Spanish American War

New York, NY

This granite obelisk at the crossing of Fifth Avenue and Broadway honors William Jenkins Worth, a soldier from Hudson, New York, whose career traced the young republic's expanding military ambitions. He earned his commission in the War of 1812, spent the 1820s shaping the officer corps as Commandant of Cadets at West Point, and won his greatest fame in the hard-fought campaigns of the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. When he died in 1849, the city he served brought him home, and the monument that rose over his grave became one of the very few burial sites in Manhattan marked by a public memorial.

New York, NY

This monument marks lower Manhattan ground where the Congress of the Confederation sat in the 1780s, when New York City served as the young nation's capital. On July 13, 1787, that Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, a landmark law organizing the vast territory north and west of the Ohio River. It laid out how raw frontier land would be surveyed, settled, and eventually admitted to the Union — and famously encouraged schools and the spread of knowledge across that new country.

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

This plaque marks the 1992 centennial of Matinecock Lodge No. 806 of the Free and Accepted Masons, a fraternal chapter chartered on Long Island in 1892. Its most famous brother was Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president, whose nearby Sagamore Hill estate in Oyster Bay was his beloved home and 'Summer White House.' Roosevelt was raised as a Master Mason in this very lodge in 1901, the same year he ascended to the presidency, and he remained a proud member until his death in 1919. Masonic fraternity ran deep in American civic life of the era, and Roosevelt often spoke of how the lodge let a president stand as an equal among his neighbors.

Allentown, PA

This marker stands in the seat of a Pennsylvania county carved out of older Northampton County in 1812, in the busy early years of the young republic when growing populations pushed the state to subdivide its sprawling colonial-era counties into more governable pieces. The county took its name from the Lehigh River, the waterway that shaped settlement and, before long, the anthracite and iron trade of the Lehigh Valley. It also claims a Revolutionary pedigree as the home of George Taylor, one of Pennsylvania's signers of the Declaration of Independence.