Search Markers

San Diego, CA · est. 1977

Designed by the noted architect Irving Gill and built in 1909–1910, this is the oldest oceanographic laboratory building in the United States. Over the years it served as a working lab, public aquarium, classroom, and director's office, and generations of leaders in ocean science received their training within its walls. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

San Diego, CA

In 1982 the National Park Service designated the George H. Scripps Memorial Marine Biological Laboratory a National Historic Landmark, recognizing its national significance in the story of American science. The 1910 building was among the founding structures of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The designation places it among the most important historic sites in the country.

San Diego, CA

Completed in 1910, the George H. Scripps Memorial Marine Biological Laboratory stands as one of the founding structures of what became the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The City of San Diego designated it Historical Site No. 119 in recognition of its role in the region's scientific heritage. From this modest beginning grew a world-leading center for the study of the sea.

New Bern, NC

Born into slavery in 1852, George H. White became a lawyer and served in the North Carolina legislature in 1881 and 1885 before winning election to the U.S. Congress, where he served from 1897 to 1901. He was the last African American to serve in Congress before the full weight of Jim Crow disenfranchisement took hold. His home still stands two blocks from this marker.

Tarboro, NC

George H. White represented North Carolina's majority-Black "Second District" in the U.S. House from 1897 to 1901, a seat carved out during Reconstruction that sent several Black congressmen to Washington. When White left office, no Black Southerner would sit in Congress again for 72 years, as disfranchisement and Jim Crow closed the door. He lived two blocks east of this spot.

Mont Alto, PA · est. 2005

George H. Wirt became Pennsylvania's first professionally trained forester and, in 1903, co-founded and led the State Forest Academy that opened at Mont Alto. A protege of conservation pioneer Dr. Joseph T. Rothrock, Wirt taught forestry by joining theory to hands-on practice and set trends that shaped the young profession. He drafted the forest-protection laws enacted in 1915 and, as Chief Forest Fire Warden from 1915 to 1946, built a wildfire-protection plan that safeguarded the state's woodlands.

Baltimore, MD

On the morning of September 14, 1964, at the peak of Beatlemania, Beatle George Harrison toured Baltimore's Mercy High School. It is remembered as the only known visit by a member of the band to an American high school during that frenzied first year of their U.S. fame.

Benton, IL

In the late summer of 1963—months before "I Want to Hold Your Hand" topped the U.S. charts—George Harrison quietly visited his sister in the small southern Illinois mining town of Benton. He jammed with local musicians, bought a guitar in Mt. Vernon, gave what may be the first Beatle interview in America, and heard early Beatles records on a local radio station. He returned to England and came back the next February with the band that would remake popular music.

San Marcos, TX

George H. Talmadge (1840–1911), an Illinois farmer and Union Army veteran of the Civil War, moved to San Marcos in 1888 with his wife Lydia and their children, including an adopted daughter orphaned by the Great Chicago Fire. A carpenter by trade, Talmadge built this Victorian house of cypress in 1889. His family lived in the home for 86 years.

Fort Worth, TX

Born in Fort Worth in 1926, George Herman O'Brien, Jr. served in the Merchant Marine, earned a geology degree from Texas Tech, and was called to active Marine Corps duty after war broke out in Korea. On October 27, 1952, ordered to retake a vital hill known as the Hook near the 38th parallel, Second Lieutenant O'Brien spearheaded a four-hour assault—much of it hand-to-hand—pressing the attack despite repeated wounds before setting a defense and tending his men. For that valor he received the Medal of Honor, later returning to Texas to work as a petroleum geologist.

New York, NY

For several years beginning in 1929, this was home to Babe Ruth at the height of his fame. "The Sultan of Swat" powered the New York Yankees to seven pennants between 1920 and 1934 and hit 714 career home runs, a record that stood until 1974. Larger than life on and off the field, Ruth became the defining star of baseball's golden age before moving on to Riverside Drive.

Monroe, WA

George Hett Shearer (1885–1951) spent more than three decades with the Washington Department of Highways, from 1919 until his death, during the formative era when the state laid out the modern road network that opened its mountains and valleys to the automobile. Highway engineers of his generation translated the nation's early twentieth-century road-building fervor into the bridges, grades, and routes that reshaped travel. This marker honors his long service to that work.

