Search Markers

Tampa, FL

This marker in Tampa carries a line of verse from José Martí (1853–1895), the Cuban poet, essayist, and revolutionary who rallied the exiled Cuban community for independence from Spain. In the early 1890s Martí made repeated visits to Tampa's Ybor City, where Cuban cigar workers became the financial and moral backbone of his independence movement, and where his speeches helped launch the final war for a free Cuba. The Spanish inscription preserves his belief that dignity keeps poetry alive in the world.

New Ulm, TX

Born on the Czech-Moravian border in 1806 and trained as a tailor, Josef Lidumil Leshikar became a voice for political freedom during the revolutions of 1848. In 1853 he led a party of immigrants to the new Czech settlements of Austin County, Texas. A committed opponent of slavery, he used Czech and American newspapers to argue against secession and civil war even as his adopted state marched the other way.

Caldwell, TX

Josef Masik, born in Moravia in 1810, was certified to teach at just sixteen before emigrating to Texas in 1855 in search of freedom from oppression. After great hardship he resumed his profession in 1859, teaching as many as fifty pupils a year until his retirement in 1872. He is remembered as the first Czech teacher in Texas.

Rogers, TX

Born to a sharecropping family in Rogers, Texas, in 1935, Joseph Arrington Jr. rose from segregated-era school and church performances to the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater and a recording career as 'Joe Tex.' His 1964 breakout 'Hold on to What You've Got' and the platinum 'I Gotcha' showcased a style in which he slowed the tempo and added spoken verses he called 'rapping,' bridging 1950s R&B ballads and 1970s funk. He briefly left music to serve the Nation of Islam as Yusef Hazziez before returning to the stage; he died in 1982, his influence echoing through soul, funk, and hip-hop.

California, PA · est. 1995

Joseph "Jock" Yablonski spent his life in the coalfields as a United Mine Workers official fighting to improve conditions for miners. After losing a reform bid for the union presidency in 1969, he, his wife Margaret, and their daughter Charlotte were assassinated in their home on December 31 in a killing traced to union leadership. The outrage over the murders fueled a reform movement that swept new leaders into the UMW in 1972.

Wharton, TX

Ohio native Joseph Andrew Hamilton fought for the Union during the Civil War, then settled in Wharton around 1866 and took up a string of local political offices in a defeated but reorganizing South. He bought this property in 1885 and moved his family into an existing one-story frame house, which was dramatically enlarged in 1907 by raising the original structure and building a new floor beneath it. The result carries touches of the neoclassical style.

New York, NY

Green-Wood Cemetery, founded in 1838, was one of America's grandest "rural cemeteries" — a rolling landscape of monuments that drew Victorian New Yorkers for strolls long before the city had public parks. This monument honors Joseph Alfred Perry, who served nearly four decades as the cemetery's comptroller, keeping its books and its business in order until his death. The trustees raised the stone in gratitude for a lifetime of quiet, faithful stewardship.

Newcastle, TX

Kentucky-born and Louisville-trained in law, Joseph Alfred Woolfolk came to frontier Belknap in 1858 to survey Peters Colony land grants and soon served as a Young County official. He joined a home-guard Ranger unit and then the Confederate army, was captured in West Virginia in 1863, and spent the rest of the war imprisoned in Ohio. Back in Texas, he gained notoriety in 1871 when the court appointed him to defend the Kiowa chiefs Satanta and Big Tree at their murder trial after the Salt Creek raid.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2009

In the decades before the Civil War, Philadelphia was home to a thriving community of free Black Americans who built their own institutions of self-help and reform. Joseph Cassey, a prosperous barber and real-estate dealer, extended rentals and loans to Black and white customers alike, while he and his wife Amy founded benevolent and intellectual societies. Amy Cassey was also active in the Female Anti-Slavery Society, part of a network of women driving the abolitionist cause.

Bremond, TX

Born in Poland, Joseph and Catherine Bartula endured the hardships of emigration to reach Texas in 1873 and became, in 1875, the first Polish settlers in Robertson County. Working on the farm of J. C. and Mary Roberts, Joseph wrote letters home urging others to follow — and follow they did, some fifty families arriving from Poland and sixty more from Marlin, until by 1885 nearby Bremond held the largest Polish settlement in Texas at 345 families. Bartula went on to buy his own farm and lead the community's civic and church life.

Round Mountain, TX

Portions of this house reach back to the mid-1850s, when pioneers Joseph and Eliza Bird settled the Texas Hill Country. Two separate single-pen log cabins, built with different techniques, were joined under one roof to form a dogtrot cabin with limestone chimneys at each end, then expanded over the decades with a half-story addition and porches. Later cypress siding hid the original logs until a 1980s renovation revealed the pioneer construction beneath.

