Search Markers

Colorado City, TX

All Saints' began around 1882 as informal worship among West Texas settlers—many of them English sheep ranchers—on the dry plains near Colorado City. Organized in 1883 by Bishop A. C. Garrett, pioneer Episcopal bishop of Dallas, as the eight-communicant "Grace Mission," the congregation built its church in 1885 and consecrated it as All Saints in 1886. Its original bell still rings today.

Austin, TX

Standing on land once granted to Republic of Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar, this Gothic Revival chapel of native limestone was built in 1899 by Austin architect A.O. Watson to serve Grace Hall, a residence the Episcopal Diocese built in 1897 for women students at the University of Texas. Dedicated to the memory of the first Episcopal Bishop of Texas, it grew into a full parish by 1910 and became closely bound to Bishop George Herbert Kinsolving, who was buried beneath its altar. Its Medieval-mosaic stained glass is prized as fine American art.

Weatherford, TX

Founded as a small mission in 1876 with just five communicants, All Saints' Episcopal Church grew alongside the frontier town of Weatherford through decades of financial struggle and rebuilding. A stone church, a lost property, a generous parishioner's memorial gift, and a new 1920s sanctuary all mark its persistence; among its later members was noted portrait painter Douglas Chandor. Its long history mirrors the slow maturing of a North Texas community into a settled town.

San Benito, TX

Episcopalians around San Benito first gathered wherever a visiting minister and a room could be found, led in part by the retired Rev. William Henry Morrison in borrowed spaces such as the King building. Church women organized guilds and raised the money that built All Saints' on this site in 1912; after a 1933 storm wrecked the building, the congregation rebuilt it in 1935.

Austin, TX

Rising in 1899 from white limestone quarried at Liberty Hill and crowned with dark slate, this Austin church follows the old cruciform plan, its long nave crossed by transepts and closed by a chancel to the east. Nearly all of its stained-glass windows came from the celebrated Willett studios of Philadelphia, and a 1939 renovation extended the chancel using stone from the very same quarry as the original. The result is a turn-of-the-century sanctuary whose fabric records the craftsmanship of its age.

Biscay, MN

This memorial in the small community of Biscay, Minnesota, honors the men and women who have served and continue to serve in defense of the nation's freedom. Tiny towns across the American heartland take special pride in remembering their own who wore the uniform. The memorial makes that gratitude visible at the center of community life.

Conway, AR

This memorial on the University of Central Arkansas campus in Conway honors alumni who died in the nation's wars — those who "made the ultimate sacrifice." College war memorials became a fixture of American campuses in the twentieth century, turning shared classrooms and dormitories into places of remembrance. By honoring alumni across all conflicts rather than a single war, it speaks to the long thread of service running through generations of students.

South Bristol, ME

This granite memorial in the small fishing town of South Bristol honors Wellington MacFarland Jordan, a young infantryman who was born in 1891 and died in service at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, in his early twenties. A local road was renamed in his memory, and the town later broadened the monument to salute all its veterans across every American conflict. It reflects the way small New England communities wove a single lost son's name into a lasting tribute to collective service.

Celina, TX

When Dr. Moses Hubbard and his wife Mary Jane found local schooling inadequate, they educated their daughter Alla at home and then sent her to a Missouri institute, where she earned a literature degree in 1880. After Alla's early death, her grieving parents founded a school in her memory in 1895, financing it entirely themselves. Opening in 1896 with 108 pupils, Alla School charged no tuition and set no age limit at a time when free public education had little support in Texas.

Lost Prairie, TX

Allan Jefferson Rogers, born in Alabama, came to Texas in 1856 and served as a sergeant in Company K of Bass's Regiment, the 20th Texas Cavalry, during the Civil War. His unit campaigned across Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Indian Territory in the war's Trans-Mississippi theater, the vast and often overlooked western front of the conflict. This marker preserves the memory of one of the many Texans who fought far from the war's famous eastern battlefields.

