Search Markers

Morris Township, NJ

This Gothic Revival house was built in 1854 by General Joseph Warren Revere, a career military and naval officer and grandson of the Revolutionary patriot Paul Revere. In 1881 it was purchased by Charles Foster, and his daughter Caroline kept the property as a working farm through much of the twentieth century. In 1973 she donated it to the Morris County Park Commission, and it endures today as a living historical farm.

Mifflinburg, PA · est. 1947

A mill has stood near this spot since 1771, when Fought's Mill first turned grain for the settlers of Buffalo Valley. During the Revolution, the sturdy mill doubled as a place of refuge when frontier raids threatened the scattered farms of the region. It was also here, on November 3, 1776, that Buffalo Valley held its first election under Pennsylvania's new revolutionary state constitution.

Wood County, TX

The community of Fouke took root in southeastern Wood County, Texas, in the years just after the Civil War, first known simply as "Center" and said to date to about 1866. As settlers gathered in the early 1870s, they raised a log building that did double and triple duty as church, school, and meeting place — a common pattern on the post-war Texas frontier, where one structure often anchored a whole rural settlement. Such communities grew up along the farms and lakes of East Texas as families sought land and a fresh start during Reconstruction.

Lincoln, CA

This marker honors Colonel C. Lincoln Wilson, the founder of the city of Lincoln, California, and a builder of the state's earliest railroads as first president of the Sacramento Valley Railroad and founder of the California Central Railroad. In an age when rail lines determined which towns flourished, Wilson laid out a community that took his name and grew along the tracks he helped bring to the Sacramento Valley.

New York, NY

This memorial honors the founder of a Staten Island institution and centers on the painting "Jesus, Friend of the Little Ones" (Isus prijatelj malenih) by Vlaho Bukovac (1855–1922). Bukovac was among the most celebrated Croatian painters of his generation, trained in Paris and admired across Europe for his portraits and religious and allegorical canvases. That one of his works came to adorn an American institution reflects the deep bonds between Croatian immigrant communities and the artistic and religious culture of their homeland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Marlboro Township, NJ

These four names reach back to the birth of organized Presbyterianism in colonial America. Francis Makemie is remembered as the father of the American presbytery, and Jedidiah Andrews and John Hampton were among the ministers who helped knit scattered congregations into a church; Walter Ker was a Scottish Covenanter, exiled across the Atlantic, who became a pillar of the early Presbyterian community in Monmouth County. Together they represent the Scots and Scots-Irish faithful who planted their form of worship in the New Jersey soil around the turn of the eighteenth century.

Houston, TX

This Houston burial ground is recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery, a designation reserved for graveyards that have served their communities for generations. Such early cemeteries hold the remains of the settlers, veterans, and civic founders who built the city in its formative decades.

Berkeley, CA

Founders' Rock marks the spot where, on April 16, 1860, trustees of the College of California dedicated the ground that would become the University of California at Berkeley; the rock itself was inscribed in 1896. The gathering here is remembered as a foundational moment in the birth of what grew into one of the nation's great public universities.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1997

In the industrial boomtown of Pittsburgh, delegates gathered at Turner Hall on November 15, 1881, to build a federation of trade unions that would soon be known as the American Federation of Labor. Under leaders who insisted on organizing skilled workers by craft, the AFL grew into the nation's largest labor federation and a durable force in American working life. In 1955 it merged with its industrial-union rival to form the AFL-CIO that endures today.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1997

As the Great Depression reshaped American industry, thirty-four international unions sent delegates to Pittsburgh in November 1938 for the first convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Breaking from the older craft-based model, the CIO organized entire industries—steel, autos, rubber—bringing millions of mass-production workers into the labor movement. Pittsburgh's own Philip Murray led the organization as president from 1940 to 1952.

Fort Worth, TX

In the late 1840s the U.S. Army sought a new post on the Trinity River to guard the line between settlers and the Plains tribes. General William J. Worth planned it but died of cholera before it was built, leaving Major Ripley Arnold to scout and establish the fort in 1849 near Marrow Bone Springs with the help of local figures like Middleton Tate Johnson. Arnold named the post for Worth, the recently fallen Mexican War hero, and the barracks rose where the Tarrant County Courthouse now stands.

Boston, MA

This tablet records the early-1630s agreement by which Boston's first inhabitants, led by Governor John Winthrop, purchased the rights to the peninsula from William Blackstone, the solitary settler already living there. The town then set aside a tract as a common training field for the militia and for grazing cattle — the origin of Boston Common. The words come from a later deposition by John Odlin and others attesting to the sale.

