Search Markers

Herriman, UT

Herriman sits in the southwest corner of the Salt Lake Valley, settled by Latter-day Saint pioneers in the 1850s and long a quiet ranching and farming community before suburban growth arrived. This building marks a civic milestone for that community: the young municipality's first dedicated city hall, the seat from which a small town began governing itself.

Amarillo, TX

Built in 1910 for ranchers Will and Eula Jo Day Herring, this Amarillo house is a showpiece of Classical Revival style, with a pedimented entry portico, colossal paired columns, an Ionic wraparound porch, and a Palladian bay window. Bought in 1920 by Judge Jonathan and Alliene Crudgington, it served as the family's home until 1936 before becoming the Musical Arts Conservatory. It remains a landmark of early Panhandle prosperity and taste.

Harker Heights, TX

John Granberry Herrington and his wife Elvira Jane left Mississippi for Texas in 1873, pressing on past Nacogdoches—where fellow travelers stopped—to settle the wilderness of Bell County. There they bought land, built a cabin and barns, and raised twelve children. When John died in 1903, his family buried him just yards from his home, founding the cemetery that a family association still tends today.

Derry Township, PA · est. 2003

In 1903, candy maker Milton S. Hershey set out to build not just a factory but an entire community around it. The model town of Hershey rose from Pennsylvania farmland, complete with housing, schools, parks, utilities, a transit system, and cultural institutions — all orbiting the world's largest chocolate factory, which opened in 1905. It became both an industrial powerhouse and a celebrated tourist destination.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2009

In the summer of 1876, as Philadelphia hosted the Centennial Exhibition and the nation marked its hundredth birthday, an eighteen-year-old Milton S. Hershey opened a modest confectionery here, selling candies, nuts, and baked goods. The venture found early customers but foundered on the shoals of credit and debt. That failure was only a beginning: Hershey went on to build the Lancaster Caramel Company and then the chocolate empire that made his name a household word.

New York, NY

This small mosaic triangle in Greenwich Village marks a sliver of land the Hess family refused to surrender when New York City seized surrounding property in the early 20th century to widen the streets and extend the subway. Rather than cede the last scrap of their estate, the family had it tiled with the defiant inscription declaring it had never been dedicated for public purposes. It has endured as one of the city's most famous acts of real-estate spite.

Cat Spring, TX

In the German farming settlement of Cat Spring, Austrian-born Henry Hess and his wife Fransiska built this modest cottage in the mid-1870s, showing off the careful joinery and cypress construction their homeland traditions prized. The Kollatschny family bought it in 1904, enlarged it, and kept it for more than half a century. Its original siding and hand-painted interior stenciling survive as evidence of that early craftsmanship.

Reading, PA · est. 1949

When General Burgoyne's British army surrendered at Saratoga in 1777, thousands of captured German auxiliary troops — most of them Hessians hired by the Crown — became prisoners of war held far from the fighting. Some were marched to Reading, where from 1781 to 1783 they lived in a camp of huts on the hillside just north of this spot. Many of these soldiers, once enemies, would remain in Pennsylvania after the war and settle among its German-speaking communities.

Hewitt, TX

In November 1894, twenty members of the older White Hall Baptist Church broke away to organize their own congregation on the growing prairie south of Waco, dedicating their first sanctuary here in 1895. A destructive 1924 storm leveled that building, and successive waves of growth carried the church through new worship centers in 1959 and 1988. The marker traces the arc of a small rural congregation that outlasted the storms and became a fixture of the Hewitt community.

Walker County, TX

Born in Virginia and raised in Tennessee, Hezekiah Faris came to Texas in 1835 to fight for the colony's freedom and took part in the decisive victory at San Jacinto. He located bounty and headright land in this vicinity, became a local leader, and named Faris Chapel for his home church back in Tennessee. He married Matilda Stevens Roberts, and over time the family name shifted to Farris.

Austin, TX

Clarksville was founded in 1871 by freed slave Charles Clark as a place where former slaves could reunite their families, govern their own lives, and worship freely after emancipation. Around 1879 former slave Peter Tucker built this board-and-batten Cumberland-style house, later home to Hezikiah Haskell—a Union soldier and Buffalo Soldier who married into the family. Standing on its original site with high physical integrity, the house was deeded to the city of Austin and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 2012.