Pottsville, PA · est. 2024

Pottsville native Allan Jaffe left Pennsylvania for New Orleans, where he and his wife Sandra took over a struggling French Quarter art gallery and turned it into Preservation Hall, a shrine to traditional New Orleans jazz. Playing sousaphone himself, Jaffe founded the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and carried the music of the city's aging masters to concert halls and festivals around the world. His stewardship helped ensure that an older generation of New Orleans musicians found new audiences and lasting recognition.

Kingsport, TN

The city of Kingsport rose in the early twentieth century as one of America's first fully planned industrial towns — its streets, factories, and neighborhoods laid out on paper before they took shape on the East Tennessee ground. Allandale is a stately, columned estate in the classical style that reflects the prosperity of that manufacturing era, a grand country mansion set amid rolling grounds. Today it is publicly owned and serves as a beloved venue for community gatherings and celebrations.

Kingsport, TN

Allandale is a stately mansion and estate in Kingsport, one of the landmark properties of a town famously laid out in the early twentieth century as a planned industrial city. This barn is part of the Allandale grounds, an outbuilding that supported the working life of the estate. Today the mansion and its grounds serve as a community landmark and event venue.

New Orleans, LA

This land was once the Allard plantation, tied to some of colonial Louisiana's founding families. Purchased in the 1770s by Don Santiago Lorreins from the estate of Francisco Hery — called Duplanty, who built New Orleans's first Cabildo in 1769 — it passed to Louis Allard and, in 1845, to the philanthropist John McDonogh, who gave it to New Orleans in 1850. Like other Louisiana plantations of its era it was worked by enslaved laborers, and the tract later became the heart of the city's City Park.

Brenham, TX

Elijah Allcorn arrived in Stephen F. Austin's colony in late 1821 as one of the "Old 300," the first legal Anglo-American colonists in Mexican Texas, and helped name New Year Creek while camping on its banks on New Year's Day 1822. His family farmed, raised stock, and hauled freight to the frontier settlements clustered around Washington-on-the-Brazos. The main house, dated to about 1845, passed through the Allcorn, Wilkins, Samuel, and finally Kokemoor families, who held it for more than a century and layered on wings, a cistern, barns, and sheds that trace a farmstead's slow growth into the 20th century.

Altoona, PA · est. 1999

Raised in 1811, the Alleghany Furnace was among the earliest ironworks in what became Blair County, part of the charcoal-iron industry that spread through Pennsylvania's mountains in the early republic. Elias Baker acquired full ownership by 1844 and built a Greek Revival mansion nearby, tying the furnace to a prosperous ironmaster's household that ran it until it went cold in 1884. The surviving stone store building, erected around 1837, still marks the site of this vanished industrial world.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1967

Rising on the banks of the Allegheny in 1814, this federal arsenal was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, one of the young republic's most important architects. For generations it garrisoned troops and manufactured and stored munitions, feeding the U.S. Army through the Civil War, the Indian Wars of the West, and the Spanish-American War. As an ordnance works it made Pittsburgh a linchpin of American military supply across the nineteenth century.

Meadville, PA

In 1815, when the country west of the Allegheny Mountains was still raw frontier, a Massachusetts-born minister named Timothy Alden set out to plant a college in the young town of Meadville, Pennsylvania. Chartered two years later, Allegheny College endured where many early frontier schools failed, and it holds the distinction of being the oldest college still operating under its original name west of those mountains. Alden, the school's first president, also designed Bentley Hall, the graceful early building that became the heart of campus administration.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2007

In 1845 and 1848, women who worked the cotton factories of Allegheny City walked off the job to protest brutal twelve-hour workdays, taking a stand in one of early America's first waves of industrial labor action. Their protests helped push Pennsylvania to pass an 1848 law capping the workday at ten hours and barring children under twelve from cotton and textile mills. These were among the earliest organized efforts by American working women to demand humane conditions.

