Search Markers

Woodbridge, VA

In February and March of 1945, U.S. Marines stormed the volcanic island of Iwo Jima in one of the Pacific War's bloodiest battles, fought to secure airfields within striking range of the Japanese home islands. The famous flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi became one of the most enduring images of World War II. This Virginia memorial echoes Admiral Chester Nimitz's tribute to the fighting there — "Uncommon valor was a common virtue" — and the Marine Corps motto, "Semper fidelis," always faithful.

Lampasas, TX

Dr. J. A. Adkins built this Lampasas house in 1868, in the lean years after the Civil War when hard cash was scarce on the Texas frontier. Rather than turn away patients who could not pay, he accepted stone in place of money — and that stone became the very walls of his home. The house stands as a literal record of a country doctor's practice.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Raised in the mid-1850s, when northeast Texas was still a young patchwork of cotton farms and frontier homesteads, this house has sheltered the same family for its entire life. Its original shutters, columns, and porch banisters survived into the twentieth century, a rare continuity in a region where most early wood-frame dwellings were lost to weather, fire, and rebuilding. Such farmsteads were the everyday architecture of antebellum settlement in Franklin County.

Wichita Falls, TX

Raised in 1892, this sturdy sandstone-and-brick building housed Joseph Kemp's wholesale grocery for thirty-five years, expanding with a two-story addition by 1901. During the 1930s oil boom it turned to petroleum supply under the Industrial Supply Company, whose skilled masonry, arched windows, and 18,750 square feet still testify to Wichita Falls' commercial rise.

Georgetown, TX

Built in 1895 by the C. S. Belford Lumber Company for grocer J. A. McDougle, this ornate Victorian home with its stained-glass windows passed through a string of Georgetown owners, including a long-serving county treasurer, before being restored in 1969. It stands as one of the finer examples of the town's turn-of-the-century domestic architecture.

Corsicana, TX

Georgia-born James A. Megarity served in the Confederate army through some of the Civil War's hardest fighting, including Gettysburg and Petersburg, and was present at Robert E. Lee's surrender. Having married Narcissa Hardman in 1859, he brought his family to Texas in 1872, rented land for a time, and bought this site in 1876 to build a home. His holdings grew to 187 acres, making him a prosperous farmer and a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

Brownwood, TX

By 1901, Brownwood was prosperous enough for a leading citizen to build a home that announced his standing. J. A. Walker, a prominent Texas Baptist and early benefactor of Howard Payne University, raised this Colonial Revival house with its ornate portico and wraparound veranda. It stayed in the Walker family for more than 75 years before a careful 1979 restoration.

Elizabeth City, NC

John C. B. Ehringhaus served as North Carolina's governor from 1933 to 1937, steering the state through the depths of the Great Depression. A former solicitor and member of the General Assembly, he was remembered as a friend of public education during years when school funding and rural relief were desperate concerns. This marker notes his birthplace a short distance to the north in his native Elizabeth City.

Alpine, TX

Julius Canselor Bird came to West Texas at eighteen as a Texas Ranger, guarding crews building the transcontinental railroad, then homesteaded ten sections along Calamity and Ash Creeks south of Alpine. With his wife America Walker he raised Durham cattle, helped found and finance the First Baptist Church, and later opened Alpine's first Buick dealership — a life that spanned the region's leap from frontier to automobile age.

Gainesville, TX

Joseph D. "Ikard" Sugg (1854-1925), the youngest of thirteen children born in Mississippi, headed west as a teenager and worked a cattle drive north from the Red River in 1868. He became a prominent rancher in partnership with his brother Cal, leasing land across Indian Territory and Texas and even selling horses to the Mexican government, while always considering Cooke County his home. At his death he left bequests to the county poor farm and to the upkeep of this cemetery.

Arlington, TX

Built in 1878 by early landowner J.D. Cooper, this house shows the plain craftsmanship of its era—colonial-style lines, square nails, and wide board floors. Later moved by the City to preserve it, it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965. Structures like it mark the settlement of North Texas in the decades after the Civil War.

Giddings, TX

Chartered by the Grand Lodge of Texas in 1865, this Masonic lodge began in the community of Evergreen and moved to Giddings in 1872 after the railroad bypassed its original home. For generations the lodge lent its hall to public schools, community groups, and government agencies, weaving itself into the civic fabric of the town. A new lodge hall rose on this site in 1969-70.

Hungerford, TX

Joel Hudgins came to the Republic of Texas in 1839 and settled near Hungerford, where after his death his widow and four sons expanded the family's land and cattle. In 1915 J.D. Hudgins and his children bought their first Brahman cows—descendants of stock brought from India in 1906—and helped found the American Brahman Breeders Association. With the 1933 bull 'Manso,' the ranch developed one of the world's largest registered American Gray Brahman herds, exporting cattle to dozens of countries.

