Search Markers

Goliad, TX

In the spring of 1836, as the Texas Revolution turned brutal, a woman remembered as Francisca Alavez moved among the Mexican army's prisoners performing quiet acts of mercy. She loosened cruel bindings, brought food and water, hid men, and pleaded for lives at Copano, Goliad and beyond—saving some of the very Texian captives marked for the Goliad Massacre, in which hundreds were shot on Santa Anna's orders. A survivor's memoir immortalized her as the 'Angel of Goliad.'

Nacogdoches, TX

Angelina was a Hasinai Caddo (Tejas) woman who grew up in Coahuila and at the Spanish presidio of San Juan Bautista, where—by European accounts—she was baptized Catholic and learned fluent Castilian Spanish. From 1712 onward she appears in the records of French and Spanish expeditions as a 'learned Indian woman' whose translation and diplomacy smoothed the founding of the East Texas missions. In 1721 she interpreted a pivotal meeting between the Caddo leader of the Hasinai nations and the Spanish governor, cementing Caddo-Spanish cooperation against the French; today the Angelina River, National Forest, and Texas's only county named for a woman bear her name.

Lufkin, TX

Chartered in 1900 and based in the sawmill town of Keltys, the Angelina and Neches River Railroad began as a humble short line hauling logs from the East Texas woods to the mills of the Angelina County Lumber Company. Its lumber-baron founders were part of a wider trend of timbermen turning to railroading, and the line grew from ten miles of narrow-gauge track and two wood-burning engines into a standard-gauge carrier reaching neighboring counties. With Southland Paper Mills' founding in 1938, it hauled pulpwood and shipped out newsprint.

Lufkin, TX

Carved from Nacogdoches County in 1846, Angelina County takes its name from the river winding through the region. In its early decades the county seat shifted restlessly from Marion to Jonesville to Homer before settling at Lufkin in 1890. The town of Homer even changed its own name to Angelina for a time, a reminder of how fluid frontier geography could be.

Linwood, TX

The Angelina River carries one of Texas's gentlest origin stories: the name honors a young Indigenous girl of the Caddo (Tejas) world whom Spanish missionaries met around 1690, prized for her kindness, and who grew to serve as an interpreter between rival French and Spanish parties. Long an artery of travel, the river was crossed by the Camino Real and by "Smugglers' Road," and by 1799 guided settlers inland from the coast. The word "Tejas" itself—the Caddo term for friend—gave Texas its name.

Odem, TX

Angelita was one of several rural communities that sprang up in San Patricio County after the Civil War, its 1880s schoolhouse serving as the heart of local life. When the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railroad arrived in 1904, a town was platted and its depot became a shipping point for cattle and crops. But when the post office and school moved to nearby Odem in 1916, Angelita dwindled and finally disappeared.

Houston, TX

After moving to Houston by 1946, plumbing-supply operator Angelo Minella and his wife Lillian commissioned architect Allen R. Williams, Jr. to design this home, completed in 1950. It was one of Williams's "Century Built Homes," a standardized all-masonry plan adapted by various Houston families. Built of concrete tile with a bold brick chimney and the clean asymmetrical lines of the mid-century Ranch style, it embodies postwar suburban design.

Angleton, TX

In 1892 two residents donated a town block for schools, and citizens raised two hundred dollars for a frame building that doubled as Angleton's meeting house. The district incorporated in 1897, and its brick schools were twice destroyed by the great coastal storms of 1900 and 1909, each time rebuilt larger. Angleton touted its schools to attract settlers and repeatedly enlarged the district; separate schools for African American and Hispanic students operated until integration was achieved in the 1960s.

Corsicana, TX

The community of Angus sprang up after rail lines reached this stretch of Navarro County in 1871, and a public school opened under teacher Lila Blackburn just three years later. The original two-room frame schoolhouse was moved several times before a brick building replaced it in 1921. After the school merged with the Corsicana district in 1941, the building lived on as a community center.