Lander County, NV

For untold generations before European contact, Great Basin peoples worked the pass near Hickison Summit, funneling migratory deer herds toward a natural ambush between low buttes. Success took the coordinated effort of several families to trap, kill, and process the animals. On the rock walls they left three panels of petroglyphs, images tied to the ritual and spiritual life of the hunt, pecked seasonally by a group's shaman as omens for a good season.

Clinton, KY

Formed in 1821, Hickman County took its name from Capt. Paschal Hickman, a Franklin County landowner and one of nine Kentucky officers killed in the aftermath of the River Raisin battle in January 1813—each later honored with a county. The original Hickman County once encompassed the whole Jackson Purchase, the vast tract acquired from the Chickasaw, and was later subdivided into eight counties. Columbus served as its first seat of government.

Petty, TX

Hickory Grove is the resting place of former slaves, freedmen, and their descendants who made Lamar County home in the 1800s. Samuel and Dicie Lucinda Swann bought the land including this site in 1881, and in 1899 Samuel deeded three acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church as a burial ground; the earliest marked grave, from 1883, belongs to Dicie's mother Cherry Lee, who had come from Alabama in bondage. Among those buried here are veterans, a preacher, Masons and Eastern Star members, and families rooted here for generations.

Kilgore, TX

The Cross Roads community, straddling the line between Rusk and Gregg counties, saw a need for a church and cemetery in 1911 and bought five acres beside the existing Hickory Grove Cemetery. A church rose in 1912, took the Hickory Grove name in 1930, and was later moved across the road onto land donated by the Still family before a new auditorium replaced the original sanctuary. For more than a century it has been a steady source of support for its neighbors.

Waverly Township, PA · est. 2003

Established in 1807 in what was then called Abington Center, Hickory Grove Cemetery is among the oldest known burial grounds tied to African Americans in northeastern Pennsylvania. Many of those laid to rest here were fugitives from slavery who reached Waverly by the Underground Railroad, part of a community that numbered some 75 former slaves by century's end. The cemetery remains the enduring trace of that vanished community.

Roxton, TX

As settlers poured into Lamar County in the late 1840s and 1850s, a Methodist congregation took root by 1852 and opened the burial ground that became Hickory Grove Cemetery. Its more than a thousand graves—many for infants and children—stand as sober witness to the hardships of pioneer life, while others hold veterans stretching from the Civil War through Korea. The diverse tombstones read almost as a stone archive of a frontier community's growth.

Linden, TX

In 1872 the Rev. James A. Steger, a Civil War veteran, deeded this ground to trustees of the Hickory Grove Methodist Church for use as a community burial place, though he may have buried family here even earlier. A Methodist sanctuary stood nearby, and a later building served for funerals and school classes. The congregation eventually disbanded, but the cemetery — resting place of several pioneer families — still marks where the community first took root.

Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947

Across the river from this point stood the "Middle Town" of the Goschgoschink cluster, later called Hickory Town, one of the Native refuge villages the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger came to in 1767. Here Zeisberger held his celebrated debate with Wangomen, a Munsee religious leader who challenged the missionary's Christian teaching — a rare recorded clash of spiritual worldviews on the colonial frontier. The town also marked the northern end of Indian paths running up from the south, along which trade goods reached these upper-Allegheny communities.

Medicine Mound, TX

Brothers-in-law Lon L. Cobb and Ira Lee Hicks arrived in the already-thriving village of Medicine Mound in 1927 and opened a general merchandise store stocking everything from work clothes and cotton sacks to groceries and horse feed. In winter, regular customers gathered by the fire to talk and play checkers. When a 1933 fire nearly leveled the town, Hicks and Cobb rebuilt that same year using round granite cobblestones hauled from Oklahoma, and the store outlasted nearly every other local business before becoming a community gathering place and museum.

Jacksboro, TX

Settlers in the 1880s founded a community here called Hicks, named for a pioneer family, served by the Cooper School beginning in 1885. In 1889 George Washington and Levicia Jamison bought land at this site and buried their infant daughter Anna here in 1893, and the surrounding ground grew into a burial place for the area's founding families. Shaded by cedar and live oak, the cemetery today holds more than forty marked graves and several unmarked ones.

