Search Markers

Mission, TX

On land once part of the Oblate Fathers' mission, this 160-acre Rio Grande Valley property belonged from 1910 to 1916 to William Jennings Bryan, the "Great Commoner" who thrice ran for president and served as Secretary of State. While living here he kept up his prolific writing, including a widely followed magazine debate with Senator Albert J. Beveridge. The setting placed one of the era's most famous orators amid the newly irrigated farmlands of South Texas.

Scottsville, TX

William Thomas Scott came to Texas in 1834 and founded the town of Scottsville, building this home of hand-hewn timbers and handmade brick between 1838 and 1840. He served as a congressman and senator in the Republic of Texas and eight terms in the state legislature, and in 1852 helped charter the Vicksburg & El Paso Railroad, a forerunner of the transcontinental-minded Texas & Pacific. Through his wife's family he was drawn into the bloody Regulator-Moderator feud that convulsed the region in the 1840s.

City of Rochester, NY

This marker pinpoints the former location of home plate at Silver Stadium, the longtime ballpark on Rochester's north side. Opened in the late 1920s and originally known as Red Wing Stadium, it served for decades as the home of the Rochester Red Wings, one of the oldest continuously operating minor-league franchises in the country. When the team moved downtown to a new ballpark in the mid-1990s, the old stadium was demolished, leaving this spot to mark where generations of fans watched the game.

Marshall, TX

Elkanah Greer came to Texas in 1848 after fighting in the Mexican War, settled at Marshall, and at the outbreak of the Civil War raised and led the 3rd Texas Cavalry. Recalled as a brigadier general in 1862, he ran the Confederacy's conscription bureau west of the Mississippi and organized labor and reserves to defend the Texas coast. A member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, he died in 1877 and is buried in Memphis.

Fort Worth, TX

Hinchie Parham Mabry, a Georgia-born lawyer and Texas legislator, became one of the state's hard-fighting Confederate cavalry commanders. With the 3rd Texas Cavalry he fought at Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge, and Iuka—where he was wounded three times and captured—then rode with Nathan Bedford Forrest's command, raiding Union communications across Mississippi. After the war he was elected a district judge, only to be removed by Reconstruction authorities, and later practiced law in Fort Worth.

Bastrop, TX

Joseph D. Sayers enlisted at Bastrop as a private in 1861 and rose through the Confederate ranks, winning a captaincy for gallantry at Valverde and organizing an artillery battery from cannons captured there. Wounded repeatedly in the Red River campaigns and the fighting in Louisiana, he served as a staff officer to Generals Tom Green and Richard Taylor. He returned home on crutches and later became a state senator, lieutenant governor, U.S. congressman, and, from 1899 to 1903, governor of Texas during the Spindletop oil strike and the Galveston hurricane.

Fort Worth, TX

K.M. Van Zandt raised Company D of the 7th Texas Infantry in 1861 and endured the surrender at Fort Donelson and Northern prison camps before fighting his way through the brutal campaigns around Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Franklin, rising to Major in Granbury's Brigade. After the war he moved to a small Fort Worth and became its greatest booster — founding a railroad-construction firm, leading Fort Worth National Bank for 56 years, and earning the title "Mr. Fort Worth."

Lufkin vicinity, TX

In 1854 W.W. Manning opened a drugstore and sawmill here and named the settlement Homer for his old Louisiana home. Chosen as Angelina County seat in 1856 under a state mandate to center each county's government, Homer was platted in 1857 around a courthouse square, and its cemetery took its first recorded burial—Margaret Patterson McMullen—in 1861. The town thrived with schools, churches, and a newspaper until it lost the county seat in 1892; its cemetery, holding veterans from the Civil War to Vietnam and many county officials, still serves the community today.

Jasper, TX

Settlement of this corner of Jasper County began in the 1830s, and the Homer community cemetery dates to 1865, with its oldest documented grave that of Jane Wilson Williams. Ten known citizens of the Republic of Texas rest here, along with veterans of the Texas Revolution and the Civil War and other early East Texas pioneers. The graveyard is one of the few physical traces the Homer community left behind.