McKinney, TX

When dry-goods merchant John David Stiff built this McKinney residence in 1893, he gave it the flourishes of the Queen Anne style then fashionable across small-town America — paired dormers and delicate fish-scale shingling that signaled a prosperous merchant on the town square. The house stayed in the Stiff family for nearly eighty years, until 1971, before being recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Clarksville vicinity, TX

J. D. Tippit grew up on a farm near this spot, served as a decorated World War II paratrooper, and joined the Dallas police in 1952. On November 22, 1963, working a beat in Oak Cliff shortly after President Kennedy was shot, he stopped a suspicious man for questioning and was gunned down. The man was Lee Harvey Oswald, and Tippit's killing helped lead to the assassin's capture.

Abilene vicinity, TX

Born in Alabama in 1816, J. D. Windham came to Texas in 1839 during the days of the young Republic and pushed onto the western frontier, becoming the first physician in Brown County in 1865 and in Callahan County in 1874. Beyond doctoring, he kept a general store and set out the county's first orchard here at Tecumseh, the kind of many-hats life a frontier settlement demanded. He and his wife, Frances Monteith, raised nine children before his death in 1901.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1997

The mansion that once stood here belonged to a Pennsylvania powerbroker who inherited and expanded one of the era's great political machines. He ran a major railroad through the Civil War years, served briefly as Secretary of War under President Grant, and then held a U.S. Senate seat for two decades. Following his father Simon Cameron into the family's dominance of state politics, he made his Harrisburg home a stage for the deal-making that defined Gilded Age America.

Grapevine, TX

John E. Foust (1861–1926) came to Grapevine in 1880 and opened a general store that, among its goods, stocked coffins. Step by step—and with the help of his wife Daisy—he built those sidelines into a full funeral company while serving as a civic leader who helped grow other area businesses. His son joined in 1923 and ran both the funeral home and the store into the 1960s, and Foust family members served Grapevine's business and civic life for more than a century.

Stanton, TX

Around 1900, J. E. and Nettie Millhollon trailed their cattle from Glasscock County into Martin County, claiming this homesite and thirty-four sections of West Texas rangeland. Business and church leaders in nearby Stanton, the couple had this house built in 1907 by N. H. Hunt of Big Spring, a prolific builder along the Texas & Pacific Railroad. Later owners restored the property beginning in 1970.

Springfield Township, PA · est. 1991

John Edgar Thomson was born on this Delaware County ground in 1808 and rose to become the guiding engineering mind of the Pennsylvania Railroad, serving as its first chief engineer and later its long-tenured president. He drove construction of the main line linking Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, threading rails across the Allegheny ridges, and pushed the system's reach all the way to the Mississippi. Under his direction the PRR grew into one of the mightiest corporations in the nineteenth-century world.

Canyon, TX

Raised on West Texas ranches and rodeo arenas, J. Evetts Haley turned a UT history degree into a lifelong mission to preserve the story of the cattle country. As the first field secretary of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Society from 1925, he interviewed old trail drivers and collected the documents and artifacts that stock museums across the region, and he wrote acclaimed books on Charles Goodnight and the XIT Ranch. An outspoken public figure, he helped found the body that became the Texas Historical Commission.

Galveston, TX

Built in 1884 to designs by Nathaniel Tobey, Jr., this Galveston house is a fine example of Italianate architecture, with paired brackets, a bay window, balcony, and hooded moldings over its tall windows. It was home to John Francis Smith, founder of the J. S. Smith & Bro. Hardware Company on The Strand, who likely ordered much of the woodwork from supply catalogs.

Bluff Dale, TX

Jeptha Franklin Warnock reached Erath County in 1898 and opened a hardware store in Bluff Dale in 1908, building this brick-parapeted storefront to house it in 1915. From here he supplied the tools and implements that kept the surrounding farms and ranches running. With its wooden storefront and transom windows, the building is a well-preserved example of the small-town commercial architecture that once lined Main Streets across Texas.

Austin, TX

Built in 1925, this Colonial Revival house on Waller Creek was home from 1926 to author, educator, and folklorist J. Frank Dobie and his wife Bertha until their deaths. Dobie taught a beloved University of Texas course on the life and literature of the Southwest and wrote many of his books here, often naming the house in their prefaces. Friends such as Carl Sandburg, Walter P. Webb, and Roy Bedichek gathered under its roof.