Brownsville, TX

Merchant Frederick Hicks and his wife Zuleika, a social worker, built this house in Brownsville around 1909, selling it a few years later to the Moler family and, in 1920, to banker and civic leader John Gregg. A fine example of the American Foursquare—a symmetrical descendant of the Prairie style—it features a hipped roof, dormer, deep porch with Tuscan columns, and a bay window, with a sunroom the Greggs later added. It stands as a well-preserved emblem of early-twentieth-century domestic architecture on the Texas border.

Brownsville, TX

Built about 1908, this Queen Anne house was among the first in West Brownsville, the town's earliest subdivision beyond the original townsite. Livery-stable owners Edgar and Goldye Hicks raised it as a country home; in 1922 it passed to Dr. O.V. Lawrence, a civic leader, school board and junior college president, and regional pioneer of X-ray technology. The September 1933 hurricane destroyed the property's outbuildings.

Hidalgo, TX

This graveyard on the lower Rio Grande dates from 1884, when its oldest surviving stone was raised. Expanded over the decades as the town of Hidalgo grew, it holds more than a thousand graves and veterans whose service ranges from the Texas Revolution to modern conflicts. Its handmade concrete blocks, wooden and wrought-iron crosses, and above-ground bovedas reflect the strong Mexican traditions of the border community.

Edinburg, TX

Hidalgo County was carved from Starr and Cameron counties in 1842 and organized in 1854, taking its name from Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the priest whose 1810 call to arms launched Mexico's independence movement. Its county seat shifted and was renamed more than once—from Edinburgh to Hidalgo, from Chapin to the modern Edinburg—as settlement moved across the lower Rio Grande. The naming reflects the region's deep Mexican heritage on the Texas border.

La Joya vicinity, TX

On September 18, 1934, veteran driller Otto C. Woods brought in the John M. Lawrence No. 1, Hidalgo County's first oil well, near this spot. The gusher flowed a thousand barrels a day or more — so much that oil at first pooled into a lake beside the derrick. The strike opened a field that would ultimately yield some twenty million barrels.

Hidalgo, TX

Until the early 20th century, the semi-arid Lower Rio Grande Valley was fit mainly for cattle grazing. In 1909 a steam-powered pump rose here to lift Rio Grande water onto some 40,000 acres, and expansions in 1911–12 by the Louisiana-Rio Grande Canal Company carried irrigation to the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo district. Sold to a county water district in 1920, the plant kept pumping until an all-electric station replaced it downstream in 1983.

Houston, TX

Commissioned by the Mexican American community of Magnolia Park and dedicated on Mexican Independence Day in 1934, this ornate quiosco was crafted in the faux bois, or false-wood, tradition by Houston molder Vidal Lozano. Its iron frame is sheathed entirely in hand-molded concrete shaped to look like bark-covered tree trunks, branch railings, and a thatched roof, with a step inscribed "Houston Mexicans to their city." It remains the only known public example of Lozano's artistry and still hosts community celebrations.

Hidalgo, TX

When Hidalgo County formed in 1852, the village here—first called Edinburgh—became county seat, linked to Reynosa, Mexico, by ferry. Renamed Hidalgo by 1861, the crossing gained regular ferry service in 1910 under Crisoforo Vela, first by rowboat and later by raft, until Joe Pate built a suspension bridge in 1926. Flood-battered spans came and went across the decades, giving way to modern concrete bridges in 1967 and 1988 that carry traffic between the two nations.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

From about 1792 until his death in 1832, this Reading site was the home of Joseph Hiester, whose life spanned the founding era. He fought as a lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army, sat as a delegate to Pennsylvania's Provincial Convention in 1776, served fourteen years in Congress, and capped his career as governor of Pennsylvania from 1820 to 1823.

Cross Plains, TX

The Higginbotham brothers opened their first general store in De Leon in 1881, and over the following decades combinations of brothers, in-laws, and friends spread the name across Texas, selling everything a town needed — right down to undertaking. This Cross Plains store opened in 1914 and still keeps its original glass counters, cabinets, mirrors, tin ceiling, and floors in use. A century on, the company counted dozens of Texas locations, a rare survivor of the old-fashioned mercantile chain.

