Search Markers

Austin, TX

This Victorian cottage was built in 1875 for architect Jacob Larmour, who had come to Austin with his family in 1871 and helped shape many of the growing city's commercial and residential buildings. His prominence earned him appointment as State Architect in 1879. Pharmacist Oscar G. Eckhardt bought the home in 1910 and it stayed in his family for over fifty years before being moved to this location in 1979.

Austin, TX

German immigrant Jacob Leser bought this Austin land in 1859 and built both a log cabin and a small factory for making soap and candles. Over the following decades he expanded the house with a stone wing, a porch, and Victorian brick-and-frame rooms, and his heirs lived here until 1951 before a restoring family enlarged it.

Fredericksburg, TX

Jacob Neffendorf sailed from Nassau in the German states aboard the barque Neptune in 1845, part of the wave of immigrants who settled the Texas Hill Country under the Adelsverein colonization scheme. He helped survey the Fredericksburg townsite and move families up from New Braunfels in 1846, receiving the standard town lot and ten-acre outlot and building a log cabin on Creek Street. Clearing land near Cross Mountain, he steadily assembled more than 200 acres, raised eight children with his wife Katherina, and served a term as Gillespie County treasurer.

St. Thomas Township, PA · est. 2001

Nellie Fox grew up in the small Cumberland Valley community of St. Thomas before becoming one of the most respected infielders of baseball's golden postwar era. A scrappy, undersized second baseman famous for choking up on an oversized bat and almost never striking out, he anchored the Chicago White Sox for over a decade, won the American League MVP in 1959, and helped carry the "Go-Go Sox" to the pennant. His reputation for hustle and craft eventually earned him a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997.

Trinity, TX

Mississippi natives Jacob Pope Barnes and Elizabeth Ann Rankin married in 1860, came to Texas after the Civil War, and settled at Trinity in 1872, where Jacob opened a mercantile store and served as county treasurer until his death in 1877. Widowed at 43 with nine children to raise, Elizabeth kept the family and the business going for another thirty-five years, running the store with her eldest son. Her long stewardship anchored the young town's commercial life.

Dobbin, TX

Jacob Montgomery Shannon came to Texas as a teenager in the 1820s, when the land was still under Mexican rule, and by 1831 held a league of land where he built a plantation known as Shannon's Prairie. The cemetery began about 1840 and, in 1863, Shannon deeded two acres for a public burial ground, school, and church. Buried here are members of his family, some of the people he enslaved and their descendants, and several war veterans.

Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1991

Jacob Stroud (1735-1806) was a militia colonel and Revolutionary patriot who fortified his home on this frontier as Fort Penn during the dangerous years of the war. He served in Pennsylvania's 1776 constitutional convention and later in the state legislature, then in 1799 founded the town that bears his name, laying out its streets with his son Daniel. His life spans the transformation of this Pocono country from exposed frontier to settled community.

Warrenton, NC

Jacob W. Holt (1811–1880) was a leading architect-builder during Warrenton's antebellum boom of 1845 to 1861, working in the fashionable Greek Revival and Italianate styles. His designs gave the prosperous plantation town much of its architectural character, and his own home still stands a block to the east.

Woden, TX

When William Jacobs led his family and neighbors from Tennessee to southern Nacogdoches County, arriving on Christmas Day 1836, they brought with them a family burial ground atop a ridge above Carrizo Creek. In 1870 his daughter Paulina deeded the surrounding acres to the trustees of Jacobs Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church for worship, school, and burials; among those resting here are William and his wife Nancy and their son James, whose family lost seven of twelve children in the 1860s to Civil War wounds and typhoid.

Sattler, TX

Settlers in Comal County started Jacobs Creek School in 1867, leasing land for a dollar, and teacher Carl Pantermuehl soon built a teacher's residence beside it. The 1½-story cabin is a fine example of German vernacular building—hand-hewn Ashe juniper joined in half-timbered fachwerk, with limestone and brick worked in. After a newer school opened nearby, the schoolhouse was razed but the teacherage lived on as a home.