Spring Branch, TX

Anhalt began in the 1850s as a small German farming and ranching settlement whose name means 'stopping place.' In 1875 residents organized the Germania Farmer Verein to combat cattle rustling with a shared brand and to support members' families, and in 1879 they built Anhalt Halle as a meeting and social hall. One of the oldest and largest dance halls in Texas, it still hosts Maifest, Oktoberfest, and performances that carry on the community's German traditions.

Somerset, PA · est. 1954

In the years just after the Revolution, the frontier of southwestern Pennsylvania was being carved into towns lot by lot. When Ulrich Bruner first platted Milfordstown in 1787 and Peter Ankeny extended it in 1789, they set aside this ground for two of a young community's most essential needs — a place to bury the dead and a place to worship. By 1795 the growing settlement had taken the name Somerset, the county seat it remains today.

Paducah, KY

Ann I. Baker came to Paducah from Kansas in 1899 to work at the Ayer-Lord Tie Company, which supplied crossties to the railroads, and spent decades as a working woman in a river-and-rail town. In 1920, the year American women won the vote, she organized Paducah's Business and Professional Women's Club and served three years as its president, later becoming the first president of the Kentucky Federation of BPW. A local boat, the A.I. Baker, was even named in her honor.

London Grove Township, PA · est. 2008

Born on this Chester County land in 1813, Ann Preston broke barrier after barrier in a world that barred women from medicine. A graduate of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, she became its dean in 1865 — the first American woman to hold such a post — and in 1860 founded the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia, later adding one of the nation's earliest nurses' training schools. A Quaker, she was also an abolitionist tied to the Underground Railroad.

Hamilton, TX

On a hot July day in 1867, teacher Elizabeth 'Ann' Whitney — remembered as a stout woman of engaging warmth — proved her courage when Comanche raiders attacked her frontier schoolhouse. Struck by a reported eighteen arrows, she kept working to get her pupils to safety, saving all but one boy before she died of her wounds.

Hamilton, TX

In 1867 Missouri-born Elizabeth 'Ann' Whitney took a teaching post at the newly built Leon River School, on a rise above the Warlene Valley about seven miles north of present-day Hamilton. On a hot summer afternoon Comanche raiders attacked, and according to local tradition Ann was struck again and again by arrows fired through cracks in the schoolhouse walls — yet, fatally wounded, she helped all but one of her students escape.

San Antonio, TX

Anna Barbara and Johann Engelbert Heidgen came from Prussia to San Antonio in 1852 and settled on the eastern edge of the Irish Flats, where they raised a large family in a caliche house on the frontier's edge. Anna Barbara worked as a midwife; Johann, a stonemason, helped build St. Joseph's, the city's German Catholic parish, and raised the family's larger limestone home in the 1880s beside the old Acequia Madre that once watered the Alamo's fields. Their story — including a daughter recovered from a raiding party by a neighborhood posse — reflects the perils and endurance of German immigrant life in early San Antonio.

Boston, MA

Anna DeFronzo (1907–1998) was a community organizer and neighborhood advocate in East Boston, remembered here as a "Mother, Activist, Community Leader." She helped lead the group known as the "Maverick Street Mothers," a grassroots force during the turbulent East Boston of the late 1960s and 1970s. Working-class women like DeFronzo turned everyday neighborhood concerns into organized civic action.

Edgecombe County, NC

In 1908 Anna Easter Brown helped found Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-letter sorority established by and for African American women, born at Howard University as Black students built their own institutions of leadership and service. A history teacher by profession, Brown embodied the era's belief that education and organization were paths to uplift. Her grave lies a quarter mile east.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2022

Anna Elizabeth Dickinson rose from Philadelphia to become one of the most electrifying public speakers of the Civil War era, championing the rights of women, African Americans, and working people. At just 21 she became the first woman to address the U.S. Congress, delivering a speech attended by President Lincoln himself. In an age when women were rarely permitted a public platform, her voice carried into the halls of national power.

