Search Markers

Segovia, TX

One of Kimble County's earliest settlements grew up on land once owned by famed Texas cattleman Samuel Maverick, taking its name from the Johnson Fork of the Llano River. The Wiley Joy family put down roots here, building a gravity irrigation system, a rock fence, and a two-room log house whose traces still remain. By the end of the Civil War eight families formed the "Joy settlement," which became a watering place for travelers and troops and, later, a stage stop.

Snyder, TX

W. A. Johnson built this Snyder home in 1910 from cement blocks he cast on site using his own sand and gravel, then finished the interior in oak woodwork crafted by an English carpenter. The self-sufficient construction reflects the resourcefulness of early West Texas builders. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Arlington, TX

Johnson Station began in the 1840s as a ranger station and trading post on the North Texas frontier, and its cemetery remains the clearest reminder of that vanished settlement. The oldest marked grave dates to 1863, though older, unmarked burials likely lie among them; here rest pioneer families, Civil War veterans, and charter members of an early Masonic lodge, in a district long since absorbed into Arlington.

San Angelo, TX

The congregation began at the turn of the century, when Mrs. W.A. Pringle set out to find neighbors in the San Angelo area who shared her Church of Christ faith. A 1900 revival led by Andrew Jackson McCarty drew a small group into regular worship, and in 1901 they bought a house for services under their first minister, T.B. Larimore. The church grew with the city — into larger buildings in 1906 and 1936, into local and foreign missions by the 1940s, and finally into a new home on Johnson Street in 1963.

Waco, TX

Merchant Sanford Taylor built this two-story pink brick house in Waco between 1873 and 1879 as a plain residence, but it took on grandeur after 1912 when new owners added a north wing, a portico, and French doors with delicate fan-light tracery. In 1957 it was purchased for the Waco Council of Garden Clubs and became the Nell Pape Garden Center. Its evolving architecture mirrors the rising fortunes of Gilded Age Waco.

Cleburne, TX

This marker honors the two Confederate officers who gave their names to Johnson County and its seat. Colonel Middleton T. Johnson, a legislator and Texas Ranger who had fought in the Mexican War, raised the 14th Texas Cavalry for Confederate service. General Patrick R. Cleburne, an Irish immigrant lawyer from Arkansas, rose to major general and led Texans of Granbury's Brigade with such tenacity that he became known as the "Stonewall Jackson of the West" before falling at the Battle of Franklin in 1864.

Piqua, OH

In 1808, only five years after Ohio gained statehood, John Johnston set out to build a proper farmstead on the frontier at Upper Piqua, aspiring to the genteel ideal of the "gentleman farmer" that many prosperous settlers carried west with them. Alongside a two-story log cabin, he raised this double-pen log barn—two cribs of hewn logs joined under one roof, a common early-American form—and later wrapped it in outer sheds to shield the vulnerable log walls from Ohio's weather. The surviving structure is a rare window into how the first generation of settlers worked and stored the fruits of newly cleared land.

Unity Township, PA · est. 1946

This sturdy 1815 house, sometimes called Kingston House, sheltered the boyhood of William F. Johnston, who served as governor of Pennsylvania from 1848 to 1852. His term fell squarely in the era of the state's great public-works push, when canals and early railroads were knitting the commonwealth together and moving people and freight across the mountains. Built by his father in an admired colonial style, the home preserves a corner of early Pennsylvania's rising political and civic life.

Springfield Township, PA · est. 1948

In the decades after statehood, taverns like Arthur Johnston's were the gas stations, inns, and news exchanges of the American road. Licensed in 1827 with the present stone-and-timber building raised in 1831, this house fed and lodged travelers moving along the Pittsburgh-Mercer road in western Pennsylvania. Its fortunes were tied to the nearby Springfield Furnace, an iron works that fired up after 1837 and drew traffic to the crossroads.

Adams Township, PA · est. 1947

On the night of May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam gave way, sending a wall of water down the valley toward Johnstown in one of the deadliest disasters in American history. The remnants of the failed dam can still be seen a short distance from this marker, a silent witness to the catastrophe. The flood killed thousands and became a national symbol of both tragedy and the era's uneasy relationship between industry, wealth, and public safety.

