Search Markers

Fort Lauderdale, FL

Built in 1907 by Edwin T. King—Fort Lauderdale's first builder, a boatwright and early citrus grower—this Dade County pine house stood on the New River as the young town took shape. It remained in the King family until 1968, sheltering King's daughter Louise and her husband, a brother of the noted civic figure Ivy Cromartie Stranahan. In 1971 the Junior League floated the house upriver by barge to save it from demolition.

Stockdale, TX

This home was built in 1898 for Robert and Rachel Emma Smith, Rachel being the daughter of John R. King, an early Texas military and political leader whose descendants have held the house almost continuously since. Among later residents was Wade Lorenz, a former Texas Ranger turned Stockdale businessman and rancher. A variation on the traditional I-house plan, it is dressed with decorative woodwork on its porches.

Austin, TX

In October 1901, William M. Tears opened a funeral home on East 6th Street to serve African Americans in Austin, a business his son took over in 1923. A second Black-owned firm, King and Company, opened nearby in 1933. In 1955 these two East Austin institutions merged into the King-Tears Funeral Home, which has continued at this site with expanded services and community charitable work.

Austin, TX

In 1916 the heirs of Texas Governor Elisha Pease formed a company to subdivide his estate into what became Austin's Enfield neighborhood. In 1922 Belmont "Belle" Graham, a Pease cousin, and her husband Florian Bibb King built this house, which the Von Rosenberg family later owned from 1928 until 1988. Blending Prairie School and Renaissance Revival details — a porte cochere, composite columns, and a wide hipped roof — the home reflects the tastes of Austin's early-20th-century residential expansion.

Kosse, TX

Bardin and Elizabeth Susan King married in Alabama in 1842 and spent decades pushing west by wagon—through Louisiana, then across several Texas counties—before settling on 189 acres in Limestone County in 1870 to raise cotton and grain. Deeply woven into the Headsville community, Bardin preached as a Baptist lay minister and joined the Grange and Masons. When Susan died in 1879 she was buried on the farm, and in 1881 Bardin set aside an acre as a family graveyard; family tradition holds that an African American freedman named Speight also rests here in an unmarked grave.

New York, NY

Founded by royal charter in 1754, King's College held its first classes on this Lower Manhattan site beginning in 1755. After the Revolution, the people of New York re-established it in 1784 under a new name, Columbia College. The institution occupied this ground until 1857 before moving uptown.

Temple, TX

In 1893 the Temple chapter of the King's Daughters and Sons, a Protestant charitable order made up largely of educated women, set out to provide care for the town's poor. They rented rooms in a small house and opened King's Daughters Hospital in 1896, appointing staff physicians and a superintendent, Cornelia Parsons. Considered ahead of its time, the institution grew into a lasting provider of affordable medical care.

Temple, TX

Nurse training began at Temple's King's Daughters Hospital as early as 1897, and formal classes started in 1903; by 1906 the hospital chartered an official nurses' school, extending its program to three years. Under leaders like director Mary Julia Putts, the school endured even the lean Depression years before a shortage of enrollees forced it to close in 1948. Its alumnae organized in 1921 and served in both world wars.

Lebanon, NH

The King's Highway was one of colonial New England's important overland routes, and this stretch was laid out in 1764, on the eve of the American Revolution, as settlers pushed up the Connecticut River valley into the New Hampshire Grants. The Daughters of the American Revolution erected this marker in West Lebanon in 1917 to keep the memory of that early road alive.

Lincoln, TX

This marker commemorates the King's Highway, or Camino Real, the Spanish colonial road system that once linked the missions and settlements of Texas and stretched toward Mexico and Louisiana. Placed in 1918 by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas, it was part of an early-20th-century effort to trace and memorialize the historic route. The road carried soldiers, missionaries, traders, and settlers for well over a century.

Giddings, TX

This marker commemorates the King's Highway, or El Camino Real de los Tejas—the Spanish royal road later known as the Old San Antonio Road—that linked colonial mission and settlement across Texas. The Daughters of the American Revolution, working with the State of Texas, marked its course with a series of granite monuments in 1918. The historic route was among the earliest overland thoroughfares connecting the region's far-flung communities.

