Search Markers

Farmersville, TX

Farmersville began in 1849 as a settlement on the Jefferson-McKinney Road, named by pioneers for their chief occupation. It gathered churches, a school, and a public square, incorporated in 1873, and grew into a farm-trade center famous in the 1930s as the "Onion Capital of North Texas," shipping over a thousand carloads a year. Among its residents was Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II, who lived here before entering the Army.

Farmersville, TX

Farmersville grew from the 1850s out of the earlier pioneer settlement of Sugar Hill, taking its name from the farming background of its settlers. In 1875 the Independent Order of Odd Fellows chartered Pride Lodge No. 208 here, and in 1899 the fraternal order set aside this hilltop as a cemetery. Enlarged to 25 landscaped acres, it holds a 1902 mausoleum and carved statuary, and still chronicles the town's history through the lives of those buried here.

Farmersville, TX

Built in 1888–89 of locally quarried limestone, this Romanesque Revival building placed a Masonic hall above a ground-floor store—one of the oldest surviving structures in Farmersville. The lodge, chartered in 1858, met upstairs until 1966 and produced two Grand Masters of the Grand Lodge of Texas. The Farmersville Times newspaper has kept offices in the building since 1956.

Farmington, NH

In the farm towns of early New England, a "pound" was a sturdy stone or timber enclosure where stray and trespassing livestock — cattle, hogs, horses, and sheep — were penned until their owners came to reclaim them and pay a fine. Farmington built this one in 1823, when animals commonly roamed open ground and keeping them out of a neighbor's crops was every farmer's daily worry. The pound was as ordinary and essential to town life then as a fire station is today, run by an elected "pound keeper" answerable to the town meeting. Its survival, and its place on the National Register, mark it as a rare intact piece of everyday early-republic community infrastructure.

San Francisco, CA · est. 1981

In a small laboratory at 202 Green Street, the young inventor Philo Taylor Farnsworth achieved a breakthrough that shaped the modern world: on September 7, 1927, he produced the first fully electronic television image. Working without a corporate laboratory behind him, Farnsworth pioneered the all-electronic system that would eventually replace mechanical television. The site marks the birthplace of a technology that transformed how the world sees itself.

Fremont County, ID

In the homestead country of eastern Idaho's upper Snake River valley, the one-room schoolhouse was often the first public building a frontier community raised together. The Farnum School House served the scattered ranching and farming families of the Fremont County area, doubling — as such buildings usually did — as the neighborhood's church, polling place, and social hall. Its survival marks the era when Idaho's high sagebrush plains were being turned into irrigated farmland by Mormon and other settlers around the turn of the twentieth century.

Newton, TX

Set in the yard of a Methodist church founded in 1868 by Alfred Farr, this East Texas cemetery holds more than 150 tombstones, the earliest dating to the 1850s and 1860s. Its first grave, that of Mollie Westbrook, is marked only by an undated stone, and the Westbrook family later gave land to enlarge the grounds. War veterans, county officials, and early circuit preachers rest here, and the graveyard is kept in the old "scraped" style, with grass cleared bare from the graves.

Huntsville, TX

Farris Chapel Methodist Church grew from a congregation founded by Hezekiah Farris in 1841, with the present building raised in 1880. Open to other faiths, it also served as the first schoolhouse in its part of Walker County. It stands as one of the area's oldest continuous institutions, born in the early years of the Texas Republic.

Burkeville, TX

Farrsville Cemetery holds the early graves of a Newton County settlement that grew up around Methodist minister Alfred Farr, who arrived before 1860. First known as Hines Cemetery for a nearby homesteader, the ground took its earliest recorded burial in 1859 and was formally deeded in 1878 as a tract reserved for a church, school, and graveyard. It was renamed Farrsville Cemetery in 1992.

Middlesex Township, PA · est. 1929

On the morning of June 28, 1863, Confederate cavalry probing the Cumberland Valley reached this farm — the farthest north any organized body of Robert E. Lee's army would advance. Learning that Union troops held nearby Sterrett's Gap, the outpost turned back toward the main force at Carlisle. Within days Lee concentrated his army eastward, and the campaign turned toward the fields of Gettysburg.