Upper Providence Township, PA · est. 2014

Anna Howard Shaw was one of the most powerful voices of the American woman-suffrage movement, a trained physician and ordained minister who traveled the country as a lecturer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association alongside Susan B. Anthony. During World War I she chaired the Women's Committee of the U.S. Council of National Defense, organizing women's contributions to the war effort and earning the Distinguished Service Medal. She made her home near this spot from 1908 until her death in 1919—just months before the ratification of the amendment she had fought so long to secure.

Raleigh, NC

Born in 1858, Anna J. Cooper rose from the Reconstruction-era South to become a renowned educator, orator, and early Black feminist. A graduate of St. Augustine's in Raleigh, she published A Voice from the South in 1892, a landmark of Black feminist thought that argued the progress of the race depended on the education of its women. She lived to 1964, her grave now resting blocks from here.

Temple, TX

Anna Laura Cole grew up in the tiny farming community of Turney and trained as a nurse at Scott & White during the depths of the Great Depression, taking charge of its nursing school in 1933 when Texas had barely one registered nurse for every thousand people. Over a 38-year career she modernized nursing education, helped launch the state's first baccalaureate nursing program, and served on the boards that set standards for licensing vocational nurses. By her 1969 retirement she had trained close to 870 nurses across Central Texas.

Upper Merion Township, PA · est. 2021

Anna Morris Holstein served as a hospital matron and nurse during the Civil War, tending the wounded at Gettysburg and beyond, then devoted her later years to historic preservation. She led the campaign to acquire and restore Washington's Headquarters and the grounds at Valley Forge — creating Pennsylvania's first state park, now a National Historical Park — and lent her efforts to saving Mount Vernon. As Organizing Regent of the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter, author, and state building matron at the 1893 World's Fair, she made preservation a public calling.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2019

Anna Thomas Jeanes was a Philadelphia Quaker who used her wealth to answer some of her era's hardest problems. Her bequest founded the institutions that became Jeanes Hospital and Fox Chase Cancer Center, while her Jeanes Foundation — the Negro Rural School Fund — poured money into education for Black children in the segregated South. She named Booker T. Washington a trustee, and the fund trained the traveling Black teachers known as Jeanes Supervisors.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 2002

Anna Wagner Keichline of Bellefonte broke ground in more ways than one. A Cornell graduate and suffrage advocate, in 1920 she became the first woman registered as an architect in Pennsylvania, designing buildings including the town's Plaza Theatre. She was also a prolific inventor, and during the First World War she served her country as a Special Agent in Army intelligence.

New York, NY

Annadale is a quiet neighborhood on the South Shore of Staten Island, and like communities across the country it sent its young men to fight in World War II. This memorial gathers the names of a dozen local residents who did not return from the war that raged from 1941 to 1945 across Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa. Neighbors raised tablets like this in parks and squares so the cost of the war would stay visible in the places these men had left behind.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1994

In an era when women had held the vote for barely a decade, Anne Brancato Wood — the daughter of Italian immigrants — broke into the rough world of Philadelphia Democratic politics in 1928 and won a seat in the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 1932. As one of the very few women in Harrisburg through 1941, she championed social-reform legislation at a time when the New Deal was reshaping what government owed its citizens. Her business offices once stood at this South Philadelphia address.

Asheville, NC

Anne Penland was a pioneering nurse anesthetist whose service during World War I proved that women could safely administer anesthesia at the front. Her work so impressed observers that in 1918 the British medical corps began training female anesthetists of their own. Her home stood at this site in Asheville.

Asheville, NC

In 1918, as the Great War ground on and the demand for skilled medical care overwhelmed the Western Front, American nurse anesthetist Anne Penland crossed the Atlantic to serve. Anesthesia was a young specialty, and in Britain the delicate work of putting patients under was still reserved for physicians. Penland's steady, expert practice at the front proved so persuasive that the British medical corps changed course and began training its own women as anesthetists — a first for that service. She later returned to Asheville, where this marker notes her home once stood.

Aledo, TX

Community founder A. B. Fraser was a Confederate soldier who chose exile in Central America over swearing loyalty to the Union, and it was there his daughter Anneta was born in Honduras. Back in Texas by the 1870s, he built a store and freight station west of Fort Worth and named it for her; when the Texas and Pacific Railroad arrived in 1880 it adopted the name as Annetta. The cemetery that grew up here holds hundreds of graves — civic leaders, farmers, and, in a poignant testament to pioneer hardship, thirty-five infants buried between 1882 and 1910.