Beeville, TX

In 1890, Will H. and Julia George raised this elegant cottage on land Julia inherited from her father, Maj. J.H. Wood, a New Yorker who had come south to fight in the Texas War for Independence before building a cattle empire. Reusing materials from an earlier house on the property, the couple created a home whose finely detailed woodwork made it a center of Beeville's social and cultural life around the turn of the century. Remodeled in 1900, it has passed down through Wood's descendants.

Georgetown, TX

Scottish immigrant George Irvine built this two-story frame home for his family in 1886 in the growing college town of Georgetown. Founder of the Irvine Brothers Lumber Co., later the Belford Lumber Co., he was a pillar of civic life, serving on the school board, city council, and the vestry of Grace Episcopal Church. In 1922 he sold the house to postmaster Simon J. Enochs, who reworked its original Italianate detailing in the 1930s.

Hillsboro, TX

Tennessee native George L. Porter married Roxie Brooks, daughter of an early Hill County official, in 1881, and rose from merchant in nearby Peoria to bank officer in Hillsboro. In 1901 Roxie's brother built this Queen Anne house—with its wrapping porch, Tuscan columns, and decorative shingles—and sold it to the couple, who were leaders in the town's civic life and First Baptist Church. It survives as a fine example of turn-of-the-century Texas domestic architecture.

Paradise, TX

George Lafayette Ramsdale left Devonshire, England, and by 1836 had reached Texas, enlisting in the army during the war for independence from Mexico. He and his wife Elizabeth moved across several counties before the Civil War, when he served the Confederacy guarding the frontier. Settling in Wise County in 1866, he farmed and ran a tannery until his death in 1884.

Aurora, TX

Georgia-born George Lawton Bledsoe, a carpenter and cotton-gin builder, came to Texas in 1834 and fought in the Texas Revolution, including the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He earned a military pension and patented land grants across five counties as the young republic and state took shape. He is buried here alongside his daughter and a brother-in-law.

Westhoff, TX

Born in England in 1816, George Lord immigrated to Canada and then New Orleans before joining volunteers for the army of the young Republic of Texas in 1837. He fought through the turbulent 1830s and '40s—the Córdova Rebellion, the Somervell Expedition, and the ill-fated Mier Expedition, where he survived the notorious Black Bean lottery and imprisonment at Perote—then served as a Ranger in the Mexican War. In 1849 he joined the Gold Rush to California, marrying Kate Myers along the way, and the couple returned with a fortune in gold to establish a Longhorn ranch in DeWitt County.

York Township, PA · est. 2021

George M. Leader rose from a York County poultry farm to the Pennsylvania governorship, serving from 1955 to 1959 after a term in the state senate. His administration pushed a wave of mid-century reforms — expanding state aid to schools, modernizing civil service, growing the park system, and improving care in state psychiatric hospitals. He also helped establish a state fair-employment council and an industrial development authority to spur jobs. After leaving office, Leader built a second career founding nursing and retirement communities across the state.

McKinney, TX

George McGarrah brought his family to this corner of North Texas in the 1840s as a member of the Peters Colony, having already left his mark as a builder in Fayetteville, Arkansas. On his own land he set aside a small family burying ground, becoming its first occupant in 1879. Its ten graves hold three generations of his family—and, in an unmarked plot, a person he had enslaved.

Perryton, TX

An Iowa native, George Morgan Perry came to the raw Texas Panhandle in 1886 and helped stitch a frontier region into an organized county, serving as clerk and judge. A tireless booster of the railroads then reaching the plains, he was honored when the Santa Fe placed a townsite on its line in 1919 and named it Perryton for him. As the town's first Chamber of Commerce president, he promoted its settlement and growth until his death in 1944.

Solebury Township, PA · est. 2010

Here in the wooded hills of Bucks County, George Nakashima built one of the guiding spirits of the American craft movement into wood and stone. An architect turned master woodworker, he designed furniture that let the grain, knots, and natural edges of a plank speak for themselves, earning international acclaim. On this land he wove together landscape, buildings, and interiors into a single integrated creative environment.

Corpus Christi, TX

Born into slavery in Kentucky in 1843, George Owens enlisted in the Union Army in 1864 and served with the 116th United States Colored Infantry through the Appomattox Campaign that ended the Civil War. He then joined the newly formed 9th Cavalry—one of the regiments Plains nations called Buffalo Soldiers—patrolling and guarding the west Texas frontier before settling in Corpus Christi, where he died in 1879.

Wasilla, AK

In 1973 Alaska's State Highway Route 3 — the roughly 320-mile artery linking Anchorage and Fairbanks — was formally named the George Parks Highway. Its namesake, George Alexander Parks, served as territorial governor of Alaska in the 1920s and early 1930s, a period when road-building slowly began to knit the vast territory together.

