Search Markers

Beeville, TX

Son of Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum, Lincoln Borglum assisted on the great carving and, after his father's death, oversaw its completion and served as the memorial's superintendent until 1944. He later settled in Beeville, where he became a beloved civic leader, sculptor, and cattle breeder until his death in 1986 — his lungs damaged by granite dust from the Rushmore blasting.

Austin, TX

James Loraine Dallas left Pennsylvania to join the fight for Texas independence, serving in the Army of Texas in 1836 during the revolution that created the Republic. He settled in Washington County, part of the wave of newcomers who staked their futures on the new nation. His grave marker preserves the memory of one of the many soldier-settlers of that founding generation.

San Saba, TX

Jim and Ellen Baker married in 1859 into families that had come to Texas during the Republic era, and Jim built one of the region's early cattle fortunes—driving 6,000 head into newly formed San Saba County in 1856. Their family survived a Comanche attack in 1861 that left Jim wounded, and after the Civil War he and his brother ran vast herds along the Goodnight-Loving Trail into Colorado and out to the Quitaque country of the Panhandle. In 1880 the brothers sold their 140,000-acre Quitaque Ranch and 20,000 cattle to Charles Goodnight, then returned to ranch quietly in their beloved San Saba.

Galveston, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, lawyer James Love came to Texas in 1837 and helped found the city of Galveston, becoming a political ally of Mirabeau B. Lamar. He served as a delegate to the 1845 convention that approved annexation to the United States and held several judicial posts. Though in his sixties, he enlisted in Terry's Texas Rangers during the Civil War and later became the first judge of the Harris and Galveston County Criminal Court.

Salado, TX

A Baylor-educated Confederate veteran, James Lowry Smith took up the professorship and principalship of Salado College in 1863 and became a driving force for rigorous education in central Texas. Despite Civil War-era enrollment losses and the financial panic of 1873, he held the college to high standards through two terms of leadership, the second ending in 1880 as the school closed. His grave monument remembers him as an epitome of virtue, honor, and truth.

Benbrook, TX

In 1876 James M. Benbrook, an Indiana native and Union Army veteran of the Civil War, brought his family to a Tarrant County settlement then called Marinda. He became a prominent farmer and landowner, and when the Texas and Pacific Railroad completed its lines and built a depot here in 1880, the company renamed the community in his honor. The town of Benbrook still carries his name.

Beulaville, NC

James M. Sprunt (1818–1884) was a man of many callings in nineteenth-century Duplin County — educator, botanist, Presbyterian minister, county official, and a chaplain in Confederate service during the Civil War. His wide-ranging life reflected the era's ideal of the learned minister who served both church and community. His grave lies about four miles west of this Beulaville marker.

Bryson, TX

Tennessee-born James Madison McCloud fought with an Alabama cavalry unit in the Civil War before bringing his family to Texas in 1881 and settling near Bryson. There he founded a church at Cottonwood Springs and began a remarkable fifty-three-year career as a Methodist circuit rider across northern Texas and southern Oklahoma. A farmer as well as a preacher, he ministered to scattered frontier congregations until his death in 1934.

Indiana, PA · est. 1998

The small college town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, raised one of Hollywood's most beloved leading men. Jimmy Stewart carried an everyman decency into classics of the 1930s and 1940s, from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to It's a Wonderful Life. His fame was matched by real service: he flew 20 combat missions over Europe in World War II and remained in the Air Force Reserve, retiring as a brigadier general.

Dallas, TX

Kentucky-born James Martin Patterson reached Dallas in 1846 and, with partner John W. Smith, pooled $700 to open one of the town's first stores. Ever the venturer, in 1851 the pair built a flatboat and tried to float cotton down the Trinity River toward the Gulf — a bold bid to give landlocked North Texas a route to market. Patterson went on to serve as county judge from 1854 to 1866 and managed extensive landholdings until his death at ninety-four.

Reading, PA · est. 2006

James Maurer rose from a self-educated Reading laborer to become one of Pennsylvania's most influential labor leaders, serving as president of the state Federation of Labor from 1912 to 1928. A committed Socialist, he won election to the state legislature and championed reforms that reshaped working life—child labor restrictions, old-age pensions, and Pennsylvania's first workers' compensation law—before twice running for vice president on the Socialist ticket in 1928 and 1932.

Carthage, NC

James McConnell left North Carolina to join the Lafayette Escadrille, the squadron of American volunteers who flew for France before the United States entered World War I. A pioneering combat aviator, he was killed in action on March 19, 1917 — among the last of the Escadrille's Americans to die before his own country joined the war weeks later.

