Search Markers

Houston, TX

The Evergreen Cemetery Association organized in 1894 and laid out 25 acres in Houston, opening with the burial of infant Nellie Storkes that October. Generations of the Hooper family tended the grounds into the 1980s, watching over a burial place that reflects three distinct traditions—fenced Southern folk family plots, finely carved German sections screened by evergreens, and individually adorned Hispanic graves. Among those resting here are veterans from the Civil War through World War II and members of fraternal orders like the Masons and Odd Fellows.

Houston County, TX

In the pinewoods of Houston County, a farming settlement named for its evergreen trees once gathered around a shared school and church. In 1879 settlers R.T. and Susan Lively gave land that served both as a schoolhouse site and a community graveyard, with the earliest known burial that of Philip Pipkin in 1886. The cemetery still holds generations of the Lively and other pioneer families.

Santa Fe, TX

When the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad set a depot near here, Henry J. Runge laid out the town of Arcadia in 1890, and a burial ground soon followed to serve the growing settlement. Evergreen Cemetery took in its first known burial in 1897, gained a formal association and state charter by 1907, and later became a resting place for the community's indigent residents. Volunteers restored its grounds in 1972.

McGregor, TX

In 1860 pioneer settlers William and Margaret Oliver gave land near McGregor for a church, a school, and this cemetery. From 1866 to 1907 area families gathered here for camp meetings of worship and song, a tradition revived in 1941 as annual reunions of the pioneers' descendants. Their grandson, Major Fred N. Oliver, later endowed a trust for the cemetery's perpetual care.

Beeville, TX

On land donated in 1859 as Beeville's townsite took shape, this South Texas burying ground was formally purchased by the county in 1862 for use as a public cemetery. Over the following decades neighbors added strips of adjoining land and fenced the grounds, knitting the graveyard into the fabric of the growing frontier community. A 1970 restoration preserved the resting place of the town's pioneer families.

Victoria, TX

Victoria's earliest citizens resisted a public cemetery, preferring home burials even after an 1846 ordinance banned the practice, so a new burial ground took shape in the 1850s on land John McCrabb bought from a Republic of Texas grant. After the Civil War, graves were relocated here from the old city cemetery and from the razed St. Mary's Church, and in 1876 local women organized the Victoria Ladies' Cemetery Association to rescue the neglected plot, naming it "Evergreen" in 1883. Among its 9,000 graves lies Martín de León, the empresario who founded Victoria, alongside veterans of the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War.

Evergreen, TX

Founded around 1862 — seven years before San Jacinto County itself existed — this congregation began as Hickory Grove Methodist Church, later became Mickles Chapel in honor of a presiding elder, and finally took the name Evergreen. Settled on this site since the late 1870s, its building hosted early school classes and its members served as leaders of the surrounding community.

Whitewright, TX

Emanuel and Rachel Everheart reached this stretch of Grayson County in 1848 and within two years held more than 3,300 acres. The oldest graves in the cemetery's northwest corner are believed to be those of people the family enslaved, buried before 1853, while later markers name Confederate soldiers and a county sheriff turned deputy U.S. marshal. Church congregations came and merged on Everheart land, and pioneer families filled the plots, making this one ground that holds both the enslaved and those who enslaved them.

Edinburg, TX

Completed in 1910 by townsite founder John Closner, the Everitt Building was among Edinburg's earliest commercial structures. Over the years it sheltered a hardware store, a World War I Red Cross workshop, the Golden Jersey Creamery, a Masonic lodge, and E. M. Everitt's grocery. It stands as a survivor of the young city's economic beginnings.

Everman, TX

Settlement of this Tarrant County spot, first called Enon, began around 1847. When the railroad arrived in 1903, residents picked up and moved to be near the tracks, renaming their town Everman for a railroad official. The cemetery here had already been founded in 1882 as the Morris family graveyard, after Rosa Morris was buried on the family farm, and it gradually became the community's shared burial ground.

San Antonio, TX

Claus and Johanna Evers brought their children from Schleswig-Holstein to Texas in 1855 and settled on this land in 1874. The family cemetery began in 1877 when a stranger passing through fell ill and died at their home, soon followed by the burial of an infant granddaughter. Several generations of Evers and Braendle descendants now rest here, a quiet marker of the area's German pioneer heritage.

