Search Markers

Abilene, TX

Founded in 1891 as Abilene Baptist College by a coalition of cattlemen, preachers, and the Sweetwater Baptist Association, the school was soon renamed for New York pastor James B. Simmons, whose gift finished its first building. In the early years that single structure housed the president, classes, and the women students, while the men bunked in a barn-like hall nicknamed "Valhalla." Under long-serving president Jefferson Davis Sandefer the college grew dramatically, and gifts from John G. and Mary Hardin brought its lasting name, Hardin-Simmons, in 1934.

Comanche, TX

John Wesley Hardin was among the deadliest gunfighters of the Old West, and it was here in Comanche in 1874 that he was first brought to justice for killing Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb. He served fifteen years in prison, where he studied law, then opened a practice in El Paso in 1894. A year later he was shot in the back and killed at age forty-two.

North Bloomfield Township, OH

In the closing weeks of the Civil War, a two-story frame house in the tiny hamlet of Blooming Grove, Ohio, welcomed a baby boy named Warren Gamaliel Harding. The son of a farming-and-teaching family, he grew up in this rural corner of north-central Ohio before making his name as a newspaper publisher in nearby Marion. From those small-town roots he climbed through Ohio politics to the U.S. Senate and, in 1920, to the White House as the nation's 29th president. His term was cut short by his sudden death in 1923.

Seguin, TX

"Hardscramble" was home to the McCulloch brothers, Henry and Ben, and later to Nathaniel Benton and Elijah V. Dale — famed Texas Rangers and veterans of the Texas Revolution — between 1841 and 1871. From this Guadalupe County ground they helped guard the raw edge of the young republic and early state. The State of Texas raised this marker in 1936, the centennial of independence.

Granbury, TX

As Granbury's courthouse square filled in during the 1870s and 1880s, wood gave way to stone quarried nearby. Built in 1882 and rebuilt after an 1891 fire, this building passed from investor to saloonkeepers to, by 1895, a hardware and tin shop run by a former county clerk. Upstairs worked Lon Morris, a lawyer remembered as a benefactor of the college that bears his name.

Wiergate, TX

This piney-woods burial ground began with the grave of Joseph Lane around 1850, and in 1853 his son set aside a small plot that grew over the decades into a two-acre family and community cemetery. Among those buried here is James Persinger Hardy, who served with Kentucky volunteers in the Army of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and later as a Newton County commissioner. Wrought iron, a handful of inscribed stones, and rows of iron-ore rocks marking unknown graves recall the settlers who wrested their living from the surrounding forest.

Jasper, TX

Built around 1840 of hand-hewn logs, chinked with moss and clay and warmed by a hand-built chimney, the Hardy Pace Home is a survivor from the earliest days of Anglo settlement in the East Texas piney woods. Later generations added an annex and siding in 1930, layering a century of family life onto the original frontier cabin, which was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Bel Air, MD

This memorial in Bel Air honors the members of Harford County's public safety agencies — police officers, firefighters, and emergency responders — who died in the line of duty while protecting the county's citizens. It stands as the community's collective tribute to those who gave their lives in service to others.

Bel Air, MD

This memorial honors students of Harford County's public schools who entered military service and gave their lives for their country. Behind each name is a young person who left the classrooms of Bel Air and the surrounding county to serve, and did not return. The community placed this tribute so their sacrifice would remain part of the schools' shared memory.

Harford County, MD

This marker recalls the late summer of 1782, when the French army of the Comte de Rochambeau made camp here at Harford Town, then called Bush, on its long march north after the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown. Noted as the twenty-second camp of that homeward journey, the site is one link in a chain of encampments that traced the allied army's route across the young nation. The French troops were returning after helping seal the Revolution's outcome the previous autumn.

Eastland vicinity, TX

North Carolina natives Larry and Mary Hargus came to Eastland County in 1879 and, in 1881, bought this tract from town founder C.U. Connellee. The family helped build a local Methodist church, sent a son into the Texas Rangers, and passed the working farm down through generations who raised large families on the land. More than a century later the property remained in Hargus hands.