Johnstown, PA · est. 2005

On May 31, 1889, the earthen South Fork Dam above Johnstown gave way, sending a thirty-five-foot wall of water and debris roaring fourteen miles down the valley into the busy steel town. In minutes it destroyed more than 1,600 homes and took 2,209 lives, making it one of the deadliest disasters in American history. In its aftermath, a wave of aid poured in from across the country, and Johnstown slowly rebuilt.

Johnstown, PA · est. 1999

After decades of catastrophic flooding, Johnstown got a massive engineered answer: a concrete-paved channel project built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers between 1938 and 1943. Running 9.2 miles along the city's three rivers, it became the nation's second-largest flood control work of its kind and reflected the New Deal-era shift toward a major federal role in local flood protection. It held back the waters for decades until the devastating flood of record in 1977.

Stephenville, TX

Settled before 1860 on the main road from Stephenville to Glen Rose, the community of Johnsville took its name from John Z. Martin, its first postmaster in 1901. In its prime it had general stores, a cotton gin, a blacksmith, lodges, a school, and a church, and its cemetery — formally established in 1910 on land near the Christian church — holds pioneers of every trade. School consolidation in 1948 and the slow drift of population left the church and cemetery as the last records of the town.

Henderson, TX

On this slope in 1930, 70-year-old Oklahoma wildcatter C. M. "Dad" Joiner brought in the discovery well of the vast East Texas Oil Field with a patched-together rig and a crew that often went unpaid through the Depression. After earlier failures, driller E. C. Laster shrugged "this is as good a place as any," and the Daisy Bradford No. 3 blew in that October, sending oil over the crown block. The strike touched off a frenzied boom, with cars bumper-to-bumper and derricks rising in every direction.

Lincoln, CA

This park honors Charles Joiner, born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1923, who enlisted in the U.S. Navy when the Second World War broke out and served in the North African theater. His dedication plaque ties a local Lincoln, California, park to the life of a sailor who answered the call in one of the war's early campaigns.

Cleburne, TX

John B. Joiner built a one-story farmhouse on this Cleburne land in 1895 and sold it in 1912 to the Long family. Banker Joseph Benjamin Long and his wife Lorena added the second story, and the couple raised their family here amid civic and church life. During World War II, with her two sons serving overseas, Lorena worked as a librarian with the Women's Army Corps — a chapter reflected in the home, which the family kept until 1997 and which blends Classical columns with Queen Anne details beneath a pronounced belvedere.

Jollyville, TX

This pioneer burial ground was formally set aside by John Grey Jolly and his wife Nancy Isabel, for whom the community of Jollyville was named and who both rest here. The earliest marked grave dates to 1872, and among those buried are five citizens of the Republic of Texas from the Strode family, who settled the area in 1841. The last burial, a Confederate veteran, came in 1929, closing nearly a century of the community's history.

Round Rock, TX

Settlement here began in the 1840s with Henry Rhodes and pioneers like Elisha Prewitt, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto. After the Civil War, Confederate veteran John G. Jolly established the community that bears his name, running a store and blacksmith shop and donating land for a cemetery and a school. The school served local children until it merged with nearby Pond Springs in 1903, and the area later grew as Austin's suburbs spread north.

Georgetown, TX

In 1902 a handful of community leaders bought two acres near the San Gabriel River so that area residents could bury their dead free of charge, founding Jonah Cemetery for a then-thriving rural settlement. Among its graves are Confederate veterans and twin sisters interred near many of their combined twenty-two children. As the community around it dwindled, the cemetery endured as one of its last physical traces.

Carthage, TX

Kentucky-born Jonathan "Old Shelby" Anderson came to this region while Texas was still Mexican territory, then took up arms in the Texas Revolution and fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. In 1848 he gave 100 acres to establish Carthage as the seat of the newly organized Panola County, and later served as sheriff and tax assessor-collector. The park on the old courthouse square was named in his honor in 1956.

