Blue Star Memorial Highway A tribute to the Armed
Screven, Wayne County, Georgia
Marker Inscription
Blue Star Memorial Highway A tribute to the Armed Forces that have defended the United States of America sponsored by The Lily Garden Club, Screven, Georgia in cooperation with Georgia Department of Transportation and Oleander District The Garden Club of Georgia, Inc.
Erected by National Garden Clubs, Inc.
The Story
The Blue Star Memorial program began in 1945, when the New Jersey garden clubs planted dogwoods along a highway to honor service members returning from World War II; the blue star echoed the service flags that hung in the windows of homes with someone in uniform. The idea spread nationwide, and markers like this one in Screven, Georgia, were placed by local garden clubs in cooperation with state highway departments. This tribute was sponsored by the Lily Garden Club with the Georgia DOT and the Garden Club of Georgia.
Why it matters
The Blue Star network is one of the country's most widespread grassroots war memorials, a reminder that honoring service became a civic project carried out mile by mile by ordinary communities.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Screven is a small community in Wayne County, in the pine flatwoods of southeast Georgia not far from the Altamaha River country. It is the kind of place a traveler passes through on the way to somewhere else — which is exactly the sort of place this memorial was designed for.
This is a Blue Star marker, and the distinction matters. Where a gold star mourns a death, the blue star honors service itself — everyone who has worn the uniform in the nation's defense. The tribute is to the living tradition of the armed forces, not to a single loss.
The symbol comes from the home front of the twentieth century's great wars. Families with a member in uniform hung a service flag bearing a blue star in the window. The garden clubs took that private emblem and made it public: adopted as a national program in the closing year of the Second World War, the Blue Star Memorial idea spread the symbol along the nation's highways.
People & events
The Blue Star Memorial Highway program began with a simple, beautiful idea in the mid-1940s — that a stretch of road, planted and marked, could stand as a living tribute to those returning from war. From New Jersey it spread across the country, carried by garden clubs state by state.
This Screven marker is one thread in that national fabric. It was sponsored by the Lily Garden Club of Screven, working with the Oleander District of the Garden Club of Georgia and the state's Department of Transportation. The names tell the story: a local club supplies the devotion and the upkeep, a district organizes the effort, and the highway department provides the road itself.
What makes the program remarkable is that no central authority built it. It grew from thousands of local decisions like this one — a garden club in a small town deciding that the highway running past deserved to carry a tribute to the armed forces.
Its place in the American story
The Blue Star network is one of the most widespread grassroots war memorials in America. There is no single Blue Star monument; there are thousands of markers, along highways in nearly every state, each placed by a community that chose to honor service in its own patch of the country.
That decentralization is its genius. A traveler crossing the United States can encounter the same blue star in a New England town, a Midwestern county, and a Georgia crossroads — a shared language of gratitude, spoken locally but understood nationally.
This marker in Screven is a reminder that honoring the armed forces became a civic project carried out mile by mile, by ordinary people. It ties one small Georgia town into a coast-to-coast act of remembrance that no government agency could have created by decree.
If you visit
Look for the blue star itself, the emblem this whole tradition is built around, and read the tribute for what it is — a thank-you to everyone who has served, not a memorial to a specific loss. It's a subtly different feeling from the gold star markers, and worth noticing.
These Blue Star markers are meant to be met from the road, so they reward the traveler more than the destination-seeker. If you're driving through the flatwoods of southeast Georgia, slow down enough to give it a look; that roadside encounter is precisely the experience the garden clubs intended.
Keep your geography straight — this is the town of Screven in Wayne County, not the Georgia county of the same name elsewhere in the state. Then let the marker do its quiet work: a small, deliberate reminder, planted beside a working highway, of the service behind the freedom to travel it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Blue Star Memorial Highway A tribute to the Armed
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The Blue Star Memorial Highway program started in 1945 and spread nationwide, honoring the armed forces with markers named for the blue-star service flags of the World War era. This marker in Hardeeville, South Carolina was sponsored by the Garden Club of South Carolina with the state highway department. It ties the Lowcountry into a coast-to-coast chain of remembrance.
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