Search Markers

Kaufman, TX

The Love family settled near King's Fort in January 1845, and when they sold the surrounding land in 1849 they set aside a quarter acre as a graveyard—its first burial believed to be their son Robert. Among those interred are early county officials, a diarist whose firsthand account preserved the region's early landscape and people, and T. J. Johnson, thought to be the son of an African American couple tied to the Love family. Each headstone opens a window onto the founding generation of Kaufman County.

La Grange, TX

Insurance agent H. B. Kaulbach built this La Grange home in 1885, incorporating five rooms of an earlier house on the site. Designed by architect C. Michaelis, its Victorian exterior shows off a two-story columnar gallery and graceful arches carried on slender turned columns. The house was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Greenville, TX

Kavanaugh Methodist Church began in 1892 as a mission Sunday school and was chartered in 1896, taking its name from Bishop H. H. Kavanaugh. As the congregation outgrew its first four-room brick sanctuary, it built the present classical revival building, dedicated in 1924, with fine brickwork, a raised temple front and fifty art-glass windows. The structure remains a landmark of Greenville's early-20th-century civic and religious life.

Newkirk, OK

Dedicated on Veterans Day 1991 in Newkirk, this Kay County monument honors the county's men and women who served in the nation's wars. Erected in a rural Oklahoma county seat, it reflects the way small communities across the Plains built their own memorials to keep local service and sacrifice in public view. Because it gathers many conflicts under one dedication rather than naming a single war, it stands as a general tribute to military service.

Nash County, NC

Kay Kyser, the self-styled "Ol' Perfesser," turned a dance band into a national sensation as host of radio's "Kollege of Musical Knowledge" from 1938 to 1950, a quiz-and-music show that later moved to television. His childhood home stood just 50 yards south of this marker. He was among the entertainers who defined the golden age of American broadcasting.

Town of Woodstock, NY

This bell was given in 1929 by the children of Peter and Anna Clare Keegan in memory of their parents, and first hung atop the Saint Joan of Arc Chapel in Woodstock. The chapel later became the Mescal Hornbeck Community Center, and the bell that once called worshippers now survives as a keepsake of the town's earlier life. It is a small monument to family devotion and to the way a community's buildings change purpose while their landmarks endure.

San Diego, CA

At this Scripps location, Charles David Keeling planned and directed the pioneering project to measure carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere. Over the following decades, the steady climb in those readings exposed the unmistakable influence of human activity on the planet's air. The American Physical Society designated the spot a Historic Physics Site in recognition of its scientific weight.

Farmers Branch, TX

Thomas and Sarah Keenan came to this area with the Peters Colony in 1842, and when their two-month-old son John died in 1843 they buried him here, founding one of the earliest cemeteries in present-day Dallas County. The many infant graves testify to the brutal hardships of pioneer life. The Keenans' log cabin also hosted the area's first Baptist congregation in 1846, and those buried here include settlers and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to Vietnam.

Keeter, TX

For more than a century, Keeter Cemetery has been the sole burial ground of the small community of Keeter, its earliest recorded grave that of infant Ida Mae Ryan, who died in 1882. Albert Lafayette Keeter, the settlement's namesake, donated the land for a cemetery in 1891 before moving away himself. Among those laid to rest here are Civil War and World War II veterans, tracing the community's span across generations.

Kutztown, PA · est. 2024

Keith Haring grew up in Kutztown before carrying its small-town roots into the electric art world of 1980s New York. He first drew notice with chalk drawings on the black paper of unused subway ad panels, developing a instantly recognizable style of bold lines, bright color, and dancing figures. His work spoke directly to the crises and causes of his moment—gay pride, the AIDS epidemic, the environment, and racism—and he founded a foundation to sustain his belief that "art is for everybody."

Horsham Township, PA · est. 1947

Sir William Keith built this country seat in 1722 while serving as lieutenant governor of colonial Pennsylvania, a proprietary official governing on behalf of the Penn family. After 1737 the estate passed to Dr. Thomas Graeme and became known as Graeme Park, one of the finest surviving early Georgian houses in the region. It stands as a rare window into the wealth and daily life of Pennsylvania's colonial governing class.

