Search Markers

Boiling Springs, NC

Gardner-Webb began in 1905 as Boiling Springs High School, a Baptist institution founded to bring education to the rural North Carolina foothills. It grew into a junior college in 1928 and achieved university status in 1993.

Carson City, NV

From 1870 to 1918 this site held the ornate two-story home of Matthew Culbertson Gardner, rancher and lumberman, headquarters of his 300-acre ranch in the meadows to the south. Alongside it stood the Carson-Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company's great lumberyard, and through the 1870s and 1880s Gardner logged south of Lake Tahoe—building the only standard-gauge logging railroad in the Tahoe Basin. Gardner died in 1908, and fire consumed the house in 1918, leaving only old shade trees behind.

Douglas County, NV

Gardnerville grew up after 1879 on John M. Gardner's homestead, serving farmers and teamsters who hauled produce to the booming mining camp of Bodie. Where nearby Genoa had drawn British and Mormon settlers, Gardnerville became a hub for Danish immigrants, who founded the Valhalla Society in 1885. From 1898 onward, Basque shepherds from Spain and France tended tens of thousands of sheep in Carson Valley, and Basque-run inns later flourished through Prohibition.

Indianapolis, IN

At the turn of the 20th century, electric streetcars stitched American cities together, and destinations like Indianapolis's Garfield Park—one of the city's oldest public parks—were popular stops for weekend excursions. Riders waiting for the next car sheltered in small trackside pavilions built for the purpose. This structure survives as a tangible relic of the streetcar age, before the automobile reshaped how city dwellers moved and played.

Garland, TX

Garland grew from a cluster of 1840s prairie settlements around Duck Creek, where a single log cabin once served as school, church, and community hall. When two competing railroads laid tracks through the area in the 1880s, rival depot towns sprang up until a compromise post office site — named for U.S. Attorney General A. H. Garland — merged them into one incorporated city in 1891. The town weathered the Depression and boomed industrially after World War II.

Annona, TX

Joseph and Martha Wagley came from Louisiana to Red River County in 1833, part of the wave of settlers moving into the young Republic of Texas's borderlands. Their family burial ground took shape here before the Civil War, in which Joseph served the Confederacy and lost a son. After Joseph sold the land to the Garland family in 1866 the cemetery took on their name, and by 1914 it passed to the Methodist church, which with the Annona community still tends it today.

Garland, TX

In 1873 Masons in the pioneer community of Duck Creek won a dispensation to form their own lodge, only to lose their first shared hall to a windstorm in 1874. Chartered permanently in 1875, the lodge met in schoolhouses, churches, and members' homes before building successive halls as Duck Creek and Embree merged into Garland. Renamed Garland Lodge No. 441 in 1903, it counted ten future mayors among its members.

Newton County, TX

Benjamin Garlington earned the land that became this burial ground as a bounty for his service as a private and musician in the Mississippi Militia during the War of 1812. He later ministered to Newton County and neighboring Louisiana parishes as a Primitive Baptist preacher. He and his wife lie here alongside an unidentified laborer who worked for them and several others whose names are now lost.

Uvalde, TX

Established in July 1941 and named for Texas native and former Vice President John Nance Garner, this field trained pilots on the eve of and throughout World War II. Civilian instructors under Army Air Corps officers taught cadets to fly PT-19A trainers; men and women worked as mechanics and parachute packers, and later classes drew cadets from across the Americas and as far as Turkey. After deactivation in 1945 the runways became a city airport and the remaining buildings opened as Southwest Texas Junior College in 1946.

Lancaster, KY

Garrard County, the 25th formed in Kentucky, was created in 1797 and named for James Garrard, then the state's governor. A Virginia native and Revolutionary War militia officer, Garrard came to Kentucky in 1783 and helped shape its path to statehood at the Danville conventions before serving as governor from 1796 to 1804.

Frankfort, KY

This early nineteenth-century Frankfort house is notable for its unusual construction—timbers infilled with brick and mortar and sheathed in clapboard, a technique rarely seen in central Kentucky. Over the years it was owned by prominent families, including those of Thomas L. Crittenden and James Garrard. The Commonwealth acquired the property in 1973.

