Search Markers

Liberty, TX

Augustine B. Hardin, born in Georgia in 1798, was among the fifty-nine men who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. That document, adopted at Washington-on-the-Brazos as Santa Anna's army advanced, formally severed Texas from Mexico. Hardin lent his name to the cause and lived out his years in the Liberty County that his generation helped found.

Brownsville, TX

Built in 1904 in Brownsville, this Late Victorian home blends Italianate and Queen Anne flourishes—polygonal bays, a curved two-story porch, and decorative hood mouldings—into a showplace of the border city's social and civic life. Augustine and Laura Celaya designed it themselves and kept it in the family for generations. It reflects the prosperity and taste of a leading Rio Grande Valley family at the turn of the twentieth century.

Crockett, TX

Gus LeGory came to Texas from Mississippi in 1855 and, after serving in the Civil War, returned to work with a Trinity River steamboat company before building his own overland and river freight business. In 1870 he opened a Crockett saloon and went on to promote the town through banking, coal production, and agriculture. He married Eliza Wortham in 1875 and raised six children, living to age ninety.

Houston, TX

Augustus Chapman Allen was a New York-born schoolteacher and bookkeeper who came to Texas in the 1830s and threw in with the Texas Revolution, even funding a ship, the Brutus, to move troops and supplies. With his brother John Kirby Allen he bought marshy land along Buffalo Bayou after independence in 1836 and platted a brand-new town, naming it for the victorious general Sam Houston. When the young Republic's Congress accepted their offer and met there in 1837, a speculative real-estate gamble became a capital city.

Morristown, NJ

This Victorian Italianate house in Morristown was purchased by Augustus Crane in 1857 and remained in the Crane family until 1971. Across more than a century, the Cranes were woven into Morristown's civic, cultural, and business life. The home stands as a reminder of the prosperous New Jersey families who shaped their town through the Gilded Age and into the twentieth century.

Moscow, TX

This double-log house, built in 1859 by Augustus Darby in the East Texas piney woods of Polk County, was raised by enslaved labor: for six months, twenty-five enslaved people drew and straightened square nails from old lumber and hand-sawed the rough cypress that sealed the pegged structure. The inscription's plain accounting of that work is a stark window into how antebellum Texas homes were built on the eve of the Civil War. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Gonzales, TX

Augustus H. Jones took up arms during the pivotal year of 1835, when Texian colonists rose against the Mexican government and set the Texas Revolution in motion. He fought at the Storming of Bexar, the hard street-by-street fight that drove Mexican forces from San Antonio, and served in the Goliad area, another flashpoint of that struggle for independence. The state honored his service with a marker bearing the star and wreath, a tribute erected nearly a century and a quarter later.

Atlanta, GA

During the Atlanta Campaign of 1864, the hilltop plantation of Augustus F. Hurt became a nerve center of the Union advance. On July 22, as McPherson's Army of the Tennessee fought off a fierce Confederate assault to the south, Sherman himself directed the fighting from command posts on this rise. The Hurt house — mistakenly recorded in the Official Records as the Howard house — was torn down by Federal forces, and it was here that the body of the slain Gen. McPherson was carried from the field.

Atlanta, GA

This hill overlooking the Augustus Hurt plantation was a hinge of the Union lines outside Atlanta in July and August 1864. After Confederate defenders abandoned the outer defense works on its eastern slope, Schofield's 23rd Corps marched in via the Williams Mill Road and entrenched, supporting the right of the Army of the Tennessee during the Battle of Atlanta. As Sherman shifted forces around the city, this position swung from the far right to the far left of the Federal line.

Trappe, PA · est. 1947

Built in 1743, Augustus Lutheran Church at Trappe is celebrated as the oldest unchanged Lutheran church building in America. It was raised by Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, the German-born patriarch who organized scattered Lutheran congregations into a unified American church and is often called the father of American Lutheranism. Muhlenberg died in 1787 and lies buried in the churchyard beside his enduring work.