Milford, TX

James McDaniel, born in Alabama in 1810, was among the men who served in the Texas army during the revolutionary year of 1836, when settlers won independence from Mexico. He and his wife Idabella lived out long lives on the Texas frontier, dying in the 1880s and 1890s. Their marker preserves the memory of an ordinary soldier-settler of the founding generation.

San Patricio, TX

This home is remembered as the residence of James McGloin, the County Sligo–born empresario who, with John McMullen, brought Irish colonists to South Texas and laid out the town of San Patricio in the 1830s. Recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, the house stands where one of the region's founding settlers made his home. It anchors the memory of the Irish colony that took root in Mexican-era Texas.

Stanly County, NC

In the rolling Piedmont of central North Carolina, where ancient, worn peaks rise above the Yadkin–Pee Dee river country, a businessman's gift became public ground for all. James McKnight Morrow (1864–1944) donated the land that let North Carolina establish Morrow Mountain State Park in the 1930s, one of the young state park system's early jewels, developed in that decade by New Deal work crews who cut trails, shelters, and roads. This monument marks not a battle or a birthplace but an act of civic generosity — the deliberate setting-aside of natural beauty at the very moment America was learning to protect such places for everyone.

Gainesville, TX

A Tennessee-trained lawyer, James Menees Lindsay arrived in Gainesville on his twenty-second birthday in 1857 and spent the next six decades shaping the young North Texas town. He served as a state legislator, sat on Gainesville's first city council, was a delegate to the 1866 Constitutional Convention, and presided as a district judge. One of the area's largest landowners, he helped bring the railroad to town and donated land for churches and schools, leaving a mark as one of Gainesville's foremost civic builders.

Somerville, MA

On April 19, 1775, the day the American Revolution began, the fighting did not stay in Lexington and Concord — it ran the length of the British column's long, bloody retreat toward Boston, through what was then part of Charlestown and is today Somerville. James Miller, sixty-five years old, was among the local men who turned out to harry the redcoats as they passed, and on this hillside he was shot down by British regulars. The words remembered on his monument, "I am too old to run," preserve the defiance of an aging New Englander who chose to stand his ground.

Galveston, TX

Newspaperman Nat Davis built this galleried two-story home in 1899, designed by Galveston architect Charles W. Bulger. As a reporter for the Galveston Daily News, Davis wrote some of the first accounts of the catastrophic 1900 hurricane; he drowned two years later, after which his widow rented rooms to boarders — among them Frank Chauncy Patten, the first librarian of the city's Rosenberg Library.

San Antonio, TX

This marker honors a Vermont-born soldier who served in the army of the Republic of Texas from 1836 to 1837, the perilous first years of Texas independence. Like many volunteers who came from the Northern states, he stayed on after the fighting, and he lived in Texas until his death in 1876.

Strawn, TX

J. N. Stuart and his wife Sally built this house in 1874 from materials hauled by ox-wagon all the way from East Texas, joined with wooden pegs by a shipbuilder named Andrew Murdock. It was the first home in the area to boast milled lumber and glass windows, and the Stuarts raised four sons here who all prospered in business. Long a stopping place for circuit riders, officials, and travelers, the house passed to the youngest son and remained in the family.

Denton, TX

James Newton Rayzor came to Texas from Kentucky as a boy in 1866 and became a teacher before settling in Denton, where he married Eva Tabor in 1882. A tireless civic figure, he ran the Alliance Mill and ice companies, led the chamber of commerce, and helped found both John B. Denton College and the state school that became Texas Woman's University. James and Eva completed this Prairie-style home, with its broad eaves and ribbon windows, in 1909.

Cuero, TX

They called James Norman Smith "Uncle Jimmy the Peacemaker," and his long life stitched together much of early Texas. Educated in North Carolina and a teacher in Tennessee — where one of his pupils was the future president James K. Polk — he came to Texas in 1840 and taught the first school in what became DeWitt County. He then surveyed the county, served as its first clerk, organized Presbyterian churches across the region and its first Masonic lodge, and at an 1857 rally introduced his old Tennessee friend Sam Houston to the crowd.

Coupland, TX

South Carolina–born James O. Rice reached Texas by 1835 and fought in its war for independence, then guarded the young Republic's frontier as a Texas Ranger. In an 1839 clash on the North San Gabriel River, his volunteers defeated Mexican forces under Manuel Flores and seized documents exposing the Cordova Rebellion, and he went on to join the Somervell, Mier, and Snively expeditions and serve in the Mexican War. Rewarded with land bounties, he became one of Williamson County's largest landowners, ran a store and post office at Rice's Crossing, and helped choose the county seat.