Denton, TX

Robert Henry Evers and his wife Mary Euphemia moved to Denton in 1885, where Robert and his brother founded Evers Hardware on the courthouse square — a store that ran continuously until 1998. On a hilltop in the fashionable "Silk Stocking Row," they built this twelve-room Neoclassical home in 1903, designed by an Austin firm and full of flourishes, including basement ventilators cast in a lone-star pattern. After a 1977 fire, community support restored the landmark.

Tuscaloosa, AL

This marker traces how engineers tamed the Black Warrior River for navigation, beginning in 1875 with work to clear snags, trim overhanging trees, and dredge shallow shoals. In 1886 the U.S. Congress authorized three locks to carry boats past the Tuscaloosa Falls, the start of a lock-and-dam system that would open Alabama's interior to steamboat and barge traffic. It captures the Gilded Age push to engineer American rivers into reliable commercial highways.

Lufkin vicinity, TX

For two decades a company sawmill town thrived on the west bank of the Angelina River, springing up after H. G. Bohlssen built a mill in 1919 to cut the surrounding virgin hardwood forests. At its height Ewing held 850 people, a commissary, post office, and a combined church and school — a self-contained East Texas timber town. When men left for World War II service and war industries, the mill shut down in 1944 and the town faded.

Marshall, TX

In a quiet corner of southern Harrison County, this cemetery took shape when the Ewing Chapel Cumberland Presbyterian Church organized in January 1855, though its earliest confirmed burial dates to 1853. It holds many of the area's first settlers, at least fourteen men who formed volunteer units during the Civil War, early physicians, and the community's first schoolteachers. Annual reunion days drew descendants back to honor their ancestors from the 1870s into the 1940s.

Jefferson, TX

The oldest hotel in East Texas, the Excelsior House began as a frame building in the 1850s, with a brick wing added in 1864. During Jefferson's heyday as a bustling riverport, its guest register reportedly included Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes and the poet Oscar Wilde. Rescued from decline, it was restored in the early 1960s by the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1966

Across this street once stood Pennsylvania's second official Governor's residence, a private home acquired by the state in 1864 and reshaped over the decades by the many governors who lived there. Grand enough by the 1880s to be called "Keystone Hall," it served the Commonwealth's chief executives for 96 years before it was demolished in 1960.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1970

Purchased by Pennsylvania in 1858, this Harrisburg site held the state's first official governor's residence during a pivotal stretch of the mid-nineteenth century. It sheltered only two chief executives—William Packer and, most notably, Andrew Curtin, the wartime governor who steered the commonwealth through the Civil War. The mansion was sold in 1864 once the state acquired a grander home known as "Keystone Hall."

Exeter Township, PA · est. 1979

Quakers established this Berks County meeting in 1725 as "Oley," renaming it Exeter in 1742, and raised the present stone meeting house in 1759 on the site of two earlier log structures. Among those buried in its ground are members of the Boone and Lincoln families—kin to the frontiersman Daniel Boone and to the ancestors of Abraham Lincoln. After closing in 1899, the meeting reopened for worship in 1949.

Exeter, NH

In the years after 1918, towns across America raised monuments to the local men and women who had served in what that generation simply called "the World War" — the global conflict we now know as World War I. Exeter, a New Hampshire town whose roots reach back to the colonial era, joined that wave of civic remembrance, honoring not only its sons but explicitly its daughters, a nod to the nurses and volunteers who served alongside soldiers. The memorial's language moves deliberately from grief for the dead, to gratitude for the survivors, to a charge laid upon future generations.

Masterson, TX

In 1845, just as Texas was joining the Union, the U.S. government sent West Point topographical engineer Lt. James W. Abert and a 33-man party to map the Canadian River. Camping near this spot, Abert was visited by Kiowa who said they were at war with Texans but welcomed him once he proved to be an American, and his maps and notes on the river's geography and its native peoples became valuable to the young state and nation.