Aurora, TX

Aurora Cemetery holds graves dating to the 1860s and grew after Confederate veteran Finis Dudley Beauchamp donated the site to a Masonic lodge in 1877. A deadly 1891 epidemic — likely a form of meningitis — added hundreds of graves, and one poignant child's epitaph is still widely quoted. The cemetery is also famous for the legend that an airship crashed nearby in 1897 and its pilot was buried here; bypassed by the railroad, the town faded but the burial ground endures with over 800 graves.

Lander County, NV

Austin sprang to life after William Talcott struck silver here on May 2, 1862, while hauling wood out of Pony Canyon below — a find that set off the famous "Rush to Reese." The nearby camp of Clifton flared briefly, but fast-growing Austin overtook it and became the Lander County seat in 1863, swelling into a substantial city of several thousand before its mines began to fail in the 1880s. From this high Great Basin outpost, prospectors fanned out to open many other important mining camps across central Nevada.

Waco, TX

Designed by prolific Southern architect R.H. Hunt and completed in 1925, this Waco church is a substantial essay in Gothic style, its brick mass rising from a raised basement beneath a prominent bell tower. Time and misfortune reshaped it: the tower's original tracery was gone by the 1940s, and a 1954 fire forced the replacement of the sanctuary's art glass. What remains is a landmark that has weathered the ordinary accidents of a long congregational life.

Waco, TX

As the 19th century closed, Waco's Fifth Street Methodist congregation had simply grown too large, so in 1900 the conference approved a new church for the city. Chartered the next year with 81 members, Austin Avenue Methodist built its first sanctuary in 1902 and grew alongside its neighborhood, eventually outgrowing that home and building anew a block away. Through the decades it sustained a steady tradition of community outreach.

Nacogdoches, TX

When Texas legislators moved in 1917 to expand public education, Nacogdoches beat out 27 rival towns to become home to the new East Texas teachers college, led by historian-president A. W. Birdwell. Completed in 1922–23 and named for empresario Stephen F. Austin, the classical-revival Austin Building served as the school's administrative and classroom heart and remains its oldest academic building still in use. Once serving a few hundred Anglo East Texans, it now anchors a university of thousands from many backgrounds.

Sherman, TX

Chartered in 1849 by the Presbytery of Brazos, Austin College opened in Huntsville during the days of the young Texas state, its early trustees drawn from the founding generation of statesmen who had shaped the Republic. A rigorous classical curriculum, the state's first law school, and Texas's first graduate degrees marked its early ambition. After the Civil War, epidemics and hard times prompted the 1876 move to Sherman, where the college matured into a modern liberal arts institution.

Huntsville, TX

The Presbyterian Church founded Austin College at Huntsville in 1849 and put up this Greek Revival building in 1851–52, its two-story portico and Doric columns announcing higher learning on the antebellum frontier. When the college relocated to Sherman in 1876, the structure was deeded to the state for the new Sam Houston Normal Institute — a teachers' college that grew into today's Sam Houston State University.

Bellville, TX

Austin County traces its beginnings to the 1821 grant that brought Stephen F. Austin's first Anglo-American colonists to Mexican Texas, and its seat, San Felipe de Austin, served as the capital of Austin's colony and the cradle of Texas's provisional government during the 1835–36 crisis. Organized as a Mexican municipality in 1828, it became a county of the new Republic in March 1836, named for the empresario himself. Bellville has been the county seat since 1848.

Bellville, TX

Declaring their old lockup "unsafe, unfit, and inadequate," the Austin County Court contracted in 1896 with the Pauly Jail Building Co. of St. Louis to erect this jail for $19,970. Its Romanesque Revival design—crenelated parapets, bartizans, and stone window arches—was made to harmonize with the county's 1886 courthouse, which later burned. The gallows, used only once in 1901, have since been removed and the jailer's quarters enlarged, but the original exterior survives.

Keating Township, PA · est. 1994

On September 30, 1911, the concrete dam of the Bayless Pulp and Paper Company — built only two years earlier, nearly fifty feet high and 534 feet long — gave way, hurling a wall of water and debris down Freeman Run into the towns of Austin and Costello. At least 78 people were killed and the mill towns were devastated. Pennsylvania's second-worst single-dam disaster, it spurred a 1913 state law to regulate dam construction.

