Search Markers

Plymouth, NC

On April 20, 1864, the three-day Battle of Plymouth reached its climax as Confederate forces closed in on the Union-held river town near Albemarle Sound. This spot marks the extreme left flank of General Robert F. Hoke's brigade as it formed just before the decisive assault. Hoke's coordinated attack, aided by the ironclad ram CSS Albemarle on the Roanoke River, forced the surrender of the garrison.

Warrington Township, PA · est. 2021

For decades a Bucks County family turned a passion for speed into one of the great names in American motorsport. Bob Holbert ran one of the country's first Porsche dealerships and racked up national championships behind the wheel of Porsches and Shelby Cobras beginning in 1953. His son Al became a dominant endurance driver, winning IMSA GT titles, a record haul of race victories, and three overall wins at the grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Holbrook, MA

Dated 1861–1865, this monument on Holbrook's town square honors the local men who gave their lives in the Civil War. Across the North, towns raised such memorials to their soldiers, framing the war as a struggle to preserve the Union and the nation's liberty. Holbrook's stands among thousands of town-square monuments that turned private grief into public memory.

Alto, TX

The Holcombs have gathered on this Cherokee County ground every year since 1897, when about 200 kin arrived by horse and buggy, pitched tents at Cold Springs, and honored family patriarchs Joseph and Zachariah Holcomb. The clan had come to Texas from Arkansas beginning in 1842; their reunion grew into a multigenerational institution, adding a pavilion in the 1950s and continuing for more than a century.

Houston, TX

Houston businessman and developer Oscar Holcombe built this Tudor Revival home in 1925, hiring architect L. W. Lindsay and landscape architect Herbert Skogland for its gardens. Its half-timbering, elaborate chimney, and decorative brick entry portico mark it as a showpiece of the era. Holcombe, who served eleven nonconsecutive terms as mayor between 1921 and 1957, lived here until his death in 1968.

Granbury, TX

Contractor E.J. Holderness, known for many of Granbury's Victorian buildings, built this frame house for his own family in 1896, giving its front porch intricate Eastlake-style trim. He enlarged and lived in it until 1913, and in 1926 it passed to Mary Narcissa Rylee Aiken, a member of a pioneer Hood County family. Her daughter Mabel later preserved the residence.

Laredo, TX

In 1880, missionaries Annie Williams and Rebecca Toland, backed by the Women's Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, set out to bring formal schooling to the young women of the Texas-Mexico border. The Laredo Seminary they founded opened its doors in 1882 as a boarding school and grew into a lasting educational institution later known as the Holding Institute. It stood as a rare avenue of advanced learning for girls in a still-frontier region.

Holland, TX

Holland grew out of three settlements that began drawing farmers to this fertile ground in the 1830s, first clustering around a place called Mountain Home. In 1878 Civil War veteran James R. "Rube" Holland built a steam-powered cotton gin, a post office took his name, and when the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad arrived in 1881 the town shifted to a new site. Czech and German immigrants poured in, and by 1920 Holland was a thriving cotton town of over a thousand, with banks, hotels, gins, and an opera house.

Alpine, TX

In 1912, as Alpine rode a boom in mercury mining in the Big Bend country, cattleman John R. Holland raised this Spanish Colonial Revival hotel as the young town's gathering place. For decades it hosted the civic, social, and business life of the community, expanding under his son Clay before finally closing its doors in 1969. Named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1980, it endures as a symbol of West Texas's boomtown optimism.

Houston, TX

Organized at Brazoria in 1835, Holland Lodge was the first Masonic lodge in Texas, working under a dispensation from Louisiana until the Texas Revolution scattered it. Its charter survived the war in the saddlebags of Dr. Anson Jones, who carried it to San Jacinto; reopened in 1837 in the young Republic's capital, the lodge helped found the Grand Lodge of the Republic of Texas and took the No. 1 designation.