Glacier County, MT

On July 26, 1806, Meriwether Lewis and a small party reached this remote stretch of the Marias River — the northernmost, farthest point the Lewis and Clark Expedition ever explored. Lewis had pushed deep into Blackfeet country to learn whether the Marias might extend U.S. claims northward. It was near here, only days later, that the Corps of Discovery had its single deadly clash with Native people.

Farwell, TX

The town of Farwell honors brothers John V. and C. B. Farwell, Chicago investors who financed the construction of the Texas State Capitol in the 1880s. In exchange for building the grand pink-granite statehouse, the syndicate received three million acres of Panhandle land — the empire that became the legendary XIT Ranch, founded in 1885. The town at the New Mexico line grew up on the edge of that vast holding.

Ridgecrest, CA

This display presents a version of the 'Fat Man,' the plutonium implosion bomb of the type dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945, ending the Second World War in the Pacific. China Lake in the California desert was a center of naval weapons research and testing during and after that war. The exhibit preserves one of the most consequential and sobering artifacts of the atomic age.

Fate, TX

When the Grand Lodge of Texas chartered Fate Lodge No. 802 in December 1896, its twenty-three founding members were mostly the merchants and farmers who made up this small Rockwall County town. For decades they met wherever they could — a grocery store, a blacksmith shop, the schoolhouse — before finally building a combined lodge hall and community building in 1953. More than a century on, the lodge still anchors the town's civic life.

Fate, TX

Fate grew up in the 1880s as a new settlement along the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, and its Presbyterians organized a congregation there among the Leonard, Kale, and other founding families. A circuit rider served the young church, and in 1894, under head carpenter and charter member H. A. Kale, the members raised their first sanctuary on Brown Street. A new building followed at this site in 1926, keeping the congregation woven into the life of the growing railroad town.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1994

During the Depression, the Rev. Major J. Divine built a religious and economic movement that fed and housed thousands through his Cooperative Economic Plan, selling life's necessities at pennies on the dollar. In 1948 he acquired the grand Divine Lorraine Hotel, built in 1894, and opened it as one of the first fully racially integrated luxury hotels in the United States — a bold act years before the civil-rights movement's legal victories.

Kewaunee, WI

Father Jacques Marquette, the French Jesuit missionary and explorer, moved through the western Great Lakes in the 1670s, traveling among and ministering to the region's Native nations. This marker commemorates a Mass he is said to have celebrated here on the Wisconsin shore on November 1, 1674, as he journeyed along Lake Michigan. It fixes a moment from the earliest era of French presence in what would become the American Midwest.

Frankfort, KY

W. A. Wentworth, a New Hampshire–born public relations executive who adopted Kentucky as his home, transformed the state's Historical Highway Marker Program as its chairman from 1962 until his death in 1971. When he began, most of Kentucky's few markers stood in the Bluegrass region; under his leadership more than 1,100 markers were erected in every county. His work made the state's history visible along its roadsides.

Shenandoah, PA

This Shenandoah site marks the birthplace and boyhood home of Father Walter J. Ciszek, born here in 1904 to Polish immigrants in the heart of Pennsylvania's anthracite country. He became a Jesuit priest and spent roughly two decades imprisoned in the Soviet Union, much of it in Siberian labor camps, before returning to the United States. His later writings on faith and endurance made him a candidate for sainthood.

New York, NY

Thomas "Fats" Waller, one of the defining figures of the Harlem stride piano tradition, lived in this Queens neighborhood late in his short life. A protégé of James P. Johnson and a mentor to Count Basie, Waller paired virtuoso keyboard technique with a playful, irresistible showmanship. His songs—including "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Honeysuckle Rose," and "Jitterbug Waltz"—remain jazz standards.

Athens, TX

This two-story brick commercial building went up in 1896, commissioned by businessman J.R. Gauntt on a site once home to the law offices of the Faulk family. Built near the rail lines at a prime spot in early Athens, it housed attorneys upstairs and a grocery below, and over the years sheltered a mercantile store, a monument business, and dental offices. Its tenants included prominent local figures — William Levin Faulk, a county judge, and James J. Faulk, who became the city's first mayor.

