Search Markers

Point Township, PA · est. 1947

The English chemist and Unitarian theologian Joseph Priestley, celebrated for isolating oxygen, made his home in Northumberland from 1794 to 1804 after leaving England. His riverside house and laboratory, now preserved as a memorial and museum, became a base for his scientific inquiry and dissenting faith during his final decade in America.

Northumberland, PA · est. 1963

From 1794 to 1804 this house on the Susquehanna was home to Joseph Priestley, the English clergyman and chemist celebrated for isolating oxygen and other gases. A political and religious radical, Priestley fled England after mobs burned his home for his sympathies with the American and French revolutions, and he rebuilt his life and laboratory in the new republic. Here in Northumberland he continued his experiments and helped seed a scientific tradition in his adopted country.

Grapeland, TX

A native of Louisiana, Joseph Randolph Yarbrough served in the Texas War for Independence, standing guard at the camp opposite Harrisburg during the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He and his father signed the 1837 petition that created Houston County, and after marrying Phebe Clementine Crawford in 1840, he settled near Grapeland and raised a family of eleven children. His life traces the arc from revolutionary soldier to founding settler.

Houston County, TX

Joseph and Willie Rice came from Tennessee to the Texas wilderness, settling into a log cabin near this spot by 1828—well before Texas won its independence. Together they raised a large family whose births and deaths, carefully recorded on the marker, span the hard decades of frontier life. Many of the Rices rest in the family plot here, rooted to the ground they helped settle.

Oil City, PA · est. 1997

In the boomtown decades after Pennsylvania's Oil City became a hub of the world's first petroleum industry, Joseph Reid founded his gas engine works here in 1894. The company's rugged single-piston engine became a workhorse for pumping wells, shipped to oilfields around the globe until the firm shut its doors in 1939. It was a classic example of the specialized machine-building that grew up alongside the oil that made the region famous.

Bristol, PA · est. 2008

Joseph Ridgway Grundy rose from Bristol's textile mills to become one of the most powerful figures in Pennsylvania and national Republican politics. An industrialist, publisher, and banker, he founded the Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association in 1909 and championed pro-business, low-tax, high-tariff policies, briefly serving as U.S. Senator in 1929–1930. His fortune still funds a foundation, library, and museum bearing his name.

West Pennsboro Township, PA · est. 1951

Joseph Ritner, a Berks County–born farmer of German stock, served as Pennsylvania's governor from 1835 to 1839. His lasting achievement was defending and putting into practice the Free School Act of 1834, which established Pennsylvania's public school system over fierce opposition from those who resented the tax. He is buried in this cemetery, having died in 1869 near Carlisle.

Corsicana, TX

Joseph S. Cullinan learned the oil business the hard way, starting at fourteen as a laborer in the Pennsylvania fields. Drawn to Texas after the 1894 Corsicana discovery, he became a driving force in the young state's petroleum industry, organizing companies—including the enterprise that became Texaco—and integrating exploration, production, refining, and marketing. He also pressed for early conservation and anti-waste legislation as the industry exploded.

Raritan, NJ

By the summer of 1921, the guns of the Great War had been silent for over two years, yet the United States was still technically at war: the Senate had rejected the Treaty of Versailles, and no formal peace existed between America and the Central Powers. The resolution came on a quiet New Jersey weekend. Visiting the Raritan estate of his friend and ally Senator Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, President Warren G. Harding sat down here on July 2, 1921, and signed the Knox–Porter Resolution, a joint act of Congress that at last declared the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary over. A momentous close to a world conflict was thus put to paper far from the marble of Washington, in a senator's country home.

Spring Branch, TX

Built in the late 1860s by German settler Bernhard Joseph Scheel and his wife Anna Barbara, this Comal County farmhouse used hand-cut faced local stone, native cedar timber, and cypress shingles. The home stayed in the family for generations, passing to son Hermann and grandson John.

Lancaster, PA · est. 2006

In the mid-1700s, Lancaster sat on the edge of the British colonies' expanding frontier, a bustling inland hub where traders outfitted expeditions toward the Ohio country and beyond. Joseph Simon, a Jewish merchant, built a far-reaching network of trade and land ventures that reached as far as the Mississippi, and when the Revolution came he helped arm the Continental cause. His home doubled as one of the earliest gathering places for Jewish worship west of Philadelphia.

