Search Markers

Brackettville, TX

Raised in 1878–1879 as the first county-owned courthouse for Kinney County on the far Texas frontier near Fort Clark, this sturdy building served the county for three decades. In 1911 it passed to the Las Moras Masonic Lodge, chartered in 1876, while its ground floor housed the Brackettville post office from 1918 to 1983. Across more than a century it has held courts, lodge meetings, mail, and county offices — a single building carrying much of a frontier town's civic life.

Brackettville, TX

Las Moras Spring, the largest in Kinney County and ninth largest in Texas, has drawn people for more than 11,000 years, from flint-knapping prehistoric hunters to Coahuiltecan, Apache, and Comanche peoples following trails into Mexico. Spanish expeditions recorded stops here, and in 1840 Republic of Texas troops destroyed a Comanche village at the spring. Fort Clark rose beside it in 1852, and the Army later walled the pool and built a huge WPA swimming pool in 1939.

Sandoval County, NM

The village of Las Placitas nestles against the Sandia Mountains, a range humans have occupied for thousands of years. The community traces to 1767, when Governor Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta issued the Spanish land grant known as La Merced de San Antonio de las Huertas, opening the fertile foothills to Hispano settlers. The 'little places' of scattered farm plots gave the village its name.

Los Indios, TX

On June 25, 1864, in the far southern reaches of Texas along the Rio Grande, Confederate Colonel John S. "Rip" Ford's forces clashed with Union troops at Las Rucias and drove them from the field. The engagement was part of the seesaw struggle for control of the border cotton trade that funneled Confederate goods through Mexico. The State of Texas raised this marker in 1936 to remember the little-known Civil War fight on the Rio Grande frontier.

Las Vegas, NV

Artesian springs once rose from this desert floor, sending streams across the valley to water lush meadows — the vegas, or "meadows," that gave Las Vegas its name. For generations the oasis was the winter home of Southern Paiutes, and it became a vital resting stop on the Old Spanish Trail after Antonio Armijo's trading party passed nearby in 1829–30. John C. Fremont camped here in 1844 and mapped the site; Mormons founded a mission and fort in 1855; and in 1905 a railroad company acquired the water rights and platted the City of Las Vegas.

Las Vegas, NV

In June 1855, thirty-two Mormon missionaries from Utah arrived at this spring-fed valley and set to building a 150-foot-square adobe fort, planting fields and orchards in the desert. Most left by 1857, and the sturdy walls passed to rancher Octavius Decatur Gass, who ran cattle and supplied nearby miners. Helen J. Stewart later grew the ranch to 1,800 acres before selling it to the railroad, whose 1905 land auction founded modern Las Vegas. The old adobe remains Nevada's oldest building.

Lasara, TX

Carved from the old San Juan Carricitos Spanish land grant, Lasara was laid out in 1926 by developers W. A. Harding and Lamar Gill, who fused their wives' names, Laura and Sara, into the town's. Within that first year a post office, a Union Sunday School, and a schoolhouse all took root, and the school became the community's social heart. Once a cattle-shipping point, the town settled into its role as a hub for the surrounding ranch country.

Galveston, TX

Built around 1870 as a galleried Greek Revival home for Galveston attorney Marcus C. McLemore, this house was bought in 1901 by the Society for the Help of Homeless Children to serve the city's orphaned and needy young. Businessman Morris Lasker funded a major 1912 expansion, and the following year the institution was renamed in his honor.

Lamar County, MS

On July 8, 1889, on Richburg Hill in southern Mississippi, John L. Sullivan outlasted Jake Kilrain over an astonishing seventy-five rounds under the broiling sun to keep his heavyweight crown. It was the last major bare-knuckle heavyweight championship in America — after it, the padded gloves and rounds of the Marquess of Queensberry rules took over the sport. Fought quietly to dodge anti-prizefighting laws, the bout became instant legend.

Brownsville, TX

On May 13, 1865—more than a month after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox—Confederate and Union soldiers clashed here on the Rio Grande in the Battle of Palmito Ranch. Colonel John S. "Rip" Ford's Confederates won the fight, a bitter irony given that the war was already effectively over and word of its end had not reached this remote corner of Texas. It stands as the last land engagement of the American Civil War.

