Search Markers

Penn Hills, PA · est. 1930

During the French and Indian War in 1758, General John Forbes cut a military road westward across Pennsylvania to seize the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio. This plaque marks the road's farthest northern point, near an encampment associated with Colonel Henry Bouquet, some 97 miles from Fort Bedford. The methodical Forbes campaign succeeded where earlier expeditions had failed.

Napier Township, PA · est. 1930

At this spot two frontier military roads parted ways: the older path cut by Colonel James Burd in 1755 and the Forbes Road blazed in 1758. From here the Forbes Road bent southwestward toward the Shawnee Cabins encampment, only a few miles from Fort Bedford. The junction marks how successive campaigns layered their routes across the Pennsylvania mountains.

Jenner Township, PA · est. 1930

Part of the 1758 Forbes Road built during the French and Indian War, this point at the foot of Laurel Hill marks the Tomahawk Encampment on the army's push toward Fort Duquesne. Each such camp was a measured stage in General John Forbes's methodical advance, guarded and provisioned as the troops climbed the Alleghenies. The marker fixes the spot along the road running toward Fort Ligonier.

Murrysville, PA · est. 1930

Near the end of the 1758 Forbes Road, the Turtle Creek Defile marked the approach to the forks of the Ohio and Fort Duquesne during the French and Indian War. The marker locates the nearby Washington Camp and the Bouquet Encampment along the army's final miles. This rugged passage was among the last obstacles before the British reached their objective.

Quemahoning Township, PA · est. 1930

On the 1758 Forbes Road, the Stony Creek Encampment served as a fortified supply headquarters — its "Ovens" baking bread for the army — during the French and Indian War campaign against Fort Duquesne. Fortifications rose just north of this site as General John Forbes staged men and provisions for the mountainous advance. The marker records its distance along the road from Fort Bedford.

Grand Prairie, TX

Pinkney Harold Ford led a Kentucky family to Texas in 1855, settling in the Watson Community near present North Arlington. The oldest marked grave, that of Maria Trayler, dates to 1858, and Ford—a Civil War veteran—bought the property in 1879 to serve as a community burial ground. Industrial Grand Prairie has since grown up around this last trace of the pioneer settlement.

Bon Wier, TX

The Ford family arrived in the piney woods of Newton County before 1880 and, over a generation, planted the three institutions a frontier community needed most. A cemetery took shape on J.D. and Ida Ford's land, its earliest documented grave that of their three-year-old daughter in 1880; a one-room log school opened in 1893; and a frame Methodist chapel rose in 1910. Though regular worship ended in the 1930s and the school folded into Newton's district by 1930, descendants formed an association in 1961 to keep the sites tended.

Llano, TX

These three attached buildings are believed to be the work of John Goodman, a stonemason who emigrated from Germany to Llano in 1878, and they show the corbelled brickwork typical of early twentieth-century commerce. Since 1904 the buff-and-red brick row has sheltered an astonishing variety of businesses — furniture and liquor stores, cafes and saloons, a saddle shop, a domino hall, and a theater among them. In 1989 the buildings were adapted to house the Llano County Library.

Erie, PA · est. 2026

In the early 1800s, Emma Howell, a Black woman freed from slavery, and her husband James Ford, who had liberated himself, owned property at Parade and 12th streets in Erie and ran it as a station on the Underground Railroad. To freedom seekers it was a known place of shelter on the last leg north. Erie's perch on Lake Erie, its nearness to Canada, and its web of abolitionists made it a vital crossing point on the road to freedom.

Rockaway Township, NJ

This 18th-century stone house sits in the heart of the Morris County iron district, a region whose forges and furnaces made northern New Jersey one of early America's most important sources of iron. The dwelling is tied to the ironmasters who worked these hills, whose furnaces supplied the material of everyday life—and, during the Revolution, cannon shot and hardware for the Continental cause.