Asheville, NC

On April 16, 1792, in the mountains of western North Carolina, an act of the General Assembly creating Buncombe County took effect near a place called Gum Spring. Carved from a rugged, sparsely settled frontier that would later cradle Asheville, the new county extended orderly government into a remote corner of the young republic. The Colonial Dames of America placed this monument in 1922 to fix the founding site in public memory.

Covington, LA

John Wharton Collins founded the town of Wharton here in March 1813, naming it for his grandfather. Three years later the Louisiana legislature renamed it Covington in honor of General Leonard Covington, a hero of the War of 1812.

Georgetown, TX

According to local tradition, Williamson County's first commissioners gathered under a great oak here in May 1848 to choose a county seat. Landowner George Washington Glasscock offered a tract bounded by the tree and the San Gabriel River, and in gratitude the commissioners named the new town Georgetown in his honor. The landmark oak stood until a storm felled it in 1886.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1999

On February 4, 1896, sixteen delegates gathered at Moorheads Hall on this site to form the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers. Meeting in Pittsburgh, the heart of America's steel and bridge-building boom, they organized to win better wages and, above all, safer conditions in one of the era's most dangerous trades. By its centennial in 1996 the union counted some 140,000 members.

Louisville, KY

On April 3, 1798, eight Louisville citizens pledged financial support for a new school, a commitment the University of Louisville still treats as its symbolic founding. That pledge produced Jefferson Seminary, which fed into the Louisville College and the Louisville Medical Institute of 1837. In 1846 these strands merged into the newly named University of Louisville, soon adding a law school.

West Liberty, KY

Edmund Wells settled this stretch of eastern Kentucky about 1814, running a mill, ferry, and tavern when it was still part of Floyd County. When Morgan County was created, its first court met at his home in 1823, and Wells gave the land for the county seat of West Liberty and built its first jail and courthouse. His grist mill, completed in 1816, anchored the settlement first known as Wells Mill and remained a landmark long after he sold it around 1838.

Takoma Park, MD

In 1883, real-estate developer Benjamin Franklin Gilbert bought farmland straddling the District of Columbia line and laid out Takoma Park as one of Washington's earliest railroad commuter suburbs, its lots strung along the B&O Railroad's Metropolitan Branch. Gilbert marketed the wooded, hilly retreat as a healthful escape from the crowded capital, and the community that grew up around the depot became known for its shady streets and Victorian cottages. This monument, raised by residents and dedicated on Independence Day 1939, marks the spot where that founding vision took root.

Baltimore, MD · est. 1976

On May 9, 1911, a small group of physicians gathered in Baltimore to found the American Psychoanalytic Association, dedicated to advancing the then-radical ideas of Sigmund Freud in the United States. Its founders included the neurologist James J. Putnam as president and the Welsh analyst Ernest Jones as secretary, alongside pioneering American figures like Adolf Meyer. The plaque was dedicated in 1976 during the association's 65th annual meeting.

San Marcos, TX

In 1847, in the log home of John D. Pitts, circuit rider A. B. F. Kerr organized the first church in newly created Hays County. The small congregation worshipped in the cabin for two years before building its own house of worship nearby.

Marion, TX

Marion owes its existence to the railroad. When the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway pushed west of the Guadalupe to link inland Texas with Gulf ports, investor Col. Thomas W. Peirce bought land near a country store and platted a town, naming it for his daughter and securing a post office in 1877. Within a year its three-acre railyard was shipping in volume, and by 1900 schools and churches had made it a settled community.

West Point, KY

In 1796 James Young and Samuel Pearman laid out West Point on Young's land, naming it for its standing as the westernmost English-speaking settlement below the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville. Its position at the confluence of the Salt and Ohio Rivers made it a prosperous river town. Young ran an inn, operated a ferry across the Ohio to the Northwest Territory by 1797, and helped finance the Louisville-Nashville Turnpike that would one day become the Dixie Highway.

Goliad, TX

On this spot in May 1849, twelve Baptists gathered under an oak tree a block west of the Goliad square to organize the area's first Baptist church, led by the Rev. John Freeman Hillyer. The charter roll reflects the antebellum South it grew from: alongside the pastor's family and neighbors like the Leas and Crows were two enslaved people, Jacob and Eliza, counted among the founding members. The congregation joined the Colorado Baptist Association by 1852 and finally built a permanent home in 1899 after fifty years in borrowed rooms.

Paducah, KY

This Paducah congregation began in 1892 as a mission, with its first church at 10th and Trimble Streets. In 1908 the Fountain Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, South was erected on this site for $35,000 and has served continuously ever since, weathering the great 1937 flood that filled its basement. A Möller pipe organ was installed in 1945, and an education wing was added in 1947.

