Search Markers

Iraan, TX

When mail, passengers, and freight still moved across West Texas by stagecoach, the San Antonio–El Paso line threaded the desolate Chihuahua Trail, or Lower Road. George H. Giddings took over the run in 1854 and built a string of stations; the one raised near the Pecos River's "S" crossing in 1858 offered adobe-and-limestone shelter, a corral of horses and mules, and water from a hand-dug well. Reported destroyed during Indian raids in 1862, the remote post's exact site stayed uncertain until 21st-century archeology pinpointed its foundations.

Brenham, TX

Gideon Lincecum grew up on the moving edge of the southern frontier, in Georgia and Mississippi, where he absorbed both the natural world around him and the cultures of the Native peoples he lived near. A veteran of the War of 1812, he settled in Texas in 1848 and opened a medical practice built on herbal remedies rather than the harsh medicines of his day. As a self-taught naturalist he won international notice for his patient study of Texas harvester ants and kept weather records for the Smithsonian, working from a cabin later moved here to preserve it.

Burton, TX

Gideon Lincecum (1793–1874) grew up on the southern frontier, absorbing the natural world and Native cultures before settling in Washington County in 1848. A self-taught physician who favored herbal remedies, he became a naturalist of international reputation, celebrated for his long study of a Texas harvester ant and for keeping weather records for the Smithsonian Institution. He completed his autobiography here after a Reconstruction-era sojourn in Mexico.

Snook, TX

Prussian-born Johann Joachim Giesenschlag brought his wife Anna and their children to Texas in 1855, settling first in Washington County before moving to Burleson County in the 1870s, where they bought more than a thousand acres. Giesenschlag set aside this tract as a family cemetery and was the first laid to rest here; in 1883 his family deeded the ground to a nearby Evangelical Lutheran church. For years a schoolhouse stood on adjoining Giesenschlag land beside this pioneer burial ground.

Milford Township, PA · est. 1948

Gifford Pinchot made his family seat at Grey Towers in Milford, the ancestral home of a line long rooted in this corner of Pennsylvania. Born in Connecticut in 1865, he became the nation's foremost forester and a champion of conserving America's woodlands and natural resources. He also served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 1930s before his death in 1946.

Dingman Township, PA · est. 1948

Gifford Pinchot was one of the towering figures of the American conservation movement, a forester who helped invent the very idea that the nation's woodlands should be managed for the long term rather than simply cut over. Born in 1865, he kept his family's ancestral seat at Grey Towers in nearby Milford and twice served as governor of Pennsylvania before his death in 1946. This Pike County cemetery, in the wooded highlands he loved, holds his grave.

Milford Township, PA · est. 1948

As the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot built the framework for managing America's national forests, then carried that reforming energy into the Pennsylvania governor's office. His first term overhauled state government; his second became famous for paving farm-to-market roads across the commonwealth to fight Depression-era unemployment and, as he put it, "get the farmer out of the mud." This very stretch of road was among those improved, near his family home at Grey Towers.

Gifford, IL

In the small Champaign County village of Gifford, a plain and heartfelt memorial honors those who served in the nation's armed forces. Naming no single war, it stands as the community's collective salute to its sons and daughters in uniform.

New Orleans, LA

This St. Charles Avenue site was home to New Orleans University and Gilbert Academy, Black educational institutions run under the Methodist Church from 1873 to 1949. Founded in the years after emancipation, they offered schooling to African American students across generations. The Gilbert Academy Alumni Association erected the marker in 1993 to keep that legacy visible.

Okanogan County, WA

Gilbert is one of the small mining camps that dotted Washington's Okanogan high country during the hard-rock strikes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prospectors chasing gold and silver threw up cabins and outbuildings that lasted only as long as the ore did; today a surviving cabin, stone foundations, and ground depressions are all that mark the settlement. It is a classic Western boom-and-bust story, written now in weathered logs and rubble.

