Search Markers

Little Elm, TX

The Harrington, Cassady, and Clark Cemeteries are three historically African American burial grounds now sharing 1.77 acres in Denton County. Founded in the 1870s on land owned by Black families — Jacob Cassady bought his plot in 1872, and Zack Rawlings and George Clark theirs in 1876 — the Cassady and Clark grounds were relocated in 1953 when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Little Elm to create Lewisville Lake. Roughly 170 graves, marked in marble, granite, fieldstone, and funeral-home plates, record the community of the vanished farming settlement of Lloyd.

Granbury, TX

Local stonemason I.W. Walley laid up the rock walls of this two-story commercial block on Granbury's square in 1899, dressing it with a cast-iron storefront and decorative brickwork behind a plastered facade. It was built for Wesley Smith Harris, who ran both a furniture store and a funeral home under the same roof — a pairing that made practical sense in an era when furniture makers also produced casket parts. The two businesses passed together to Ben Estes in later years.

San Saba, TX

Harris Cemetery was already in use by 1874, when A.J. and Ellen Crawford deeded five acres to local trustees for a burial ground, school, and place of worship. Its oldest marked grave belongs to N.M. Baker, born in 1819, and one relocated 1868 stone recalls a family whose remains were lost to a flood. Cared for by an association, the site endures as a tangible record of San Saba County's earliest settlers.

Mendoza, TX

Sidon H. Harris brought his family to Texas in 1851 and settled in this part of Caldwell County by 1856, buying land where the family cemetery began when he died in 1861. Two of his children were buried here in 1862, followed by his wife Amanda in 1866. Though descendants later sold the land, the graves were meant to be preserved; after the cemetery was destroyed in 1984 its markers were replaced.

Hughes Springs, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Cass County in the 1850s, and the community took its name after John T. Harris arrived in 1853 on land that already held a Methodist log church and burial ground. The church doubled as a schoolhouse, was rebuilt larger in 1859, and the cemetery grew alongside it, its oldest legible stone dating to 1859. Rebuilt again after a 1949 tornado, the church endures beside graves that include veterans from the Mexican War through Korea.

Houston, TX

Home to the Karankawa and Orcoquiza peoples and once eyed by Spain for a presidio, this region was permanently settled in 1822 by Stephen F. Austin's colonists. John R. Harris founded a village he named for his family and for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and it grew into one of the most influential colonial municipalities, playing a major role in the Texas War for Independence. The county was created in 1836, briefly held the Republic's capital, served as a Confederate command and ordnance center, and eventually grew into the world-commerce hub of Houston.

Seabrook, TX

This archeological site preserves evidence of Native life on the Texas coast reaching back thousands of years. It is a shell midden—a refuse heap of oyster and rangia clam shells left by early inhabitants beside their campsite—that also held a burial ground. Excavations recovered a Plainview dart point tied to very early peoples and radiocarbon-dated part of the midden to 1476 B.C., while ceramics buried with 32 individuals dated the cemetery to the first millennium A.D.

Houston, TX

When the Allen brothers laid out Houston in 1836, they set aside this block as the courthouse square, and a two-story pine-log courthouse rose here the next year. The grand Classical Revival building standing today—the fifth on the spot—was completed in 1910 to designs by Charles Erwin Barglebaugh of the Dallas firm Lang and Witchell, its domed roof, Corinthian columns, and terra-cotta ornament announcing a booming young city.

Houston, TX

The lack of public schooling was written into the Texas Declaration of Independence as a grievance, and President Mirabeau B. Lamar answered by setting aside county land to fund education — earning Texas the nickname "Father of Education." Harris County built on that foundation, funding schooling for indigent children by 1856 and creating its Department of Education in 1889 under first superintendent B.L. James, who oversaw more than fifty common school districts serving some 900 students. As statewide reforms reshaped public education, the department evolved into one of only two surviving county school entities in Texas.