Austin, TX

Prominent Austin contractor George Fiegel completed this Queen Anne and Colonial Revival home in 1903 for Joe and Mary Martin. Joe Martin was a noted wild-game conservationist best known in local business for the Austin White Lime Company, and when Mary's sister died in 1918 the couple took in and raised three of her children, prompting an addition to the house. The Martin family kept the home until 1971.

Egypt, TX

In 1823 the Newmans joined Rachel's parents among Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" — the first Anglo-American families to settle Mexican Texas under empresario contract. Granted a league and a labor of land by Mexico, they farmed and raised stock on the raw frontier that became Wharton County, weathering the hardships that thinned so many early colonies. Their ten children scattered into Texas history, most famously the notorious frontierswoman Sally Scull.

St. Thomas Township, PA · est. 1960

Joseph Armstrong settled this Franklin County land in the 1730s, on the contested edge of Pennsylvania's frontier. He served in the colonial Assembly and rose as a militia captain, and his home became a ranging station in 1757 for troops during the French and Indian War. It served the same purpose during Pontiac's War of 1763–64, when Native resistance again swept the backcountry.

Driftwood, TX

Joseph B. Rogers (1833–1912), son of settlers who reached Texas in 1831, rode with Terry's Texas Rangers during the Civil War before buying this Hays County land in 1869. In the early 1870s he hired local workmen to raise this native limestone house, built in the pioneer fashion with a central hall and a chimney at each end. His descendants preserved the home, replacing its wooden porch with concrete in 1916.

Austin, TX

Maine-born Joseph Baker helped launch the Telegraph and Texas Register at San Felipe de Austin in October 1835, giving the Texas independence movement a printed voice on the eve of revolution. He then took up arms, fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, and served the new republic as first chief justice of Bexar County and a member of its Congress before his death in 1846.

Town of Highlands, NY

In the mid-twentieth century, volunteers with the New York–New Jersey Trail Conference laced the Hudson Highlands and nearby ranges with the footpaths that hikers still follow today. Joseph Bartha served as the Conference's Trails Chairman from 1940 to 1955, the hands-on decades when routes were scouted, cleared, and blazed across rugged terrain near the Town of Highlands. This plaque, set in 1966, remembers a man whose life's work was quite literally cutting a path and marking the way for others.

Carthage, TX

Joseph Benedict Beauchamp, born in Kentucky in 1814, joined the Army of Texas in 1835 and took part in the Storming of Bexar, one of the first major clashes of the Texas Revolution. He died in 1862, the same year as his wife, Angelina Lindsay, and the two are remembered together on this Panola County marker.

Round Mountain, TX

North Carolina native Joseph Bird brought his family to the land between Cypress Creek and the Pedernales around 1854, and for half a century helped build Blanco County as a frontier Baptist circuit minister, postmaster, rancher, and county judge. The settlement that grew up around him was first called Birdtown before being renamed Round Mountain, where a post office opened in 1857. Bird rode a preaching circuit, founded churches, and served as a Confederate first lieutenant during the Civil War.

Wallisville, TX

In August 1754, French trader Joseph Blancpain—already a merchant in Natchitoches—crossed into Spanish-claimed territory and opened a trading post here, dealing with the Atakapan and neighboring tribes. Spain regarded the intrusion as a threat: aided by the Bidai, soldiers attacked in October and hauled the Frenchmen to prison, where Blancpain died in Mexico in 1756. On the very spot Spain then raised Presidio San Augustín de Ahumada and Mission Nuestra Señora de la Luz, later destroyed by a 1766 hurricane.

Houghton Township, MI

This marker remembers Joseph Blight, Sr., founder of the Original Lake Superior Safety Fuse Company in Michigan's Keweenaw copper country. Safety fuse was vital technology in the region's deep copper mines, allowing miners to detonate blasting charges from a safer distance. Blight's enterprise served the industrial heart of one of America's great mining districts.

Tarboro, NC

Joseph Blount Cheshire, Jr., trained first as a lawyer before entering the ministry and serving as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina from 1893 to 1932. A writer as well as a churchman, he led his diocese for nearly four decades. His birthplace stood a block to the west and his grave lies a short distance to the south.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

For a year or so after 1815, this Philadelphia house sheltered Joseph Bonaparte — Napoleon's elder brother and the deposed king of Naples and later Spain — as he began his long American exile following the collapse of the Napoleonic empire. In these rooms gathered Bonapartist refugees and French émigrés, a small colony of the defeated regime finding footing in the young republic. Joseph would go on to build a grand estate at Point Breeze in New Jersey and live in America for years before returning to Europe.