San Antonio, TX

Placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas in 1918, this marker honors the King's Highway — El Camino Real de los Tejas — the historic network of routes that Spanish soldiers, missionaries and later settlers followed to link the East Texas missions with San Antonio and points south. For two centuries it was the principal artery of overland travel across the region.

Nacogdoches, TX

This marker commemorates the historic overland route known variously as the King's Highway, El Camino Real, and the Old San Antonio Road — a corridor rooted in the Spanish colonial era that linked missions, settlements, and the wider Southwest across what became Texas. It was placed in 1918 by the Daughters of the American Revolution together with the State of Texas as part of a broad effort to mark the road's course.

New Braunfels, TX

The King's Highway — El Camino Real, later called the Old San Antonio Road — was the great overland artery laid out under Spanish rule to link the missions and presidios of Texas with the interior of New Spain. For generations it carried soldiers, priests, traders, and eventually Anglo colonists across the Texas frontier. In 1918 the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas set a chain of markers along its route to keep the old road from being forgotten.

San Marcos, TX

This marker stands along the old King's Highway, or El Camino Real, the Spanish colonial road that became known as the Old San Antonio Road. Blazed to connect Texas missions and presidios with the heart of New Spain, it served for well over a century as a lifeline of travel and settlement. In 1918 the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas placed markers like this one to trace its historic path.

Paige, TX

Here ran the King's Highway — El Camino Real, later the Old San Antonio Road — the Spanish colonial route that bound the missions and presidios of Texas to the wider empire of New Spain. Travelers, missionaries, and colonists followed it across the frontier for generations. In 1918 the Daughters of the American Revolution joined with the State of Texas to mark its course for posterity.

Giddings, TX

This marker commemorates the King's Highway, or El Camino Real — the Old San Antonio Road — the historic overland route that Spanish colonial authorities developed to link their missions, presidios, and settlements across Texas. Long a lifeline for soldiers, priests, and travelers, the road was formally memorialized here by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas in 1918.

Lincoln, TX

This marker, placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas in 1918, honors the old Camino Real — the King's Highway — that Spanish authorities blazed across Texas to link their missions and presidios with settlements to the south. Following older Indian trails, the route carried missionaries, soldiers, and later Anglo colonists through the region for well over a century. It remained one of the great arteries of early Texas travel and settlement.

Cleveland County, NC

On October 7, 1780, Patriot backwoodsmen crushed a Loyalist force at Kings Mountain, just over the line in South Carolina, in a decisive Revolutionary War victory. The battle broke Britain's grip on the southern backcountry and turned the tide of the war in the Carolinas; the national military park lies a few miles southeast.

Douglas County, NV

In the frantic years after silver was struck on the Comstock Lode, getting men and freight over the Sierra crest became big business. In 1859–1860 David Kingsbury and John McDonald secured a franchise from the Utah Territory and spent roughly $70,000 carving a sixteen-foot wagon road—braced in places by granite retaining walls—up what had been the Georgetown and Daggett Pass trail. The new grade shortened the haul between Sacramento and Virginia City and quickly filled with merchants and teamsters paying tolls to reach the Washoe mines.

Paradise Township, MI

In the small northern-Michigan community of Kingsley, residents pooled their own resources to raise a memorial honoring every local man and woman who answered the call to serve. Rather than mark a single battle, the monument gathers generations of hometown veterans under one dedication of gratitude.

Kingstone, TX

Kingston Baptist Church was founded in 1880 by 26 charter members when the town of Kingston sprang up along the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. Kingston's growth stalled after 1886, when a competing Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe line built three miles north and drew many businesses to the new town of Celeste. The church stayed put, however, rebuilding in 1947 and again in 1985, when volunteers from area congregations raised a new building in a single week.