McLennan County, TX

Harris Creek Baptist Church began in the home of Aquilla and Delila Jones, who in 1872 gave 1.6 acres of McLennan County land for a church, schoolhouse, and cemetery. The congregation grew through the following decades, sharing its building with a Methodist congregation from 1932 to 1960 and dedicating a new brick auditorium in 1977.

Winona, TX

Harris Creek Baptist Church took root in 1849 in the Mount Carmel community of East Texas, moving to this higher ground in 1852 after floods drove it from Lott's Spring. Its meetinghouse doubled as a schoolhouse, and Anglo settlers and the people they enslaved worshipped in the same building while seated apart. The adjoining cemetery, in use since at least 1857, holds several hundred graves and veterans of every war from 1812 to Vietnam.

Waco, TX

In the 1850s the Haley, Crain, Caufield, and Jones families settled along Harris Creek in McLennan County, founding a community that took the stream's name. The burial ground began with the 1865 grave of young Hattie Timmons and grew on land the Jones family formally set aside in 1872, part of it reserved for a church and school. Among those resting here is Joel Crain, who received the surrounding land as a grant for his service at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto.

Town of Clarence, NY

In 1807, pioneer Asa Harris settled this rise of land in western New York and opened a tavern along the frontier roads northeast of Buffalo, giving the area its enduring name of Harris Hill. When British forces burned Buffalo during the War of 1812, the hill's relative safety made it a refuge for families fleeing the destruction. The marker recalls both the area's earliest white settlement and a tense chapter when the young nation's frontier was a war zone.

Granville County, NC

Founded by Methodists before 1778, Harris Meeting House served as the mother church for its corner of the North Carolina Piedmont in the Revolutionary and early national years. It gathered worshipers for half a century before disbanding in 1828.

Dallas, TX

The Harris-Savage House traces a Dallas family line back to 1843 pioneers, but its story centers on attorney Will Randolph Harris, who moved into this Mission-style home in 1921 after a career that included the successful impeachment of Governor James "Pa" Ferguson. His daughter Dorothy and her husband, former Dallas Mayor Wallace Savage, later carried on the family's civic legacy, founding the Dallas Academy and helping lead the city's historic-preservation movement. Their efforts helped make this house and neighborhood the first National Register historic district in Dallas in 1974.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1915

On the banks of the Susquehanna here stood the landing of Harris' Ferry, first granted to John Harris in 1733 and for half a century the name by which the future Harrisburg was known. It was among the most important crossings in early Pennsylvania, funneling settlers, traders, and pack trains westward into the interior and on toward the Ohio Valley. From this modest ferry grew the city that would become the state capital.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1946

Harrisburg grew from Harris' Ferry, a Susquehanna River crossing established by the trader John Harris Sr. in the early 1700s. His son, John Harris Jr., laid out the town in 1785, and in 1812 it became Pennsylvania's capital. Its position on a major river and travel route made it a hub of trade and government for more than two centuries.

Susquehanna Township, PA · est. 1946

Harrisburg began as Harris' Ferry, a Susquehanna crossing run by the trader John Harris Sr. a century before the town took shape. His son John Harris Jr. laid out the town in 1785, and it became Pennsylvania's capital in 1812. Its riverside setting kept it at the center of travel, trade, and political life for generations.

Swatara Township, PA · est. 1946

What became Harrisburg started as Harris' Ferry, a Susquehanna River crossing established by trader John Harris Sr. in the early 1700s. His son John Harris Jr. laid out the town in 1785, and in 1812 it was chosen as Pennsylvania's capital. Astride a major river and trade corridor, it served as a center of travel and commerce for over two centuries.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1946

Harrisburg traces its origins to Harris' Ferry, a Susquehanna crossing settled by the trader John Harris Sr. His son John Harris Jr. laid out the town in 1785, and it became Pennsylvania's capital in 1812. For more than two centuries the river city has been a crossroads of travel, trade, and historic events.

