Search Markers

Channing, TX

Hartley County was organized in 1891, and its county seat see-sawed until XIT Ranch interests helped move it to Channing in 1896—where the old frame courthouse was dismantled and hauled to the new town. In 1906 a proper Beaux Arts courthouse rose in its place, its triumphal-arch entrance and paired Roman Ionic columns lit and watered by its own well and power plant. Vaults and jury quarters were added over the following decades as the Panhandle county matured.

Old River-Winfree, TX

This small graveyard on the banks of Old River began with a tract granted to Texas immigrant Robert Wiseman in 1831 and sold in 1853 to Dr. Edward Hartman, whose first wife was likely its earliest burial. Now marked mostly by shallow depressions, handmade brick crypts, and a few stones, the cemetery preserves rural Texas burial customs—including bricks probably fired at a nearby 1870s brickyard. A separate slave cemetery is believed to lie on adjacent land.

Wallis, TX

Established in 1899, Hartsville Cemetery serves a community near Wallis in Austin County at the close of the 19th century. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2006, it preserves the graves of the farming families who settled this part of the Brazos bottomlands. Such burial grounds often survive as the clearest record of vanished rural hamlets.

Sunny Isles Beach, FL

This memorial honors Harvey Baker Graves, credited as the original creator of the Sunny Isles area on Florida's Atlantic coast. In the land-boom era of the 1920s, developers like Graves acquired and promoted stretches of subtropical shoreline and mangrove, transforming Miami-Dade's barrier islands into resort communities. The marker, set in Town Center Park, links today's beach city to the ambitious real-estate visionaries who first platted it.

New Boston, TX

Harvey C. Sanders was a Kentucky-born Confederate soldier who fought at Shiloh and Chickamauga before being wounded and reassigned as a guard at the Confederate White House in Richmond. When the capital fell in April 1865, he rode for five weeks in the escort protecting the fleeing President Jefferson Davis toward Florida, a desperate flight that ended with Davis's capture in Georgia. Sanders was imprisoned for a year, then settled in this corner of Texas, where he was long remembered as the last surviving member of Davis's bodyguard.

Albuquerque, NM

Beginning in 1883, the Fred Harvey Company recruited thousands of young women from the Midwest and East to staff its restaurants and hotels along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Known as the Harvey Girls, they brought clean, orderly, high-quality dining to raw railroad towns across the Southwest, working under strict rules and living in company dormitories. Many stayed, married, and settled — becoming, in the popular phrase, the women who "civilized the West."

Houston, TX

Harvey Homan arrived in Texas in January 1836, at the very outset of the revolution, and that spring fought at San Jacinto in Captain Richard Roman's company—the decisive battle that won Texas its independence. Born in Kentucky in 1806, he made his life in the new republic's rising city of Houston, where he died young in July 1846.

Silsbee, TX

Founded as a sawmill town in 1894, Silsbee became a Santa Fe Railroad stop in 1902, and within a few years travelers could dine and lodge at one of Fred Harvey's famous Harvey Houses. Stretching from Chicago to California along the Santa Fe lines, the Harvey Houses brought crisp linens, good food, and a touch of refinement to rough railroad towns. Silsbee's first Harvey hotel burned in 1906, but a rebuilt restaurant served the community until 1923.

Baltimore, MD

In mid-twentieth-century Baltimore, tennis was still largely divided along racial lines, and Harvey J. Burns, Jr. (1923–1988) devoted himself to opening the game to Black players in his city. Working as a teacher, promoter, and mentor, he coached young people and helped them find a path into competitive tennis at a time when those doors did not open easily. This memorial marks the legacy of a local pioneer who used sport to widen opportunity.

San Francisco, CA

This plaza honors Harvey Milk, who in 1977 became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States when he won a seat on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. From his Castro Camera store he built a neighborhood movement, earning the nickname "the Mayor of Castro Street" and authoring the city's Gay Rights Ordinance while championing renters, seniors, and working people. His assassination alongside Mayor George Moscone in November 1978 brought 40,000 mourners into the streets in a candlelight march. The plaza was dedicated in his memory in 1985.