Corpus Christi, TX

In June 1845 Texans voted to join the United States, and President Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to mass troops near the Rio Grande as a boundary dispute with Mexico simmered. Corpus Christi became the army's staging headquarters, and on September 12, 1845, the steamer Dayton was ferrying soldiers to St. Joseph's Island when its boilers burst and the burning vessel sank near McGloin's Bluff. Eight soldiers died and were laid to rest here in a same-day military funeral chosen by General Hitchcock. Their gravestones name men born from Poland, England, Canada and across the young republic.

Archer City, TX

In 1908 landowner Charles E. Graham granted the Wichita Falls and Southern Railroad a route across his property and laid out a townsite, naming it Anarene for his wife, Annie Lawrence Graham. He built a hotel and secured a post office, cattle pens, and a dipping vat, and the schoolhouse doubled as a place of worship. Oil discovered nearby in 1921 and a refinery in 1938 sustained the town until production ceased and the trains stopped in 1954, after which Anarene quickly faded.

Columbus, TX

Exum Philip Whitfield helped build the young town of Columbus into a commercial hub along the Colorado River, wearing the many hats common to ambitious men on the mid-19th-century Texas frontier — merchant, physician, farmer, and railroad president. His leadership of the Columbus Tap Railway from 1861 to 1866 tied a small Texas town into the region's expanding rail network, even as he twice enlisted in Confederate service during the Civil War. His long life spanned the boom decades that transformed Texas from republic to industrializing state.

Houston, TX

Around 1900, Ezekial Miller arrived in Houston and built a thriving timber business, becoming a well-known merchant and civic leader in a city then booming on lumber and commerce. In 1905 he built this home for his wife Mary Jane and their five children. Its corner tower, dormer window, and mix of Queen Anne exuberance with restrained Colonial Revival lines typify the work of Houston's early-20th-century builders.

Fayetteville, NC

Ezekiel Ezra Smith (1852–1933) rose from the era of emancipation to become one of North Carolina's most influential Black educators, leading the state's normal school for training African American teachers in Fayetteville during the hard decades after Reconstruction. His life braided together many callings at once—teacher and school administrator, U.S. diplomat posted to Liberia, militia officer, and ordained minister—at a time when such doors rarely opened to Black Americans. The marker's phrase 'apostle of interracial goodwill' captures a man who spent his career building institutions and understanding across the color line in the Jim Crow South.

Seguin, TX

Ezekiel Smith, a Virginia native, marched with the Army of Texas in the 1842 Mier Expedition, a bold but disastrous raid into Mexico that ended in capture and the infamous "black bean" lottery of death for many Texians. Smith survived to die in Seguin in 1854. His marker preserves the memory of an ordinary soldier caught up in one of the young republic's most harrowing episodes.

Hallettsville, TX

This school traces its roots to a lime-coated "White House" church-and-school that stood out against the green prairie in the 1850s. Moved and renamed Ezzell in 1883 for local merchants, it became the community's first public school and steadily expanded where many rural schools closed. New wings and labs added across the 20th century kept it growing, and it endures today as an elementary school.

Bedford, MA

The F-86 Sabre was America's first swept-wing jet fighter and the iconic warplane of the Korean War, where its pilots dueled Soviet-built MiG-15s in the stretch of sky along the Yalu River that airmen nicknamed "MiG Alley." Sleek, fast, and a leap beyond the straight-winged fighters that came before it, the Sabre helped the U.S. Air Force win control of the air in the first great jet-versus-jet conflict in history. A static display like this one preserves a machine that carried American airpower into the jet age and lets visitors stand beneath a shape that once screamed across Korean skies.

Snyder, TX

In 1909 the druggist F. J. Grayum raised this classical revival home on the West Texas plains, dressing it with Ionic-pillared porches, eleven-foot ceilings, and solid brass hardware in an era when such finish signaled prosperity on the frontier. Later owners included a rancher and the proprietor of the town's electric light plant, whose family filled its rooms. The double masonry walls and thick floors have carried it forward as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Marion, KY

Born in New York in 1884, F. Julius Fohs moved to Marion as a boy and managed a fluorspar mining operation before serving as Kentucky's assistant state geologist from 1905 to 1912. His expertise in mineral resources later earned him an honorary doctorate from the Israel Institute of Technology. In 1926 he built and gave to the people of Marion the community auditorium known as Fohs Hall, added to the National Register in 1982.