Kingsville, TX

Built in 1921 after a North Carolina promoter rallied local investors, the Kingsville Cotton Mill spun locally grown cotton into yarn for northern carpet makers, employing 250 workers at its peak. Low profits closed it in 1924, but new operators reopened it to make Model-T brake linings and packing twine; during World War II it turned out twine and khaki belts for military uniforms. After the war the King Ranch bought the building and converted it into an elementary school, which it gave to the community in 1947.

Kingsville, TX

Built in 1904 of locally made adobe brick to the standard plans of the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railroad, this depot is among the oldest structures in Kingsville. Its platforms saw the traffic of border unrest and the mobilizations of both world wars before the Missouri Pacific system, which took over the line in 1925, ended passenger service in 1966. The building carried on as a dispatcher's office, a working relic of South Texas railroading.

Brackettville, TX

Kinney County's roots run from ancient Indigenous inhabitation through Spanish expeditions beginning in 1535 to the 1852 opening of Fort Clark, an Army outpost that anchored settlement along the San Antonio–El Paso stage line. The county organized in 1873 with meetings held first in a settler's home, choosing Brackettville as its seat. In 1911 the county occupied this Beaux Arts Classical courthouse—buff brick accented with red banding, an octagonal-towered design topped by a Seth Thomas clock—built by a Dallas architect and a Louisville contractor.

Hamlin Township, PA · est. 2011

Begun in 1881 to carry coal, lumber, and oil across a deep Pennsylvania valley, the Kinzua Viaduct rose as the highest and longest railroad bridge in the world. Rebuilt in 1900 to bear ever-heavier loads, it served until 1959 and became the centerpiece of a state park. In 2003 a tornado tore through and toppled much of the span; the surviving towers were stabilized and topped with a dramatic skywalk in 2011.

Booker, TX

Kiowa Cemetery holds a community of German-Russians—descendants of Germans who had settled the Russian steppe under Catherine the Great in the mid-1700s. Around 1910 several of these families settled along Kiowa Creek south of Booker, where they soon built a Lutheran church, and the burial ground took its first grave, Abraham Littau, in 1912. In 1916 the Littau family deeded the land for a cemetery still tended by the descendants of those buried there.

Valley View, TX

On January 5–6, 1868, a large Kiowa war party swept through the valleys of Cooke County, burning homes and killing thirteen settlers before a blizzard forced them back. Captives were taken, some escaping or ransomed, and the toll might have climbed higher had a settler named George Masoner not ridden ahead like a frontier Paul Revere to warn the scattered farms. The raid was one episode in the long, brutal struggle as Kiowa and Comanche bands answered the loss of their hunting grounds to encroaching settlement.

Azle, TX

In April 1867 a band of about sixty Kiowa warriors, led by chiefs Satank and Satanta, struck the Walnut Creek home of William Hamleton while he was away, killing his wife Sally and carrying off their two daughters. Lavina was freed after six months, but young Mary was raised among the Kiowa, took the name To-Goam-Gat-Ty, and married another captive to become an accepted member of the tribe. The raid site now lies beneath the waters of Eagle Mountain Reservoir.

Kountze, TX

Built in 1902 and designed by Beaumont architect Frank T. Smith, this house was the home of James L. Kirby, superintendent of the Kirby Lumber Company founded by his brother, timber magnate John Henry Kirby. Fittingly, most of its materials came from the Kirby mills, and its blend of Colonial Revival and Victorian styling includes 48 pillars, curved walls, and six shingled gables. Kirby descendants lived in the house until 1990, and it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1998.

Kirbyville, TX

Kirbyville was born on May 1, 1895, when a town-lot auction marked the point where the Gulf, Beaumont & Kansas City Railroad—built by attorney and timber magnate John Henry Kirby with partner R. P. Allen—reached this spot. Kirby's lumber empire ran through the town, whose big Kirby Lumber Co. sawmill operated from 1903 until it burned in 1917. The community became a hub of the East Texas timber trade and, from 1926, a center of early forest-conservation work, with State Forest No. 1 nearby.

