Search Markers

Jefferson, TX

Established in 1876, Frith-Jones Cemetery lies near Jefferson in the piney woods of East Texas, once a bustling riverport town. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2006, it preserves the graves of families from the Reconstruction-era community. The two family names it carries hint at the intertwined households that settled the surrounding land.

Independence, TX

Fritz Paul Schroeder built this one-and-a-half-story farmhouse in 1914 on land he bought from his stepfather, using locally sourced materials and the vernacular building traditions of his community. It stood in Sandy Hill, a rural settlement north of Brenham that at the time was made up entirely of German immigrants. The home reflects the close bond between builder, family, and the traditions of a German-Texan farming world.

New Ulm, TX

In 1926, Czech immigrants Jan Jindrich Frnka and his wife Cecilie set aside land near New Ulm for a family burial ground and placed it in the care of three trustees. The couple raised thirteen children, and all but one daughter are buried here alongside most of their spouses, beneath obelisks, curbed plots, and grave slabs. The cemetery still serves the family's descendants today.

Blue Ridge, TX

The Frognot community grew up around the Dixon consolidated school, founded in 1913 on land donated by Stephen Arnold Douglas Box, and its odd name spawned a whole folklore of frog-related theories—from a strict schoolmaster who banned pupils' captured frogs to residents supposedly wiping out a noisy frog population. General stores run by the McGuffeys and later the Dixons anchored community life, the Dixon Store hosting the founding of the local water supply corporation. Today only the school's concrete storm cellar survives.

Buffalo, NY

Standing in Buffalo's Front Park, overlooking the Niagara River that separates the United States from Canada, this memorial celebrates one of the world's longest peaceful borders. After the War of 1812 left the two nations bruised but eventually reconciled, the long, undefended boundary became a point of pride — a frontier guarded not by fortresses but by friendship. The monument was raised in the early twentieth century to mark roughly a century of unbroken peace between the two countries.

Montgomery, TX

Built in 1845 by Dr. E. J. Arnold, a settler from Connecticut, this is reckoned the oldest house in Montgomery, one of the early towns of the Republic of Texas era. An 1835 log cabin on the lot lived on as a doctor's office, and the home passed down for generations among the builder's Simonton descendants.

Edom, TX

The first burial here was nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Carolina Piles in May 1856, followed within days by her sister, on land owned by their father. Among the roughly 188 graves lie six Confederate veterans of the Civil War. Four acres were set aside for the cemetery in 1886 and doubled by a later gift, and an association tends the grounds today.

Bandera, TX

Built in 1933, this building houses the Western collection of J. Marvin Hunter, a historian, newspaperman, and author who had lived across the West before settling in Bandera. In 1923 he founded the magazine "Frontier Times," devoted to pioneer achievement and "border tragedy," and began gathering the relics that filled his museum — a project he financed by selling his own books. After his death the collection passed to a foundation that maintains it still.

Albany, TX

After the Civil War the U.S. Army built Fort Griffin above the Clear Fork of the Brazos in 1867, and a raucous town called "The Flat" sprang up below it. A stop on the buffalo-hide trade and the Western cattle trail, it drew merchants and soldiers alongside gamblers and gunfighters—Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Lottie Deno, and Big Nose Kate among them. When Albany won the county seat and the railroad, the town faded, though remnants lingered into the mid-20th century.

Leavenworth, KS

This marker notes Fort Leavenworth's designation as a Registered National Historic Landmark. Established in 1827 on the Missouri River, the fort was a key staging point for the westward-bound Santa Fe and Oregon Trails and the oldest continuously active U.S. Army post west of the Mississippi. For generations it guarded the frontier and outfitted expeditions pushing into the West.

Frost, TX

Frost sprang up in 1887 when a post office was established to serve settlements along the St. Louis, Arkansas, and Texas Railroad, drawing businesses from the older nearby community of Cross Roads. Named for county judge and legislator Samuel R. Frost on land donated by R. J. Sanders, the town incorporated in 1893 and quickly gained churches, schools, banks, and its own weekly newspaper. A 1930 tornado destroyed or damaged many of its buildings.

