Search Markers

Corsicana, TX

The James Hamilton, Jr. family set out from Tennessee for Texas around 1841, but after James died in Arkansas, his widow Elizabeth pressed on with their children, reaching Navarro County about 1846. This family burial ground holds Elizabeth, her daughter Julia Hamilton Bragg and Julia's husband Joseph, and several of their children, with the earliest known grave dating to 1855. It remains a quiet record of one pioneering frontier family.

Star, TX

Thomas Edgar Hamilton came to Mills County as a boy in the early 1890s and built his life in the small town of Star, working a family cotton gin before rising to banker and school board member. He and his wife Nettie raised four children in this late-Victorian transitional house, built around 1900, and Hamilton even helped bring an electric plant to town. When daughter Maurine married rancher John Soules, the couple carried the home into a new generation.

Wayland, MA

In 1960, this tract of eastern-Massachusetts woodland was deeded to the Sudbury Valley Trustees — a regional land trust that protects open space along the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord rivers — as a living memorial to Paul M. Hamlen. The gift came during the postwar decades when metropolitan Boston's suburbs were spreading rapidly and once-common woods and farm fields were vanishing under new development. By placing the woods permanently in a conservation trust's care, the donors turned a private act of remembrance into protected land held for the wider community.

Hamlin, TX

Hamlin sprang up in 1902 when settler R.D. Moore sold land to a Kansas City development company for a townsite on the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway, which arrived in 1906. Named likely for railroad executive W.H. Hamlin, the town boomed past a thousand residents by 1908, powered by cotton, rail shipping, and a busy roster of gins, mills, and factories. Oil discovered in 1928 broadened its economy, and the town supported both white and African American schools before integrating in 1965.

Town of Hamilton, WI

This marker honors Hamlin Garland, the author who grew up amid the coulees and farms of western Wisconsin and turned that hardscrabble world into literature. In 'Main-Travelled Roads' and his 'Middle Border' memoirs, Garland gave an unsentimental voice to the toil of pioneer farm families settling the upper Midwest. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922.

Gatesville, TX

The Hammack Building stands on land once owned by John Chrisman, who helped survey Gatesville in 1854, and was erected in the late 1800s by W. W. Hammack. Over the decades the Hammack family leased the Italianate-style structure to a succession of tenants—the Gatesville National Bank, a saloon, a drugstore, and other businesses. Its elaborate brickwork typifies the ornamental commercial architecture of a Central Texas county seat.

Milford, TX

When the John Henry Himmel family settled here in 1876, their daughter Emma soon taught the little Himmel Branch School — whose name a misspelling turned into Hammel's Branch. The arrival of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad in 1893-94 spurred a brief boom, with a general store, gin, blacksmith, and post office clustering along the tracks. Decline set in after World War I; the last store closed in 1920 and the school in 1925, leaving only faint traces of the town.

Pasadena, TX

Established in 1851, this burial ground dates to the earliest years of Anglo settlement around what became Pasadena, when families claiming land along the Texas coast set aside private plots for their dead. Its combined family names reflect the intermarried settler households that founded the community. The state recognized its historical value with a Historic Texas Cemetery designation in 2010.

Lexington, KY

Hampton Court is one of Lexington's historic residential landmarks, recognized for its architectural and local significance during the city's growth as the commercial and cultural hub of Kentucky's Bluegrass region. Its listing on the National Register of Historic Places marks it as a place worth preserving—part of the fabric of a city long known for its stately homes, horse farms, and antebellum and Victorian-era building traditions.

Hamshire, TX

Built in 1859 of Louisiana cypress on land patented to William H. Smith, who died at the Alamo, the Hamshire House is a fine example of the ranch dwellings of early Southeast Texas. It was raised for Emil Broussard, and here grew up J. E. Broussard, who went on to build the first rice mill in Texas — a crop that would transform the coastal prairie. The widowed Azema Broussard later married Lovan Hamshire, and the couple donated the land for the area's first Catholic church.