Huntsville, TX

Erected in 1851, Austin Hall was the first building of Austin College, one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in Texas, and it served students continuously for a quarter century. After the college relocated, the hall passed to a private academy and then to the forerunner of Sam Houston State, keeping its doors open to learning. Its long educational service makes it a rare survivor of antebellum Texas academic life.

Austin, TX

Tax-supported public secondary education came to Austin in 1881, when the city school district opened a high school department under school-board president A. P. Wooldridge and Superintendent John B. Winn. The first class of 31 girls and 17 boys met on the third floor of the West Austin School, and as enrollment grew the school moved from a Baptist church to the Temporary State Capitol to an opera house before finally getting buildings of its own. Over more than a century Austin High became known for innovative programs and academic excellence.

Austin, TX

Edwin Waller's 1839 plan for Austin set aside two blocks for schools at Rio Grande and 12th Street, and by 1881 the school board was teaching every grade there, from primary through high school. Austin High moved to this campus in 1925, and the late 1920s brought a burst of student life—the Red Jackets, the Red Dragon drama club, and the 'Austin Maroon' newspaper. Renamed for Stephen F. Austin in 1953, the school used the site until 1975, after which it joined the Austin Community College system.

Austin, TX

Austin's public high school, founded in 1881, gained its first purpose-built home here after fire destroyed its temporary quarters in the old State Capitol. Completed in 1900 with a domed rotunda, the ornate red-brick "Old Red" building housed pioneering programs, including the John T. Allan manual training center and one of the nation's earliest home economics departments. It served as a high school until 1925 and later a junior high before fire claimed it in 1956.

Austin, TX

Master Masons met at surveyor Edwin Waller's home on October 11, 1839, just a week before President Mirabeau B. Lamar arrived to establish the government of the Republic of Texas in its new capital. Grand Master Branch Archer authorized Austin Lodge No. 12 that November, with Alexander Russell as its first worshipful master. Its rolls read like a roster of early Texas leadership — vice president Edward Burleson, whose 1851 Masonic burial was the first in the State Cemetery, and governors Edward Clark and Hardin R. Runnels among them.

Austin, TX

As Austin outgrew its older graveyards in the early 20th century, a private corporation bought farmland northwest of town in 1927 and opened Austin Memorial Park, recording its first burial in 1928. The city bought the grounds in 1941 to serve the public, though highways, a recreation center, and new construction later trimmed its edges. Among those interred are Pulitzer-winning novelist James A. Michener, legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, actor Zachary Scott, and famed University of Texas coaches Dana X. Bible and Harvey Penick.

Austin, TX

The seminary grew from the Austin School of Theology, founded in 1884 by Revs. Richmond Kelley Smoot and Robert Lewis Dabney to train Presbyterian ministers who would stay in Texas and the Southwest. Though that school closed in 1895, enthusiasm carried a new Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary into being in 1902, and in 1908 it moved to this site to partner with the University of Texas. After World War I it added a Spanish-speaking department to serve south Texas.

Austin, TX

Founded in donated quarters, the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary moved to this site in 1906 under President T. R. Sampson, who dreamed of binding the school closely to the nearby University of Texas. Buff-brick, Mission Revival buildings rose here — Lubbock Hall, Sampson Hall, faculty homes, and a 1941 chapel — even as the seminary briefly closed during World War I. Though the early buildings were razed by 1996, the seminary's partnership with the university endured through classes, lectures, and exchanges.

Austin, TX

In 1856, when Texas was still a frontier state and psychiatry a young and uncertain field, the legislature created a hospital for the mentally ill here. Construction began in 1857, and the institution opened in May 1861 with about a dozen patients housed in its Administration Building. Renamed Austin State Hospital in 1925, it remains the oldest mental hospital in Texas.

Austin, TX

Established in 1882, this cemetery holds the graves of patients of the Austin State Hospital, one of Texas's earliest public institutions for the mentally ill. Many of those buried here were poor, unclaimed, or long forgotten, making the ground a quiet record of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century society cared for — and set apart — its most vulnerable. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002.