Concord, NC

James P. Cook led the effort to found the Stonewall Jackson Training School, an early reform institution meant to educate and rehabilitate wayward boys rather than jail them. A state senator and newspaperman, he established The Daily Standard in 1890. His home stood a block west of this Concord marker.

Van Alstyne, TX

James P. Dumas (1820-1875), a South Carolinian, married and moved to the Republic of Texas in 1841 and worked as a surveyor, helping map land that became part of Dallas. He fought in the Mexican War of 1846, served as Grayson County surveyor, and amassed holdings so vast he could ride the twenty miles to Sherman without leaving his own land, later helping found a Sherman bank in 1872.

Ballinger, TX

James Petty Flynt was elected sheriff of Runnels County at age 30 and served two terms, from 1908 to 1914 and again from 1920 to 1924—the last man to hold the combined office of sheriff and tax collector there. His long law-enforcement career included Texas Ranger service during both World Wars, and he later worked for the state game department from 1924 to 1940. He also helped organize the Runnels County Fair Association in 1911.

San Augustine, TX

A North Carolina lawyer who arrived in Texas in 1836 leading a company of volunteers, James Pinckney Henderson swiftly became one of the young Republic's leading statesmen, serving as attorney general, secretary of state, and diplomat to Europe. When Texas joined the Union, voters chose him as the state's first governor in 1846. He then led Texas troops as a major general in the Mexican War, earning a formal vote of thanks and a sword from Congress, before a late turn as U.S. senator.

Johnson City, TX

Georgia-born and raised in DeWitt County, James Polk Johnson served in the Confederate army before joining his uncles in the Blanco County cattle business, which he bought and made his own by 1871. In 1879 he founded a new town on the Pedernales River — Johnson City — and worked to develop it, though his ambition to make it the county seat was not realized until 1891, six years after his death.

Johnson City, TX

Built by town founder James Polk Johnson, this versatile structure served Johnson City as a community hall, opera house, and meeting place for churches and civic groups, while also housing banks, stores, hotels, and offices. When the Blanco County seat moved to Johnson City in 1890, the building briefly served as courthouse and jail. Years later, former president Lyndon Johnson kept an office here for a time.

Milton, PA · est. 2017

Born in Milton in 1810, James Pollock served as governor of Pennsylvania from 1855 to 1858, reducing the state's debt by selling off its canals and railroads and signing the 1857 Normal School Act that spread teacher-training schools across the commonwealth. A founder of what became Penn State University, he later served as Director of the U.S. Mint, where in 1864 he championed placing the motto "In God We Trust" on the nation's coins. He is buried in the town where his life began.

Seattle, WA

James R. Ellis was the Seattle civic leader whose vision drove some of the region's defining public works, from the Metro agency that cleaned up polluted Lake Washington to the Forward Thrust bond campaigns, the lidded Freeway Park, and the preservation of King County farmlands. Working from the 1950s onward, he championed the idea that citizens could shape their metropolis through bold public investment. This marker recalls the landmarks that grew from his advocacy.

Martinez, CA

In 1865, seventeen-year-old James Rankin left a Scottish coal-mining town for the 'black gold' of Contra Costa County, working pick-and-shovel in the underground mines at Somersville. Two decades later, in 1885, the immigrant miner was elected county sheriff.

Houston, TX

English-trained railroad car builder James Robert Cade emigrated to the United States and reached Harrisburg, Texas, in 1873, hiring on with a small railroad that Southern Pacific later absorbed. Rising to Master Car Builder for SP's Atlantic System, he oversaw the manufacture of high-quality private rail cars and pioneered the industry-wide shift from wooden to iron construction, with his 1892 iron rigging design adopted nationally.

Weatherford, TX

A Tennessee native and Civil War veteran, James Robertson Couts brought his family to Parker County in the mid-1860s and, with the proceeds of a cattle drive to California, opened a bank in Weatherford that endures today. An influential civic figure, he left an endowment to Weatherford College in his will and now rests beside his first wife, Martha. His life bridged the cattle-trailing frontier and the settled world of banking and philanthropy.

Old Center, TX

James Rowe came to the Mexican frontier of Texas from North Carolina and took up arms in the 1836 revolution that won Texas its independence. A prosperous tanner, he helped organize newly created Panola County in 1846, served a term in the young state's legislature, and donated the ground where this cemetery now stands. His story is a compact portrait of the settler-soldiers who turned a contested borderland into an American state.

Houston, TX

James Sherwood Lucas, a Nottingham-trained brick layer, emigrated from England and settled his family in Houston by 1873, where his craftsmanship shaped landmarks like the Houston Cotton Exchange and the Preston Street Bridge. His son Alfred apprenticed at sixteen and carried on the firm, building courthouses, breweries, armories, and City Hall, while Lucas Brick Works paved many of Houston's streets from clay dug along Buffalo Bayou.