Bellville, TX

The son of a Prussian immigrant, Emil H. Harigel opened a hardware, tinware, and stove store in Bellville in 1881 and soon built this home for his family. Its Mansard roof and Gothic Revival and Second Empire touches reflect the tastes of a prosperous small-town merchant, and Harigel descendants have kept the house in the family for more than a century.

Palmer, TX

Carpenter and blacksmith D. H. Harkey built this four-room house around 1870. Dr. J. M. Johnson bought it in 1896 and added the second story and Colonial Revival columns before selling it in 1897 to Confederate veteran John Payne, a successful Palmer merchant. Framed in cypress, the home stayed in the Payne family until 1906.

San Saba, TX

Founded in 1855 when the Harkey family moved from Arkansas, this San Saba County community grew famous for its horses and its racetrack—drawing crowds for half a century behind a fleet-footed mare Riley Harkey brought from Arkansas. A single street of stores, a blacksmith shop, a school, and a baseball diamond overlooked the racetrack flat. The track closed in 1907, the school consolidated in 1929, and the last store shut in 1954, leaving only a community hall to mark the town.

Harleton, TX

Settlers trickled into the country between Big and Little Cypress creeks in the 1830s, but Harleton truly took off when a railroad arrived in 1891 as part of a scheme by the Harle brothers and their backers to harvest the area's virgin forests. Their Hope Lumber Company built a depot, commissary, and band sawmill, and their well-stocked store so outclassed the nearby village of Grady that its post office moved over and took the Harle name. Timber wealth spurred farming and a cluster of thriving merchants, though the company closed its mill by the late 1890s once the nearby forests were cut over.

Harleton, TX

Methodist worship in this corner of Harrison County began in settlers' cabins in the 1840s, when East Texas was still raw frontier. By 1901 the congregation had land and a sanctuary of its own, and in 1914 they raised a brick church here under trustee R. W. Taylor. Long a shared civic space for other local groups, it became Harleton United Methodist Church in 1970.

Harlingen, TX

As World War II approached, Harlingen offered the Army 960 acres of its flat coastal plain — useless for artillery but ideal for aircraft — and in August 1941 the Harlingen Army Gunnery School took its first students. At its peak the base trained up to 9,000 airmen, among them Women Airforce Service Pilots, before closing in 1946. Reactivated during the Korean War as Harlingen Air Force Base, it trained more than 13,000 navigators until its 1962 closure dealt the local economy a heavy blow; its grounds now serve an airport, museums, and schools.

Harlingen, TX

When Lon C. Hill, the founder of Harlingen, deeded these acres to cemetery trustees for a token dollar in 1912, he was formalizing a burial ground that had already received its first grave three years earlier. Like many South Texas cemeteries of its era, it was originally laid out in separate sections for Anglos, Hispanics, African Americans, and infants — divisions abandoned after the city took it over in 1947. The tombstones and grave decorations still preserve the borderland's braided cultural traditions.

Harlingen, TX

Harlingen's first hospital opened in this building in 1923, the joint venture of local businesswoman Ida Gilbert and nurse Marie Yeager. The seven-bed facility, with wings added to a central section, served the young Rio Grande Valley town for just four years before the larger Valley Baptist Hospital eclipsed it. The structure later became a rooming house and residence, and was moved to this site in 1978.

Marquette, MI

Amos and Olive Harlow were among Marquette's founding pioneers, arriving by steamship on Lake Superior in 1849 as Michigan's Upper Peninsula iron country opened up. On this farm, which they named Eureka after Amos found iron ore nearby, they built a sawmill and raised produce to sell to the region's miners. Only this dry-stacked stone foundation, a few apple trees, and stone fence lines remain.

Topsey, TX

The Harman community's schoolhouse traces to an 1891 land gift by M.F. Harman, moving twice before a three-classroom building with a stage rose here in 1917-18 on land bought for $200. Beyond lessons, it hosted Boy Scouts, a home demonstration club and even a rat-killing club before consolidating with Gatesville schools in 1948 and becoming a lasting community center.