Farmers Branch, TX

Dr. Samuel H. Gilbert reached Texas about 1850 and by 1857 had built this native-limestone house on 275 acres, combining a medical practice with farming and livestock. A community leader, he helped outfit a local militia unit during the Civil War and later drew the railroad through Farmers Branch by selling land to the Dallas & Wichita line in 1874. The vernacular center-passage house, with Greek Revival touches and twin chimneys, is a rare survivor of early Texas homebuilding.

Nursery, TX

Pioneer horticulturist Gilbert Onderdonk (1829–1920) left New York for the warmer Texas coast in 1851 for his health, and after the Civil War built a renowned nursery business in Victoria County. When the railroad reached the area, his family opened a branch nursery in 1883 around which the town of Nursery grew, complete with a post office where Onderdonk served as postmaster and shipping agent for his mail-order trade. He earned a national reputation developing new varieties of peach and other fruit trees.

Martin County, FL

Commissioned in 1875, Gilbert's Bar House of Refuge was one of nine such stations the U.S. Life-Saving Service built along Florida's then-remote east coast. Their purpose was humane and simple: a keeper and his family lived here year-round to feed, clothe, shelter, and carry to safety anyone cast ashore by shipwreck or storm. Today it stands as the last survivor of those nine, a rare relic of the government's first organized effort to rescue mariners.

Gilberton, PA

In the heart of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region, the small borough of Gilberton raised this tribute to the local men and women who served in the nation's defense. Communities like this one sent a remarkable share of their sons and daughters into uniform, and the hard coal mined from these hills helped power the country through its 20th-century wars. The memorial gathers that shared sacrifice into a single, lasting promise of remembrance.

Dimmitt, TX

Tennessee native and local merchant Jeff T. Gilbreath brought his family to the newly settled Castro County in 1905 and built this house in 1909, soon selling it to county attorney Mark Cowsert. A fine example of early 20th-century vernacular architecture with its bay window and hipped, gabled roof, the house was preserved when the Castro County Museum acquired it in 1976.

Ben Franklin, TX

Settlers from Giles County, Tennessee founded this academy in 1859 and named it for the homeland they had left, hiring fellow Tennessean Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday as its first teacher. Parents paid the bills, and a small community with a store, blacksmith, and church grew up around the log schoolhouse. Hockaday's daughter Ela, born here, would go on to found the celebrated Hockaday School for Girls in Dallas in 1913.

Pecan Gap, TX

Established in 1877, Giles Cemetery is among the older burial grounds of Delta County, in the blackland-prairie country of Northeast Texas. Its founding in the decades after the Civil War reflects the wave of farming families who settled this fertile region during Reconstruction. The state recognized it as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016.

Austin, TX

This two-story brick residence was built in 1905 for William L. Gilfillan, a founder and director of the Austin National Bank. Designed by prominent local architect Charles H. Page, Jr., it blends the Mission Revival and Prairie School styles fashionable before World War I. In 1931 it passed to Julius G. Knape, a Swedish stonemason and contractor.

Gilmer, TX

Founded in 1865 as the Civil War ended, this Black Baptist congregation began under a brush arbor and took the biblical name "Gilgal," the Israelites' first camp in the Promised Land — a fitting choice for a people newly freed. Over the following decades its members raised a frame church, ran a Black school on donated land, and, under Rev. W. L. Dickson, opened the Dickson Colored Orphans Home. The brick-veneered sanctuary and educational annex trace a congregation that steadily built institutions of faith, learning, and care.

Liberty, TX

Dr. E. J. Gillard moved his family from Louisiana to Texas in 1845 and about 1848 raised this home of native woods on his plantation east of Liberty. Its Greek Revival lines carry Creole touches from his Louisiana background, along with unusual features like a traveler's room and an upstairs schoolroom. The house passed down through the Duncan and Welder descendants and was relocated to its present spot in 1980.

Fredericksburg, TX

Once crossed by the trails of roving Indian peoples, these Hill Country lands were settled by German immigrant pioneers in 1846, with a group of Mormons founding Zodiac the next year. The county was created and organized in 1848 and named for Richard Addison Gillespie, a Texas frontier defender and Mexican War captain who was killed at the Battle of Monterrey in 1846. Fredericksburg became its seat.