Seattle, WA

Engineer Homer M. Hadley designed a series of innovative concrete bridges across Washington State, pioneering some of the earliest American uses of the European hollow-box, or cellular, method of concrete construction. His work helped prove that reinforced concrete could span economically where steel had dominated, influencing bridge design across the region. Seattle's floating bridge span later bore his name in recognition of that legacy.

Jasper, TX

Homer Methodist Church began in 1860 as a frontier circuit congregation whose first worshippers gathered under a tent, guided by traveling ministers who rode long loops between scattered East Texas settlements. After James W. and Virginia Yeates deeded land in 1893, community members built a sanctuary completed by Christmas 1896 that doubled for years as the local schoolhouse. Circuit preachers like the long-serving Rev. John A. Henderson kept the faith alive across generations.

Odessa, TX

Homer Robert Henderson rode into Odessa in 1906 as a member of Company A of the Texas Rangers, serving under the famed Captain J. A. Brooks in the years when Rangers kept order as settlers rushed to file claims on West Texas land. One of twelve children born in Wilson County, he married Annie Henderson in Odessa in 1908 and turned to ranching, later serving as deputy sheriff and county commissioner in both Ector and Crane counties. His life traces the transition of the Permian Basin from open frontier to settled, governed country.

Alto, TX

As settlers poured into the Piney Woods of East Texas in the 1860s, the informal traces beaten by farmers hauling goods to market began to harden into an official road network. Surveyors laying out the Homer-to-Alto route did what generations of travelers had done before them—they followed the buffalo paths and Indian trails that already threaded the best ground between the hills. The road carried the mail between county seats, gave rise to a community that became Lufkin, and a century later was absorbed into the modern highways that still trace its path.

Baytown, TX

Virginia-born planter William Scott came to Texas in 1824 as one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists, taking a headright on the San Jacinto River and naming his home Point Pleasant. A backer of independence who captained the Lynchburg Volunteers in 1835, Scott made his house a waystation for revolutionary-era figures like Lorenzo de Zavala and Austin's sister, Emily Perry.

Fairfield, TX

Born in Georgia in 1816, Joseph Burton Johnson served as a U.S. Army officer in Florida and rose to major by the Mexican-American War era before settling in Freestone County in 1854. On his sprawling 10,550-acre plantation he built a twelve-room stone mansion in 1860 and served as a brigadier general of Texas State Troops during the Civil War. A county commissioner and the first master of the Texas State Grange, he left descendants across many walks of life.

Galveston, TX

Adolph D. Dolson was a Galveston native, the son of a Norwegian father and Irish mother who had immigrated to the island in the 1860s. A busy businessman, he served four terms as Galveston's finance commissioner from 1943 to 1950 and earned Papal honors for his civic and religious service. He and his wife Catherine made their home in this 1907 house, originally built for the Wansker family, from 1937 until his death in 1950.

Boerne, TX

The son of German immigrants who helped settle the Hill Country, Albert Paul Kutzer built a life as a Boerne merchant and cotton-gin operator around the turn of the twentieth century. As mayor, school board president, and civic organizer, he helped guide the town's early growth while raising his family in a house first built for his parents in 1890.

Jefferson, TX

Barry Benefield was born in 1877 when Jefferson was among East Texas's dominant river-port cities, and he absorbed its character while working at his father's wagon yard beside this 1860s family home. After the University of Texas he became a journalist and then a novelist, and two of his books—"Chicken Wagon Family" and "Valiant Is the Word for Carrie"—reached the movie screen and carried Jefferson's name worldwide. He returned to this house in retirement, living here until his death at 94.

Waxahachie, TX

A native Texan, Dr. Dixon Gillespie Thompson earned his medical degree in Louisville and trained in eastern hospitals before building this home in 1883–84. Beyond his standing as a physician, he held large landholdings in Ellis County and interests in three banks. Though he sold the house in 1917, he continued to live here until his death in 1935.