Happy, TX

Holland E. Toles opened a grain elevator in this Panhandle area in 1926 and was joined by Vernon Harman in 1938, with the partnership continuing after Toles's death. Wartime demand, expanding irrigation, and a federal grain program soon called for larger storage, and construction of this six-unit concrete elevator began in March 1945. The labor came from an unexpected source: some fifty Italian prisoners of war from a camp near Hereford, working under Geneva Convention rules, who finished the job that July.

Longview, TX

Harmon General Hospital, authorized by the U.S. Army in 1942 and named for Col. Daniel Warrick Harmon, treated servicemen in Longview from late 1942 until the end of 1945. This ecumenical chapel, opened in January 1943, served Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish personnel alike. After the war the property became a college campus, and the well-preserved little chapel was renovated and formally named Speer Chapel.

Somerset, PA · est. 1947

Harmon Husband arrived in the Somerset country as its first settler after fleeing North Carolina in 1771, where he had helped lead the Regulator uprising against colonial authority. Living for a time at his Coffee Springs farm, he never abandoned the cause of common people against government overreach, taking up his pen as a pamphleteer. In the 1790s he threw himself into the Whiskey Rebellion, the western Pennsylvania revolt against the federal excise tax, before his death in 1795.

Hankamer, TX

The Harmon family made saddles in East Texas from before the Civil War, when Joshua Harmon worked leather part-time in Orange as early as 1856. After moving to Chambers County, he partnered with another saddler—Harmon carving the wooden saddletrees, Bingle working the leather—and built a reputation among Gulf Coast cowboys and ranchers. His son Charles formally opened the Harmon Saddle Shop in 1896, and the business, prized for comfort and durability, stayed in the family for generations.

Jackson Township, PA · est. 1947

This walled ground holds the graves of members of the Harmony Society, the German pietist commune that settled here between 1805 and 1815. In keeping with their beliefs the graves were left unmarked, plain and equal in death as the Harmonists sought to be in life. The stone wall came later, in 1869, built after the society had returned from its sojourn in Indiana and settled at "Old Economy" in Beaver County.

Newcastle, TX

Kentucky-born Peter Harmonson came to Texas in 1845 as a settler in the Peters Colony and helped organize Denton County, where he served as its first sheriff. In 1854 he moved his family west to establish a ranch near this site—Harmonson Rancho—and went on to help found Young County as its first chief justice. He died of a wound suffered in the Elm Creek Indian raid in 1865, and years later his old ranch was again the scene of a clash between Indians and cattlemen involving his son.

Harmony, PA · est. 1947

The town of Harmony was the first American home of the Harmony Society, a communal religious settlement founded in 1804 by George Rapp and his German followers. Seeking to live simply and hold property in common while awaiting the millennium, the Harmonists prospered here before moving west to New Harmony, Indiana, in 1814. A decade later they returned to Pennsylvania, settling at Economy in present-day Ambridge in 1825.

Palestine, TX

The Harmony community took root in 1855 as families from South Carolina and Mississippi carved farms out of the East Texas landscape. In 1891 nine charter members organized Harmony Missionary Baptist Church, worshipping in a small building on a local farm that doubled as the community school. Across the next century the congregation outgrew building after building, trading creek-side baptisms for an indoor baptistry in 1976.

Helena, TX

Oral tradition traces the Harmony Baptist Church to 1864, and by 1875 Thomas Ragsdale had donated land here for a church building. That building also hosted school classes and Woodmen of the World lodge meetings, making it a center of community life. The adjoining cemetery holds early settlers of Harmony and Karnes County, its oldest marked grave dating to 1875, and descendants still gather annually though the church disbanded in 1974.

Navasota, TX

When John Moore McGinty and his wife Mary Loretta Brown settled the Grimes County prairie in 1853, they gathered their neighbors into a frontier congregation that soon met in a local schoolhouse and took the name "Harmony." The first church house rose in 1870, and the family later deeded the burial ground that had already served the community for years. The present building was finished about 1924, and services continued here into the 1930s.