Oakalla, TX

Absalom Barton Gillum and his wife Hannah Emmaline came to Texas from Alabama in 1872, and by 1880 he had bought the land that became this cemetery. A Civil War veteran, Master Mason, cotton-gin owner, and postmaster of Oakalla, Gillum first buried his four-year-old son Willie here in 1882. The grounds went on to hold Woodmen of the World members and veterans from the Civil War to the present, tended today by a family association.

Gilmer, TX

Founded in 1846 and named for Thomas W. Gilmer — U.S. Secretary of the Navy and a fervent champion of Texas annexation — this East Texas town came of age just as Texas joined the Union. During the Civil War it served as a supply, training, production, and educational center for the Confederacy, and later thrived as a hub of farming, lumbering, and oil. Today it is perhaps best known for its long-running Yamboree sweet-potato festival.

Rocksprings, TX

When Jesse Walter Gilmer raised his two-story frame hotel in 1916, Rocksprings was a remote ranching center where traveling salesmen, cattlemen, and visitors needed lodging and a hot meal. Its dining room fed townspeople and even the county jail's prisoners, and in hard moments the hotel became a refuge — sheltering influenza patients during the World War I epidemic and, in 1927, survivors of a devastating tornado.

Houston, TX

Built in 1905, this stately, pillared home is an early Houston example of the Classical Revival style, its four Ionic columns and elliptical balcony announcing a fashionable respect for antiquity. Its owners read like a roster of the city's rising business class: Brian Brewster Gilmer, a drug-industry leader and Chamber of Commerce president; attorney Elliott Cage of the Cage Cotton Company; and finally Harry Cohn, a dry-goods and furniture merchant born in Latvia whose family lived here for 64 years. Each family left its mark on a house that shows both Neoclassical and Arts and Crafts influences.

Chireno, TX

Raised around 1895 in the small East Texas community of Chireno, the "Gingerbread House" is a showpiece of late Victorian craftsmanship. Its builders used heart pine and other fine materials, including brass hardware, and lavished the exterior with carved skirt boards, fascia, cornices, and ornate trim across its many porches. Later carefully restored by the C. V. Lindsey family, it survives as a testament to small-town Victorian taste.

Seattle, WA

This ginkgo was grown from a seed of a tree that survived the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and was given by Green Legacy Hiroshima as a living symbol of peace. Ginkgoes were among the first plants to leaf again in the bombed city, making them enduring emblems of survival and renewal.

Marshall, TX

Italian immigrant Charles Ginocchio arrived in Marshall in 1871 and built up holdings near the Texas & Pacific depot—including the ground where a notorious 1879 shooting left actor Maurice Barrymore wounded and Ben Porter dead. In 1893–96 he raised this three-story brick hotel with stores, a café, a ballroom, dining room, and forty guest rooms, finished with rare hand-carved curly pine. Threatened with demolition, it was rescued and restored in the late 1960s.

Marshall, TX

Italian immigrant Charles Ginocchio, a rising Marshall businessman, settled in the East Texas town with his wife Roxana in 1871 and built this home in 1886. It was designed by C. G. Lancaster, architect of the county courthouse. Passing through the related Cook and Signaigo families and, from 1945, the Greek-American Pedisons who had run the dining room at Ginocchio's own hotel, the house traces an unbroken line of immigrant entrepreneurs.

Boone, NC

Wild American ginseng, prized in China as medicine, grew thick in the Blue Ridge, and mountain families dug the root for generations to earn scarce cash. Boone became a hub of the trade, where firms like Wilcox Drug—established in 1900—bought and shipped the harvest to distant markets.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2011

When Giovanni's Room opened in Philadelphia in 1973, being openly gay could still cost a person their job, home, or safety. The bookstore became far more than a place to buy books — it was a gathering spot, a source of hard-to-find resources, and a refuge for a community just beginning to organize. As one of the nation's oldest LGBT bookstores, it stood at the dawn of the modern movement for gay and lesbian civil rights.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Stephen Girard's 1831 will founded a school for poor white orphan boys, and for more than a century that racial restriction stood. Beginning in the 1930s, attorney Raymond Pace Alexander challenged it, and lawyer Cecil B. Moore later carried the fight into the federal courts. A 1968 ruling finally opened Girard College to students of all races, making its walls a landmark of the modern civil rights struggle.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2001