Navasota, TX

Joseph Brooks left England for Texas in 1853 with his wife Mary Ann, and after Civil War service he settled in Navasota—surviving the deadly 1867 yellow fever epidemic that swept the Gulf region. He rose to become a leading local lumberman and, in the 1870s, built this family home in the ornate Victorian fashion of the day. Decades later his daughter Mary Elizabeth reworked it with classical revival detailing, layering one generation's taste over another's.

Elizabeth City, NC

Born in Elizabeth City in 1854, Joseph C. Price rose to become one of the most celebrated Black orators and educators of his generation. He was a founder and the first president of Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, championing higher education for African Americans in the decades after emancipation. His eloquence carried him across the country and abroad before his death in 1893 at just thirty-nine.

West Point, TX

Joseph C. Robinson was among the Texians captured in the Dawson Massacre of September 18, 1842, when a small volunteer company was surrounded and cut down by Mexican forces during General Adrián Woll's raid on San Antonio. He survived captivity and lived until 1861. His grave marker recalls one of the sharp, often-forgotten clashes of the independent Republic of Texas.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

Joseph Charles Miszner was born in Prussia in 1822 and, by the marker's account, studied under composer Franz Liszt and graduated from the Leipzig Conservatory before emigrating to America in 1845. Naturalized in 1860, he taught music and languages in Rusk County, composed, and became a respected landowner in Henderson. His life carried the high musical culture of central Europe into the towns of East Texas.

Temple, TX

A Tennessee native, Joseph Dennis brought his family to Texas in 1849, just as Bell County was being carved from Milam County. He helped choose the site that became Belton, the county seat, and served as the county's first treasurer before relocating to Temple.

Killeen vicinity, TX

Joseph Dennis and his wife Isa left Arkansas for Texas in 1840, and when Bell County was organized a decade later he chaired the committee that chose Nolan Springs—today's Belton—as the county seat. He became the county's first treasurer, ran a grist mill and lumber yard, and assembled tracts of land including this acreage, long known as Elmore Ranch. The property has stayed in his family's hands ever since.

Boerne, TX

Joseph Dienger built this limestone commercial building soon after buying the site in 1884, running a grocery on the ground floor and living with his family above. A later addition housed the dry goods store of his sisters Lina and Louise, and the family kept the double-galleried building until 1967. Its Victorian styling carries the German influences typical of Boerne's Hill Country builders.

Houston, TX

Born in the Alsace region of France in 1792, Joseph Ehlinger was among the European-born settlers who cast their lot with the Texas cause. He served in Captain William J. E. Heard's company at San Jacinto in 1836, the battle that won Texas its independence, and lived out his years in Houston until his death in 1845.

Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1928

This marker honors Joseph Elliot, a Revolutionary War soldier of the embattled Wyoming Valley frontier. He fought at Trenton on the night of December 25, 1776, and by tradition was given a sword by George Washington for his bravery. He survived the Wyoming Massacre of 1778 — breaking free at the Bloody Rock and swimming the Susquehanna with a bullet in his shoulder — and later, at the 1782 Battle of Lime Hill, helped rescue captured children.

Leonard, TX

This Star-and-Wreath grave marker honors Joseph F. Fenner, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence who served in Shackelford's Company under Colonel Fannin's command in 1836. Erected by the State of Texas in 1962, it commemorates one of the citizen-soldiers of the revolution that won Texas its independence. Fannin's command is best remembered for its tragic end at Goliad, making every survivor's story part of that fraught campaign.

Mexia, TX

Established in 1889, this 70-acre camp of the United Confederate Veterans hosted enormous annual reunions in an era when Texas still looked to its Civil War veterans for leadership. Each August, under the full moon, thousands gathered in tents and brush arbors for speeches, memorial programs, and feasts of barbecue and sweet potato pie, with special trains running from Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston; at its peak the encampment drew 5,000 people, and the Civil War cannon "Old Valverde" fired dawn and dusk salutes until 1940. The grounds remain dedicated to the memory of the Confederate veterans who once camped here.

Gregory, TX

Ohio-born Joseph French Green arrived in South Texas with the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad and so impressed an opposing lawyer in an 1886 suit that he was hired to run a 224,000-acre ranch, later managing the vast Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company. In 1906–07 he built La Quinta, a twelve-bedroom mansion overlooking Corpus Christi Bay grand enough to host President William Howard Taft in 1909. Known as the "White House of the Taft Ranch," the great house burned in 1938.