Galveston, TX

In 1885, widowed midwife Barbara Lenz Jacobs commissioned the noted Galveston architect Nicholas J. Clayton to design a two-story home for her family of six children. The double-gallery, side-hall house features pierced eaves and a plan tailored to the island's coastal climate. Three generations of the Jacobs family lived here across 84 years.

Wimberley, TX

Serving area residents since 1883, Jacobs Well Cemetery grew from a Hill Country settlement named for a natural spring in Cypress Creek, where many pioneers had migrated from South Carolina. Landowner James Spillar donated the burial ground after the death of early settler Moses Bond Egger, and the graves that followed hold Texas Rangers, a county sheriff, ranchers, teachers, and whole families lost to epidemics. Descendants formed an association in 1980 that still tends the vertical stones, wooden markers, and unmarked graves.

Lander County, NV

Founded on the banks of the Reese River in 1859 by George Washington Jacobs, Lander County's first sheriff, Jacobsville served as an Overland Stage and mail station and became a Pony Express stop in 1860. In its early-1860s prime it held some 400 people and claimed the first telegraph relay station, a post office, courthouse, three stores, and two hotels, and was the first seat of a Lander County that then sprawled across northeastern Nevada. The seat soon moved to booming Austin, and today only a few foundation stones remain.

Calvert, TX

Jacques Adoue was the youngest of three French brothers who came to Texas in the 1860s and rose to become business leaders in Calvert, Dallas, and Galveston. This handsome store, built for the Collat, Adoue & Risser dry-goods firm, set an ambitious commercial tone for the town, and when Adoue died in 1906 of injuries from a Calvert cotton-compress fire, friends felt an era had passed with him.

Gonzales, TX

First mapped in 1825 as Market Square, this Gonzales public square had become known as Jail Square by 1836. That year, as Santa Anna's army advanced, Gonzales was burned by order of General Sam Houston to keep its buildings and supplies from falling into enemy hands—part of the desperate retreat known as the Runaway Scrape. Gonzales, already famed as the site of the war's opening 'Come and Take It' clash, thus sacrificed itself in the campaign for independence.

Luckenbach, TX

A German-born teacher who immigrated to the Texas Hill Country in 1846, Jakob Brodbeck never let go of a dream he first had at sea: to build a flying machine. Teaching in Fredericksburg, Luckenbach, and San Antonio to fund his work, he raised money by selling shares and, shortly after the Civil War, launched a coil-spring-powered airship north of San Antonio—it lifted off before the mechanism failed. Though he never rebuilt it, in 1967 Texas Governor John Connally dubbed him "the father of U.S. Aviation."

Corpus Christi, TX

James Jalufka, born in 1879 to Moravian Czech immigrants in Lavaca County, became a prominent South Texas cotton grower and a veteran of both the Spanish-American War and World War I. Around 1905 he built this house in Corpus Christi's "Old Irishtown" neighborhood. In 1944 it passed to Pete and Minnie Lee Govatos, part of the city's Greek community, before eventually being rescued from disrepair and moved to Heritage Park.

Boston, MA

Jamaica Plain, a leafy streetcar-suburb neighborhood of Boston, sent hundreds of its sons into the two great conflicts of the twentieth century, and this memorial gathers their sacrifice into a single act of civic remembrance. In World War I, American doughboys shipped overseas to the trenches of France in 1917–18; a generation later, World War II drew the neighborhood's young men to battlefields across Europe and the Pacific. Communities like this one across America raised such monuments so that the names and losses of ordinary local families would not be forgotten. It stands as the neighborhood's collective thank-you to those who did not come home.

Boston, MA

James Jackson Storrow, a Boston banker and civic leader, and his wife Helen Osborne Storrow, a philanthropist and early champion of the Girl Scouts, devoted themselves to transforming the tidal flats of the Charles into a public landscape. Their advocacy helped create the Charles River Basin and Esplanade, a ribbon of parkland and water meant to be "available to all." This memorial honors the vision and energy they poured into that gift to the city.

