Search Markers

Bigfoot, TX

James Washington Winters fought at San Jacinto in the 1836 revolution that won Texas independence and later joined the Somervell Expedition. A loyal follower of Sam Houston, he refused to sign the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy at Oakville on July 4, 1861, yet served as a captain, provost marshal, and scout in the militia patrolling the country between the Nueces and Rio Grande. He spent eight years in Tuxpan, Mexico, and raised a large family with his wives Piercy Tullos and Elizabeth Wier.

Bigfoot, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1817, James Washington Winters fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived to age 86, and in 1936 — the centennial of Texas independence — the state erected this marker at his grave.

Cambridge, MA

In these Cambridge rooms between 1955 and 1976, James D. Watson helped drive the revolution in molecular biology that followed the discovery of DNA's structure. From here he also planned the revival of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he went on to direct. The site marks a nerve center of postwar American science.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

James Wilson rose from a Carlisle law office to become one of the most consequential legal minds of the founding generation. As a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress he signed the Declaration of Independence, and at the Constitutional Convention he was among the principal architects of the framework that still governs the nation. He later served on the first U.S. Supreme Court.

Bryan, TX

Born in Ireland in 1821, James Wilson immigrated to the United States in 1842 and trained for the ministry, graduating from Lafayette College and Princeton Theological Seminary before his ordination as a Presbyterian minister in 1850. Sent to Texas in 1856, he spent 53 years as a circuit-riding missionary, organizing Presbyterian congregations across the Brazos Valley. He and his wife Laura, a published poet, are buried near a church he founded.

Abilene, TX

Raised on the Texas High Plains, James Winford Hunt worked as a newspaper publisher before becoming a Methodist minister in 1903. While serving as a pastor in Abilene, he persuaded the Northwest Texas Conference of the Methodist Church to found a college in the city — McMurry College, which opened in 1923 with Hunt as its first president. Widely known for his writings and sermons, he made his mark as a Christian educator.

La Grange, NC

James Y. Joyner (1862–1954) served as North Carolina's Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1902 to 1919, one of the longest and most influential tenures in the office's history. An educator and agriculturist, he worked to expand and modernize the state's public schools during the Progressive Era. His former home stands a few blocks northwest of this La Grange marker.

Fort Worth, TX

Completed in 1915 for Thomas and Annie James, this gambrel-roofed Fort Worth home was bought four years later by Kanetaro Fujita, president of the Gosho Company, a Japanese cotton-exporting firm. The business, incorporated in 1917, thrived on the trans-Pacific cotton trade until it was dissolved just after the United States entered World War II. Fujita returned to Japan in the 1930s, selling the house to his company.

Jamestown, NY

In the industrial city of Jamestown, near the shores of Chautauqua Lake, this monument honors local residents who left their factories and farms to serve in the First World War and never returned home. Dedicated in the years after 1918, it reflects the wave of civic memorials that swept American towns large and small as communities sought to give permanent form to their grief and pride. The inscription's reference to "the world war" — before a second would require renumbering it — dates its sentiment squarely to that interwar generation.

Park City, UT

When Jan Wilking moved to Park City, Utah, in 1969, the old silver-mining town was reinventing itself around skiing and the outdoors. In 1992 he led the creation of the Mountain Trails Foundation to build and protect the network of paths that now threads the surrounding mountains. His work helped turn abandoned mining slopes into a celebrated recreational landscape.

Manchester, TX

Jane Chandler Gill was an Englishwoman who died in 1816, soon after settling at Jonesboro in what is now Red River County — decades before Texas independence, when the region was still a remote borderland of New Spain. Her grave is counted among the oldest marked European-American burials in Texas.

Houston County, TX

Jane Dotson Lively came from Alabama to Houston County in 1850 with her husband Thomas, for whom the surrounding community of Livelyville was named. She helped establish a church and school on the family's land and was remembered as a courageous pioneer and community leader. Mother of thirteen and twice married, she lived to be one hundred, dying in 1922.