Decatur, TX

In 1883 four local landowners donated three acres for a cemetery, school, and church, and the Anneville School—a two-story building—rose just west of the graveyard. The little settlement of Anneville, probably named for early settler Annie Davis, supported stores, a post office, a gin, and a gristmill. The school district consolidated with Boyd in 1930, and the old building served as a church until fire took it in 1959.

Corbet, TX

Tennessee-born Annie Carpenter came to Navarro County as a child in 1876, steeped in family stories of pioneer forebears. She taught school before marrying William F. Love in 1901, and in the 1930s she set out to preserve local heritage, gathering artifacts for a museum room at the county courthouse. In 1933 she published her "History of Navarro County," grounded in research and interviews with aging pioneers.

Dayton, TX

By 1883 Liberty County ran 53 schools, 19 of them for African American children, though the school year was often just three months long. In the late 1890s the district hired its first Black teacher, Annie Fairchild Colbert, a Tillotson Institute graduate who — barred from teaching in Houston as a married woman — came to Dayton and, with her students, built an improved one-room schoolhouse by hand. She taught the community's children until 1918, and in 1934 a new four-room Rosenwald School was dedicated in her honor.

Ft. Stockton, TX

Built in 1900, the Annie Riggs Hotel was Fort Stockton's first hotel of real significance, an adobe building trimmed with "gingerbread" woodwork. Its wide verandas, dining room, parlors, and guest rooms welcomed travelers passing through the West Texas town. The hotel remains a landmark of the region's turn-of-the-century frontier hospitality.

Austin, TX

Annie Webb Blanton rose from a Fayette County classroom to become a national figure in education. In 1918 she won election as State Superintendent of Public Instruction, becoming the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas, and used the post to advance progressive school legislation. A professor at the University of Texas and founder of the Delta Kappa Gamma Society for women educators, she left a legacy carried by schools named in her honor across the state.

Argyle, TX

Born in Houston in 1870, Annie Webb Blanton began teaching at 17 and rose to become an associate professor at North Texas State Normal College, where she wrote grammar textbooks used across the country. In 1916 she became the first woman president of the Texas State Teachers Association, and in 1918 she made history as the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas, serving as State Superintendent of Public Instruction. She later earned a doctorate, became a full professor, and helped found the Delta Kappa Gamma Society honoring women educators.

Houston, TX

Modeled on the great churches of Europe, Annunciation Church was begun in 1867 by Father Joseph Querat, a French canon of the Cathedral of Lyons who served as a missionary to Texas. To fund the foundation, parishioners bought the old Harris County Courthouse for its bricks, completing the main church in 1874. A sacristy and steeple designed by noted Texas architect Nicholas J. Clayton followed in the 1880s, giving Houston one of its landmark 19th-century sanctuaries.

St. Hedwig, TX

Beginning in December 1854, Polish families from Upper Silesia settled eastern Bexar County in a community first called Martinez, building a log mission church by 1857 and a cemetery beside it. The first known burial, in 1863, was of Rev. Julian Przysiecki, killed in a fall from his horse, leaving the settlers without a Polish-speaking priest. A new church to the Virgin Mary followed in 1868, the present cemetery was chartered in 1872, and the town was renamed St. Hedwig for Silesia's patron saint.

Anoka, MN

This memorial honors the men and women of Anoka, Minnesota who left home to serve in the armed forces. It names no single war, standing instead for the whole community's tradition of military service across the generations. Small-town honor rolls like this are how local communities keep faith with their veterans.

Danevang, TX

In the early 1890s the Danish Folk Society brought 93 Danish families from the Midwest to found the Danevang Cooperative Settlement on the Texas coastal plain. Deeply Lutheran, the settlers organized a congregation in 1895 with help from the Rev. F. L. Grundtvig, worshipping at first in Danish under pastors sent from Denmark. Their 1909 church held a painting of St. Ansgar and a 1,700-pound bell heard for miles, and after a 1945 storm they rebuilt using a reassembled army chapel.