Lampasas, TX

Garrison Greenwood (1799–1859) left Illinois and arrived in 1833 — when Texas was still part of Mexico — traveling with the wagon train of Baptist leader Daniel Parker. He served as a ranger in the Republic of Texas, helped found Fort Houston in present Anderson County, and set up a Ranger post on the Trinity River. In 1836 he led settlers fleeing eastward ahead of Santa Anna's army in the great "Runaway Scrape," then lived out his days as a Texas farmer and father of fourteen.

Houston, TX

Cotton broker John W. Garrow commissioned this house in 1913 as the seventh home built in Houston's exclusive Courtlandt Place enclave. Designed by noted architect Birdsall P. Briscoe, it is a fine example of the Italian Renaissance style fashionable in America between 1890 and 1935. The Garrow family lived here until 1944, leaving a landmark of early-twentieth-century Houston prosperity.

Baltimore, MD

Born Thomas Garrison Morfit in Baltimore, Garry Moore became one of the friendly faces of early American television, hosting popular variety and panel programs like I've Got a Secret and The Garry Moore Show. In the 1950s and 1960s, as TV entered living rooms across the country, his easygoing style helped define the new medium.

Fort Worth, TX

This lot began as part of the Foster family's holdings and, in 1884, gained a modest one-story cottage built by William and Lula Garvey after their move from Kentucky. By the late 1890s they had expanded it into the exuberant two-story Queen Anne seen today, complete with turrets, dormers, and wrap-around porches — fitting for Samuels Avenue, then the address of Fort Worth's wealthiest families. After passing through the Veihl family, the house survived abandonment and a brush with condemnation in the 1970s.

Dallas, TX

This burial ground holds the pioneer families who settled early Dallas County, with graves reaching back to the 1870s. Prominent merchants and attorneys—James Garvin and the Crawford brothers—donated the land to the community. Among those resting here are Civil War veterans, including Col. Pleasant Swor, who led an assault at the Battle of Corinth.

Garwood, TX

Garwood sits on land granted in 1827 to Preston Gilbert, one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old 300" colonists. In 1896 a lawyer-legislator, a merchant-banker, and a druggist-sheriff bought part of Gilbert's league as a farming venture, and by 1901 they had dug canals, launched rice production, and platted a town they named for a friend who never lived there. Rice has anchored the community's economy ever since, joined over the years by gravel, oil and gas, and waterfowl hunting.

Clifton, TX

South Carolinians William and Rutha Gary brought their family west and settled here by 1852, when the land still belonged to McLennan County. When Bosque County was formed in 1854, William Gary became one of its first five commissioners, and several Garys voted in its first election. The couple's graves, William's in 1855 and Rutha's in 1868, became the seed of a small family and community cemetery that filled slowly until the last burial in 1932.

Tyler, TX

In 1907 school officials bought two acres from Horace Chilton and the next year raised an eight-room stone schoolhouse, naming it for early settler and education advocate Franklin N. Gary. The original building gave way to a new structure in 1924, with further additions as enrollment grew. Generations of Tyler students passed through its classrooms, many going on to lead the community, and the school still serves the public today.

Post, TX

Created on paper in 1876 and attached to Borden County until it could stand on its own, Garza County was finally organized on July 8, 1907, at the OS Ranch — where, by local legend, even the horses "voted" to reach the 75 ballots required. The first court convened under a tent before the first courthouse was built in 1908, and this marker honors the pioneer men elected its first officials.

Post, TX

This West Texas county carries the name of the Garza family, among the Canary Islanders who helped settle San Antonio in 1731—the first organized civil colony in Spanish Texas. Long open cattle range after its own settlement, the county turned to farming after 1910 and welcomed textile mills in 1912, with the town of Post serving as its seat.

Post, TX

Garza County was created in 1876 but not formally organized until 1907, at the urging of cereal magnate C. W. Post. As cotton fueled the region's growth, citizens funded a new courthouse in 1922, hiring Amarillo architect Guy Carlander. Completed in 1923 in reinforced concrete with brick and cast-stone detailing, it stands as a late but fine example of Prairie School design on the Texas plains.