Nacogdoches, TX

When James Norvel Pitts came to Texas in the 1870s, his wife, son, and a caravan of Pitts brothers and Mississippi friends followed by wagon to join him, founding the community they aptly named Harmony. Pitts donated land for a combined church-and-school building and this public cemetery, whose oldest marked grave dates to 1886. Families long gathered for an annual cemetery cleaning day, a tradition later carried on by a formal association, and among those buried here are veterans reaching back to the Civil War.

Huntsville, TX

Harmony Cemetery is a quiet ledger of frontier Walker County, its earliest known grave dug for pioneer Vincent Herlock in 1851. Known in turn as Herlock and Goolsby cemetery, the ground later anchored the Harmony Missionary Baptist Church after it relocated here in 1906. Church and graveyard tell the familiar rural rhythm of settlement, worship, decline, and revival by a caretaking association.

Weatherford, TX

Harmony Cemetery began as a community gathering place, its first grave that of Mary Green, buried here in 1869; her son Rufus, a Civil War veteran, and his wife owned the surrounding land. Rufus later sold a parcel including the burial ground to the DeBusk family, who deeded it to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Though no church was ever built on the site, it went on serving as the community burial ground for the Green family's kin and other pioneer settlers.

Fairfield, TX

Among the oldest church buildings in Freestone County, this sanctuary rose in 1876 to serve the Stewards Mill community, which had worshiped in homes and the schoolhouse before. Families with names like Awalt, Bonner, and Steward built it as a shared space, meant to host different denominations on different days, and Rev. Thomas Joel Bonner preached its first sermon that December. Its board-and-batten walls and paired transom-topped doors mark it as a fine survivor of nineteenth-century rural church design.

Huntsville, TX

In 1871, businessman William Koehl donated an acre north of Huntsville so the African American residents of Pine Prairie could establish a church, led by deacons W.T. Watkins and Matthew Bryant and Reverend W. Watkins. The building doubled as the Pine Prairie school, and for over a century Harmony Grove was the community's only Black church. After fire destroyed it in 1978 — a neighbor rescued the bell — the congregation rebuilt, and it still holds its August homecoming and sustains youth, nursing-home, and prison ministries.

Williamsburg, OH

In 1800, the lands north of the Ohio River were raw frontier, freshly opened to American settlement after decades of contest. Major General William Lytle came to this corner of the Northwest Territory as a surveyor, a profession that made him one of the most influential men on the early frontier—those who measured the land often ended up owning much of it. Lytle platted and acquired vast acreage across what became Clermont County, and from this homestead he helped shape the young county's boundaries, settlement, and civic life.

Tatum, TX

The oldest grave here belongs to J. W. Hall, buried in 1844 beneath a large rock before John W. Kuykendall formally donated the first two acres in 1852. Maintained by a cemetery association since 1882, the grounds have grown through later gifts of land. Those laid to rest include the area's early settlers and county leaders alongside veterans of the Mexican War, Civil War, both World Wars, and Vietnam.

Enon, TX

In the late 1920s and 1930s, scattered one-room schools across Wood and Upshur counties faced a choice familiar to rural America: consolidate or fall behind. Beginning with the 1929 merger of Mt. Gilead and Rosewood, a string of tiny districts folded together into a single school housed in a rock building here. The founders named it Harmony to mark how smoothly the notoriously touchy business of school consolidation had gone.

Jackson Township, PA · est. 1947

In the years after the German Harmonist communal society moved on from western Pennsylvania, Abraham Ziegler bought their property and, in 1816, organized a Mennonite congregation here in Butler County. The Rev. John Boyer served as its first pastor, and by 1825 the worshippers had raised the sturdy stone church that still marks their presence. It is a quiet reminder of the layered German religious settlement that shaped this corner of the frontier.

