Search Markers

Lazbuddie, TX

In 1902 Thomas Kelly bought more than 55,000 acres of the legendary XIT Ranch and built the Star Ranch, dotting the high plains with thirty windmills, corrals, and a schoolhouse. As the great ranch was carved into smaller farms, a community took root: D. Luther 'Laz' Green and Andrew 'Buddie' Sherley opened the Lazbuddie commissary in 1924, giving the town both its heart and its whimsical name. Post office, churches, schools, and grain elevators soon followed.

Dallas, TX

In the early twentieth century, Deep Ellum — the neighborhood around Elm Street and Central Avenue in downtown Dallas — was one of the largest and most vibrant Black urban communities in the country, its clubs, dance halls, and street corners alive with music. It was here that Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, who arrived around 1910, first heard a jazz band and discovered the 12-string guitar, and where he met his musical partner Blind Lemon Jefferson. Together with their Deep Ellum peers, they helped shape American blues, jazz, country, and rock for generations to come.

Houston, TX

The League of United Latin American Citizens formed in Corpus Christi in 1929 to unite Texas Hispanics against discrimination while promoting education, patriotism, and equality. In 1934 more than twenty Houston men chartered Council 60 in Magnolia Park, going on to open jobs for Mexican Americans in wartime industry and the city's police and fire departments. The council backed landmark court fights—including Hernandez v. Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court—and launched the "Little School of the 400," a model for the national Head Start program.

League City, TX

When Galveston developer John Charles League platted his townsite in 1890, he set aside land not just for a school and church but for this park, established in 1895 through a sale to the railroad. For decades League Park was the beating heart of the community—hosting campaign speeches, medicine shows, revivals, and summer band concerts from a two-story bandstand rebuilt after the catastrophic 1900 hurricane. During World War I it became a rallying ground for Red Cross drives, and residents funded a new bandstand for the American Bicentennial.

Murchison, TX

The Leagueville community grew from the Aaron York survey, and tradition holds its cemetery began beside an early schoolhouse on land donated by B.T. and Annie Roberts. That pioneer schoolhouse also hosted worship, and in 1880 the congregation that became Leagueville Baptist Church organized there. The oldest marked grave, that of Alabama native Jacob Colvin, dates to 1863, and pioneer families like the Reagans, Adairs, and Colvins rest among many unmarked early burials.

Bastrop, TX

In an era when engineering was almost entirely a man's profession, Leah Moncure of Bastrop apprenticed at her surveyor father's side, earned a civil engineering degree from UT Austin, and in 1938 became the first woman in Texas to register as a professional engineer. Born with a congenital heart condition doctors thought she wouldn't survive, she instead built a 32-year career with the Texas Highway Department in research, right-of-way, and road design. A UT scholarship in her name still supports women studying engineering.

Medford, MA

This Medford square honors Private Thomas Ambrose Leahy of Company E, 101st Infantry, 26th ('Yankee') Division, one of the New England men sent to France with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. He died in the fighting there, and his home city dedicated this ground to keep his sacrifice in daily view.

Navasota, TX

Built as a modest one-story frame store in 1873 and enlarged in 1885 with native sandstone walls and a second floor, this Navasota building became a fixture of the town's commercial life. In 1886 builder and horse breeder John Wesley Leake bought it, and his family held the property for more than eighty years while a parade of important firms did business behind its Victorian storefront.

Leakey, TX

Dating to at least 1881 and once known as the Floral Cemetery, this burial ground sits on land John and Nancy Leakey sold for a dollar and a cemetery plot. Its oldest documented graves are those of Sara Catherine McLaurin and fifteen-year-old Allen Lease, killed in April 1881 in what is remembered as the last Indian raid in the Frio Canyon area. Among more than 900 burials lie pioneers, Civil War veteran John Colter Brice, elected officials, and countless children lost to measles, typhoid, diphtheria, and influenza.

Leakey, TX

When John and Nancy Leakey built a home and sawmill in the Frio River Canyon in 1856, they were the first to settle this remote stretch of the Hill Country—and their home soon hosted the circuit-rider services that grew into this congregation. From a schoolhouse meeting place to sanctuaries raised in 1890 and 1922, the church tracked the growth of the town named for its founding family. Easter sunrise and community Thanksgiving services have long knit it into local life.

Leakey, TX

Education in the Leakey area began in settlers' homes in the 1850s and evolved through the Floral School and Academy on land the Leakey family deeded in 1883. As county lines shifted—Edwards County, then Real County in 1913—Leakey twice served as county seat and steadily built up its schools, opening new buildings in 1922 and 1930 as surrounding rural districts consolidated in.

Leander, TX

Leander began as a relocation of the older town of Bagdad, founded in 1854, after the Austin & Northwestern Railroad bypassed the original site in 1882. A new town was platted along the rail line and named for railroad official Leander Brown, and homes and businesses simply picked up and moved to it. The post office followed in 1882, and the school that opened in 1893 grew into the county's largest district.

Waelder, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1810, Leander C. Cunningham fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived out a long life on the Texas land his generation had wrested into a new republic, dying in 1896. He is remembered here alongside his wife Ann, who was born in Kentucky in 1808.