Frost, TX

A small band of about twenty Baptists, led by the Rev. H. A. Conway, organized this congregation in July 1890, at first gathering just once a month before building to weekly worship. Their first sanctuary went up the same year and was enlarged in 1906. A 1930 tornado — the same storm that devastated the town of Frost — destroyed the building, and the congregation rebuilt in brick, worshipping there until a new sanctuary rose in 1979.

Frost, TX

This Methodist congregation traces its origins to the 1860s at Cross Roads, a community a couple of miles south. After a railroad crossed Navarro County in 1887, both church and community relocated to the new rail town of Frost. A 1930 tornado that devastated the town destroyed the church building, and the congregation rebuilt this sanctuary in 1931, a symmetrical design with classical detailing, a central hipped roof, pedimented gable, and flanking pavilions.

Houston, TX

Frost Town grew up just east of the brand-new city of Houston on land owned by Jonathan Benson Frost, a veteran of Texas's war for independence who died of cholera barely a year after settling there. Subdivided by his brothers in 1838, it became one of Houston's earliest neighborhoods and drew successive waves of newcomers — German and Irish immigrants, railroad workers, freed people after the Civil War, and Mexican families in the twentieth century. Highways and industry eventually erased it, and today a city park marks where the community stood for more than a century.

Red Oak, TX

In 1882 Sam and Sarah Jane "Jennie" Fry bought 150 acres of Ellis County blackland prairie, and the next year raised a farmhouse with the help of local carpenter Lewis Butcher. Its turned-wood porch posts, jig-sawn brackets, and gabled roof made it a proud example of the Queen Anne style then fashionable even on Texas farms. The home stayed in the family for over a century, passing to Jennie's son George A. Butcher before finally leaving family hands in 1986.

Ladonia, TX

Abraham K. Fry bought this land in 1844, while Texas was still an independent republic, and built his home here a decade later on the eve of statehood's first generation. The homestead passed down within the Fry family, an unbroken line of ownership that the marker celebrated at the time of its dedication.

Marshall, TX

This raised Greek Revival cottage was built by Fidel Bircher on land sold to him in 1853 by its designer, W. R. D. Ward. In 1872 Edwin James Fry, a native Virginian who had come to Texas in 1855, bought the residence and enlarged it for his growing family; a leading businessman, banker, and Mason, Fry was active in Trinity Episcopal Church. After his death the home passed to his daughter Pamela and her husband, banker W. L. Barry, and it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1962.

Cherokee County, TX

A natural gap in a ridge near the headwaters of Gum Creek long guided travelers, including the Kickapoo, before the Fry family settled the creek in the 1840s. A small industrial hamlet grew up around Joseph Fry's grist mill and blacksmith shop and Rhome Ragsdale's brickyard, kiln, and cotton gin, and when the Texas & New Orleans Railway laid its line along the old trail in 1902, the depot became a shipping point for produce, lumber, and oilfield supplies. The community even hosted a traveling tent show each winter in the 1920s before fading away.

Frydek, TX

Czech immigrants began settling this part of Austin County in the 1850s, naming their new home Frydek after a town in their old country. When two of their number died in 1885 they were laid to rest on Jan Pavlicek's land, which he formally deeded to the church in 1890. A schoolhouse that also served as church and convent once stood here, and the cemetery endures as a quiet monument to the area's Czech heritage.

Wheeler, TX

Built in 1884 by 1877 settler Henry Frye, this native-stone home used windows and lumber hauled some 200 miles from Dodge City and boasted the first wood floors in the county. Frye had bought his land from a buffalo hunter who lived in a dugout, and from 1897 to 1909 the house served as the Frye Post Office, with mail coming out from Mobeetie. It stands as a rare early landmark of the Texas Panhandle frontier.