Fluvanna County, VA

In the years after the Civil War, John Benjamin Page raised a log cabin on this Fluvanna County land, anchoring a working homestead of farmland and woods. Beyond the fields lie the remains of the Page family gold mine — a reminder that central Virginia's slate belt was part of a 19th-century gold-mining region that drew prospectors well before the rushes out West. Today the surviving cabin and mine workings sketch the everyday life of a Reconstruction-era Virginia family that farmed and dug for fortune on the same ground.

Carthage, TX

When emancipation came, freedpeople across the South built their own communities from the ground up, and land like this—deeded by Spearman Holland to former slaves after the Civil War—became the anchor for a church, a school, a lodge hall, and a cemetery. More than 500 graves rest here, though only a fraction are marked, among them fraternal-order members and veterans of every war from World War I to Vietnam. Still serving its community today, the burial ground is a living monument to a settlement that has endured for well over a century.

Burnet, TX

Long a watering place for Native peoples, these cool springs on Hamilton Creek drew Henry E. McCulloch's Texas Ranger camp in 1847. A visiting Georgian, Samuel E. Holland, judged the valley ideal for a home and bought 1,280 acres to become the first permanent settler in what became Burnet County. The Ranger post gave way to Fort Croghan in 1849, and Holland's efforts grew the site into a thriving pioneer community.

Bradford, PA · est. 2008

In 1899, brothers George and Earl Holley began building engines and cars in Bradford, and the carburetor on their Motorette caught the eye of Henry Ford. Specializing in that technology, the Holley Motor Company became a leading supplier to Ford and, in time, to the aircraft industry and the U.S. military. The name endures today as a byword for high-performance carburetors.

Mesquite, TX

Tennessee native Nathaniel A. Holley came to the Mesquite area in 1884 and, after farming and enduring family losses, opened a grocery store on the town square in 1903 while serving as alderman and school-board member. His sons Raymond and Anson served in World War I and joined the business, and son-in-law Ferd McWhorter expanded it in 1943 into the hardware-and-furniture firm McWhorter's, later McWhorter-Greenhaw. A third generation, through musician-educator Frank Greenhaw, carried the family's long commitment to schools and the arts.

Cambridge, MA

Built in 1763 by the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Hollis Hall has sheltered Harvard students for more than two centuries and honors the Hollis family of London, whose generosity sustained the college for generations. In 1775-76 the building traded scholars for soldiers, serving as barracks for colonial troops during the siege of Boston.

Brownsville, OR

In Brownsville — one of Oregon's oldest towns, settled along the Calapooia River in the mid-19th century — a cluster of homes still wears small plaques announcing their builders and the year 1908. That was a confident, prosperous moment for the town, whose woolen mill and farm trade had given rise to comfortable frame houses on tree-lined streets. The plaques, visible from the sidewalk, turn an ordinary residential block into a walkable record of the craftsmen who shaped the community.

Lovelady vicinity, TX

Straddling the Houston-Trinity county line, Holly Cemetery grew up around a Primitive Baptist church on land oral tradition credits to William and Harriet Brannen. Its unmarked graves may reach back to 1863, while the earliest dated marker belongs to a Brannen infant who died in 1880. Headstones carry a roll of pioneer family names, and veterans of several wars rest among them.

Washington, GA

Holly Court preserves the layered history of an antebellum Georgia household. Its rear section is thought to date to about 1817, while the front portion was hauled some seven miles by oxcart in the 1840s by Dr. Fielding Ficklen and joined to the older structure. The result is a home that literally combines two buildings—and two moments—from the early history of Wilkes County.

Independence, TX

Holly Oaks was the home of Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor, a jurist and Baptist minister who came to Texas in its republic years and helped shape its early institutions. He lived out his final decades here in Independence, in the heart of one of Texas's oldest Anglo settlements. The university chartered in 1845 that bears his name became one of the state's most enduring seats of learning.

Pittsburg, TX

Holly Springs Baptist Church was formed in 1903 when two older congregations founded by post–Civil War settlers merged under the Rev. B. H. Sims. On land donated by Harriet Coffman, the congregation raised its first sanctuary and joined the Liberty Baptist Association, replacing it with a new building in 1928 that twice hosted the association's annual meeting. Long known as a training ground for young ministers, it has served the Camp County community for over a century.