Orange, TX

Following his physician father into medicine, Georgia-born Edgar William Brown practiced in Orange before marrying into the Lutcher lumber family and rising to become one of the nation's leading lumbermen. From this homesite he directed timber and cypress operations across Texas and Louisiana, invested in the region's early oil boom, and as mayor championed the deep-water port and Intracoastal Canal that made Orange a shipping center.

Galveston, TX

Trained at Edinburgh University, the Scottish-born Dr. William Keiller crossed the Atlantic in the early 1890s to become the first professor of anatomy at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He held the post for forty years, also serving as dean and as president of the Texas Medical Association, and overcame physical disabilities to become recognized as the leading American anatomist of his era. From this address he raised his family until his death in 1931.

Castell, TX

Emil Kriewitz left Potsdam for the Texas coast in 1846 and threw himself into the frontier's every hazard—first as a U.S. soldier, then as an agent of the Adelsverein, the German society organizing settlement along the Llano River in Comanche country. To build trust he lived among the Comanche himself, a striking act of diplomacy in a violent borderland. He married Amalia Markwort in 1857, built this home and a small "Sunday house" around 1867, and served his community as justice of the peace and postmaster until his death in 1902.

Columbus, TX

Fannie Baker Darden, born in 1829, was the daughter of Texas Revolution general Mosely Baker and became known as the 'Poet Laureate of Columbus.' She married a local attorney, raised two sons, taught art at Colorado College, and wrote for newspapers from Columbus and Galveston to Houston and New Orleans.

Liberty, TX

George Orr first ventured into Texas in 1813 with the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition and returned in 1821 to settle his family along the Old Atascosito Road. His home became a welcome waystation for travelers, and he served repeatedly as alcalde of the Atascosito District in the years of Mexican Texas. He died in 1835, just before independence, having helped open the region to further colonization.

Terrell, TX

Oscar Branch Colquitt rose from tenant farmer and newspaperman to become the twenty-fourth governor of Texas (1911–1915), nicknamed "Little Oscar" and "the Napoleon of Texas Politics." As railroad commissioner he earned the title "Daddy of the Causeway" for his work on behalf of Galveston, and as governor he pushed prison reform, improved state institutions, and helped preserve the Alamo. This Terrell block was his legal residence during both terms.

New Braunfels, TX

Johann Joseph and Anna Gertruda Walzem emigrated from Prussia around 1851, and in 1859 Texas formally granted them the 160 acres they had settled near New Braunfels. A stonemason, Johann and his sons quarried local stone to build their home and barn, dug four cisterns, and raised the nearby St. John Chapel. In the 1860s the stone house doubled as a school for local children.

Mason vicinity, TX

Taking over leadership of the German colonies from Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, John O. Meusebach guided settlement into the Hill Country and secured a treaty with the Comanches that opened the land between the Llano and San Saba rivers to peaceful settlement. He later retired to a farm on this ground, and the German colonists he brought left a lasting imprint on Texas through their thrift, craft, and blending of Old World custom with frontier necessity.

Amarillo, TX

James Nathan Browning taught himself by reading at night by the light of a pine knot, then rode west from Cooke County to spend nine years as a trail-driving cowboy before studying law at Fort Griffin. Admitted to the bar in 1876, he became the first district attorney of a Panhandle judicial district so vast he rode hundreds of miles to hold court, and won repeated election to the legislature as a champion of small farmers against big ranching interests. He capped his career as Lieutenant Governor from 1898 to 1902 and later as a district judge in Amarillo.

San Angelo, TX

Born Mary Lee Payne in Weimar and shaped by a hard pioneer childhood, Mrs. Robert Massie became a teacher, postmaster, and lifelong champion of education across West Texas. She married Scottish-born Robert Massie in 1899, a former sheep herder who built a fortune in the wool industry, and together they raised an adopted daughter, three nephews, and a niece while she taught Sunday school in San Angelo. Their estate, left largely to the benefit of youth, seeded the Massie Memorial Foundation, which has funded thousands of student scholarships since 1932.

