Search Markers

Dallas, TX

Dallas cemented its place as North Texas's commercial hub when the Texas & Pacific and Houston & Texas Central lines crossed here in 1873. City and county leaders had paid the H&TC $5,000 to bend its route toward town, then engineered a legislative rider forcing the T&P to cross near Browder's Springs — conveniently close to the courthouse — before sweetening the deal with bonds and right-of-way along what became Pacific Avenue. The result was one of Texas's first rail crossroads.

New Braunfels, TX

The meeting of the Guadalupe and Comal rivers was claimed for the King of Spain by Gov. Martín de Alarcón on May 8, 1718, and long served priests and soldiers traveling to East Texas. In 1845 a ferry run here by Adolph von Wedemeyer helped German immigrants settle Central Texas, and by the 1860s the spot held a brick kiln and tannery.

Junction, TX

In 1895, business leader Ernest Holekamp had a canal dug from the South Llano River to power Junction's grist mill, cotton gin, and sawmill while supplying water to homes—the town's first waterworks. Known as the Junction City Milling Company, the system changed hands six times before the city bought it in 1928. Holekamp, who arrived in 1881, became the first president of the county bank and Junction's first mayor.

Galveston, TX

Though Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation declared enslaved people in the rebelling states free as of January 1863, the news—and the Union power to enforce it—did not reach Texas until the Civil War was over. On June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and read General Order No. 3, informing the people of Texas that all slaves were free. Freed African Americans began marking "Emancipation Day" the very next year, and the celebration grew into Juneteenth, which became a Texas state holiday in 1979 and is now observed around the world.

Bastrop, TX

Joe Jung, a Bohemian-Austrian immigrant, built this Bastrop house in 1873, using sun-dried brick in its original two rooms. The Pearcy family purchased the home in 1936, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Mifflintown, PA · est. 1982

Juniata County, split from Mifflin County in 1831, takes its name from the scenic river that threads through it. For generations the valley served as a natural highway: first the footpaths of Native travelers, then a turnpike, a canal, and finally the railroad, each layering a new mode of movement onto the same route through the mountains. Mifflintown, the county seat, was incorporated in 1833 as this corridor of trade and travel matured.

Worth Township, PA · est. 1947

Between 1790 and 1850 the streams of this region powered dozens of charcoal furnaces and forges, and the metal they produced—known as Juniata iron—was reckoned the finest in America. Its ruins still line the valleys, silent monuments to a once-thriving trade. The industry's long reign came to a close as coal- and coke-fired methods overtook the older charcoal process.

Cromwell Township, PA · est. 1947

Between 1790 and 1850, the streams of the Juniata region powered dozens of charcoal iron furnaces and forges whose ruins still dot the landscape. Juniata iron earned a reputation as the finest in America, prized for its purity and strength in an age before industrial steelmaking. The industry's reign ended in the mid-19th century as ironmakers shifted to coal and coke fuel, drawing production toward the coalfields and cities.

Morris Township, PA · est. 1947

Between 1790 and 1850, the streams of the Juniata region powered dozens of charcoal iron furnaces and forges whose ruins still dot the landscape. Juniata iron earned a reputation as the finest in America, prized for its purity and strength in an age before industrial steelmaking. The industry's reign ended in the mid-19th century as ironmakers shifted to coal and coke fuel, drawing production toward the coalfields and cities.

Oliver Township, PA · est. 1947

Between 1790 and 1850 the streams of this region powered a cluster of charcoal-fired iron furnaces and forges whose product, known as Juniata iron, was prized as the finest in America. Fueled by hardwood charcoal and local ore, these ironworks made the valley an early industrial heartland. Their reign ended as furnaces fired by coal and coke—cheaper and larger in scale—rose to dominate the trade, leaving only ruins along the water.

Woodbury Township, PA · est. 2015

Between 1790 and 1850 the streams of Morrison Cove powered dozens of charcoal furnaces and forges that turned local ore into some of the finest iron in the country, a trade known as Juniata Iron. Springfield Furnace ran from 1820 to 1884 alongside eleven others, and ironmaster Samuel Royer built his mansion here in 1815. The industry faded once coal and coke made larger, cheaper iron possible.

