Search Markers

Goldsmith, TX

Goldsmith sprang to life as an oil field on June 14, 1935, when the discovery well gushed 1,140 barrels of crude a day and shacks and tents soon housed 350 people. First platted as Ector City by Harry L. Tucker in 1937 and later renamed for landowner C. A. Goldsmith, the boomtown quickly gained cafes, a hospital, movie theater, hotels, and a newspaper—though its lone bath was a 25-cent shower from an overhead tank. It endures today as a gas processing and distribution center.

New Orleans, LA

Designed in 1859 by the noted architect Henry Howard, the Goldsmith-Godchaux House is a jewel of antebellum New Orleans residential design. It is prized for its painted interiors, said to hold more fresco and stencil decoration than nearly any other mid-nineteenth-century home in the South. The state tourism department erected the marker in 1980.

Goldthwaite, TX

Central Texas newspaperman William H. Thompson launched a weekly called The Mountaineer in 1885; after it lapsed and revived, his nephew renamed it The Goldthwaite Eagle in 1896—when eagles still nested in the hills of Mills County. The paper passed among the Wilson and Thompson families for decades and, through a merger with a rival, became the county's sole newspaper. It has served the community continuously into the modern era.

Goldthwaite, TX

Three local men bought this ground for a cemetery in 1888, with Houston Roberts the first laid to rest. The Odd Fellows Lodge acquired and expanded it in 1894; among its stories is that of Watson Whittaker, killed in an 1898 train robbery and carried home by a funeral train that made headlines. The city took ownership in 1943, and community groups later added memorials honoring the area's veterans.

Goliad, TX

Goliad ranks among the three oldest municipalities in Texas, rooted in the Aranama Indian village the Spanish called Santa Dorotea and anchored by the Presidio La Bahía and Mission Espíritu Santo, established in 1749. Renamed Goliad in 1829—an anagram honoring the Mexican patriot Hidalgo—it became a crucible of the Texas Revolution. In March 1836, Colonel James Fannin and his men, taken prisoner after the Battle of Coleto, were marched from the La Bahía presidio and executed on Palm Sunday in the notorious Goliad Massacre.

Goliad, TX

The Goliad Advance-Guard grew from two earlier papers: the Guard, which began in 1867 when Richard Wayne Davis renamed the old Intelligencer, and the Advance, started in 1905 by a young Mississippi editor. In 1913 the two weeklies merged under the name it still carries. Generation after generation, correspondents from across the county fed it the local news that bound the community together.

Goliad, TX

First known to Spanish settlers as a mission and presidio in 1749, this place — La Bahía del Espíritu Santo — became a strategic fort under Spanish, Mexican, and Texan control before its name was changed to Goliad in 1829. In 1836 it was the scene of the massacre of Fannin and his command, a rallying cry of the Texas Revolution. Organized as a county that same year, it later sent several companies to the Confederate army.

Goliad, TX

Completed in 1894 for just under $68,000, Goliad's fourth courthouse reused limestone and brick from an 1870 predecessor, standing as the seat of a county born with the Republic of Texas in 1836. It sheltered the injured after a devastating 1902 cyclone, lost its central clock tower to a 1942 storm, and was enlarged in 1964 with its carved staircases and walnut wainscoting preserved.

Goliad, TX

Freemasons first met in Goliad in 1851 and won their charter the next year, and since 1854 the lodge has gathered in this rubble-stone building—one of the town's oldest. Its ground floor long did double duty as the local post office and city hall, making the modest structure a hub of civic as well as fraternal life in a community steeped in Texas Revolution history.

Goliad, TX

Built in 1937 as part of the statewide Texas Centennial commemorations, the Goliad Memorial Auditorium rose from a special legislative appropriation and matching federal and state Centennial grants championed by County Judge James Arthur White. Architects Raiford Stripling and Samuel Vosper blended beaux-arts and Spanish mission styles, with sculptors adding plaster moldings depicting pioneer life and the region's many ethnic groups. Completed in just seven months and dedicated with a turkey show honoring local farms, it went on to host big-band dances and remains a community cultural venue.

