David Anderson Everett
Glynn County, Glynn 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 Garden Club of Georgia, Inc. in cooperation with St. Simons Island Council of Garden Clubs Honoring Lt. David Anderson Everett, U.S.N. Returned POW from Vietnam
Erected by Garden Club of Georgia
The Story
This Blue Star Memorial marker on St. Simons Island carries a personal dedication, honoring Lt. David Anderson Everett of the U.S. Navy, a prisoner of war returned from Vietnam. Blue Star Memorial Highways began in 1945, named for the blue-star service flags of World War II, and garden clubs across the country later used them to honor individual servicemen as well as the armed forces at large. Here the St. Simons Island Council of Garden Clubs joined the Garden Club of Georgia to recognize a hometown POW.
Why it matters
It links a national tradition of remembrance to one community's Vietnam veteran, showing how the Blue Star program gave grief and gratitude a public, lasting home.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Coastal Georgia has always faced outward, toward the sea and the wider world. St. Simons Island, in Glynn County, is one of the Golden Isles just off the mainland near Brunswick — a place of salt marsh, live oaks, and old fortifications, where the tides have carried in soldiers, sailors, and settlers for centuries.
This marker belongs to a much later chapter. By the years when Americans were coming home from Vietnam, the island had become a quiet coastal community, the kind of hometown-scale place where a returning serviceman was not an abstraction but a familiar name. It was into that setting that the garden clubs placed their tribute.
The Blue Star Memorial program itself was born of an earlier war. Garden clubs launched it in 1945, at the close of World War II, taking the name from the blue-star service flags families hung in their windows — one blue star for each member away in uniform, and a gold star if that member did not return. What began as roadside plantings and highway dedications grew into a nationwide habit of remembrance.
People & events
At the center of this marker is a single naval officer, Lt. David Anderson Everett, U.S.N., named as a returned prisoner of war from Vietnam. The inscription tells us that much and no more, and it is enough: here was a man who spent part of the war not in the air or at sea but in captivity, and who came home.
His story sits inside one of the most emotional homecomings in modern American history. When the long war wound down, the return of American prisoners held in North Vietnam became a moment the whole country watched — men stepping off aircraft, saluting, walking back into ordinary life after captivity that had stretched on for months or years. To honor one of them by name is to stand in for all of that.
The local response here was small in scale and large in feeling. The St. Simons Island Council of Garden Clubs joined with the Garden Club of Georgia to dedicate this Blue Star tribute in his honor. It was a community deciding, deliberately, that this neighbor's service and survival deserved a permanent place along the road.
Its place in the American story
Most Blue Star markers salute the armed forces as a whole — a broad, collective thank-you planted along America's highways. This one does something rarer: it narrows the tribute to a single person while keeping the national frame intact.
That combination is the quiet genius of the Blue Star program. It gave grief and gratitude a public, physical home at a time when the country's feelings about the Vietnam War were complicated and often painful. A garden club could not change national policy, but it could plant a marker and say, clearly, that a serviceman's endurance mattered.
So a traveler passing through coastal Georgia meets, in one modest plaque, both the enormous story of America's wars and the intimate story of one man who was taken prisoner and came back. The local and the national are welded together on the same piece of metal.
If you visit
Come to St. Simons Island for the marshes, the beaches, and the old island landmarks, and let this marker be a small, deliberate stop along the way. Blue Star plaques are easy to walk past; slow down and read this one, because it carries a name.
Notice how the wording moves from the general to the personal — a tribute to all the armed forces, and then the honoring of one returned prisoner of war. That shift is the whole point. Stand there a moment and consider what it meant, in this quiet coastal community, to single him out.
It pairs naturally with a broader Golden Isles road trip: the island's beaches and historic sites are close at hand, and the memorial gives your route a thread of remembrance to follow. You won't need much time here — just enough to let the name register, and to remember that behind every homecoming was a person who had to endure the leaving.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Lt. David Anderson Everett, U.S.N.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Flame of Freedom
Valdosta, GA
In the years after World War II, Korea, and amid Vietnam, American Legion posts across the country raised memorials to honor those who had served, and Valdosta's Post No. 13 was no exception. Dedicated on Veterans Day in 1969 as a gift to the city and Lowndes County, the Flame of Freedom stands not for a single battle but for the veterans of every American war. Its eternal-flame motif — popular in mid-century civic memorials — was meant as a perpetual reminder of sacrifice, a fixture of small-town South Georgia's public square.
Boys Estate (Elizafield Plantation)
Glynn County, GA
A half-mile west lies Boys Estate, a home for boys set on part of the old Elizafield Plantation, once among the rich rice and sugar estates of the Georgia coast. In the early 19th century Elizafield was the domain of Dr. Robert Grant and later his son Hugh Fraser Grant, cultivated intensively in rice and cane; the tabby ruins of a great sugar mill still stand. Given to the state as a park by Cator Woolford in 1935, the tract was set aside in 1945 for the boys' home.
Danny Goodale Memorial Recreation Center
Grovetown, GA
In the small town of Grovetown, Georgia, just west of Augusta, a community recreation center carries the name of Danny Goodale, a local son born in 1948 who was killed in action in Vietnam in March 1969, still in his early twenties. His death came during some of the fiercest years of American involvement in Southeast Asia, when the war reached deep into towns like this one and returned young men home as names on plaques and monuments. Naming a place of gathering, sport, and youth after him turned everyday community life into a living memorial, ensuring his sacrifice stayed woven into the town he came from.
The Burning of Darien
Darien, GA
On June 11, 1863, Federal troops from nearby St. Simons Island burned the largely deserted seaport of Darien, destroying churches, businesses, and nearly every home while most of its 500 residents had fled inland. The raiders included the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw—among the first African American regiments to serve the Union—and the 2nd South Carolina under James Montgomery. The needless torching of an undefended town became one of the war's most controversial acts.