Lampasas, TX

James S. Gillett's life traced the martial history of nineteenth-century Texas: a Kentucky-born frontier fighter who earned a major's rank in the Mexican War, sat in the early Texas Legislature, served as Adjutant General, rode again with the Texas Rangers, and finally soldiered for the Confederacy. His son James B. Gillett would carry the family name into Ranger legend. The marker gathers a career that touched nearly every armed chapter of the state's formative decades.

Galveston, TX

In Galveston's East End Historic District, where the city's leaders built their finest homes during the boom of the 1880s and 1890s, county treasurer James Stephen Waters bought a Church Street lot in 1891. His Victorian house, designed by Henry Collier Cooke, featured curved porches, an inset entrance, and a roof tower — removed in the mid-20th century and restored in 2015 from historic photos. Waters, an insurance agent and treasurer for 16 years, presided over the county through Galveston's era of greatest growth, and his family kept the house until 2014.

La Grange, TX

James Seaton Lester served as a delegate to the 1835 Consultation, the assembly that set Texas on the road to revolution, and fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He went on to serve in four congresses of the Republic of Texas. The state honored him with this marker in 1962.

Sulphur Springs, TX

James Selen Stout came of age on the raw northeastern Texas frontier and, still a teenager, rode three months in the Republic of Texas cavalry in 1836 — service that earned him a 320-acre land grant. As a scout and explorer he helped draw settlers into the region, and decades later took up arms again for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He and his wife Elvira raised eleven children on land his family helped open.

Lexington, TX

Born in 1808, James Shaw fought in the Texas War for Independence and stood among the soldiers at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He went on to serve as a representative or senator across five congresses of the Republic of Texas, helping govern the young nation before it joined the United States. He is buried here beside his wife, Nancy Ann Shaw.

York, PA · est. 2002

Built in 1892, this York schoolhouse was part of a broad national movement to educate Black children with Black teachers at a time when opportunity was fiercely contested. It honored James Smallwood, chosen in 1871 as teacher of the city's first "colored school," a generation earlier. The building stands as a witness to how African American communities fought to secure learning as a foundation of freedom and citizenship.

York, PA · est. 1949

James Smith, who lies buried in this churchyard, was one of Pennsylvania's signers of the Declaration of Independence. A York lawyer of Irish birth, he raised a company of Associators—citizen-soldiers—early in the Revolution and served in the Continental Congress. He was also an ironmaster, part of the frontier industry that helped arm the American cause.

Quitman, TX

James Stephen Hogg rose from a Civil War-era orphan who worked as a farmhand and printer's devil to become, in 1891, the first native-born Texan elected governor. His public climb began in Wood County, where he served as justice of the peace and county attorney before rising to district attorney and state attorney general. As governor he championed ordinary Texans against what he saw as Wall Street excess, most famously creating the Texas Railroad Commission, a regulatory model studied around the world.

Rusk, TX

James Stephen Hogg was born on a Cherokee County plantation in 1851 and rose through Wood County offices to become Texas Attorney General in 1887. Returning to his native Rusk in April 1890, he launched his gubernatorial campaign before a crowd of some 3,000 at Live Oak Park, speaking for nearly three hours. The platform he laid out that day — creating the Texas Railroad Commission and passing the Alien Land Law — became the signature achievement of his time as the state's first native-born governor.

Quitman, TX

This modest 1860s cottage was bought in 1873 by James Stephen Hogg, who honeymooned here with Sarah Ann Stinson while serving as editor-publisher of the "Quitman News" and the local justice of the peace. From these small-town beginnings Hogg rose to become the first native-born governor of Texas, serving from 1891 to 1895. Preserved by local clubs and later restored by his daughter Ima Hogg, the cottage survives as a memento of that ascent.

Clarendon, TX

James T. Patman served as sheriff of Donley County from 1905 to 1916, a time when the great Panhandle ranches were being broken up and sold off as farmland. Born in Sulphur Springs and a Methodist, he married Allie Graves, raised a son and a daughter, and died in Clarendon. He was remembered as an outstanding peace officer of that transitional frontier era.

Pattison, TX

At the crossing of the Atascosito Road and the San Felipe Trail, James Tarrant Pattison and his wife Sarah settled a Republic of Texas land grant that grew into a 5,000-acre plantation with its own grist mill, sawmill, and cotton gin. The homesite doubled as a stagecoach stop, and the Pattisons founded the community's first church and school. The town that grew up here took the founder's name, and his heirs still live on the land.

