Search Markers

Fort Worth, TX

This California-style craftsman bungalow rose in 1915 in what is now Fort Worth's Fairmount Historic District. In 1917 it was bought by the widow of Nathaniel Grammer, a prominent businessman who owned the city's largest and oldest drug store. After 1948 it belonged to Alice Pierce, of Choctaw descent, whose family had moved to Fort Worth to rebuild their fortunes after the 1929 crash.

Fort Davis, TX

This 6,076-foot peak was long known as Granado Mountain for Trinidad Granado (1868–1958), a rancher whose spread lay at its base. The tract had first been acquired from the State of Texas in 1876 by Belgian-born settler Anton Diedrick Dutchover, a Mexican War veteran and civilian stock herder at Fort Davis, whose daughter Dorothea married Granado in 1890. Granado built his ranch on land bought in 1910, and in 1964 Governor John Connally proclaimed the peak renamed Barry Scobee Mountain.

Boston, MA

This tablet at the Granary Burying Ground, founded in 1660, names some of the notable Americans buried within. They include three signers of the Declaration of Independence — John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Robert Treat Paine — alongside colonial and early-republic governors, jurists such as Samuel Sewall, and prominent ministers. It is one of the most visited stops on Boston's Freedom Trail.

Granbury, TX

Known as "the cemetery lot" before the town of Granbury even existed, this hillside held graves predating the city's 1866 founding, the earliest from 1853. Church leaders briefly made it the site of a high school that grew into Granbury College before the land returned to full use as a burial ground in 1915. Among those at rest are the city's namesake, Confederate Brigadier General Hiram B. Granbury, and veterans of every American conflict from the War of 1812 through Vietnam.

Granbury, TX

Widowed and raising three children, Martha Washington Stringfellow came to Hood County about 1871 and supported her family by running a boarding house here known as "The Granbury House." In 1874 she married local stonemason and builder Joseph W. Anderson, who likely erected this structure and went on to construct many of Granbury's homes, churches, and Victorian commercial buildings. Over the years the building also housed hotels, saloons, cafes, and clothing stores.

Granbury, TX

Before 1923, private companies supplied Granbury's electricity, until residents voted to build and own a municipal power plant. The city bought out the Granbury Water, Ice, Light and Power Company and erected this building to house the new plant, whose diesel engines generated the town's power until 1954. The machinery still sits inside the industrial structure.

Granbury, TX

The Rev. John R. Hill and seven charter members gathered this Methodist congregation in 1871, in the earliest years of Hood County, worshipping in a borrowed schoolhouse until they raised their own sanctuary in 1883. As Granbury grew, so did the church, adding buildings and programs across the decades. It took the name First United Methodist Church in 1968, part of a nationwide denominational merger.

Granbury, TX

Trimmed in pressed tin and built of stone in 1886, this building gave the frontier town of Granbury a taste of culture on its upper floor, where Kerr's Opera House staged vaudeville acts, plays, and musical programs until 1911. Downstairs bustled with a saloon, a saddle and harness shop, and two grocery stores. After its roof collapsed and the building fell into ruin, the Granbury Opera Association restored and reopened it in 1975.

Granbury, TX

Built in 1914, this depot replaced the original station that arrived with the railroad in 1887, connecting Granbury to the wider markets of a growing Texas. With its wide overhanging eaves and red tile roof, it typifies the modest but proud rural train stations of the early twentieth century. Passenger service ended by 1973, but the building endures as a monument to the railroad age.

River Forest, IL

This memorial honors the men who "wore the blue" in the Union Army during the Civil War of 1861–1865. It was dedicated in October 1930 by the Past President's Club of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, one of the heritage societies that carried the memory of the Grand Army of the Republic into the twentieth century. It stands in River Forest as a tribute to those who preserved the Union.

Bellingham, WA

The Grand Army of the Republic was the great fraternal organization of Union veterans of the Civil War, a powerful force in American civic life from the 1860s into the twentieth century. This memorial was dedicated in 1931 by the Woman's Relief Corps, the Sons of Veterans and their auxiliary, and the schoolchildren and citizens of Bellingham — a community gathering to honor the aging and dying generation that had fought to preserve the Union. By that date the last Union soldiers were passing into memory.