Justiceburg, TX

After a string of failures from 1911 to 1919, Garza County's first producing oil well came in on the J.M. Boren property near Justiceburg in 1926, drilled by the Phelps, Caldwell and Blackwell Oil Company. That single well produced 1,641 barrels before being abandoned in 1932, the same year four more wells came in south of Post and a refinery rose nearby. The county's fields would eventually yield more than 85 million barrels.

Post, TX

Excavated in a 1959 highway salvage dig, this archeological site gave its name to the Garza point—a thin, finely worked triangular arrowhead with a notched base and serrated edges. Alongside the points, archeologists found more than two hundred artifacts around ancient cooking hearths: bone awls, wolf-tooth pendants, tubular beads, knives, scrapers, and drills. The Garza people who left them were roving hunters who camped here before 1500 A.D.

Floresville, TX

This burial ground is one of three that served the old Lodi Settlement, and most of those laid to rest here were Tejanos—Texans of Mexican descent. The earliest known grave, that of Polonio Garcia, dates to 1883, and the cemetery also holds veterans across generations of American wars, from Civil War soldier Juan de la Garza to World War I veterans Vicente Garza and Jesus Valdez. Its crosses, Spanish-language grave slabs, and brick enclosure—laid in bricks like those of the Wilson County Courthouse—still mark an active, living memorial.

Quitaque, TX

Cotton farmers began settling this High Plains area in 1903, and a new water well in 1906 drew still more. With the nearest gin ten miles away in Turkey, three partners bought a gasoline-powered engine and built their own gin here, ginning the first bale in April 1907. The gin gave rise to a town literally named Gasoline, which withered after the railroad bypassed it in 1927; the gin itself burned in 1938.

San Mateo County, CA

This marker records where the expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá camped twice in the autumn of 1769, during Spain's first overland push into Alta California. Sent north from San Diego in search of Monterey Bay, the party of soldiers, priests, and muleteers instead stumbled upon San Francisco Bay, reshaping the map of the Pacific coast. Their trek opened the road for the chain of missions and presidios that would define Spanish California.

Henderson, TX

An oil boom in the early 1930s swelled the local population and prompted formation of the Gaston Independent School District in 1931. Dallas architects designed an elementary and two-story high school, completed with a football field in 1932, and the campus grew through the decade with a gymnasium, auditorium, cafeteria, and shop, its native-stone landscaping finished by the WPA. Students went on to win regional titles and honors—including a Rhodes Scholarship—before the district merged into West Rusk County ISD in 1965.

Gonzales, TX

The Gates family came to Texas as part of Stephen F. Austin's original colony, and this cemetery sits on land granted to Samuel H. Gates for service in the Texas War for Independence. The first burial, in 1863, was his son Samuel A., a Confederate soldier who died soon after returning from imprisonment at Vicksburg; another son, Joseph Dillard Gates, served in one of Texas's first Confederate units before a career in county affairs. A later descendant taught on Indian reservations and helped organize the cemetery association.

Plainview, TX

Gates Hall was the original administration building of Wayland Baptist College, raised in 1909–1910 in the young town of Plainview. The land came from Dr. J.H. Wayland, a physician who settled here in 1891 and lent the college his name. The hall itself honors the school's first president, Dr. I.E. Gates, in whose term it was built.

Port Arthur, TX

John Warne "Bet a Million" Gates, an Illinois-born financier famed for promoting barbed wire, helped drive the early growth of Port Arthur after the coastal oil boom drew him in around 1900. A major backer of the company that became Texaco, he funded a business college, hospital, and hotel, and in 1909 set aside land for a public library. His plans stalled after his death in 1911, but his widow Dellora and local citizens saw the library completed and dedicated in 1917–18.

Port Arthur, TX

The financier and philanthropist John W. Gates set aside this Port Arthur land for a public library, and after his death in 1911 his widow Dellora saw the project through to completion in 1917. Designed by the prestigious New York firm Warren & Wetmore — architects of Grand Central Terminal — the Classical Revival building brought big-city refinement to a Gulf Coast industrial town. Deeded to the city in 1918, it now serves as part of Lamar University at Port Arthur.