Burton, TX

Virginia-born Leander H. McNelly served as a Confederate soldier before Reconstruction Governor E. J. Davis named him one of four captains of the Texas State Police in 1870. Later, as a Texas Ranger, McNelly commanded a special force—the Washington County Volunteer Militia—sent to quell the violent Sutton-Taylor feud. He then took his men, who proudly called themselves the "Little McNellys," to the Rio Grande to fight cross-border cattle raiders in the so-called Las Cuevas War.

Leander, TX

Organized in 1857 by the Rev. R. M. Overstreet as Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church, this congregation first worshipped in the town of Bagdad. When the railroad bypassed Bagdad in 1882 and the new town of Leander sprang up along the tracks, the members voted to follow, erecting a building in 1884 on land given by church member Sarah J. Walker. The church's move captures how the railroad reshaped the map of Central Texas.

Leander, TX

Schooling in this part of Williamson County began in 1855 at Bagdad, a pre-Civil War community that faded once the railroad drew settlers to nearby Leander. A free public school opened there in 1893, and local business leaders formed a high school association in 1899 to sustain it. The first Leander High School class graduated in 1931, and the schools grew alongside the town.

Leander, TX

This Methodist congregation was organized around 1860 in Bagdad, a Williamson County community a mile to the west. Early worshipers met with circuit preachers and missionaries in a log schoolhouse and a Masonic hall until they built a sanctuary in 1879. When the railroad drew settlement to Leander in 1901, the church followed, and the old Bagdad sanctuary was moved to land deeded by Sarah J. Walker.

Leander, TX

In December 1982, highway archeologists near Leander uncovered the skeleton of a woman who lived roughly 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, quickly nicknamed the "Leanderthal Lady." About 30 years old and 5-foot-3, she was found in an intact grave at the Wilson-Leonard site, one of the earliest such burials known in the United States. Her remains opened a rare window onto the peopling of North America.

Logan Township, PA · est. 2000

Built in 1902 by Philadelphia's E. Joy Morris, Leap-The-Dips is a side-friction figure-eight coaster from the dawn of the American amusement-park era, when hundreds of such wooden rides thrilled crowds at trolley parks nationwide. As tastes changed and the others were torn down, this one at Lakemont Park endured to become the last of its kind and the world's oldest known operating roller coaster. It carries National Historic Landmark status.

Gilmer, TX

During the Civil War this East Texas site hummed with the unglamorous but vital work of keeping an army moving. A shoe factory turned local leather into footgear for Confederate soldiers, while a nearby harness shop produced the bridles, saddles, and rigging that hitched horses and mules to gun carriages, wagons, and ambulances. Fed by a tanyard that processed over 2,000 hides a year, East Texas plants supplied the South hundreds of saddles and harness sets each month.

Commerce, TX

This ground has served as a burial place since the 1860s, and pioneer settler Rebecca Hart Williams Little—who reached the area in the 1830s—formally deeded it for church and school use in 1871. Among those laid to rest are early settlers, infants and children, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars. A one-room school once stood alongside it until 1945.

Lebanon, PA · est. 1982

Lebanon County was organized in 1813 from parts of Dauphin and Lancaster counties, though the community here reached back much further — its township dated to 1729 and the town of Lebanon to around 1740. Settled largely by Pennsylvania Germans, the area grew into a landscape of prosperous farms and closely held religious traditions. That blend of rich agriculture and faith gave the county an enduring identity rooted in its early settlers' values.

Aquilla, TX

In October 1872, landowners deeded four acres in Hill County to a group of Methodist trustees, and tradition holds that pastor Isaac Pierce Lowery proposed the congregation's biblical name of Lebanon the following year. The first church building burned in the early 1880s, prompting members to move to the present site. An early school on the church grounds served the surrounding community well into the twentieth century.

Albany, TX

Georgia-born William Henry Ledbetter came to Texas in 1858 and built a salt works on Hubbard Creek during the Civil War, weathering raids on the exposed western frontier before relocating nearer the protection of Fort Griffin. In the mid-1870s he raised this picket house — walls of upright timbers set in the ground — a construction method common on a frontier short on sawn lumber. Ledbetter served as Shackelford County's first county judge, and the city of Albany moved and restored his home in 1953.

Albany, TX

Discovered by trail drivers in 1861 and developed by W. H. Ledbetter beginning in 1862, this Hubbard Creek salt works answered the desperate Confederate need for salt — the only means, before refrigeration, of preserving meat. Large furnaces and kettles hauled in from East Texas turned out salt for Confederate troops west of the Mississippi, state militia, ranches, and settlers who traveled up to 200 miles to fetch it. Frontier cavalry guarded the works from raids, and after nearby Fort Griffin was established in 1867 a cannon was even loaned for its defense; production continued until 1880.

Roxton, TX

This quiet country burial ground grew up around the 1860 grave of a one-year-old child on Herbert Lee's farm, and he set the land aside for a cemetery in his Civil War-era will. Most of those laid to rest here were buried between 1870 and 1890, in the lean years of Reconstruction when few could afford ornate stones. Among them rest a citizen of the Republic of Texas and veterans of the Civil War.