Kirk, TX

Settled in the 1870s and 80s as Elm Grove, this community was renamed Kirk when its 1887 post office honored local merchant Jepitha N. Kirk. Land donated for schools, churches, and a cemetery anchored a town that grew to several hundred people, with cotton gins, a telephone exchange, a two-story schoolhouse, and a community hall. The Depression began its decline; the school consolidated with Mart's in 1952, leaving little but a few homes and the cemetery.

McKinney, TX

E.W. Kirkpatrick, a Confederate veteran who became a leading McKinney businessman and civic figure, bought this property in the 1870s for a thriving plant nursery. In 1901–02 he built this spacious Queen Anne house, hauling cypress siding by wagon all the way from Jefferson. His descendants have continued to live in and preserve the home, recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1976.

New York, NY

In 1921, in the quiet green of Kissena Park, Queens residents raised a "Memorial Knoll" to their neighbors who had died in the Great War just a few years earlier. The United States had entered World War I in 1917, and by the Armistice of November 1918 tens of thousands of New Yorkers had shipped overseas, many never to return. Across the country in the early 1920s, towns and city neighborhoods answered that loss by dedicating parks, groves, and knolls—living memorials meant to be walked through rather than merely looked at.

Irving, TX

John W. and Jestine Gorbit farmed here by 1850, and a settlement called Gorbit grew up around them as a stop on a pre–Civil War postal route. After Ike Story opened a store and post office in 1889, confusion with a similarly named town led to the settlement being renamed Kit in 1894, and residents added a cemetery and schools. When the railroad town of Irving was founded nearby in 1903, Kit's businesses, churches, and post office drifted to the new townsite, and by the 1940s the community had faded into the growing metropolis.

Applewold, PA

For a generation before the French and Indian War, Kittanning was the largest Delaware (Lenape) town beyond the Allegheny front, a thriving community on the Allegheny River whose name carried the sense of the "great river" that fed the Ohio country. From the 1730s it grew into a hub of Native life and, by the 1750s, a staging ground for raids on frontier settlements. In September 1756 a Pennsylvania force under Lt. Col. John Armstrong marched west and burned the town, one of the war's few colonial strikes deep into Indian country.

Kittanning, PA

For roughly a generation, this bluff above the Allegheny River held Kittanning, the largest Delaware (Lenape) town west of the Appalachian ridges — a thriving community whose name honored the "great river" it overlooked. During the French and Indian War it became a staging ground for raids on Pennsylvania's frontier settlements, and in September 1756 a colonial force under Colonel John Armstrong marched over the mountains and burned it. The destruction of the village broke a key node in the borderland war and became one of Pennsylvania's most celebrated frontier exploits.

Kittanning, PA

On this river flat above the Allegheny stood Kittanning, also called Attiqué, a Lenni-Lenape (Delaware) town that by 1727 had become the most important Native settlement west of the mountains as the Delaware pushed westward from the Susquehanna. During the French and Indian War it served as a staging base for raids on Pennsylvania's frontier settlements. In September 1756 Colonel John Armstrong led some 300 provincial troops from the Cumberland Valley on a surprise strike that destroyed the town.

Kittrell, NC

During the last, desperate years of the Civil War, the Kittrell Springs Hotel was pressed into service as a Confederate hospital, and the men who died there were laid to rest nearby. Fifty-two soldiers, each grave individually marked, rest in this cemetery a short walk to the northeast. Their deaths in 1864–65 speak to the sickness and wounds that filled the war's makeshift hospitals far from the famous battlefields.

Kittrell, NC

In the nineteenth century, Kittrell's Springs drew visitors as a fashionable health resort and social retreat, its mineral waters promising restoration. When the Civil War came, the resort took on a graver role as the site of North Carolina's first Confederate General Hospital, operating from 1861 to 1865. The springs themselves lie a half mile west.

Swain County, NC

Kituwah is the ancient "mother town" of the Cherokee, the place from which the people traced their origin and identity. A council house once stood atop the earthen mound here, the ceremonial and political heart of Cherokee life. During the Anglo-Cherokee War, British colonial forces under James Grant destroyed the town in 1761.