Jefferson, TX

This brick building rose before 1866, in the years when Jefferson thrived as the greatest inland port in the Southwest, its steamboats reaching the Gulf by way of Big Cypress Bayou. Under one roof it held offices, a grocery, a saloon, and a drugstore. In 1882 it was given to Sallie Harrison as a wedding gift on her marriage to C. A. Culberson, who would later serve as Texas governor and U.S. senator.

Austin, TX

Catherine North began this house as a family residence in 1847, and in 1892 Austin banker Ira Evans completed it in the grand style of a French chateau. In 1929 the charter members of the Austin Woman's Club bought the home and lovingly remodeled it with period materials, giving their organization a landmark headquarters in the heart of the city.

Austin, TX

During the Civil War, Austin was no sleepy statehouse town but a working engine of the Confederate effort. Behind the secession convention and the wartime legislative sessions ran a gritty industrial machine: an arsenal on Waller Creek, a gun-cap factory turning out shells by the thousands, and a foundry casting cannon. Citizens paid for it with hardship — fever and diphtheria, food shortages, and hotels that demanded gold or tobacco before they would rent a bed.

Lander County, NV

The silver-mining boomtown of Austin raised three churches in quick succession during its heyday. St. Augustine's Catholic Church went up in native brick and stone in 1866, where Father Monteverde charged a dollar's admission to his first Christmas Eve mass to control the crowd; the Methodist church followed, financed by stock sold as far as the East Coast; and St. George's Episcopal Church was consecrated in 1878 after a rousing Easter sermon secured pledges, its organ shipped around Cape Horn. The young Emma Wixom attended Sunday school here before becoming the world-famous soprano Emma Nevada.

Austin, TX

Austin's "moonlight towers" are 165-foot iron structures first raised in 1894–95, when their carbon-arc lamps cast a bluish glow said to light the entire young city at once. The idea of flooding a town with artificial "moonlight" from tall towers was tried in several 19th-century cities, but Austin's are the last surviving system of their kind. Converted over the years to mercury-vapor lamps, more than two dozen of the original towers still burn from dusk to dawn.

City of Oneonta, NY

Set into this Main Street plaza are original pieces of track from the Oneonta trolley system, which once carried riders up Broad Street to the heart of downtown. In the early twentieth century electric streetcars like these knit small cities together, letting people live, shop, and work along the line long before the automobile reshaped the American town. The salvaged rails mark the very spot where the line met Main Street.

Authon, TX

This burial ground began as a family cemetery for Kentucky-born pioneer Isom Cranfill, whose 15-year-old son Linn Boyd was killed in an Indian attack near the family home in 1871. Sitting along the old Fort Worth–Fort Belknap Military Road, the site was later deeded to the Authon Church of Christ and remains a public cemetery holding many of the area's early settlers.

Franklin Township, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the hill country of Clermont County sat on the Ohio River frontier directly across from slaveholding Kentucky, making it a crossroads of the antislavery cause and a corridor for freedom-seekers moving north. This parcel once held the home of Arthur Fee (1791–1879), remembered here as part of a family that earned a reputation for abolitionist conviction in an era when opposing slavery could mean social scorn and real personal risk. A marker on a former house site like this one preserves the memory of ordinary households that turned private principle into public stand.

Anaheim, CA

This monument in Anaheim commemorates Autonetics, the North American Aviation division that became a Cold War pioneer in electronics, guidance, and navigation. Its engineers developed the inertial guidance systems for Minuteman missiles and advanced navigation technologies that guided ships, aircraft, and spacecraft. The memorial celebrates a workforce whose innovations, as the inscription puts it, charted new frontiers on Earth and beyond.

Newton, TX

Built in 1912 by turpentine producer L. M. Autrey, this Newton County house passed through a succession of the area's leading businessmen — road contractor N. A. Dawson, then for more than half a century the family of lumberman and civic leader Thomas Williams. Framed in long-leaf pine and modeled on the Malbis Plantation near Mobile, Alabama, it blends classical and Victorian styling. Its owners trace the industries — turpentine, roads, and timber — that built the East Texas piney woods economy.