Groesbeck, TX

David Faulkenberry, born in South Carolina about 1795, came to Texas in 1833 as part of Daniel Parker's Pilgrim Church and moved to present-day Limestone County in 1835, helping build cabins and Fort Parker for defense. He and his son Evan were killed in an 1837 attack near Fort Houston, and his widow Nancy — who later married Elisha Anglin — established this cemetery, deeded as a graveyard by her descendants in 1874. Its graves include two state representatives, five sheriffs, an early Texas Ranger, and veterans reaching back to the Texas Revolution.

New Orleans, LA

In 1925 the young William Faulkner, later a Nobel laureate, lived here in the French Quarter and wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay. The building itself dates to 1840, raised by the widow of Jean Baptiste LaBranche on ground that once held part of the yard and buildings of the French colonial prison. The address marks an early, formative chapter in one of America's greatest literary careers.

Billerica, MA

Along the falls of the Concord River in North Billerica, the Faulkner Mills turned water power into cloth, part of the great wave of textile manufacturing that reshaped New England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Generations of workers — many of them immigrants and neighbors from the surrounding village — spent their days at the looms and machinery that made the mills the beating heart of the local economy. This memorial honors those employees, the ordinary hands whose labor kept the wheels turning.

New Braunfels, TX

Completed in 1929 as the Travelers Hotel, this 63-room inn rose on the strength of New Braunfels's prosperous economy just before the Depression. Renamed "The Faust" in 1936 for the prominent family whose homesite it occupied, the hotel has operated continuously ever since. Its Spanish Colonial Revival design, rich with ornate terra-cotta detailing, marks the ambitions of a confident era.

New Braunfels, TX

Spanish supply caravans on El Camino Real forded the Guadalupe near here in the 1700s, sometimes waiting weeks for floods to recede. In 1887 Comal County hired Ohio's King Iron Bridge Company to build a high-water crossing — a monumental wrought-iron truss stretching more than 640 feet, combining Pratt and Whipple spans on masonry piers. It carried the main Austin-to-San Antonio traffic until a concrete bridge replaced it in 1934, then served locals until fire damaged it in 1979.

Newton, TX

Sam and Mary Herrin homesteaded 106 acres in the Fawil community of the East Texas piney woods, raising eleven children to adulthood and setting aside an acre for a family burial ground. The earliest graves, from 1911 and 1912, belong to a granddaughter and a daughter, and most of the dozens interred here descend from that pioneer couple. The surrounding community once supported three churches, a school, a plywood mill, and a store.

Lexington, KY

Fayette County was one of three original counties carved out in 1780 when Virginia divided its vast Kentucky County, at first sprawling across the land north and east of the Kentucky River — territory that today holds dozens of counties. By 1799 it had shrunk to its present size around Lexington. It carries the name of the Marquis de Lafayette, the young French nobleman who crossed the Atlantic in 1777 to fight for American independence.

Uniontown, PA · est. 1982

Formed from Westmoreland County in 1783, Fayette County honors the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who fought for American independence. Its rolling ground holds Fort Necessity, where a young George Washington fought an early engagement of the French and Indian War in 1754. Later the county's seat, Uniontown, incorporated in 1796, sat astride the National Road, the young republic's great federally built highway west that became U.S. Route 40.

La Grange, TX

Carved from Colorado and Bastrop counties, Fayette County was created in December 1837 and organized the following January, in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas. It bears the name of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman whose devotion to the American cause made him a symbol of republican friendship. La Grange was chosen as the county seat.

La Grange, TX

When Fayette County's third courthouse was judged unsafe around 1890, the county turned to 27-year-old San Antonio architect James Riely Gordon, who would go on to design public buildings across Texas. Funded by $90,000 in bonds and built in 1890–91, his Romanesque Revival design used four native Texas stones—Blue Muldoon sandstone, Belton limestone, Pecos red sandstone, and Burnet granite—around a central atrium built for light and ventilation. It is the oldest surviving Gordon courthouse in Texas and still serves La Grange as a center of county government.