Gatesville, TX

Gatesville became the seat of newly created Coryell County in 1854, on a townsite donated by Indian trader Richard Grant and named for the nearby Old Fort Gates (1849–1852), a post established for protection against Native raids. The town grew slowly amid intermittent raids until a period of strong progress from 1870 to 1882, capped when the St. Louis & Southwestern railroad ran a spur line in 1882 to a jubilant public welcome. With the railroad came new homes, businesses, and even a frontier opera house.

Covington, TX

Founded around 1860 by Covington's founder Col. James Gathings and his brother Philip, Gathings College drew over 200 students and added a military department to prepare young men for Civil War service. While most of Confederate Texas's twenty-five colleges shuttered for want of teachers and books, this one stayed open—sustained by Gathings's mills, tannery, and workshops. He gave flour, meat, and shoes to soldiers' needy families and outfitted army units at his own expense.

Kerrville, TX

When crews built the Spur 98 bridge over the Guadalupe River in 2004, they uncovered an extraordinary Native American site with stone tools and projectile points older than 7,500 years—predating Egypt's earliest dynasties. For thousands of years, small bands of hunter-gatherers returned to these banks to harvest fruits, nuts, and roots and to hunt bison, deer, and rabbit, cooking in limestone ovens they built themselves. Radiocarbon dating shows people camped here across more than six millennia in a cooler, wetter Edwards Plateau.

Key West, FL

Eduardo H. Gato built this Key West cigar factory in 1916, replacing an earlier wood-frame factory that had burned on the same site. Its Neo-Classical Revival design and poured-concrete construction, built around a large central courtyard, reflected the booming cigar trade that made Key West a manufacturing powerhouse. Cuban immigrants and their skilled hands drove the industry that filled such factories.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

Beginning on July 4, 1965, activists gathered each year at Independence Hall in orderly, dress-coded pickets demanding equality for gay and lesbian Americans — among the earliest sustained public demonstrations of their kind. These "Annual Reminders" ran through 1969, the same year as New York's Stonewall uprising, and helped turn a small campaign into a national civil rights movement soon marked by the first Pride parades. The choice of Independence Hall pointedly claimed the nation's founding ideals.

Hillsboro, TX

German immigrant Charles Gebhardt opened Hillsboro's first bakery in 1901 and moved it into this handsome brick building when it was finished in 1905, living with his family on the second floor. The structure blends Romanesque and Italianate touches, with arched upper windows, decorative brickwork, and corner turrets. After its baking days, the building housed millinery and barber shops.

Sublime, TX

Near this spot stood Strunksville, a hamlet of store, saloon, and gin founded by German settler Diedrich Strunk in 1854. In 1868 Pastor Christoph Geiger—trained at the Basel mission and sent to gather scattered frontier congregations—organized a Lutheran church here, and the community began burying its dead in the adjoining cemetery. The congregation's church was later dismantled and hauled by oxcart to Sublime in 1905, but families still return to tend one of the area's oldest graveyards, a last remnant of a vanished town.

Washoe County, NV

In the boom decades of Nevada's Comstock Lode, the Geiger Grade Toll Road carried silver-rush traffic between the mines of Virginia City and the ranches of the Truckee Meadows, and Geiger's Station was its busiest stop. With a toll house, blacksmith shops, barns, corrals, and the Magnolia House inn, it was a crossroads of freight outfits, stagecoaches, and weary teamsters. When the Virginia & Truckee Railroad reached Reno in 1872, the toll road faded, but the inn kept hosting travelers and dances until 1915.