San Francisco, CA

Fort Point stands at the southern edge of the Golden Gate, a masonry fortress completed in 1861 to guard the entrance to San Francisco Bay just as the Civil War began. Its multi-tiered brick casemates were a marvel of 19th-century military engineering, and the American Society of Civil Engineers recognized it as a landmark in 1976. Though its guns never fired in anger, it symbolized the Union's determination to hold the gold-rich Pacific coast.

Warrenton, OR

On June 21, 1942, a 5.5-inch shell fired from the Japanese submarine I-25 exploded here, one of seventeen aimed at the Columbia River's coastal defenses at Fort Stevens. It was the only hostile shelling of a military base on the U.S. mainland during World War II and the first foreign attack on a mainland fort in over a century. The gunners at Fort Stevens, wary of revealing their positions, held their fire.

Horseshoe Bay, TX

The Republic of Texas granted this land to San Jacinto veteran Ferdinand Lueders, who transferred it in 1844 to the Rev. Adolph Fuchs, a German musician and composer who brought his wife Louise and seven children to Texas in 1845 and settled here in 1853. The first recorded burial came in 1869, and the wide-branching Fuchs family helped shape many area communities before the land finally left family hands in 1963. Adolph, Louise, and many descendants rest here.

Grand Prairie, TX

This ground lay within a 640-acre tract patented to Peters colonists Rowland and Anna Huitt in 1843; Rowland became Dallas County's second sheriff in 1847. The oldest marked grave dates to 1864, and among those buried are pioneer families, infants, and veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I, with the last burial in 1951. Named by tradition for the Fuget family, the cemetery has since 1949 been maintained by Navy personnel of the adjoining former air station.

Blairsville, PA · est. 2004

In April 1858, with the Fugitive Slave Act empowering federal marshals and Southern slave-catchers to reach deep into the free states, the people of Blairsville acted. They rescued a man named Newman from arrest, and local Black abolitionist Lewis Johnson—a conductor on the Underground Railroad—sheltered him. Indiana County had long been an important station on the secret routes north.

Newbury Township, OH

In the years after Ohio's 1803 statehood, settlers pushed into the forested Western Reserve of the state's northeast, and around 1821 Thomas Fuller established a small community along a reliable stream in what is now Geauga County. Water power was the engine of early frontier life, and Fullertown grew into a busy little milling hamlet where neighboring farmers brought grain to be ground and timber to be sawn. Like countless such water-powered settlements, it thrived while the mills turned and faded as roads, railroads, and larger towns drew commerce elsewhere.

Fulshear, TX

Oral tradition holds that this cemetery began as the burial ground for enslaved people on the plantation of Tennessee native Churchill Fulshear, making it one of the oldest African American sites in the area. Many early graves are unmarked, and the oldest surviving headstone, that of Rebecca Scott, dates to 1915. Those buried here include midwives, a chef, a horse trainer, founders of the community's first colored schoolhouse, business owners, religious leaders, and veterans from World War I through Vietnam, their graves marked in fieldstone, marble, homemade concrete, wood, and resin.

Fulshear, TX

This burial ground began on land granted in 1824 to Churchill Fulshear, Jr., one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old 300" colonists, part of which he gave to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1851. Known first as Union Chapel Cemetery, with its earliest recorded burial in 1850, it took the Fulshear name when a town grew up here in the 1890s. A church and school once stood on the grounds before the congregation moved into town in 1894.

Fulton, TX

Founded in 1867 by George Ware Fulton on the shore of Aransas Bay, the town of Fulton grew up around fishing and shipping, with schools, churches, and businesses following quickly. A one-room schoolhouse of 1886 was later repurposed as city hall, and in modern times tourism and commercial fishing and shrimping have carried the local economy. Fulton formally incorporated in 1978.

Walnut Springs, TX

First known as the Morgan Cemetery for Kentucky-born Daniel Morgan, who came to Texas in 1834 and served in the Civil War with the Texas State Troops, this burial ground sits along the eastern fork of the Bosque River. Its earliest marked grave dates to 1880, and oral tradition holds that railroad workers were buried here because of the nearby rail line. After the Morgan family sold out and left around 1906, the name changed to Fulton, honoring the trustees who took over the land.