San Antonio, TX

Laid out by Spain around 1720 as El Camino Real a La Bahía—the King's Highway to Goliad—this road served for a century and a half as a major route for emigrants, armies, and traders, later becoming part of the Chihuahua Road linking the Gulf Coast to Mexico. Soldiers of Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederacy marched along it, as did Native peoples, and near this spot it crossed Salado Creek on the approach to San Antonio. Its heavy traffic faded only when the railroads arrived.

Goliad, TX

On a Sunday afternoon in May 1902, a tornado remembered as one of the worst in Texas history tore across Goliad. Sounding like a freight train, it cut a mile-long path through the northwest of town, flattening more than a hundred homes and killing 114 people. At least fifty died when a Black Methodist church was destroyed, and the county courthouse was pressed into service as a hospital and morgue.

Cuero, TX

The Golly Hollow community built its first schoolhouse in a low-lying spot, then moved it to higher ground in 1884 on an acre donated by Theresa Hubers-Burger. Named for pioneer Antone Golly, the school joined the public system around 1893 and taught local children until 1946, when it consolidated with Arneckeville. The old building found a second life as a community center in 1952.

Brownfield, TX

On August 3, 1903, nine worshippers gathered under a wagon-sheet tent to organize this Baptist church, led by the Rev. J. R. Miller and meeting monthly in the Gomez schoolhouse. A one-room sanctuary built in 1909 was later moved when the town of Gomez itself was relocated for highway construction, and a larger church rose in 1936. The congregation gained its first full-time pastor by 1942 but was disbanded in 1992, its fortunes tied to the fading town of Gomez.

Brownfield, TX

Established in 1902, this cemetery served Gomez, the first settlement in Terry County, which then stood a half-mile to the west. Pioneer settler H. F. Adams deeded the original four-acre tract to the Gomez School trustees in 1906, and some of the area's earliest homesteaders were buried here. When the county seat shifted, many graves were moved to Brownfield in 1918.

Gonzales, TX

Here on September 29, 1835, Mexican troops arrived to reclaim a small cannon the government had lent the colonists of Gonzales for defense against raids. The Texians stalled for two days while reinforcements gathered, then flung back their famous answer — "Come and Take It." The standoff over that little gun helped ignite the Texas Revolution.

Gonzales, TX

At this spot in a peach orchard, the colonists of Gonzales buried their contested cannon to hide it from 150 Mexican dragoons sent to seize it in September 1835. Two days later they dug it up, mounted it on ox-cart wheels, loaded it with chains and scrap iron, and fired what is remembered as the first shot of the Texas Revolution.

Gonzales, TX

This cemetery holds, by tradition, the reinterred remains of Gonzales's earliest settlers in a common grave, alongside figures central to the Texas Revolution. Among them are Dr. George W. Barnett, quartermaster Major Valentine Barnett, and Matthew Caldwell. Gonzales itself was the site of the revolution's opening skirmish over the "Come and Take It" cannon.

Gonzales, TX

Gonzales County was organized in 1837, in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas, and after its first courthouse burned in 1893 this second one was raised between 1894 and 1896 at a cost of $64,450. Serving as a gathering place for Texas leaders and the setting for consequential court decisions, the building has anchored the civic life of a town already famous in Texas history. It remains a proud landmark of the county seat.

Gonzales County, TX

When Green DeWitt planted his colony on the Guadalupe River in 1825, he ordered a road cut to link his capital at Gonzales with San Antonio, and surveyor Byrd Lockhart opened the eighty-mile route in 1827—its mileage notched into roadside oak trunks. Settlers, traders, and Mexican travelers braved the road despite the danger of raids. A decade later it became a thoroughfare of the Texas Revolution: the 'Immortal 32' marched down it from Gonzales to reinforce the Alamo, and Santa Anna's army followed after the fort fell.