Dallas, TX

Designed by the prominent Dallas firm of Lang and Witchell, this building rose in stages between 1914 and 1923 to house the dry-goods manufacturing and distributing business of the Higginbotham-Bailey-Logan Company. Its simplified Renaissance Revival design, with geometrically detailed corner towers, reflected the confident commercial architecture of early-20th-century Dallas. The firm was known as Higginbotham-Bailey after 1945.

Dallas, TX

Rising four stories in Dallas's west end in 1909, this brick warehouse moved through a chain of tenants before becoming home to the Higginbotham-Pearlstone Wholesale Hardware Company in 1926. For half a century it supplied hardware across the region, its corbelled cornices marking the industrial energy of the growing city. It still stands as a focal point of the historic district it once helped define.

Higgins, TX

Higgins was platted in 1887 when the railroad reached this corner of the Texas Panhandle, taking its name from a wealthy railroad stockholder and quickly becoming an early cattle-shipping point. Ranching and farming defined the town, and oil drilling joined them after 1957 — but its darkest day came on April 9, 1947, when a devastating tornado killed an estimated 45 people and injured 140 more.

Higgins, TX

Higgins was platted in 1887 by E. C. Gray and the Patton brothers, who had bought land betting the Santa Fe Railroad would build through it—and it did, growing the town into a farming, ranching, and oil community named for a railroad stockholder. Gray deeded its cemetery in 1900, though burials had begun earlier, the oldest marked graves those of two children who died in 1889. Among the interred are a pioneer dentist-sheriff, early friends of humorist Will Rogers, and the forty-five townspeople killed when a tornado destroyed much of Higgins on April 9, 1947.

Canton, TX

High Cemetery opened in 1859 with the burial of Nancy Jane Hubbard, six years after the High community took shape in Van Zandt County. More than a hundred of its graves date from the nineteenth century, including that of Samuel A. High, the area's first permanent landowner and the man who donated the ground. Civil War veterans and generations of pioneer families rest here, making the cemetery a roster of the settlers who built the community.

Jacksonville, AR

Taking its name from the beloved aviator's poem 'High Flight,' this memorial at Jacksonville, Arkansas, honors the airmen of nearby Little Rock Air Force Base who died in aircraft and missile accidents in the line of duty. Opened in 1955, the base was a Cold War hub for airlift and, for years, for Titan II intercontinental missiles, and its crews faced the constant dangers of flight and of handling powerful weapons systems. The marker gathers their sacrifice into a single place of remembrance.

Schulenburg, TX

The High Hill Post Office, established about 1858, united three neighboring villages and gave this six-acre burial ground its name. The land once belonged to George Herder, a German immigrant and veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, and its oldest stones mark settlers who died in 1861. Holding roughly 241 graves — mostly of German families — the cemetery was tended by relatives until an association formed in 1963 to care for it.

High Island, TX

Perched on a salt dome rising some 45 feet above the flat Bolivar Peninsula, High Island was the only ground to stay dry when Gulf storms drowned the coast. Anglo farmers settled here in the early 1800s within the 1837 Martin Dunman land grant, and the community grew after the railroad arrived in 1886, gaining a depot, businesses, and the Sea View Hotel that sheltered refugees during the deadly 1900 and 1915 hurricanes. Oil strikes beginning in 1916 turned the salt dome into an economic engine, and today the same high ground draws birders from around the world as a famed migratory stopover.

Ozona, TX

Built in 1902 as the first station out of Ozona on the San Angelo–Ozona mail line, this stand kept ten fresh horses ready at the 20-mile point of an 86-mile run. It served one of the last commercial stagecoach lines in Texas, its 'hacks' carrying whiskey peddlers, lightning-rod salesmen, and traveling preachers. Automobiles arriving in 1908 and the railroad in 1910 soon put the line out of business.