Pharr, TX

Built in 1928, this Mission-style building was the first meeting hall in all of Kiwanis International to be owned by a local club—raised just a year after the Pharr chapter was chartered. Doubling as a community center, it hosted civic gatherings and even sheltered the local Chamber of Commerce.

San Angelo, TX

On the eve of America's entry deepening into World War II, the San Angelo Kiwanis Club launched the Little Olympics in 1942 to give grade-school children an area track-and-field competition they otherwise lacked. The event grew into a beloved annual tradition, drawing thousands of young competitors and spectators from dozens of local schools and sustained by hundreds of volunteer hours. By 2016 it had reached its 75th year.

Hutto, TX

German-born William Klattenhoff immigrated to Texas in 1872 at seventeen, and work on the International and Great Northern Railroad brought him to Hutto, where he bought land in 1876. After marrying Alvina Plattow he built a first home, then a grander second house in 1896 as his success as farmer, rancher, and businessman grew. The homestead stayed in the family into the 21st century, a marker of German settlement in the region.

Tomball, TX

Built in the 1890s by Edward Kleb, grandson of German immigrants who reached Texas in 1846, this hall-and-parlor farmhouse anchored a stretch of dispersed rural settlement in northwestern Harris County. His son Elmer "Lumpy" Kleb, born in the house, lived without utilities and devoted himself to the land, planting trees and nursing injured wildlife. When mounting tax debt threatened the property in the 1980s, a national outpouring helped Harris County buy it in 1991 and create the Kleb Woods Nature Preserve.

Dallas, TX

The town of Kleberg took root in 1850 on the land grant of Robert Justus Kleberg, a veteran of the Republic of Texas army who had fought at San Jacinto. Beginning as a stage stop where two wagon trails met, it grew into a farming town that gained a post office, bank, and shops once the railroad arrived in 1881. Ambitious dams and locks on the Trinity River briefly brought jobs in the early 1900s, until a 1908 flood swept the work away.

Kingsville, TX

Kleberg County was carved from Nueces County in early 1913 and organized that June, with Kingsville named as its seat. It honors Robert Justus Kleberg, a pioneer German settler who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Texas's 1836 war for independence. The county lies at the heart of the vast South Texas ranching country made famous by the King Ranch.

Bastrop, TX

Built between 1887 and 1890 for Charles and Maria Kleinert, this house stands among a cluster of Bastrop homes raised by German immigrants in the nineteenth century. Fellow German immigrant and local innkeeper A. L. Hoppe bought it in 1890, and it remained in his family until 1961. With its pedimented architraves, jigsawn porch details, and distinctive octagonal bay, it is a fine example of eclectic Victorian-era design.

Bastrop, TX

Prussian immigrant Carl Kleinert and his wife Marie settled in Bastrop in the early 1860s, joining a sizable community of German merchants. In 1868 he built this grocery and mercantile, which after an 1890s fire gained the pressed-metal cornices, cast-iron columns, and wood storefront it still wears. The building stayed in the Kleinert family until 1931 and has since housed a succession of businesses.

Fredericksburg, TX

Johann Jost Klingelhoeffer left Europe in 1846 seeking freedom and opportunity, sailing to the port of Indianola and making his way through New Braunfels to Fredericksburg. Around 1854 he built his home in the German Fachwerk, or half-timbered, style—oak timbers filled with handmade brick and two ground-floor rooms divided by a dogtrot breezeway. Additions after the Civil War and again in 1955 reshaped the house, but it endures as an example of the distinctive Texas-German building tradition unique to the Hill Country.

Bastrop, TX

German-born blacksmith Henry Klockman and his wife bought this Bastrop lot in 1894 and built the house about 1895, where he worked his forge until his death two years later. His widow supported their son by taking in boarders, and after a 1926 fire the property passed to new owners who remodeled it. One later resident kept extensive diaries of daily life in the house that now reside in the Bastrop County Museum.