On Armistice Day 1932, Philadelphia Girl Scouts baked cookies and sold them in the display windows of the local gas and electric company, turning a simple fundraiser into a local sensation. The idea spread through the city as a yearly tradition, and by 1936 the national Girl Scouts had adopted the cookie sale as an official program. What began as girls behind a store window grew into one of the most recognizable youth enterprises in the country.

Borger, TX

Borger boomed on Panhandle oil in the 1920s and '30s, and civic-minded newcomers like Hudson and Ruby Davis helped knit the young town together. Ruby organized a Girl Scout troop that drew more than a hundred girls, and after wartime shortages delayed construction, the Lions Club rallied a community-wide effort to build this rock headquarters—faced in dolostone from the local Alibates formation—completed in the years after World War II.

Marshall, TX

Lucy Holcombe Pickens (1832–1899) grew up at Wyalucing, her family's East Texas plantation home that was a hub of social and cultural life among the surrounding plantations. Celebrated for her beauty and charm, she became the only nineteenth-century Texas woman honored with a portrait on currency—the Confederate $100 bill. Her husband served as the Civil War governor of South Carolina, and from 1863 to 1865 Wyalucing housed the Confederate Post Office Department west of the Mississippi.

Dunbar Township, PA · est. 1948

Christopher Gist was a frontier surveyor for the Ohio Company who accompanied the young George Washington on his 1753 mission to warn the French at Fort LeBoeuf. He settled this plantation in the wilderness in 1753, but the following year the frontier war caught up with it: Washington paused his campaign here in 1754 before falling back to Fort Necessity, and pursuing French forces destroyed the place. It was one of the earliest English settlements west of the Alleghenies.

Utah County, UT

In the spring of 1865, the Given family settled and built a cabin on this stretch of central Utah frontier, plowing land amid rising tensions between Mormon settlers and Native peoples. On May 26th they were attacked; only two survivors ran for help that arrived too late, and the dead were buried in nearby Fairview. The episode came during the Black Hawk War, a bitter period of conflict in territorial Utah.

Houston County, TX

Solomon George Givens and his wife Lula, both born in Houston County in 1871 to formerly enslaved parents, married in Crockett in 1891 and bought 34 acres here the following year. Their farm prospered, and in 1893 they built a large eight-room house on this site. Known for their charity and their leadership in founding a local school and Baptist church — with baptisms held in a tank on their land — the Givenses made their home the heart of an African-American farming community remembered as "Givens Hill."

Dallas, TX

This marker traces the tradition of public thanksgiving in Texas, from Native peoples and a 1541 service by a friar of Coronado's expedition to Sam Houston's 1842 call for the Republic to give thanks. In Dallas, a rabbi, a priest, and Protestant ministers launched a shared community thanksgiving service in 1907, an early act of interfaith goodwill that led eventually to the 1968 founding of downtown Thanks-Giving Square.

Gladewater, TX

Founded in 1827 as St. Clair a few miles east, the settlement moved to Glade Creek and the Texas & Pacific Railway in 1872 and took the name Gladewater. Its population exploded from 500 to 7,000 after oil was discovered in 1931, turning the farming and dairy town into a production and refining hub. The town became known for its East Texas Quarter Horse Show and a nationally known rodeo held in a converted salt-water disposal pit.

Gladewater, TX

On the eve of the twentieth century, twenty master masons — many from the Longview lodge — petitioned to form their own fraternal lodge, chartered in December 1901 with Daniel Washington Wood as first Worshipful Master. For three decades members met above James Ponder's general store, and their ranks included leading Gladewater businessmen, clergy, and civic figures, among them Dr. Earl McLaughlin, who won national notice for a remedy devised during the 1918 influenza epidemic. In 1940 the lodge dedicated its own hall, long a fixture of the town's civic life through scholarships and community programs.