Dallas, TX

Born into slavery around 1800, Jane Elkins was the first documented enslaved person purchased in the newly created Dallas County, sold and leased between owners until she was hired out to care for a widower's children. When that man was found bludgeoned to death in 1853, Jane — who alerted authorities and later said a prominent citizen was the killer — became the sole suspect. Tried in a single week by an all-white male jury, with no lawyer, no witnesses, and no investigation, she was convicted and hanged ten days later.

Edgewood, PA · est. 1959

Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884) lived and died at the homestead on this site, but her influence reached far beyond it. A fearless newspaper editor, she championed the abolition of slavery, women's rights, and temperance, and served as a nurse during the Civil War. She also chronicled her turbulent age in the memoir "Half a Century," writing at a time when few women held a public voice in American journalism.

Port Bolivar, TX

Born in Maryland in 1798, Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long followed her husband into the dangerous filibustering expeditions that sought to wrest Texas from Spain. Left to hold a fort on the Bolivar Peninsula through a brutal winter with her daughter and an enslaved woman named Kian, she gave birth there amid hunger and danger — the episode that earned her the honorary title "Mother of Texas." She later received her own headright of land in Austin's colony, unusual for a woman, and opened her San Felipe boarding house to the rallies and intrigue of the Texas Revolution.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2007

In Gilded Age Pittsburgh, as industrial fortunes rose alongside deep need, Jane Holmes devoted her wealth to organized charity. She founded and funded a range of social service institutions—among them the Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children—at a time when such systematic philanthropy was still novel. Notably, she extended her giving without regard to race, class, or gender.

New York, NY

In a modest 1842 rowhouse on Hudson Street, the writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs spent two decades observing the everyday life of Greenwich Village from her own front stoop. Her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, drew on that street-level view to challenge the mid-century orthodoxy of slum clearance and expressway-building, arguing that dense, mixed-use neighborhoods were assets to protect rather than blight to erase. From this address she also helped organize the grassroots campaigns that closed Washington Square to through traffic and blocked Robert Moses' proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, a highway that would have leveled swaths of SoHo and the Village.

Richmond, TX

Jane Wilkinson Long earned the name "Mother of Texas" through the winter of 1821, when—stranded at Point Bolivar with her small daughter and an enslaved girl named Kian while her husband's filibustering expedition marched into Mexico—she gave birth in a snowstorm and then rose to gather food and firewood for her family. In the decades that followed she ran two of the most famous boarding houses of the colonial and republic eras, hosting William B. Travis, Sam Houston, and Mirabeau B. Lamar. On this Richmond site she opened a house in 1837 that became a hub of Texas social and political life until her plantation prospered in the 1840s.

Raleigh, NC

Jane McKimmon built North Carolina's home demonstration program, which she organized and led from 1911 to 1937. Working under the era's Cooperative Extension movement, she carried practical science in nutrition, food preservation, and household economy to rural women across the state. Her work turned isolated farm households into a connected network of learning.

Charlotte, NC

In the autumn of 1780, the Revolution's southern campaign swept into the North Carolina backcountry, and for a few tense weeks Lord Cornwallis's British army occupied Charlotte — a town so fiercely rebellious he reportedly branded it a "hornet's nest." This marker honors Jane Parks McDowell, who according to local memory rode ten hard miles to carry word to the American camp as the British pulled out of the town. Her ride belongs to that anxious moment when Patriot militia shadowed every British move through the Carolina Piedmont.

Austin, TX

Jane Y. McCallum lived in this Austin house while helping lead the Texas woman suffrage movement in the early 20th century. As a force in the Texas Joint Legislative Council — the so-called 'Petticoat Lobby' — she pressed for political and social reform, and as Secretary of State from 1927 she famously rediscovered and preserved an original signed copy of the Texas Declaration of Independence.

Port Arthur, TX

In this refinery town on the Gulf Coast, a restless, outspoken girl named Janis Joplin grew up chafing against her hometown's conservatism before leaving in 1962 to study art in Austin. There she fell into the folk-club scene, then carried her raw, blues-soaked voice to San Francisco, where the 1967 Monterey festivals and the album Cheap Thrills made her a star. She burned bright and briefly, returning home once for her high-school reunion in 1970 only weeks before an overdose ended her life at 27; her final album, Pearl, became a posthumous classic.