Houston County, TX

In 1899 R.M. Keith, agent for the Central Coal & Coke Company, began buying up the region's virgin pine, and by 1902 the great "Four C" mill was sawing 300,000 board feet a day. A railroad from Lufkin and a web of tram lines fed fresh-cut timber to the mill, and the company built houses, a store, and logging camps for its workers. Rivalry with the nearby town of Ratcliff turned bitter—a 16-foot fence between them was dynamited more than once—before the company exhausted its 120,000 acres and dismantled the mill in 1920.

Cambridge, MA

On April 19, 1775, the war for American independence began at dawn on Lexington Green and spread down the road through Concord. The bloodiest hours came not in the morning volleys but during the British column's long, harried retreat toward Boston, when militia and townsmen fired from behind walls and houses along the route. Cambridge lay squarely on that path, and here four of its citizens fell to the retreating regulars. The city raised this monument in 1880 to mark the ground and keep their names — Isaac Gardiner, William Marcy, John Hicks, and Moses Richardson — from fading.

Phalba, TX

Established in 1848, this congregation is recognized as Texas's first Norwegian Lutheran church, rebuilding its sanctuary across the generations in 1854, 1875, 1941, and 1955. It marks one of the earliest footholds of Norwegian settlement in the state.

Freeport, TX

Four miles from this spot stood the original town of Velasco, one of early Texas's most consequential coastal sites. Here the schooner Lively landed the first immigrants to Stephen F. Austin's colony in 1821; here colonists and Mexican troops clashed in the 1832 Battle of Velasco, an early spark of Texan resistance; and here, in 1836, Presidents David G. Burnet and Santa Anna signed a peace treaty that Mexico never ratified. Few places hold so many turning points of the Texas Revolution in one stretch of shoreline.

Statesville, NC

Established around 1750 and settled on this site by 1756, Fourth Creek Meeting House was a Presbyterian congregation gathered by the Scots-Irish settlers who filled the North Carolina backcountry. The Rev. James Hall, a noted frontier educator and minister, served as its first regular pastor. The meeting house became a spiritual and civic heart of the early Statesville community.

Houston, TX

Founded as Watts Chapel in 1877 by the Rev. Henry Watts, a South Carolina native newly arrived in Houston, this congregation became Fourth Missionary Baptist Church in 1884 and repeatedly rebuilt after storm and fire. Under a father-and-son pastorate spanning decades, it grew into a leading institution offering a kindergarten, baby clinic, food programs, and low-income housing, while sending missions as far as Panama, Haiti, and the Philippines. In 1968 it became the first Black church to join the Union Baptist Association — a milestone in the integration of Texas churches.

Commerce, TX

In the 1880s a traveling Arkansas singing master named G. J. Oslin held a twenty-day music school here, and out of it grew a monthly singing "convention" that gathered voices from across the region. In the early years a tuning fork alone set the pitch until instruments could be obtained. The tradition, held on the fourth Sunday of each month, took root alongside the founding of the nearby village once known as Hoover's Gin.

Burkburnett, TX

In 1918, cotton farmers Shields and Cassie Fowler were ready to abandon their drought-stricken land near Burkburnett until Cassie suggested drilling for oil instead. With help from family, friends, and local merchants, they sank a well near their hog pen, and on July 26 the Fowler Discovery Well blew in, gushing some 2,500 barrels a day. It tapped the enormous Townsite Pool and set off four years of frenzied boomtown growth, with nearly 3,000 wells and several refineries crowding the area.

Salado, TX

In 1872, Tennessee settler Josiah Fowler raised this house in Salado, a Central Texas village that had grown up around Salado College and a busy stagecoach crossing on the road between Austin and points north. Fowler had served in the Confederacy, taught at the college level, and co-authored a widely used arithmetic textbook — a reminder that frontier towns like Salado prized education even in their earliest decades. The home earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Kaufman, TX

London-born physician Joseph Fox, who settled in early Kaufman County, set aside this ground as a burial place after his daughter Sarah became the first person laid to rest here in August 1852. Fox himself died in 1872, and many prominent pioneers of the young settlement are buried alongside him. Generations of descendants and friends have tended the grounds ever since.

New York, NY

In the mid-17th century, the Dutch village of Vlishing (today's Flushing, Queens) became an unlikely cradle of religious liberty in the American colonies. On June 7, 1672, George Fox, the English founder of the Society of Friends—the Quakers—preached to a gathering here beneath a stand of great oaks that later took his name. His visit strengthened a Quaker community that had already defied a ban on their worship, a stand of conscience remembered as part of Flushing's early fight for freedom of religion.