La Grange, TX

When the Republic of Texas carved out Fayette County in 1837, the young town of La Grange became its seat of government, and a jail followed within a year. The stone building that stands today dates to 1883, raised after an arsonist destroyed its predecessor, with rock hauled from Buckner's Creek and Muldoon sandstone shaped into a solid, Victorian Gothic form. For more than a century it held prisoners and housed the sheriff's family before finding new life serving the community.

Fayetteville, TX

In 1880 the citizens of Fayetteville raised $600 in private donations, added $200 in county tax money, and built this Victorian precinct courthouse—celebrating with a ball whose proceeds paid for the paint. A two-cell calaboose was finished upstairs in 1887, and a ladies' club donated the clock in 1934. Precinct courthouses were a genuine rarity in early Texas.

La Grange, TX

Though Fayette County voted narrowly against secession in 1861, it threw itself into the Confederate war effort once Texas left the Union, raising thousands of men and making La Grange the headquarters of the 22nd Brigade of Texas State Troops. Local citizens funded relief for soldiers' families and freighted stored cotton to Mexico on grueling months-long wagon hauls that ran the gauntlet of border bandits. County men like Gen. Tom Green—a hero of San Jacinto and the Mexican War—rose to prominence in Confederate campaigns from Galveston to Mansfield.

Fayetteville, TX

Fayetteville began as a stage station on the Old San Felipe Trail, founded by members of Stephen F. Austin's first colony of settlers. The surrounding community became home to a remarkable roster of Texas Revolution figures—veterans of the Battle of Velasco, heroes of the San Jacinto campaign, and participants in the ill-fated Mier Expedition. Their presence made this quiet Fayette County town a gathering place of the Republic's founding generation.

Fayetteville, TX

Czech-Moravian Brethren settled at Ross Prairie in the early 1850s and, in 1855, held what is remembered as the first Czech worship service in Texas. Their society Osveta founded the state's first Czech-English school in 1871, and in 1874 the Jecmeneks gave land for a church, parish house, school, and this cemetery. Among the graves is that of Reverend Jindrich Juren, who served as pastor and schoolmaster here for some 45 years.

Fayetteville, TX

Fayetteville's city cemetery has served the community since its earliest days, with the first recorded burial dating to 1851. Among those interred are the surveyor who platted and named the town and donated land for the burying ground, a physician and military leader, and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the War of 1812. Its rows of graves read as a roll call of the pioneer families, tradespeople, and officials who built the town.

Fayetteville, TX

The Slavonic Benevolent Order of the State of Texas (SPJST) was founded by Czech-Texans in 1896 at the Fayette County courthouse in La Grange, offering mutual aid and life insurance to its members. For more than fifty years its headquarters stood here in Fayetteville, guided largely by secretary J.R. Kubena, before the home office moved to Temple in 1953. The order still thrives today, promoting Czech heritage, youth programs, scholarships, and community service.

Media, PA · est. 2021

On the night of March 8, 1971, a small group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI slipped into the bureau's Media field office and carried off its files. Among the stolen documents was proof of COINTELPRO, the FBI's secret program to surveil, infiltrate, and disrupt domestic political groups. The revelations, published in the press, forced the government's covert spying into public view.

Livingston, TX

In 1857 Aaron and Sarah Feagin left Alabama for the Bear Creek community of the East Texas Piney Woods, paying $10,000 in gold for nearly 2,820 acres to build a home and store. Their descendants, the Handley family, carried on the settlement — securing a post office in 1891 that renamed the town Hortense for a young daughter, and deeding two acres of Feagin land for a public cemetery in 1905. The grounds hold more than 200 marked graves alongside many unmarked ones, most believed to be infants, a quiet record of how costly pioneer life could be.

Sherman, TX

After the federal district court established a Sherman division in 1902, the U.S. Treasury's supervising architect John Knox Taylor designed this Spanish Colonial Revival–Beaux Arts landmark, completed in 1907 for $140,000. With terra cotta tiles, faux balconies, wrought-iron grillwork, and two stone eagles over the entrance, it commanded Sherman's downtown near the rail station. For decades it housed the courts, a first-floor post office, and a rotating cast of federal agencies.