Martin's Mill, TX

This burial ground grew out of a rural Methodist congregation on land donated in 1860, with additional acres deeded in 1863 at the height of the Civil War to create a community cemetery. Its earliest interment was in 1863, though two stones bear older dates from graves reinterred here in 1968 from a pioneer graveyard. For well over a century it has served the settlers, church leaders, and veterans of the Martin's Mill area.

Martins Mill, TX

Organized in 1852 and named for the native holly trees and fresh springs near its first site, Holly Springs is among the oldest churches of any denomination in this corner of Van Zandt County. Its original small board building served as both church and school for a farming community that leaned on cooperation and shared labor. In 1859 the members relocated to the present site, where the congregation has remained a fixture for over 160 years.

Los Angeles, CA

Long before it became shorthand for the movie business, the corner of Hollywood and Vine was open ranch land. In 1887 the pioneering couple Mr. and Mrs. Horace E. Wilcox subdivided their ranch and named the new community Hollywood, laying out the dirt crossroads that would grow into its bustling heart. The marker recalls those rural beginnings beneath one of the world's most famous intersections.

Houston, TX

One of Houston's oldest and largest cemeteries, Hollywood was founded when the Moore brothers bought its first 55 acres in 1895 and formally chartered the cemetery association in 1902. Its more than 30,000 graves hold prominent Houstonians — a pioneering naturalist, a Japanese nurseryman, mayors, judges, and veterans from the Civil War to the present — and it has passed through several long stewardships, most recently a nonprofit preservation group.

Torrance, CA

From 1931 to 1958, the Hollywood Riviera Beach Club drew Angelenos — and no small number of movie-colony figures — to the sands of the South Bay. It was the social centerpiece of the Hollywood Riviera, a Mediterranean-styled seaside development that helped define Southern California's beachfront leisure culture from the Depression through the postwar boom.

Corsicana, TX

William Lee Holman came to Corsicana in 1908 to manage the Southland Cotton Oil Mill, part of the boom that made the town an early Texas center for cotton and oil. In 1914 he built this classical revival home, touched with late Victorian and Prairie School details, and his family kept it for eighteen years. The house reflects the prosperity of a city rising on the cotton trade.

Bay City, TX

William Shields Holman, a Spanish-American War veteran who served as Matagorda County judge, built this showpiece home with his wife Louise just as Bay City was coming into its own. Completed in 1909, it is a textbook example of Queen Anne styling, with an asymmetrical silhouette, a corner tower, a wraparound porch, and richly varied wall textures. The Holman family held onto it for seven decades.

Monahans, TX

Built around 1910 by James R. Holman, a livery and lumber man who met the daily trains and ferried newcomers to the family hotel, this house sat at the center of early Monahans life. Its most famous son, Eugene Holman, rose from this West Texas town to the presidency of Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1944, then the world's largest oil company. The home links a frontier railroad town to the boardrooms of the American petroleum industry.

Weimar, TX

John T. Holman came from Virginia to Texas in 1837 and, around 1875, built this house near Weimar after making fortunes in cattle and cotton; married three times, he raised eighteen children. After 1901 the home passed to the Banse and Seifert families, who altered its Greek Revival lines, razing several rear rooms and adding on. In 1953 a later generation of Seiferts restored what remained of the original structure.

Holmdel Township, NJ

By the early 1960s, postwar suburban growth was steadily consuming New Jersey's open countryside. In 1961 the state responded with its pioneering Green Acres program, which pooled public bond money to buy and protect land for parks and recreation before it could be developed. Holmdel Park was dedicated on May 30, 1964 — Memorial Day — as one of the open spaces secured for the people of Monmouth County using a combination of county and state Green Acres funds.

Mason, TX

Attorney Henry Holmes (1836–1895) settled in Mason after Army service and served as county attorney, justice of the peace, and personal secretary to Governor Lawrence Sullivan Ross. About 1883 he built this sandstone office, and by 1888 he had partnered with Mason native Charles Bierschwale, whose work lay in land survey and sales. The building housed their combined law and land office and stayed in the Bierschwale family until 1994.