Fredericksburg, TX

This limestone building went up around 1870 in Fredericksburg, the storied German settlement of the Texas Hill Country, combining a storefront in front with a two-story home behind. Christian Kloth bought it in 1878, and after his death it passed to his daughters and stayed in the Ludwig family until 1966, hosting a succession of shops along the way. Its dual purpose reflects the practical, work-and-live rhythm of a nineteenth-century immigrant town.

Electra, TX

Formed in January 1919 by four Wichita Falls businessmen—Joseph Kemp, the Munger brothers, and Reece Allen—the Kemp-Munger-Allen Oil Company gave its initials to a vast field that eventually spread across 135,000 acres and more than 3,000 wells. From its first well in 1919, the KMA field produced through decades of deeper discoveries and engineering advances like pressurized-gas and saltwater injection that kept the oil flowing. Its boomtown grew so large it needed a post office, and because "KMA" wouldn't do as a name, the postmaster added letters to christen the town Kamay.

Spring Branch, TX

German Catholic families settled the Honey Creek area beginning in 1845, worshiping first in a home and a log chapel. In 1878 Johann Adam Kneupper and his wife Margarethe gave the land and helped neighbors raise this one-room chapel from locally quarried stone, where services were held until 1892.

Knickerbocker, TX

Drawn by Dove Creek's water and irrigable land, farmers and stockmen settled this West Texas valley in the 1870s, beginning with the Baze brothers' 1875 irrigation ditch dug to supply nearby Fort Concho. In 1877 New York sheepmen named their ranch—and later the town—for Washington Irving's character Diedrich Knickerbocker, and by 1890 the community boasted stores, hotels, churches, and schools. Like many rural West Texas towns, it faded as automobiles and better roads pulled residents toward San Angelo.

Hardwick Township, NJ

Before mechanical refrigeration, Americans kept food from spoiling with natural ice cut from frozen lakes and ponds each winter. Crews sawed the surface into heavy blocks, slid them along docks like this one, and packed them in sawdust-insulated icehouses to be shipped to distant cities through the warm months. The Knickerbocker Ice Company was one of the region's well-known ice enterprises, and the weathered remains near this shore mark where that now-vanished trade once met the water.

Knickerbocker, TX

Education came early to southwestern Tom Green County, where A. P. Baze built an adobe subscription school on his farm in 1877 for children who rode in on horseback for a six-month term. As Knickerbocker grew, a frame schoolhouse replaced it about 1889, and a red-brick building with an auditorium followed in 1926. In 1895, at the urging of Dr. Boyd Cornick, a separate county school was built for children of Mexican descent; the two schools ran apart until they combined in 1948, and area schools consolidated to Christoval in 1960.

Tarboro, NC

Between 1886 and 1890 Black farmworkers in this region joined the Knights of Labor, the era's largest and most inclusive labor organization, and hosted a state convention here in 1890. Their organizing fed directly into the Fusion movement, the biracial coalition of Populists and Republicans that briefly won power in 1890s North Carolina. It was a rare moment of interracial political alliance in the Gilded Age South.

Fort Worth, TX

First erected in 1881 and rebuilt after a fire in 1901 by the noted Fort Worth architects Sanguinet and Staats, this hall was the first Pythian Castle Hall built in the United States. Styled after a North European city hall or medieval guild hall, it still displays the seven-foot suit of armor that crowned the original building. In 1970 it became the first Fort Worth building listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Cuero, TX

The Knights of Pythias, founded in 1864 amid the divisions of the Civil War to promote friendship and reconciliation, reached Cuero in 1889 when local citizens chartered Jewel Lodge No. 103. In 1902 the lodge hired noted architect James Wahrenberger — possibly with local designer Jules Leffland — to build this Richardsonian Romanesque hall, its corner tower, arched windows, and corbelled brickwork marking it as a downtown landmark. As was typical, the ground floor was leased to businesses, from a wholesale grocery to an early automobile dealership, while members met upstairs.