Columbus, TX

Civil War veteran John Wilbur Keith and his wife Haseltine moved to Columbus in 1870 and built this house around 1871, selling it a few years later to merchant Charles W. Traylor and his wife Lura, granddaughter of an early Colorado River ferry operator. Children of both families were born in the house, and in 1896 a Keith son and a Traylor daughter were married there. Successive additions gave the home its Queen Anne detailing and late-Victorian center-passage character.

Fort Wayne, IN

At the meeting of three rivers, generations of Native people lived and traveled for thousands of years before European contact. By historic times the cluster of villages known as Kekionga had become a principal center of the Miami nation — a hub of trade, diplomacy, and habitation on ground now within Fort Wayne, Indiana. Its rivers made it a crossroads of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley worlds long before any town was platted there.

Wichita Falls, TX

Nicknamed "Little Adobe," this pueblo-revival terminal was built in 1928 for Kell Field, Wichita Falls' first municipal airport, in the heady early years of American commercial aviation. Pioneering aviators including Charles Lindbergh, Wiley Post, and Amelia Earhart passed through its doors. In 1941 the airfield was folded into Sheppard Field, a World War II Army Air Corps training center, and it endures today as part of Sheppard Air Force Base.

Wichita Falls, TX

Frank Kell came to Wichita Falls in 1896, following his brother-in-law Joseph Kemp, and together the two men steered the region through decades of explosive growth. Beginning with the Wichita Mill and Elevator Company, Kell chartered railroads to reach north Texas wheat, coal, and oil, built downtown warehouses and banks, and sold his milling empire to General Mills in 1928 while serving thirteen years as a Dallas Federal Reserve director.

Keller, TX

After the Texas & Pacific Railroad pushed through, druggist H. W. Wood set aside 40 acres in 1881 for a townsite he called "Athol." Within a year it was renamed Keller for John C. Keller, a railroad construction foreman. Businesses, hotels, doctors, a newspaper, and a shared Union Church soon sprang up to serve the surrounding farms.

Keller, TX

Like many small Texas towns, Keller began with congregations sharing whatever building was available, until the Keller Methodist Church was formally organized in 1897 under Pastor W. K. Simpson. The church built its own home in 1913 and, by 1946, supported a full-time minister and a growing membership. Renamed the First United Methodist Church of Keller in 1968, it went on to sponsor community programs such as the Christian Community Storehouse and a preschool.

Cuero, TX

German immigrant Antone Keller reached Texas in 1846 as a colonist of the German Emigration Company, landing at the bustling port of Indianola, where he opened a store and in 1851 built this house. After the devastating 1875 hurricane, his son moved the dwelling inland, and the family finally relocated the business to Cuero following Indianola's destruction in 1886. Later home to the Grunder family, the house was the 1910 birthplace of John Junior Bell, who went on to serve in the Texas Legislature, the state Senate, and the U.S. Congress.

Kelleys Island, OH

On this small limestone island in the western basin of Lake Erie — a close-knit community better known for its quarries, vineyards, and glacial grooves — residents set aside this memorial to their own who went off to serve in the nation's wars. Like countless town greens and village squares across America, it gathers the sacrifice of a single place into one quiet monument, naming no single battle but honoring generations who answered the call. That it remembers both the young men and women of the community reflects the broadening of American service across the twentieth century.

Gulfport, MS

This Ionic-columned, neoclassical house was built around 1900 for T.G.B. Kellier and later owned by Edward Sternberg, a claims manager for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. In its final years it housed "The Chimneys" restaurant before Hurricane Katrina destroyed it in 2005.

Brookshire, TX

Platted in 1893 by John G. Kellner, who donated the right-of-way and station site for the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, Kellner was the first town in this area. Its rich Brazos River watershed lands produced rice, cattle, peanuts, pecans, and later natural gas. The town was eventually renamed Brookshire, though Kellner's old home still stands nearby.