Garden City, TX

Glasscock County, created in 1887 and organized in 1893 with Garden City as its seat, honors George W. Glasscock (1810–68), a onetime flatboating partner of Abraham Lincoln in Illinois who came to Texas in 1834. He fought in the Texas War for Independence, built central Texas's first flour mill, and lent his name to Georgetown before serving in the state legislature. The marker also surveys how Texas's 254 counties were named — for patriots, revolutionaries, frontiersmen, statesmen, and Confederate figures.

Garden City, TX

Barely a month after Glasscock County organized in 1893, its first commissioners' court issued bonds for a combination courthouse and jail, completed in 1894 with the ground floor for court and the upper floor for the jail. As the county grew, a grander 2½-story Classical Revival courthouse rose in 1910, built of three-foot-thick native stone quarried from a local ranch and crowned with colossal Doric columns. That 1910 courthouse has served continuously ever since, while the original building continued as a jail into 1980.

Glazier, TX

Glazier sprang up in 1887 when the Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway reached the site, becoming a handy cattle-shipping point north of the flood-prone Canadian River. The Glazier Cemetery Association bought its ground in 1910, though the earliest burials date to 1906. The town endured hard blows—a 1916 fire that leveled its business district and a 1947 tornado that killed twelve—yet the cemetery still marks the community's history.

Glen Flora, TX

Glen Flora took root on the east bank of the Colorado River in land that traced back to Robert H. Kuykendall, one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old Three Hundred" colonists. Around 1890 C.H. Waterhouse brought Pennsylvania German families to the west bank and built a sugar mill, cotton gin, and pumping plant, and when the Cane Belt Railroad reached the area in 1898 a townsite sprang up beside the tracks. Hotels, a bank, cotton gins, and a movie theater followed, until the 1913 flood and crop blights sent families toward the cities. A commercial fruit orchard in the 1980s revived the town's old agricultural bond.

Glen Flora, TX

This house was built by a Mr. Sanford between 1860 and 1866, spanning the Civil War years in the plantation country of Wharton County. By 1881 it was home to W. H. Hood, who went on to found the town of Glen Flora in the 1890s. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Munfordville, KY

Built between 1819 and 1822 by Colonel Aylette Hartswell Buckner, Glen Lily was in 1823 the birthplace of Simon Bolivar Buckner. He grew up to command Confederate forces in the Civil War, famously surrendering Fort Donelson in 1862. Buckner later returned to public life as governor of Kentucky from 1887 to 1891 and, in 1896, ran as a candidate for vice president.

Thornbury Township, PA · est. 1997

This Delaware County hamlet grew up around water-powered industry that reached back before the Revolution, when a forge was raised here around 1739 and Pennsylvania's first iron-slitting mill followed in 1746. Nearly a century later the Willcox family turned the site to papermaking, and in the years after the Civil War their mill produced paper for United States currency—engineered so cleverly to defeat counterfeiters that it earned international fame. By the time the railroad station arrived in 1882, Glen Mills bustled as a center of commerce.

Kerrville, TX

On October 15, 1894, a group of Kerrville citizens set aside a ten-acre tract near the Guadalupe River as Glen Rest, a community burial ground. Its directors and the thousands laid to rest here — some families reaching five generations deep, bearing names like Schreiner, Dietert, and Butt — read like a roll call of the Hill Country's founding families. A low native-limestone wall from the 1920s is said to reuse stone from the demolished 1886 Kerr County courthouse, binding one landmark's remains into another.

Brenham, TX

Scottish-born Thomas Affleck (1812–1868) was among the 19th century's most influential writers on agriculture, and from 1858 he ran a 3,500-acre plantation near here with celebrated nurseries and experimental fields. An early champion of conservation farming, he surrounded his Glenblythe mansion with gardens, greenhouses, mills, and workshops, and during the Civil War his workshops built wagons and ambulances and fed a Confederate legion training nearby. After the war he worked to rebuild Texas farming and even traveled to Europe to recruit new settlers.