Waxahachie, TX

Businessman William F. Lewis and County Judge M.B. Templeton put up this Victorian commercial block in 1890, its facade dressed in decorative brickwork and cast-iron columns typical of a prosperous county-seat business district. In 1907 the well-known defense attorney William Pitt Hancock bought the property for his law office, lending it his name. Grocers, a justice of the peace, and real estate and insurance men have all worked beneath its ornate front.

Dublin vicinity, TX

This burial ground, once called North Bolton Cemetery, holds its earliest marked grave from 1876, dating to the era when the Franks family owned the land. After passing through the Bolton and Caudle families, it took the name of Benjamin T. and Elizabeth Hancock, settlers who arrived around 1887. Many of the roughly fifty people buried here were kin to the Hancocks, families who helped found the nearby communities of Alexander and Purves.

Austin, TX

Led by former mayor Lewis Hancock, Jr., a group of Austin enthusiasts built a nine-hole golf course in 1899 and incorporated the Austin Golf Club in 1900, helping establish the city as a golfing center. The Colonial Revival clubhouse, raised in 1934 by architect Charles H. Page, Jr., reused materials salvaged from the University of Texas's demolished Old Main Building. After the club sold the course to the city in 1946, the clubhouse became one of Austin's first public recreation centers.

Lampasas, TX

When the first Anglo settlers arrived in the 1850s they found Native people already using these curative waters, and a town quickly grew up around the springs on the routes of stagecoaches, freight wagons, and cattle drives. Around 1882 Santa Fe Railway promoters built the lavish 200-room Park Hotel with a boardwalk to the springs, and it won fame as the South's finest health resort. The hotel later housed Centenary College until fire destroyed it in 1895, and the area is now a city park.

Lampasas, TX

In the mid-1800s word spread of the curative mineral springs at Lampasas, earning the town the nickname "Saratoga of the South." After the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad arrived in 1882, investors built the Grand Park Hotel and this bathhouse, with hot and cold baths and separate pools reached by a mule-drawn streetcar. Floods eventually carried off the roof, but the limestone walls endure beside the turquoise, spring-fed pool, now part of a city park.

Columbus, TX

County tax collector John S. Hancock built the original cypress-and-cedar house here in 1865, its "dog-trot" hall dividing the front rooms. A later owner moved a second house to the rear in 1884 and dressed the porch and gable in elaborate Victorian trim. In 1906 the rancher and merchant P. F. Heller's family bought the home, and their descendants have occupied it ever since.

Crafton, PA · est. 1946

During the Revolutionary War, the frontier post of Fort Pitt guarded the vital forks of the Ohio, and disease was a constant threat to its garrison. In 1777 General Edward Hand ordered an isolation hospital built on this site to treat and quarantine sick and wounded troops, its log structure ringed by protective blockhouses. The precaution reflected the era's hard-won understanding that contagion could cripple an army as surely as any enemy.

Teville, TX

John J. Handley, a Confederate veteran who had lived in Georgia and elsewhere in Texas, settled in this West Texas country in 1892 and gave the land for its cemetery. He lived long enough to watch farming rise to rival ranching on the plains, and the tiny community of Teville—named for a road junction—rose and faded with him, its post office open only from 1906 to 1910. Four generations of the Handley family and their neighbors now rest in the ground he provided.

Arlington, TX

When the Texas and Pacific Railroad reached this area in 1876, a community quickly took root and needed a burying ground. Handley Cemetery's earliest marked grave, that of Jane E. Thomas, dates to 1878, and a church stood on adjacent land here for nearly half a century. The town took its name from Civil War veteran Maj. James M. Handley, and though several early residents were later reinterred at nearby Rose Hill, burials continued here until 1967.

Fort Worth, TX

A settlement first called Turkey Knob took the name Handley after 1876, when the Texas & Pacific Railroad built a depot and section house nearby. Local Protestants worshiped together in a union building until 1905, when J. Dan Thomas invited about twenty-two neighbors into his home to organize the Handley Church of Christ. The congregation soon outgrew that start and has kept to this location since 1919.