Wormleysburg, PA · est. 1947

Harrisburg began as Harris' Ferry, settled in the early 1700s by John Harris Sr. at a strategic crossing of the Susquehanna River. His son laid out the town in 1785, and in 1812 it became Pennsylvania's capital, cementing a role as a crossroads of travel and trade it had already held for generations. For over two centuries the site has funneled people and commerce through the heart of the state.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1990

Chartered by the Commonwealth and opened in 1845, the Harrisburg Cemetery is the oldest and largest burial ground in Pennsylvania's capital, spreading across 35 acres of carefully composed late-Victorian landscape. Its ornate statuary and its caretaker's house — designed by A.J. Downing, the era's foremost American landscape gardener — reflect the rural-cemetery movement's ideal of the graveyard as a serene, park-like place. More than 30,000 people rest here, among them Revolutionary War soldiers, Pennsylvania governors, and figures of local, state, and national note.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2005

From around 1900 into the 1950s, the Harrisburg Giants gave the city a place in the golden age of Black baseball. Run for decades by Colonel William Strothers until his death in 1933, the club was one of 27 major Negro League teams and finished second in the Eastern Colored League in 1925. Its rosters glittered with talent — Hall-of-Famer Oscar Charleston among them — and the team played its home games at Island Park through 1957.

Susquehanna Township, PA · est. 1987

When it opened in 1851, this was Pennsylvania's first state mental hospital—a direct result of the tireless campaigning of Dorothea Lynde Dix. Traveling the country to expose the cruel neglect of the mentally ill, Dix pressed legislatures to build humane public asylums, and Pennsylvania answered by placing this one on the wooded hills above Harrisburg.

Houston, TX

This burial ground took shape as African Americans settled around Harrisburg's cattle trade and railroads in the mid-1800s, and after emancipation freedpeople organized their own benevolent societies to bury their dead with dignity. Successive Black organizations and, later, one of Houston's oldest African American funeral homes cared for the grounds into the 1960s. Those laid to rest here include a body servant of Sam Houston who witnessed San Jacinto, a soldier of the 84th U.S. Colored Infantry, a buffalo soldier who served in Cuba, and veterans of World War I.

Selma, TX

As early as 1848, brothers-in-law John S. Harrison and William McCulloch ran stagecoaches from the Texas coast into central Texas, one thread in a web of competing lines and government "star routes" that carried travelers and mail under Post Office contract. Their Star Route 6285 linked Austin and San Antonio, an eighteen-hour run that left Austin at 3 a.m. and rolled into San Antonio by night, passing through New Braunfels and Selma along the old post road and stretches of the Camino Real. The Selma stop still stands as a prime example of "limecrete" construction, its walls poured from local sand, pebbles, and river slip.

Crosby, TX

Born into slavery around 1845, Harrison Barrett spent years after the 1865 emancipation of Texas slaves gathering his scattered family, reuniting nearly all of them east of the San Jacinto River. He bought this land in 1889 and founded what became Barrett Settlement, establishing a school, church, and cemetery and leading the growing community of homes and farms. His twice-rebuilt homestead still stands, and he lies with family in the cemetery descendants named Journey's End.

Fort Worth, TX

This one-acre burial ground began on the land of Tarrant County pioneer D.C. Harrison, its earliest known grave that of young Mary E. Harrison in 1871. In 1895 R.A. Randol, operator of the nearby Randol Mill, bought the tract and deeded it forever as a cemetery. Its roughly sixty graves gather early settler families, including Randol's brother John, killed in an 1894 mill accident.

Dew, TX

Founded in the 1850s with a mere dozen members on land donated by pioneer George Harrison, this Methodist congregation grew as settlers poured into the surrounding country. Its annual camp meetings drew worshippers from a wide area, a hallmark of frontier Protestant revivalism. The adjoining cemetery holds many of the region's earliest settlers, including numerous Confederate veterans, and the church itself relocated to Dew in 1870.

Marshall, TX

Harrison County was carved from Shelby County and created in January 1839, in the days of the Republic of Texas, and organized in 1842. It honors Jonas Harrison, a New Jersey–born statesman who came to Texas in 1820 and served in the 1832 convention at San Felipe before his death in 1836. The county seat, Marshall, was named for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall.