Pecos, TX

George R. Reeves raised and captained a company in the 11th Texas Cavalry at the Civil War's outbreak, campaigning across Arkansas, the Indian Territory, and the 1862 invasion of Kentucky. Promoted to colonel and command of his regiment by 1863, he led it at the bloody battle of Chickamauga and through the grinding Atlanta campaign, opposing Sherman's march to the sea and fighting on into the Carolinas in 1865. The West Texas county and town of Pecos's Reeves County bear his name.

Pottsboro, TX

George R. Reeves, born in Tennessee in 1826, came to Texas around 1845 and climbed steadily through public life as a Grayson County tax collector, sheriff, and state representative. During the Civil War he served as a Confederate officer, fighting at Chickamauga and through the grinding Hundred Days Atlanta Campaign. He returned to politics afterward and rose to Speaker of the Texas House before his death in 1882 — the man for whom vast Reeves County was later named.

Graford, TX

George Rice Bevers settled this spot on the Fort Worth–Fort Belknap Road in 1854, near Flat Rock Crossing of Keechi Creek, where he fed and housed travelers such as famed Indian agent Robert S. Neighbors. Palo Pinto County's first school opened nearby in 1856, and the family lived among noted pioneer neighbors like the Curetons, Goodnights and Slaughters. The nearby Bevers Cemetery holds a victim of the Indian raids of the 1860s that drove frightened settlers to seek refuge as far away as the Fort Worth courthouse.

Boston, MA

George Robert White (1847–1922) built a fortune in Boston's patent-medicine trade and left much of it to the city, endowing health clinics, parks, and public improvements through the George Robert White Fund. Dedicated in 1924, this memorial in the Public Garden — the work of sculptor Daniel Chester French — honors that gift, its verse from Ecclesiastes a nod to generosity returned. It stands amid the Gilded Age city his money helped modernize.

Huston Township, PA · est. 1984

George Rosenkrans (1881–1955) spent most of his life in the small community of Penfield, where he served as church organist and became a remarkably prolific composer. Alongside piano works, organ pieces, and hymns, he wrote more than 200 band numbers, including patriotic marches such as "Triumphant Battalions" and "Our Glorious Flag." His music belonged to the golden age of the American community band, when town ensembles were a centerpiece of civic life.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1950

George Ross settled at Lancaster around 1751 and became a soldier, jurist, and ardent patriot in the cause of American independence. As a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress, he signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The site of his country house, nine blocks north on Ross Street, is now marked by a monument; Ross died in 1779, in the midst of the Revolution he helped launch.

West Columbia, TX

New Yorker George Rounds fought in Colonel James W. Fannin's regiment during the Texas War for Independence and survived the Goliad Massacre that claimed most of his comrades. Settling in Columbia, he ran a tavern and, shortly before his death, left his estate to educate poor and orphaned children. When oil and gas were found on his land in the 1930s, the fund's value soared, and his bequest still aids local students.

Galveston, TX

Galveston-born merchant George Seeligson built this house in 1875 on another lot in the block, later moving it here when his family put up a larger residence in 1887. Like many of the island's fine homes, it blends Greek Revival lines with Victorian flourishes. It passed to his daughter Lillian Winterbotham and, in 1954, to the Johnson family.

Webberville, TX

George Self served in Captain Jesse Billingsley's company at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, the brief and decisive clash that secured Texas independence. His terse grave marker, noting only his service and his death in 1856, is typical of the plain memorials raised to the Republic's soldier-settlers. It preserves the memory of one man among the small army that won a nation.

Rockdale, TX

Born in Rockdale in 1910, George Sessions Perry drew on his small-town Texas boyhood for a celebrated body of fiction and nonfiction, winning the 1941 National Book Award. During World War II he reported firsthand from the front for The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post, bringing the war home to millions of American readers before his death in the mid-1950s.

Lexington, KY

George Shannon was the youngest member of the Corps of Discovery that crossed the continent from 1803 to 1806. He later settled into Kentucky life, studying at Transylvania University and practicing law from an office in Lexington's Jordan's Row. A member of the Masonic Lodge and patriotic societies, Shannon served in the Kentucky legislature and was appointed a state circuit judge before moving with his family to Missouri in 1828.