West Columbia, TX

James Price Phillips descended from one of the "Old Three Hundred" families of Stephen F. Austin's original Texas colony, and in 1920 he built this home to mark the birth of his youngest child. It rose on a former pecan orchard beside the Dr. Rees Porter home, which had once served as a hospital for soldiers of the Texas Revolution. The American foursquare house, with prairie and craftsman touches and columns of pale Gonzales brick, stayed in the family until 1978.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 2014

Born and raised in Bellefonte, James A. "Billboard" Jackson became a leading African American journalist in the early twentieth century. As an editor at Billboard magazine during the 1920s, he championed Black performers and theater in the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. He later worked for the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he promoted African American business enterprise.

Millerstown, PA · est. 1948

James A. Beaver was born in this Perry County town in 1837 and rose to become one of Pennsylvania's most distinguished public men. He won fame as a Civil War officer, later served as governor of the commonwealth, and finished his career on the state's Superior Court bench. He spent his adult years in Bellefonte, where he died in 1914.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 1961

James A. Bland, born on Long Island in 1854 to a free Black family, became one of the most successful songwriters of the American minstrel stage, penning "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" and hundreds of other tunes. He toured widely, even performing in Europe, but the fashions of popular music passed him by and he died in poverty in Philadelphia in 1911. This cemetery marks the resting place of an artist whose music long outlived his fame.

Temple, TX

Bell County native James Andrew Fletcher (1858–1944) rose to become a leading Temple businessman, in 1907 acquiring with his son Omar a business his brother-in-law had founded in 1881. It grew into Fletcher Enterprises, a prominent banking and industrial firm. San Antonio architect Ernest Scrivener designed this eclectic 1925 home for Fletcher and his wife Susan Jane, later named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Victoria, TX

On the coastal prairies of Victoria County stands this 1890 Victorian home of Florida pine and cypress, built for James A. McFaddin (1840–1916), a stockman whose life spanned the Republic of Texas, Confederate service, and the great cattle era that followed. Moving from Refugio in 1876, he was among the ranchers who reshaped Texas grazing by bringing in barbed wire and hardy Brahma cattle, and even founded the town that bears his name. His "M6" brand, registered in 1840, remained active long after him.

Doylestown, PA · est. 1999

James A. Michener grew up in Doylestown and graduated in 1925 as a top student from the public school that once stood here. His first book, Tales of the South Pacific, won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize, launching a career of sweeping, meticulously researched novels — Hawaii, The Source, and many more — that made him one of the 20th century's most widely read authors. A tireless traveler, art collector, and philanthropist, he never forgot the Bucks County town that shaped him.

Falfurrias, TX

Kentucky-born James Abijah Brooks came to Texas in 1876 as a rancher and trail driver before joining the Texas Rangers, whom he served from 1882 to 1906. He chased down South Texas cattle thieves, helped block the notorious 1896 Fitzsimmons-Maher prizefight near El Paso, and later served in the legislature and for decades as county judge of the county that bears his name.

Roanoke, VA

In the years before the Revolution, the Virginia backcountry around present-day Roanoke was still frontier, and land changed hands through royal grants issued in the name of the Crown. In 1771 King George III conveyed a 150-acre tract to James Alexander for fifteen shillings, and a tree on the property served as a living surveyor's marker for the boundary line. Such "witness trees" were a common way to fix the corners and edges of colonial land claims, long before modern surveying and recorded plats.

Kosse, TX

This state marker honors James Alfred Head, who fought for Texas independence and then served in the Congress of the young Republic of Texas in 1841-1842. Erected in 1962, it commemorates a member of the generation that won and then governed the short-lived Republic before annexation to the United States.