City of Glen Cove, NY

This plaque marks the Justice Court Building's 1990 addition to the National Register of Historic Places, the federal government's official roll of sites judged worthy of preservation. Buildings like this once housed the local courts and civic offices that handled a community's everyday legal business. Its recognition reflects Glen Cove's effort to safeguard the landmarks of its municipal past.

Frankfort, KY

Built in 1812, this was the Frankfort home of Thomas Todd, a Virginia-born jurist who served as clerk to the Danville conventions that brought Kentucky to statehood before rising through the young state's courts. President Jefferson appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served from 1807 until his death in 1826. His second marriage, to Dolley Madison's sister Lucy Payne Washington, was the first wedding ever recorded in the White House.

Justin, TX

The town of Justin sits where the Denton, Oliver, and Trail creeks meet in the North Texas prairie, long home to Native American peoples before white settlement. Its ground holds layered histories: the 1841 death of John B. Denton at the Village Creek Battle, an 1848 Icarian colony of French socialist immigrants that collapsed within two years, and Texas Ranger protection for settlers from Missouri and elsewhere. The town took its name from railroad engineer Walter Justin Sherman when the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway came through, and by 1914 it bustled with elevators, gins, and a flour mill.

East Bernard, TX

Beginning in the 1880s, Czech immigrants settled around East Bernard, and in 1889 Catholic Czechs founded a mutual-aid society, the K.J.T., to offer insurance and fellowship. In 1905 the men of Holy Cross parish chartered local Society No. 40 and by 1913 built a hall that became a social hub for conventions, bazaars, and klobase-kolache festivals. Successive halls burned and were rebuilt, and the society thrives today with more than 500 members.

Temple, TX

This Bell County family burial ground took its name when Keeton McLemore Jones was laid to rest here in 1890. A farmer and stage stop operator, Jones had fought in the Texas War for Independence, guarding the baggage camp opposite Harrisburg during the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto before moving his large family to the Howard community in 1865. His wife Laura Ann and a granddaughter rest beside him, making the plot a compact monument to one pioneering Texas clan.

Baytown, TX

The Goose Creek oil boom of the early 20th century swelled the population around Baytown, and in 1928 twenty founding members organized the K'Nesseth Israel congregation to serve the area's Jewish families. They hired Houston architect Leonard Gabert, whose 1930 synagogue featured a barrel-vaulted roof, round-headed stained glass, and an arched brick entry.

Honolulu, HI

This 2018 plaque honors the many O'ahu residents who, over four decades, resisted urban development along the wild Ka Iwi coastline between Hanauma and Makapu'u. Guided by aloha 'aina—love of the land—they helped preserve the coast's natural landscape, native plant habitats, and cultural sites. It commemorates one of Hawai'i's long-running grassroots conservation movements.

Electra, TX

Amid the Great Depression, as the shallow wells of the KMA Field ran dry, veteran operator George E. Kadane and his sons gambled on drilling deep where geologists saw little promise. On November 11, 1937, they struck oil at 3,800 feet, bringing in the Mangold No. 1 as a gusher and sparking a fresh Wichita County boom at the spot mapped as "Kadane Corner." The field they helped open eventually yielded some 250 million barrels from more than 2,000 wells over forty years.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Congregation Mikveh Israel traces its roots to about 1740, when Philadelphia's small community of Jewish settlers first gathered to worship in rented rooms. In 1782, in the young republic taking shape after independence, they built the city's first synagogue on this ground. One of the oldest congregations in the nation, it wove Jewish life into the fabric of colonial and early American Philadelphia.

Honolulu, HI

Kāhi Hāli‘a Aloha — "The Place of Loving Remembrance" — marks a Native Hawaiian burial ground, a sacred resting place for ancestral iwi (bones) in the Hawaiian tradition that regards such remains as living links between the living and their forebears. In Hawaiian culture the care and protection of iwi kūpuna is a profound spiritual duty. The name itself invites all who pass to honor the ancestors laid here with reverence.