New York, NY

George T. Delacorte (1893–1991) built a publishing empire and then spent much of his fortune making New York City more delightful, funding fountains, monuments, and whimsical public gifts across the five boroughs. A memorial to him honors the philanthropist whose generosity, in the inscription's words, helped "beautify New York City." His gifts turned private wealth into shared public pleasure enjoyed by generations of New Yorkers.

Jefferson, TX

Captain George T. Todd, a Confederate veteran who became a district attorney, state legislator, and senior East Texas attorney, built this late Victorian home in Jefferson in 1893 for his large family. Distinguished by a corner tower with a mansard roof, the house remains in the hands of his descendants.

Easton, PA · est. 1953

This handsome stone house was built in 1757 by William Parsons, the Surveyor-General who laid out Easton, and first served as his own home. It later belonged to George Taylor, an ironmaster and member of the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Taylor's forges helped supply the Revolution with the iron of war, and his signature bound him to the boldest gamble of the founding generation.

Catasauqua, PA · est. 1947

George Taylor, an Irish-born ironmaster who rose from indentured labor to prosperity, made his home in this handsome 1768 house along the Lehigh. Elected to Pennsylvania's provincial Assembly in 1764, he stood against royal government and was sent to the Continental Congress in July 1776, where he added his name to the Declaration of Independence. His restored home is today a National Historic Landmark.

Corsicana, TX

George Taylor Jester came to Corsicana from Illinois as a boy, working for fifty cents a day on the county's first brick building before making his name in dry goods, cotton, and banking. He joined the Confederate army in the war's final year, then climbed through the Texas legislature to serve as lieutenant governor from 1894 to 1898. A founder of Southern Methodist University, he also fathered a future Texas governor, Beauford Jester.

Houston, TX

Raised in Houston's Fifth Ward and trained as a pharmacist, Mickey Leland won a Texas House seat at 27 and championed civil rights, voting rights, and affordable health care. A 1973 trip to famine-stricken Tanzania reshaped his mission, and after succeeding Barbara Jordan in Congress in 1978 he founded a House committee on world hunger and secured hundreds of millions in famine relief. He died in a 1989 plane crash on a relief mission to refugee camps in Ethiopia.

San Marcos, TX

George Thomas McGehee arrived in the San Marcos area as a boy in 1846, among its earliest settlers. He rode with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War, served three terms in the state legislature, and in 1895 crowned his standing by building this turreted Victorian residence with his wife Sarah. Restored in 1949 by the Thompson family, the house survives as a monument to a pioneer-turned-statesman.

Point Blank, TX

Born in Georgia in 1795, George Tyler Wood came to serve the young Texas nation, sitting in the Congress of the Republic of Texas in 1841–42 before winning the governorship of the new state in 1847. He led Texas through its early statehood years and rests here beneath the simple epitaph, "Here sleeps a just man."

Temple, TX

A Texas native born in 1886, Dr. George Valter Brindley graduated from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1911 and joined the Temple Sanitarium, which became Scott & White Hospital. He grew into a leading surgeon and cancer specialist and helped guide the hospital's development and expansion over a fifty-year career. He retired in 1961 and gave his later years to community service before his death in 1970.

Temple, TX

George Valter Brindley, Sr., born on an Ellis County farm in 1886, graduated from the University of Texas medical department at Galveston in 1911 and joined the staff of the Temple Sanitarium that same year. Over a fifty-year career he became a pioneering cancer surgeon and a central figure at what grew into Scott and White Memorial Hospital, lending his name to its foundation. His life mirrors the rise of Central Texas as a regional center of modern medicine.

Cambridge, MA

George Vasmer Leverett was a Harvard man through and through, earning his bachelor's in 1867, a law degree in 1869, and a master's in 1870 before making his mark as a lawyer, scholar, and university trustee in the decades after the Civil War. This memorial honors the gift that let Harvard knit together its growing northern grounds with the venerable College Yard, the leafy heart of the campus in Cambridge. Such benefactions were the quiet engine of the American university's Gilded Age expansion, as alumni fortunes were turned back into brick, shade, and open space.

Henderson, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1848, George W. Burton served the Confederacy before migrating to Rusk County, Texas, around 1880. He went on to represent the county in the Texas House of Representatives from 1915 to 1921, three eventful terms during which he took part in the impeachment of Governor James Ferguson, the state's mobilization for World War I, and the creation of the Texas State Highway Department. He and his wife, Julia Savannah Palmer, raised six children.