Milam, TX

Robert and Nancy Agnes Gellatly left Dundee, Scotland, in the mid-1830s and crossed the Atlantic to the young Republic of Texas, bringing their son and Nancy's father, William Sturrock, with them. Robert earned a land grant for his service in the Republic's army and went on to hold nearly every office Sabine County had to offer — justice of the peace, sheriff, tax collector, and chief justice. The family cemetery began in sorrow in 1863 with the death of their daughter Anna, and four generations of Gellatlys now rest here.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1931

Raised in 1741 as Bethlehem's first house of worship, the Gemein Haus stood at the heart of the Moravians' remarkable communal experiment in colonial Pennsylvania. Its rooms sheltered a roll call of Moravian leaders — including the reforming Count Zinzendorf — and hosted the community's celebrated 1749 "Great Wedding." Most strikingly, it housed a school devoted to studying and teaching Indigenous languages, part of the Moravians' unusual missionary engagement with Native peoples of the region.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953

Built in 1741, the Gemeinhaus was the beating heart of the new Moravian settlement at Bethlehem, its second floor serving as the community's first place of worship. In 1742 Count von Zinzendorf, the Moravians' patron and leader, kept his quarters here while directing the church's ambitious missionary work in America. Through the colonial and Revolutionary years its rooms hosted conference after notable conference, making this log building a center of religious and civic life on the Pennsylvania frontier.

Austin, TX

Born in Virginia in 1827, Alexander Watkins Terrell came to Texas in 1852 and served as a district judge before the Civil War, then rose to brigadier general in the Confederate army by 1865. In the decades after the war he became one of the state's most influential public men—serving thirty years in the Texas Legislature and, in the 1890s, as U.S. Minister to Turkey. He died at Mineral Wells in 1912.

Farmville, NC

Allen Hal Turnage (1891–1971), born in Farmville, rose to command the U.S. Marine Corps Third Division in the Pacific during World War II. He led its assaults on Bougainville and Guam in 1943–44 and was awarded the Navy Cross for his leadership. He was born just southeast of this marker.

Norristown, PA · est. 1949

Andrew Porter, born near this spot in 1743, served as an officer during the Revolutionary War and then turned his talents to mapping the young state, surveying Pennsylvania's western and northern boundaries between 1784 and 1787. He capped his career as the commonwealth's Surveyor-General from 1809 until his death in Harrisburg in 1813. His home, "Selma," is marked a block away.

Georgetown, KY

Scott County native Basil W. Duke (1838–1916) served the Confederacy as the trusted lieutenant and brother-in-law of John Hunt Morgan, giving discipline and dash to the famed 2nd Kentucky Cavalry. Twice wounded in 1862 and captured during the 1863 Indiana–Ohio raid, he later took command of Morgan's brigade and helped escort Jefferson Davis in the war's final weeks. Afterward he practiced law in Louisville, entered politics, and wrote the History of Morgan's Cavalry.

Exeter, NH

This spot in Exeter marks the home of Enoch Poor, a New Hampshire merchant and shipbuilder who rose to become a brigadier general in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. From this seacoast town he helped rally New Hampshire's men to the Patriot cause, leading troops through the hard campaigns of the war before his death in 1780. Exeter itself served as New Hampshire's revolutionary-era capital, making it a fitting home for one of the state's most trusted field commanders.

Hempstead vicinity, TX

In the uneasy months after the Civil War, the U.S. sent a large force into Texas to restore order and to counter French-backed forces in Mexico. From August to October 1865, George Armstrong Custer and his cavalry — with his wife Elizabeth, "Libbie" — camped on the Liendo plantation of Leonard Groce, heir to "Old 300" cotton baron Jared Groce. Custer's insistence that his troops respect Texans and their property helped keep relations with local families cordial.

Austin, TX

George W. Terrell arrived in Texas in 1840, during the brief life of the independent Republic of Texas, and rose almost at once to its highest offices — associate justice of its Supreme Court, Secretary of State, and Attorney General. As chargé d'affaires he carried the young nation's case to the courts of England, France, and Spain in 1844–45, the very years annexation to the United States was being decided. He died in Austin in 1846, months after Texas became a state.

Greenville, TX

Erected in 1885–1887 for the pioneer Harrison family, this was the first two-story brick house in Greenville, built in a typical Victorian style with brick fired at the nearby "Puddin' Hill" farm. That land had been settled by the Horton family in 1846, and in 1929 Hal C. Horton—an Army colonel and National Guard general—bought and remodeled the house using walnut from the old homestead. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1969.