Marshall, TX

In 1909 three Marshall physicians pooled their resources to answer a growing need for a hospital, opening a small facility in the former home and sanitarium of Dr. John H. Pope. A patient's estate funded the bulk of the effort, giving the twelve-bed hospital the Kahn name, and nursing training began in 1911. Sustained again and again by community and county support, it expanded across the decades and integrated its staff, hiring its first female physician in 1957 and welcoming African American doctors in 1964.

Jefferson, TX

Built in the early 1860s as a boarding house and mercantile, this Jefferson landmark became the Kahn Saloon around 1900, a lively gathering place in a busy East Texas river town. Temperance crusader Carrie Nation was turned away at its door during a Texas campaign, and young Marion Try Slaughter — later famous as country recording pioneer Vernon Dalhart — got an early start singing here. Local prohibitionists shuttered the saloon after an 1907 election, and the building went on to serve as a newspaper office, lodge, furniture store, and funeral home.

Columbus, TX

When John Frederick Kaiser and his family stepped off the boat from Bremen in 1848, they joined a wave of German immigrants already settling the blackland country around Frelsburg and the Brushy community in newly organized Colorado County. In 1859 Ludwig and Anna Kaiser deeded a small parcel for a school and burial ground, and Ludwig's death the following winter opened the cemetery that still bears the family name. Its German-inscribed headstones, Confederate and later veterans' graves, and clustered family plots trace the arc of a rural German-Texan community from the Republic era through the twentieth century.

La Grange, TX

This Gothic Revival house, built in 1885-86 with projecting bays, a corner entry, and ornate detailing, became home to the Kallus family in 1916. Frank J. Kallus, a Moravian immigrant who came to Texas in 1890, taught school in nearby Ellinger before moving to La Grange, where he served as a county official and lawyer. The home passed to his daughter Anna and stands as a record of Fayette County's Central European heritage.

Hawaiʻi County, HI

Lot Kapuāiwa reigned as Kamehameha V from 1863 until his death in 1872, the last ruler to carry the Kamehameha name. He worked to restore authority to the Hawaiian throne—promulgating a new constitution in 1864 that strengthened the monarchy—and his reign was marked by public improvements across the islands.

Port Lavaca, TX

John William McKamey, born in Arkansas in 1878, graduated from Baylor University in 1899 and returned to Texas to help run his family's cotton farm. With relatives and a partner he acquired more than 8,000 acres that became the Kamey Community, moving there in 1912 to raise cattle, cotton, and grain sorghum with his wife Maude. A rail depot, a one-teacher school, a post office, and a long-lived general store grew up around the family, whose descendants still work the land.

Austin, TX

The Beta Xi chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma was chartered at the University of Texas in 1902, and its house association formed in 1936. Construction of this three-story Georgian Revival sorority house began in 1938 to a design by noted Houston architect Birdsall P. Briscoe, complete with a two-story entry porch, Ionic columns, and Greek detailing along the cornices.

Jamaica Beach, TX

This coastal site was one of several campsites and burial grounds of the Karankawa, the nomadic people who lived along the Texas Gulf and drew their survival from its waters. They aided the shipwrecked Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca in 1528 but resisted later intruders, from La Salle's 1685 French expedition onward. Devastated by disease and conflict with pirates and Anglo-American settlers, the Karankawa had all but vanished from Texas by the 1840s; the campsite was rediscovered in 1962.

Corpus Christi, TX

The Karankawas were nomadic bands who lived along the Texas coast from Galveston Bay to the Corpus Christi area, fishing and gathering roots and cactus fruit and famously smearing themselves with alligator grease against mosquitoes. Among the first Native people met by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish explorers, they were friendly at first but later feared, and Spanish attempts to gather them into missions failed. Never numerous, they were ravaged by European diseases and by nineteenth-century warfare with Lafitte's pirates and Anglo colonists; the last remnants fled to Mexico around 1843, and the tribe vanished by about 1858.

Lockhart, TX

Lockhart cotton buyer Julius W. Karbach had this two-story house built in 1911, blending Victorian and classical revival styling under builder Louis Neeb. In 1924 it passed to Martin Owen Flowers, a former city attorney who went on to become Caldwell County judge and, in 1939–41, Texas secretary of state under Governor W. Lee O'Daniel. The home thus reflects both the cotton economy and the political life of early twentieth-century central Texas.