Bastrop, TX

Jonathan Burleson was a soldier of the Texas War for Independence, serving in the campaigns at Velasco, Gonzales, Bexar, and finally San Jacinto—the 1836 victory that secured Texas's break from Mexico. The Gonzales and Bexar fights and the decisive rout at San Jacinto were the pivotal engagements of that struggle. His marker honors his part in winning independence for the young republic.

Lott, TX

Born in Georgia in 1806, Jonathan Cochran Pool came to Texas as a boy in 1815 and grew up to enlist in the Texian Army, taking part in early skirmishes of the Texas Revolution at Anahuac, Nacogdoches, and San Antonio. He later scouted for Gen. Sam Houston before settling in Falls County in 1852 as a farmer and stock raiser. A Civil War veteran, he was buried here on his plantation.

Vernon, TX

A Quaker trader known for keeping peace on a violent frontier, Jonathan Doan came from Ohio into the hides trade of Indian Territory in the mid-1870s. In 1878 he opened a trading post at the Western Cattle Trail's Red River crossing — the famous Doan's Store — soon run by his nephew C. F. Doan. Respected by Indians, cattlemen, and frontiersmen alike, the Doans became fixtures of the great trail-driving era.

Seguin, TX

Born in Georgia in 1799, Jonathan Douglas fought for Texas independence as a private in Captain Splane's company at the Battle of San Jacinto, the 1836 victory that secured the Republic of Texas. He and his wife Nancy lived out their lives in the Seguin area, where this marker honors their memory.

Palo Pinto, TX

Virginia-born Jonathan Hamilton "Ham" Baker reached Texas in 1858 and settled in Palo Pinto County, where he opened what is believed to be its first organized school and helped found its first Methodist church. On the exposed frontier he led local defenders against Comanche raids, rode with Lawrence Sullivan Ross in the 1860 recovery of Cynthia Ann Parker, and captained the home guard during the Civil War. He was also a trail-driving cattleman and tireless local officeholder whose decades-long diary preserves a vivid record of frontier Texas.

Springville Township, PA · est. 2001

Born in 1840 to parents who had escaped slavery, Jonathan Jasper Wright grew up in Springville and went on to become the first Black lawyer admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania. He stood with Frederick Douglass in the fight for the vote and legal equality, and in 1870, during Reconstruction, he was elevated to the South Carolina Supreme Court—the first African American to sit on a state's highest court. His rise from a runaway slaves' son to the bench marked a breathtaking, if fragile, moment of possibility.

Asheboro, NC

Jonathan Worth managed North Carolina's finances as state treasurer during the Civil War, then won election as governor in 1865 amid the wreckage of defeat. A former Unionist, he struggled to steer the state through federal Reconstruction before being removed from office in 1868. His home once stood a block south of here.

Rusk, TX

John R. Jones and his wife Mary came from Jackson County, Alabama in 1853, established a farm, and built a log cabin on land in Cherokee County. When John died in 1857 he became the first person buried in what grew into the family cemetery, joined by Mary in 1864 and by generations of descendants — farmers, ranchers, and veterans of both the Seminole Wars and the Civil War. The ground stayed in Jones hands as a quiet testament to a pioneering family's role in settling the area.

Utopia vicinity, TX

In 1879 the Rev. Irvin Jones deeded two acres of his homestead to the Utopia Methodist Church for a cemetery, and his wife Elizabeth was buried at its center in 1886. Early settlers of the Taylor and Utopia communities rest here, alongside several Civil War veterans and the Mexican War veteran and Texas Ranger Ben Highsmith. Also interred is George Barker, the teacher credited with giving Utopia its name.

Beeville, TX

Organized in 1888 as Jones Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, this Beeville congregation first worshipped in a schoolhouse while circuit-riding ministers rotated among churches by stagecoach and horseback. In 1889 members built a sanctuary on land Capt. A.C. Jones donated to three formerly enslaved men serving as trustees, and many of the church's charter members were themselves formerly enslaved. Still on its original site, the congregation remains active in Beeville's African American community and its Juneteenth celebrations.