Fort Worth, TX

Organized in 1877 just after the railroad created the town of Handley, this congregation was first led by the Rev. J. J. Cannafax, who doubled as the community's first schoolteacher. Early services were held in the one-room schoolhouse until a shared Union Church was built in 1882, where Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and others worshiped together until 1907. The bell at this site survives from that old Union Church.

Donna, TX

Thomas J. Handy came to the lower Rio Grande as a Union cavalryman during the Civil War and stayed to build a life on the border. In 1866 he married Angelita Cavazos at her family's ranch along the old military highway, and together the couple became substantial landowners, joining an Anglo newcomer's fortunes to a rooted Tejano ranching family. Handy farmed, ranched, and served as a U.S. Customs inspector, and the family's holdings shaped the land around present-day Alamo for nearly a century.

Comanche, TX

In 1874 a mob used this oak to hang Joe Hardin and Tom and Bud Dixon, kinsmen of the notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, in reprisal for the murder of Deputy Charles Webb. The grim episode captures the vigilante violence that flared across the Texas frontier when formal law was thin and feuds ran deep.

Comfort, TX

In the 1850s, German immigrants drawn to the Texas Hill Country founded the community of Comfort along Cypress Creek. Using cypress logs cut from the creek banks, Emil Serger and Paul Hanisch raised this house in 1857 and opened Comfort's first pharmacy inside it. Later wings and a traditional "Sunday house" reflected the German settlers' custom of a town lodging for families who lived on outlying farms.

Atlanta, GA

In April 1968, after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, his body was brought home to Atlanta, the city of his birth and his ministry. This marker recalls Hanley's Bell Street Funeral Home, where—amid a grieving nation—his family and community tended to him before his funeral. Tens of thousands would fill Atlanta's streets to mourn the fallen leader of the civil rights movement.

Lampasas, TX

In the Texas Hill Country, the bubbling mineral springs first glimpsed by "Hopping John" Burleson in 1847 became the seed of the town of Lampasas, laid out in 1855 around a hotel at Scott's White Sulphur Springs. Under later owner John L. Hanna the resort took his name and drew health-seekers who believed the mineral waters could cure their ailments. A grand pavilion-turned-opera-house even hosted the 1892 State Democratic Convention before the fashion for spa towns faded and the grounds fell to brush, until the site was given to the city in 1994.

Lampasas, TX

These sulphur springs, first developed by John Hanna of a prominent local family, drew hundreds who came to camp and take the healing waters in early Lampasas. As the resort's fame grew, the Central Texas Town Company formed in 1884 to promote the park and built a convention hall. There, the 1892 State Democratic Convention backed Grover Cleveland for president and nominated James Hogg for governor — both of whom won — before the hall became an opera house and the resort faded after 1900.

Chico, TX

Alexander Virgil Hanna raised this native sandstone building in 1893 to house his drugstore in Chico, renting space to a doctor, lawyer, jeweler, and the town's first telephone switchboard. The business passed in 1920 to Rueben R. Robinson, whose daughter and son-in-law carried it on, and the property changed hands again in 1973. The solid stone structure remained a hub of small-town commerce and communication across three families' stewardship.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

Hannah Callowhill Penn married William Penn in 1696 and shared his life in Pennsylvania, including two years at the Slate Roof House in Philadelphia at the turn of the eighteenth century. When a stroke left her husband incapacitated in 1712, she took up the reins of the colony he had founded, and after his death in 1718 she governed as acting proprietor until her own death in 1726. For roughly fourteen years she managed the affairs of Pennsylvania — no other woman controlled a British proprietary colony for so long.

Baytown, TX

Born in New Jersey in 1800, Hannah Este Burnet became the wife of David G. Burnet, who served as president ad interim of the fledgling Republic of Texas from March to October 1836. Those turbulent months spanned the fall of the Alamo, the flight of the Runaway Scrape, and the victory at San Jacinto, with Hannah at the side of the Republic's first executive. She died in 1858, her life bound to the dramatic birth of Texas independence.