Milam, TX

James Taylor Gaines lived a frontier epic: surveyor of newly acquired Louisiana lands, Sabine River ferryman, and veteran of both the War of 1812 and the filibustering expeditions of early Texas. He represented the Sabine region at Washington-on-the-Brazos in 1836, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Republic's constitution, and served in its congresses. He later followed the Gold Rush to California, where he died in 1856.

Anahuac, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, James Taylor White drove cattle from Louisiana into the Texas coastal prairies in 1828 and built one of southeast Texas's greatest Longhorn herds. On his ranch in 1832 colonists drafted the Turtle Bayou Resolutions, an early protest against Mexican rule, and during the Revolution he sheltered fleeing settlers and supplied beef to the Texas army. His postwar cattle drives to New Orleans, over the Opelousas Trail, foreshadowed the great trail-driving era to come.

Honey Grove, TX

James Thomas "Tank" Holt came to Fannin County as a boy in 1849 and, after riding with the Confederate cavalry in the Civil War, turned a freighting business into a diversified fortune. He invested in ranching, a cotton oil mill, and a national bank, and even built Honey Grove's first public water system. His career traces the arc of a frontier veteran becoming a pillar of a growing Gilded Age Texas town.

Daingerfield, TX

James Thompson served in the North Carolina militia in 1781, helping secure American independence, before joining the westward drift of pioneer families through Alabama and Mississippi to the young Republic of Texas, where he was revered as a patriarch. His kin carried that martial thread onward: a son-in-law fought in the War of 1812, and a grandson became a Texas Ranger and county sheriff, killed in an Indian fight. Thompson and many descendants rest in the Daingerfield Cemetery.

Grapevine, TX

Virginia-born James Tracy Morehead brought his family to the raw frontier of newly organized Tarrant County in 1852 and within two years was chosen its third Chief Justice. He is remembered for renaming the settlement of Dunnville "Grapevine" after the nearby Grape Vine Springs, and in 1858 he oversaw the elections that organized neighboring Parker County. His career traces the machinery of local government taking shape on the North Texas frontier.

Dallas, TX

Connecticut-born James W. Latimer (1783-1860) moved to Texas with his family in 1833 and, in 1849, founded the first newspaper in the frontier town of Dallas. Known at first as "The Cedar Snag" and then as the Dallas Herald, the paper he started was eventually absorbed into the Dallas Morning News in 1885. His press gave the young settlement one of its earliest public voices.

Gonzales, TX

Indiana-born James W. Robinson came to Texas in 1833 and was elected the Republic's first lieutenant governor in 1835, briefly serving as governor before shouldering a musket as a private at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. He later settled in Gonzales, sat as a district judge, and served on the state Supreme Court. The office he first held became the second-highest in Texas, wielding broad power over the Senate and legislation.

Austin, TX

Born in Georgia in 1797, James Wales Jones was one of the Old Three Hundred—the first colonists Stephen F. Austin brought into Mexican Texas in the 1820s. He took up arms in the Texas War for Independence and lived out his days in the young republic and state he had helped to found, dying in 1847. His wife, Hetty Stiles Jones, survived him by more than half a century.

New Bern, NC

James Walker Hood was a towering figure in North Carolina's Reconstruction era. He served as Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1868 to 1870, helped found Livingstone College in 1885, and rose to bishop in the A.M.E. Zion Church, having founded St. Peter's congregation in 1864. His work joined faith, education, and civil equality for newly freed African Americans.

Brenham, TX

James and Catherine Walker settled on this Austin-colony land grant after July 1824, making their double-pen cedar-log house one of the oldest surviving log dwellings in Texas. As "Old 300" colonists, the Walkers raised sons who fought in the 1836 Texas Revolution and worked the family league of more than 4,000 acres. The house was moved twice, served for a time as a barn, and was carefully restored in 1986 using its own surviving structural evidence.

McKinney, TX

Built about 1868 by civic leader James Waller Thomas for his family of thirteen, this modest Collin County house began as a single room and has changed little since 1902, preserving original flooring, chimney, and rough-hewn timbers from before rail service reached North Texas. Thomas also edited and published the county's first newspaper, and his outspoken support for the Union and for the rights of Black settlers made him enemies — the site witnessed an attempt on his life during the turbulent Civil War and Reconstruction years.

Cambridge, MA · est. 1989

On the evening of October 11, 1920, James Walter Mullally, a crossing tender at North Cambridge Station on the Boston & Maine Railroad, was killed trying to pull elderly Emma Osgood from the path of an oncoming train. The public raised a fund to support his widow and five children, and he was awarded the Carnegie Medal for Heroism; the city named this crossing in his memory.