Pittsburgh, PA

When Allegheny County was carved out of Westmoreland and Washington counties in 1788, its seat at Pittsburgh was already a generation old — laid out in 1764 at the strategic forks where the Allegheny and Monongahela join to form the Ohio, a gateway that had drawn soldiers, traders, and settlers pushing west. Incorporated as a city in 1816, Pittsburgh grew into one of the great engines of American industry, its furnaces and mills pouring out the iron and steel that earned the region its "Workshop of the World" reputation. The county's story runs straight from a frontier river junction to the smoke-and-fire heart of the nation's industrial age.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1788 and named for the Allegheny River, this county grew around Pittsburgh, a settlement laid out in 1764 at the strategic forks of the Ohio. As the 19th century advanced, the city's furnaces and mills made it a titan of iron and steel, earning it the boast "Workshop of the World." Immigrants poured in to feed the industry that armed and built modern America.

Shippen Township, PA · est. 1949

Long before roads crossed the mountains, travelers moving between the Susquehanna's West Branch and the Allegheny River faced a 23-mile overland carry that began at a "canoe place" near this point. Native peoples and later pioneers hauled their canoes north to Portage Creek, then took to the water again near present-day Port Alleghany. The route stitched two great watersheds together across the Pennsylvania wilderness.

Port Allegany, PA · est. 1949

Here the waters of two great river systems nearly meet, and travelers long exploited the gap. The roughly 23-mile Allegheny Portage carried canoes and cargo overland from the West Branch of the Susquehanna, up Portage Creek to a "canoe place" near this point, where boats could be relaunched down the Allegheny toward the Ohio country. Native people and, later, pioneers used this crossing to move between the eastern and western drainages of Pennsylvania.

Portage Township, PA · est. 1994

Before tunnels pierced the Alleghenies, the mountains stood as a wall across Pennsylvania's ambitious canal system. From 1834 to 1854 the Allegheny Portage Railroad solved the problem with a feat of engineering, hauling entire canal boats up and over the ridge along a series of inclined planes on a 36-mile line between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown. Horses and mules pulled the first cars, later giving way to steam locomotives, with Plane No. 2 serving as the line's headquarters.

Allegany Township, PA · est. 1947

High in Potter County rises the modest headwater of the Allegheny, a river whose importance far outstrips its quiet source. For centuries it carried Native travelers, and later French and British traders and westward-bound settlers, deep into the interior. Winding hundreds of miles to Pittsburgh, it joins the Monongahela to form the mighty Ohio, one of the great arteries of the American continent.

Allen, TX

Fertile prairie and reliable water had drawn settlers here since the 1840s, but Allen truly began in 1876 when the Houston and Texas Central Railroad built a water stop on Cottonwood Creek and platted a town, naming it for railroad founder Ebenezer Allen. In 1878 an outlaw gang said to be led by Sam Bass robbed the depot in what is often called Texas's first successful train robbery. Interurban electric rail arrived in 1908, and late-century growth in the Dallas metroplex swelled the town past 19,000.

Bryan, TX

Allen Academy began in 1886 as Madison Academy, founded in Madisonville by Mississippi educator John Hodges Allen and renamed when his brother Rivers joined him a decade later. In 1899 the Allens moved their private boys' boarding school to Bryan, where it grew across the early 20th century, added military training during World War I, and earned national recognition under three generations of the Allen family. It endures as the oldest accredited, nonsectarian preparatory school for boys in Texas, now coeducational.

Cuero, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1804, Allen Caruthers fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 engagement that won Texas its independence. He and his wife Martha, a North Carolina native, were among the settlers who built lives in the young republic and state before his death in 1863. Their graves near Cuero mark the resting place of one of the veterans whose service is woven into the founding story of Texas.

Allen, TX

Formally established by the Odd Fellows in 1884, Allen Cemetery has gathered a community's memory across three acres for well over a century. Its stones record early epidemics, pioneer settlers and physicians, and veterans of foreign wars — among them a soldier killed in the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I and another who served in the Spanish-American War — while oral tradition places an older slave burial ground in one corner. A cemetery association organized in 1899 still tends the grounds and keeps an annual Decoration Day.

Murchison, TX

The Murchison community grew up as a station on the Texas and St. Louis Railway, named for Confederate officer T.F. Murchison, and soon supported a school, post office, cotton gin, churches, and farms of corn, cotton, and peaches. This burial ground served residents from the late 1800s, with James Mack Pettiet's 1890 grave the oldest marked stone and the family of J.C. Allen giving it its name. Pioneers, farmers, ranchers, and veterans reaching back to the Civil War rest here under vertical stones and fraternal markers.