Bethlehem Township, NJ

Tucked into the New Jersey Highlands, this enormous boulder — said to be the largest exposed rock in the state — carries the name of Hannah Quick, the woman who once owned the surrounding land. Local legend adds a Revolutionary-era flourish: that a shoemaker and a ladder maker lived and plied their trades in a cave beneath the stone while war raged across the young nation. Whether folklore or fact, the rock has anchored community memory for generations.

Hempfield Township, PA · est. 1946

Just east of here stood Hannastown, established in 1773 as the seat of Westmoreland County and the first county seat west of the Allegheny Mountains. Its citizens gathered in 1775 to adopt a bold declaration backing the Revolutionary cause, an early frontier voice for independence. In 1782, near the end of the war, a raiding party burned the town, and it never fully recovered.

East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947

Two miles north stood one of the region's pioneer Presbyterian congregations, founded in 1736 under its first pastor, Richard Sankey. Its graveyard became the resting place of the valley's earliest settlers alongside men who fought in the frontier wars and the Revolution that followed. A country churchyard like this is a layered record of the community that grew up around it.

Hanover County, VA

Standing near the Hanover County courthouse in Virginia, this monument honors the county's men who fought for the Confederacy and the women who supported the war effort on the home front between 1861 and 1865. Like hundreds of similar monuments erected across the South in the decades after the Civil War, it reflects the "Lost Cause" memorial movement that sought to commemorate Confederate service. Hanover County itself saw significant fighting, including the Battles of Hanover Court House and Cold Harbor nearby.

North Codorus Township, PA · est. 1953

In November 1863, this rural railroad junction in York County was where Abraham Lincoln's train changed lines on his way to dedicate the national cemetery at Gettysburg. Months earlier the same junction had funneled wounded men from the battlefield onward to distant hospitals, and it served as a key relay on the military telegraph network that carried war news north and east. What looks like an ordinary spot where two rail lines met was, for a season, a nerve center of the war in Pennsylvania.

East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1946

On June 4, 1774, Col. Timothy Green and eight fellow patriots of Hanover Township drew up what the marker calls the earliest resolves for independence in Pennsylvania. Written more than two years before the Declaration, their bold pledge to commit their cause to "Heaven and our Rifles" captured the defiant mood spreading through the colonial countryside. Such local resolves gave voice to ordinary communities determined to resist British authority.

Whatcom County, WA

In the farming town of Lynden, in Washington's Nooksack Valley, pioneer Hans C. Berthusen and his wife Lida left their homestead land to the public as a permanent park upon Hans's death. The inscribed verse—'All that a man has when he comes to die is what he has given away'—captures the early-20th-century civic-philanthropy spirit that turned private homesteads into shared green space. The stand of old-growth timber they preserved became one of the region's cherished public grounds.

Moorhead, MN

This monument honors Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771–1824), the Norwegian lay preacher whose revival movement stirred a spiritual and social awakening among ordinary Norwegians and helped lay the groundwork for later waves of emigration. Norwegian settlers who poured into Minnesota and the northern plains in the nineteenth century carried Hauge's memory with them, and their descendants raised this memorial to a founding figure of their faith and heritage.

Spearman, TX

This was the first burial ground set aside in Hansford County, its earliest grave that of Mrs. Alfie P. Magee, wife of the first sheriff, in 1890. Among those interred are the Cator brothers, founders of the Zulu Stockade, and the Wright brothers, early ranchers of the Texas Panhandle. It served as the county's only official cemetery until 1928 and remains in use today.

Spearman, TX

Carved from earlier territorial claims and created in 1876, Hansford County took its name from John M. Hansford, a Republic of Texas figure who arrived in 1837, served in the Texas Congress, and sat as a judge of the Seventh Judicial District. Formal organization did not come until 1889, a reminder of how sparsely settled the Texas Panhandle remained decades after the county lines were drawn on paper.