San Francisco, CA

Harvey Milk made history in November 1977 as the first openly gay person elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and one of the first in the nation. His camera store and campaign headquarters at 575 Castro Street, with his apartment upstairs, became a hub of activism for human rights, labor, environmental, and neighborhood causes. His work on behalf of all San Franciscans earned broad respect before his life was cut short in 1978.

Bryan, TX

Arriving from Tennessee in 1839, Harvey Mitchell first served with the "minute men" guarding the north Texas frontier, then settled in Brazos County and filled nearly every local office from deputy clerk to chief justice. He taught school, kept a store, farmed, and helped build the county's churches and its 1846, 1853, and 1878 courthouses. His determination helped secure the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas for the county, earning him the title "Father of Brazos County."

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

Harvey Pollack, a Temple graduate known to fans as "Super Stat," spent nearly seven decades chronicling professional basketball in Philadelphia. Working with the Warriors and later the 76ers from 1946 to 2014, he invented ways of measuring the game that we now take for granted—counting rebounds, assists, and turnovers—and his annual statistical guide was sought after around the world. In 2002 the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame honored his lifetime of work.

Wellston, OH

Wellston owes its name and its start to Harvey Wells, who laid out the town in the coal-and-iron country of southeastern Ohio in the years after the Civil War. The region's furnaces and mines drew workers and investment during the Gilded Age industrial boom, and promoters like Wells turned crossroads into incorporated towns almost overnight. His name still marks the community he brought into being.

Wellston, OH

This stone honors Harvey Wells, the coal-and-iron entrepreneur for whom Wellston, Ohio, is named. In the boom years after the Civil War, the hills of Jackson County and the surrounding Hocking Valley proved rich in coal and iron ore, and Wells laid out the town in the early 1870s to tap that wealth and the railroads that carried it. He lived from 1846 to 1896, a single lifetime that tracked the region's rise from farm country into one of southeastern Ohio's busy Gilded Age mining and furnace districts.

Harveys Lake, PA · est. 1997

First encountered by frontiersman Benjamin Harvey in 1781, this glacial lake in the mountains above Wilkes-Barre became one of Pennsylvania's grand recreational escapes. By the early 1900s, trains and trolleys delivered crowds to grand hotels like the Oneonta, an amusement park, and public beaches, while Lake Transit Company steamboats ferried thousands across the water. The resort era faded over the twentieth century, but its heyday captured a distinctly American appetite for lakeside leisure.

Harwood, TX

Harwood sprang up in 1875 as a stop on the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railroad, and land for this cemetery was set aside when the town lots were first platted. Its oldest marked grave belongs to Civil War veteran I. M. Shelton, who — local tradition holds — was struck by lightning while working on the railroad in 1877. Among the graves lie veterans of nearly every American conflict from the Texas Revolution through the Korean War.

Harwood, TX

After the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railroad founded Harwood in 1875, the community raised this two-story meetinghouse. The ground floor served Methodist worship and doubled as a school, while Masonic Lodge No. 468 met upstairs from 1876 until 1962. It is a classic example of the shared-purpose buildings that new railroad towns put up to house their earliest institutions.

Haskell, TX

Haskell County was created in 1858 and finally organized in 1885, named for Charles Ready Haskell, a young Tennessean shot alongside Colonel Fannin's men in the 1836 Goliad Massacre during the Texas Revolution. Captain R. B. Marcy crossed this country in 1849 while surveying a wagon route to California, and the first settlement at the future county seat came in 1882.

Comanche, TX

This Central Texas community began as "Cordwood Junction," a humble siding on the Fort Worth & Rio Grande Railroad where flatcars were loaded with firewood for shipment across the region. As the fuel trade grew the railroad built a station, and in 1892 the stop was renamed Hasse for a local railway agent. Cotton, cattle, a gin, and a lumber yard briefly made it a real town before automobiles, highways, and urban migration drained it away, leaving only a few buildings behind.