Denton, TX

O'Neil Ford grew up in Sherman and Denton and learned his craft largely by correspondence course and hands-on work, meeting his mentor, architect David Williams, on a Denton church construction site. From the 1930s onward he became a defining architect of the American Southwest, designing Denton's Little Chapel in the Woods, restoring San Antonio's La Villita, and creating the Tower of the Americas for HemisFair. Blending natural materials, clean lines, and open spaces with the work of craftsmen and artists, he became an AIA Fellow and served on President Johnson's National Council for the Arts.

Andice, TX

When Wiley Fore arrived from Alabama in 1883, he joined a fledgling settlement started two years earlier by his nephew Robert Baker. Fore quickly became a community builder, organizing a Cumberland Presbyterian church and a local Grange chapter, and in 1884 he donated an acre for a free community cemetery. The first burials were two children of the De Luna family that same year, and the graveyard has served the area ever since.

Sulphur Springs, TX

Settlement of this area began in 1847 when Thomas and Elizabeth Ticer brought their family west, and the ground was serving as a burial place before it was formally set aside in 1858—the year of its first known marked grave. Landowner Winship S. Petty enlarged the cemetery to six acres, donated it to the Forest Academy community, and supplied lumber for its first church and school. By 1910 the families had moved on, leaving the Methodist church and this graveyard as the last traces of the settlement.

Tionesta, PA · est. 1982

Established in 1848 from Jefferson County and enlarged with part of Venango County in 1866, Forest County was named for the deep woodlands that still define it. Long before county lines, the region was laced with Native American paths, and between 1767 and 1770 the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger carried his mission among the Munsee people here. The county seat later moved from Marienville to Tionesta.

McKinney, TX

This congregation grew from informal prayer meetings held in 1847 in the home of William and Mary Snider, when the surrounding land was still being settled under the Peters Colony grant. Remarkably, its early membership included veterans of the American Revolution alongside the colony's first pioneers. Though regular services ended in 1984, the church buildings—beside historic Fitzhugh Cemetery, with graves dating to 1852—still host community programs.

Livingston, TX

By 1905 Livingston's old city cemetery was full, so residents formed the Forest Hill Cemetery Association in 1906 and bought a hilltop south of downtown, where Arthur B. Garner became the first burial that November. Women organized the Ladies Cemetery Association in 1908 to beautify the grounds, and in the 1930s Marion Tew's stewardship even prompted the paving of Washington Avenue — Livingston's first paved street. Its stones mark thirty Confederate and one Union soldier alongside circus figures and acclaimed theatre director Margaret 'Margo' Jones.

Fort Worth, TX

One of Tarrant County's oldest burial grounds, Forest Hill was used long before anyone kept records; landowner J. W. Chapman formally deeded it to a Cumberland Presbyterian congregation in 1883. Among those laid to rest here were Press and Jane Farmer, who lived on the site of Fort Worth even before the U.S. Army planted its fort there in 1849. Though largely full, the cemetery shows few headstones, as most early graves were unmarked or set with field stones long since vanished.

Kilgore, TX

Organized in 1889 by the Rev. J. R. Goode and eight charter members from four founding families, this congregation began in a windowless one-room log church with a single door. A larger frame building soon followed and doubled as a school for children from both Rusk and Gregg counties, and the church added facilities as it grew. Descendants of those charter members still worship in the congregation their forebears founded.

Denison, TX

Denison established Forest Park in 1872, the same year the town was founded as a terminus of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas ("Katy") Railroad, when Robert S. Stevens donated six acres on the condition it stay a public park forever. The park hosted the town's first civic celebrations and took its name from the woods that once covered it. During the bitter 1922 nationwide railroad shopmen's strike, the Texas National Guard pitched a tent city here — Camp Ellis — as hundreds of arrests were made among some 1,400 Katy workers.

Forestburg, TX

Forestburg took shape just after the Civil War, founded in memory of the pioneers who had pushed into this contested North Texas frontier. Its brief inscription honors settlers who battled Native peoples, endured hardship, and broke the soil so that a lasting community could follow. It marks the raw edge of settlement where survival itself was the founding achievement.