Great Bend Township, PA · est. 1947

In the years before 1830, the young Joseph Smith spent time in this part of the Susquehanna Valley, where — according to Latter-day Saint tradition — much of the translation work that produced the Book of Mormon was carried out. The site, a few miles from this marker, became one of the formative locations in the origins of a distinctly American religious movement. The land is preserved by the church that grew from Smith's work.

Oakland Township, PA · est. 1948

In the late 1820s a young Joseph Smith lived in this stretch of the Susquehanna valley, where his wife Emma's family had roots. Here, at a house nearby, he carried out much of the work he described as translating the golden plates into the Book of Mormon, the founding scripture of the movement he would lead. An infant son of his is buried in this cemetery.

Seguin, TX

Joseph Sonka left Czech-speaking Central Europe and reached Seguin in 1878, bringing a stonemason's skill to a growing Texas town. He ran a brickyard and cotton gin, and beginning in 1881 he spent more than a decade building this Italianate-trimmed brick home from his own bricks, finishing it the year he married Annie Klicka. For two years the house even served as a community hospital before settling into generations of Sonka family life.

Wichita Falls, TX

Missouri-born Joseph Sterling Bridwell arrived in Wichita Falls in 1909, moved from real estate into oil leases, and by the 1920s ran his own drilling and oil companies, helping found the producers' association that became the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. A passionate rancher as well, he built a celebrated Hereford herd and poured his fortune into public gifts — parkland, water for Lake Arrowhead, the land that brought Sheppard Field to the city, and a foundation still funding charities and universities.

Houston County, TX

Joseph T. Bowman came to Texas in 1835 as the son of Jesse B. Bowman, who would die defending the Alamo. That December he signed the Goliad Declaration of Independence calling for Texas to break free, and after the revolution he served in the army of the Republic of Texas. He settled with his family in the Houston County area around 1845.

McVeytown, PA · est. 1947

Joseph T. Rothrock was born on this spot on April 9, 1839, and grew up to become the father of Pennsylvania's state forest system. At a time when the state's woodlands had been stripped bare by unchecked logging, he championed reforestation, scientific forestry, and organized fire control, helping launch the state forests that still cover the mountains around him. He is remembered as one of the founders of the American conservation movement.

West Chester, PA · est. 1952

Joseph Trimble Rothrock lived in this West Chester house from 1876 until his death in 1922, during the decades when Pennsylvania's forests were being stripped bare by logging and fire. A physician turned botanist and reformer, he championed the idea that the state should own and manage forests as a public trust, and he became Pennsylvania's first forestry commissioner. His campaigns for fire control, reforestation, and scientific management laid the groundwork for the state forest system.

Athens, TX

Joseph Thomas La Rue (1864–1930) served on Athens' first city council in 1901 and wore many hats—educator, merchant, banker, and civic booster—with the nearby town of La Rue named in his honor. In 1892 he married Stella Elvira Parsons (1874–1949), the daughter of a physician, and together they raised seven children. Warmly remembered in their community, the couple embodied the merchant-civic leadership that knit together small East Texas towns around the turn of the twentieth century.

Columbus, TX

Joseph V. Frnka, born in the Czech-Texan community of Industry, built this Columbus home in 1906 and taught himself law well enough to join the Texas Bar in 1915. He served in the Texas House in the 1920s, rose to assistant state attorney general, and after World War II sat as a prosecutor and judge with the U.S. military government in occupied Germany.

San Marcos, TX

Tennessee native Joseph W. Earnest came to Hays County with his family in 1854 and grew up to serve in both the Texas Rangers and the Confederate army before making his mark as a merchant and cattleman. In 1892 he hired local builder Charles Sinz to raise this Victorian home in San Marcos, where his niece Mary Cock was reared and which later passed to her and her husband Irvin Rylander.