Hale Center, TX

J. Frank Norfleet rose from a ranch hand with little schooling to a Panhandle cattleman whose holdings grew to 20,000 acres, and a short-line railroad town briefly bore his name before competition and thin finances killed it. In 1919 a swindle cost him his savings, and rather than accept the loss he spent nearly five years chasing the con men across North America and the Caribbean, an odyssey he later put into a book. His dogged manhunt made him a folk figure of frontier justice.

Lincolnton, NC

Born in Germany, J.G. Arends emigrated to become one of the earliest Lutheran ministers and teachers on the North Carolina frontier, ordained in 1775. In 1803 he helped organize and became the first president of the North Carolina Lutheran Synod. His grave lies a few yards east.

Hillsborough, NC

J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton was a University of North Carolina historian and professor who understood that the past can vanish if no one saves its paper trail. He founded the Southern Historical Collection, gathering letters, diaries, and records from across the region before they could be lost. His labor turned Chapel Hill into one of the great archives of Southern life.

San Marcos, TX

John Howard Barbee, born outside San Marcos in 1854, was a rancher, builder, and developer who helped found the Farmers Union Gin Company. In 1906 he moved into town and built this Classical Revival house — with Doric columns, a prominent pediment, and dentil trim — for his wife Abbie, an accomplished singer. Over the following decades the home passed through families tied to the commerce and schools of San Marcos.

Atlanta, IL

The J. H. Hawes Grain Elevator in Atlanta, Illinois, is a preserved wooden country elevator of the kind that once stood beside the rail line in nearly every prairie town. For generations these towering structures were the economic heart of farm communities, weighing, storing, and loading the corn and grain that moved by rail to distant markets. Now operated as an agriculture museum along the old Route 66 corridor, it keeps alive the machinery and rhythms of Midwestern farm life.

Quitman, TX

An Alabama native who reached Texas in 1877, J.H. Jones taught school, won election as Wood County clerk, and prospered as a Quitman merchant. In 1902 he gave this land to the Old Settlers of Wood County Association, whose members gathered each year to honor the region's pioneers. Save for a pause during World War I, the homecoming reunions continued here, and in 1952 the grounds passed to the Governor Hogg Shrine State Park.

Scotland, TX

German-born John H. Meurer settled in Archer County around 1900 as a land agent, selling more than 60,000 acres and helping found the German Catholic towns of Windthorst and Scotland. In 1911 he built this eleven-room, one-and-a-half-story home with its wraparound porch. After remaining in his family until 1941, the house was purchased by St. Boniface Catholic Church to serve as a residence for parish priests.

Jefferson, TX

Built around 1858, this house became the longtime home of the J. H. Rowell family beginning in 1879, in the riverport town of Jefferson. Rowell was a fixture of local government, serving Jefferson through several terms as both mayor and alderman. The dwelling was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1995

J. Horace McFarland was a Harrisburg printer whose passion for beauty made him a national force in the early conservation and civic-improvement movements. As longtime president of the American Civic Association, he championed the "City Beautiful" ideal—that clean, green, well-designed cities uplift their citizens. He fought successfully to protect Niagara Falls from industrial exploitation and campaigned for the creation of the National Park Service in 1916. A devoted rose grower, he edited the "American Rose Annual" for decades from his Breeze Hill home and gardens in Harrisburg.

Weatherford, TX

J.J. Hamilton settled in this part of North Texas by affidavit in 1855 and helped petition for the creation of Parker County. By 1858 he had built a two-room log cabin with a dogtrot between fireplaces, and he served as a founding member and later minister of the local Christian Church. The family's story turned tragic in 1863 when his two sons were killed by Native Americans at Patrick's Creek, and in their grief the Hamiltons left the county.

San Felipe, TX

Built in 1847 by John Crutcher on San Felipe's Plaza de Commercio, this was the last store raised in the town after it was burned by military order in 1836 during the Texas Revolution. Dr. J. J. Josey bought it in 1867 and ran it as a store until 1942; the much-relocated building was eventually returned to its original site and moved to Stephen F. Austin State Park as a museum.

Snyder, TX

Drilled through most of 1923, the J. J. Moore No. 1 became the first producing oil well in Scurry County and opened up a major West Texas petroleum region. The drillers struck something strange along the way—a pressurized reservoir of 'cold air,' actually nitrogen and helium, that blew mud sixty feet skyward and, once harnessed, powered the rig and even refrigerated the crew's food and water. Still producing after more than 500,000 barrels, the well heralded a field that would eventually see thousands of wells drilled in the county.