Denton, TX

In the 1850s pioneers from Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, and beyond were drawn to this North Texas prairie by its rich soil and reliable water, forming the Rue Settlement that later took the name Good Hope. The cemetery holds the community's dead, with the earliest legible stone dated 1870 and more than eighty nineteenth-century burials that testify to the hardships of frontier life. As churches closed and the school shut in 1949, the settlement faded, leaving the graveyard as one of the few reminders it ever existed.

Giddings, TX

German and Wendish settlers founded the Good Hope community in the 1880s and had a school going by 1887. The cemetery's oldest marked grave, from 1889, belongs to Dora Vick, and several tombstones still carry German inscriptions. Buried here too is George Kruse, whose nearby rock quarry supplied fill stone—carried by a rail spur to the coast—for building the Galveston Seawall.

Houston, TX

Founded by the Rev. Samuel Grantham—who first preached in his own backyard—Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church was formally established in 1872 in Houston's Fourth Ward, its early members including formerly enslaved people. It grew into one of the city's leading Black institutions and a crucible of civil rights: pastor Albert Anderson Lucas led the local NAACP, member Dr. Lonnie Smith was the plaintiff in the landmark Smith v. Allwright, and Barbara Jordan worshipped here. Its influence reached far beyond the sanctuary walls.

Dallas, TX

Around 1920 Martha Schultze, a registered nurse trained in her native Germany before immigrating to the United States, opened Good Samaritan Hospital on Leland Avenue, where her husband Ernest ran an associated clinical laboratory. Starting with maternity care, the hospital added an operating room and general services by 1933 and treated neighborhood residents—elderly, infirm, and those unable to pay—until it closed in 1945. Schultze ran it for the whole of its roughly twenty-five years, and hundreds of children were born under its roof.

Frankfort, KY

A Catholic presence took root in Frankfort in 1808, with worship held in private houses and, by 1837, a property secured by Bishop Flaget of Bardstown. Known first as St. Patrick Mission, the congregation grew rapidly after an influx of German and Irish immigrants in the 1840s and gained a permanent pastor in 1848. With the dedication of its church in 1850, it was renamed Good Shepherd.

Valley Mills, TX

When W.H. Everett claimed 320 acres of central Texas prairie in 1846, death arrived before permanence did — he set aside this ground after four-year-old Sarah Hornbeak died in 1851. Two years later he brought his widowed sister Nancy Goodall and her eight children west from Arkansas, and one of those children, W.B. Goodall, bought the land and lent it his name. The burial ground holds about forty graves, a small record of the families who settled the McLennan County frontier.

Austin, TX

At the turn of the twentieth century, Austin's prosperous families were building grand homes on the streets radiating from the university, and this was among the finest. Physician Goodall Harrison Wooten, son of a Confederate-veteran doctor, and his wife Ella completed the house in 1900 and transformed it in 1910 into a Classical Revival showpiece of paired Ionic columns and wraparound galleries. Ella's celebrated gardens helped make it a local landmark, and the family held the property until the 1940s.

Athens, TX

Named for a pioneering family that migrated from Alabama in the 1850s, Goodgame Cemetery has served Henderson County since the Civil War era, its first recorded burial a young girl who died in 1863 while her father was away at war. Floyd Crockett Goodgame's sons became Confederate officers, and one, a schoolteacher, returned to teach and help found the community of Turkey Creek. The ground was formally deeded in 1901 and holds veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Korea, marked by Woodmen of the World stones and family curbing.

Austin, TX

Built in the early 1890s near the Texas Capitol, this handsome brick commercial building with decorative brickwork and iron railings served grocer Joseph Goodman, whose store occupied the main floor until 1924. Upstairs, from 1892 to about 1896, Jacob Bickler ran an elite German and English preparatory academy. Together they made the building a small hub of Austin's Gilded Age commerce and learning.

Tyler, TX

Begun in 1857 as a home called "Bonnie Castle," this Tyler landmark was bought after the Civil War by Dr. S. A. Goodman and enlarged by his son, Major W. J. Goodman, a surgeon in the 13th Texas Infantry of the Confederate army. Passed down and remodeled across generations, it was willed to the city in 1939 and has housed the Smith County Historical Society Museum since 1960.