Brenham, TX

Dr. Walter F. Hasskarl chose this Brenham hilltop for its sweeping views and in 1925 had noted Houston architect Alfred C. Finn design a home blending Prairie School horizontality with classical touches like an arched loggia and terrace. Hasskarl served as Washington County Health Officer for an extraordinary 51 years. The house stayed in his family until 1992.

Hastings, PA · est. 2007

From 1924 to 1926, the United Mine Workers of America brought traveling "Labor Chautauquas"—programs of education and entertainment—to the bituminous coal towns of western Pennsylvania, and Hastings drew the largest crowds in 1925. Under District 2 president John Brophy, these gatherings featured nationally known speakers alongside local performers. They won national press attention and admiration from Progressive-era reformers.

Port Lavaca, TX

This burial ground served the family of Captain Sylvanus Hatch, a Cape Cod–born builder who served in the War of 1812 as an adjutant under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans before later joining the Texas War for Independence. The Hatch family reached the Chocolate Creek area by 1842, and the captain established the cemetery in 1850 when his wife Pamela died of cholera—an outbreak that also killed German immigrants who had landed at Indianola and lie buried here. Hatch and two Confederate-veteran sons are interred among other pioneering families.

Texarkana vicinity, TX

For a thousand years, from roughly 800 to 1800 A.D., the Caddo people lived along the Red River near this spot, raising ceremonial earthen mounds and farming corn, squash, and beans. Skilled potters and traders, they linked the Puebloan peoples of the Southwest with the mound-building cultures to the east. Mounting pressure from Euro-American settlement eventually forced them from their homeland, and their descendants live today in Oklahoma.

Rusk, TX

Hubbard G. Hatchett came to Texas from Tennessee in 1846 and settled near the Angelina River in the Cherokee County community of Atoy, building a double-pen log cabin of the kind he had known back home. In 1850 he leased the Rusk Ferry, and the family soon expanded the house into an inn where river travelers could lodge. Among those who crossed at his ferry was Gen. Sam Houston in 1857, and the operation continued until a county bridge replaced it in 1888.

Washington, TX

This 1853 house of brick, white pine, and cedar was built by enslaved workers for Basil M. Hatfield, a soldier of the Battle of San Jacinto whose steamboat worked the Brazos River trade. His nearby store in Washington had served the Republic of Texas for its meetings and hosted the Republic's last inaugural ball before Texas joined the Union. The home was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Abilene, TX

In the 1880s, Abilene was a young railroad town on the West Texas plains, and lawyer Henry Sayles arrived in 1886 to practice alongside his eminent legal-scholar father and manage property for Galveston investors. Around 1889 he and his wife Hattie built this finely detailed Queen Anne home on what was then a nearly empty avenue. As president of the Abilene Land and Improvement Company, Sayles helped shape the surrounding neighborhood that still bears the family name.

Jewett, TX

Born in Jewett in 1886, Hattie Barnes Adkisson returned to her hometown after schooling in San Marcos and became a leading figure in community and church life. In 1920—barely a year after Texas women won the vote—frustrated Jewett citizens elected Hattie and five other women as mayor and aldermen, making the town one of the earliest female-governed municipalities in the nation. She oversaw civic improvements across two terms and later served on state and federal committees.

Victoria, TX

German immigrant George Herman Hauschild came to Victoria after his 1866 marriage and, having built a prominent business, opened an opera house here in 1894. Occupying the top two floors above the family's music store, the theatre hosted vaudeville, plays, and silent films under the management of his son H.J. Hauschild. As "talking pictures" won over audiences, the opera house closed during the 1930s.

La Joya, TX

The community of Havana stands on Porcion 46, land granted by the Spanish crown to Don Jose Matias Tijerina in 1767, who is said to have named it for the Cuban city where he had stopped on his voyage from Europe. Early families settled here, among them a Civil War Union soldier, Patricio Perez, and in 1891 they built a frame church dedicated to St. Joseph. Descendants of those pioneers still live in the area, and many are buried in the Havana Cemetery.