Beaumont, TX

Holmes Duke, a Carthage native, bought this Beaumont lot in 1898 and finished his Queen Anne and Colonial Revival home the next year, distinguished by twin semicircular bays, a sunburst-decorated gable, and fish-scale shingling. Duke was a busy figure in the growing city — inventor, restaurateur, hotel builder, city alderman, and health inspector — and he lived here until his death in 1946. The house is one of the few Beaumont structures that predate the 1901 Spindletop oil gusher.

Gonzales, TX

Dr. George Holmes, a Gonzales County native, began practicing medicine in Gonzales in 1915 and dreamed of giving the county seat a fully equipped hospital. That dream was realized in 1921 with this two-story red-brick building — accented by a Spanish tile roof and a bracketed porch and built by contractor Fred Miesenhelder — which served as hospital and offices until 1978. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1984.

Ann Arbor, MI

This memorial keeps faith with the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and the millions of others destroyed by Nazi prejudice during World War II, while honoring the righteous few who risked everything to shelter the persecuted. Erected far from the killing grounds of Europe, it asks an American community to remember and to resist hatred. Such memorials became widespread in the postwar decades as survivors and their descendants insisted the world not forget.

Stinnett, TX

Texas colonization and homestead laws of the late 1890s drew settlers into the thinly peopled Panhandle, and Hutchinson County gathered enough land applications to organize in 1901. In 1903 Benjamin and Birda May Holt donated seven acres for a community schoolhouse and cemetery; Nola Storrs was the first person buried there in 1909. The graveyard, later expanded when the school closed, still holds many of the area's first families and veterans of the World Wars and Korea.

Bluff Dale, TX

Dr. Hardy L. Holt, a Confederate first lieutenant in the Civil War, later studied medicine and became a pioneer physician in Bluff Dale, where he opened the town's first drugstore—complete with an ice cream parlor. Around 1895 he and his wife, Belle, built this two-story Folk Victorian and Queen Anne home to replace an earlier house lost to fire. Its wrap-around porch and balcony, turned columns, and wrought-iron fence still mark it as a landmark of the town's early days.

Stinnett, TX

After Hutchinson County was organized in 1901, settlers formed small country school districts across the plains, and this two-room schoolhouse rose in 1916 from lumber hauled all the way from Texoma, Oklahoma. Its modest classical-revival touches—a gabled entrance, oversized windows, decorative shingles—dressed up a simple frame building where classes met until 1935. Long after the last lessons, it stayed the community's gathering place for weddings, funerals, quilting bees, and elections.

Yorktown, TX

In 1867 Anton and Lucyia Koszielsky deeded land near Yorktown for a Catholic burial ground to serve a growing immigrant community, and later families enlarged it and adorned it with a crucifixion monument and statuary. The spelling of the founders' name shifting from Koszielsky to Kozelski over the generations quietly records the assimilation of Central European Catholics into South Texas.

Bay City, TX

After the Catholic Church created a frontier diocese at Galveston in 1847, Polish immigrant families settled in Matagorda County in a community called St. Francisville, served only by traveling priests. Convert Louisiana Thompson Bowie helped keep the faith alive, hosting clergy at her plantation home and traveling with them to Mass. When Monsignor Jacob Schnetzer arrived in 1907, he built a Bay City sanctuary designed by noted Galveston architect Nicholas Clayton, the seed of today's Holy Cross parish.

Yorktown, TX

Polish Catholic families who first landed in Texas in the 1850s and settled the pioneering colony of Panna Maria later migrated to the Yorktown area, splitting from a largely German parish to form their own congregation. On land deeded in 1867 they built a church dedicated to St. Mary; after fire destroyed it in 1915, architect F. B. Gaenslen designed the present red-brick Romanesque building, completed in 1916 with much of the labor supplied by parishioners. It reused the cross from the old steeple, giving the church its name.