Charleston, SC

In the depths of the Great Depression, the federal Public Works Administration—a cornerstone of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal—funded schools, civic halls, and public buildings across the country to put Americans back to work. This marker records one such project in Charleston: a building whose foundations were laid in December 1938 by the trustees of the College of Charleston, paid for by the city with income from the college's endowment and dedicated to the physical well-being of the community's youth. In one of the nation's oldest cities, federal relief dollars thus helped raise a modern facility for a new generation.

Sabine Pass, TX

At the Battle of Sabine Pass on September 8, 1863, Lt. Richard W. Dowling and fewer than fifty Confederate Davis Guards repelled a Union naval assault, disabling the gunboats Clifton and Sachem and taking more than 300 federal prisoners. Many Union sailors died, some killed when the Sachem's boiler exploded, and Confederate crews aboard the Uncle Ben helped recover the dead. The victors buried a reported 28 Union troops in a long ditch near the Dorman Hotel, a site later confirmed by twentieth-century excavation though much of it has eroded away.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

The Federal Inn, built around 1754, once stood on this Reading site and welcomed a famous guest in October 1794: President George Washington, traveling with a military escort. He was on his way west to muster the armed force that would suppress the Whiskey Rebellion, the farmers' tax revolt that tested whether the new federal government could enforce its laws.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

Founded in 1849 as Congregation Mikveh Israel's second cemetery, the Federal Street Burial Ground holds some of the most notable figures of nineteenth-century American Jewish life. Among them are the publisher Abraham Hart, the soldier and engineer Alfred Mordecai, the rabbi and educator Sabato Morais, and jurist Mayer Sulzberger, along with veterans of the Civil War. The ground is a quiet record of a Jewish community deeply woven into Philadelphia's civic, military, and intellectual life.

Port Arthur, TX

This federation traces its roots to the Women's Self-Improvement Club, founded by nine women in a Port Arthur parlor in February 1898 as a literary society that soon embraced social service. Over the following decades music, reading, and culture clubs joined together, meeting in homes and rented halls until a 1923 fire spurred members to build their own clubhouse at this site in 1924. Renamed in 1977, the federation of sixteen clubs has long shaped the city through scholarships, civic projects, and historic preservation.

Terlingua, TX

Federico Villalba, born in 1858 on his family's Chihuahua ranch, carried a long ranching lineage north to the Big Bend borderlands in the 1880s. Starting with a country store, he built a trading and landholding empire, and in 1902 became the first Hispanic in Brewster County to file a mining claim after finding cinnabar—the ore of mercury—near what became the Study Butte mine. By his death in 1933 he held tens of thousands of acres and a reputation as both a shrewd businessman and an advocate for Mexican Americans of the region.

Moscow, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River was one of the most consequential borders in America — free soil on the Ohio bank, slavery on the Kentucky shore opposite. Moscow, a small river town in Clermont County, sat squarely on that dividing line, making it one of many crossing points where freedom seekers slipped north. According to local oral tradition, the home of Thomas Fee Jr. (1801–1862) served as one such refuge, a stop where people escaping bondage could find shelter on their way to safety. Like much of the Underground Railroad's history, the account survives through community memory rather than written ledgers, which by necessity were rarely kept.

Van Horn, TX

This West Texas cemetery was first used in 1910 for the infant son of J. H. Feely, a grocer in the railroad settlement of Plateau who went on to become Culberson County's first sheriff when it organized in 1911. Three years later he was killed in the line of duty. The burial ground holds mostly unmarked graves of family members and pioneer settlers, long neglected and protected only by a metal fence.

Felicity, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the free soil of southern Ohio sat just across the river from slaveholding Kentucky, making its small towns natural way-stations for freedom seekers heading north. Felicity, in Clermont County, lay within this borderland network, and the cemetery here holds the graves of Arthur Fee and Oliver Perry Spencer Fee, the latter remembered as an abolitionist who helped operate the Underground Railroad. Their work meant sheltering and guiding people escaping bondage — quiet, dangerous acts of conscience carried out by ordinary neighbors who believed slavery was a moral wrong worth risking their safety to resist.

Felicity, OH

In the 1840s, the question of slavery was tearing American churches apart from the inside. Nationally, antislavery Methodists broke away in 1843 to form the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, refusing to share communion with slaveholders; here in southern Ohio, just miles from the Ohio River and the slave state of Kentucky, that conviction took local form when forty members walked out of their congregation to found this church in 1847. Clermont County was already a stronghold of abolitionist feeling and Underground Railroad activity, and a congregation defined by its stand against slavery fit naturally into that landscape.