Anson, TX

This corner of west Texas was crossed by an emigrant trail and a frontier military road guarded by Fort Phantom Hill, founded in 1851. The county was named for Anson Jones, a San Jacinto veteran and the last president of the Republic of Texas. Phantom Hill served as a Butterfield Overland Mail station in 1858-61 and then as a Civil War patrol point trying to curb frontier raids, before the county was fully organized in 1881 with Anson as its seat.

Anson, TX

Named for Anson Jones, the last president of the Republic of Texas, Jones County was created in 1858 but not fully organized until 1881—its founding delayed by the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the raw West Texas frontier. After a succession of modest courthouses, the county built its grand Beaux Arts landmark in 1910, crowned by a statue of Lady Justice atop a domed clock tower. Decorative painting later uncovered in the district courtroom reveals Arts and Crafts touches beneath the classical grandeur.

Milwaukee, WI

For nearly a century, the sandy peninsula of Jones Island at the mouth of the Milwaukee River was home to a tight-knit fishing village whose residents — many of them Kashubian Poles alongside other immigrant groups — pulled a living from Lake Michigan. Their shanties, nets, and smokehouses formed a self-governing community that outsiders regarded almost as a world apart, until the city reclaimed the land for harbor and industrial use in the early 20th century. Milwaukee recognized the site as a city landmark in 1974.

Canadian, TX

Thomas Stanley Jones, a Welsh-born rancher who rose to prominence in the Texas Panhandle, had this home built in 1910 for his wife Rosalie and their children. Designed by Amarillo architect E. Wellington, it was the first brick residence in Canadian, its Classical Revival grandeur, monumental Ionic columns, corner quoins, and Renaissance detailing broadcasting the family's standing. The mansion still speaks of Panhandle cattle wealth.

Powhatan County, VA

In the 1930s, during the depths of the Great Depression and the era of Jim Crow segregation, Roosevelt and Arletha Granger Jones built a thriving business in rural Powhatan County, Virginia. Their Jones Restaurant was a hub of community life — part grocery store, part gas station, and part gathering place for dining and dancing. For African American travelers and neighbors in a segregated South with few welcoming businesses, such Black-owned establishments were vital social and economic anchors.

Houston, TX

Houston architect Alfred C. Finn designed this Tudor Revival home after World War I for Sarah Jones, widow of state senator James W. Jones, folding the oak woodwork, windows, and grand staircase of the family's 1893 house into the new one. Sarah moved in with her daughter Irma and son-in-law William Hunt in 1921, and five generations of the family lived here until 1989. Its wide central gable, off-center entrance portico, and porte cochere mark the taste of Houston's interwar gentry.

Geneva, TX

Around 1892 C. A. Jones milled pine from his own East Texas land to raise the first two rooms of this Sabine County home, hauling stone by oxcart for its chimneys as he enlarged it over the years. A storekeeper and shingle-mill operator, Jones eventually sold the house to his father-in-law, a prosperous farmer and Confederate veteran, and it has remained in the same family across the generations. The home is a quiet monument to the self-reliant timber economy of the Piney Woods.

New Boston, TX

When James W. and Laura Williams Jones built this home in 1883, they brought a piece of the Upper South with them — North Carolina architectural styling and garden plantings transplanted to the pinewoods of Bowie County. The house reflects the migration of settlers who carried regional tastes and traditions westward into Texas after the Civil War.

Honey Grove, TX

In the 1840s New Jersey natives John W. and Tamson Finley Jones settled in Fannin County, later joined by kin who had served as missionaries to the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. A community grew up around the family's flour mill and cotton gin, though decades later a rival mill built by the Self brothers shifted the population, and eventually nearby Honey Grove eclipsed them all. Today the Jones' Mill community survives only in its historic cemetery, with headstones reaching back to 1850.

Manchester, TX

On the Red River, Jonesboro was one of the earliest ports of entry into Texas for Anglo-Americans, in use by 1814 and busy by 1817, named for ferry owner Henry Jones. Claimed by both Mexico and the United States, it served as county seat of Arkansas's Miller County and counted some 2,350 residents by 1834. Sam Houston crossed into Texas here in 1832 and David Crockett in 1835 — but by 1840 the town had lost its trade and settlers to rival communities.