Marshall, TX

Long home to the Caddo people, this corner of East Texas drew Anglo settlers from the southern states in the 1830s, many taking Mexican land grants before Texas won independence in 1836. Organized in 1839 and named for revolutionary leader Jonas Harrison, Harrison County became the most populous and among the richest counties in antebellum Texas — a cotton economy built on slavery that, after emancipation, left it with a large Black population. The Texas and Pacific Railway later made Marshall a major rail center, its shops and offices anchoring the town's growth.

Marshall, TX

Completed in 1900 at a cost of $62,000, this was the third courthouse to stand on the site, following the log 'Little Virginia' of 1851 and a brick Gothic hall of 1889 that burned in 1899. Built of granite, brick, and marble in a Capitol-inspired classical Roman style, it was crowned with a clock dome, belfry, and a figure of Justice, and since 1964 has housed the Harrison County Museum.

Columbus, TX

This Columbus residence began in 1861 as a modest two-room house. Between 1877 and 1901 owner Jesse Joyner Harrison hired the prominent local builders Andrew Wirtz & Sons to enlarge it into a two-story central-hall home, its wraparound porches trimmed with fine milled woodwork. The Hastedt family acquired it in 1911 and kept it until 1989.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 1947

This early Georgian house went up in 1704, when the Welsh Quaker settlements of the Philadelphia countryside were barely a generation old, and later took its name from owner Richard Harrison. Its most consequential resident arrived in 1774: Charles Thomson, who would serve as Secretary of the Continental Congress through the entire Revolution, keeping the young nation's official records. He lived out his long retirement here until 1824, a founding-era figure quietly farming outside Philadelphia.

Louisville, KY

After the Civil War, as large Kentucky estates were subdivided, African American families settled the land along Harrods Creek and in nearby Prospect and "The Neck." In 1919 entrepreneur James Taylor purchased land from Mary Shirley Helm and began selling lots to Black families, and his Taylor Subdivision grew into a thriving suburban community. The Jacob School, built in 1916 and named for former slave Jefferson Jacob, still stands as a landmark of that world.

Town of Huntington, NY

This tribute stands in Huntington, the Long Island town Harry Chapin called home and helped define through his music and activism. A storytelling folk-rock singer-songwriter of the 1970s, Chapin turned hit songs into a platform for fighting hunger, staging countless benefit concerts and co-founding organizations to feed the poor before his life was cut short in a 1981 crash on the nearby Long Island Expressway. The lines quoted here distill the conviction that drove him: that a single life, well spent, might measurably change the world.

New York, NY

This small Brooklyn Heights playground honors singer-songwriter Harry Chapin (1942–1981), who grew up nearby and played in this very park before finding fame with songs like "Cat's in the Cradle." The surrounding neighborhood carries a much longer story: land the Lenape (Canarsee) knew as Ihpetonga, purchased by Dutch settlers, and transformed after Robert Fulton's steam ferry began daily runs in 1814 into what became Manhattan's first commuter suburb. In 1965 Brooklyn Heights was named New York City's first officially designated historic district.

Amherst County, VA

This bridge honors Harry F. Byrd, the powerful Virginia governor and long-serving U.S. senator whose political machine dominated the Old Dominion's politics for much of the 20th century. The marker credits his advocacy with helping create the Blue Ridge Parkway, the scenic motor road begun in the 1930s as a Depression-era public works project to link Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks. Dedicated in 1985, the bridge stands in the Virginia high country the parkway was designed to showcase.

Deersville, OH

This marker honors a remarkable turn-of-the-century figure who made her name in an era when few women led scientific expeditions into the wild. Working alongside and later beyond her husband, the famed taxidermist and naturalist Carl Akeley, she trekked through the forests of British Columbia and across Africa, gathering specimens and observations that enriched the collections of the American Museum of Natural History. She also turned her adventures into books and, back home, founded a girls' camp to pass her love of the outdoors to the next generation. Her honors reached a global audience at a time when exploration was overwhelmingly a man's world.