Mexia, TX

Born into a family of horticulturists in Rhenish Bavaria and educated in Germany, Joseph W. Stubenrauch emigrated to New York in 1871 and to Texas in 1876, buying 100 acres of open prairie in Limestone County. Finding the region's fruit unsuited to the climate, he used cross-pollination, budding, and grafting to develop some 100 new peach varieties, more than twenty of them grown commercially. A tireless writer and advocate for terracing, crop rotation, soil testing, and irrigation, he saw many of his conservation ideas absorbed into U.S. government farm programs and won national recognition.

Baytown, TX

Joseph William Ellender's Texas story began with disaster: a British seaman, he was shipwrecked off Iceland in 1866 and rescued by a schooner bound for Galveston. He settled at Cedar Bayou, married Nancy Lavenia Prather in 1868, and raised ten children while becoming a pillar of the community. A dedicated Master Mason, he served three times as worshipful master of Cedar Bayou Lodge, founded its Order of the Eastern Star chapter in 1884, and rose to statewide fraternal leadership.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 2005

In the decades after the Civil War, Chambersburg was home to Joseph Winters, a Black inventor whose ingenuity turned a common danger into a solvable problem. In 1878 he patented a wagon-mounted fire escape ladder with a hose conductor, then improved on it the next year — innovations that helped firefighters reach upper stories and save lives. Before that, Winters had risked his own freedom and safety aiding those escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad.

Portland, OR

This Portland park was donated to the public in 1935 in honor of Dr. Joseph Wood Hill, an educator who came to Oregon in 1878 to run the Bishop Scott Grammar and Divinity School. He introduced military training, renamed the institution Bishop Scott Academy in 1887, and founded Hill Military Academy in 1901. His sons dedicated the park for educational, scientific, and recreational purposes.

San Patricio, TX

In 1863 Josepha "Chipita" Rodríguez, an aging woman who hosted travelers on the Cotton Road near the Aransas River, was hanged for the murder of horse trader John Savage. Though the missing gold was recovered before trial and the jury urged leniency on the circumstantial evidence, the judge sentenced her to death, and she was executed that November—the last woman legally executed in Texas until 1998. Doubts about the trial's fairness, lost court records, and lingering discrepancies turned her case into enduring local lore, and in 1985 the Texas Legislature formally absolved her.

Josephine, TX

Josephine began as a father's gift: when the St. Louis Southwestern Railway pushed through in 1887, Jesse Hubbard donated four acres for a town named after his daughter. Nearby churches from Reed's Chapel relocated to the new rail town, and by the early twentieth century Josephine boasted a drug store, soda fountain, silent movie theater, and bank. Fires in 1910 and 1935 repeatedly leveled its business district, but New Deal aid rebuilt its school and the town endured to incorporate in 1955.

Newton, TX

Josephus S. Irvine came to Texas as a boy in 1830 and, at seventeen, took his place among the soldiers who won Texas independence at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He went on to serve as a major in a Texas regiment of the Confederacy during the Civil War and as a Masonic Grand Lodge chaplain. This state marker honors a life that spanned the founding of the Republic and the war that divided the nation.

Huntsville, TX

Built of native pine logs during the depths of the Great Depression, this Huntsville lodge rose from a mix of private generosity and New Deal labor. Oilman Robert A. Josey funded it, the federal Civil Works Administration pitched in, and Gibbs Brothers and Company donated the logs and rock; the dedicated building opened in 1934 with three petrified-stone hearths. For generations it has sheltered Boy Scout troops and community gatherings alike.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1996

Before Major League Baseball opened its doors to Black players, some of the game's greatest talent thundered through the ballparks of the Negro leagues — and few hit harder than Josh Gibson. His career began at Pittsburgh's Ammons Field in 1929, and through the 1930s and '40s he powered the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords with a bat that reportedly launched some 800 home runs. Denied the big-league stage in his lifetime, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972, a quarter century after his early death.