Crosbyton, TX

Henry Clay Smith was a true High Plains pioneer — the first to open a post office, farm, break land, and drill a water well in Crosby County. When the Civil War began he was mining at Pinos Altos, New Mexico, and joined efforts to seize the gold and silver mines for the Confederacy until Indian raids and the Confederate withdrawal in 1861 closed them down. He served four years for the South and spent the rest of his life on the plains, building a rock house in 1877 now replicated in a Crosbyton museum.

Hilliar Township, OH

This modest marker crowns the highest point—1,285 feet—along a former rail line that dates to about 1873, the era when a dense web of railroads was being stitched across Ohio during the post-Civil War industrial boom. The initials "C., A. and C." stand for the Cleveland, Akron and Columbus Railroad, one of the many lines that hauled coal, farm produce, and passengers through the state's interior in the Gilded Age. Long after the trains stopped running, the graded railbed found a second life: it became the Heart of Ohio Trail, a segment of the cross-state Ohio to Erie Trail that now carries cyclists and walkers where locomotives once labored uphill. The marker turns an ordinary summit into a quiet monument to that transformation from rail to trail.

High Point, NC

In the Piedmont city of High Point, North Carolina — a community long defined by its furniture industry — this memorial was dedicated on Memorial Day 2005 to honor the men and women who have worn the nation's uniform. Rather than marking a single battle, it gathers the whole sweep of American military service, in wartime and in peacetime alike, into one place of remembrance. Community memorials like this one carry forward a civic tradition of gathering neighbors to reckon with the cost of service.

Kendall County, IL

The High Prairie Trail was a branch of the Chicago-to-Ottawa road, one of the major overland commerce routes across northern Illinois in the 1830s. Along such trails, ox-drawn wagons hauled grain, goods, and settlers between the young port of Chicago and the Illinois River towns. This route helped stitch the newly settled prairie into the region's growing economy.

Washoe County, NV

High Rock Canyon holds a record of human presence stretching from around 3,000 B.C. to the gold rush, written on its towering volcanic walls in rockshelters, campsites, and petroglyphs. Northern Paiute people ranged this remote country when John C. Frémont passed through in 1843. Soon after, the Applegate brothers blazed an emigrant trail through the canyon in 1846, Peter Lassen followed part of the route in 1848, and by 1849 gold seekers crowded the narrow passage westward.

Harlan County, KY

In the rugged coal country of Harlan County, atop Black Mountain — Kentucky's highest ground at over 4,100 feet — a local WWII veteran named William Risden turned elevation into innovation. In the early days of television, mountainous terrain blocked broadcast signals from reaching valley towns, so Risden mounted an antenna high on the peak and ran cable down to the community below, delivering reception no rooftop aerial could catch. His Cumberland Cable Company became one of the first ten cable television systems in the entire United States, part of the grassroots wave of 'community antenna television' that would eventually grow into a national industry.

Garrett County, MD

In Maryland's mountainous far west, where the Allegheny highlands roll toward West Virginia, this plaque marks the loftiest spot the state's road network reaches — 3,095 feet above sea level in Garrett County. It dates from the era when the Maryland State Roads Commission was knitting the state together with modern paved highways, a decades-long push that turned rutted wagon roads into an engineered system. The named officials and contractor belonged to that generation of road-builders who carried the nationwide 'Good Roads' movement over some of the state's most rugged terrain.

Edgewood, TX

Highland Cemetery, established by 1894, served a Van Zandt County farming community that took shape once a new road opened easier access to markets. Settlers built a school in 1889 that doubled as a meeting house for Methodist and Church of Christ worshippers, and the surrounding families raised cotton, then tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and eventually cattle. Its obelisks, Woodmen of the World marker, and graves of Civil War veterans make it one of the last vestiges of the vanished Highland settlement.

Melissa, TX

The Highland community grew up in the mid-1800s as a stop on the stagecoach route between Buckner and Bonham, and in 1858 settler Charles H. Wysong gave three acres for a church, school, and cemetery. The oldest marked grave, dated 1861, belongs to Robert Strother, and generations of north central Collin County pioneers rest here. A cemetery association organized more than a century ago still cares for the grounds.

Brookshire vicinity, TX

Erected in the 1890s on land owned by D.R. Boyd, this small white frame schoolhouse first bore his name before becoming known as Highland Home School. A single teacher taught grades one through seven, and the building doubled as a gathering place for the surrounding rural community. Like countless one-room Texas schools, it closed in 1929 when it was consolidated into the Waller Independent School District.