Spearman, TX

Bob Martin came to newly settling Hansford County in 1906, bought land, and ran a livery stable that gave land-seekers from the north and east their only real way to travel the raw Panhandle. Chosen sheriff in 1908 for his standing as a good citizen — as many frontier lawmen were — he was, like his neighbors, a cowboy and farmer. In 1911 he was killed while helping a U.S. marshal make an arrest in a boundary dispute.

Hanson, KY

Named for civil engineer Henry B. Hanson, who laid it out, this Hopkins County town was founded in 1869 and incorporated in 1873. Hanson grew into a bustling tobacco center whose "Hanson Twist" tobacco was shipped across the United States. A string of costly fires in 1889, 1894, 1905, and 1906 repeatedly reshaped the town's fortunes.

Proctor, TX

Hanson Cemetery grew from a settlers' pact: tradition holds that hunting companions William Hanson and M. Walton agreed the first to die would be buried beneath the oaks along Sowell Creek, and the cemetery would bear his name. Hanson's worn marker dates his death to 1870 or 1871, and the burial of his wife formally began the graveyard that served the scattered community of Roch. By the time the Walton family deeded land for it in 1925, more than fifty people already rested there, and later generations added a veterans memorial in 1998.

Concord, MA

In 1935, as Concord marked three centuries since its 1635 founding, the town dedicated a woodland given in the name of Hapgood Wright — a man born in Concord in 1814 who spent his later life in the booming mill city of Lowell, where he died in 1896. His bequest became part of a wider New England movement in which communities set aside "town forests," public woodlands held in common for recreation, watershed protection, and timber. Unveiled amid the Tercentenary celebrations, the monument binds one benefactor's gift to the town's long tradition of stewardship over its own land.

Happy, TX

The Happy Cemetery Association formed in March 1912 and bought five acres from local businessman James F. White, setting aside adjoining grounds—one section reserved for Catholics. The oldest recorded grave is that of William T. King, and for decades a small frame house on the grounds hosted annual Decoration Day gatherings until it was razed in 1985 to make room for more plots. Among those laid to rest here are numerous pioneers and veterans, including both Confederate and Union men who had once faced each other in the Civil War.

Happy, TX

Formal schooling in Happy began when the settlement moved to this townsite in 1906 to meet the new Santa Fe rail line, and Sarah Ann Rose taught a one-room class that first year. The district grew through brick schoolhouses in 1916 and 1928 and absorbed eight rural schools in the 1930s. Its graduates include an Olympian who coached the 1936 U.S. men's basketball team to gold, and the storied "Uncle Sam Band," which played for President and Mrs. Roosevelt and at the Cotton Bowl.

Plainview, TX

Drawn by cheap land and a healthful climate, families like the Matslers, Pearsons, and Neils began settling this stretch of Hale County around 1890, ranching and raising feed and hauling supplies by rail from Amarillo. In 1897 they built a single room that served at once as school, church, and community center, and chose the hopeful name Happy Union. Cotton gins, a store, and a grain elevator followed, and irrigation later made it a prosperous farming area that kept its close-knit identity even as growth stayed modest.

Bastrop, TX

This home in Bastrop carries a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark medallion, the state's designation for structures of architectural and historical significance, but bears no interpretive inscription beyond that mark. Bastrop is among Texas's older towns, settled in the era of Mexican Texas and the early Republic, and its stock of historic residences reflects that long continuity. Without a transcribed text, the specific history of the Haralson family and their house is not recorded here.

Badin, NC

On a hill above the Yadkin River lies one of the most important early sites in the American Southeast. The Hardaway Site preserves traces of some of the first people to inhabit the region, with occupation reaching back roughly 12,000 years to the close of the last Ice Age. Its distinctive stone tools have helped archaeologists define the earliest cultural sequences of eastern North America.

Cobb County, GA

In June 1864, as Sherman's armies pressed toward Atlanta, Confederate forces under General William J. Hardee dug in along a line of North Georgia creeks and ridges to slow the Union advance. This marker notes the position of Hardee's Corps along the Mud Creek line, one link in a chain of entrenchments during the grinding Atlanta Campaign. The fighting here was less a single pitched battle than a deadly war of maneuver and earthworks in the Georgia summer.