Ayr Township, PA · est. 2021

In the summer of 1864, Confederate cavalry under General Bradley T. Johnson camped on this ground on July 31, just after McCausland's raiders had burned Chambersburg in retaliation for Union destruction in the Shenandoah Valley. They proved to be the last Confederate troops ever to camp on Pennsylvania soil. Union cavalry under General William W. Averell gave chase and routed the raiders a week later at the Battle of Moorefield in West Virginia.

Panhandle, TX

After 1880, Texas herds streamed north each season to fatten on northern grass, and in 1892 the N Bar N ranch organized the last of the great Panhandle drives from these headquarters. Under manager J.L. Harrison and trail boss Tom Coffee, one hundred cowboys pushed roughly 25,000 cattle all the way to Montana between April and September. The herds belonged to the Niedringhaus brothers, St. Louis tinsmiths who had poured an enamelware fortune into ranching before the range was fenced and sold off to smaller farmers.

White Deer, TX

Each spring after 1880, Texas herds streamed north to fatten on distant grasslands, and in 1892 the N Bar N outfit staged the last of the great Panhandle drives from this headquarters. Under manager J. L. Harrison and trail boss Tom Coffee, a hundred cowboys pushed ten herds—25,000 head in all—clear to Montana between April and September. The cattle belonged to the Niedringhaus brothers, St. Louis tinsmiths who had poured an enamelware fortune into ranching, on range once leased from a British-backed syndicate.

Hart County, KY

In October 1792 — the very year Kentucky entered the Union — a party of travelers was ambushed at Oven Spring, leaving several settlers dead or carried off and their pack horses seized. Such raids were the grim punctuation of a decades-long struggle over the Ohio Valley, where Native nations fought to hold ground against the flood of settlers pouring through the Cumberland Gap. This marker records what local memory held to be the last such attack in the county, closing the violent frontier chapter of the region's early history.

Chatfield, TX

Confederate General Jo Shelby's Missouri cavalry — the storied 'Iron Brigade' — wintered in Texas in 1864-65 and, refusing to surrender as the Confederacy collapsed, bivouacked near Chambers Creek south of Chatfield. On June 2, 1865, the last organized Confederate unit lined up here for what became known as the 'last review of the Confederacy' before Shelby led hundreds of his men south to offer their swords in Mexico.

Ingleside, TX

When highway engineers dug for caliche near what is now Swan Lake in 1939, they uncovered one of the richest fossil deposits ever found at a single Texas site. Over the next two years, excavators recovered the remains of 42 species of Ice Age vertebrates—mammoth, saber-toothed cat, ground sloth, camel, bison, tapir, and more. The find opened a remarkable window onto the Late Pleistocene world that flourished along the Gulf Coast long before human settlement.

Latexo, TX

The congregation that became Latexo Baptist Church was organized in 1900 as the Stark Switch Baptist Church, in a community first known as Oldham. When the Louisiana Texas Orchard Company became the area's major employer, the town renamed itself Latexo in the company's honor, and the church followed suit in 1905. As settlement shifted east toward a new highway after 1930, the church relocated in 1945 and has thrived there, marking a century of service in 2000.

Lathum, TX

This small burial ground holds four pioneer settlers of the San Saba County frontier. The first grave was that of young George Lathum, who died of a rattlesnake bite in 1863; nearby lies Chaney Couch, killed by Indians in 1864, along with Isabella Couch and Elizabeth Christian. Relatives of these families went on to found the nearby Deer Creek Cemetery and a school and chapel named for Isabella Couch.

New Orleans, LA · est. 1976

This stately mansion on New Orleans' St. Charles Avenue was recognized on October 21, 1976, when the Department of the Interior placed the Latter Memorial Library on the National Register of Historic Places. Serving the public as a branch library, the building preserves the grandeur of the avenue's early twentieth-century residential architecture. The bronze plaque records its formal listing among the nation's protected historic places.