Galveston, TX

Kentucky native Edwin Hawes was a prominent attorney and politician who served as Wharton County judge and mayor of Kerrville. After marrying Lizzie Milburn Rust in 1881 and raising seven children, the family became summer residents of Galveston, where Hawes bought this lot in 1907 and had a summer home built. The two-story Colonial Revival house, with shingled gables and a full-width porch, stayed in the family until 1991.

Albany Township, PA · est. 2019

The ridge at Hawk Mountain sits astride a major migration corridor, and for years hunters gathered there to shoot passing raptors by the thousands—a slaughter encouraged by a 1929 bounty on goshawks. In 1934 conservationist Rosalie Edge bought the land and turned the killing ground into the world's first refuge for birds of prey. With early supporters like Richard Pough, she transformed it into a center for raptor research, education, and hawk-watching that draws nature lovers from around the globe.

Arlington, TX

Named for Tennessee-born pioneer Harvey Hawkins, who received a 160-acre land grant signed by Governor Sam Houston in 1860, this cemetery began as a family plot for the Tate Springs community. By local memory an enslaved man named Poly Penn was the first buried here, though his grave is unmarked; the earliest lettered stone dates to 1868. As the settlement grew, the plot became a public burial ground in 1890, chronicling the pioneer families who put down roots in the mid-1800s.

Loving, TX

In 1876 S. J. Hawkins brought his family to the Young County frontier, and kin and neighbors soon gathered around his homestead to form a pioneer community. A school rose in 1879, a summer brush-arbor camp meeting began in 1882, and a Methodist chapel followed in 1884, with a cemetery taking its first burial in 1889. The school and church eventually closed, but descendants still gather each summer beside the cemetery that endures.

Waxahachie, TX

Benjamin Franklin Hawkins, a member of the Peters Colony that drew settlers to North Texas, helped organize Ellis County and built a one-story house on this site in 1851. Over the following decades the home grew—expanded to two stories in the 1880s and remodeled by his son into an elegant Colonial Revival residence in 1903, complete with fluted Corinthian columns and a second-story balcony. Its layered construction reads like a timeline of the family's rising fortunes.

Blessing, TX

Established in 1854 on the Matagorda County coastal plain, Hawley Cemetery dates to the early decades of Anglo settlement in the region and was formally recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2011. Burial grounds of this age are often the earliest surviving records of the pioneer families who first settled the area.

Mineral County, NV

Hawthorne was laid out in 1880 by Carson and Colorado Railroad president H. M. Yerington as a division point, named for pioneer lumberman William A. Hawthorne rather than its planned name of Millbrae. The town seesawed through Nevada's county-seat rivalries—taking the Esmeralda seat from Aurora in 1883, losing it to Goldfield in 1907, and becoming Mineral County's seat in 1911. Its fortunes turned again in the late 1920s when the Navy, after a disastrous eastern munitions explosion, chose Hawthorne for a huge ammunition depot, commissioned in 1930.

Noonday, TX

Mississippi natives William and Emily Hawthorne brought their large family to Smith County in 1867, and though the cemetery bears their name, no Hawthorne headstone survives among its graves—some marked only with initials. The first documented burial, in 1882, was the infant son of the Adams family, followed by neighbors bearing names like Cone, Gandy, and Turman. The Turman family long cared for the grounds with annual cleanings and dinners before deeding the site to a cemetery association in 1982.

Myrtle Springs, TX

In October 1878, fourteen charter members led by Dr. George D. Staton gathered to organize a Baptist congregation, first named Myrtle Springs Baptist Church, agreeing to meet once a month as rural fellowships did. They built a church in 1889, worshipped for a time at the Cow Prairie schoolhouse, and in 1904 raised a new sanctuary and took the name Hayden Baptist Church. The pioneer congregation has served this stretch of Van Zandt County ever since.

Midway, TX

Patrick Hayes was an Irish immigrant who reached Texas around 1836 and promptly took up arms in the war that won Texas its independence. Rewarded and restless, he built a sprawling world of cotton plantations along the Trinity River, practiced herbal medicine as the locally beloved "Dr. Hayes," and in 1857 opened this family burial ground on his Seven Oaks plantation. Beneath its soil lie Hayes kin, and by long belief the enslaved people and servants whose graves went unrecorded, making the quiet cemetery a witness to a pioneering family's rise and the human cost woven into it.