Sanger, TX

William S. Forester drove his family from Tennessee to the Denton County frontier in the early 1850s and carved out a ranch on open range still contested with Native peoples, a danger that cost his teenage son Sol his life while herding cattle. His son Lock, a Confederate veteran, expanded the spread past 6,000 acres and made its "Two I Jinglebob" brand well known, before a third generation carried the ranch into the twentieth century. For over a century the Forester Ranch shaped the cattle country of North Texas.

San Francisco, CA

Erected in 1927 by the Foresters of America of California, this plaque honors members of the fraternal order who died during the years of the First World War, 1917–1919. Fraternal societies were pillars of civic life in early 20th-century America, offering mutual aid, insurance, and community — and when war came, they memorialized their own who did not return. The dedication captures a nation still grieving its Great War dead a decade after the armistice.

Forks Township, PA

During the depths of the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps put hundreds of thousands of young men to work restoring America's forests, streams, and parklands. From 1933 to 1941, Camp S-95 stood here in the wooded hills of Sullivan County, its enrollees planting trees, fighting fires, and building the trails and infrastructure that still shape Pennsylvania's public lands. In exchange for a small wage sent largely home to their families, these workers gained steady labor, discipline, and a sense of purpose amid hard times.

Acton, TX

Raised in native stone between 1866 and 1868, this building served the Acton Masonic Lodge on its top floor while the ground floor did triple duty as schoolhouse, church, and social center for the young Hood County community. After the lodge departed in 1922, the empty hall fell into decay until the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas bought and restored it in 1974 as the Church of the Good Shepherd.

Brenham, TX

Brothers J. D. and D. C. Giddings, lawyers by training, opened Brenham's first bank in 1866 as Texas rebuilt after the Civil War. In 1872 they erected this building for the bank, sharing the third floor with a Royal Arch Masons chapter — a common mingling of commerce and fraternal life in a growing town. The bank served the community until it closed in 1945.

Calvert, TX

Calvert became the seat of Robertson County in 1870 and began this imposing courthouse in 1875 — but a deadly 1873 yellow fever epidemic had already stripped the town of many leaders, and in 1879 the county seat moved to Franklin before the building was even finished. Merchant Robert A. Brown bought the unfinished structure in 1885 and, with his wife Lucy, converted it into a family residence. It passed through the Hammond family for decades before becoming a museum in 1966.

Ayden, NC

The small town of Ayden once hosted two church-affiliated schools. Carolina Christian College, founded by the Disciples of Christ, operated from 1893 to 1903 and was a predecessor of today's Barton College in Wilson. Nearby, Free Will Baptists founded Ayden Seminary in 1896; later renamed Eureka College, it closed in 1929, and in 1951 the denomination established Mount Olive College instead.

Jacksboro, TX

Built in 1910 of stone from a nearby quarry, this depot served Jacksboro's second railroad, the Gulf, Texas & Western. The line was financed through local effort with backing from the New York banking firm of R. C. Megargel & Company. A recorded Texas Historical Landmark, it stands as a reminder of the rail connections that shaped small North Texas towns.

Hidalgo, TX

Built in 1889 to house a general merchandise store, this modest building set aside one corner for the town's postal service — a common arrangement on the Texas frontier, where the store was the heart of a community. It served as Hidalgo's post office until 1913, with storekeeper William Odell, his wife Josephine, and Gumaro Rodriguez among those who kept the mail moving. It is celebrated as the oldest surviving post office building of its kind.

Montgomery, TX

Joseph L. Bennett came to Texas in 1834 and, when revolution broke out, raised a company of local volunteers and marched toward the Alamo in early 1836, turning back only on learning the fort had fallen. He joined Sam Houston's army and, as lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Regiment, fought at San Jacinto. Rewarded with land grants, he went on to command frontier defense, serve two terms in the Republic of Texas Congress, and carry the mail before dying in 1848.