Bastrop, TX

Felipe Enrique Neri, the self-styled Baron de Bastrop, was one of the pivotal figures who opened Texas to Anglo-American settlement. As an empresario on the Red River, land commissioner for Stephen F. Austin's colony, and a member of the Congress of Coahuila and Texas, he helped make Austin's colonization scheme a reality in the 1820s. In gratitude, both the county and its seat bear his name.

San Diego, TX

Felipe Valerio (1878–1953) and his wife Jesusa built this store in 1905 as the heart of the small community of La Rosita, roughly halfway between San Diego and Freer. It supplied groceries and goods to a rural stretch of South Texas, and the 1930s oil boom brought enough business to add a gas station and garage; it also served as a bus station, and Valerio was local postmaster from 1917 to 1929. The building closed in 1956 after State Highway 44 was built.

Victoria, TX

Felix de León was born in Texas in 1806, third son of the empresario Don Martín de León, founder of the De León Colony and the city of Victoria. As a boy he was seized and held hostage aboard a pirate ship to pressure his father, and he grew into a skilled frontier fighter who took up the cause in Texas's war for independence. He made his living driving horses, mules, and cattle to the New Orleans market.

Wichita Falls, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1847 to a mulatto mother and a full-blood Creek father, Felix Lindsey carried food to Union troops as a boy during the Civil War before joining the U.S. Army in 1882 with the 10th Cavalry "Buffalo Soldiers" at Fort Davis. His unit pursued Geronimo across Arizona in 1885, where he was wounded three times before a leg injury ended his career in 1893. He then settled in Wichita Falls, married, raised nine children and ran a cleaning business until his death in 1939 at age 92.

Three Rivers, TX

Private First Class Felix Longoria of Three Rivers enlisted in 1944 and was killed in the Battle of Luzon in the Philippines. When his remains came home in 1949, the town's only funeral home refused to hold his wake, a decision widely seen as racial discrimination against Mexican Americans. His widow turned to Dr. Hector Garcia and the newly formed American G.I. Forum, and Senator Lyndon Johnson arranged burial at Arlington National Cemetery, turning a private grief into a national reckoning.

El Paso, TX

Felix Martinez rose from the frontier village of Peñasco, New Mexico, to become one of the most influential Hispanic leaders of the early-twentieth-century Southwest. He served in New Mexico's territorial legislature and published the leading Spanish-language newspaper, La Voz del Pueblo, before moving to El Paso in 1897. There he helped bring electric streetcars and power to the city, backed the Elephant Butte Dam that transformed Rio Grande agriculture, and was named a U.S. commissioner to South America by President Wilson before his death in 1916.

Fredericksburg, TX

Belgian immigrant Felix Van Der Stucken bought this Fredericksburg site in 1864 and raised the original one-story limestone section soon after, adding a second story later. He ran a steam-powered mill nearby that grew into the Reliance Roller Mills, and his home blended Victorian and Greek Revival details in native stone. The Hennig family bought the house in 1940.

Corpus Christi, TX

A German émigré trained in engineering, languages, and law, Felix von Blucher came to Texas in 1845 and joined the settlers at New Braunfels, where he helped John O. Meusebach negotiate the 1847 Comanche treaty that opened the Fisher-Miller grant. After service in the Mexican War he settled in Nueces County, mapped a trade route to Eagle Pass, and became county surveyor. His descendants carried on as surveyors and cartographers of the region for over a century, giving the family enclave the name Blucherville.

Joaquin, TX

Founded by settlers who crossed the Sabine River by ferry as early as 1818, Fellowship Baptist Church is among the oldest Baptist congregations in Texas, ministering through the Republic of Texas era. Worshippers rode miles by farm wagon to gather in a log building heated by an eight-foot fireplace, with split-log benches and shutter-covered, glassless windows that doubled as a schoolhouse in season. Its first pastor, Rev. Wyatt S. Childress, was kin to George C. Childress, an author of the Texas Declaration of Independence.