Weches, TX

This park honors Dr. J. W. Hayes, a Tennessee native who came to Texas in the 1860s and lived a strikingly varied life as a trail driver, locomotive engineer, and rancher before entering medical school at forty and becoming a missionary physician to Native people. His son, also a doctor, donated the park to commemorate the physicians who served the Augusta community from the 1860s onward.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

Haym Salomon arrived in America around 1772, an immigrant who threw himself into the Revolutionary cause and was twice imprisoned by the British. From Philadelphia he worked as a broker and money-lender, extending enormous credit to help keep the struggling war effort and the young government solvent. Active in the city's Jewish community, he was never repaid and died in debt.

Sealy, TX

Daniel Haynes arrived in the new railroad town of Sealy in 1881, and in 1885 he invented both a process and a machine for making a felted, non-tufted cotton mattress. Sold nationwide under his trademark, the mattresses became so identified with the town that when Haynes sold his patents in 1906 the buyer took the name Sealy. Haynes opened a new factory on this site in 1909, and it remained one of the town's leading industries until 1976.

Granbury, TX

This native-stone building went up in the early 1870s as an early home of the Granbury post office, erected by postmaster James C. Haynes. Later owners included postmaster Thomas Burns and newspaperman Thomas Ewell, who wrote an early history of Hood County. Offices, stores, and cafes filled the structure until its 1975 restoration.

Sealy, TX

Built in 1901–1902 for H. Schumacher in Sealy, this Queen Anne residence passed in 1906 to Richard H. Haynes, who with his father founded the Haynes (Sealy) Mattress Company in 1909. Confectioner F. J. Felcman bought the house in 1927 and enlarged it, and it stayed in his family into the 1990s. Its projecting gable, wood shingles, stained glass, and jigsawn brackets make it a fine example of late-Victorian domestic style.

Del Valle, TX

Haynie Chapel was founded in 1839, during the days of the Republic of Texas, by the Rev. John Haynie, its first congregation gathering in a log church on donated frontier land. The present building, the third on the site, was raised in 1907. Descendants of the original settler families later placed a plaque commemorating its long history.

Spicewood, TX

The sparsely settled Haynie Flat community grew up near Red Bluff Creek and the Colorado River along the Burnet-Travis county line. Its cemetery's earliest graves belong to siblings Sallie and Dennis Cox, who died months apart in 1864, though the area is generally reckoned as settled in 1879 when the adjacent Haynie Flat School opened. Land records trace the community's slow formalization over decades, and after the school consolidated with Spicewood in 1950 and residential development arrived in the 1980s, the cemetery remained one of the few reminders that a community had ever stood here.

Rice, TX

Founded in 1874 by the Rev. William Vaughn, this Methodist congregation grew alongside the little Navarro County town of Rice, on land donated by W. M. Rice—the Houston & Texas Central Railroad official whose fortune would later endow Rice University. The present sanctuary went up in 1908, named for steward W. D. Haynie, and was dedicated the following year. It stands as a record of how railroads, land gifts, and faith communities knit together the rural towns of Reconstruction-era Texas.

Nelsonville, TX

When the widowed Nellie Brophy Haynie married Confederate veteran John T. Embrey in 1887, the blended family built this frame Victorian house in Brenham and raised five children there. Two sons went on to the University of Texas law school: Robert Haynie became a prominent Abilene attorney and West Texas Chamber of Commerce leader, while Wilford Embrey served Brenham as city attorney for fifty years and sat on its school board for over thirty. The house was moved to its present site in 1975.

Richards, TX

Thomas Jefferson Haynie and his wife Sarah Jane came from Georgia in 1855 and, with the labor of enslaved people, built a two-story home of native pine, post oak, and rock. Haynie was active in local politics and gave land for the Fairview School. In 1923 the farm passed to Dr. Guy Cecil Sanders, a prominent Richards physician, and became a hub for community gatherings, Fourth of July celebrations, and political rallies.

