemic started in Indianola in June. It moved through infected travelers to Galveston, then inland across East-Central Texas. Galveston buried about 1,000 people out of 22,000. Houston lost 492 out of roughly 6,000.
La Grange got it worse than either. The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1867 marker stands at the Old City Cemetery, and it went up in 2016. It records more than 200 deaths. That was fifteen to twenty percent of everyone living in La Grange.
Many citizens left town hoping to avoid the disease, and the marker names who stayed and died: doctors, judges, sheriffs, clerks. You can read the outbreak in the stone. A large number of gravestones show deaths from August through October 1867. Unidentified victims went into mass graves in the northeastern section of the cemetery.
Old City Cemetery, La Grange, TX 78945
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
One Stagecoach Passenger Started the Huntsville Outbreak
The Huntsville Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1867 marker stands in Oakwood Cemetery. It went up in 2016, and it names the exact moment the fever reached Walker County.
A stagecoach passenger showed up sick from a coastal city and took a room at a Huntsville tavern. He died on August 9. The disease spread from there through a town of about 1,500 people, and roughly 10 percent of them were dead by October 18. It wasn't Huntsville's first outbreak either. An earlier one reached the county in 1853 by way of Cincinnati.
Help came from the coast. In September the Howard Association of Galveston sent five experienced nurses and a doctor to back up Huntsville's exhausted physicians. Walk the cemetery and you'll find grave markers clustered in those ten weeks of 1867.
Oakwood Cemetery, 9th and Avenue I, Huntsville, TX 77340
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Bryan's Yellow Fever Cemetery Has One Marked Grave Left
The Texas Historical Commission lists this one as the Old Bryan Yellow Fever Cemetery. It sits behind a chain-link fence on a freeway frontage road, and it got its state historical marker in 2024. It's the emptiest site on this list.
This was the first public burial ground in Bryan, on land originally owned by William Joel Bryan. Burials ran from 1861 to 1900. The yellow fever name traces to the Brazos County death tolls in 1867 and again in 1873. City ordinances set the ground aside for paupers, so most people buried here were poor or passing through.
The commission counts 24 or more graves and designated the site a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016. Almost nothing survives above ground. One marked grave remains, for James P. King, 1835 to 1868. Bryan opened a new city cemetery in 1868, and this ground sat neglected for over a century.
From East State Highway 21, drive south on the west frontage road of North Earl Rudder Freeway for 0.4 mile. The cemetery is on your left.
Old Bryan Yellow Fever Cemetery, Bryan, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
What Changed After 1867
Texas rewrote its rules. An 1879 amendment to the quarantine law let the governor appoint a state health officer. That officer had to be a physician familiar with yellow fever. By 1888 nearly every Texas city and town had a board of health working on sanitation.
The last yellow fever epidemic in Texas hit in 1905. After Reed's findings, cities went after standing water instead of quarantining ships, and the outbreaks stopped.
How RoadHistorical Finds These Markers
Discovery Mode runs in the background while you drive and notifies you when a marker is coming up. You don't have to know a marker exists to find it. The sites above sit in cemeteries and on frontage roads, and you'd drive past all of them without a reason to slow down.
The AI Tour Guide answers the questions a plaque can't fit. Ask why the 1853 station went up on the eastern tip of the island, or who the Howard Association was. Offline mode keeps everything working out in Fayette and Walker counties where cell coverage drops out. Stopping at a marker is how preservation actually works.
Start Discovering Texas History Today
RoadHistorical is free to download on iPhone and Android. Download it here and turn on Discovery Mode before your next drive. Android users can download RoadHistorical from Google Play.
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