Plainview, TX

Founded in 1912, the Texas Land & Development Company was an agricultural experiment on an enormous scale, drawing Eastern and European capital to develop 65,000 acres across Hale, Floyd, and Swisher counties. By pioneering irrigated and dryland farming methods on the High Plains, the company helped make the region one of the most productive in America before winding down in 1956. Its officers, farm superintendents, and even a staff historian left their mark on Panhandle agriculture.

Gardner, MA

In 1912, as Jewish families put down roots in the furniture-making city of Gardner, Massachusetts, Congregation Ohave Shalom raised a synagogue that would anchor their community for more than a century. Through much of the 20th century the building served as both a house of worship and a gathering place, while its congregants wove themselves into the civic and commercial life of the city. When the structure finally came down in 2017, this marker rose in its place to keep the memory of that community alive.

Mansfield, OH

For more than a century the Ohio Brass Company manufactured electrical and industrial hardware in Mansfield, Ohio, from its founding in 1888 until it closed in 1990. Its shutdown put 1,220 people out of work, a blow of the kind that reshaped countless American factory towns in the late twentieth century. This marker stands where a pillar of the local economy once hummed.

Kennard, TX

Built around 1920 near Ratcliff, this one-teacher schoolhouse was one of hundreds of Texas schools funded through the philanthropy of Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago businessman who partnered with Black communities to build schools for African American children across the South. Local Houston County residents matched Rosenwald's grant, and dedicated teachers like Alfred Foy carried on a tradition of learning that had begun in brush arbors and log cabins. Parents brought food so the children could have hot lunches, a testament to the community's fierce commitment to education.

Weathersfield, VT

This spot in Weathersfield marks where a 54-foot single-span covered bridge once stood, a multiple-kingpost design built in the 1870s and attributed to James Tasker, one of the Connecticut River valley's prolific self-taught bridge wrights. The structure was relocated in 1959, a common fate for aging wooden bridges as automobile traffic outgrew them. Vermont's covered bridges were as much practical engineering as folk craft, their roofs built to protect the timber trusses from rot.

Gardner, MA

In 1773, two years before Gardner was set off as its own town, Seth Heywood raised his home on this ground as one of the community's first settlers—and later helped push the petition that made the town official. The marker's real significance surfaces in its final line: in 1826 his grandson took up manufacturing here, planting the seed of an industry that would make Gardner famous as the 'Chair City' of America, where the Heywood name became synonymous with furniture-making. What began as a settler's homestead thus became the birthplace of a manufacturing dynasty that shaped the town for generations.

Town of Hamlin, NY

This ground served two very different chapters of 20th-century America. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps — a New Deal program that put unemployed young men to work on the nation's parks and forests during the Great Depression — ran Camp SP-53 here. During World War II the site was repurposed to hold enemy prisoners of war, part of a nationwide network of camps whose inmates often helped fill wartime labor shortages.

Seguin, TX

When the Wolters and Nixon school districts merged in 1916, trustees bought two acres from William Dowdy and built the Wolters-Nixon School here. A 1930s oil boom funded a gymnasium and new classrooms, and in 1932 the renamed Dowdy School added high school classes for the first time, where students would go on to excel in team sports. Declining enrollment eventually led to its 1951 annexation into the Seguin school system.

Miami, FL

From 1938 to 1943, the pioneering animation house Fleischer Studios operated from Miami, having relocated south from New York. Founded by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, the studio was Walt Disney's chief early rival, known for Betty Boop, Popeye, and a landmark series of Superman cartoons whose lush, rotoscoped style influenced animation for decades. Their Miami years produced ambitious feature work before the studio was absorbed by its parent company and the operation wound down.

Corsicana, TX

Corsicana opened its first public school for Black children on this site in 1881, first naming it for the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In 1925 it was renamed to honor G.W. Jackson, its first principal and a follower of Booker T. Washington, who brought industrial education and a celebrated music program. Beloved by its alumni until integration closed it in 1970, the school was razed in 1974 and this park raised in its place.