Robert Lee, TX

For a single year, 1889 to 1890, the settlement of Hayrick served as the first county seat of Coke County before the honor — and the population — shifted to nearby Robert Lee. Named for a distinctive nearby mountain, Hayrick lost its reason for being once the courthouse moved on.

Robert Lee, TX

This Masonic lodge was organized in 1890 at Hayrick, the first seat of newly formed Coke County on the West Texas frontier, and moved to Robert Lee the following year when the county seat shifted. Its two-story hall, raised in 1906 from concrete blocks a contractor mixed and cast by hand, doubled as a home for local businesses and even U.S. offices on its ground floor. Fraternal halls like this one were the civic anchors of small ranching towns, offering meeting space, services, and continuity as settlements took root.

Brownsville, TN

This monument honors the soldiers of Haywood County, Tennessee, who fought and died for the Confederacy during the Civil War of 1861–1865, and it pointedly salutes the county's Confederate women, whose labor sustained the home front. Memorials like it rose across the South in the decades after the war — most during the Jim Crow era, erected by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy — to shape how the Lost Cause was remembered.

Churchill County, NV

Hazen sprang up in 1903 as a rough-and-tumble camp housing laborers on the federal Newlands irrigation project, one of the first reclamation efforts to green the Nevada desert. When the railroad to Tonopah arrived in 1905 and the Southern Pacific built a roundhouse and depot the next year, the town of hotels, saloons, and brothels boomed—alongside a reputation for lawlessness that included the 1905 lynching of 'Red' Wood. Fire nearly wiped it out in 1908, and the town named for Civil War general William B. Hazen never fully recovered.

Saint Jo, TX

Long before the town of Saint Jo was founded here in 1873, this spot at the head of Elm Creek was a landmark on the frontier crossed by government survey expeditions, a proposed federal railroad route, and the U.S. 2nd Cavalry under Albert Sidney Johnston marching to establish Texas frontier forts. A post office opened in 1860, and the site steadily grew from a waypoint into a permanent settlement.

Saint Jo, TX

The oldest of three graveyards in Saint Jo—once called Head of Elm—this hillside holds the area's pioneers and their descendants. Local tradition remembers settlers like Enoch Willett and his daughter Mary among those killed in Indian raids and buried here in the 1860s, though the first documented burial is that of infant Charlie Wyatt in 1874. Early residents recalled a far larger cemetery than the scattered surviving stones suggest.

Winona, TX

From the 1850s until the railroads arrived in the 1870s, Belzora Landing was the head of navigation on the Sabine River and a busy port serving Tyler and East Texas. Settlers here, like those in the eastern states, turned to rivers for transportation, and the well-watered Sabine let light steamboats ascend to Belzora for several months a year; in dry seasons, goods waited on barges for a rising freshet to carry them downstream. Alongside its landing and ferry on the Dallas-to-Shreveport Post Road, the town supported a dozen businesses, a post office, and a church-schoolhouse—until the railroads bypassed it and it faded into a ghost town.

Carrollton, MO

This building in Carrollton, Missouri, once served as a county "insane hospital," one of the institutional asylums that spread across the country during the Progressive-era push to house and treat those deemed mentally ill. Repurposed in later decades—here for a Head Start program—such buildings mark a shift in how communities cared for vulnerable residents. The structure is a survivor of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century institutional reform.

Tyler, TX

When Union naval blockades choked off imported medicine during the Civil War, the Confederacy turned to home-grown remedies. Near the mineral waters of Headache Springs, one of only nine Confederate medical laboratories—and the sole one west of the Mississippi—produced medicines and whiskey for the government. Workers gathered native herbs like poke root, snakeroot and mullein and combined them with mineral salts into what the marker aptly calls the medicines of desperation.

Rocksprings, TX

Founded in Missouri in 1898, the American Angora Goat Breeders' Association moved to Texas in 1924 and settled in Rocksprings in 1926, the heart of the state's mohair country. Its headquarters keeps the complete national registry of Angora goats along with portraits of breeders and champion animals.