Houston, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1798 and trained as a physician, Anson Jones came to Texas in 1833 and fought as a private at San Jacinto during the war for independence. He rose swiftly through the Republic—congressman, first Grand Master of Texas Masons, minister to the United States, secretary of state, and finally president in 1844. On February 19, 1846, he lowered the Lone Star flag and declared 'the Republic of Texas is no more,' earning his lasting nickname, 'the architect of annexation.'

Anson, TX

Built in 1907, the Anson Opera House was the beating cultural heart of this West Texas town. Its stage hosted traveling stock companies and Chautauqua shows, early silent films like "Perils of Pauline," a state-championship wrestling match, and Anson High School's first graduation in 1909—one memorable production even borrowed the sheriff's horse to lead onstage. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1963.

Madison, GA

As cotton plantations spread across Morgan County in the early 1800s, the town of Madison became a social and commercial hub where planters shopped, worshipped, and built fashionable in-town residences. Their grand Greek Revival homes advertised both new wealth and the stark reality of a slave-based plantation economy that had displaced the region's earlier yeoman farmers. Landmarks like the Johnston-Jones-Manley House—later preserved as the house museum Heritage Hall—still trace that antebellum transformation.

Antelope, TX

The oldest tombstone in this Jack County cemetery dates to 1882, marking the burial ground of the small community of Antelope. In 1890 the site passed to the Antelope Methodist Church, which held it until deeding the tract to a cemetery association in 1954, with an added parcel given the following year.

Fritch, TX

From roughly 1200 to 1500, Plains Village people built a cluster of interconnected stone dwellings above a branch of the Canadian River, dubbed by later observers "Texas' first apartment house." Fashioned from native dolomite slabs, the rooms centered on hearths ringed by roof posts, with smaller chambers for storage and possible ceremonial platforms. These semi-sedentary farmers raised corn, beans, squash, and pumpkins in the sandy creek-bottom soil while hunting bison and antelope, and WPA crews in 1938–41 recovered arrow points, knives, grinding stones, and cord-marked pottery that illuminate their way of life.

Antelope, TX

Organized in 1879 on the North Texas frontier, this Methodist congregation hauled its building materials by wagon from distant railheads and shared its sanctuary with the local Baptists until they could complete their own. A Sunday school program followed within a few years.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

In the crowded streets of colonial Philadelphia, a mild-mannered Quaker schoolteacher named Anthony Benezet quietly became one of the most influential abolitionists of his age. From this home he taught free and enslaved Black children in the 1750s and 60s, and in 1754 opened one of the era's earliest schools for girls—radical acts in a city where slavery was still ordinary. His tracts against the slave trade crossed the Atlantic, shaping antislavery thinkers in Britain and America alike.

Roans Prairie, TX

Anthony Drew Kennard, born in Tennessee in 1788, served in the Army of Texas in 1835 during the struggle for Texas independence, and lies buried here with his wife Sallie Moore Kennard. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936, the centennial of the Republic, to honor his service. His grave ties this quiet Grimes County spot to the revolution that made Texas a nation.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

From an office on this site, financier Anthony J. Drexel built what the marker calls the world's first trans-Atlantic banking network, channeling European capital into the railroads and enterprises driving America's industrial boom. A noted philanthropist, he also founded the institution that became Drexel University. His firm helped make Philadelphia a hub of Gilded Age finance.

Huntsville, TX

Anthony Martin Branch came from Virginia to Huntsville in 1847 and read law alongside historian Henderson Yoakum. A state legislator on the eve of the Civil War, he joined the Confederate army in 1862 and then the Confederate Congress, only to be refused a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1866 because of that service. A friend of Sam Houston, he was named co-executor of Houston's will before dying in the 1867 yellow fever epidemic.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2015

Anthony Palmer came to Philadelphia in 1705 and built a career as a merchant before rising through colonial government, serving on the provincial council and in judicial posts. He briefly held the colony's highest office as acting governor from 1748 to 1749, using diplomacy with the French, Spanish, and Native nations and working with Benjamin Franklin to fund defenses against coastal privateers. In the 1730s he founded the riverside community of Kensington, now part of Philadelphia.