Childress, TX

During the dangerous frontier years of 1866–71, this was a stretch of the great cattle trail blazed by Col. Charles Goodnight, carrying thousands of Texas cattle north to U.S. forts in Colorado and New Mexico. Herds watered at this spot on the drive. The site later became the town of Childress in 1886, and the old watering hole is now a lake in Fair Park.

Chaves County, NM

Blazed in 1866 by cattlemen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, this famous trail ran some 2,000 miles from Texas to Wyoming, carrying herds across the open Southwest. Through New Mexico it followed the Pecos River north to Fort Sumner, where the government bought beef to feed the thousands of Navajo people held at the Bosque Redondo Reservation. The route became one of the great arteries of the post–Civil War cattle era.

Mentone, TX

This marker recalls the legendary Goodnight-Loving Trail, the cattle route pushed from the Fort Griffin–Dodge City road across New Mexico and into Colorado in the mid-19th century. It honors Oliver Loving (1812–1867), remembered as the first Texan to trail cattle north to distant markets, whose partnership with Charles Goodnight helped open the great era of Texas cattle drives.

Albany, TX

In 1866 and 1867, cattlemen Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight drove herds through the wide, unsettled reaches of Shackelford County, tracing a route that would bear their names. Unlike the trails north, the Goodnight-Loving ran west and south through desert and mountain passes, exposing herd and drover alike to raids and brutal country — but it delivered cattle straight to markets in New Mexico and Colorado. Portions followed the old Butterfield Overland Mail route, whose lone Smith's Station stood on Chimney Creek, and the trail's success drew a flood of cattlemen behind them.

Piqua, OH

In the decades after the Civil War, the western-Ohio town of Piqua was home to Goodrich Giles (1846–1927), a Black entrepreneur whose long life spanned emancipation, Reconstruction, and the industrial rise of the Midwest. The marker remembers him for the enterprising spirit behind what it calls the first African-American Co-operative Association — a form of collective, member-owned business-building that let Black communities pool their resources and stand on independent economic footing. Across more than fifty years in the town, he became a fixture of its commercial and civic life.

Goodrich, TX

Goodrich School is one of the few area schoolhouses known to have been built through the federal Works Progress Administration, with construction beginning in May 1934 under architect Emory S. White. Its Jeffersonian-style design and prized auditorium made it a source of community pride during a national push to strengthen rural schools. Long after classes, it has continued to serve as a gathering place for the town.

Clark County, NV

The folded limestone of this district held ore that went unworked until the mid-1850s, when Mormon settlers opened work at Potosi, among the earliest underground mines in Nevada. Named for cattleman Joseph Good, the springs grew into the ranching-and-mining community of Goodsprings, and the arrival of the Los Angeles-Salt Lake Railroad in 1905 and a narrow-gauge feeder line in 1911 cut the cost of shipping its zinc ores. Operations peaked in 1916 with some eight hundred residents, and the district—unusually rich in minerals—ultimately produced about twenty-five million dollars, chiefly in lead and zinc.

Cooks Point, TX

In 1854, enslaved people led by A. S. Broaddus arrived near Cooks Point after a six-month wagon journey from Virginia. In 1887 many of those now-emancipated African American families asked Broaddus to help them establish their own church, and after buying land near Cedar Creek in 1888 they called Jerry Shorter as first pastor. Rebuilt several times, Goodwill Missionary Baptist became the center of a community with its own school, store, and cemetery.

Graham, TX

Named for a bend in the Brazos River, Gooseneck Cemetery grew from land donated by Kentucky native George Washington Fore and his son John Silas Fore, on ground that had once been part of the Brazos River Indian Preserve. The Fores also gave land for a school and a church that became Bunger Baptist. Burials date from just after the Civil War, and those interred include a Virginia-born War of 1812 veteran, James James, said to have died at age 114.

Granbury, TX

Alonzo Peyton Gordon left Georgia for Granbury in 1871, teaching school before opening a mercantile store that became one of the largest in Hood County, housed in a stone building on the town square. A cotton-gin operator and civic leader, he served as local school superintendent and won a seat in the Texas Legislature in 1898. He built this house in 1882, and it remained in his family for a full century.