Austin, TX

In 1936 Father Francis R. Weber celebrated the first Mass of Holy Cross, the first Catholic parish to serve Austin's African American community, in the home of William M. Tears—just as the city's 1928 plan pushed Black residents into East Austin. Parishioners built the church in 1937 and went on to found a second parish, a school, and Holy Cross Hospital, the first in Austin to let Black physicians practice, staffed by physician-nun Sister Mary Celine Heitzman. Its members shaped civic and political life, including the first Black speaker pro tem of the Texas Legislature.

East Bernard, TX

Catholic immigrants from the Czech lands settled the prairies near East Bernard in the 1880s, served at first only by visiting priests. They began building a parish in 1900, raising a small frame church in 1905 on donated land, and by 1925 replaced it with a striking Spanish Colonial Revival sanctuary designed by a Houston architect, complete with a 70-foot belfry and imported Czech statues and stained glass. A school and convent followed in the same style, and Holy Cross endures as the oldest Catholic church in continuous use in Wharton County.

Giddings, TX

Holy Cross Church was founded in the Rabb's Creek area in 1873, and its cemetery opened that same year with the burial of Pastor Johann Zapf. The parish later sold the church site but kept the graveyard, building a new church near Warda in Fayette County in 1882. The 53 graves that remain mark the resting place of an early German settlement's founding congregation.

Yoakum, TX

German-speaking settlers streaming into the Yoakum area in the late 1800s brought their Lutheran faith with them, and in 1891 Rev. Cornelius Ziesmer helped about ten families organize Holy Cross Lutheran Church. Their first sanctuary was flattened by a tornado just a month after it was finished in 1893, and the congregation simply rebuilt on the same spot. More than a century later the church still counts descendants of those founding families among its members.

Houston, TX

This Episcopal congregation began in 1865 when the Rev. J. M. Curtis and two dozen Harrisburg communicants gathered in a mission first called Nativity, renamed Holy Cross about 1875. Its members — the women especially — spent years raising building funds, erecting a steepled brick church in 1895; after storm damage and eventual ruin, the present church and parish house were dedicated in 1920.

Nazareth, TX

The story of Holy Family Catholic Church is the story of Nazareth itself. Irish families led by the McCormick brothers arrived from New York in the early 1890s, and in 1902 Father Joseph Reisdorff came to found a parish. Advertising in German-language newspapers across the Midwest, he drew German Catholic families to the plains and named the new town Nazareth, with the church at its center.

Nazareth, TX

In 1902, Father Joseph Reisdorff, the priest and colonizer who founded the German Catholic settlement of Nazareth, set aside donated land for Holy Family Cemetery. The first burial came in 1906, and nine early tombstones still bear German inscriptions, echoing the community's roots. Later decades brought statuary, an arched gateway, tree-lined walks, and memorials, including one to the town's only World War II combat death.

Fredericksburg, TX

This congregation grew from the first Protestant services held in the German settlement of Fredericksburg by the Rev. Henry Basse in 1846, the year the town was founded. Members worshiped in the communal Vereins Kirche until 1888, when Carl Priess donated a lot for a dedicated building completed in 1893; its tower still holds a bell from the original church. A 1948–49 remodeling accompanied the congregation's transition to Holy Ghost Lutheran Church.

Galveston, TX

Holy Rosary began not as a church but as a school: in 1886 Bishop Nicholas Gallagher opened a one-room classroom for African American children in Galveston, staffed first by Dominican sisters. The congregation that gathered there became one of Texas's first African American Catholic parishes, with Fr. Philip Keller appointed pastor in 1889. The Sisters of the Holy Family—the first African American sisters to teach in the state's diocesan schools—took charge in 1898, and the parish sheltered more than 200 people during the deadly 1900 storm before opening Texas's first Catholic high school for African Americans in 1927.

Rosenberg, TX

After Arabella Dorigan donated two lots in 1895, Rosenberg's Catholics built a wooden church and rectory in 1911, only to lose them to fire in 1924. A mission-style stucco church followed in 1925, and in 1954 a larger Gothic Revival church was dedicated on donated acreage west of town. A parish school begun in the 1930s, along with a rectory, bell tower, and grotto, grew the parish into a full campus.