Waxahachie, TX

Organized in 1876, this congregation took the name of its first pastor, the Rev. Joshua Goins, who planted African Methodist Episcopal churches across Texas. Worshipers met in an old schoolhouse until they raised this sanctuary in 1917, designed by the noted Black architect W. S. Pittman in the Romanesque Revival style. It has stood ever since as a landmark of Waxahachie's Black community.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Arriving from Tennessee in 1845, Joshua Foster Johnson settled near the future Mount Vernon and helped found the town—first called Keith—in 1848. In the Third Texas Legislature he sponsored the bill establishing the Mount Vernon Male and Female Academies, an early step toward public schooling, and he sat in both the 1861 Secession Convention and the 1875 Constitutional Convention. A Baptist pastor as well, he helped organize the Mount Vernon Baptist Church.

Pineville, KY

Bell County, formed in 1867 from parts of Harlan and Knox counties, honors Joshua Fry Bell (1811–1870), a congressman, Kentucky secretary of state, and state legislator. In 1861 he served as a commissioner to the Peace Conference that sought, in vain, to head off civil war. He was a great-grandson of Dr. Thomas Walker, who had explored the Kentucky wilderness back in 1750.

Huntsville, TX

Born into slavery in Alabama and brought to Texas in 1840 in the household of Sam and Margaret Houston, Joshua Houston rose after emancipation into one of Walker County's most respected leaders. He built businesses and won public trust as a Huntsville alderman, county commissioner, and delegate to the Republican National Convention. A steadfast champion of Black education, he was buried near the general whose household he had once served.

Haverford Township, PA · est. 1947

Joshua Humphreys, the naval architect who designed the frigate USS Constitution — the legendary "Old Ironsides" — made his home from 1803 to 1838 at the Pont Reading House standing opposite this marker. His heavy, fast, over-built frigates gave the young United States Navy warships that could outfight or outrun anything of comparable size. The house itself grew by stages between 1683 and 1813, a layered piece of early Pennsylvania architecture.

Corry, PA · est. 2008

After oil was struck near Titusville, the Downer Oil Works rose nearby in 1862, and chemist Joshua M. Merrill made it a laboratory of refining. He devised an illuminating oil safer than kerosene for railroads, steamships, and factories, then pioneered deodorized lubricants that opened world markets in the late 1860s. His work earned recognition at Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exhibition.

Moon Township, PA · est. 2008

Joshua Meeks took up arms as a militia captain during the American Revolution and stayed to help build the new republic on the western Pennsylvania frontier, petitioning in 1787 to create Allegheny County. A farmer by trade, he opened his home to serve as a fort in times of danger, a polling place for elections, and a schoolhouse for the community. Through these acts he wove the habits of citizenship into the fabric of a frontier settlement.

Middletown Township, PA · est. 1993

A Civil War veteran and Philadelphia attorney, Joshua Pusey turned an inventor's mind to an everyday problem and in 1892 patented the paper matchbook. He sold the patent to the Diamond Match Company three years later, and soon millions of the little folders were rolling out each year to light stoves, lamps, and cigarettes across the country. One of nearly forty patents in his lifetime, it was the work of a man from an old Quaker family who lived here at his home "Maple Linden."

Hungerford, TX

Josiah Dawson Hudgins, born in 1852 to a pioneer family that reached Texas in 1839, grew from a country storekeeper into a leading rancher of Wharton County. He and his brothers bought land and cattle, ran a cotton gin and gristmill, and moved their community to the new railroad town of Hungerford. In 1906 J.D. imported Brahman cattle suited to the humid Gulf Coast and, with his son Walter, helped develop and organize the American Brahman breed.

Belmont County, OH

Josiah Fox (1763–1847), an English-born Quaker trained in naval architecture, brought his rare expertise to the young United States and helped shape the design of its first warships during the early years of the republic. His influence reached the frigates that would win the new navy its early fame.

West Columbia, TX

One of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, Josiah Hughes Bell was a South Carolina-born hatter who befriended Moses and Stephen Austin in Missouri and served in the militia during the War of 1812. Granted permission to settle Austin's colony in 1821, he served as alcalde, constable, and judge, at times handling Austin's duties during the empresario's travels to Mexico. Bell laid out two towns, developed a sugar plantation, built the area's first hotel, and completed a family home that Stephen F. Austin often used as an office until his death in 1838.