Hazle Township, PA · est. 1972

On September 10, 1897, hundreds of unarmed immigrant coal miners marched near Hazleton to demand fairer wages and working conditions in the anthracite fields. Sheriff's deputies opened fire on the strikers, killing nineteen and wounding dozens more, most of them recent Eastern European immigrants. The bloodshed shocked the nation and became a rallying point for the growing labor movement and the United Mine Workers.

Hazle Township, PA · est. 1997

On September 10, 1897, a group of unarmed immigrant coal miners—Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian—marched from Harwood toward Lattimer demanding higher pay and fair treatment. Sheriff's deputies opened fire on the peaceful column, killing nineteen and wounding many more. The dead were laid to rest in the ethnic parish cemeteries around Hazleton, and the massacre became a rallying cry for the growing labor movement in the anthracite fields.

Del Rio, TX

In 1942, with the nation racing to train pilots for World War II, the U.S. Army built an airfield east of Del Rio, where year-round clear skies and open ground offered near-ideal flying conditions. It was named for Lt. Jack Thomas Laughlin, a Del Rio native shot down over the Java Sea and the first local pilot killed in the war; his widow and infant daughter attended the 1943 dedication. Instructors trained crews on the B-26 Marauder before the base closed at war's end and reopened as an Air Force base in 1952.

West Pennsboro Township, PA · est. 1947

Built around 1763 on the waters of the Cumberland Valley, Laughlin Mill ground the grain of local farmers and stayed in its founding family's hands for well over a century. Grist mills like this were the beating heart of frontier settlements, the place where a farmer's harvest became flour and a community gathered. Preserved rather than lost, it survives as the oldest such structure in the region.

Abilene, TX

Dan T. Laughter learned the undertaking trade in a northeast Texas furniture store — a common pairing in an era when the same craftsmen who built cabinets built coffins — before settling in the booming West Texas railroad town of Abilene in 1900. He founded this firm in 1905, won sole ownership on the flip of a coin in 1908, and ran a combined funeral home and ambulance service into the 1970s. Under Russel and Willena North it carried on as North's Funeral Home, one of Abilene's enduring family businesses.

Brevard County, FL

Launch Complex 34 at Cape Canaveral was one of the pads that carried America into the space age. From here the mighty Saturn I and Saturn IB rockets rose in the early and mid-1960s, testing the hardware that would eventually send astronauts toward the Moon. It is also the solemn site where, on January 27, 1967, a fire during a ground test of Apollo 1 killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee — a tragedy that reshaped the safety of the entire lunar program.

Brownsville, TX

In the spring of 1915, as revolutionary turmoil spilled across the Rio Grande, the U.S. Army was just beginning to imagine what airplanes might do in war. From the old cavalry drill field at Fort Brown, two Signal Corps aviators took a fragile Curtiss biplane aloft to scout the movements of Pancho Villa's forces along the border. When ground fire struck their machine, it marked the first time an American military aircraft came under fire in hostilities—a small, dangerous milestone in the birth of American air power.

Caldwell County, NC

This simple stone in the North Carolina foothills marks the grave of Laura Foster, a young woman whose death on May 28, 1866, became the seed of one of America's most enduring murder ballads. In the hard years just after the Civil War, her killing led to the arrest and eventual hanging of Tom Dula — 'Tom Dooley' — a former Confederate soldier whose case gripped the Appalachian backcountry and drew national newspaper attention. Nearly a century later the Kingston Trio's 1958 recording of 'Tom Dooley' turned this local Blue Ridge tragedy into a folk-revival sensation, sending listeners back to the very hills where Laura Foster lies.

Humboldt County, CA

This memorial honors Laura Perrott Mahan and James P. Mahan, early champions of the Save-the-Redwoods League in the 1920s. Laura Mahan in particular famously stood against loggers to protect ancient redwood groves along the Eel River, at a time when the timber industry was rapidly felling California's old-growth giants. Their activism helped spark the movement that set aside redwood parks for future generations.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Laura Wheeler Waring built her career as a portrait painter in an era when few Black women found a place in the American art world. Trained in Philadelphia and in France, she captured the faces of leading African Americans and led the art department at Cheyney State College, shaping generations of students. Her portraits now hang in the National Portrait Gallery and other major collections.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

Founded in 1836 on a bluff above the Schuylkill River, Laurel Hill was the nation's second major rural cemetery, laid out by the Scottish-born architect John Notman. Its winding drives, ornamental plantings, and eclectic monuments made it as much a landscaped park as a burial ground, offering city dwellers a romantic escape from crowded, unhealthy urban churchyards. By 1861 it had grown to 78 acres, and Philadelphians came to stroll its grounds long before the city had public parks. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1998.