Amity Township, PA · est. 1966

Anthony Sadowski, a Polish pioneer, settled along the Schuylkill River in this region in 1712, making his living as a trader among the Native peoples of the area. His command of frontier diplomacy led the Provincial Government to employ him as a messenger and interpreter during negotiations with Indian tribes in 1728, and he was buried here in 1736 in the graveyard of St. Gabriel's Church.

Erie, PA · est. 1946

"Mad" Anthony Wayne was one of the boldest field commanders of the Revolution, remembered for his daring bayonet assault at Stony Point. After the war he led the young United States Army to a decisive victory over a Native confederation at Fallen Timbers in 1794. Returning east from that western command, he fell ill and died at the lonely lakeside garrison of Fort Presque Isle in December 1796, and was first buried beside the blockhouse there.

Throop, PA · est. 1994

By 1911 northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite fields powered the nation, but at a brutal human price. On the morning of April 7, fire broke out at the Pancoast mine in Throop, and seventy-two miners suffocated underground along with a government rescue worker who died trying to save them. The catastrophe pushed the state to act, and that June a new law required that buildings inside coal mines be built of fireproof materials.

Sprigg Township, OH

Before county sheriffs and professional police reached into rural corners of America, neighbors banded together to protect their most valuable and easily-stolen property: their horses. This marker at Bentonville commemorates the Anti-Horse Thief Society of Adams County, a volunteer protective association that rode from 1851 until 1961 — more than a century of members pledging to pursue thieves, recover stolen animals, and stand as a kind of mutual insurance for the farming community. Such societies spread widely across the Ohio Valley and beyond in the 19th century, filling the gap where formal law enforcement was thin or slow.

Town of Middletown, NY

In the 1840s, tenant farmers across the Hudson Valley and Catskills rose up against the manor system — a semi-feudal arrangement that bound them to pay perpetual rents to a handful of wealthy landlords. A flag raised through a hole in this nearby boulder was among the signals that called farmers to action during the Anti-Rent War. Their long resistance eventually pressured New York to reform its old land-tenure laws.

Round Rock, TX

This Williamson County graveyard is tied to the family of pioneer Baptist preacher Freeman Smalley and to the nearby Anti-Slaveholding Union Baptist Church — a congregation whose very name declared its opposition to slavery in antebellum Texas. Though the oldest surviving stone dates to 1853, Freeman Smalley, Jr., is believed to have been the first buried here in 1849, and the land was formally deeded to the church's trustees in 1854.

Carlsbad, TX

Responding to a 1911 state law, Texas opened Anti-Tuberculosis Colony No. 1 near Carlsbad in 1912, when fresh air and rest were the chief weapons against a deadly, contagious disease. The isolated facility grew into a self-sustaining community of some 2,000 people, with its own school, dairy, bakery, power plant, and a nursing school that trained 500 nurses. Renamed for longtime superintendent Dr. J. B. McKnight, it treated roughly 55,000 people before antibiotics and surgery made such sanatoria obsolete and it closed in 1971.

Henderson, TX

In 1866, barely a year after emancipation, freedpersons in Rusk County organized Antioch Baptist Church and gathered a community around it. The congregation went on to plant five more churches and to sustain a school, whose one-room building was rebuilt in the early 1920s with help from the Rosenwald Fund before integration closed it in 1966. Church, school, and cemetery together made Antioch a lasting freedmen's settlement.

Morgan County, GA

Founded in a primitive log cabin in September 1809, Antioch Baptist Church grew quickly on the Georgia frontier, soon erecting a large meetinghouse. In 1827 it hosted a session of the Ocmulgee Association drawing some 4,000 people, and a sermon by its minister, Dr. Adiel Sherwood, sparked a revival that reportedly swept 22 counties and brought thousands of converts. The congregation moved to its present site in 1845.