Pickton, TX

After landowner Jesse Odom brought an itinerant preacher to hold revivals for area settlers in 1877 and 1878, a congregation formed and built its first sanctuary in 1879 on land Odom donated, with the Rev. S. W. Jones as first pastor. A cemetery opened that year on an adjacent tract given by Henry P. Barron, whose 1880 burial is the earliest recorded. Local tradition holds that the goodwill and harmony during the sanctuary's construction gave the church and cemetery their name; the congregation dissolved in 1963, but the cemetery is still maintained.

Ambridge, PA · est. 1963

This ground holds the graves of 594 members and workers of the Harmony Society, the German pietist community whose nearby village of Old Economy was one of America's most successful communal experiments. Led by their faith in a coming millennium, the Harmonists lived and labored together, prospering in farming and manufacturing while practicing celibacy. Their unmarked burials reflect the plain, self-effacing devotion at the heart of the society.

Ambridge, PA · est. 1967

Between 1828 and 1831 the Harmony Society—German Pietist immigrants who followed George Rapp in a communal, celibate religious life—raised this brick church at their town of Economy. The members made the bricks themselves, and the building, believed designed by Frederick Rapp, became the spiritual heart of one of America's most successful utopian communities. The Harmonists blended fervent millennial faith with shrewd industry, prospering while awaiting the Second Coming.

Forksville, PA · est. 1999

Harold 'Red' Grange — the 'Galloping Ghost' — was born in Forksville, where his family farmed and worked the nearby lumber camps before moving away when he was five. He became a three-time All-American at the University of Illinois and, from 1925 to 1934, one of professional football's first great draws, chiefly with the Chicago Bears. A member of the College Football Hall of Fame, he did as much as anyone to make the young sport a national spectacle.

Bryn Athyn, PA · est. 1972

In 1924 aviation pioneer Harold F. Pitcairn established his first flying field on this site, launching decades of experimentation in flight. He and his associates developed the American autogiro—an aircraft with a free-spinning rotor that pointed toward the eventual helicopter—and won the prestigious 1930 Collier Trophy for the achievement. This quiet Montgomery County ground was an early laboratory of American aeronautical innovation.

Altoona, PA · est. 1994

Harold L. Ickes grew up in Altoona before rising to become one of the most consequential figures of the New Deal, serving as Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior from 1933 to 1946. He oversaw a vast public-works program that built dams, roads, and public buildings across Depression-era America, all while championing conservation of the nation's natural resources. Blunt and combative, he was also an early and forceful advocate for civil rights within the federal government.

New York, NY

In 1925, from a Manhattan address, a sharp-tongued editor launched a weekly magazine that would help define urban American wit for a century. Harold Ross gathered a circle of writers, humorists, and performers—among them Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx, and George Gershwin—whose crackling repartee set the tone for The New Yorker. The magazine's blend of reporting, criticism, fiction, and cartoons became a national institution.

Hemphill, TX

This burial ground began in 1896 with the death of J.R. Harper, a Mississippi native who brought his family to Texas and gave his name to the surrounding community once known as Lick Skillet. As the Harper Chapel community grew, local Baptists raised a frame church here in 1934, and neighbors continued burying their dead on land expanded by later donors. Veterans of conflicts beginning with World War I rest among the generations of area families.

Hemphill, TX

Local Baptists first gathered for revivals under a brush arbor on this spot before raising a proper frame chapel in 1933–34. The men of the community did the building while the women funded it by selling box lunches, a small drama of Depression-era self-reliance. Though the congregation disbanded in the 1950s, the chapel with its beveled siding and four-over-four windows still hosts funerals, weddings, and community gatherings.

Houston, TX

In 1905, a rising Houston industrialist named Benjamin Harper built this home in the new Westmoreland district using mail-order plans from George Barber, one of the era's most popular architects of pattern-book houses. Its late Queen Anne dress — wraparound porch, decorative gable, Doric columns — matched Barber's published design 'Suburban Beauty,' a reminder of how middle- and upper-class Americans could order architectural fashion straight from a magazine. Harper himself embodied Houston's early-twentieth-century growth, running Union Iron Works and helping lead a local bank.