Wills Point, TX

This burial ground first served the pioneer families of the Turner community, its earliest marked grave that of Hiram White, who died in 1867. Named at first for the White family, it became Allen Cemetery after William J. Allen deeded the land to trustees in 1909; he and his wife Elizabeth Jane, who had come to the area in 1850, both rest here. Among the graves are military veterans, European immigrants, and the descendants of the region's first settlers.

Bryan, TX

Methodism among African American Texans reached back before the Civil War, and after emancipation freed people gathered to build churches of their own. Named for Richard Allen, who founded the African Methodist Episcopal movement in 1787, Allen Chapel's Bryan congregation was meeting by the late 1860s — first in brush arbors under Reverend Emmanuel Hammitt, its first minister in 1866 — and bought land for a chapel in 1870. It later sheltered a school for Black children after theirs burned in 1914, rebuilt in 1920 and again in 1961, and backed causes from the NAACP to sickle-cell research.

Fort Worth, TX

Built between 1912 and 1914, this Tudor Gothic Revival sanctuary served one of Fort Worth's African American Methodist congregations during a period of growth for Black urban churches across the South. It was designed by William Sidney Pittman, a pioneering Black architect and the son-in-law of Booker T. Washington. Its tower and stained-glass windows reflect the ambition of the congregation that raised it.

Fort Worth, TX

Organized about 1870 by a pioneer circuit rider and a handful of settlers, this became the oldest and largest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in Fort Worth. Members met in homes until they built on this site after purchasing it in 1878, and the following year adopted the name Allen to honor Richard Allen, a formerly enslaved man who became the first bishop of the A.M.E. Church. Across more than a century and dozens of pastors, the congregation played a central role in the city's growth.

Houston County, TX

In the 1870s, emancipated people who had been enslaved on nearby plantations built homes and farms here, founding a community that would take its name from church trustee Nat Allen. Life revolved around the African Methodist Episcopal church and a one-room schoolhouse near this site. That schoolhouse was moved to Kennard in 1968 and brought back in 1985, and descendants of the original settlers live here still.

New York, NY

Allen Ginsberg lived at this address from 1958 to 1961, in the years just after his poem "Howl" (1956) exploded onto the American scene and helped ignite the Beat Generation. Here in apartment #16 he wrote "Kaddish" (1961), a raw and mournful elegy for his mother Naomi. An internationally acclaimed poet, he later joined the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Hearne, TX

Built in 1872 on land bought from the International Railroad Company, this Hearne store passed through several owners before R. A. Allen purchased it in 1891 and brought in his son Robert. Their heirs have kept it in the family and running ever since. In earlier days its shelves held everything a frontier town needed—seeds, saddles, wagons, implements, and even coffins.

Marlin, TX

Built in 1911 for Dr. Walter and Nettie Allen, this Marlin residence showcases Greek Revival grandeur, its giant entablature carried on paired Ionic columns. The Allen family lived here until 1956, and after Nettie's death a relative gave the house to the community as a social center. It remains a stately reminder of early 20th-century Falls County.

Quintana, TX

Built in 1883 by the Jarvis family of Old Quintana, this well-known boarding house long served travelers and residents on the Brazoria County coast. It weathered a century of Gulf hurricanes, including the devastating Hurricane Carla of 1961, and was later restored by owner B. T. Allen. The surviving structure recalls the small resort and coastal communities that once dotted the Texas shore.

Pasadena, TX

This busy commercial district was once the Allen Ranch, among the oldest and largest in southeast Texas, rooted in an 1824 Mexican land grant to Morris Callahan. Samuel William Allen and later his son Samuel Ezekiel Allen built it into a prosperous cattle operation of some 23,000 acres, shipping stock to eastern and foreign markets. In 1917 Rosa Allen sold 700 acres to Sinclair Oil for a refinery, and the ranch house was eventually moved to Galveston Bay to become an Episcopal camp.