Honolulu, HI

This monument marks a century of Japanese immigration to Hawaii, a migration that began in earnest in the 1880s as thousands crossed the Pacific to labor in the islands' booming sugar plantations. Recruited for backbreaking field work, these immigrants and their descendants built enduring communities, language schools, temples, and traditions that reshaped Hawaii's culture. By the time of the centennial, Japanese Americans had become one of the islands' largest and most influential communities.

Parker, AZ

This surviving building stood within the Poston site near Parker, one of the War Relocation Authority camps where the United States confined Japanese Americans during World War II. Beginning in 1942, tens of thousands of men, women, and children—most of them U.S. citizens—were removed from the West Coast and held behind barbed wire in remote desert camps solely because of their ancestry. Ordinary houses and barracks like this one were home to families who lost their freedom without charge or trial.

Elko County, NV

The Jarbidge country has drawn people for a very long time—Native hunting parties camped here as early as 10,000 years ago, and Shoshone-speaking peoples who arrived about a thousand years ago still live in the region; the very name comes from a Shoshone word for an evil spirit. Dave Bourne's 1909 gold strike in this remote canyon sparked a rush that by the early 1920s made Jarbidge Nevada's leading gold producer, eclipsing fading Goldfield. It also holds a colorful footnote: the last stagecoach robbery and murder in the West, on a stormy December day in 1916.

Elko County, NV

Dave Bourne's gold discovery in 1909 gave rise to the town of Jarbidge, and within a year some 1,500 people crowded its steep canyon. The community built this pioneer-style hall, famous for its "floating" maple dance floor, as a gathering place for the boomtown. Long after the rush faded, support from the Nevada Commission for Cultural Affairs and local residents funded the building's restoration, keeping a piece of the mining frontier standing.

Walker County, TX

Robert and Jane Jardine Browne raised their first cabin here in 1849 from hewn pine logs on walnut posts, on land granted in 1835 to Jane's uncle and surveyed by the Republic of Texas. As the family grew, so did the house — a second log cabin, then a lean-to bedroom, dining room, and detached kitchen added by their Texas-born son. Purchased from the family's heirs in 1940, the homestead was restored in 1966.

White Hall, TX

Here in 1833 planter Jared Ellison Groce built the home known as "Groce's Retreat," and here he died on November 20, 1836, the year Texas won its independence. The Retreat name outlived the house, carrying on as a post office and village that grew up two miles east after the original home was torn down. Groce was among the wealthiest of Stephen F. Austin's colonists.

Van, TX

After seismograph surveys and leasing of thousands of acres, the Pure Oil Company began drilling in a cotton patch on W. T. Jarman's farm in 1929. Crowds brought picnic lunches to watch, and after one disappointing all-day vigil the Number One well quietly came in on the morning of October 14, turning the sleepy village of Van into an overnight boomtown. It was the first of 591 wells in a field that would yield hundreds of millions of barrels of oil.

Jacksonville, TX

When Devereux and Polly Ann Jarratt came from Virginia to settle this East Texas ground in 1850, their sons set aside a burial plot in 1858 — its first grave that of a nameless transient worker known only as Mr. Watts. Added to by many hands over the following century, the cemetery became a shared resting place formally organized by descendants and neighbors in the 1960s.

Jarrell, TX

Jarrell was born of a railroad gambit: developer Orlando D. Jarrell persuaded executives of the Bartlett and Western Railway to route their line through leased land rather than the nearby town of Corn Hill, and in 1909 he began selling lots. When the tracks arrived in 1911, most of Corn Hill's residents — and even two dozen of its buildings — moved to the new town, which thrived on cotton until the crop's decline and the railway's 1935 closure shrank it. The town endured a devastating tornado in 1997 before incorporating in 2001 and entering an era of rapid growth.