Fulton, TX

Set aside in 1868 when George Ware Fulton platted the town, this community graveyard holds a poignant record of pioneer life — its earliest burial an infant, and its many children's graves testifying to the hard conditions of the coast. European immigrants, leading citizens, and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam rest here; a 1947 brush fire destroyed many of the early wooden markers.

Fulton, TX

In the years before fishing and tourism reshaped the Texas coast, tiny Fulton counted only about 200 residents who had to drive to Rockport just to attend Sunday worship. That changed in 1943 when a visiting Fort Worth preacher, Frank Walker, felt called to stay, resigned his position, and organized a congregation; members raised a sanctuary the next year. The nondenominational church grew into a civic anchor for the fishing community and still serves the surrounding coast today.

McConnellsburg, PA · est. 1982

Established from Bedford County in 1850, Fulton County honors Robert Fulton, the Pennsylvania-born pioneer of the steamboat. Its seat, McConnellsburg, was incorporated in 1814 in the ridges of south-central Pennsylvania. During the Civil War the county saw the first casualties of the Confederacy's Gettysburg Campaign, and in 1864 it hosted the last Confederate campsite on Pennsylvania soil.

Fulton, TX

Built between 1874 and 1877 by cattle-empire partner George Ware Fulton and his wife Harriet, this imposing three-story residence on the Texas coast was named "Oakhurst." A striking example of the French Second Empire style, its plank-wall construction, shell-aggregate concrete basement, and mansard roof housed remarkably modern comforts for its day — central heating, ventilation, indoor plumbing, and gas lighting. The Fulton family lived here until 1895.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1952

When Fulton Hall rose in Lancaster in 1852, it honored native son Robert Fulton, the painter-turned-engineer whose steamboat had transformed American travel. The hall soon became one of the finest theaters of its age, and for three-quarters of a century its stage drew the leading actors and touring stars of the American theatre. It survives as a rare and elegant survivor of the 19th-century 'Opera House' tradition.

Fulton, TX

In 1947 a runaway agricultural brush fire tore through Fulton, leaping the highway from Copano Village to burn homes, businesses, and ancient live-oak groves. Shaken residents resolved to protect themselves, and in 1948 fifteen men founded the Fulton Volunteer Fire Department, meeting in the schoolhouse and running a 1937 Ford truck donated by Rockport. Sustained for decades by community donations and the annual Oysterfest, the volunteers still serve their Gulf Coast town.

Rockport, TX

Built around 1868 on the Aransas County coast, this vernacular Texas home blends Greek Revival lines with Italianate porch details and oversized dormers. Business and civic leader James C. Fulton bought it in 1872, and in 1907 it passed to his son-in-law Albert L. Bruhl, a pharmacist and three-term mayor of Rockport. The house stayed in the Bruhl family for more than eighty years.

Clarendon, TX

For over a century this site has held a funeral home serving a wide stretch of the Texas Panhandle. Kentucky native Pleasant Andrew Buntin brought his family to Texas in 1879 and, after the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad reached Clarendon, established the business here in 1899—one of the earliest in the region. His son Fred, trained at the Dallas School of Embalming, carried it on, and the family conducted burials across several counties, including that of famed rancher Charles Goodnight in the 1920s.

Anderson, TX

This family burial ground honors the Ephraim Fuqua family, among the earliest settlers in this part of Grimes County. Fuqua secured a land patent from the young Republic of Texas in 1841 and set aside part of it for a cemetery, whose first recorded grave belongs to a Confederate soldier who died in 1862. Generations of the family rest here, including veterans of the Spanish-American War and both world wars.

Carrollton, TX

Furneaux Cemetery began in 1884 when English immigrant William Furneaux, who had come to Texas in 1857 and married into a Peters Colony family, was buried on farmland he had set aside as a public graveyard. A neighbor soon donated adjoining land for a church, a cemetery association was chartered in 1888, and the surrounding heights became known as Cemetery Hill. When a 1924 tornado destroyed the frame church, the association took over the grounds.