Austinio, TX

Samuel Cartmill Hiroms was born in 1836 to parents among Stephen F. Austin's 'Old Three Hundred,' the first Anglo-American colonists of Mexican Texas. A schoolteacher and county surveyor, he served in the Confederate Army before moving his family to Houston County and settling the Creek community — later Austinio — in 1878, where he received land for his teaching and helped lead the local Methodist church.

Palo Alto, CA · est. 1986

On this Palo Alto ground stood Mayfield Farm, the home Sarah Armstrong Wallis built in the years after California statehood. A committed reformer, Wallis was elected in 1870 to lead California's first statewide suffrage organization, and her parlor became a gathering place for the movement's leading figures. In an era when women could not vote, the farm hosted national voices for the cause and helped knit California into the broader campaign for the ballot.

Westphalia, TX

Theodore Rabroker and his wife Mary Ann emigrated from Westphalia, Germany, in 1866, and after years in Pennsylvania and Iowa, Rabroker saw promise in this fertile Falls County land and imagined a German-Catholic community here. Settling in 1879 and buying acreage he resold to Frelsburg families, he deliberately invited only German-Catholics within a five-mile radius, forging tight community traditions. The first Mass was said in his home in 1882, and he led the building of the parish church that followed.

Canyon, TX

A native Texan and Civil War veteran, W. F. Heller settled on this land in 1887 and became the first to farm the area successfully—no small feat on the challenging Texas plains. When the county organized in 1889 he was elected its first clerk, and he helped found both the area's first Sunday school and West Texas State Normal College. He married Susan Roberts in 1897.

Homestead, PA · est. 2000

Founded by Homestead steelworkers around 1900, the Homestead Grays grew into one of the most dominant franchises in all of baseball history. Under the leadership of Cumberland Posey Jr., the Grays captured twelve national titles — including nine in a row from 1937 to 1945 — and fielded Hall of Famers like Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, and Smokey Joe Williams. Playing in the segregated Negro Leagues, they were a source of fierce pride for African Americans in Pittsburgh and far beyond before disbanding in 1950.

Fredericksburg, TX

Karl Itz left Westerburg, Germany, as a boy and settled among the German immigrants of Gillespie County in 1852, marrying Henrietta Evers a few years later. When the Civil War came, Itz joined fellow German Unionists who refused to fight for the Confederacy and set out for Mexico, only to be overtaken by Confederate forces at the Battle of the Nueces in 1862. Many of his companions were killed, but Itz survived and lived in hiding until the war's end. He later moved his family here and built this stone home in 1875.

Cranfills Gap, TX

Norwegian immigrant Knud S. Knudson brought his family to Bosque County in 1868, received a state land grant, and built a farm at this site. A small 1860s log home was later enlarged with a limestone addition, and the farmstead, with its home, barns, and outbuildings, stayed in the family until 1945. It survives as a fine example of a rural Norwegian vernacular farm complex.

Munhall, PA · est. 1992

At dawn on July 6, 1892, the Homestead Strike erupted into open battle when 300 Pinkerton agents, hired on behalf of Carnegie Steel, tried to land by barge to break the union's hold on the mill. Strikers and townspeople drove them back in a bloody firefight that left seven workers and three Pinkertons dead. Days later 8,000 state militia marched in to restore the company's control, and by November the strike—and the union—had been crushed.

Munhall, PA · est. 1993

In the summer of 1892, workers at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead steelworks clashed with a barge-load of Pinkerton guards hired to break their union during a bitter lockout. The July 6 gun battle along the Monongahela left men dead on both sides and became one of the defining confrontations of American labor history. Buried in these two adjoining cemeteries are six of the seven steelworkers who died, ordinary men whose graves mark the human cost of the struggle between organized labor and industrial capital.

Karnack, TX

Claudia Alta Taylor—known from infancy as "Lady Bird"—was born near Karnack in 1912, daughter of a general-store owner, and attended East Texas schools before earning degrees at the University of Texas. In 1934 she married Lyndon Baines Johnson, then a congressional aide, and rose beside him through his career to Congressman, Senator, Vice President, and President. As First Lady she championed conservation, beautification, and historic preservation.