Midland, TX

George H. W. and Barbara Bush came to Texas in 1948 and settled in Midland, buying this modest c.1939 house in 1951. Here young George W. Bush attended Sam Houston Elementary and played baseball, the family mourned the death of daughter Robin, and two more sons were born before the Bushes moved to a larger home in 1955. The house is uniquely tied to two U.S. presidents, two governors and a first lady.

Waco, TX

Baylor University's Carroll Science Hall was named for businessman and philanthropist George Washington Carroll, whose gifts of $60,000 and $15,000 funded its construction. Completed in 1903 to a Beaux Arts design by architect S. Wemyss Smith, its three floors and basement housed laboratories and classrooms for chemistry, physics, biology, geology, and astronomy, along with an early home of Baylor's museum. After new science buildings rose in the 1960s, renovations converted it to classrooms, and it now houses the Department of English while keeping its original name.

Cuero, TX

This state marker honors George W. Davis, a citizen soldier who served Texas during its 1835–1836 struggle for independence from Mexico. It was erected by the State of Texas in 1962 to commemorate his part in the Revolution.

Austin, TX

George W. Sampson, a former Confederate captain turned leading Austin merchant, married Mary Goodwin Hall—niece of Reconstruction governor Edmund J. Davis—in an 1872 ceremony that was the first wedding held in the Governor's Mansion. In 1875 he built this house of native limestone hand-cut on site, fed by a rainwater cistern that supplied what may have been Austin's first complete indoor plumbing. A Corinthian-columned gallery was added in the 1920s.

Waco, TX

George W. Truett followed his family from North Carolina to Texas in 1889 and, though ordained a Baptist minister in 1890, first made his mark as a gifted fundraiser — clearing Baylor University's crushing $92,000 debt in under two years as its financial secretary. He enrolled at Baylor, paid his way as a Waco pastor, and in 1897 took the pulpit of First Baptist Church, Dallas, which he led for 47 years as it grew more than tenfold. His fundraising also helped found the hospital that became Baylor Hospital.

Dialville, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1816, George Washington Slover was a Baptist minister and skilled carpenter said to have built the Atlanta hotel later immortalized in "Gone with the Wind." He moved to Cherokee County in 1848, where he helped found the Rocky Springs Baptist Church and served as its pastor. With his wife Adelia Wood he raised seven children before his death in 1864.

Louisville, KY

This memorial honors George Warren Fuller (1868–1934), a pioneering sanitary engineer whose work transformed America's drinking water. Fuller helped establish modern water filtration and disinfection, engineering some of the first large-scale treatment systems that made public water supplies safe. The plaque praises the engineering skill, diplomacy, and leadership that defined his career.

New York, NY

On April 30, 1789, George Washington stood on the balcony of Federal Hall in lower Manhattan and took the oath as the first President of the United States. New York City served as the nation's first capital, and this moment set the young republic's experiment in self-government into motion. The stone marked here commemorates the physical spot where that history began.

Village of Patchogue, NY · est. 1999

On April 22, 1790, President George Washington dined at Hart's Tavern during his tour of Long Island, part of a series of journeys he made to see the new nation firsthand. Roadside taverns like this served as the inns, meeting halls, and waystations of early America. The marker recalls the day the first President passed through this Suffolk County community.

Waterford, PA · est. 1946

In December 1753 a 21-year-old George Washington reached this remote frontier carrying a message from Virginia's governor demanding that the French withdraw from lands Britain claimed. The French politely refused, and Washington's dangerous winter journey home carried the warning that war was coming. The mission was his first appearance on the public stage, and a statue here honors that formative errand into the wilderness.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

In October 1794, President George Washington came to Carlisle to review militia gathered from Pennsylvania and New Jersey before marching west to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. The tax revolt among frontier distillers had become the first serious challenge to federal authority, and Washington's personal appearance at the head of an army was a deliberate show of resolve. It remains the only time a sitting American president has commanded troops in the field.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1950

Fresh from winning independence, George Washington rode west in 1784 to inspect and secure his sizable landholdings, including a 2,613-acre tract in Washington County. Near this spot, at David Reed's home, he met on September 20 with thirteen Covenanter squatters living on that land. When the two sides could not agree on terms of purchase, Washington took the settlers to court in Washington to eject them—and eventually prevailed.

Forward Township, PA · est. 1970

In December 1753, a young George Washington passed through this region on his return from Fort Le Boeuf, where he had carried a British demand that the French withdraw from the Ohio Country. Traveling the Venango Indian Trail, he came close to death here on December 27, 1753, when an Indian fired at him from less than fifteen paces. The perilous mission helped ignite the imperial struggle that became the French and Indian War.