Allen, TX

The town of Allen boomed after the Texas Traction Company's interurban line arrived in 1908, linking Dallas and Sherman with hourly electric passenger cars and twice-daily freight. After first working from a farmhouse, the company bought this property and built a brick depot in 1913. Renamed the Texas Electric Railway in 1917, the line ran from Denison to Waco until it was abandoned in 1948.

Allen, TX

The Allen Water Station traces its roots to an 1848 railroad charter obtained by former Republic of Texas Attorney General Ebenezer Allen, whose line became the Houston & Texas Central. When the H&TC reached Denison in 1873 it completed the first all-rail route linking Texas to St. Louis and the East, and in 1874 the company built a stone dam and water station here to supply its steam locomotives. Worked by American, Irish, German, and Swiss laborers, the station spawned the town of Allen and served until diesels replaced steam in the mid-twentieth century.

Bastrop, TX

Built around 1852 for the headmaster of the new Bastrop Academy, this house doubled as a boarding home for students in an era when frontier towns prized any school they could get. When the academy became the Bastrop Military Institute in 1857 under Col. R.T.P. Allen, the home hosted cadets and even welcomed Sam Houston, whose sons studied there. A later owner dressed the two-story L-plan house in the jigsawn woodwork and bay window fashionable in the Victorian age.

Honey Grove, TX

In 1842, on land given by Wilson Allen, a Methodist congregation raised a log chapel and gave its name to the surrounding settlement of Allen's Chapel. Early circuit riders and founding families—Hamil, Ramsey, Wheeler, Stroud, and others—built the community's spiritual life for generations. Declining attendance closed the church in 1916, and former members later passed the building to a Baptist congregation, but the community cemetery endures as a marker of the early settlement.

Houston, TX

This bend of Buffalo Bayou was Houston's first port, where in January 1837 the steamer Laura tied up and began the ocean-going trade the Allen brothers had envisioned when they founded the city. Though shallow and winding, the bayou made Houston 'the head of navigation' and drew steamers and sailing vessels to its natural turning basin. Generations of dredging, from the 1910 'Houston Plan' onward, deepened the channel into one of the nation's great seaports.

Berkeley, CA · est. 1998

Designed in 1903 by the noted architect Ernest Coxhead for banker Allen Freeman, Allenoke Manor is the last great estate near the north edge of the University of California campus. Its clinker-brick house, crowned by five massive gambrel dormers and ringed by formal gardens, won immediate acclaim as a pioneering work of Bay Area architecture. In 1938 it passed to Robert Sibley, a founder of the East Bay Regional Park system, whose home became a gathering place for "town and gown."

Allentown, PA · est. 1947

Allentown was laid out in 1762 by William Allen, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant and chief justice of colonial Pennsylvania, and was known as Northampton until 1834. Its most storied moment came in 1777, when patriots spirited the Liberty Bell out of Philadelphia ahead of the advancing British and hid it here, while the town also sheltered wounded Continental soldiers. Incorporated as a city in 1867, Allentown went on to thrive as a center of textiles and cement.

Whitehall, PA · est. 1947

Laid out in 1762 by the powerful colonial jurist William Allen, this Lehigh Valley town spent its first seventy years known as Northampton before taking its founder's name. In the anxious autumn of 1777, as the British occupied Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell was spirited here for safekeeping and Revolutionary wounded were nursed in the town. It grew through the 19th century into a humming center of textiles and cement, earning its city charter in 1867.

South Whitehall Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1762 by the colonial leader and jurist William Allen, this town went by the name Northampton until 1834. During the Revolution its distance from the Delaware made it a safe haven — the Liberty Bell was hidden here in 1777 and wounded Continental soldiers were treated nearby. Chartered as a city in 1867, it became a long-lived hub of textile mills and cement works.

South Whitehall Township, PA · est. 1947

William Allen, a leading colonial jurist, established this settlement in 1762; it answered to the name Northampton until 1834. In 1777 it sheltered the Liberty Bell from advancing British forces and hosted Revolutionary wounded. Incorporated as a city in 1867, it flourished as a center of textiles and cement manufacture.