Waco, TX

Virginia-born Edward Kellum served in the Tennessee Militia during the War of 1812 before marrying Karen Tabor and moving west through Alabama and Mississippi, finally settling along the Brazos River in McLennan County in 1854. He established a farm and, before his death in 1863, chose this ground as the family graveyard, becoming its first burial. Twenty-five graves, most now marked only by illegible sandstone, hold several generations of Kellums; Mary Elizabeth Jurney Kellum, the last buried here in 1895, left provisions in her will to maintain the plot.

Houston, TX

Built in 1847 by Nathaniel Kellum in the young city of Houston, this brick house is among the oldest surviving structures in the city. Over its long life it served as an early school and, in 1899, became part of Houston's first city park. It was restored in 1954 by the Harris County Heritage Society, preserving a rare link to the antebellum republic-era town.

San Antonio, TX

When Major Benjamin Foulois scouted farmland south of San Antonio in 1917, he found the site that became Kelly Field, opened the day before the U.S. declared war on Germany. Named for the first military pilot killed in a crash, it trained aviators and mechanics for two world wars and taught fliers including Charles Lindbergh and Curtis LeMay. Through the Korean War, the Cold War, and Desert Storm it grew into San Antonio's largest employer before realigning in 2001.

Baltimore, MD

This bridge was erected by the City of Baltimore in 1926, its plaque naming the mayor, engineers, and contractors who brought it into being during a decade of rapid municipal growth. Across 1920s America, cities were pouring concrete and steel into new roads and bridges to keep pace with the automobile age, and dedication plaques like this one recorded the public officials and firms responsible.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

In 1694 the German mystic Johannes Kelpius led a band of learned followers to the banks of the Wissahickon, drawn by William Penn's promise of religious liberty. Known as the "Hermits of the Wissahickon," they wrote poetry and music, studied the stars and plants, built one of the colonies' early pipe organs, and waited for the millennium they believed near. Notably tolerant for their age, they welcomed people of every background, including Native Americans, until the community faded after Kelpius's death in 1708.

Nacogdoches, TX

A member of the Second Congress of the Republic of Texas, Kelsey Harris Douglass commanded the Texas forces in the decisive July 1839 battle that drove the Cherokee and their allies from East Texas. A charter member of the Grand Masonic Lodge of Texas, he died in 1840, the same year as his young daughter Anne Elizabeth. His marker was raised by the state in 1936.

Corpus Christi, TX

Founded in 1872 under Bishop John C. Keener, this Corpus Christi congregation was led by the Rev. Alejo Hernandez, remembered as the first ordained Mexican American Methodist minister. The church weathered the upheavals of the Mexican Revolution and the Depression, emerging by the late 1930s as a Spanish-speaking Iglesia Metodista. A gift from Anna Marietta Kelsey funded a new sanctuary, and in 1948 the church was renamed in memory of her parents, the early Corpus Christi settlers John and Amanda Kelsey.

Kelsey, TX

In 1898 two brothers bought timberland in this corner of East Texas and, with church endorsement, planted a Latter-day Saint colony that took shape over the next few years. A Sunday school, a laid-out townsite, a store-based post office, and a one-room building serving as both school and church all followed by the early 1900s, and the first church was raised in 1909. The Kelsey Branch became a hub, sponsoring congregations across a wide swath of East Texas towns before consolidating in 1958.

Enon, TX

In the late 1890s the Edgar brothers and other Latter-day Saint families from Alabama settled along Kelsey Creek, and by 1901 church officials had founded the area's first branch and school. Upshur County created Kelsey School District No. 45 in 1907, and a two-story brick schoolhouse rose in 1911, drawing students as smaller nearby schools closed. Failed crops and the Great Depression thinned the population, and the school closed in 1943.