Mission, TX

Laurel Hill Cemetery has served Mission, in the lower Rio Grande Valley, since 1913, when graves were relocated from the town's first, unsuitable burial ground. Among those interred are city founder John J. Conway, author and television personality Dr. Cleo Dawson, and the aviator and stuntman Floyd "Slats" Rodgers, along with pioneers and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. Its false crypts, mausoleums, and statuary reflect the region's blended traditions.

Coldspring, TX

Laurel Hill Cemetery took its name from the laurel trees ringing the baptismal pool of the local Baptist church, and its land was donated in 1848 by General James B. Davis, adjutant-general of the Republic of Texas army. Burials began in the 1840s; the oldest surviving stone marks two-year-old Frances California Snow, who died in 1854. Davis himself was buried here in 1859, and later neighbors donated additional strips of land as the grounds were fenced.

Jefferson Township, PA · est. 2021

Laurel Hill was one of five Recreational Demonstration Areas the National Park Service created in Depression-era Pennsylvania to reclaim worn land for public use. Between 1935 and 1941, workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration built the roads, cabins, and facilities that turned the site into a place for recreation. Today it is the most intact RDA in the state, still holding examples of every kind of structure the New Deal builders left behind.

Franklin County, NC

In the rolling piedmont of Franklin County, a water-powered gristmill and the home of a local planter-militia officer stand as a paired reminder of everyday antebellum life. Mills like Laurel Mill were the beating heart of rural North Carolina communities, grinding neighbors' corn and wheat into meal and flour and giving farm families a reason to gather. Col. Jordan Jones, whose nearby house shares the marker, was the kind of landholder-and-officer figure who anchored such a settlement, blending farming, milling, and a title earned in the local militia.

London, KY

Laurel Seminary grew from an 1826 act of the Kentucky legislature that set aside land to fund education in Laurel and other counties. The land was eventually sold and the seminary opened in 1858, only to be pressed into service as a hospital during the Civil War. In 1900 Governor W. S. Taylor even convened a special session of the legislature here, and the institution carried on as a common, private, and public school into the twentieth century.

Maxton, NC

From 1942 to 1945, the Laurinburg-Maxton Army Air Base served as a major U.S. Army Air Forces glider training center. Engine-less gliders, towed aloft and released to land troops and equipment behind enemy lines, were trained here for airborne operations — including units that took part in the D-Day assault on June 6, 1944.

Austin, TX

Born to enslaved parents in Tennessee in 1853, Laurine Cecil Anderson educated himself at Memphis schools and Fisk University before coming to Texas in 1880 to lead a training school in Brenham. He went on to head what is now Prairie View A&M University, served as founding president of the Colored Teachers State Association, and for thirty-two years led Austin's only high school for Black students. Two days after his death in 1938, the city's school board voted to name that school in his honor.

Hallettsville, TX

Lavaca County traces its roots to an 1842 judicial county created by the Republic of Texas, reestablished by the new state in 1846 after the judicial counties were ruled unconstitutional. This is the fifth building to serve as its seat of justice — earlier ones included a log courthouse and, after a fire, sessions held under a live oak in old Petersburg. Designed by noted Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner in Richardsonian style and built of Mineral Wells sandstone in 1897-1899, it was dedicated on July 4, 1899, and later listed on the National Register.

Port Lavaca, TX

Chartered in 1848, this was the first Masonic lodge in Calhoun County, part of the wave of fraternal organizations that anchored civic life in young Texas towns. The lodge went dormant during the Civil War era, then was revived in 1886 when a lodge from storm-battered Indianola relocated to Port Lavaca after a devastating hurricane. It carried the W. P. Milby name until 1935, when its original Lavaca Lodge No. 36 identity was restored.