Comfort, TX

Saloon owner Ernst Karger had this building raised in 1913 next to his business in the German-founded town of Comfort. Its first tenant was Fritz Anderwald's pool hall, and over the years a succession of enterprises followed, including a cabinet shop that swapped the storefront for garage doors before a later restoration. The frame building's showpiece is its decorative pressed-metal facade, pediment, and siding, manufactured by the George L. Mesker & Co. of Evansville, Indiana.

Spring Branch, TX

Established in 1867, the Karl Haas Cemetery dates to the years just after the Civil War, when German immigrant families were settling the rolling country of Comal County in the Texas Hill Country. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2018, it is one of the small family and community burial grounds that mark the enduring presence of the region's early German-Texan settlers.

Holmdel Township, NJ

In 1932, Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky, working at this Holmdel site, detected radio waves coming from beyond the Earth while investigating sources of static on radio calls. Tracing the mysterious hiss to the sky, he found it came from the direction of the Milky Way's center — the first radio emissions ever recorded from space. From this quiet New Jersey field grew the entirely new science of radio astronomy.

Doss, TX

Karl Kensing was born in Germany in 1828 and immigrated to Texas with his family in 1845, three of the children surviving to settle in Fredericksburg by 1850. On their Hill Country property the Kensings set aside a small family burial ground, where Karl became the first known interment alongside his wife and later descendants. The graves, moving from traditional German inscriptions to simple English ones, quietly chart the passage from immigrant pioneers to their American-born children.

Nacogdoches, TX

From the early 1900s, the East Texas town of Nacogdoches was home to Karle Wilson Baker, one of the state's most celebrated writers. Arkansas-born and college-trained, she first published a poem in Harper's in 1903 and went on to become the most frequently published poet in the Yale Review, with collections issued by Yale University Press. Dubbed "The Poet of Quiet Things," she wrote poems, essays and historical novels set in East Texas, saw her 1931 collection nominated for a Pulitzer, and taught for a decade at Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College, for which she wrote an early school song.

Karnes City, TX

Founded in the Christmas season of 1890 when Otto Buchel's partnership bought 1,000 acres beside the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad, the town was first named for Texas Ranger hero Henry W. Karnes before 'City' was added with its 1891 post office. It grew so fast that by 1894 voters moved the county seat here from Helena. In its railroad heyday six passenger trains a day rolled through a town built on ranching, farming, uranium, oil, and gas.

Karnes City, TX

Karnes County's seat of government followed the railroad. When Helena failed to win the San Antonio and Aransas Pass line in the 1880s, W.G. Butler's land donation drew the tracks through the new town of Karnes City, which soon eclipsed the old county seat and claimed the courthouse in 1893. Built by contractor John Cormack and completed in 1895 with Second Empire and Richardsonian Romanesque flourishes, the courthouse was stripped of its towers over the decades before a 2011–2018 restoration returned it to its original grandeur.

Karthaus Township, PA · est. 1948

Near this spot Peter Karthaus built an iron furnace in 1817, part of the early push to work the ore and timber of Pennsylvania's Clearfield County wilderness. Rebuilt in 1836, the furnace made a notable experiment in 1839 as one of the earliest in the region to try coke in place of charcoal for smelting iron. The venture proved short-lived and was abandoned that same year, but it foreshadowed the fuel revolution that would soon transform American iron.

Shiner, TX

When barbed wire replaced smooth fencing in the 1890s, August Kaspar — son of a Swiss Lutheran missionary — salvaged the discarded plain wire and, in 1895, twisted it into a corn-shuck basket. A neighbor's purchase turned a backyard hobby into a business; by 1898 Kaspar was manufacturing wire baskets and horse muzzles full time, armed with little more than pliers and ingenuity. Passed down through three generations, the firm grew into a maker of display and newspaper racks and shelving sold worldwide, earning the first Governor's Expansion Award in 1967.