Greensboro, NC

Born in Guilford County in 1836, Joseph Gurney Cannon moved west and built a political career in Illinois that spanned nearly half a century in Congress. As Speaker of the House from 1903 to 1911, 'Uncle Joe' ruled with such an iron grip that a bipartisan revolt finally stripped the office of much of its power. His birthplace once stood about a mile and a half southwest of here.

Denison, TX

An Illinois livestock broker, Joseph G. McCoy (1837–1915) opened the first workable market for Texas cattle by securing rail cars and building loading pens at Abilene, Kansas — turning $5 longhorns into beeves worth $25 or more up north. He had part of Jesse Chisholm's trail surveyed and marked to guide the great drives through Oklahoma, over which some ten million cattle moved between 1866 and 1884. When the railroad reached Denison in 1872, McCoy moved here and helped launch a refrigerating company to ship dressed beef.

Lake Jackson, TX

Joseph H. Hawkins, a Virginia-born lawyer who served in Kentucky's legislature and Congress, befriended a broke and hesitant Stephen F. Austin in New Orleans. He urged Austin to carry on his late father's colonization plans, offering him work and, in an 1821 agreement, $4,000 in capital in exchange for half the lands Austin would receive as empresario. Hawkins sent boats of supplies and colonists to Texas but died in 1823 deeply in debt; years later Austin conveyed some 42,000 acres to his heirs, though none remained in Texas.

Huntington vicinity, TX

When Angelina County was organized in 1846, Alabama-born Joseph Herrington was among six men appointed to set its boundaries and choose Marion as the first county seat. Just twenty-two, he was elected the county's first chief justice and, across five terms, helped open trade routes and establish county school districts. An active Mason, he was laid to rest in the family cemetery here.

Edenton, NC

Joseph Hewes built his fortune as an Edenton merchant and shipowner before politics carried him to the Continental Congress, where in 1776 he became one of North Carolina's signers of the Declaration of Independence. Overseeing naval matters, he is often remembered for helping lay the groundwork of an American navy. His store once stood a few blocks south of here.

Bern Township, PA · est. 1947

Joseph Hiester rose from Revolutionary War soldier—captured and held on a British prison ship—to a long career in public life, serving in Congress and then as governor of Pennsylvania from 1820 to 1823. A son of the Pennsylvania German community, he lived at the Hiester Mansion here in Berks County. The property later became part of the county welfare farm.

Whatcom County, WA

This carving is the work of Joseph Hillaire (Kwull Kwull), a renowned Lummi master carver, made for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and later donated in 1990 to Northwest Indian College. Hillaire was among the most celebrated Coast Salish artists of the 20th century, carrying forward Pacific Northwest carving traditions on a national stage. The piece links Native artistry to a defining moment of mid-century Seattle.

Wichita Falls, TX

An Ohio native, Joseph Hudson Barwise brought his family to Wichita County in 1880 and became one of its guiding figures. He earned the nickname "Father of Wichita Falls" by donating land to lure the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway through the area, ensuring the young town's growth. A three-term county judge and tireless booster, Barwise helped shape the community before his burial in Riverside Cemetery.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

At the dawn of the 20th century, Philadelphia-born architect Joseph Huston built Oaks Cloister as his own home and studio, folding into its Tudor design the architectural details and artwork of the very craftsmen he would soon marshal for a far grander project. Trained in the influential Philadelphia firm of Furness and Evans before striking out on his own in 1895, Huston went on to design the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg, a Beaux-Arts landmark whose lavish decoration reflected the collaborative artistry glimpsed in his private residence.

Webberville, TX

Joseph J. Manor came to Texas from Tennessee at twenty and settled at Webberville, where he built a store and cotton gin and gathered land along the Colorado River. He and his wife Caroline lie here among other early pioneers, in a burial ground that honors veterans of nearly every American conflict from the War of 1812 through Vietnam. A descendants' association formed in 1982 now cares for the site.

Columbus, TX

Born in West Virginia in 1861 to a Confederate colonel killed soon after his birth, Joseph Jefferson Mansfield came to Texas in 1881 and built a career in Eagle Lake and Columbus as lawyer, editor, mayor, and county judge. Elected to Congress in 1916, he chaired the House Rivers and Harbors Committee, steering federal money toward flood control on the Colorado River—work commemorated in the naming of Mansfield Dam. Late in life he gave his Columbus property to the town for a public library, and when he died in 1947 mourners including future president Lyndon B. Johnson gathered for his funeral.

Hallettsville, TX

Joseph Kent arrived in Texas around 1832, when the region was still a Mexican province stirring toward revolt. He took up arms in the Texas War for Independence, seeing action at the storming of Bexar in 1835 and at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, before settling and dying in Lavaca County in 1849.