Teague, TX

In 1933, at the depths of the Depression, trustees of the Busby and Grove Island schools joined forces to create a single district for African-American children in western Freestone County. On land acquired from the Albert Wright family, the campus opened that fall—named for its first superintendent, Furney Richardson—offering classes through high school, and a small rural community of businesses grew up around it. A leading Black school for decades, it lost its high school to Teague in 1958 and fully merged a decade later, after which the schoolhouse lived on as a community and reunion center.

El Paso, TX

This deep cut through the Franklin Mountains has funneled people, goods, and animals between river valley and desert basin for centuries, and long served Native Americans as a source of seasonal water, plants, and game. It takes its name from Texas Ranger and U.S. Deputy Marshal Charles Fusselman, killed here in an 1890 gunfight while pursuing cattle rustlers. The outlaw leader, Geronimo Parra, eluded capture for a decade before being tried and hanged in El Paso in 1900.

Boling, TX

Built in 1909, this was the oldest home in Boling, a town founded in 1900 along the new Wharton–Palacios rail line. G. C. Mick, a Missouri wheat and stock farmer, arrived in Texas aboard a promotional 'Rice Special' excursion train in 1903; his son A. C. Mick designed the mansard-roofed house, built by Cuban carpenters, whose emergency bell and sturdy frame made it a hurricane refuge for neighbors.

Jacksboro, TX

G. D. Cross, born in Arkansas in 1855, rode with a Texas Ranger company in the mid-1870s during the violent frontier campaigns that pushed Native peoples out of North Texas. He later settled into ordinary life as a merchant and farmer, raising thirteen children with his wife Mary. In his memory of those ranging days, he built a picnic table on the very ground where his unit had once camped, turning a former military bivouac into a gathering place for family reunions.

Livingston, TX

Raised in 1895 from long-leaf pine with cypress siding, this East Texas home is a fine example of Victorian domestic architecture, complete with handmade gingerbread trim. Such ornamented frame houses were a point of pride in prosperous small towns during the Gilded Age, showcasing the skill of local carpenters and the reach of the region's timber industry.

Gainesville, TX

George Henry Ragsdale came from Tennessee to Cooke County in 1867 and served three terms as county surveyor, but his lasting fame came from a self-taught mastery of natural history. An expert in birds, small mammals, fossils, and geology, he gathered hundreds of specimens and eggs, sold and donated many to the Smithsonian Institution, and published dozens of articles, even writing a natural-history column for the Gainesville Hesperian. Contemporaries honored him by naming a fossil oyster and a snail in his name.

West Chester, PA · est. 2002

In a converted auto repair shop in West Chester, chemist G. Raymond Rettew solved one of World War II's most urgent problems: how to make penicillin in quantity. Working with Wyeth Laboratories in 1943, his lab produced and shipped more of the new antibiotic to the armed forces than any other in the world. The drug that had been a laboratory curiosity became a battlefield lifesaver.

Waco, TX

Opened in 1956, G. W. Carver High School educated some 500 African American children of the La Vega district and honored the famed scientist and educator George Washington Carver. Its students excelled, and in 1967 its award-winning marching band traveled to Montreal's Expo '67 and carried home the grand prize as champion American high school band. The school closed in 1970 when federal courts ordered integration, then lived on as a community center, special-education site, and finally a neighborhood school.

Crosbyton vicinity, TX

This house was built in 1914 for the eldest son of Hank Smith, remembered as the first settler of the South Plains of West Texas. Its plain shiplap construction—three rooms on each side of a central hall—was later dressed up in 1936 with a veneer of rock hauled from a nearby canyon. It stands as a marker of a family that helped open one of the last stretches of the Texas frontier to settlement.