Harper, TX

Harper's schoolhouse story begins in 1884, when a handful of settlers organized classes for a growing Hill Country community and raised a one-room frame school on donated land the next year. Voters formalized the Harper Independent School District in 1906 and put up a limestone building, then weathered a decade of budget shortfalls that repeatedly cut the school year short. Through consolidations, WPA-built additions in the early 1940s, and homemade six-man football on cleared pasture, the district outlasted dozens of rural neighbors to become one of only three left in Gillespie County.

Harper, TX

Founded in 1881 as the Barnett Spring Presbyterian Church, this Hill Country congregation began in a schoolhouse before moving to Harper in 1901, where members raised a simple frame church on donated land. A bell was hung in 1903, and over the decades the building did double duty—housing the Harper School in 1906 and again in the 1940s and welcoming other denominations to worship.

Haltom, TX

When Henry Jackson Harper moved his family from Tennessee to this corner of Tarrant County in 1894, the frontier still swallowed travelers whole. The cemetery began, as many did, with grief on the road: a passing family's child died and was laid to rest among trees on Harper's farm. Over the following decades the Harpers buried their own kin here, from grandson Henry Mayton to the patriarch himself in 1928.

Harpers Ferry, WV · est. 1963

Brown and 21 men captured the federal arsenal at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah. Cornered by U.S. Marines under Robert E. Lee, Brown was captured, tried, and hanged — becoming a martyr to abolitionists and a warning to the South.

Kingston, TX

In the 1850s the early settler Richard Harrell built cabins and a brush arbor here, creating one of Hunt County's first religious sites. Each summer, when crops were laid by and work was slack, Methodist families forded the Sabine River with milk cows, cook stoves, and wash tubs to camp for weeks of preaching, hymns, and scripture — a rare gathering in hard, lonely lives. Between meetings the camp often sheltered passing travelers, and its influence lasted half a century.

Round Rock, TX

Jacob and Mary Harrell came to Texas with Robertson's colony in 1833 and were among the first to settle the site that became Austin, where Jacob sold his homestead for the grounds of the State Capitol and served as mayor in 1847. In 1848 the family moved to Jacob's headright near this spot, helping organize the new Williamson County government. The cemetery holds Harrell family members and one of the family's enslaved people.

Allentown, PA · est. 1990

Around 1900, the African-American evangelist Harriet A. Baker opened a mission on North Penn Street in Allentown and preached there until her death. Her small storefront ministry took root, and in 1914 it became the first home of St. James A.M.E. Zion Church, which built its permanent home on this spot in 1936. Baker was part of a wider tradition of Black women preachers who founded and sustained congregations at a time when the pulpit was rarely open to them.

City of Glen Cove, NY

In the early 20th century, Glen Cove was transforming from a Long Island coastal village into a Gold Coast community, and civic-minded residents shaped its public institutions. Harriet Barnes Pratt, a prominent figure known for her work in landscape design and public improvement, lent her leadership to the creation of the city's Civic Center. On May 31, 1937, the City Council dedicated this park in her honor as a lasting expression of gratitude for that service.

Cincinnati, OH

In the 1830s and 40s, Cincinnati sat on the Ohio River just across from the slave state of Kentucky, making it a charged crossroads where the realities of American slavery were impossible to ignore. It was here, during her years living in the city, that Harriet Beecher Stowe witnessed the human toll of bondage firsthand and endured personal grief that deepened her moral conviction. Those experiences fueled Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a novel that put the cruelty of slavery before a national audience and helped harden Northern opposition in the decade before the Civil War.

Edenton, NC

Born into slavery around 1813 in Edenton, Harriet Jacobs endured years of abuse before escaping north, where she became a writer and abolitionist. Her 1861 memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, gave a rare first-person account of enslavement from a woman's point of view and became one of the era's most important slave narratives. She drew on her early life in this Chowan County town for the book.