Jonesboro, TX

This Methodist congregation traces its roots to the late 1860s, when Jonesboro's early settlers gathered for worship in a shared church-school-Masonic lodge building. W. L. Jones donated land in 1871, and the congregation formally organized that same year, raising the first of several buildings that would follow over the decades. In time, Methodist congregations from the nearby communities of Ames, Pancake, and Turnersville merged into the Jonesboro church.

Jacksboro, TX

This cemetery carries the memory of Joplin, a small Jack County farming community named for settler Johnny Joplin, and of its school, Fairview. The earliest marked grave dates to 1881, and Joplin himself was buried here in 1899. When the local school district consolidated with Jacksboro in 1947, proceeds from selling the school building endowed the cemetery association that still cares for the grounds.

Arlington, TX

George Washington Jopling raised this log cabin in 1863 in the Johnson Station community for his wife Catherine and their large family. A farmer, cattleman, and cotton gin owner, Jopling helped organize the local Masonic lodge before deeding the enlarged cabin to his daughter Jane and her husband, blacksmith Z. T. Melear. Moved to its present site in 1970, it preserves the world of North Texas pioneer families.

Bertram, TX

Founded by families like the Faires and the Aters in the mid-1870s, this farming and ranching settlement was first called 'Pool Branch' for a waterfall pool that later powered a cotton gin and mill and earned the name 'Mill Pond.' A store, blacksmith, and even a home hat shop gathered around it, and land donated by the Danfords in 1881 secured a school and church — the community renamed itself 'Joppa' when a post office opened in 1891. Today only the church house and old schoolhouse, now a community center, remain.

Bertram, TX

The small community of Joppa grew up around a church and school in the 1880s, and as Burnet County's railroad-driven population climbed, voters approved a 1906 bond to build three truss bridges nearby. Completed in 1907, this 136-foot Pratt-truss span—the last survivor of that group—carried families to neighboring towns and, crucially, let rural young people reach schools beyond the elementary grades. Its riverbank was also a favorite spot for rest and recreation through hard times.

Dallas, TX

On the banks of the Trinity River, formerly enslaved people from the nearby Miller Plantation founded Joppee in 1872, one of the few surviving freedman towns in Texas. Henry Critz Hines, who ran the Honey Springs Ferry, helped establish the community, and freed families from across East Texas settled alongside a growing Dallas. Through churches, schools, and civic leaders, Joppee endured Klan pressure and remains home to descendants today, with roots in early Juneteenth celebrations.

Houston, TX

As families left the Fourth Ward's "Freedmantown" for Houston's Third Ward in the 1870s, African Americans there needed a church of their own, and in 1879 an itinerant preacher helped gather several families to found Jordan Grove. Under a pastor who led for forty-eight years, the congregation built a sanctuary in the 1890s, lost it to the 1900 storm, and rebuilt again. Across the next century it grew into a community anchor whose members entered the ministry and whose pastors gained national standing.

South Jordan, UT

This memorial remembers the adults and children killed and injured when a school bus collided with a train near Jordan, Utah, in December 1938—one of the deadliest school-bus disasters in American history. The tragedy, which killed dozens of students on an icy winter morning, spurred lasting changes in school-bus safety across the country.

Boston, MA

This spot marks the birthplace of Jordan Marsh, the great New England department store founded when nineteen-year-old Eben Dyer Jordan partnered with Benjamin L. Marsh in mid-19th-century Boston. In the same bustling commercial city, Nantucket's Rowland Hussey Macy gained the early retail experience that would lead to his own famous name. The plaque records how, in 1996, the two lineages of American retailing joined when Jordan Marsh became Macy's.

Grand Prairie, TX

David Jordan, who came to Texas from Tennessee around 1859, built this house about 1860 from hand-hewn logs cut in the Trinity River bottomlands. A farmer, he also ran a store and a stage stand on the Dallas-Fort Worth Road in a time of frequent Indian raids — the outlaw Sam Bass gang was even suspected of an 1870 holdup nearby. Victor Bowles bought the property in 1886, keeping it in his family for 65 years, until Minnie Bowles remodeled it and donated it to the city in 1951 as a museum and meeting place.