Reno, NV

In 1890 the General O.M. Mitchel Post 69 of the Grand Army of the Republic — the great fraternal organization of Union veterans — bought seventeen lots in Reno's Hillside Cemetery as a final resting place for its Civil War comrades. Among those buried here are Nevada volunteers who served across their own state and the neighboring West from 1861 to 1866. After decades of neglect and vandalism, the Daughters of Union Veterans and local citizens began restoring the plot in 1963.

Judsonia, AR

"In Memory of the Defenders of the Union, 1861–1865" marks the Grand Army of the Republic — the powerful fraternal order of Union Civil War veterans — in Judsonia, Arkansas. Though Arkansas joined the Confederacy, thousands of its men, white and Black, fought instead for the Union, and this memorial honors that loyal service.

Baltimore, MD

The Grand Army of the Republic was the great fraternal order of Union veterans who had marched home from the Civil War, and by the 1930s their ranks were thinning fast as the old soldiers passed into memory. This sundial was placed in Baltimore in 1933 not by the veterans themselves but by their descendants — the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, a heritage society formed to keep faith with the men of 1861–1865. A sundial makes a fitting tribute: a quiet instrument marking the passage of time over a generation that was slipping away.

Reno, NV

This tree was planted in soil gathered from Civil War battlefields and dedicated in June 1913 by the national commander-in-chief to honor the Grand Army of the Republic, the great fraternal order of Union veterans. In 1969 it was rededicated by the Sons and Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War in Reno, keeping the memory of those soldiers alive into the 20th century.

Carthage, TX

This cemetery served the vanished community of Grand Bluff, an early ferry crossing on the Sabine River where the land for the graveyard was given by ferry operator David Vawter. The oldest known burials date to 1838, in the days of the Republic of Texas. When the railroads arrived in the 1880s, they made the river ferry obsolete and the settlement faded; the last burial, in 1906, was the donor's own son.

Houston, TX

Amid the "golden age" of African American fraternal societies, the Order of Calanthe took shape in 1883 as a women's auxiliary of the Colored Knights of Pythias, offering Black women sick benefits, life insurance, and a rare arena of self-governance. Organized in Texas by 1898 and headquartered in Houston, the Grand Court grew into one of the most successful female-led fraternal insurers in the country, managing millions of dollars, making mortgage loans to Black residents, and joining the local NAACP's fight for voting and civil rights. In 1948 its members raised a state headquarters on Dowling Street, a modern building owned and run by Black women when that was almost unheard of.

Borger, TX

When oil transformed the Texas Panhandle, Borger sprang up as a townsite in 1926, and Greek immigrant brothers Gus and John Yiantsou arrived from St. Louis to open a restaurant. In 1927 Gus erected this building — among the first substantial structures in the roaring boomtown — and by 1929 the brothers were running Grand Hardware and Variety Store below a second-floor hotel. Known for their generosity, the Yiantsous gave freely to local and Greek charities.

Waco, TX

Texas Freemasonry began with a false start in 1828, when Stephen F. Austin's petition to the Mexican Grand Lodge foundered amid political turmoil. A charter finally reached Texas through Anson Jones, who reportedly carried it during the Battle of San Jacinto, and in 1837 three lodges convened under Sam Houston to form the Grand Lodge of the Republic of Texas, with Jones as first Grand Master. After meeting in many places, the Grand Lodge settled permanently in Waco in 1902.

Uvalde, TX

Built in 1891 by local investors to host professional touring troupes, the Grand Opera House brought musicals, dramas, and home-talent plays to frontier Uvalde. Its programs became social events marked by lavish dress and lively parties, and its copper roof and corbeled bay-window tower gave the town a touch of urban elegance. It later passed into the ownership of former U.S. Vice President John Nance Garner and his family.

Galveston, TX

Designed by New Orleans architect Frank Cox in the Romanesque Revival style, this building opened for its first season in 1895 as an opera house, hotel, and restaurant. Its ornate stone and terra cotta trim once carried a cupola over the main entrance, lost in the catastrophic 1900 Galveston storm. Turned into a movie theater in the 1920s, it was lovingly restored decades later to host live performances once again.