Kosse, TX

Georgia-born James A. Head came to Texas in 1835 and enlisted at San Felipe de Austin in Silas Parker's ranging company, earning a land grant and a place among the Texas Rangers who guarded the frontier during the war for independence. With his wife Elizabeth he farmed in what became Brazos County, served as justice of the peace and chief justice, and won election to the Sixth Congress of the Republic of Texas. By 1852 he worked some 17,800 acres and died at Headsville in 1872, father of thirteen children.

Austin, TX

James Allison York joined the fight for Texas independence, taking part in the capture of San Antonio in 1835 and serving in Captain Moseley Baker's company at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. Kentucky-born, he was among the volunteers whose victory secured the Republic of Texas. He later settled in Lavaca County, where he died in 1869.

Midway, TX

James and Calpernia Mitchell left Virginia for Texas in 1833 and settled on a Mexican land grant during the years when Texas was passing from Mexican province to independent republic to statehood. James helped locate the seat of Montgomery County in 1837 and became one of Walker County's first commissioners in 1846, while the family's house and inn on the Old San Antonio Road offered rest to travelers and served for a decade as the area post office. The couple lie in a family cemetery near this spot.

Jewett, TX

Ohio-born James Elgin Anderson settled in Leon County in 1857, enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861 with Hood's Texas Brigade, and stood with Robert E. Lee at Appomattox in 1865. Returning home as a captain, he became a distinguished educator and married Julia Evans in 1867. The couple bought this property in 1875 and built a house with outside end chimneys, then remodeled it between 1885 and 1895 in the Victorian fashion, adding a second story and the exuberant Eastlake trim that still graces its porches and rooflines.

Austin, TX

In Austin's Tarrytown neighborhood stands the Mission Revival home of James and Leanna Walsh — its curved gable parapet, low tile roofs, and corbel-arch porch built from limestone quarried nearby. James was the third son of Irish immigrant William J. Walsh, whose Austin White Lime Company helped supply the mortar and plaster of a growing city; James carried on the family business and took part in the area's development.

Richards, TX

Alabama-born James Monroe Hurry and his Georgia-born wife Missouri built this house around 1904 with the help of several neighbors, a common act of rural mutual aid, to shelter their growing family. Its L-plan design, full porch, and bungalow touches are typical of early-20th-century Texas vernacular building. The home stayed in the Hurry family until 1962.

New Waverly, TX

James and Rhoda Winters led their large family from Tennessee to this land between the forks of the San Jacinto River in 1834, following the good report of two elder sons who had come ahead. When war with Mexico broke out, the family gave heavily to the cause: sons and sons-in-law fought in the 1836 Texas Revolution, and one son, James W. Winters, lived to help mark the San Jacinto battlefield in 1901, 65 years after fighting there. Family members went on to help settle half a dozen more Texas counties.

Azle, TX

A Tennessee-born physician, James Azle Steward reached this part of North Texas before 1860 and became one of its most respected pioneers. When he donated land for a townsite in 1883, the settlement — which had gone by several names — took his middle name and became Azle. He also gave ground for Ash Creek Cemetery and the Azle Christian Church, weaving himself into the community's civic and spiritual life.

Jacksboro, TX

James B. Dosher came to Texas in 1847 and rode with the Texas Rangers on the unsettled northern frontier before farming in Jack County. His life traced the arc of a hard border era, from Ranger companies to service with Confederate and Texas State forces during the Civil War. In 1870 he was scouting for the U.S. Army as a civilian guide when his gallantry at Bluff Creek earned him the Medal of Honor.

Georgetown, TX

James B. Williams left Kentucky with his bride and extended family, reaching the Berry's Creek area of Central Texas on Christmas Eve of 1848. He rode with his uncle's Texas Ranger company through the 1850s and early 1860s, when such units guarded the exposed frontier, and eventually made his permanent home in Glasscock Valley north of Georgetown. He and his wife Sarah raised thirteen children on the land they helped settle.

Liberty, TX

Kentucky-born James B. Woods arrived in Mexican Texas in 1830 and became a brilliant lawyer and orator in the Liberty District, elected alcalde (mayor) in 1834. As one of five delegates from Liberty, he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos in March 1836 and served that year in the Texas Army. His life ended in tragedy after he killed a man in an election quarrel in 1851, dying soon after amid remorse.