Allentown, PA · est. 2024

Allentown State Hospital opened as Pennsylvania's first state institution to treat mental illness through homeopathic medicine, part of a national movement to give the mentally ill dedicated care. Among those who worked here was Dr. Solomon C. Fuller, the first African American psychiatrist, who served as a consulting pathologist, and in 1930 a pioneering Children's Institute opened under Dr. Henry Klopp. In 1999 the hospital drew international attention as the first state facility to abandon patient seclusion in favor of its Psychiatric Emergency Response Teams.

Alleyton, TX

Beneath these oaks lie some of the earliest Anglo settlers of Texas, members of Stephen F. Austin's colonizing venture. Rawson Alley, a surveyor on Austin's 1821 expedition, was buried here in 1833, and his family had come west with the famed 'Old Three Hundred' in 1822. Though the cemetery wasn't formally deeded until 1881, its first graves—those of Dr. John Millar and his children, lost to smallpox in 1831—predate it by half a century, and generations of Alleys, including a Texas Revolution veteran and a Western Swing bandleader, followed.

Jefferson, TX

Built around 1851 by Daniel Nelson Alley, a founder of Jefferson, this Greek Revival house with its four-room central-hall plan stands among the earliest homes of Marion County. In 1884 it passed to Hector McKay, a Civil War veteran and one of the region's leading attorneys, whose family held it into the mid-20th century. The house survives as a rare antebellum landmark of a onetime riverport boomtown.

Alleyton, TX

Alleyton was once the oldest permanent settlement and largest town in Colorado County, founded by the Alley brothers—William, John, Rawson, Thomas, and Abraham—all members of Stephen F. Austin's original 300 colonists. Its prominence grew when it became the terminus of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railroad from 1860 to 1867.

Alleyton, TX

Alleyton grew from the settlement of the Alley brothers around 1822 and became Colorado County's largest town after William Alley donated railroad right-of-way in 1859. Blocks marked as a graveyard on the 1860 town map were formally established as a cemetery by 1880, when an adjacent Colored Cemetery was also created for the community's African American residents. Burials here span a yellow fever epidemic of 1867 and veterans of wars from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Columbus, TX

When war came, the little railhead of Alleyton became a vital artery of the Confederacy. As the terminus of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railroad, it gathered cotton from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas to launch it down the "Cotton Road" toward the Rio Grande. After Vicksburg fell in 1863 and the Mississippi was sealed, this route to neutral Matamoros, Mexico became the South's lifeline, exchanging cotton for guns, clothing, and medicine that flowed back through Alleyton.

Kilgore, TX

These twin Allis-Chalmers reciprocating pumps stand as relics of Kilgore's transformation into an oil boomtown after the Lou Della Crim No. 1 well blew in on December 28, 1930, opening the vast East Texas field. Brought here in 1931 by the Shell Pipe Line Corporation to push crude toward Houston-area refineries, the pumps ran until 1985 and are estimated to have moved over a billion barrels.

Whitesboro, TX

Allison Cemetery took shape in the mid-1800s on three acres of North Texas prairie, its oldest dated grave marking a burial in 1865. Among those resting here are a family lost to influenza in the 1850s, several war veterans, and generations of the Dennis family and their neighbors—some in graves marked only by rough stones. Still tended by descendants, it remains in use today.

Carthage, TX

The Rev. Littleton Fowler, an early Methodist missionary in East Texas, is believed to have organized this congregation between 1837 and 1839, when Texas was a young republic. First called Bethesda Church, it worshiped on land given by Purviance Williams before taking its present name to honor Samuel G. Allison, who donated the building site in 1882. Tradition holds it the oldest active church in Panola County.

Elwood, TX

Ransom Allphin came from Illinois to Texas with his parents in 1829 and secured this land through an 1835 Mexican land grant, farming and running a grist mill on the frontier. In 1854, while digging a well, he struck clay and soapstone, abandoned the shaft, and donated five acres as a community burial ground—becoming its first grave that same year. Later burials, many from the 1918 influenza epidemic, layer generations of local history into the plot.