Dallas, TX

In 1855, a handful of pioneer families gathered in the frontier village of Dallas to form a Christian Church congregation, worshipping in homes and the county courthouse before building their first church in 1867. Civil War veteran Gen. Richard M. Gano served for years as minister and elder, and an 1877 dispute over instrumental music split the group, with those who remained becoming a Church of Christ that has relocated and renamed itself several times over the generations.

Dallas, TX

Highland Park Methodist Church began in February 1916 as the University Church at Southern Methodist University, its first members drawn from faculty and students, with the Rev. A. Frank Smith as first pastor. As families settled the new suburb of Highland Park, the congregation grew, built its "Little Brown Church," and in 1926 raised a grand Gothic Revival sanctuary on land SMU had donated. Rapid postwar expansion pushed membership past 10,500 by 1995.

Dallas, TX

Rising in 1926 in the fast-growing enclave of Highland Park, this Gothic Revival church by architects Roscoe DeWitt and Mark Lemmon announced the ambitions of Dallas's booming interwar suburbs. Its bell tower holds a 48-bell carillon, and pointed-arch windows glow behind delicate stone tracery. Major additions between 1950 and 1961 kept pace with a swelling congregation.

Fort Thomas, KY

Fort Thomas's oldest congregation traces its roots to an 1830 gathering in the Taliaferro home, and by 1832 a log building served both as a Sunday meetinghouse and as the area's first weekday school. The congregation raised a frame church around 1850 and built its present home on this site in 1900. For decades the building doubled as a community anchor—hosting Highlands High School graduations, the city's first kindergarten, and even displaced junior-high classes after the high school burned in 1962.

Marlin, TX

Built around 1898-1900 by B. C. Clark, the Highlands Mansion rose in sturdy cypress crowned with a stained leaded-glass dome and windows imported from Italy. An elegant expression of Gay Nineties taste, it stood among the showplaces of turn-of-the-century Texas and figured prominently in early Marlin society. It was carefully restored in the 1960s and named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Louisville, KY

The Highlands began in 1815 as the "Briar Patch," a plantation established by Major William Preston and his wife Caroline Hancock. The approval of Bardstown Pike in 1819 opened a major route south, spurring commerce and settlement, and by 1865 an influx of German immigrants had given the area the name New Hamburg. Streetcar lines and the creation of Cherokee Park later drew residents, and by 1901 St. Anthony's Hospital served the neighborhood's poor and sick.

Morgan Mill, TX

Georgia-born John B. Hightower brought his family to Erath County before the 1860 census, ranching a large spread on which they had already buried three children. In 1870 the family formally set aside nearly two acres as a cemetery, whose first non-family burial was Reuben Phillips, found dead near the ranch after an Indian attack. Deeded to a cemetery association in 1895, the burial ground still holds veterans, lodge members, and generations of area residents.

Salt Lake City, UT

This marker commemorates the dedication of a roadway to Abraham Lincoln, part of the early automobile age's impulse to name transcontinental routes for national heroes. Salt Lake City sat along the historic Lincoln Highway, America's first coast-to-coast auto road, championed in 1913 to knit the nation together by motorcar. Such dedications turned ordinary pavement into monuments of memory and mobility.

Ringgold, TX

Ever since 16th-century Spaniards chased Indian rumors of 'Seven Cities of Gold' across Texas, the state has spun tales of hidden riches—and this one is largely true. In 1936 the Texas Highway Department paved stretches of U.S. 81 and 287 in Montague County with concrete made from local sand that assayed out to contain gold. The metal was too finely embedded to mine profitably, but an estimated $31,000 in gold lies distributed along some 39 miles of roadway.

Seattle, WA

Known as 'The Hiker,' this statue honors the American soldiers, sailors, and Marines who served between 1898 and 1902 in the War with Spain, the Philippine-American War, and the China Relief Expedition. The popular figure, replicated in cities across the country, memorializes a generation of volunteers who fought in the nation's first overseas campaigns. It marks the moment the United States stepped onto the world stage as an imperial power.