Hawkins, TX

In the Jim Crow era, when Black Texans were shut out of most higher education, the Texas Negro Disciples of Christ and the Christian Women's Board of Missions joined forces in 1904 to build a school. On land donated by Ida and J.J. Jarvis, the institute opened in 1913 with a dozen elementary pupils and steadily grew—adding high school, junior college, and by 1937 a full four-year college that won accreditation in 1950.

Laredo, TX

Samuel Matthias Jarvis, a Columbia-trained engineer from New York, joined Zachary Taylor's army in the Mexican-American War, later married in Nuevo León, and settled his family in Laredo after the Civil War. As county surveyor and mayor from 1868 to 1872, he laid out streets and parks, mapped the city, and expanded the old Spanish town plan of 1767. He donated the land for this plaza, known by his name since at least 1881.

Jasper, TX

Jasper County was one of the twenty-three original counties of the Republic of Texas in 1836, and its seat — the old Bevil settlement founded around 1824 — was renamed for Revolutionary War hero William Jasper. After an 1849 fire destroyed the first log courthouse, a succession of buildings followed, culminating in the 1889 red-brick courthouse whose clock tower, WPA annex, and later remodelings chart the county's changing fortunes.

Jasper, TX

Far from the great battlefields, Jasper County was a vital rear-area hub for Confederate Texas — voting overwhelmingly for secession and serving as a communication, supply, and transportation center during the war. Texas troops crossed it on the 1862-64 Louisiana campaigns, a mounted courier route ran through it, and it hosted a quartermaster depot and brigade headquarters of the Texas State Troops. When the war ended, Union occupation forces under George Custer bivouacked on the town square.

Jasper, IN

This placard traces the Jasper Desk Company's woodworking lineage back to 1876, when it was founded as the Alles Brothers Furniture Company. To fix that date in memory, it notes that Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant was then president and that George Custer had not yet met his end at the Little Bighorn. The firm belonged to Jasper's celebrated tradition of German-rooted craftsmanship, which turned the Dubois County seat into a furniture-making center.

Walker County, TX

Organized in 1870, just after the Civil War, Jasper Missionary Baptist Church was among the first African-American congregations in Walker County, its founders first worshipping under a brush arbor. With the church came a wave of legally recognized marriages long denied under slavery, and soon a school where children walked miles for a seventh-grade education. Rebuilt over generations and completed anew in 1994, it has anchored fellowship, learning, and scholarships in New Waverly for over a century.

Jasper, TX

Jasper's tradition of higher learning began in 1851 with the Jasper Collegiate Institute, a partly tax-supported, coeducational school led by Edinburgh-educated East Texas educator Marcus Montrose. Weakened by the losses of the Civil War, it gave way in 1878 to the Southeast Texas Male and Female College, which earned wide respect and the financial backing of local citizens before closing in 1910. Its properties, including a building erected in 1900, were then deeded to Jasper's public elementary and high schools.

Jasper, TX

In the era of segregated sport, logging contractor Elmer Simmons built the Jasper Steers, an African American baseball team, buying bleachers, lighting, and dressing rooms from a defunct Louisiana club and reassembling them as Steer Stadium east of Jasper in the 1940s. The barnstorming Steers traveled across the United States and Canada, one of many independent Black semi-pro teams whose players insisted they could beat any professional club. In a telling local twist, the stadium hosted the white high school's home games, and Simmons even signed one of its pitchers to his by-then integrated roster before the team played its last game in 1961.

New Braunfels, TX

Johann Carl Ludwig Jauer and Anna Caroline Alemeier married in 1851 and settled on land acquired through an 1847 contract with the German Emigration and Railroad Company's Fisher and Miller Colony. The burial ground was likely begun with the 1853 death of an infant daughter, and a single stone marks the graves of Ludwig, Anna, and their daughter Karoline. A prominent landowner, Ludwig remarried in 1880 and was ultimately buried elsewhere on his Clear Springs land.

San Antonio, TX

Developer Jay E. Adams arrived in San Antonio from Denver in 1888 to invest in real estate, and he set out to develop an upscale district north of the city that he named Laurel Heights. To set the tone for the neighborhood, he built this elaborate three-story Queen Anne house of rusticated limestone and wood, crowned with a rounded corner tower and adorned with stained glass, carved stone, and griffins flanking the entry. A matching brick-and-stone carriage house completed the showpiece.