Crockett, TX

Harry F. Moore began his banking career in Ohio, married Anna Laura May in 1885, and by 1891 had settled in Crockett, Texas. He helped organize the First National Bank and served as its president for 22 years beginning in 1904, setting a standard later followed by two of his sons. Beyond banking he helped found banks in neighboring towns and was active in his church and Masonic lodge.

Charlotte, NC

Harry Golden, who lived a block from here, published the Carolina Israelite from 1944 to 1968, mixing humor with pointed commentary on Southern life. A Jewish immigrant turned Charlotte journalist, he became a nationally read voice for civil rights, satirizing segregation with wit rather than fury. His bestselling books carried his gentle-but-biting arguments to millions.

Port Arthur, TX

Born in Louisiana in 1922 and raised in Port Arthur, Harry Choates became one of the defining voices of Cajun music, a fiddler who sang in French and English and blended traditional Cajun sounds with Western swing. His 1946 recording 'Jole Blon,' a reworking of an old Cajun waltz, won airplay nationwide and remains his enduring classic. But contract troubles, alcoholism, and a fractured personal life shadowed his talent, and he died in the Travis County Jail in 1951 at just 28.

New York, NY

For more than two decades, this was home to the world's most famous escape artist. From 1904 until his death in 1926, Harry Houdini filled these rooms with illusions, theatrical memorabilia, and a vast library on magic and psychic phenomena. Ropes, chains, straitjackets, bank vaults, and jail cells—none of them could hold him, and his daring escapes made him a global sensation.

Boston, MA · est. 1994

Harry Houdini, born Ehrich Weiss in 1874, became the most famous escape artist of his age, thrilling crowds by freeing himself from handcuffs, chains, and locked containers. On May 1, 1908, he performed one of his celebrated bridge escapes at this spot in Boston. A Hungarian-Jewish immigrant who rose to international stardom, he was also a past national president of the fraternal society that placed this memorial.

Boston, MA

Harry Houdini — born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest in 1874 — was the most famous magician and escape artist of his age and for years the national president of the Society of American Magicians. Among his most sensational publicity stunts were manacled leaps from bridges into cold rivers, from which he freed himself underwater as crowds held their breath; he performed one such escape here in the spring of 1908.

Beaumont, TX

Trumpeter and bandleader Harry James, one of the biggest stars of the Big Band era, spent his childhood in Beaumont, where his father set up a music studio in the family home and started him young. James played in his school orchestras before turning professional in 1934, joining Benny Goodman's orchestra, and launching his own band in 1940 with hits like "You Made Me Love You." A defining voice of swing, he helped launch the careers of Frank Sinatra and Buddy Rich and reached film stardom alongside his wife, actress Betty Grable.

Erie, PA · est. 2008

Born in Erie in 1849, Harry Kellar rose to become the "Dean of American Magicians" and the first homegrown conjurer to win international fame. For more than four decades he dazzled audiences across five continents with elegant stage illusions, popularizing the Vanishing Birdcage and perfecting the seemingly impossible levitation. A mentor and friend to the young Harry Houdini, he returned often to perform in the city where his boyhood home once stood.

Independence, MO

This Independence, Missouri, house is tied to the early years of Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States, who spent much of his life in and around this town. Rising from modest Missouri roots, Truman led the nation through the end of World War II and the opening of the Cold War. Independence remained his lifelong home, and sites like this one ground his extraordinary career in the ordinary community that shaped him.

Erie, PA · est. 2019

Born in Erie, Harry T. Burleigh rose to become one of the most influential figures in American music. A gifted baritone and composer, he studied under Antonín Dvořák and set the verse of poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes to song. Above all, Burleigh transformed the spirituals of the enslaved into concert art, championing them as America's only truly original music.

Mineola, TX

Harry Meredith arrived in Mineola around 1907 from Kentucky by way of a Kentucky brick plant, and spent the next half-century shaping the town from behind a banker's desk, serving as bank president, board chairman, and briefly as mayor. Late in life he turned his fortune toward the public good, and the Meredith Foundation he organized still funds the town's library, civic center, and youth and church programs. His home once stood on this site, a fixture of the community he reshaped.