Lavon, TX

Drawn by the rich Blackland Prairie soil and Bear Creek's water, settlers reached the Lavon area in the 1850s, and the town proper took root when the railroad arrived in 1886. Originally called Thompson or Thompson Switch after early postmaster and merchant Elbert Thompson, it was renamed Lavon for his son to avoid confusion with another town. WPA crews built a school here in the late 1930s, and in the 1950s Lavon Dam turned the area into a fishing and boating retreat—one restaurant even appeared in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.

Lavon, TX

Between 1938 and 1940, the Lavon Independent School District replaced the community's earlier two-story schoolhouse with a five-classroom building erected through Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, with local crews rotated so every man needing work earned about $3.50 a day. Designed by architect Hoke Smith with a hardwood-floored gymnasium and lunchroom, the school was dedicated in the fall of 1941 by Congressman Sam Rayburn. After districts consolidated in 1949 it served as an elementary school and later as a factory, library, and city hall.

McKinney, TX

From this McKinney law office practiced James W. Throckmorton, who served as governor of Texas in 1866 and 1867 during the fraught early years of Reconstruction before military authorities removed him from office. The building's front has been remodeled, but its interior survives much as he knew it. It stands as a tangible link to Texas politics in the turbulent aftermath of the Civil War.

Langtry, TX

In this dusty building beside the Rio Grande, Judge Roy Bean dispensed his own brand of justice as the self-styled "Law West of the Pecos," holding court between pouring drinks and consulting a single 1879 statute book he rarely opened. Trials spilled onto the porch, drunks were chained to mesquite trees, and fines went straight into the judge's pocket. His notoriety peaked in 1896 when he staged a banned heavyweight title fight on a Rio Grande sandbar to outwit the Texas Rangers—and he named his saloon-courtroom the "Jersey Lilly" for an English actress he adored but never met.

Atlanta, TX

George and Martha Law, pioneers from Georgia, founded this congregation in 1853, making it the first Protestant church in the area. Members began worshipping under a brush arbor, then in a log structure, before joining the Methodist Conference in 1859 and starting their lasting building in 1869.

Lexington, TX

Native peoples long used the reliable water at the Yegua Spring before English-born pioneer John Lewis Smith and his son Samuel settled here in 1848, dug out the spring, and gave it the family name. The Smiths had followed the American frontier from Virginia through Kentucky and Alabama into Republic-era Texas. The first person buried on the hillside was an enslaved man of John Lewis Smith who asked to rest beside him; graves of the Smith family, marked as Citizens of the Republic of Texas, and generations of area pioneers followed.

Florence, TX

Founded before the mid-1800s, this rural community took its name from early settler L. T. "Uncle Lee" Lawler, beloved for leasing his land free of charge so neighbors could build a school, church, and cemetery. Its first school, begun before 1872, honored land donor Edward Stevenson. Once a gathering point for pioneer families, the area is now given over to farms and ranches.

Lawn, TX

At the peak of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force ringed bases with intercontinental ballistic missiles, and this site near Lawn held one of the first subterranean Atlas F silos in the country. Sunk 185 feet deep and built of concrete, resin, and steel to survive a nuclear blast, the silo was linked by tunnel to a launch control center manned by a five-person crew of the 578th Strategic Missile Squadron from 1962 until the Atlas program ended in 1965. Most Texans never knew such weapons stood beneath their farmland.

Terrell, TX

When the Texas and Pacific Railroad pushed through in 1873, a group of investors formed a colony association to promote the new town of Lawrence, named for one of their directors. The town's cemetery began the same year with the burial of a seven-month-old child and has since grown to hold more than four hundred graves, many of them the area's earliest pioneers.

Thrall, TX

Adam Lawrence, a Kentucky-born pioneer who received a Texas land grant in 1822, donated this tract for a cemetery in 1840. A farmer and cattle raiser, he fought in the Texas Revolution of 1836 and in numerous frontier conflicts, and legend held that he once leaped his horse twenty feet into a river to escape pursuers. The burial ground he gave still marks the community he helped found.