Liberty, TX

Kentucky-born James B. Woods came to Texas in the era of its fight for independence and put his name to the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, joining the delegates who broke with Mexico and founded a new republic. He lived until 1851, part of the founding generation that shaped early Texas. The State of Texas raised this marker in his honor during the 1936 centennial of independence.

Woodville, TX

Raised of hand-hewn pine in 1842, this is remembered as the oldest home in Tyler County, built by the area's first Indian agent—a man appointed to that post by Sam Houston, the towering figure of the Republic of Texas. In the young Republic, an Indian agent stood at the fraught boundary between Anglo settlers pressing westward and the Native peoples already on the land. The house survives as a rare wooden witness to Texas's earliest days of statehood-in-waiting.

Rosebud, TX

James Bayliss Buck, born on a Tennessee tobacco farm in 1875, came to Texas as a child and in 1904 bought cheap land in Falls County, moving his family there and completing the farmhouse, barn, and outbuildings in 1909. Modeled on his father's home and framed in the Folk Victorian tradition with Queen Anne and Greek Revival touches, the house anchored the small Travis farming community. Buck's daughter Reba married neighbor Hubert Johnson, who later led the Waco Methodist Orphanage into a nationally recognized child-care institution and bought the family farm in 1948.

Fairfield, TX

James Bonner Rogers became sheriff of Freestone County in 1872, during a lawless stretch of Reconstruction-era Texas. After a deputy was shot in a chase, he pursued a band of horse thieves alone — only to be gunned down from ambush by two strangers thought to be the vengeful thieves. He died at 35, leaving a widow and three children.

Kenney, TX

James Bradford Pier, an Ohio native born in 1813, came to Texas in 1835 with his wife Lucy and settled near the early town of Travis. He served in the Texas Army during the war for independence, posted as a rear guard across from Harrisburg during the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. In peacetime he farmed, raised stock, taught, kept a store, served as justice of the peace, and became the Travis community's first postmaster.

Bailey's Prairie, TX

James Briton "Brit" Bailey came to Texas in 1818 with his wife and six children, settling the tallgrass expanse that still bears his name. He joined Stephen F. Austin's colony in 1824, served as a militia captain, and fought in the skirmishes that preceded the 1836 revolution. True to a fiercely proud reputation, he asked to be buried upright, facing west with his gun at his side, so that no one could ever look down on him.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1950

James Buchanan — lawyer, diplomat, and the fifteenth President of the United States — is buried in this Lancaster cemetery, about 350 yards to the southeast. He made his home at Wheatland, on Marietta Avenue, before and after occupying the White House from 1857 to 1861. Buchanan led the nation in the tense years just before the Civil War, and his inability to halt the slide toward secession has shaped his reputation ever since.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1951

James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States, made his home in Lancaster and lies buried at Woodward Hill Cemetery just south of here. A seasoned diplomat and lawmaker, Buchanan led the nation during the fraught years of 1857 to 1861, as the quarrel over slavery pushed the Union toward rupture. He left office as Southern states began to secede, handing the crisis to his successor, Abraham Lincoln.

Peters Township, PA · est. 1955

James Buchanan, the fifteenth president, was born in a log cabin near this spot in 1791, in the Cove Gap country of the Pennsylvania frontier. He rose through law and diplomacy to the White House on the eve of the nation's greatest crisis, serving from 1857 to 1861. The humble cabin of his birth was moved more than once and today stands on the campus of Mercersburg Academy.

Marfa, TX

James Buchanan Gillett came of age on the far western Texas frontier, trading a teenage cowboy's saddle for a Ranger's badge at nineteen during the turbulent late 1870s. His years of service coincided with the last decades of open-range conflict, when Rangers policed a sprawling, thinly settled country. After leaving the force he pinned on an El Paso marshal's star and spent the rest of a long life ranching the dry high country around Marfa, later setting his experiences down in a memoir still read as an Old West classic.