Kemah, TX

The land beneath Kemah began as an 1824 Mexican grant to Michael Gouldrich, one of Stephen F. Austin's original three hundred colonists. By the 1890s the Kipp and Bradford families held the tract, and when the railroad pushed through in 1898 they founded a townsite called Evergreen. Rebuilt after the devastating 1900 storm and renamed Kemah when it won a post office in 1907, the little Galveston Bay town grew on boat building, commercial fishing, and tourism.

Kemp, TX

Kemp's story begins in 1851 with a U.S. post office and its first postmaster, Levi Noble, anchoring an agricultural settlement that served surrounding farm families before the Civil War. A traveling Presbyterian preacher founded the Kemp Academy in 1867, but it was the Texas Trunk Railroad in the 1880s that truly spurred growth — by 1882, a year before the tracks even arrived, the town already boasted dry-goods stores, a saloon, blacksmith, three churches, and a steam gin and mill. Kemp incorporated, dissolved in 1910, and reincorporated in 1922 as it settled into life as a farm-trade center.

Wichita Falls, TX

In the 1890s Flora Anderson Kemp and other Wichita Falls women began circulating books among friends, an early grassroots library. After years of trying, Flora asked her husband, pioneer businessman Joseph Alexander Kemp, for a public library building as a Christmas gift in 1916; in 1918 he presented the main structure to the city. Citizens donated 4,000 books and raised money to furnish it, and though enlarged over the years, the original building remains intact.

Wichita Falls, TX

Joseph Alexander Kemp, who opened his first store at eighteen, moved to Wichita Falls in 1883 and spent his life building the young town into a commercial city. He helped charter rail lines, platted new neighborhoods, erected banks, hotels, and a library, and — most consequentially — privately financed Lake Wichita in 1901 and later Lakes Kemp and Diversion to give the arid region a dependable water supply.

Kempner, TX

Founded in 1882, this town honors Harris Kempner, a Polish immigrant who became a Texas banker, railroad magnate, and philanthropist. After arriving in America he joined Parson's Brigade in the Confederate Army and was wounded in the Red River Campaign, left for dead on the battlefield before recovering to serve out the war. He went on to help rebuild Texas in the decades that followed.

Kendalia, TX

In 1882 Boerne newspaper editor Carl Gustav Vogel and his wife Ettie began buying land here, and after a Methodist congregation organized in 1886 they deeded this site to it. Community residents raised the meetinghouse themselves; after the fellowship merged with a Boerne church in 1966, a new Kendalia Community Church took over the building and carries on.

Boerne, TX

Kendall County was carved out and organized in early 1862 and named for George Wilkins Kendall, a journalist and author who co-founded the New Orleans Picayune and survived the ill-fated Santa Fe Expedition. Beyond his newspaper fame, Kendall became the most successful sheep rancher in the Southwest. The county seat was fixed at Boerne, in the German-settled Hill Country.

Boerne, TX

Built in 1869–1870, this is the first and only courthouse Kendall County has ever had, raised seven years after the county organized. Its early officials were a colorful lot: first county judge Joseph Graham later became U.S. Consul to Argentina, and first sheriff Capt. John Sansom was a Texas Ranger and Indian fighter. Early dockets brimmed with frontier cases—horse theft, cattle rustling, and illegal liquor sales—before additions and remodeling in 1909 and 1954.

Yorkville, IL

This marker commemorates the mills of Kendall County, Illinois, and in particular the county's first mill, built in 1834 by John Schneider at the mouth of Blackberry Creek. Water-powered grist and saw mills were the first industry of any frontier district, grinding settlers' grain and cutting the lumber for their homes. Schneider's mill helped turn raw prairie into a functioning farming community.

Boerne, TX

Masons in Boerne worked toward a lodge from 1904, and the Grand Lodge of Texas chartered Kendall Lodge No. 897 in December 1905. After fire destroyed their hall in 1908, members met in the county courthouse and then the Calrow Building before settling into a new home in 1969. In 1911 local women chartered Boerne Chapter No. 200 of the Order of the Eastern Star, and both bodies have long supported the community.