Lancaster, TX

From 1891 to 1918, Lucy Frances Head ran a celebrated boarding house on this Lancaster site, where her fried chicken, popovers, and ambrosia drew crowds—especially on Sundays and holidays. Traveling salesmen, known then as "drummers," spread word of her table across the country, and the house became a favorite of honeymooners. It kept the Head name until it closed and was torn down in 1936.

Galveston, TX

Former Galveston mayor John S. Sydnor built an eight-room house on this site in 1857, but it was the German immigrant Samson Heidenheimer who transformed it into a landmark. Beginning with a $100 loan and building a fortune as a Confederate blockade runner and auctioneer, Heidenheimer enlarged the house to four stories and 37 rooms, crowning it with castle-like towers and turrets. Passed through many owners after his death, the fabled 'castle' burned in 1973 and was razed two years later.

Canadian, TX

Hogtown sprang up in 1886 as a tent city for the railroad gang laying the Southern Kansas line, earning its unflattering name from its rough, hogpen appearance. It was the forerunner of the town of Canadian, but when the landowner Sam Pollard and the railroad could not agree on a price for his land, the company simply moved the line across the river—and the people followed. The tent town was left behind, one of the West's many settlements that lived and died with the rails.

Dawson, TX

Liberty Hill grew up in the 1840s as an Anglo-American farming community, taking firmer root when Samuel and Prudence Wright arrived from Tennessee in 1849 and drew in pioneer neighbors. By 1860 several founding families had organized a Cumberland Presbyterian church, and Wright later donated land for a cemetery and a public school. When the railroad towns of Dawson and Hubbard rose as Cotton Belt shipping points, they drained away Liberty Hill's population until its school and church closed and the fields returned to grazing.

Longview, TX

Longview's first public high school classes began in a building erected in 1880, replaced by a larger structure in 1884 as enrollment grew. A senior high complex rose on this site in 1929 but was converted to a junior high just three years later, after the area's oil boom doubled the student body and prompted a new high school on East Whaley Street. Later bond elections in 1972 and 1986 funded the modern Longview High School Complex on Airline Road.

Midland, TX

Chartered in Odessa in 1902 as the Odessa National Bank, this institution moved to Midland in 1903 and took the name Midland National Bank, setting up shop in the two-story wooden Llano Hotel, a gathering place for ranchers and businessmen. Fire destroyed the building in 1909, but the rebuilt hotel again housed the bank, whose business shifted from agriculture to oil by 1927. Through new buildings, a 1968 merger, and a 1983 renaming, the bank followed Midland's rise from a ranching town to a center of the oil economy.

Waskom, TX

In 1850 a group of fourteen men organized Concord Masonic Lodge No. 77, meeting at first in a member's home. Three years later, the owner of the original Republic of Texas land grant donated nine acres to Methodist trustees, and a two-story building rose that served both church and lodge for decades, with a community cemetery growing beside it. The lodge closed in 1880 and the congregation later disbanded, but the burial ground endures under a cemetery association.

Kansas City, MO

In 1931 Emmett Breen built the Red Crown Tavern and Tourist Cabins along the highway west of here, a typical Depression-era auto-camp. On July 19, 1933 it became a battleground: a coalition of Platte County, Jackson County, and Missouri Highway Patrol lawmen converged on the site in one of the violent lawman-versus-outlaw confrontations that marked the Midwest's 'public enemy' era of the early 1930s.

Hereford, TX

Saint Anthony's Catholic School opened in 1914 in a repurposed former Deaf Smith County courthouse, converted for parish use by Father Salvator di Giovanni and Brother James. As enrollment climbed, a purpose-built schoolhouse rose in 1927 and served students until the school relocated in 1955. Since 1966 the building has held a local history museum of pioneer artifacts.

McLennan County, TX

In the 1880s, eight German immigrant families settled near West, Texas, on land owned by Jacob Closner, who deeded ten acres for a church and burying ground. Organized as St. Peter's Evangelical in 1887 under the Rev. Christian Schaer, the congregation worshiped here for generations before merging into the First United Church in 1966. The building was later sold, but the pioneer cemetery remains.