Longview, TX

Built in 1871 for hardware merchant Franklin L. Whaley and his wife Mary Caroline Rogers, this was among the earliest homes in Longview, its lumber cut right on the site. The central-hall house shows off the era's craftsmanship — gabled pavilions, three dormers above the front porch, fine milled woodwork, and elaborate jigsawn railings. Five generations of the Whaley family have called it home.

Barren County, KY

In 1855, brothers John and Francis Marion Jones opened a general store at Myers Steam Mill on Beaver Creek, and their business became the seed of a whole village. A post office followed in 1856, and the settlement—renamed Coral Hill—soon gathered homes, churches, a school, a blacksmith, a cobbler, and a mill around the store. The Cumberland Trace Stage Line rolled through twice daily on the seven-day, 214-mile run between Nashville and Lexington, until the Civil War ended the route.

Saint Paul, MN

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great chronicler of the Jazz Age, was born in St. Paul in 1896, and this house is tied to his Minnesota roots. Designated a National Historic Landmark, it honors the origins of a writer whose novels captured the glamour and disillusionment of early 20th-century America. The recognition marks the city's claim on one of its most famous native sons.

Baltimore, MD

While living in Baltimore in the 1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald—already famous for 'The Great Gatsby'—produced some of his most searching later work. Here he published the novel 'Tender Is the Night' and the essays later gathered as 'The Crack-Up,' written as his own life grew troubled. The city marks this difficult but productive chapter of his career.

Fredericksburg, TX

In 1898 Frederick William Arhelger, a second-generation cabinetmaker and wheelwright, raised this limestone shop in Fredericksburg to build and repair farm implements. Its double doors, front ramp, and open, partition-free interior let wagons and heavy equipment roll straight inside. Arhelger ran the business until selling it in 1918.

Austin, TX

Ironsmith Fortunat Weigl emigrated from Germany to Austin in 1913 with his wife Anna and their sons. Work was scarce until 1917, when woodcarver Peter Mansbendel supplied him a forge and tools and set him working. Weigl opened his own ornamental iron works in 1922, moved it to this site in 1935, and with his sons hand-wrought original pieces for grand Austin homes, the State Capitol, and the campuses of UT and Texas A&M until the firm closed in 1977.

Castroville, TX

Around 1870 a German artisan who built many of the area's houses raised this sturdy home in the Alsatian settlement of Castroville. Cypress logs floated down the Medina River and adzed for attic timbers, 22-inch limestone walls quarried nearby, a hand-carved stone fireplace, and a separate outside kitchen all reflect old-world craftsmanship. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Dallas, TX

Standing on a Peters Colony land grant of 1854, this frame Victorian farmhouse was built before 1885, when Francis Asbury Brown bought it with 200 acres of farmland. His son Ernest later ran a dairy farm from the home, and the family preserved it against the tide of Dallas's growth. It survives as a rare rural homestead amid the modern city.

Houston, TX

Houston businessman Franz Carl Ludwig Neuhaus and his wife Emilie commissioned the noted firm Sanguinet and Staats to design this Colonial Revival house in 1909, completing it the following year. Classical touches — a Doric-entablature portico, arched sidelights, and a porte cochere — mark it as fine early-twentieth-century craftsmanship. It was the first home built on Courtlandt Place, one of Houston's early planned residential enclaves, and stayed in the family until 1945.

Flatonia, TX

Born in Bremen, Germany, in 1820, F.W. Flato immigrated to Texas in 1846 and by 1866 had settled in southwestern Fayette County, where he and his wife ran a thriving mercantile business. When the GH&SA Railway approached in 1873, Flato helped negotiate moving the town closer to the tracks, and the community — renamed Flatonia in his honor, with Flato as postmaster — grew around the line. An energetic entrepreneur, he built a brick factory and steam sawmill and promoted land sales to the immigrants pouring in along the new railroad.