Grand Prairie, TX

This burial ground began in 1866 when David A. Jordan set aside land to bury his son-in-law, Robert A. Hight. What started as a family plot soon opened to neighbors and became a public cemetery holding members of many pioneer families of the area — the Bowles, Brannan, Robertson, Miller, Jordan, and Hight lines among them. A family association formed in 1955 to care for the grounds.

Grand Saline, TX

When John Jordan settled in this corner of East Texas in 1844, he and partner A.T. McGee tapped the region's underground salt deposits to found Jordans Saline. Salt was a frontier necessity—for preserving meat, tanning hides, and trade—and the little town thrived on it, even serving briefly as Van Zandt County's first seat. But when the Texas & Pacific Railroad laid its tracks a mile to the north in 1873, the whole community picked up and moved to the rails, reincorporating as Grand Saline. Jordans Saline simply faded away.

Orange, TX

J. K. Jorgensen, a hardware store clerk, bought this Orange lot in 1900 and built his home in an unusually thrifty way. In 1907 he detached the front porch and two rooms of a relative's house and hauled them here on wooden rollers pulled by mules, adding two more rooms behind them. The result is a modest vernacular residence dressed with Victorian porch details and tall windows.

San Antonio, TX

Born in San Antonio in 1795, Jose Antonio Navarro was a Tejano statesman and one of the few native-born Texans to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. He devoted his life to the cause of Texas and the rights of its Mexican-descended citizens through the turbulent transitions from Mexican rule to republic to statehood. This marker, erected by the State of Texas in 1936, honors him and his wife, Margarita De La Garza Navarro.

Corsicana, TX

José Antonio Navarro was a San Antonio–born statesman who bridged Spanish, Mexican, and Texan governments across a revolutionary generation, serving in the legislature of Coahuila and Texas and then signing the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. He went on to help write the state constitution and sit in the Texas Senate, and he lent his name both to Navarro County and to Corsicana, which he called after his father's native Corsica. This 1936 centennial marker honors a rare native-born Tejano leader of the Republic.

Geronimo, TX

José Antonio Navarro was a rare Tejano statesman who bridged Mexican and Texan worlds, holding office under Mexico before championing Texas independence and signing its Declaration in 1836. In 1834 he bought ranch land along Geronimo Creek, and its house sheltered his family during his imprisonment by Mexican forces after the ill-fated Santa Fe Expedition. He held the ranch until 1853.

Rio Grande City, TX

In the mid-eighteenth century, the Spanish colonizer José de Escandón explored the country from Tampico to the San Antonio River and planted some two dozen towns, many of which survive today. He founded missions, opened roads, and settled families across what is now the lower Rio Grande borderlands, earning from the Spanish crown the title Conde de la Sierra Gorda.

Fruitvale, TX

During the Spanish colonial era, the Franciscan missionary José Francisco Calahorra y Saenz ministered in East Texas from about 1730 and earned deep trust among many Native Texan peoples. After the 1758 attack on Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá, he brokered peace between Spanish authorities and the Taovaya and Tawakoni, then journeyed to their Sabine River villages in 1760 by way of trails later known as the Cherokee Road and Kickapoo Trace. His written accounts of these diplomatic visits left an invaluable record for later historians and archaeologists.

San Antonio, TX

Born in San Antonio in 1783 to a wealthy ranching family, José Francisco Ruiz was educated in Spain and served as a city schoolteacher before joining the Mexican struggle against Spanish rule, a fight that forced him into exile in the United States. Returning home, he broke with Santa Anna's growing dictatorship and was elected a Bexar delegate to the 1836 convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos, where he became one of only a few native Tejanos to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence. He went on to serve as Bexar's first senator in the Congress of the new Republic.

Los Angeles, CA

This memorial honors José Martí (1853-1895), the poet, journalist, and revolutionary who became the father of Cuban independence and a hero across the Spanish-speaking Americas. His words inscribed here call on those with a homeland to honor it and those without to win one, and urge unity "with all, and for the good of all." In Los Angeles his memory endures among the city's deep Latino communities.