Commerce, TX

Kentucky-born Josiah Hart Jackson reached Texas in 1839 and, in the 1850s, opened a store that seeded a village he called "Cow Hill," complete with race track and blacksmith shop. As postmaster he renamed the place Ashland in 1873, then moved the post office to nearby Commerce at that town's founding. His trading post traces the way a single frontier merchant could conjure a community.

Kerens, TX

Josiah "Joe" Martin Daniel of Kerens left the University of Texas in 1904 when a boll-weevil infestation ruined his family's cotton crop, then built a career in banking and insurance while serving as mayor and in the Texas National Guard. He rode with the U.S. Army pursuing Pancho Villa in West Texas, served as a captain in the 36th Division in World War I, and reached the rank of colonel in the Texas State Guard during World War II. As first chairman of the Veterans Affairs Commission he helped deliver services to more than a million Texas veterans.

Cuero, TX

Josiah Taylor's life traces the violent birth of Texas across three decades. He first rode into the province in 1812 with the Gutiérrez-Magee filibuster, an armed bid to pry Mexico from Spanish rule, and was wounded repeatedly at the disastrous Battle of Medina. Returning with his family in the 1820s, he took a headright in Green DeWitt's colony, and by 1842 five of his sons were riding with Jack Hays' Rangers against a Mexican invasion.

Haskell, TX

Belgian immigrant Victor Josselet joined his brothers in coming to America in 1873, working as Chicago coal miners before farming in Texas, and in 1900 bought a large tract near Haskell to ranch and raise a family of nine. When the Wichita Valley Railroad reached Haskell in 1906, Josselet sold the line a strip for a siding, and "Josselet Switch" became an important cattle-shipping point to the Fort Worth and Kansas City stockyards. The switch gained a depot, store, and fuel station, and much of the original land is still worked by his descendants.

Jourdanton, TX

Jourdan Campbell, son of Campbellton founder John Campbell, grew up in Atascosa County and became a county commissioner in the 1890s. In 1907 he and Col. T. H. Zanderson bought the 33,760-acre Tobey Ranch, part of which became the town of Jourdanton, where Campbell served as bank vice president and lobbied hard for a railroad. His efforts helped make Jourdanton the county seat in 1910 and pushed a highway project linking the county's towns.

Elgin, TX

Georgia-born Jourdan Smith came to Texas in 1836 to fight in its war for independence, earning land from the young Republic for his service. A carpenter and professional builder, he settled in the Young's Prairie community, served as justice of the peace, and passed down land his descendants still hold today.

Jourdanton, TX

In 1909 two entrepreneurs—merchant Jourdan Campbell and Danish wool-and-mohair man Theodore Zanderson—laid out a town on their ranch and persuaded a land speculator to bring the railroad through; the first train arrived that September. Jourdanton quickly gained utilities, a bank, a newspaper and churches, and in 1910 wrested the county seat from Pleasanton. Oil and gas discoveries in the 1940s and later lignite mining kept the town growing well after the railroads stopped running.

Jourdanton, TX

Jourdanton was platted in 1907 after two men bought the 40,000-acre Toby Ranch, and the arrival of the Artesian Belt Railroad made the town boom—with a lumberyard, cotton gin, bank and hotels—so quickly that in 1910 voters moved the county seat here from Pleasanton. The city cemetery, set aside in the original plat, holds early settlers, some hundred veterans including Civil War soldiers, and four sheriffs, its graves ranging from wooden crosses to curbed family plots.

Jourdanton, TX

When early-20th-century enrollment outgrew scattered county schools like the Hilburn School, Jourdanton residents petitioned the legislature and in 1911 won the first independent school district in Atascosa County. They passed bonds for a three-story brick school, later adding a high school, football field, and a WPA-built gymnasium in 1938, before moving to the present campus in 1953. Through two world wars that pulled teachers into service and war-bond drives onto campus, the district kept educating generations who often returned to teach.

Jourdanton, TX

When the railroad town of Jourdanton took shape in 1909, its Methodist congregation organized the same year, worshiping first in a tent before trustees bought a corner lot and raised a frame church in 1910. As the community grew, the congregation rebuilt in 1941, moved and replaced its sanctuary over the following decades, and spun off a lively network of women's, men's and youth societies. The present sanctuary dates to 1964.