York, PA · est. 1949

In 1778, while the Continental Congress sat in nearby York, General Horatio Gates—hero of the American victory at Saratoga and then President of the Board of War—kept his residence here. It was a fraught moment: the so-called "Conway Cabal," a murky swirl of criticism aimed at General Washington's leadership, was said to have unraveled in these rooms, thwarted in part by the young Marquis de Lafayette's steadfast loyalty to the commander-in-chief.

New York, NY

In the autumn of 1776, the British had just captured New York City and turned nearby Staten Island into a major staging ground, its shores watched across the narrow tidal waters of the Arthur Kill from New Jersey. Hugh Mercer—a Scottish-born physician who became one of Washington's most trusted generals—commanded American forces in the region and pressed the kind of swift, small-scale raids that kept a larger enemy off balance. This spot marks one such strike: patriots crossing from Perth Amboy fell upon the enemy by surprise, carrying off prisoners along with captured weapons and ammunition. Mercer would be mortally wounded only months later at the Battle of Princeton, sealing his place among the Revolution's early martyrs.

Mount Carmel, PA · est. 2001

A coal-town boy from Mount Carmel, James M. Gavin rose to become one of the most admired combat leaders of World War II. As a commander in the 82nd Airborne Division he jumped with his paratroopers into Sicily, Salerno, Normandy, and Holland, helping prove that airborne assault could reshape modern warfare. He went on to hold senior Cold War commands, retired as a lieutenant general in 1958, and served as U.S. Ambassador to France under President Kennedy.

Independence, TX

James Willie was a Georgia-born lawyer who rose in the young state of Texas to become its Attorney General in 1856–57, helping shape the legal footing of a state barely a decade removed from its own republic. When secession came, he cast his lot with the Confederacy, serving as an officer until his death in Houston in 1863. His life traces the arc from antebellum statecraft to the Civil War that consumed it.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

General John Armstrong lived on this site and earned lasting fame as the "Hero of Kittanning" for his 1756 raid on a Delaware stronghold during the French and Indian War. He went on to serve as a Revolutionary officer, a member of the Continental Congress, and a county judge, dying in Carlisle in 1795 and resting in the Old Graveyard two blocks south. His long career spanned the frontier wars and the founding of the nation.

Paducah, KY

This heroic statue honors General Lloyd Tilghman, a Maryland-born engineer who laid out the first railroad to reach Paducah before casting his lot with the Confederacy in 1861. He was killed leading troops near Vicksburg in May 1863. His sons and the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected the monument in 1909, sculpted by the noted Boston artist Henry H. Kitson.

O'Hara Township, PA · est. 1999

Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway commanded the 82nd Airborne Division during its World War II campaigns, including the invasion of Sicily, before leading the XVIII Airborne Corps into the war's final year. In 1951 he took over United Nations forces in Korea and soon rose to supreme Allied commander in Europe and then Army Chief of Staff, where he cautioned against reliance on massive nuclear retaliation. In 1989 the Ridgway International Peace Shrine was dedicated here in his honor.

Canadian, TX

In the winter of 1874–75, the U.S. Army swept the Texas Panhandle in the campaign now known as the Red River War, and General Nelson Miles ran part of it from a dugout post near here. His columns fought eight engagements that season and, in November 1874, recovered two of the captive German sisters, Addie and Julia, with their older sisters freed the following February. From this rough headquarters Miles nominated soldiers for the Medal of Honor, among them the celebrated scout Billy Dixon, before Fort Elliott rose in 1875 to carry on the work.

Washington County, MD

On the morning of September 14, 1862, the Maryland Campaign reached the wooded slopes of South Mountain, where Confederate forces fought to hold the gaps against advancing Union columns three days before the carnage at Antietam. In the fighting around Fox's Gap, Brigadier General Samuel Garland, Jr.—a young Lynchburg lawyer turned brigade commander under D. H. Hill—rode among his North Carolinians to steady their line and was struck down, dying of his wound that day. His loss was one of several among senior officers in a battle that bought the Army of Northern Virginia precious hours but could not stop the Federal push through the passes.