Grand Prairie, TX

The Curtiss Flying Service bought this Grand Prairie tract in 1929 and opened an airport and flying school in 1930, only to see it shuttered within the year by the Depression. Aviator Lou Foote revived it as a flying school before the U.S. Navy bought the field in 1942 and built it into a primary flight-training facility, where about 1,000 men learned to fly during World War II, some practicing night landings without permanent lights. After the war the field passed to the Texas National Guard and the Army before closing in 1976.

Grand Saline, TX

The great salt deposit at Grand Saline, first worked by Native peoples and developed into salt works by 1854, became a strategic source of salt for the Confederacy during the Civil War. When owner Sam Richardson went to war, his wife ran the operation until the Confederate government took over production, exempting salt workers from the army and drawing brine through hollowed gum-log pipelines to iron evaporating kettles that yielded over 10,000 pounds a day. With salt the only means to preserve meat and cure leather, it grew so scarce that women dug up smokehouse floors to reclaim it.

Electra, TX

As Electra's population swelled during the North Texas oil era of the 1910s, local business leaders commissioned Fort Worth architects Meador & Wolfe to design a proper entertainment house. Opened in 1920, the Grand hosted vaudeville, opera, boxing, and silent films—its orchestra pit later fitted with an organ and piano to accompany the movies. Its eclectic Mission-and-Classical design, full of swags, piers, and a vaulted motif, reflected the boomtown's appetite for fancy and fantasy.

Durand, MI

This preserved caboose, Grand Trunk Western No. 75003, once rolled at the end of freight trains on a railroad that linked Michigan to Canada and the wider Great Lakes network. Durand was a major junction on the Grand Trunk system, its depot among the busiest in the state during the age of steam and early diesel. The caboose recalls the era when a crew rode the train's tail to watch over the cars and signal the engineer.

Durand, MI

This Grand Trunk Western 4-6-2 "Pacific" steam locomotive, No. 5632, represents the powerful passenger engines that once sped through Durand, a key junction on the Grand Trunk system. The 4-6-2 wheel arrangement was prized for hauling passenger trains at speed across the Midwest and into Canada. Preserved on display, the engine stands as a monument to the town's deep ties to the railroad.

Somerville, MA

On the first day of 1776, on the heights the Continental Army had seized during the siege of Boston, the newly organized army raised a flag of thirteen stripes representing the thirteen united colonies. The gesture came from the ring of fortified hills where Washington's troops held the British bottled up inside the town. It was one of the earliest displays of a common banner for the colonies acting as one.

New Castle, KY

The Grand United Order of Odd Fellows formed in 1843, when nearly every other fraternal order barred Black members, and after the Civil War it offered vital mutual support to African American communities. In New Castle, former slaves founded Washington Lodge #1513 in 1872, just seven years after emancipation, and the lodge has owned this building—one of the few surviving 19th-century facades in town—since 1886. It remains the only active GUOOF lodge in Kentucky and among the oldest Black fraternal organizations in the state.

Fort Worth, TX

Organized in 1880 under a national order chartered in 1843, this lodge of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows became an active pillar of Fort Worth's Black community in the early twentieth century. Its members funded charities and offered seminars and business-training sessions that helped build economic self-reliance. They raised this building in 1926 and met on its second floor until disbanding in 1937, leaving it as one of the few surviving landmarks of the city's original Black business district.

Corpus Christi, TX

This Corpus Christi home was built in 1904 for Benito Grande, who arrived as a boy in the late 1860s and grew into a prominent leader of the city's Mexican-American community after taking over the family business. In 1925 the house was acquired for Rebecca Grossman, matriarch of a family she helped emigrate from Russia in the early 1900s, and her descendants became leaders in business, medicine, law, and politics. Moved to this site in 1982 to save it from demolition, the house blends two-story central-hall and bungalow features beneath a wraparound porch.

Grandfalls, TX

Raised in 1910 by three Protestant congregations pooling their efforts, the Grandfalls Union Church was the first church building in a West Texas town founded only in 1897. Shared 'union' churches were a practical frontier answer to thin populations, letting several denominations worship under one roof until each could stand on its own.