Kendleton, TX

This Fort Bend County ground carries layers of Texas history: a Mexican land grant to settler Elizabeth Powell, whose home served as a frontier stage stop, and a spot where Santa Anna's army camped during the 1836 Texas Revolution. The community that endures here, though, was born of Reconstruction, when William E. Kendall sold parcels for as little as fifty cents an acre to help formerly enslaved people establish their own farms. When the railroad arrived in 1884, the freedmen's village took Kendall's name.

Kenedy, TX

Rising on land once part of a royal Spanish grant, Kenedy took shape after railroad promoter Mifflin Kenedy bought a townsite in 1886 along the San Antonio and Aransas Pass line. Booming into a cotton and business hub, the incorporated town earned the rough nickname "Six Shooter Junction," and a 1915 hot-mineral-water strike spawned a popular bath house and hotel. During World War II an alien detention camp operated on its outskirts, one chapter in a long agricultural history that still sustains the town.

Kenedy, TX

During World War II the United States interned not only its own residents of German, Japanese, and Italian ancestry but also civilians seized from Latin American nations, holding many as bargaining chips to exchange for Americans trapped overseas. The camp at Kenedy opened in April 1942 and passed more than 3,500 internees through its fences over thirty months before becoming a branch prisoner-of-war camp for Fort Sam Houston. Five people who died in confinement lie buried here, their graves marked by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1976 and the ground designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2005.

Sarita, TX

Kenedy County was carved from Cameron, Willacy, and Hidalgo counties in 1921 and named for Mifflin Kenedy, who came to Texas in 1846 aboard U.S. Army supply boats and went on to become a leading commercial navigator of the Rio Grande. Kenedy built a steamboat and ranching empire along the lower river before his death in 1895, and the tiny town of Sarita serves as the seat of the sparsely peopled county that bears his name. The county's late creation reflects the slow settlement of the vast South Texas ranchlands.

Kenedy, TX

After the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II, the government detained tens of thousands of people it classified as 'enemy aliens' — Japanese, German, and Italian nationals, many seized in Latin America, along with U.S.-citizen relatives. Texas hosted several confinement sites, and Camp Kenedy, a former WWI training camp and Civilian Conservation Corps site, was converted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1942. Its first detainees, largely men from Latin American republics, arrived that April; the camp held internees until 1944, when it became a prisoner-of-war camp.

Kennard, TX

Kennard was founded in 1903 by the Louisiana and Texas Lumber Company on 160 platted acres, with land agent Alexander McTavish doubling as its first postmaster. As the terminus of the Eastern Texas Railroad hauling timber toward Angelina County, the town quickly drew businesses and residents from older settlements nearby, gaining banks, stores, and lodges. Timber and farming carried it through the 1920s and 1930s, and after State Highway 7 shifted its center to Main Street, Kennard incorporated in 1969 and endures in the heart of the Davy Crockett National Forest.

Gonzales, TX

James B. and Anna Jones Kennard built this Queen Anne–style house in 1895, and it remained in the Kennard family until 1963. Its ornate lines reflect the exuberant Victorian architecture that prosperous Texans favored at the close of the nineteenth century. Recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967, it was carefully restored in the mid-1960s.

Kennedale, TX

The farming and brick-making community of Kennedale established its school district around 1890, decades before the town formally incorporated in 1947. The first two-story frame school had a single teacher and a two-month academic year built around the farm calendar. A brick schoolhouse rose on this site in 1913, and though its origins tie to the WPA era, an old rock wall — attributed by local memory to Depression-era federal labor — still marks the campus.

McKeesport, PA · est. 2012

On April 21, 1947, two young, first-term members of the House Labor Committee met at the Penn-McKee Hotel in McKeesport to argue the merits of the newly proposed Taft-Hartley labor law. The debaters were John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, then obscure congressmen at the start of their careers. Neither could know that thirteen years later they would face each other again in the first televised presidential debates.

Kerrville, TX

Built in 1914 for seven-term legislator and Texas House Speaker Austin Milton Kennedy, this Victorian Free Classic house sheltered him only three months before tuberculosis claimed his life. In 1919 rancher and businessman Sid Peterson and his wife Myrta bought the home; the Petersons later endowed a charitable foundation for local students and, in 1949, the Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital. With its wrap-around porch and original beveled glass and columns, the house remains a Hill Country landmark.