McKinney, TX

Built in 1915 by George W. and Lula Fox, this house reflects the Prairie School style then sweeping American design, with its low hipped roof, deep eaves, boxed rafters, and a wraparound porch echoing the horizontal lines above. George Fox, descended from a pioneer Collin County family, worked as a local Realtor and county official. In 1922 the prominent Caldwell family bought the home, giving it the second half of its name.

Foxburg, PA

In 1887 Joseph M. Fox made land available to the newly formed Foxburg Golf Club and served as its first president, laying out a course that expanded from five holes to nine the following year. The club leased the ground until the Foxburg Country Club bought it outright in 1924. It endures today as the oldest golf course in continuous use in the United States.

Marshall, TX

Built in 1896 in the American four-square style with colonial revival detailing, this Marshall home was raised for Clinton Virgil Fraley, a Kentucky-born Confederate soldier who had been captured and held in Union prisons during the Civil War. Fraley came to Marshall in 1866 and served the county as deputy sheriff, tax collector, and constable. In 1907 railroad worker Wiley E. Garland bought the house, and he and his wife ran it as a boardinghouse for more than fifty years.

Berkeley, CA

Completed in 1927, this Classical Revival hall was built by the Swedish-American Vasa Order as a lodge and cultural center for Berkeley's sizable community of Swedish immigrants. At the cornerstone laying, Prince William of Sweden urged the members to become "good Swedes but even better Americans." The Depression soon devastated the building trades many local Swedish-Americans worked in, and by 1932 the order had lost the hall it named Framåt — "forward looking."

Austin, TX

This state marker rests over the graves of Frances Lenoir McCulloch and her son Benjamin, mother and son of a family that gave two brigadier generals to the Confederacy. Benjamin McCulloch first fought as a private at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, helping win Texas independence, then became a noted Texas Ranger before rising to Confederate brigadier general. He was killed at the Battle of Elk Horn (Pea Ridge), Arkansas, in March 1862.

San Francisco, CA

This San Francisco marker commemorates Frances E. Willard, the reformer and educator who led the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and became, as the inscription notes, a pioneering "world organizer of women." Inspired during an 1883 visit to the city, she carried her vision of a united "world of tempted humanity" across the globe, building one of the largest women's organizations of the 19th century.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

In the decades before and after the Civil War, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was among the most widely read and widely heard Black voices in America—a poet, novelist, and traveling lecturer who took the abolitionist and, later, equal-rights cause to audiences across the country. From this Philadelphia home she wrote and organized, insisting that education was the surest road to advancement for Black Americans. Her work bridged the antislavery struggle and the reform movements of the later 19th century.

New York, NY

In the Conservatory Garden at the north end of Central Park stands a quiet bronze fountain honoring Frances Hodgson Burnett, the English-born American author whose children's books—most enduringly The Secret Garden—shaped generations of young readers. The fountain's two children, a boy playing a flute and a girl holding a bowl, echo Mary and Dickon from that beloved 1911 novel, set in a walled garden much like the one that surrounds them here. Dedicated in the 1930s after Burnett's death, the memorial was a gift meant for the children of the city, tying the author's imaginative world to a real public garden they could wander.

De Leon, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1849, Frances Marie Sparks married Thomas Brown in 1865 and moved to a 410-acre farm near here around 1876. Through the 1880s and 1890s, "Aunt Fanny" served as midwife and lay doctor, often riding six to eight miles by horseback in the dark to deliver a baby. After her husband's death in 1912 she managed the farm, raised twelve children, and kept nursing her neighbors to the end of her long life in 1934.

Homestead, PA · est. 2003

When Frances Perkins came to Homestead in July 1933 as the nation's first female cabinet secretary, local officials tried to silence her — barring her from meeting aggrieved steelworkers in a nearby park. Undaunted, the U.S. Secretary of Labor simply moved the gathering onto federal ground at the local post office, where free speech could not be denied. As the architect of much of the New Deal, including Social Security and wage-and-hour laws, Perkins served longer than any labor secretary in history.

Williamsport, PA · est. 2024

Raised in Williamsport, Frances Tipton Hunter became one of the most beloved commercial illustrators of the mid-20th century. Her warm, sentimental cover art of children and their pets graced The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and other national magazines during the golden age of American illustration. She also lent her brush to advertisements, calendars, puzzles, and the popular Little Busybodies paper dolls.

Santa Barbara, CA

The Franceschi House crowns a hillside in Santa Barbara, once home to Francesco Franceschi, an Italian-born horticulturist who arrived in the 1890s and transformed the region's gardens. He introduced hundreds of new plant species to Southern California, helping shape the lush, Mediterranean landscape the area is known for today. Though now closed to the public, the house and its surrounding park preserve his botanical legacy.