Fort Worth, TX

Born in Greenville, Texas, in 1901, Lawrence Clifton Elliott showed his knack for flight by building an experimental airplane in high school. After training as an Army pilot, he began a 35-year federal aviation career in 1928, based for 25 years at Fort Worth, where he helped mark domestic flight routes, develop aviation weather broadcasting, and set standards for aircraft maintenance and safety. During World War II he served as a regional manager of the U.S. Civil Aviation System.

New Castle, PA · est. 1982

Created in 1849 from parts of Beaver and Mercer counties, Lawrence County honors Capt. James Lawrence, the naval hero of the War of 1812 remembered for the dying cry "Don't give up the ship." Its county seat, New Castle, had been laid out decades earlier, but the town's real boom came around the turn of the twentieth century, when it exploded as a center of the American tin-plate industry. For a generation it ranked among the fastest-growing cities in the nation.

Dawson, TX

This family burial ground sits on an 1835 land grant to David McCandless, who came to Texas as a Robertson colonist in the last days of Mexican rule. The plot passed to his daughter Macca Orange and her husband Joseph Thompson Lawrence, and was opened in 1868 with the heartbreaking burial of their six-year-old daughter, Sarah Medora. Deeded formally in 1913, the cemetery is still tended by the family's descendants.

Mesquite, TX

Stephen Decatur Lawrence, son of an original Mercer colony settler, received about 640 acres on his twenty-first birthday and began building here in 1874, adding a T-plan clapboard house in 1882 that grew into a striking Victorian home with a central tower and steeply pitched roof. Barns, a smokehouse, a root cellar, and a wash house rounded out a working blackland-prairie farmstead where Lawrence raised eleven children across two marriages. The family held the land until 1995, when part of it became a city historical park.

Raleigh, NC

Lawrence O'Bryan Branch built a public life across business and politics before the Civil War, serving as president of the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad and three terms in Congress. When war came he became a Confederate brigadier general. His home stood near this marker, and his grave lies to the east.

Lawrence Township, MI

This memorial gathers the seals of all five U.S. military branches to honor the men and women of the Lawrence, Michigan area who served in uniform. Community veterans memorials like this became widespread across small-town America through the twentieth century, giving neighbors a shared place to remember local service and sacrifice.

Cass County, TX

This cemetery began as a family plot when Henry G. Law died in 1854, soon after his family moved to Cass County from Georgia. It grew into a community burial ground after his brother Richard donated six acres to the Laws Chapel Church in 1869, and was later shared with the nearby Piney Grove Baptist Church founded in 1887. Expanded in 1941, it still serves the area and holds generations of local pioneers, veterans, and families.

Willow Park, TX

Born into slavery in 1839 on a Kentucky plantation, Lawson Daniel Gratz enlisted in the Federal army in 1864 and rose to first sergeant in the 114th U.S. Colored Infantry, serving at the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond and standing at Appomattox when Lee surrendered. He later reenlisted with the 10th U.S. Cavalry — the Buffalo Soldiers — and kept serving even after an explosion cost him the sight in one eye. Settling at last in Parker County, he raised fourteen children and was remembered for his leadership and unbending devotion to duty.

Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947

At the mission the Delaware called Lawunakhannek — "northerly stream place" — the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger and his Native converts raised what is remembered as the first Protestant church building west of the Allegheny Mountains in 1769. Moravian missions like this one gathered Delaware and other Native peoples into small Christian communities along the frontier rivers. The name itself preserves the Delaware language mapping of this stretch of the Allegheny.

Sandyston Township, NJ

The village of Layton grew from a settlement founded by John Layton in rural Sussex County in the early 1800s. Once called Centreville, it gathered a blacksmith, a carpenter's shop and tavern, a store, a Methodist church, and one-room schools, and took its lasting name when a local petitioner won a post office in 1861.

Tinicum Township, PA · est. 2008

Established in 1799 after a devastating yellow fever epidemic, the Lazaretto stood as Philadelphia's line of defense against imported disease. For nearly a century, ships bound for the port stopped here first so that cargo could be inspected or fumigated and passengers examined; the sick were hospitalized and held until they recovered — or died. For countless arriving immigrants, this quarantine station was their very first taste of America.