Quanah, TX

Created in 1858 and finally organized in 1884, Hardeman County honors two brothers of the Texas independence generation: Bailey Hardeman, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Jones Hardeman, a member of the Texas Congress and Legislature. The county seat moved from Margarette to Quanah, a town named for the Comanche chief Quanah Parker. That pairing captures the frontier's transition, as land once dominated by the Comanche opened to Anglo settlement.

Quanah, TX

Hardeman County was created in 1858 but not organized until 1884, when growth allowed a formal government; the county seat moved from Margaret to Quanah in 1890 after the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway laid out the new townsite. A 1906 bond funded a grand replacement courthouse, designed by architect R. H. Stuckey with a domed cupola, Ionic columns, and glazed tan brick over an Indiana-limestone basement. Completed in 1908, the Neoclassical building has anchored county government and downtown Quanah ever since.

Quanah, TX

When Quanah became the seat of Hardeman County, work began in 1890 on this sturdy native-stone jail, finished in early 1891. It was a two-in-one building: the sheriff's office and living quarters below, prisoners' cells above — a common arrangement on the Texas frontier, where the lawman and his charges shared one roof. Sheriff Malon C. Owens held the post here longer than anyone, from 1936 to 1964, and community effort later turned the old jail into a museum.

Henderson, TX

Built in 1884 for John S. Hardeman and his wife, this Henderson home passed in 1918 to businessman H.L. Griffin and his wife Nellie, staying in the Griffin family for more than four decades. Both Hardeman and Griffin were prominent local merchants, and the house blends Eastlake and Colonial Revival styling with ornamental woodwork in its exterior gables. It stands as a fine example of the fashionable homes East Texas businessmen built in the late 19th century.

Muleshoe vicinity, TX

Harden A. Douglass came to the newly settling plains of West Texas in 1904, part of the wave of homesteaders who filled Bailey County in the early twentieth century. When the county formally organized in 1919 he was chosen its first sheriff and tax collector, an office he held for more than a decade during the raw frontier years of ranching and dryland farming. His long tenure helped bring order and civic structure to a county still finding its footing.

Belknap Township, MI

Recognized under Michigan's Centennial Farm program, the Hardie family farm has been worked by the same family since 1869 — more than 150 years. The designation, awarded by the Historical Society of Michigan, honors farms held continuously by one family for over a century, a testament to the agricultural roots that settlers put down across the Great Lakes country after the Civil War.

Kountze, TX

Hardin County was created on January 22, 1858, and organized that August, taking its name from the Hardin family of neighboring Liberty County. Five Hardin brothers—Benjamin Watson, Augustine Blackburn, William, Frank, and Milton—had come to Texas in 1825, among the early Anglo-American settlers of the region. The county seat sat at the town of Hardin until 1887, when it moved to Kountze.

Hardin, TX

This Liberty County congregation traces its roots to 1876, when the Rev. J. R. D. Taylor established a Methodist church called China Grove, holding early services in a nearby log building. A chapel went up in 1886 on land donated by businessman William F. "Bee" Hardin, and the church changed names over the years, becoming Hardin Chapel Methodist Church by 1910. Fire destroyed a 1939 sanctuary in 1958, but the congregation rebuilt and has remained active for more than 120 years.

Austin, TX

Mississippi-born Hardin R. Runnels rose through Texas politics as a member and then Speaker of the House before serving as lieutenant governor and, from 1857 to 1859, as governor of the state. His single term put him at the head of Texas government in the tense years just before the Civil War. This 1936 Centennial marker honors a leading figure of the young state's antebellum political generation.

Lumberton, TX

In use from about 1859 to 1900, the Hardin-Concord Road was one of the oldest overland routes in the area, carrying wagon and horseback travelers between early settlements. It linked Hardin, the first Hardin County seat, with Concord, the southernmost point steamboats could reach on the Neches River by way of Pine Island Bayou—joining land and water travel into a single network. Traces of the old road can still be followed where modern U.S. Highway 69 now crosses its path.