Crosbyton, TX

Born at Blum, Texas, J.J. Pierce became sheriff of Crosby County in January 1947 and was killed later that year in the line of duty while arresting a bootlegger at Ralls. A father of eight, he was remembered as a man of quiet courage and fearless character, and his marker was recorded in 1967.

Denison, TX

James Kinsey Miller and his wife Orrena came from North Carolina in 1852 and settled by 1860 near the future Denison, where about 1866 they and their sons raised a two-room dogtrot house of oak logs over a stone cellar — complete with gun ports for defense against Indian raids. A daughter born in the house is remembered as the first known native of Denison. The heavy log construction and gun ports capture just how exposed north Texas settlement still was after the Civil War.

Austin, TX

Norwegian immigrant John L. Buaas came to Austin in 1839 and rose to be appointed a city alderman under Reconstruction governor E. J. Davis. In 1875 he built this two-story Italianate mercantile store, cleverly designed with facades on both Pine (Fifth) and Pecan (Sixth) Streets. Though Buaas sold it in 1879, the building has served commercial tenants ever since and today anchors the revitalized Old Pecan Street district.

Somerville, TX

Jebb Lee Woods arrived in Somerville in 1900 and got his start selling coffins at his uncle's mercantile store. In 1911 he became the town undertaker and opened the first funeral parlor in Burleson County, adding embalming by 1914 and using a horse-drawn hearse until 1929. His descendants carried on the business, which endures today as a family-run funeral home.

Galveston, TX

Brothers Joseph and Bernard "Ben" Levy, raised in the livestock trade of Alsace, founded a Galveston livery business in 1868, offering horses, mules, and wagons to a city recovering from the Civil War. By about 1880 they were supplying horse-drawn hearses and carriages, and Ben's role overseeing the vast number of burials after the catastrophic 1900 hurricane cemented the firm as the city's leading undertakers. They introduced motorized coaches around 1916 and built a pioneering funeral home in 1926.

Post, TX

Built in 1908 from lumber hauled 75 miles across the open plains, this home belonged to J. M. Boren — Garza County's first county judge, as well as a rancher, bank director, and civic leader. Its hospitality was well known to the pioneers and cowboys who passed through the young town of Post. The house reflects the determination it took to build a settled community on the West Texas frontier.

Coldspring, TX

Built in 1870, this modest structure became a survivor of San Jacinto County's history: it was the first building moved to the relocated town of Coldspring after fire destroyed the courthouse in 1915. For years it housed the county abstract company, and it holds the distinction of being where the county's first telephone was installed.

D'Hanis, TX

When the railroad carried the town of D'Hanis to its new site, hospitality followed. J. M. and Mary Ann Koch, hotel keepers here since 1898, built this brick lodging in 1906 from bricks fired at the local D'Hanis plant—reportedly laid up by Chinese railroad laborers. It served travelers until 1920, then became a feed store for the Farmers Exchange and later a boarding house, its two-story porch, paired round-arched windows, and corbelled parapet marking it as an elegant small-town hotel of its day.

Victoria, TX

English-born conservationist, composer, and cattleman J. Meredith "Jack" Tatton came to Texas in 1930 and married Victoria native Virginia Drake Hallinan, a great-granddaughter of legendary rancher Thomas O'Connor. In 1936 they commissioned noted Houston architect John F. Staub—famed for his refined country houses—to design this colonial revival and Monterey-influenced home. It later passed to the Welder-Murphy family, tying together several of south Texas's great cattle-ranching dynasties.

Statesville, NC

Joseph Pearson Caldwell edited the Statesville Landmark from 1880 to 1892 before taking the helm of the Charlotte Observer, which he led until 1909. A forceful and influential newspaperman, he helped shape public opinion across the Piedmont during a formative era for North Carolina journalism. His home stood two blocks north of here.

Austin, TX

Jacob Peter "Jake" Schneider got his start in the mid-1860s clerking in a general store and working as a page in the Texas Capitol, and by about 1870 he and his mother had opened their own store in Austin. As the business grew he built this two-story brick building in 1873, its basement stocked with meats, wine, whiskey, and cheese, its upper floors packed with food and clothing, and a wagon yard behind it for travelers. The store stayed in the family for generations, later adding a saloon after Prohibition's repeal before closing in 1935.

Houston, TX

Beginning in 1931, architect John F. Staub designed a Chateau-style River Oaks house for coffee magnate and banker James Robert Neal, while Fred Dawson of the famed Olmsted Brothers firm laid out its garden. Together they transformed 3.75 acres into an American take on Louis XV's Versailles, blending French detailing and cobblestone courts with native Texas plantings that survive intact from the original design.