Kitsap County, WA

This cabin in the forests of Kitsap County was first built in 1936 by sixteen-year-old Joseph E. Emel, a young man raising his own shelter in the woods during the hard years of the Great Depression. Decades later it was carefully reconstructed by a Washington State Department of Natural Resources crew, with young workers from the Mission Creek Youth Camp and support from the Seabeck Community Club, preserving a piece of everyday rural life.

Grandview, TX

Grand View reportedly took its name in 1854 when John Whitmire exclaimed "What a Grand View!", and settler F. L. Kirtley soon donated land for a Baptist church and cemetery. The town grew with general stores, a blacksmith, and Johnson County's first Masonic lodge, though its founder James Scurlock died during the Civil War. The cemetery holds pioneers, the mysterious murdered traveler remembered only as "Annie," and an African American section including early settlers Scott and Elmira Matlock. When the railroad passed a mile away in 1881, the town migrated to the tracks and the cemetery gradually reclaimed the original site.

West Palm Beach, FL

As newcomers and automobiles poured into South Florida around the turn of the twentieth century, developers platted Grandview Heights in the 1910s and 1920s as one of West Palm Beach's first speculative suburbs. Sitting on comparatively high ground within a mile of downtown, it drew working and middle-class families to well-built but affordable Craftsman and Mission-style bungalows. The neighborhood is a snapshot of the 1920s Florida land boom.

Grandview, TX

Chartered on June 14, 1861, the Grandview Masonic Lodge is Johnson County's oldest lodge in continuous operation, having held its first meeting the previous December. It began by sharing a building with the Methodist church near the Grandview cemetery, then relocated with the town, weathering a sale in 1893 and a destructive fire in 1920 that was quickly followed by rebuilding. Today its members continue community activities and scholarships.

Rio Vista, TX

In the farming settlement of Nolands River, a chapter of the Grange — the national farmers' fraternal order — organized in 1874 and raised a two-story hall that doubled as school, church, and Masonic lodge. In 1878 the Kizziars gave land for a cemetery, where more than half the marked graves predate 1900 and a few early burials are marked only by rocks or bois d'arc posts. The community faded after the railroad town of Rio Vista rose nearby in the 1880s.

Corsicana, TX

Grange Hall Cemetery served the small farming community of Cryer Creek and likely took its name from the Grange, the farmers' organization that was a powerful force in rural life. Burials began here as early as 1872, five years before pioneer Samuel Wilson donated the land for a Methodist church and churchyard. Among those at rest are Civil War veterans, pioneer families, and members of a colony that migrated from Meridian, Mississippi, in 1870.

Fairfield vicinity, TX

Settlement here began in the 1850s just as Texas carved Freestone County from Limestone, drawing farming families who soon threw themselves into the Grange movement — the national agrarian organization founded in 1873 to give farmers cooperative power. A local resident, Joseph Burton Johnson, served as the first master of the statewide Texas Grange, and the community renamed itself for the two-story hall its members built in 1877 to house both Grange meetings and a public school. The building passed to school and church trustees and served the neighborhood, in various rebuilt forms, into the 1980s.

Granger, TX

Czech Protestant immigrants began farming the rich land around Granger in the early 1880s, worshiping at first in a schoolhouse whenever a traveling minister could come. Encouraged by the Rev. Adolph Chlumsky, who commuted from Brenham for eighteen years, they organized a congregation in 1892 and built their first church in 1901. In a landmark moment for Czech-American religious life, the Unity of the Brethren denomination was formally organized at this church in 1903.

Granger, TX

Built in 1908–09, this eclectic building first housed Farmers State Bank, the second bank in the prosperous farming town of Granger. Its facade blends Italianate, Moorish, and Romanesque touches into a Victorian-era hybrid that announced the town's early-twentieth-century wealth. The bank closed in 1926, and by 1929 the structure had begun a second life as Granger City Hall.

Granger, TX

By the time this handsome brick schoolhouse rose in 1924-25, education had been a fixture on this Granger site for nearly forty years, through three earlier buildings dating back to 1887. Its designers dressed an ordinary institutional plan in the fashionable Spanish Colonial Revival style, crowning it with an "Alamotif" parapet, tile panels, and cast-stone flourishes that gave a small Central Texas farm town a touch of civic grandeur.