Munfordville, KY

Formed in 1819 from Hardin and Barren counties, Hart County was home to the Buckner family. Simon Bolivar Buckner, a West Point graduate and Mexican War captain, became a Confederate general and later governor of Kentucky; his son, Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., commanded the U.S. Tenth Army and was killed on Okinawa in 1945. Both rest in the Frankfort Cemetery.

New York, NY

The poet Hart Crane (1899–1932) lived here while earning his keep as an advertising writer, one of the restless 'Lost Generation' of American authors between the world wars. His collection White Buildings and his ambitious long poem The Bridge sought a soaring, harmonious language for the din and chaos of modern urban life.

Lampasas, TX

Raised just after the Civil War, this building began as a two-room, two-story stagecoach stand and hotel — a waypoint for travelers on the road. As Lampasas boomed as a health resort in the 1870s, it was enlarged twice to lodge visitors drawn by the local mineral springs. Over its long life it also served as a tannery and weathered two floods of Sulphur Creek.

Woodville, TX

This East Texas burial ground grew up around a water-powered mill on Sutton Lake and became the resting place of some of Tyler County's earliest Anglo pioneers. Families like the Barclays and Bevils arrived as Texas moved from a Mexican province to an independent republic in 1836, and their leaders helped organize the young county's government and courts, with John Bevil even serving as a delegate to the 1835 Consultation that set the Revolution in motion. James Walter Barclay's role as agent to the Alabama, Coushatta, and Pakana Muskogee peoples marks the uneasy meeting of settlers and Native nations on this frontier. In 1929 descendants formally deeded the ground as a community cemetery, and their families tend it still.

Kountze, TX

Georgia-born brothers-in-law William Henry Hart and Hampton Jackson 'Hamp' Herrington moved their families to the East Texas community of Providence in 1853 and set aside part of their land for a cemetery. When Hardin County was created in 1858, Hart became county treasurer and Herrington its first chief justice. Hart's 1861 burial formally established the graveyard, believed to be the second in the county, where eight of the nine marked graves belong to the two founding families.

Porter Township, PA · est. 1946

Long before roads crossed these ridges, the Frankstown Path carried Native travelers and colonial traders through the region, passing the spot that became Hart's Log. The name came from a hollow log that the trader John Hart used between 1744 and 1755 as a feeding trough for his pack horses. The little settlement grew from that humble waypoint into the town later called Hartslog, and eventually Alexandria.

Orange County, NC

Hart's Mill was a working grist mill, but its real fame lies in the events that swirled around it. In 1766 it hosted a key gathering of the Regulators, backcountry farmers protesting corrupt colonial officials, and in 1781 a skirmish there gave a boost to the Patriot cause during the Revolution. The mill sat at the crossroads of two of North Carolina's great uprisings.

Albany, TX

In the boom-town bustle of 1880s Albany, cook Charles Hartfield dreamed big, turning his popular "Charley's Restaurant" into an elegant stone building meant to anchor the growing courthouse town. The ambition outran his purse: he sold the unfinished structure, was financially ruined, and was found dead within a year. Completed by new partners—including his widow Lettie as an equal shareholder—the building went on to house groceries, a bowling alley, and the Masonic Lodge, its limestone façade twice reworked over more than a century.

Bastrop, TX

Built in 1906 by J.P. Fowler, Jr., this Bastrop residence was purchased in 1912 by Hartford and Beulah Alice Jenkins, whose descendants still own it. Hartford Jenkins was a prominent public servant, serving as the county's first superintendent of schools as well as a county judge, commissioner, and district court clerk. The home earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1971.

Hartley, TX

Carved from the vast Young and Bexar territories, Hartley County was created in 1876 and formally organized in 1891 in the Texas Panhandle. It honors brothers Oliver Cromwell Hartley and Rufus K. Hartley, both noted members of the Texas Bar. The town of Hartley became its county seat.