Victoria, TX

Black education in Victoria began in a Reconstruction-era freedmen's school, and by 1902 a prominent brick schoolhouse stood on East Convent Street under the long leadership of Prof. Frederick W. Gross. Renamed in his honor in 1935, the school won a reputation for excellence in academics and athletics and moved to a new building in 1939. It served as Victoria's high school for African American students until integration in 1966.

Melrose, NM

This is a static display of an F-100 Super Sabre, the first U.S. Air Force fighter able to fly supersonic in level flight. Entering service in the mid-1950s, the 'Hun' became a workhorse of Cold War tactical air power and saw heavy combat duty in later decades. The tail codes identify its service with a tactical fighter wing.

Boerne, TX

German-born Julius Fabra came to the Boerne area in 1854 and, after hauling freight, opened a meat market for the local farms. His son Ludwig joined at eighteen and in 1887 built this limestone smokehouse for the store, raising a second story in 1904. The family business ran through three generations until grandson Henry retired in 1962, and today the smokehouse is all that remains of it.

Houston, TX

As Houston's state fairgrounds took shape on the prairie south of downtown in the 1870s, baseball became one of its biggest draws, and the fair grounds ball field hosted some of the earliest multi-city games in Texas. Even after the fair left in 1878, the open blocks kept the game alive: the first Texas League game was played here in 1888, with Houston beating Galveston 4-1, and rebuilt grandstands seated 2,500 by 1896. Until the land was subdivided for houses and shops in 1904, the field welcomed Texas League clubs, major-league exhibition teams, and leading African American teams.

Palo Alto, CA

In 1959, at Fairchild Semiconductor in the orchard country south of San Francisco, Robert Noyce devised a practical way to build an entire electronic circuit on a single sliver of silicon. His planar integrated circuit — arrived at alongside Jack Kilby's parallel work at Texas Instruments — swept away the tangle of hand-wired components that had limited electronics. The breakthrough helped turn a valley of fruit farms into the center of the global technology industry.

Fairfield, TX

In the years just before the Civil War, education for young women was a rarity on the Texas frontier, which makes this 1858 undertaking notable. Erected by the Freestone School Association and opened in 1859 under president Dr. Henry Lee Graves, Fairfield Female College received its state charter on February 8, 1860. It reflected a broader antebellum push to bring formal schooling — and specifically women's education — to the growing settlements of East Texas.

Fort Worth, TX

Developer A. C. "Clayton" Luther bought up land west of Fort Worth and, beginning in 1942, built the Ridglea Village Shopping Center along with partners who added a hotel and country club. In the 1950s the firm created this property as a private family residence for J. T. Luther and Earl Wilson. Architect Al Komatsu gave it a modern cast dressed in Mediterranean and Spanish Revival details—clay tile roofs, timber balconies, and stone courtyards.

Fairfield, CT

This honor roll stands as Fairfield's collective thank-you to the townspeople who left Connecticut to serve in uniform across nearly a century of American conflict. From the trenches of World War I through the beaches and skies of World War II, then Korea, Vietnam, and the deserts of the Persian Gulf, generations of the town's men and women answered the call. Honor rolls like this one became a fixture of New England town greens, turning a public square into a permanent civic ledger of local service and sacrifice.

Wake County, NC

After 1928, this half-mile dirt oval near the state fairgrounds helped popularize Indy-style automobile racing in North Carolina. It earned a footnote in motorsport history in 1970, when it hosted the last NASCAR premier-series race run on a dirt track. The site captures the moment stock car racing left its rural dirt roots behind.

Follett, TX

At the far northern tip of Texas—closer to six other state capitals than to Austin—Fairmont Cemetery outlasted the towns that made it. Settlers founded Ivanhoe in Oklahoma in 1901, moved it to the railroad as South Ivanhoe, then in 1917 dragged its buildings on skids across the state line to a new Santa Fe stop named Follett. The cemetery, deeded in 1910, holds its first burial the reinterred body of a mother of six killed by lightning, alongside the children of Mexican railroad workers lost to the 1918 influenza epidemic and more than a hundred military veterans.

Hemphill, TX

Families settled along South Prong Creek in deep East Texas as early as the 1850s, sustained by a post office that ran from 1854 into the twentieth century and a school that lasted until 1953. Burials likely began by the mid-1850s, though the oldest marked grave—that of Eli Elijah Smith, son of a Baptist pastor—dates to 1874. Fairmount Cemetery remains a quiet link to the pioneers and the churches, like Friendship Missionary Baptist, that shaped the community.