Douglas County, NV

Beginning in 1861, the forests around Glenbrook on Lake Tahoe were logged to feed the insatiable timber demand of the Comstock mines, whose tunnels required vast quantities of shoring and whose mills burned mountains of cordwood. Under Duane Bliss, the Carson & Tahoe Lumber & Fluming Company became the largest such operation, running sawmills, steam tugs, logging railroads, and V-flumes that floated wood to Carson City. Over its lifetime it stripped some 750 million board feet of lumber from the Tahoe basin before timber depletion and declining mining closed it in 1898.

Morris Plains, NJ

Glenbrook began as a modest colonial dwelling, raised around 1752 in the New Jersey hills near Morris Plains. During the Revolution, mounted 'light horse' troops were quartered here, tying the house to the war that swept through the region. Enlarged in 1868 by Jonathan Roberts — who went on to found a local library association in 1881 — it grew from a working farmstead into a fixture of community life.

Glencoe, MN

Laid out in June 1855 by Martin McLeod, John H. Stevens, and other town founders, Glencoe rose quickly to become the seat of McLeod County. When the U.S.–Dakota War erupted in 1862, fear swept the Minnesota frontier and the young town threw up fortifications, garrisoning as many as four companies of soldiers behind its walls. The fort marked here embodied a settlement bracing itself amid one of the era's most wrenching conflicts.

Washington County, OR

This memorial ties Glencoe, Oregon, to Glencoe, Scotland, honoring the Scottish immigrants who helped settle the Oregon Territory in the mid-19th century. Dedicated in February 1985 and bearing the Clan MacDonald motto 'Per Mare, Per Terras,' it remembers pioneers who carried their names, clans, and traditions west.

Glencoe, MN

This memorial in Glencoe, Minnesota, honors all local residents who served in the United States armed forces across the generations. Small prairie towns like Glencoe sent sons and daughters to every American conflict, and memorials like this gather their service into one place of civic gratitude. It stands as the community's collective thank-you to its veterans.

Trinity, TX

Glendale grew up near the antebellum Tullos Plantation, and by the time its post office opened in 1887 a small settlement had taken root. The cemetery's earliest graves—a four-year-old girl and an infant, both from 1884—speak to the hard mortality of frontier childhood. Fueled by the J. I. Cameron Lumber Company and the Glendale Orchard Company, the town boomed to some 1,200 residents by 1899, only to fade to about 75 by 1914 as local industry collapsed. Area families have tended the burial ground ever since.

Houston, TX

Glendale Cemetery began as a private family plot of John R. Harris, founder of Harrisburg (now part of Houston), with its first burial in 1839 — Judge John Birdsall, a former attorney general of the Republic of Texas. Growing without formal management, the grounds were tended for years by local women who formed the Glen Dale Cemetery Company in 1897, and after later neglect were restored beginning in 1952. Today it holds the graves of Texas heroes and pioneers of the Republic era.

Trinity, TX

Glendale Congregational Methodist Church organized in 1917 to keep worship alive after the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, discontinued services in the community. Meeting first in the old Methodist building and then in the Baptist church, the congregation erected its own home in the 1930s almost entirely through donations and volunteer labor. Pastors from Westminster College served the flock over the years as the campus grew with classrooms and a fellowship hall. Through local outreach and mission work, the church has remained a fixture of community life.

Sparks, NV

Glendale was a settlement older than Reno, once expected to become the metropolis on the Truckee River—until the Central Pacific Railroad was lured to a station at Lake's Crossing, the future Reno, instead. Teacher E.C. Sessions organized the community's school in his own home before this building, built by Archie Bryant for $1,446, opened in 1864. Generations of Nevadans learned here, among them U.S. Senator Patrick A. McCarran, and the well-crafted structure survived two moves to reach its present site by 1993.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

This burial ground began in the 1850s with the death of planter Julien Sidney Devereux, whose father and infant son were soon reinterred beside him. Known first as Devereux and Sand Field, it served the nearby Forest Hill community, home to an academy Devereux founded in 1850. When a post office opened in 1872 the settlement took the name Glenfawn, growing to include stores, a school, church, and Masonic lodge before fading away.