Edenton, NC

Francis Corbin served as an agent for Lord Granville, collecting quitrents and granting lands in the proprietor's sprawling North Carolina district, and also sat as a jurist and legislator. His heavy-handed land dealings helped provoke the 'Enfield Riot' of 1759, when angry settlers seized him over grievances about fraudulent fees and titles. His home was the elegant Cupola House, still standing two blocks south in Edenton.

Marin County, CA

On June 17, 1579, the English privateer Francis Drake — midway through his globe-circling voyage — put ashore somewhere on this Marin coast to repair his ship, the Golden Hind. He claimed the land for Queen Elizabeth I, naming it Nova Albion, or "New England." It was one of the earliest European encounters with the future California coast, generations before Spanish settlement.

Whitesburg, KY

Whitesburg honors Burdine native Francis Gary Powers (1929–1977), the CIA pilot whose high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union made him a Cold War symbol. On May 1, 1960, his aircraft was downed deep inside Russia; he parachuted to safety, was captured, tried for espionage, and freed in 1962 in a swap for a Soviet spy. He later died in a helicopter crash while working as a news pilot.

Hempstead, TX

North Carolina-born Francis Jarvis Cooke fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, joining the volunteer army that won Texas its independence, and lived until 1903. He is remembered here alongside his Tennessee-born wife, Emily Stockton Cooke, whose long life stretched into 1908. Their joined memory ties a veteran of the republic's founding fight to the family that carried on after him.

Port Arthur, TX

Frank Trost came to Port Arthur in 1895 and turned a photography hobby into a thriving studio at this site. On January 10, 1901, he rushed his cumbersome equipment to the Lucas Gusher at Spindletop and captured images of the erupting oil on a glass negative he made himself. The photograph ran in newspapers across the country and abroad, and demand was so intense he printed as many as 250 copies a day.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

In the early 1800s, Philadelphia was a center of American musical life, and Francis Johnson stood at its heart as a celebrated composer, bandleader, and virtuoso performer. Hailed in his day as a master of music, he led popular ensembles, played for the city's cavalry troop, and toured widely at a time when few Black musicians reached such prominence. His compositions and performances shaped the sound of early American concert and dance music.

Rowan County, NC

Colonel Francis Locke commanded the Patriot militia that routed a large Loyalist force at the Battle of Ramsour's Mill on June 20, 1780. Fought largely by neighbors on both sides, the battle broke Tory strength in the western Piedmont at a critical moment of the Revolution's Southern campaign. Locke's home stood nearby in Rowan County.

Milam, TX

Francis Marcus Weatherred was a Virginia-born frontiersman who fought in the Creek Indian War before joining the Texas War for Independence in 1836, the year the Republic of Texas was born. Arriving in Texas in 1835, he earned the coveted status of a Citizen of the Republic, and he and his wife Nancy settled in the piney woods of Sabine County near the Louisiana line. The state honored his service with this grave marker in 1962.

Texarkana, TX

Francis Marion Henry, a great-great-grandson of the Revolutionary orator Patrick Henry, served in the Confederate army before buying land in the young town of Texarkana around 1873. Elected to the Texas Senate in 1876, he built the city's first brick home, donated ground for a Methodist church, and spent 34 years as a leading trial lawyer of wide repute. When he died in 1911, every business in Texarkana closed in his honor.

Chatfield, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1830 and orphaned young, Francis Marion Martin led his adoptive family to Navarro County in 1853 and built a life as a horse breeder and farmer before entering politics under the wing of Sam Houston. A Confederate cavalry captain in poor health, he returned to public life after the war as a constitutional convention delegate and state senator, proudly styling himself a "farmer-senator." As the "Swamp Fox of Navarro," he championed farmers and laborers, drew significant African American support, served as lieutenant governor from 1883 to 1885, and later became a Populist leader.

Edna, TX

Francis Menefee White, born in Tennessee in 1811, took part in the 1835 capture of Bexar — the siege that drove Mexican forces from San Antonio in the opening months of the Texas Revolution. His grave marker, which also remembers his wife Rosanna, ties an ordinary volunteer to one of the war's first decisive victories. He lived on until 1897, long enough to see the frontier republic he fought for become part of the United States.

Douglas, MI

From about 1854 to 1863, this Francis metallic surfboat stood ready near the Saugatuck Lighthouse, one of only 137 such craft in the nation and 48 on the Great Lakes. Joseph Francis's corrugated-iron lifeboats were a genuine mid-19th-century innovation, deployed at remote stations to pull the drowning from wrecks before the U.S. Life-Saving Service was formally organized.