Temple, TX

Doctors Arthur C. Scott and Raleigh White, Jr. founded this nursing school in 1904 as part of their Temple Sanitarium, first teaching a small student body in a former Catholic convent. Modeled on Florence Nightingale's philosophy, the program grew steadily, adding liberal-arts coursework with Temple Junior College by 1946 and ranking among the nation's best by 1949. Before its diploma program was phased out in favor of a baccalaureate degree, the school graduated 1,233 nurses over 66 years.

Temple, TX

In 1898 the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad chartered a YMCA in Temple and built a three-story hall the next year to lodge and entertain its railway workers. The "Y" also opened its doors to townspeople and pioneered youth athletics before fire destroyed the original building in 1934. Rebuilt and then handed to the USO in 1942, it served the community through war and peace.

Progreso, TX

The Rio Grande Valley's early agricultural boom owed much to the San Benito & Rio Grande Valley Railroad, begun in 1912 by Missouri native Sam A. Robertson and nicknamed the "Spiderweb" for its dense tangle of lines and spurs. In 1926 the railroad built a station here as the hub of Progreso, a planned citrus community, opening a channel that carried local produce to markets nationwide.

Loeb, TX

Founded in 1858 as Benton, this was the first town in Hardin County, planted at a strategic river crossing on the route from Beaumont to points north. It grew rapidly into a busy steamboat port of some 300 people, its fortunes riding on the traffic of the waterways. When the railroads arrived in the 1880s, they bypassed the old port and drew commerce elsewhere, and Concord dwindled away. Today only the townsite remains to mark where a thriving river landing once stood.

Fluvanna, TX

The town of Light sprang up in 1899 around a new post office on D. C. McGregor's land, growing further when a ranch schoolhouse was relocated there and a two-room school followed in 1905. Its fortunes reversed almost as quickly: when nearby Fluvanna was surveyed in 1907 at the terminus of the Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific Railroad, residents hauled their buildings a mile west to be on the rails. Light soon vanished, though the area still supplies water to its rival.

Hermleigh, TX

A small farming settlement grew here in the late 1880s and took the name Wheat after a bumper wheat crop the year its post office opened in 1890. Served by postmasters Minerva Thomas and G. W. McCall, it had a school that doubled as a church. When the Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific Railroad bypassed the community in 1907, residents relocated two stores and a cotton gin to the new railside townsite of Hermleigh, and Wheat faded away.

Fort Worth, TX

Completed in 1930 as the headquarters of the Texas State Teachers Association, this Renaissance Revival building was designed by noted Fort Worth architect Wiley G. Clarkson. The TSTA moved its offices to Austin in 1949, and the building was later bought by the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, which occupied it for three decades.

Hempsted, TX

Before modern communication, scattered post offices tied together the isolated farm villages of what became Waller County, often tucked into a residence, general store, or gristmill near a church or cotton gin. They served as social hubs and even polling places, each covering only a small radius because wagon travel over dirt roads was slow. Motor transport, rural free delivery after 1896, and creeping urbanization gradually erased most of them.

Whiteface, TX

Realtor William E. Flenniken put up this hotel in 1926 as the first brick building in Whiteface, raised to house prospective buyers when Cochran County opened for sale in small tracts. It stood at the center of the land rush that peopled this corner of the South Plains. In 1968 the J.S. Noel estate gave the building to Girlstown, U.S.A., for the use of its management.

Forney, TX

Long before Anglo settlers arrived, a Native American path known as the Kickapoo Trace crossed this land, and pioneer families like the Briscoes and Sheltmans settled here in the mid-1840s. When the Texas & Pacific Railroad pushed through in 1873, the nearby village of Brooklyn shifted to this spot and took the name Forney for a noted railroad official; by 1891 it boasted more than fifty businesses, an opera house, and a booming trade in cotton, Bois d'Arc products, and prized blackland hay. After decades of Depression-era decline, Forney was reborn as a growing suburb of Dallas.