Walnut Springs, TX

James Buckner "Buck" Barry came to Texas from North Carolina in 1845 and spent his life on its edges — as a soldier in the Mexican War, a fighter in Indian campaigns, and, during the Civil War, commander of Confederate cavalry strung along frontier outposts from the Red River to Fort McKavett. His patrols, camped a day's ride apart, guarded scattered settlers against raids and the threat of Federal incursion from Indian Territory. He later served in the Texas Legislature and left behind personal records of those frontier-defense years.

Providence, RI

This plaque marks a dwelling raised in Providence around 1786, in the first years after American independence, when the town was shaking off the disruptions of the Revolution and reclaiming its footing as a busy New England seaport. Homes of this vintage went up as merchants, tradesmen, and craftsmen built along the streets climbing up from the Providence River, giving the young city its enduring Federal-era character. A modest date like 'c. 1786' signals a structure that has quietly outlasted more than two centuries of the town growing up around it.

Austin, TX

This monument honors James Hogg, who served as governor of Texas from 1891 to 1895 during the Gilded Age. He rose to office as the state wrestled with railroads and corporate power, and his tenure is remembered as a turning point in how Texas regulated the era's expanding industries. A generation after the Civil War, leaders like him steered a rapidly growing state into the modern age.

Wimberley, TX

Wimberley builder James Calvin Lane raised this modest craftsman home in 1935, next door to the café his wife Rebecca ran in the Texas Hill Country. From its living room, Rebecca operated Wimberley's first telephone switchboard, tying a small community together in the early days of rural phone service. The house is prized locally for its rare "giraffe rock" exterior, native stone studded with petrified wood and fossils.

New York, NY

This New York building sheltered a remarkable trio of American performers. James Cagney (1899–1986), who set the movie standard for the tough gangster in films like The Public Enemy and Angels With Dirty Faces, lived here in the late 1960s. Its other residents included actress Margaret Hamilton—forever the Wicked Witch of the West—and the celebrated 19th-century soprano Emma Thursby.

Tyler, TX

Migrating from Alabama in 1840, James Calhoun Hill led the first permanent settlers into the future Smith County and helped run its boundaries and plat the county seat at Tyler in 1846. He prospered as a surveyor and planter in the 1850s, but by the Civil War's end in 1865 he was blind and much reduced in means. Still, in 1874 he donated land to bring a railroad into the county, and he and his wife Rebecca raised eleven children.

McKinney, TX

James Calvin Rhea came from Tennessee to Texas in 1855 and, with his brother, built the gristmill that gave the community of Rhea Mills its name. This elegant home, built around 1890, shows off Eastlake-style flourishes—a wraparound veranda, ornamental woodwork, and sunburst panels—and stayed in the Rhea family until 1956. A Civil War veteran, Rhea lies with his wife Mary in nearby Pecan Grove Cemetery.

Muldoon, TX

James Carrel Bell, born in 1820, was a young soldier in the Texas war for independence who entered Bexar in December 1835 under Captain John York. He later served in Company D of the Eighth Texas Infantry Regiment, C.S.A., during the Civil War. This state-erected marker honors him and his wife Eliza Baker Bell, tying one man's life to both the founding of Texas and its Confederate service.

Floresville, TX

When Wilson County was organized in 1860 it honored James Charles Wilson, an Englishman who left home in 1836 and remade himself as a Texan lawyer, editor, and legislator. Captured during the ill-fated 1842 Mier Expedition, he escaped a Mexican prison in 1843, then built a career spanning the press, the bench, the Texas Senate, and the delicate work of settling Spanish- and Mexican-era land claims. He closed his life near Gonzales, licensed to preach, and now rests in the State Cemetery in Austin.

Clarksville, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1789, James Clark settled in Northeast Texas and founded the town of Clarksville, which bears his name. He died there in 1838, in the early years of the Republic of Texas.