Springtown, TX

Along an 1860s wagon route locals called Jay Bird Lane, a donation of three acres in 1883 preserved a camp-meeting ground that quickly became the center of rural community life. A frame building served the Union Grove school and hosted the Jay Bird Freewill Baptist Church, while a cemetery grew alongside from 1884 — the school, church, and burial ground bound together for generations of area families.

Thornhurst Township, PA · est. 1947

Long before Jay Gould became one of the Gilded Age's most feared financiers, he was a young man learning the tanning trade in the Pennsylvania backwoods. In the mountains near Thornhurst he partnered with the veteran tanner Zaddock Pratt in the late 1850s, running a large tannery that stripped hemlock bark to cure hides—one of the region's dominant early industries. The venture proved shrewdly lucrative, and Gould reportedly maneuvered his older partner out before turning his ambitions toward the railroads and stock markets that would make him infamous.

Thornhurst Township, PA · est. 1947

Long before he became one of the Gilded Age's most feared financiers, Jay Gould got his start in this quiet Pocono village—then named Gouldsboro in his honor. Between 1856 and 1861 he partnered with the wealthy leather magnate Zaddock Pratt to run a large tannery here, converting the hemlock forests of northeastern Pennsylvania into the tanbark that cured hides on an industrial scale. The profits Gould pulled from this remote operation gave him the capital he would later parlay into control of railroads, gold, and Wall Street itself.

Jefferson, TX

Built in 1888, the private railway car "Atlanta" carried the Gilded Age financier Jay Gould, whose empire included the Union Pacific, Missouri Pacific, and Texas and Pacific railroads. Fitted with observation rooms, staterooms, baths, a kitchen, and dining room in mahogany and curly maple, it was a rolling mansion. Passed down through the Gould family, it later served as a residence during the 1930s East Texas oil boom before being preserved at Jefferson in 1954.

Ennis, TX

On a Sunday in June 1902, a professional baseball game was shifted from Corsicana to a cramped Ennis field with a fence barely 200 feet from home plate. There Jay Justin Clarke slugged eight home runs and drove in sixteen runs in a single game — minor league records that still stand more than a century later, as his Corsicana team routed its opponent 51-3.

McDonald, PA · est. 2004

Jay Livingston grew up in the small railroad and mining town of McDonald before becoming one of Hollywood's most decorated songwriters. Working for decades with lyricist partner Ray Evans, he wrote music that won three Academy Awards and produced the enduring holiday standard "Silver Bells," along with instantly recognizable television themes. His work reached across stage, screen, radio, and TV from the 1940s into the 1990s.

Ames, IA

This stone honors Jay Norwood 'Ding' Darling (1876–1962), the celebrated Iowa political cartoonist and passionate conservationist. His widely syndicated cartoons won national acclaim, while his conservation work helped launch the federal duck stamp program that funds wetland protection. He carried the cause of wildlife from the drawing board into public policy.

Beaumont, TX

Jean Baptiste 'Jonas' Chaison was born in Nova Scotia to French parents and, after his family's imprisonment during the French and Indian War, fled to France before returning to North America. He joined the American cause in 1775 and, by the marker's account, served through the Revolution — at Brandywine and Germantown, wounded at Eutaw Springs, and present at Yorktown under Lafayette. He later settled as a farmer, moved to Beaumont around 1840, and lived, the marker says, to well past a hundred; the Daughters of the American Revolution marked his grave in 1944.

Galveston, TX

The notorious privateer Jean Lafitte made Galveston Island his base in 1817, sailing under the Mexican flag as he preyed on Spanish shipping in the Gulf. Here he built Maison Rouge, a red house doubling as a fort with an upper story pierced for cannon and furnished lavishly with plunder. Forced out by the United States in 1821, he burned his home, fort, and village and sailed for the Yucatán; the present structure rose in 1870 atop his old cellars and foundations.