Gorham, ME

Erected in 1866 by Honorable Toppan Robie, this monument honors the sons of Gorham who died in the Civil War, then still fresh in memory as "the Great Rebellion of 1861." Maine sent a remarkably high share of its men to the Union cause, and towns like Gorham paid dearly in the war's battles. Raised just a year after Appomattox, it is among the earliest generation of Civil War memorials.

Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947

When the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger arrived in this stretch of the upper Allegheny in 1767, the name Goschgoschink applied to all three of the refugee Indian towns clustered along the river here. It was later attached specifically to the "Upper Town" that stood across the water. These were communities of displaced Delaware, Munsee, and Seneca peoples, gathered in the Ohio country during a decade of upheaval that followed the French and Indian War and preceded the American Revolution.

Decatur, TX

These bois d'arc trees are a remnant of a spiny hedge planted in 1861 around the log cabin of Stephen M. Gose, a Missouri emigrant who came to Texas in 1859 and served as justice of the peace, blacksmith, and Methodist leader. The dense, thorny growth was meant as a living barrier against raids on the exposed frontier. The surviving trees stand as a quiet witness to the dangers of frontier homesteading.

Eustace, TX

Established after the Civil War and named for the Biblical "land of milk and honey," Goshen served nearby farms as a marketing center and offered a rest stop to trail drivers moving cattle from East Texas. When the railroad bypassed it, merchants moved to Eustace on the new line, and the town faded. Local legend says the cemetery began with a wandering cowboy who sickened and died on a nearby ranch; the first documented burial, Benjamin G. Hooker, dates to 1869.

Belmont, NC

Goshen Presbyterian Church was established in 1764, one of the frontier congregations planted by the Scots-Irish settlers streaming into the North Carolina Piedmont. Its first regular minister, the Rev. Humphrey Hunter, arrived in 1796, and the congregation later moved to its present site two miles northwest in 1956.

Goshen Township, OH

When this sturdy two-story schoolhouse rose in 1907, it embodied one of the Progressive Era's quiet revolutions: the consolidation of scattered one-room country schools into a single, modern, graded building. Goshen Township's choice to gather its pupils under one buff-brick roof reflected a nationwide push to bring standardized curricula, trained teachers, and better facilities to rural American children. The building outlived its original name, later serving generations as Goshen Intermediate School and Sheila Green Elementary.

Bally, PA · est. 1947

In 1743 the Jesuit priest Theodore Schneider established a Catholic mission at Goshenhoppen, founding the third Catholic mission and the first Catholic school in colonial Pennsylvania—remarkable in an era when public Catholic worship was banned in most of British America. The community later took the name Bally to honor Father Augustin Bally, a long-serving pastor. William Penn's promise of religious tolerance made such a foothold possible here.

La Grange, TX

Opened around 1828 by Alabama settler James Gotcher, this trace linked San Felipe in Stephen F. Austin's colony with Bastrop in the "little" colony to the north. Short but dangerously exposed, it and the nearby Wilbarger Trace earned the grim nickname "via Dolorosa" of early Texas for the tragedies along them. Gotcher himself settled in this area, and in 1836 six of his family were killed and others taken captive in an Indian attack.

McKinney, TX

McKinney attorney James Rowland Gough built this Victorian residence, with its Queen Anne detailing, in 1898, at a time when he was representing the area as a state legislator. In 1918 the home passed to Wallace Hughston, another public servant who won a seat in the Texas Senate and later served on the Texas Railroad Commission, the State Board of Education, and with the Federal Housing Authority.

San Antonio, TX

When painter Robert J. Onderdonk settled in San Antonio in 1878, he brought a realist sensibility that helped shape Texas art, and in this 1882 house his family made a gathering place for the state's artists. His son Julian became a celebrated painter of impressionistic Texas landscapes, famous for bluebonnet scenes, while daughter Eleanor was a noted miniaturist and served for decades as art curator of the Witte Museum. The home preserved the legacy of one of Texas's most influential artistic families.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2026

Gouverneur Morris served as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and it was his pen that gave the finished document much of its final polish. He is remembered as the "Penman of the Constitution" for drafting the Preamble and its ringing opening words, "We the People." During that momentous summer he lodged at Mary Dalley's boarding house nearby.