Goldsboro, NC

Kenneth C. Royall of Goldsboro holds a singular place in American history as the last U.S. Secretary of War and the first Secretary of the Army, serving from 1947 to 1949 as the nation reorganized its defense establishment. An attorney and state senator, he served as a brigadier general from 1943 to 1945 and led important reforms of the military justice system. This marker stands at the site of his home.

Anderson, TX

Kenneth Lewis Anderson rose through the young Republic of Texas as a district judge, Speaker of the House, and finally its last Vice President before his death in 1845, the year Texas moved toward statehood. The town of Fanthorp was renamed Anderson in his honor, and this state-erected memorial also remembers his wife, Patience Burdett Anderson. His career spanned the brief, turbulent life of an independent Texas nation.

West Mifflin, PA · est. 1992

Kennywood began in 1898 as a leafy picnic grove on Anthony Kenny's farm, leased by the Monongahela Street Railway to draw riders out along its trolley line—a classic "trolley park" of the era. Passed to private owners in 1906, it outlasted the Depression, recessions, and two World Wars while nearly all its trolley-park peers vanished. Its endurance earned it status as a National Historic Landmark in 1987.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2026

For three days in May 1844, the Kensington district erupted in the first of two riots that tore through Philadelphia that year, part of a national wave of Protestant nativist violence aimed at Irish Catholic immigrants. Dozens were killed or injured and more than thirty buildings were destroyed as local authorities failed to restore order. The chaos spurred lasting reforms, including the 1854 consolidation of the city, a unified police force, and the Catholic diocese's first parochial schools.

Jayton, TX

Kent County was carved from older Texas territories in 1876 and formally organized in 1892, taking its name from Andrew Kent, one of the defenders who fell at the Alamo. Its county seat first sat at Clairmont before moving to Jayton in 1952. The State of Texas erected this marker during the 1936 centennial of independence.

Frankfort, KY

Set in Frankfort, the Commonwealth's capital, this memorial honors the Kentuckians lost during the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world beginning in 2020. Its inscription borrows Kentucky's own state motto — a centuries-old rallying cry about solidarity — and turns it toward a modern crisis, asking a grieving public to face catastrophe together rather than apart. Placed in the seat of state government, where the emergency response was coordinated, it marks one of the deadliest public-health events in American history.

Whitewright, TX

First settled in the 1830s as Annaliza, this Grayson County community was renamed by Kentucky emigrants in 1858 and laid out in an unusual pattern meant to guard against raids on the frontier. A stop on freight and stage routes, it became a cradle of "Sacred Harp" shape-note singing and, during the Civil War, a rendezvous for the notorious Quantrill guerrilla band. Its layered history packs settlement, culture, and wartime lawlessness into one small crossroads.

Simpson County, KY

This marker reflects on the origins of Kentucky itself, tracing the name to an Iroquois word and recalling that Native peoples ranged across the region long before white settlement. The first permanent settlement came at Harrodsburg in 1774, and Kentucky became the second area west of the Alleghenies to be settled — and in 1792 the first to enter the Union as a state.

Frankfort, KY

Kentucky's Executive Mansion in Frankfort is the second official residence of the state's governors, built between 1912 and 1914 at a cost of $95,000 under the guidance of Governor James B. McCreary. Constructed of limestone in a Beaux-Arts manner said to be patterned after Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon villa, the twenty-five-room house and its gardens have been renovated several times. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

Frankfort, KY

Championed by Gov. J. C. W. Beckham to relieve the overcrowded Old Capitol, this Beaux-Arts capitol was funded in part by federal war-claim reimbursements. Architect Frank M. Andrews was chosen in 1904, the cornerstone laid in 1906, and the building dedicated in June 1910. Its dome and rotunda echo Napoleon's tomb, and its marble stair recalls the Paris Opera House.