Chapel Hill, NC

In April 1947, an interracial group organized by the Congress of Racial Equality set out from Washington, D.C., to test a Supreme Court ruling that barred segregation on interstate buses. These early "freedom riders" reached Chapel Hill on April 13, where a mob attacked one rider and four others were arrested and sentenced to thirty days on chain gangs. Their courage prefigured the more famous Freedom Rides to come.

Corpus Christi, TX

Born in 1904 into a fifth-generation land-grant family near Roma, Texas, Jovita González de Mireles grew up on her grandparents' ranch absorbing the stories and legends of the borderlands. Encouraged by folklorist J. Frank Dobie, she earned degrees in San Antonio and at the University of Texas and became a leading authority on South Texas folklore—the first and only Mexican American woman to preside over the Texas Folklore Society. A longtime Corpus Christi teacher active in LULAC, she wrote novels including Caballero and Dew on the Thorn that were only published decades later, after their rediscovery in university archives.

Laredo, TX

Born in Laredo in 1885, Jovita Idar became a journalist, teacher, and tireless activist for the Mexican-origin community of South Texas during an era of rampant discrimination. Writing for her family's newspaper and helping organize efforts like the 1911 Congreso Mexicanista, she championed education, women's rights, and the dignity of Mexican Americans — famously standing in the doorway of a press to block the Texas Rangers from shutting it down. Her work spanned the newsroom, the classroom, and the front lines of civil rights.

Clay County, TX

The oldest church in the Joy community began in April 1881 as a Methodist Episcopal Church, South, when the settlement was still called Fannin Town. The founders met under an oak tree beside a log schoolhouse, ground now part of Joy Cemetery, and built their first sanctuary in 1891. From frontier camp meetings to modern outreach, the congregation has been a mainstay of rural life for well over a century.

South Park Township, PA

This memorial honors Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918), the American writer best known as a "soldier poet," who was killed in action near Ourcq, France, in the summer of 1918. Kilmer volunteered for service in World War I and died during the fierce fighting of that year's Allied offensives. His verse and his sacrifice made him one of the era's most widely mourned literary figures.

Crane, TX

This natural salt flat in far West Texas has been prized for roughly three centuries, its name a garbled map-maker's version of Juan Cordova, who held a Mexican land grant here. Spanish explorers met Apaches at the site as early as 1683, and generations of Mexicans and Anglo-Texans returned for its salt — during the Civil War a San Saba wagon train even bartered watermelons to Indians here for the scarce mineral. Burro trains hauled salt out as late as the 1910s, and commercial shipments continued into the 1930s.

Anahuac, TX

Juan Davis Bradburn, a Kentucky adventurer turned officer in the Army of the Republic of Mexico, was sent in 1830 to build a military post at the mouth of the Trinity River. His high-handed rule at Fort Anahuac—seizing supplies, arresting a land commissioner, and jailing colonists including William B. Travis and Patrick C. Jack—provoked the 1832 Anahuac Disturbances. Deposed by his own officers, Bradburn fled that July, and returned in 1836 with Santa Anna's army only to lose again.

Mission, TX

John Davis Bradburn was a Virginia-born, Kentucky-raised adventurer who entered Mexico in 1817 to fight for its independence from Spain, later becoming a naturalized citizen and marrying into a prominent family. As the Mexican commander at Anahuac in 1830–32, his clashes with Anglo colonists helped ignite the tensions that led toward the Texas Revolution. Promoted to general in 1832, he died a decade later and is said to be buried on a nearby hill.

San Elizario, TX

As Spain eyed both the mineral and missionary promise of New Mexico and worried over English rivals in the New World, King Philip II commissioned Don Juan de Oñate in 1595 to claim and colonize the region. In January 1598 Oñate led some 400 men and their families north across the Chihuahuan Desert to the El Paso area, where on April 30, 1598, he performed the ceremony called La Toma, taking formal possession of all the land drained by the Rio Grande for Spain. He then pressed north to found the province of New Mexico near present Santa Fe.