Hopkinsville, KY

Born near Bardstown and trained at Transylvania University, Charles S. Morehead built a long public career—state legislator, attorney general, U.S. congressman, and governor of Kentucky from 1855 to 1859. As the nation fractured, he joined the 1861 Washington Peace Conference in a last effort to avert war; though he stayed officially neutral, his sympathy for the Confederacy and criticism of Lincoln led to his arrest and months of imprisonment. Warned of a second arrest, he fled abroad and died at his Mississippi plantation in 1868.

Barbourville, KY

Born in Laurel County in 1875, Flem D. Sampson attended Union College and built his law practice in Barbourville, once partnering with Caleb Powers, a figure in the notorious Goebel assassination case. He rose through the county, district, and appellate courts to become chief justice of Kentucky's Court of Appeals before serving as governor from 1927 to 1931, confronting the onset of the Great Depression.

Frankfort, KY

George Madison came to Kentucky as a young Virginian who had already soldiered in the Revolutionary War, and he spent roughly two decades as auditor of the state's public accounts after his appointment by Governor Isaac Shelby. Distinguished service in the War of 1812 lifted him to popularity, and in 1816 Kentuckians elected him governor. He died only weeks after taking office—the first Kentucky governor to die in office—and Lieutenant Governor Gabriel Slaughter completed the term. Madison rests in the state section of the Frankfort Cemetery.

Mineola, TX

James Stephen Hogg spent his formative years in Wood County from 1868 to 1882, the crucible of a career that carried him to the Texas governorship as the state's first native-born chief executive. Once in office he drew on friendships forged here, appointing Wood County associates to shape state institutions—among them a professor at Sam Houston Normal College, the future Ranger captain Bill McDonald, and a State Librarian. These local ties rippled outward into the governance of the whole state.

Houston, TX

Houston architect Ernest L. Shult built this white-stucco, mid-century modern house on a triangular River Oaks lot in 1959, its asymmetrical façade and windowless walls typical of the confident postwar style. A decade later it became home to John B. Connally, Jr.—Texas governor, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and the man wounded beside President Kennedy in the Dallas motorcade of November 1963. Connally and his wife Nellie lived here from 1969 until 1984, during his years at a Houston law firm, in Nixon's cabinet, and through his 1980 presidential run.

Harford County, MD

This roadside marker along the old Post Road honors William Paca, born nearby in 1740, who rose to sign the Declaration of Independence and later served three terms as governor of Maryland. The Post Road itself, noted here as established in 1666, was one of the colonial arteries binding the Atlantic settlements together long before the Revolution. Paca went on to help shape Maryland's early state government and its constitution.

King County, WA

In the autumn of 1853, emigrants of the Longmire wagon train paused in this mountain meadow to rest before the grueling descent through the Cascades into the Puget Sound country. Their journey over the newly cut Naches Pass route was part of the great overland migration that peopled the Pacific Northwest. The meadow's name recalls that pioneering passage.

Mineola, TX

During the Great Depression, federal and local programs kept the town of Mineola afloat. Agencies like the WPA and CWA put people to work paving streets, raising a federal building, and even commissioning artist Bernard Zakheim to paint a mural in the post office, while city government extended sewer and water lines and ran a malaria-control effort. Together these initiatives cushioned residents through one of the hardest chapters in American life.

Warren, MI

Alex J. Groesbeck was born in 1872 into a pioneer Dutch-French family near Warren Township, at the crossroads of Mound and Twelve Mile Roads. His father's 1880 election as sheriff moved the family to Mount Clemens, and young Alex went on to a University of Michigan education and a career in Michigan public life. This marker honors a local son who rose from rural southeastern Michigan to statewide prominence.