Dickinson, TX

In 1899 a small band of Episcopalians in Dickinson petitioned their bishop for a priest, and with the Rev. A.J. Burnett they organized Holy Trinity Mission, worshiping in homes and a converted picnic-ground building. The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 battered the fledgling church, but the members rebuilt in 1901 the beloved "little church by the side of the road." A later rectory honored victims of the 1947 Texas City disaster, and the parish grew into a larger sanctuary by the 1960s.

Dallas, TX

Turmoil in early-twentieth-century Greece drove hundreds of thousands of Greeks to America, and Dallas's growing community soon felt the need for an Eastern Orthodox parish of its own. In 1915 a charter created Holy Trinity, and by 1916 a modest wood-frame church rose on Riggs Street — built to be temporary, since many parishioners expected to return home. Instead the congregation put down roots, moving to Swiss Avenue after the war and to its present site in the 1990s while anchoring Greek cultural life through festivals, choirs, and community events.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1975

Founded in 1730, this Lancaster congregation stood at the heart of a bustling colonial town where the Pennsylvania frontier met the settled east. Its early building even hosted a 1762 Indian treaty council, a reminder that diplomacy with Native nations often unfolded in the plainest of civic spaces. The stone church dedicated in 1766 still guards the graves of two Pennsylvania statesmen of the Revolutionary era, Thomas Wharton and Governor Thomas Mifflin.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2023

Founded in 1787 by German-speaking Catholics who wanted to worship and pass on their traditions in their own language, Holy Trinity became the first German national parish in the United States. Its church rose in 1788–1789, and within a few years its congregation and cemetery included African Americans and refugees from the upheaval in Saint-Domingue, buried alongside parishioners of European descent. The model of the ethnic 'national parish' it pioneered would shape American Catholicism for generations before the parish finally closed in 2009.

Calvert, TX

About 1874, at least two dozen Chinese families were brought to the Calvert area to labor in the cotton fields, arriving with queues and drawing much notice from their neighbors. Many stayed on as permanent, respected residents, and their descendants moved into industry, business, and the professions. The marker sets their story within Texas's broad immigrant tapestry—more than twenty-five ethnic groups, from Canary Islanders and Cuban cigar makers to European lace makers, who helped settle the state.

Independence, TX

This home was built in 1845 by Jerome B. Robertson, whose long public life spanned the Republic and the Confederacy. He served as a captain in the army of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and in the Somervell Expedition of 1842, sat in both houses of the Texas Legislature, and rose to brigadier general commanding Hood's Texas Brigade in the Civil War. The State of Texas erected the marker in 1936.

Sherman, TX

Allison Mayfield opened a law practice in Sherman in 1884 and rose to the Texas Railroad Commission in 1897, where he served 26 years, 16 of them as chairman. Created in 1891 to regulate shipping rates, the commission under his leadership took on the far larger task of conserving oil and gas — overseeing pipelines, proration, and, in the 1930s, the vast East Texas field. His insistence on orderly regulation helped Texas flood the Allies with oil during World War II.

Vega, TX

Dr. Oscar H. Loyd came to Vega in 1907 as Oldham County's first physician and quickly became far more than a doctor. Over ranchers' objections he introduced farming to the Panhandle, broke sod with the county's first steam tractor, and won prizes for his produce at state fairs; he served more than thirty years as a volunteer weather observer, phoning in daily reports at his own expense. During the 1918 flu epidemic he tended the sick day and night, delivered food, and buried the dead, and he bought the county's first automobile to reach his patients. A tireless civic leader, he founded its first Chamber of Commerce and backed the original Highway 66 Association.

Snyder, TX

Vermont-born J. Wright Mooar came west at nineteen and, with his brother, established the first buffalo-hunting camp in the Texas Panhandle in 1873. Over his career he shot an estimated 22,000 bison — including a rare albino whose hide his descendants still preserve — and later supplied game to railroad crews and turned to ranching. His marksmanship earned the respect of Comanche chief Quanah Parker, who became his friend.