Austin, TX

Austin architect Charles Granger designed "The Perch," a two-story garage-and-apartment at the rear of this lot, in 1938, giving it a stucco façade and a continuous band of plain steel windows in a rare local example of residential International Style. After marrying in 1946, Granger designed a larger midcentury-modern home for his growing family, completed around 1951, that stepped down a hillside and featured corrugated asbestos panels and a glass rear wall. Together the buildings trace the architect's own evolving modernist vision.

Cedar Park, TX

When quarried limestone proved unsuitable for the new Texas Capitol in the 1880s, builders turned to pink granite from Burnet County's Granite Mountain. The Austin and Northwestern Railroad, which had opened up western Williamson County and founded Brueggerhoff (Cedar Park) and Leander, extended a line to the quarry in 1885. More than 4,000 flatcars of granite rolled through this area in 1886–87 toward Austin—so many that three dozen blocks tumbled into the creekbed were simply left behind, since the state got its stone free of charge, and the Capitol was finished in 1888.

Llano, TX

The great granite outcrops of Llano County drew their first quarry in 1888, and when the railroad arrived in 1892 the demand for the pink-and-gray stone soared. Among the quarrymen was Italian immigrant Vincenzo Fantozzi Petrick, whose stone armored Texas coastal jetties and joined the granite shipped to build capitols, universities, and monuments. Llano granite still faces the Texas State Capitol and buildings from Austin to Kansas City.

Marble Falls, TX

A few miles from this marker rises Granite Mountain, the source of the distinctive pink granite quarried to build the Texas State Capitol. Constructed from 1885 to 1888, that capitol was second in size only to the United States Capitol. The stone was paid for in a remarkable barter — three million acres of state land traded for the building's construction.

Marble Falls, TX

Granite Mountain is an 866-foot dome of solid pink granite—molten rock that cooled deep underground into crystals of quartz and feldspar eons ago—and today the site of one of the largest granite quarries in the United States. Its fame was sealed in 1885 when, amid a dispute over building stone for the new Texas Capitol, Governor John Ireland resisted pressure to use imported limestone, and the quarry owners donated their native pink granite to the state. A special rail spur was built to haul the stone to Burnet, and the granite went on to face the Capitol, the Galveston sea wall, and monuments across the world.

Baltimore County, MD

For more than a century the village of Granite—first called Waltersville after the family that opened the industry around 1820—shipped some of North America's finest building stone. Its Waltersville and Fox Rock quarries employed hundreds of stonecutters whose granite went into the Baltimore & Ohio's pioneering railroad, the Thomas Viaduct, and landmark buildings including the Library of Congress and the inner walls of the Washington Monument. The workers' homes still cluster nearby, and the district was placed on the National Register in 1994.

New York, NY

This monument was raised by American Legion Post 1296 to honor those who died in their nation's service. The American Legion was founded in 1919 by returning veterans of the First World War and became one of the country's most active builders of local war memorials through the twentieth century. Without naming a single conflict, the dedication reaches across every war to all who "paid the supreme sacrifice."

Socorro, TX

Founded in 1915 as El Paso County's second poor farm, this refuge was run by the O'Shea family and later by daughter Helen O'Shea Keleher, who spent fifty years caring for more than four thousand orphaned and abandoned children. Renamed Granja Río Vista, it hosted Depression-era relief efforts including the Texas Transient Bureau, the WPA, and a Civilian Conservation Corps unit. From 1951 to 1964 the farm became a processing center for the Bracero program, receiving Mexican workers bound for the fields of the El Paso valley and other agricultural regions of the United States.

Vancouver, WA

Long before he commanded Union armies or entered the White House, Ulysses S. Grant served here as a young quartermaster at Columbia Barracks (later Fort Vancouver) in 1852–1853. Posted to the far edge of the Oregon Country, he pined for the family he'd left behind and dabbled in frontier ventures to make ends meet on an officer's thin pay. The lonely, obscure years he spent in the Pacific Northwest were a world away from the fame that lay ahead.

Monroe Township, OH

This cast-iron nameplate is a surviving relic of the original Grant Memorial Bridge, a steel truss span erected between 1925 and 1927 during the great era of American road-building, when reinforced steel and concrete were replacing the wooden and iron crossings of the previous century. The bridge carried its name in honor of Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and president who was born just a short distance away at Point Pleasant in Clermont County. When the original structure was eventually retired, this nameplate — one of two — was preserved and set into the walkway so that travelers could still touch a piece of the old bridge.