Houston, TX

Built in 1921 by the Episcopal Diocese of Texas as a gathering place for Rice University students, Autry House echoed the Italian Mediterranean style of the young campus nearby. It was designed by Houston architect William Ward Watkin with the Boston firm Cram & Ferguson and named for Texaco general counsel James Lockhart Autry, whose widow Allie funded its construction. It became an early hub of student life at Rice.

Avalon, TX

Organized on July 6, 1879, as Mt. Nebo Baptist Church, this Ellis County congregation began with two elders and sixteen charter members. Early worship took place in the Muscrat School and beneath a brush arbor before a sanctuary rose in 1924–25, followed later by Sunday school rooms and a parsonage. Renamed Avalon Missionary Baptist Church, it has served the community for well over a century.

Killeen, TX

Rising in 1923 to replace a brick schoolhouse lost to fire, the Avenue D School served the growing railroad town of Killeen. Dallas architect C.J. Leinbach gave the three-story building decorative stonework and, in the custom of the era, separate entrances for girls and boys. In a resourceful touch, the community furnished the interior with money raised by selling advertising space on the auditorium curtains.

Galveston, TX

This Galveston congregation traces its roots to the enslaved members of the city's First Baptist Church in the 1840s, who by the early 1850s worshiped separately as the African Baptist Church. After the Civil War the property was deeded to the congregation, which reorganized under Black leadership and later took the name Avenue L Missionary Baptist Church. Its pastors went on to lead district associations, a national convention, and a college, making the church a pillar of Black religious and civic life.

Monterey County, CA

Dedicated on November 11, 2011—at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, echoing the Armistice—this Avenue of Honor remembers local Monterey County veterans killed in action in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and later conflicts. Spanning generations of service under the motto "Lest we forget," it gathers a community's war dead into a single place of remembrance.

Amarillo, TX

Avery Turner, a Santa Fe Railroad executive who spent fifty-eight years with the line, moved to Amarillo with his wife Mary in 1902. In 1910 the couple built this two-story Dutch colonial revival house—a rare style locally—modeled on Mary's family home in New Jersey, with a full-width porch, Tuscan columns, and a brick carriage house. Mary was active in the Red Cross and Salvation Army, and the home stayed in the family until her death in 1951.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1968

Founded in 1849 by Charles Avery—a Methodist lay preacher, businessman, and committed abolitionist—Avery College offered a classical education to African Americans at a time when such opportunity was almost universally denied them. Located on Pittsburgh's North Side, it became an important institution for Black advancement and a center of antislavery sympathy in the decades before the Civil War. Avery devoted much of his fortune to the education and uplift of the people the nation still held in bondage.

Avery, TX

In the cotton country of Northeast Texas, a small frame church with a steeple and belfry rose in 1896 in a settlement then called Douglas. Like many rural churches of its era it did double duty, sheltering other denominations and serving as a schoolhouse until 1901. When the town was renamed Avery in 1902, the congregation carried on as a mission church, slowly building youth and missionary groups before reaching full-station status in 1950.

Peoria, IL

When this stone was raised in September 1919, the guns of the Great War had been silent for less than a year, and the small industrial community of Averyville along the Illinois River was still counting its cost. Neighborhoods across America erected monuments like this one — funded by ordinary townspeople — to fix in stone the names and sacrifice of the local men who had shipped overseas. Averyville was later absorbed into Peoria, but its wartime memorial endures.

Saint Louis, MO

In the summer of 1920, a corner of St. Louis's Forest Park was cleared as an Aviation Field, a grass strip meant to carry U.S. airmail on the fledgling Chicago–St. Louis route. These were the pioneering years of scheduled airmail, when open-cockpit biplanes stitched the nation's cities together faster than any train could. Federal budget cuts closed the service after less than a year, in mid-1921, but the field marks a moment when a city park doubled as a gateway to the sky.