Hubbard, TX

Tris Speaker (1888–1958) — the "Grey Eagle" — was born, schooled, and buried in Hubbard, and became the first Texan elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. A star center fielder, he won World Series titles with Boston in 1912 and 1915 and managed Cleveland to its first pennant in 1920. Shrewd with the money of his playing days, he always came home to Hubbard, where he served as a lifetime member of the volunteer fire department.

Naples, TX

Morris Sheppard (1875–1941), born near Naples, rose from a Texas law practice to nearly four decades in Congress and the U.S. Senate. He authored the 18th (Prohibition) Amendment and the Federal Credit Union Act, backed woman suffrage, and championed military aviation through lean years, helping ready the nation's air defenses before World War II. Sheppard Air Force Base was named in his honor in 1942.

Wabash County, IN

This picnic shelter complex was built in 1937 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the New Deal's most popular programs, which put young men to work during the Great Depression building the parks, trails, and shelters Americans still use. Working with local stone and timber, CCC crews left behind a rustic style of park architecture that defined the public landscape of the 1930s. Structures like this one are enduring monuments to Depression-era relief work and the birth of America's modern parks.

Farmersville, TX

Businessman John Milburn Honaker and his wife Malinda built a Queen Anne home here in 1893, then remodeled it in 1910 into a Neoclassical showpiece with a two-story porch and Doric columns. After Malinda's death, John married her sister and died soon after, and the house passed to a niece and her husband, the Holsonbakes, who owned it into the 1970s. The Holsonbake family became known for generously housing local teachers and hosting community events.

Hondo, TX

Spanish explorers named the deep gully 'El Arroyo Hondo' long before Henri Castro's colonists began settling the area in the 1840s. The town took shape after the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad platted a townsite in 1881; a post office followed in 1882, and the county seat moved here from Castroville in 1892. Hondo grew as a cotton and trade center, struck oil in the 1920s, and exploded during World War II when an Army Air Corps base pushed its population toward 12,000 before the base closed in 1946.

Hondo, TX

The first Methodists in this area worshiped under a live oak on the banks of Hondo Creek before organizing as a church in 1857 and meeting in a log hut. In 1859 they raised a shared church-and-Masonic-lodge building on donated land, served monthly by circuit-riding ministers. The congregation moved to its present Hondo site in 1890, replacing outgrown buildings as the community grew.

Honea Path, SC

This memorial in the small upstate South Carolina town of Honea Path honors the local men and women who served in the nation's armed forces and those who gave their lives in that service. Town squares and courthouse lawns across America hold such monuments, where communities gather on Memorial Day and Veterans Day to remember their own.

Honesdale, PA · est. 1948

Laid out in 1827 at the head of the Delaware & Hudson Canal, Honesdale took its name from Philip Hone, the New York merchant and celebrated diarist who championed the canal and the region's anthracite coal trade. The town became the point where hard coal met the waterway that carried it toward eastern markets, and it grew important enough to become the Wayne County seat by 1841. Its founding tied a remote Pennsylvania valley into the great commercial machinery of the young republic.

Honey Grove, TX

A decade after Honey Grove incorporated, Mayor J. P. Gilmer pressed the council in 1885 to build a proper city hall and jail, and the surviving minutes record every step—choosing a lot, arranging financing, and even rejecting the county's offer of aid when commissioners demanded a quarter interest. Built of stone from the local Floyd Quarry by contractor W. N. Allen, it opened in 1889 and remains Fannin County's only original civic building still standing. It is a rare survivor of small-town self-government in the Gilded Age.

Honey Grove, TX

Chartered in 1856 after a dispensation two years earlier, the Honey Grove Masonic Lodge met first in the attic of the old Smith Hotel and above the Walcott School before settling into its own quarters. Fire destroyed its N. 6th Street building in 1955, after which the lodge and the local newspaper rebuilt side by side at this site. For more than a century it has been a fixture of the town's civic and charitable life.