Middlebury, VT

This cannon was presented in 1910 by the U.S. Government to W. P. Russell Post No. 89 of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Vermont department of the great fraternal order of Union Civil War veterans. In the decades after the war, aging veterans gathered in G.A.R. posts across the North to keep faith with fallen comrades, and the federal government issued surplus ordnance to adorn their memorials. The gun stands as a tangible link between a small Vermont town and the armies that preserved the Union.

Aransas Pass, TX

Along the Texas Gulf Coast, the small port of Aransas Pass grew up around the bounty of its bays. This marker honors G.E. "Bill" Minter, who in 1913 launched a commercial shrimping operation that would help define the town's identity. Weathering devastating hurricanes and the financial collapse of 1929, he helped turn seasonal fishing into a year-round industry that anchored the local economy for generations.

Gloucester Township, NJ

The Gabrial Davies Tavern preserves one of the older buildings in the Gloucester Township area of colonial New Jersey, when a tavern was far more than a place to drink. Roadside taverns served as inns, courtrooms, meeting halls, and news exchanges for travelers moving through the young colony. This surviving structure carries the name of the family long associated with it.

Liberty Hill, TX

When Samuel Mather built a gristmill on the North San Gabriel River in 1852, a small community took root around it—complete with a store, a post office, and a log cabin that doubled as church, school, and lodge. Under later owner W. L. Brizendine the mill added a cotton gin, and the village of Gabriel Mills thrived on the traffic of area farmers. But when the Austin & Northwestern Railroad bypassed it in 1881, the town slowly withered, its post office closing in 1905 and its buildings gone by the 1920s.

Village of Malverne, NY

Gaddis Park honors Hamilton S. Gaddis (1891–1965), who served as mayor of the Village of Malverne from 1933 to 1941, guiding this Long Island village — served by the Long Island Rail Road — through the depths of the Great Depression. In 1971 the incorporated village dedicated the park and its flagpole in his memory. It is a hometown tribute that turned a patch of green into a small monument to civic service.

Alpine, TX

Raised in 1866 in what would become Alpine, this house is one of the oldest survivors in the vast, sparsely settled Big Bend country of far West Texas. It passed through a series of early owners—among them the Gage and Van Sickle families whose names it now carries—men who staked their futures on this remote and rugged frontier.

Canadian, TX

As settlers filtered into this corner of the Texas Panhandle around 1900, the little community of Gageby took shape with a school and other services. A local couple donated three acres for a cemetery in 1944, and the husband, who died soon after, became its first burial. The ground holds the teachers, veterans, and civic leaders who anchored the community.

Galveston, TX

Italian immigrant San Giacinto 'Cinto' Gaido opened a sandwich shop at Seawall and 23rd Street in 1911, and by 1920 it had become Galveston's first year-round seafront restaurant, famous for the fresh seafood his customers wanted. His son Mike and daughter-in-law Kewpie, both civic leaders, carried it on, and in 1962 Gaido's became one of Galveston's first restaurants to integrate. Generations of the family still run the business today.

Borden, TX

Here in 1872 Gail Borden — surveyor, newspaperman, and the inventor who perfected a process for condensing milk — built a beef-canning plant and his own residence, running the operation until his death in 1874. Borden's condensed-milk patent had already transformed how food could be preserved and shipped, feeding armies and cities alike. The plant that stood on this spot was demolished in 1885, but it marks the late-career venture of one of 19th-century America's most consequential food inventors.

Elgin, IL

The Gail Borden Public Library in Elgin, Illinois, carries the name of Gail Borden Jr., the inventor whose condensed-milk process transformed the American food industry. Founded in the era of civic library-building that swept the country around 1900, it reflects a community's investment in free public learning. The library ties a river-mill town to one of the nineteenth century's notable inventors.

Galveston, TX

On this Galveston site stood the home of Gail Borden, Jr., surveyor, newspaper editor, and restless inventor, who lived here from 1837 to 1851. It was here in 1840 that he began the experiments leading to his process for condensing milk — a breakthrough that would transform food preservation and feed armies and cities for generations. Borden embodied the inventive energy of early Texas even as his work reached far beyond it.