Andrews, TX

Built in 1900, this is among the oldest houses in Andrews County, raised at the exact point where four claimants' land sections met so each could satisfy the legal requirement to live on his claim. After the group proved up their claims, they sold to Mr. and Mrs. J. S. Means, who by 1904 held fourteen sections and kept adding land to build a thriving cattle ranch. The operation ran cattle even after oil fields spread across the range in the 1920s.

Burlington, NC

In 1924, J. Spencer Love founded Burlington Mills, betting on the new synthetic fiber rayon at a moment when the textile industry was transforming the American South. That gamble paid off spectacularly, growing the enterprise into what became the world's largest textile company. His "Pioneer Plant" launched an industrial empire from the Carolina Piedmont.

Blum, TX

This modest dwelling grew the way frontier homes did — from a single-room cabin in the late 1800s, expanded with board-and-batten additions, then enlarged with a frame wing and porches after John Thomas Baker bought it in 1900 to house his large family. Baker died in 1914, but his widow Harriet and their nine children carried on here, and the house stayed in the family for generations.

Houston, TX

Born enslaved in Louisiana around 1863, J. Vance Lewis rose through teaching and a Chicago law degree to become, by 1904, one of only a handful of Black attorneys admitted to the Texas Bar. Settling in Houston's Freedmen's Town, he built the home he called Van Court in 1907, published his autobiography, and moved his law office here. Beyond the courtroom he funded a Black-owned bank, joined the Colored Commercial Club, and championed education and equal rights across the nation.

Gonzales, TX

J. W. Bailey built this modest Queen Anne–style residence in 1897–98 for his wife Nannie and their family in Gonzales. With its gable roof, tapered porch posts on brick piers, double- and triple-hung wood windows, and long-leaf pine woodwork, the house is a well-preserved example of turn-of-the-century Texas domestic architecture. It passed to the Baileys' daughter and remained in the family until 1948.

Fredericksburg, TX

Joseph W. Baines and his wife Ruth built this home in 1904 after a career that spanned Civil War service, journalism, and posts as Texas Secretary of State, legislator, and attorney. They faced the exterior with locally made "Basse Blocks" of prefabricated cement and dressed it with a gabled dormer, jigsawn fretwork, and turned columns. Ruth sold the house in 1907, the same year her daughter Rebekah married Sam Johnson—a union that would produce President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Ballinger, TX

Raised in Denton County, J. W. Clampitt tried his hand at ranching on the "free grass" ranges of Presidio County in the 1880s, running the Chalk Valley Ranch and sometimes driving cattle fifty miles just to find water. Drought wiped out his herd in 1885-86, so he turned to the hardware business in Ballinger and then to law enforcement, serving as Runnels County's second sheriff and tax collector from 1890 to 1896.

Goliad, TX

Raised in 1885, this monument honors Col. James W. Fannin and the men who died with him in the Goliad Massacre of March 27, 1836, when hundreds of Texan prisoners were executed on Santa Anna's order weeks after Texas declared independence. Its faces bind together the rallying cries "Remember the Alamo, Remember Goliad" with the dates that independence was declared and, at San Jacinto, finally won.

Hillsboro, TX

J. W. Freeland spent nearly four decades in Texas law enforcement, serving as Hubbard's city marshal through a rowdy prohibition era before becoming a Hill County sheriff and mayor. His career's high point came in 1933, when he tracked down and arrested Raymond Hamilton, a notorious member of Clyde Barrow's gang.

Paris, TX

John Winn Harrison arrived in Paris, Texas, from Alabama in 1886 and worked as a carpenter before founding a construction partnership and then his own contracting firm. He played a major role in rebuilding the city after a disastrous 1916 fire, and when his son Barney joined him the firm J. W. Harrison & Son was formed in 1919. The company raised many of the city's landmarks—homes, schools, the city hall, and the public library.

Itasca, TX

John Wilkes Park and his wife, Willie Clinkscales Park, built this Classical Revival home around 1908, its massive Corinthian columns and milled details reflecting the era's fashionable embrace of classicism. A Mississippi native, Park served as mayor of Itasca from 1916 to 1920; after his death, Willie rented out parts of the house, which stayed in the family until 1945.

Athens, TX

Black-eyed peas came to America in the 1700s mostly as livestock feed, until Civil War scarcity pushed them onto Southern tables. Born near Athens in 1866, John Benjamin Henry saw a business in the humble cowpea, and after weevils spoiled his shipments he and his wife Josephine perfected a commercial dehydrating process in 1906. Branding himself "the pea man" in a bold newspaper ad, Henry built a wholesale empire that by the 1920s shipped hundreds of railcars a year, even sending a symbolic sack by barge all the way to Chicago.