Solebury Township, PA · est. 1997

In 1939, six farms along a Bucks County creek joined together in an experiment that would reshape how Americans cared for their land. Working with federal soil experts, they showed that neighbors cooperating across property lines could halt erosion and protect water and wildlife better than anyone acting alone. The idea proved so successful that it became a model copied by thousands of watersheds nationwide, and the site was named a National Historic Landmark in 1969.

Wabash, IN

The Honeywell House in Wabash, Indiana, is associated with industrialist Mark C. Honeywell, whose heating-controls enterprise grew into one of America's best-known manufacturing names. Preserved as a community gathering place, the house reflects the wealth and civic ambition of an early-twentieth-century industrial leader in a small Indiana city. It ties a global corporate name back to its Midwestern roots.

Hancock, VT

This honor roll in the tiny mountain town of Hancock, Vermont, carries the simple charge "to honor those who served." Communities across Vermont raised such rolls to keep the names and sacrifice of their servicemen and women before the public eye. Without naming a single war, it embraces every generation of the town's veterans.

Tuscaloosa, AL

This monument gathers the names of Revolutionary War soldiers and patriots who, after independence was won, migrated south and west into the Alabama frontier and settled in Tuscaloosa County. Their arrival was part of the great postwar movement of veterans and their families into the old Southwest, where land grants and opportunity drew a generation that had fought for the new nation. Tuscaloosa itself would go on to serve as Alabama's early state capital, built by exactly this pioneering stock.

Bath, ME

Erected by the City of Bath in 1867, just two years after the Civil War's end, this monument honors local men who died in the conflict. Its inscription borrows Abraham Lincoln's own words from the Gettysburg Address, tying a small Maine shipbuilding city to the national reckoning over the war's meaning. Bath sent many sons to the Union cause, and communities across the North raised such memorials in the war's immediate aftermath.

Columbus, OH

This memorial carries a short, plainspoken verse in the voice of a veterans' memorial stone—red for blood shed, bearing a medal as the country's thanks, and longing to be seen so that peace might come. Such community tributes gather the service and sacrifice of veterans across many wars into a single place of reflection. Standing in Columbus, it speaks not to one conflict but to all who have served.

Cuero, TX

August C. Buchel arrived in Texas in 1845 already a seasoned European soldier, having trained in Prussia and fought in the Carlist wars in Spain before serving in the U.S.-Mexican War. As a Confederate colonel he commanded the 1st Texas Cavalry and played a central role in Texas coastal defense, guarding the vital cotton trade that ran through Mexico around the Federal blockade. He was mortally wounded at the Battle of Pleasant Hill during the 1864 Red River Campaign and is buried in the Texas State Cemetery.

Carnegie, PA · est. 1998

Honus Wagner, the "Flying Dutchman," was born in 1874 to German immigrants and lived his whole life in Carnegie. Widely hailed as baseball's greatest shortstop and one of its finest all-around players, he starred for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1900 to 1917, winning a record eight National League batting titles and later coaching the team. Admired for his modesty and sportsmanship, he became one of the five charter members inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936.

Southlake, TX

On the north Texas frontier of the 1840s and '50s, families drawn west by the Peters Colony land grants carved farms out of the prairie near what is now Southlake. This burial ground grew on the farm of Missouri emigrant Thomas M. Hood, its oldest marked grave dating to 1855 and its resting dead including Peters colonists and Confederate veterans. The handmade sandstone markers and stone burial cairns here were shaped by pioneer hands with the materials the land itself provided.

Granbury, TX

This is the fifth courthouse to stand on Granbury's central square, succeeding a one-room log cabin of 1867 and three stone structures. Built in 1890–1891 of native limestone by architect W.C. Dodson and contractors Moodie & Ellis, it is a Texas rendering of the French Second Empire style, crowned by a clock tower added after completion. The tower was reinforced with steel in 1969 to preserve the landmark.

Granbury, TX

Built to replace an 1873 log lockup during a time when lawlessness ran high on the North Texas frontier, this late-Victorian stone jail was substantial enough to be remembered in a local ballad. Its tall front block was designed to house a gallows, though no execution was ever carried out there. Local lore even recalls a character who once locked the sheriff inside and dropped the key with the judge on his way home.