Washington, DC · est. 1997

Jean Monnet (1888–1979), the French economist remembered as a founding architect of a united Europe, spent part of World War II in Washington working from an office in the historic Willard Hotel. As a member of the British Mission, he threw his talent for large-scale coordination into America's "Victory Program," helping marshal the astonishing surge of industrial output that armed the Allies. Only after the war did he turn that same genius for cooperation toward binding former enemies into a peaceful European community.

White Pine County, NV

Between May and June of 1827, explorer and trapper Jedediah Strong Smith forced a route from California's Central Valley to Utah's Great Salt Lake Valley, becoming the first known European American to cross the entire expanse of present-day Nevada. Because his journal and map were lost, his exact path is uncertain, but historians trace him over the Sierra at Ebbetts Pass, southeast along the Walker River, and northeast across central Nevada's Smoky Valley toward Utah.

Fort Davis, TX

Carved from Presidio County and organized in 1887, this West Texas county was named in honor of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States. The town of Fort Davis, which had served as Presidio County's seat, became the new county's seat. The marker records the administrative birth of a mountainous, sparsely settled corner of the Trans-Pecos.

Fort Davis, TX

Erected in 1910–1911 to replace the county's original 1880 adobe courthouse, this Classical Revival building was designed by the Dallas firm of L. L. Thurman and Co. and built by a Louisville, Kentucky, contractor. A massive Doric portico fronts the concrete-and-stone structure, whose walls show alternating bands of locally quarried pink rusticated stone beneath a Beaux Arts clock tower fitted with a Seth Thomas timepiece. More than a century on, it still serves as the seat of Jeff Davis County government.

Fort Davis, TX

The town of Fort Davis grew up around the U.S. Army post established in 1854 to guard travelers on the San Antonio–El Paso Road, and it served as a county seat for both Presidio and, from 1887, Jeff Davis County. This crenellated, fortress-style jail was built in 1910–1911 alongside a new courthouse, designed by Dallas architect L.L. Thurman and disguised in scored plaster to resemble cut ashlar stone. Divided into an office, kitchen, jailer's quarters, and cell block, it held prisoners until 1978.

Belton, TX

Born into slavery in Kentucky, Jeff Hamilton was a child when Sam Houston reportedly bought him at auction to spare him a cruel master, and he became Houston's personal servant during the governor's final years, standing at his bedside when he died in 1863. In freedom, Hamilton worked as custodian for Baylor Female College, following the school to Belton in 1886. Late in a long life that reached to 1941, he was honored by many groups for his firsthand link to Houston's era.

Belton, TX

Born into slavery in Kentucky and brought to Texas as a child, Jeff Hamilton became the enslaved personal servant and companion in the household of Sam Houston, the revolutionary general and Texas statesman, serving through Houston's governorship and until Houston's death in 1863. Freed by emancipation, Hamilton spent more than fifty years in the Belton area and worked for decades as custodian of Mary Hardin-Baylor College. His remembered life offers a rare, intimate window onto one of Texas's most famous households from the vantage of the man enslaved within it.

Jefferson, TX

Long home to the Caddo Indians, this corner of Texas drew Anglo-American colonists in the early 1800s, and Jefferson was founded in 1839 on a curious double grid — one aligned to the compass, another angled to Big Cypress Bayou. As a bustling inland port on the Red River system it welcomed riverboats daily and served as a major Confederate supply center during the Civil War. A cleared logjam in 1873 lowered the water, killed the port, and sent the town into a long decline that tourism later reversed.

Jefferson, TX

Founded in 1836 and named for Thomas Jefferson, this East Texas town rode the steamboat trade up the Big Cypress Bayou to become the state's chief river port between 1846 and 1870. During the Civil War its wharves and workshops turned to the Confederate cause, running a quartermaster depot that produced boots, shoes, ironwork, and preserved meats for the army. When the river traffic faded, the antebellum mansions remained, and a 1939 oil strike nearby added a new chapter.

Port Lavaca, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1801, Jefferson Beaumont served as chief justice of Calhoun County from 1848 to 1856 during the early years of Texas statehood. It was in his honor that Jefferson County, Texas, took its name. He died in 1865 on the Gulf Coast he had helped govern.