Gwinnett County, GA

On the evening of December 6, 1953, four F-84 jets of the Georgia Air National Guard's 128th Fighter Bomber Squadron went down near this spot while returning from weekend training and trying to land at Dobbins Air Force Base in bad weather. All the pilots were killed, though no one on the ground was hurt — the family whose home was destroyed happened to be away. Investigators traced the disaster in part to confusion reading the aircraft altimeter, prompting the U.S. Air Force to redesign the instrument.

Avinger, TX

Around 1876, to guarantee the East Line & Red River Railroad would cross his land, Dr. Hamilton J. Avinger donated ground for a depot, a Methodist church, and this cemetery, founding the town that bears his name. A South Carolina immigrant who had reached Texas in 1855, Avinger drew neighbors from older nearby settlements once the depot opened, and the town grew into a shipping point for lumber and produce. The cemetery's earliest known burial, a typhoid victim, dates to 1877.

Grand Prairie, TX

With housing critically short near defense plants in the early 1940s, federal officials seized on Avion Village as an experiment in fast, low-cost quality housing through prefabrication and mutual home ownership. Designed by Roscoe DeWitt and David Williams with modernist architect Richard Neutra, the 300-unit project launched in May 1941 amid a publicized race that saw the first house framed in under an hour and the whole development finished in 100 days. Workers from North American Aviation were the first residents, and in 1948 they bought the community, which remains resident-owned.

Avoca, TX

This congregation grew out of an 1887 brush-arbor camp meeting led by Methodist circuit rider J. H. Wiseman in the Spring Creek community. When the railroad created the new town of Avoca, the church moved with the people and completed its sanctuary in 1906. After a storm destroyed the original steeple, a 1953 belfry was added to hold two railroad locomotive bells—a fitting echo of the railroad that had summoned the town into being.

Plymouth Township, PA · est. 1994

On September 6, 1869, fire erupted at the Avondale Colliery near Plymouth, and because the mine had only a single shaft — which doubled as its only escape route — the trapped miners had no way out. The death toll reached 110, including five boys aged twelve to seventeen and two would-be rescuers who suffocated in the attempt. The horror spurred Pennsylvania's legislature to pass safety laws in 1870, among the earliest of their kind.

Fort Worth, TX

In 1861 Benjamin Patton Ayres and his wife Emily bought a 320-acre farm and set aside two acres on this hillside as a family burial ground. Ayres, the second Tarrant County clerk and a founder of Fort Worth's First Christian Church, was the first laid to rest here. Beyond the fenced family plot lie an unknown number of graves — victims of spring fevers and Trinity River floods — whose fieldstone markers have long since vanished.

Lost Prairie, TX

This marker honors Azariah G. Moore, who served as a soldier and ranger in the Texas War for Independence and rode with Captain Billingsley's Mina Volunteers in 1836. Erected by the State of Texas in 1962, it preserves the memory of one of the many ordinary men who took up arms in the revolution that created the Republic of Texas.

Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1947

On the broad plain below this overlook, French émigrés fleeing the Revolution built an improbable frontier refuge between 1793 and 1803. Called Azilum (French for 'asylum'), the settlement included a large timber 'Great House' that local tradition linked to hopes of sheltering Queen Marie Antoinette and her son. The queen never came, and within a decade most colonists drifted away, but for a moment the Pennsylvania wilderness held a transplanted piece of aristocratic France.

Wysox Township, PA · est. 1947

This marker points travelers toward Azilum, the French refugee colony founded a few miles south along the Susquehanna in the 1790s. Fleeing the guillotine and the revolts of the French Revolution and its Caribbean colonies, the exiles carved out a village on the frontier and raised 'La Grande Maison' — a house whose builders imagined it might one day shelter the French queen and the young heir to the throne. The royal guests never arrived, and the colony faded within a decade.

Azle, TX

Growing from open-air services in the 1880s on land given by the town's namesake, Dr. Azle Stewart, this congregation organized in 1890 and worshiped under a brush arbor until its first sanctuary rose in 1893. Its young people did more than pray: the church's youth society founded Azle's first public library, housed in a member's home. Small-town churches often seeded the civic institutions that came after them.