Moran, TX

Ohio-born Granville Eades Waters came to Texas in 1871 and settled in Shackelford County, where he and his wife raised five sons amid the hardships of frontier life—the nearest post office days away at Fort Griffin. Known by the courtesy title of "Colonel," he made his name introducing Hereford cattle to the region in 1885 and rose to lead the American Hereford Cattle Breeders' Association. In his later years he turned to oil and gas leasing, scouting for the Texas Company and helping open the county to petroleum exploration.

Corsicana, TX

In the early 1880s, landowner G. W. Eliot set aside ground at this rural Navarro County site for the fourfold anchors of a frontier settlement: a school, a Methodist church, a parsonage, and a graveyard. Families like the Doolens, Duncans, and Wimberlys built their community around these institutions, with burials beginning about 1881. Time thinned the settlement — the school consolidated away in 1928, the church burned in 1975 — but the cemetery and an annual memorial gathering keep the community's memory alive.

Grapevine, TX

Named for the wild mustang grapes that grew thick across the area, Grapevine took shape after Ambrose and Susannah Foster arrived from Missouri in 1845 and their family gathered land at the community's heart. Cattle raising dominated before the Civil War, with beef driven to nearby Camp Worth, and the arrival of the Cotton Belt Railroad in 1888 turned the town into a shipping hub for cotton, grain and dairy. Over the following century it absorbed a lake, paved highways, and eventually the sprawling Dallas–Fort Worth Airport within its limits.

Grapevine, TX

The Coble brothers, Samuel and Allen, settled here in the 1850s and in 1878 sold four and a half acres for a public cemetery. The oldest known grave belongs to 22-year-old Louisa Guiry, who died in 1860, and the grounds hold many of the area's pioneer settlers—among them Barton H. Starr, Grapevine's first mayor, and James Tracy Morehead, an early Tarrant County judge. Additional land was added in 1925 as the community grew.

Coppell, TX

The Grapevine Springs, feeding the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, have drawn people for thousands of years, and in 1843 Republic of Texas President Sam Houston camped here during treaty talks with Native American nations, an agreement later signed at Bird's Fort. Donated as county parkland in 1936, the site gained rock walls, footbridges, and picnic facilities built by the Works Progress Administration. After wartime reversion and later gifts, the City of Coppell now maintains it while efforts continue to restore the WPA-era features.

Grassland, TX

On the wide South Plains, this site lay along an ancient Indian trail that later carried explorers, U.S. Army columns, and — after 1880 — stagecoaches and freighters bound north from Colorado City. In 1888 Enos L. Seeds established Grasslands Ranch here, named for a Cleveland estate, building a frame house and the region's first trading post and serving as postmaster. The little community that grew up around it endures today as Grassland.

Paige, TX

German immigrants settled the Grassyville community in the 1850s and organized a Methodist church, and many of this cemetery's gravestones are lettered in German script. The two earliest burials date to 1871, and among those resting here are seven Confederate veterans who served in a Texas artillery battery during the Civil War. Though the village itself has vanished, the burial ground remains in use.

Paducah, KY

Alben W. Barkley, the genial Kentuckian known as "The Veep," began his public life as McCracken County Attorney and rose to become one of the most influential figures in mid-century American government. He served decades in Congress, led the Senate Democrats for thirteen years under Franklin Roosevelt, and was Vice President under Harry Truman from 1949 to 1953. He collapsed and died in 1956 while giving a speech, having just declared he would rather be a servant in the house of the Lord than sit among the mighty.

Goliad, TX

After Col. James Walker Fannin's outnumbered Texas force surrendered following the Battle of Coleto in March 1836, Santa Anna ordered the prisoners held at Presidio La Bahía executed. On Palm Sunday, roughly 400 men were marched out and massacred and the wounded shot within the fort, with Fannin himself the last to die; a handful were spared by their medical skill or saved by the "Angel of Goliad," and about thirty escaped. Weeks later Gen. Thomas J. Rusk's army gathered the scattered remains and gave them a military burial here on June 3, 1836.