San Angelo, TX

San Angelo laid out its "New City Cemetery" here in 1893, and within a few years a volunteer women's auxiliary — led for 38 years by Mrs. C.A. Broome — took charge of the graveyard and renamed it Fairmount. Its 52 acres now hold more than 33,000 burials that read like a cross-section of West Texas history: former slaves, African American Buffalo Soldiers, pioneer ranchers and oilmen, and veterans of every conflict from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, among them WWII Medal of Honor recipient Lt. Jack Mathis. Fine statuary, a Greek Orthodox section, and decades of women's stewardship make it a civic landmark.

Philadelphia, PA

This is an old milestone — a roadside stone that once told travelers they had eight miles yet to go to reach Fairmount, the rise above the Schuylkill River that gave its name to Philadelphia's celebrated Water Works and Fairmount Park. In the era of turnpikes and toll roads radiating out of Philadelphia, such stones were the GPS of their day, spaced a mile apart to measure a journey by horse, stagecoach, or wagon. Weathered and easy to overlook, they mark the routes that carried farmers, merchants, and mail into one of early America's greatest cities.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

For nearly a century the Fairmount Water Works stood as the beating heart of Philadelphia's municipal water supply, drawing water from the Schuylkill River and lifting it to a hilltop reservoir from which gravity carried it into the growing city. Designed in an elegant neoclassical style by Frederick Graff and his son, the buildings deliberately dressed heavy industrial machinery in the clothing of a garden pavilion. Power evolved with the century — from Oliver Evans' pioneering high-pressure steam engine, to breast waterwheels, and finally to turbines.

Fort Worth, TX

The Fairmount-Southside Historic District spreads across roughly 375 acres and 100 blocks just south of downtown Fort Worth, with more than 1,200 contributing homes and buildings. Platted largely between 1883 and 1907 during the boom that followed the railroad's 1876 arrival, its additions—led by the 1890 Fairmount Addition—drew middle-income workers, and streetcar lines soon carried doctors, lawyers, and railroad men to and from their homes. Its cottages, bungalows, and foursquares chart the evolution of domestic style from Queen Anne to Craftsman.

Floresville, TX

Fairview sprang up after the Civil War when Henry Hudson opened a store on the Old Oakville Road, gaining a post office in 1868 and growing into a cotton town with churches, a school, a gin, and a Masonic lodge. The boll weevil and other pests ravaged the cotton crop, and the community faded after World War I. Fairview's proudest legacy was its lawmen — twenty-seven peace officers including twenty Texas Rangers, among them Frank Hamer, who pursued and helped bring down Depression-era outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.

Churchill County, NV

Fairview rose out of the same wave of optimism that Tonopah and Goldfield set off, when an 1905 strike of rich silver float sparked a rush that peaked across 1906–1907. At its height the town claimed 27 saloons, hotels, banks, assay offices, a newspaper, and a miners' union hall. The first frenzy soon passed, but the Nevada Hills Mining Company sustained profitable milling from 1911 to 1917, drawing $3.8 million in silver — with prominent promoters George Wingfield and George Nixon among the early backers.

Clifton, TX

Organized in 1889 as Coon Creek Missionary Baptist Church, this congregation met for years in a schoolhouse on ground donated by settler "Gip" Smith before building a church of its own. The elevated school grounds gave the community its lasting name, Fairview, and the cemetery received its first burial in 1900. Local legend even claims the notorious outlaw Belle Starr once owned land nearby and used it as a hideout.

Center, TX

Founded in 1901 to add burial space alongside the older Methodist churchyard, Fairview became Center's second-oldest cemetery, organized by a seven-member association that bought land tracing back to the Jesse Amason headright survey. Kate Crisp Ricks, an early promoter of the project, was the first buried here in 1902. Its monuments mark many of the civic leaders who built the young town—among them Panzie Annie Rennick Bryarly, the first female member of the Texas Press Association—beneath tall memorials and a white gazebo at the cemetery's heart.