Salado, TX

Kate Crawford, a Salado schoolteacher, married pastor Zachary Clay Taylor on Christmas Day 1881, and their church commissioned them that same day as missionaries to Brazil. Arriving in 1882, they helped organize a Portuguese-speaking Baptist congregation, with Kate translating evangelistic writings into Portuguese until her death from cancer in 1894. Zachary remained in Brazil until 1909, returning to Texas only to drown in the great 1919 hurricane that devastated Corpus Christi.

Sabine Pass, TX

Georgia native Kate Dorman ran the Catfish Hotel at Sabine Pass from the late 1840s, weathering widowhood and remarriage before turning her hotel into a hospital during an 1862 yellow fever epidemic. A fierce Confederate supporter, she braved enemy fire to carry food to Lt. Dick Dowling's men during the 1863 Battle of Sabine Pass. Her wartime courage made her a local legend of the Texas coast.

Town/Village of East Rochester, NY

Kate Gleason (1865–1933) was a Rochester-area pioneer who broke barriers in engineering, machine-tool manufacturing, and real-estate development at a time when few women entered such fields. She worked in her family's Gleason Works, an internationally known gear-cutting machine company, and later became the first woman admitted to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the first woman to head a national bank. After her death, her estate funded community improvements, including this memorial erected in 1949.

Post, TX

This marker remembers Kate McCommis, who died in February 1884 on the very day she was born, attended only by her young cowboy father amid the hardships of frontier life. Recorded as a Texas historic landmark in 1968, her small grave stands as a witness to the isolation and peril of the open range. It speaks to the countless unrecorded losses that shadowed pioneer families.

New York, NY

From 1921 to 1952, the acclaimed stage actress Katharine Cornell and her director husband Guthrie McClintic made their home here, building a creative partnership that reached across the Broadway stage. Their production company mounted celebrated shows including The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Romeo and Juliet, and The Three Sisters, and toured for American troops through the U.S.O. during World War II. Together they helped define the golden age of the American theater.

Bensalem Township, PA · est. 2004

Born to a wealthy Philadelphia banking family, Katharine Drexel turned her inheritance toward the people her era most neglected. After professing her vows in 1891 she founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and spent more than four decades building mission schools and churches for Native and African American communities, including Holy Providence School near this spot. In 2000 the Catholic Church recognized her as a saint.

Brownwood, TX

Born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek in 1890, the writer who became Katherine Anne Porter lost her mother young and left Texas in 1915 for a restless life as actress, teacher, reporter, and publicist across Chicago, Denver, Mexico, and New York. Her first collection of stories appeared in 1930, and she won lasting fame with the novel "Ship of Fools" and a Pulitzer Prize for her collected stories in 1965. When she died in 1980 her ashes were returned home, buried beside her mother in Indian Creek Cemetery.

Kyle, TX

Born Callie Russell Porter in 1890, the future writer spent her Texas childhood in Kyle after her mother's death, raised in part by the grandmother whose name she would later adopt. She left the state in 1915, became a journalist, and rose to the front rank of American fiction with collections like "Flowering Judas" and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Collected Stories." By her wish, her ashes were returned to Texas to rest beside her mother's grave.

Wilmot, NH

This quiet spot in the hills of Wilmot was once the beloved country retreat of Katherine Raynore, a New York City stage actress of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When she died in 1931, the land she had cherished passed to the Douglass family of Belmont, Massachusetts, who in 1933 gave it to the State of New Hampshire in her memory. A later member of the family, Donald C. Douglass, added this remembrance in 1972, keeping her name attached to the place she loved through the decades.

Ennis, TX

Katie Litty Daffan built a remarkable public career at a time when few women did, working as a teacher, author, journalist, and clubwoman. She served as an officer of the Texas State Historical Association, wrote several books including a Texas history textbook, and edited the literary pages of the Houston Chronicle from 1921 to 1928. Deeply active in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, she led the Confederate Woman's Home in Austin from 1911 to 1918, and later taught and wrote a column in Ennis, where she died in 1951.