New Braunfels, TX

Joseph Klein was among the German immigrants who founded New Braunfels in 1845 as part of the Adelsverein colonization of the Texas Hill Country. About 1852 he built this simple frame house, later sold to shoemaker William Kuse, who kept his shop inside it. When Kuse's daughter and her husband built the Eggeling Hotel in 1898, the little house was moved to the back of the lot.

New Ulm, TX

When Rev. Josef E. Bergman of Cat Spring sent home a letter praising Texas, some 33 Czech families answered the call and immigrated between 1851 and 1853 — among the earliest waves of Czech settlement in America. Josef L. Leshikar and his four sons built this first home in 1854.

Washington County, OR

This marker stands on the land claim of Joseph L. Meek, the self-described "unlettered" mountain man who reached the Oregon Country in 1840 after guiding the first wagon over the stretch of the Oregon Trail from Fort Hall to Walla Walla. A trapper turned settler, Meek became a founder of Oregon's Provisional Government, the improvised American self-rule set up before the territory formally joined the United States. His life bridged the fur-trade frontier and the wave of overland emigrants who followed.

Asheville, NC

Joseph Lane was born near this spot before rising to national prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. He won fame as a major general in the Mexican War, then became the first territorial governor of Oregon and later a U.S. Senator. In 1860 he ran for vice president on the Southern Democratic ticket with John C. Breckinridge, on the eve of the Civil War.

Hallettsville, TX

Joseph Lawrence volunteered in the Texas War for Independence and stood among the victors at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the fight that secured Texas's separation from Mexico. The State of Texas marked his memory with the star and wreath reserved for veterans of that founding struggle.

Lee County, VA

In the 1770s, the rugged country of far southwestern Virginia stood at the gateway to the Wilderness Road, the route Daniel Boone blazed through the Cumberland Gap toward Kentucky. General Joseph Martin, a frontiersman, soldier, and Indian agent, established Martin's Station near here, one of the westernmost outposts of colonial settlement and a vital waystation for pioneers pressing into the trans-Appalachian frontier. This monument honors Martin alongside the more than 200,000 settlers who braved that hard country to push the boundaries of the young nation.

Clifton, TX

The Joseph Olson family sailed from Norway in 1858 and settled among fellow Norwegian immigrants in Bosque County's Norse community. In 1866 Olson raised a log cabin on his small farm, where the family lived until a stone house replaced it in 1872. The cabin stayed in the family for generations and was moved and reconstructed on this site in 1985 to honor the area's Norwegian heritage.

North Andover, MA

This memorial honors Joseph P. McDonough, a veteran of the World War and a North Andover town official, erected by his neighbors in 1931. In the years after the 1918 Armistice, New England communities raised countless tributes to residents who had served overseas and then returned to civic life. McDonough was remembered for both his wartime service and his work on behalf of the town.

Boston, MA

Dedicated to the veterans of "the World War" — the name Americans used for World War I before a second one made numbering necessary — this memorial honors the young men of a Boston neighborhood who answered the call in 1917 and 1918. More than four million Americans served in that war, and cities and parishes across the country raised tablets like this one to their local sons. The singular phrasing dates the memorial to the years before a second world war made "the Great War" one of two.

New York, NY

In postwar New York, Joseph Papp built an American theater empire from a radical idea: that Shakespeare belonged to everyone, for free. Beginning in Central Park in 1954 and founding The Public Theater in 1967, he championed hundreds of productions and made a downtown home for new and diverse voices in the American stage. He lived at this address during the height of that work, from 1973 until his death in 1991.

Groesbeck, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1810, Joseph Penn Lynch served as both private and captain in the army of the young Republic of Texas and took part in the 1836 San Jacinto campaign that won Texas independence. He died at Springfield, Texas, in 1860. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1962 to honor his service in the revolution.

Palo Pinto County, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1823, Joseph Peter Davidson came to Palo Pinto County around 1856 and set up a trading post near this site. In 1865 he started a ranch in what became Eastland County and helped organize that county, serving as its official surveyor and helping found a Methodist church and Masonic lodge. Married three times, he fathered fourteen children and lies buried with many descendants in the family cemetery near his homestead.

Northumberland, PA · est. 1947

Fleeing political and religious persecution in England, the chemist and Unitarian thinker Joseph Priestley settled in Northumberland from 1794 to 1804 and built a home and laboratory beside the river. Famous as an early isolator of oxygen, he spent his American years continuing his scientific and theological work in this quiet Susquehanna town, which now preserves the site as a museum.