Yoakum, TX

Czech immigrant women worked farms as equals to men, yet insurers refused them life policies, leaving families exposed to the costs of illness and death. In 1894, Anna Jakubik and Marie Yurek of Yoakum founded the Katolika Jednota Zen Texaskych (Catholic Women's Union of Texas), a mutual-aid society that grew to 60 chapters and over 8,000 members by 1917. Uniquely staffed entirely by women, it evolved into a financial institution offering insurance, loans, and scholarships—and even published a Czech-language newspaper with hard news, rare for a women's publication of the era.

New Orleans, LA

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, breaching New Orleans's levees and flooding roughly four-fifths of the city in one of the deadliest and costliest disasters in American history. These storm-killed trees, left standing as stark sculpture, were dedicated on the fifth anniversary by University of New Orleans students as a living reminder of the storm's force and the city's long recovery.

Hillsboro, TX

When the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) line reached Hillsboro in 1881, it stitched the growing town into the national rail network, and this handsome depot—completed in 1902 in a blend of Eastlake, Victorian, and Prairie styles—became its front door. Katy trains hauled building materials and new residents into town and, over the years, carried notable travelers including presidents Wilson, Taft, Coolidge, and Truman. Moved from its original site in 1978, the station preserves the era when the railroad was a small town's lifeline to the wider world.

Calvert, TX

When railroads turned Calvert into a cotton-trade center, its women joined the national club movement, chartering an American Woman's League chapter in 1908. On land donated by Ella Hamman, the league built this Prairie-style chapter house in 1909, complete with a commissioned bas-relief titled "Woman's Mission." Though the league soon folded, local women revived it as the Calvert Woman's Club and ran a community library from the building for decades.

Iola, TX

Katy Holland came to Texas in 1822 as a seven-year-old, part of Stephen F. Austin's celebrated "Old 300" colony of Anglo settlers. Her life laid bare the brutality of the frontier: twice widowed before she married William Cobb in the 1840s, she raised five children through hardship and loss. Her first husband was himself an Austin colonist, and her cousin Tapley Holland died at the Alamo.

Waco, TX

At the turn of the 20th century, baseball fever gripped Waco, and city leaders built a ballpark near the MKT ("Katy") rail line. Under baseball man Henry Fabian, teams came and went — the Tigers, Cubs, and Pirates — and the park hosted a 1929 exhibition where Babe Ruth waded into the crowd to check on a boy his line drive had struck. Segregation shaped the diamond too: Negro League clubs like the Kansas City Monarchs played here, and the final games in 1965 were part of a statewide tournament of African American teams.

Kaufman, TX

Created and organized in 1848 in the first years of Texas statehood, this county took the name of David Spangler Kaufman, a lawyer who reached Nacogdoches in 1837 and rose through the Congress of the Republic of Texas before winning a seat in the U.S. Congress. The marker stands in the county seat that also bears his name, a common frontier practice of anchoring a new county's identity to a favorite son. Kaufman's short life spanned the arc from independent republic to American state.

Kaufman, TX

This burial ground is part of a 600-acre poor farm that Kaufman County opened in 1883 to care for its indigent residents. It became the final resting place for poor-farm residents, jail inmates, transients, and paupers, and may first have received anonymous victims of an 1871 typhoid epidemic. Though most graves are unmarked, the earliest identified belongs to a poor-farm inmate who died the year the farm opened.

Kaufman, TX

Like many Texas counties in the 1880s, Kaufman County opened a poor farm in 1883 to shelter and feed indigent residents while replacing older, ad hoc relief. All able-bodied residents worked the land, and by 1893 even county inmates convicted of minor crimes lived on site; in the 1930s the farm doubled as a showcase for new agricultural methods. Usually filled to capacity, it operated into the 1970s, leaving behind a cemetery and a few buildings.

Scurry, TX

The first Masonic lodge in Kaufman County sat in the town of Kaufman, but in the 1880s impassable rain-soaked roads pushed sixteen members to seek a charter closer to home in the young town of Scurry. Kaufman Lodge No. 726, A.F. & A.M., was chartered in December 1891 and became a hub of community life, weathering fires and lean times as it moved from building to building. In keeping with Masonic tradition, its members raised funds for neighbors in need and supplied leaders for Scurry through good years and bad.