Celeste, TX

This burial ground took shape around 1860, in the years when families were still carving farms and communities out of the North Texas blackland prairie of Hunt County. A rural cemetery like this one served scattered settlers as both a resting place and a fixed point of community memory, long before the surrounding towns had churches or courthouses of their own. Its later designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes that continuity across more than a century of local life.

Quitman, TX

North Carolina natives Benjamin and Alice Lee arrived around 1853 and built up a cotton plantation of more than 1,230 acres worked by their large family and enslaved people. Benjamin became a community leader and county commissioner, and the family burial ground begun at his death in 1856 gradually opened to neighbors and grew into a thirteen-acre public cemetery. Its graves—including four Lee sons who served in the Confederate army, alongside bankers, a mayor, a doctor, and newspaper publishers—read like a roster of the community's history.

Seagoville, TX

When James J. Lee donated this 1.125-acre tract in 1870, he made a deliberate act of charity: plots were never to be sold. As the first cemetery in southeast Dallas County, it became a democratic resting place, gathering some 1,500 burials that cut across the era's hard lines of race and rank — a Confederate founder, a Mexican War general, dozens of people of Mexican descent, and an enslaved man brought to Texas in 1855.

Brownwood, TX

Organized in 1888 and named for AME Bishop Benjamin Franklin Lee, Lee Chapel gathered Brownwood's Black community first in a Baptist church and then in a brush arbor at the home of its pastor, the Rev. George E. Smith—who also founded the town's first school for Black children. In 1906 the congregation's building was moved to this site, where the church has continued to serve ever since. Its story braids together worship, education, and community survival under segregation.

Baytown, TX

In the depths of the Great Depression in 1934, voters of the Goose Creek school district chose to found Lee Junior College, betting on higher education when money was scarce. Its first 177 students paid under $15 a semester and met at night in a high school, and four women made up the 1935 graduating class. Renamed Lee College in 1948, it became a pioneer in prison education in 1966 with courses inside the Texas Department of Corrections aimed at reducing recidivism.

Giddings, TX

Straddling the Old San Antonio Road on land first surveyed for Moses and Stephen F. Austin's colony, Lee County became in 1854 the heart of Wendish settlement in America, when Pastor Johann Kilian led his Sorbian-speaking congregation from Central Europe to a new home here. Their school was the only one in the United States to teach in Wendish, a Slavic language that survives in the modern world chiefly here and in Australia. The county was organized in 1874 and named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee, with Giddings as its seat.

Giddings, TX

Completed in 1899, the Lee County Courthouse rose after fire destroyed the county's first courthouse in 1897. Designed by J. R. Gordon in the muscular Richardsonian Romanesque style—named for the influential Louisiana-born architect Henry Hobson Richardson—it echoes public buildings of its era with heavy stone and rounded arches. Its builders, a San Antonio firm, set it on the high ground dividing the Colorado and Brazos river basins, a commanding perch for the seat of county government.

Prosper, TX

In 1875 Masons around the Rhea's Mill community, tired of traveling to McKinney for meetings, won a charter for their own lodge from the Grand Lodge of Texas. When the Santa Fe railroad made Prosper the area's rising town, the members voted in 1903 to relocate and built a lodge hall there in 1904. The fraternity has remained part of Prosper community life ever since.

Union Township, PA · est. 1947

On August 16, 1782, Major John Lee and his family were killed near this place in a raid by an Indian war party, with only his son Robert surviving. The attack came during the violent final years of the Revolutionary War on the Pennsylvania frontier, when British-allied raids terrorized isolated valley settlements. Such tragedies were a grim feature of life on the contested edge of the new nation.

Salisbury, NC

Lee Slater Overman represented North Carolina in the United States Senate from 1903 to 1930, a long tenure that spanned the Progressive Era and World War I. He was a prominent ally of President Woodrow Wilson, backing the administration's wartime measures, and later chaired a Senate inquiry into wartime disloyalty. His home stood here in Salisbury.

Sherman, TX

Lee Simmons (1873–1957) stepped into public life when Denison citizens urged him to run for sheriff, winning election in 1912. In the 1920s successive governors tapped him to inspect and then oversee the Texas prison system, and by 1930 he was its general manager, earning a strong reputation and famously founding the Texas Prison Rodeo. He died before finishing his autobiography, fittingly titled "Assignment Huntsville."

Navasota, TX

This African-American Methodist congregation traces to 1860 and, after the Civil War, built a church in 1866 in a Navasota neighborhood called 'Freeman's Town.' Formally organized in 1876, the group raised its present Gothic Revival sanctuary in 1896 — worshipping in the basement until the building was finished — and renamed itself to honor its pastor, the Rev. Edward Lee. With its arched and stained-glass windows and tower entry, the church has served its members for well over a century.

Caldwell, TX

Lee W. Henslee (1872–1927), a native of Burleson County, was named county sheriff in 1902 during an era when law and order were still hard-won. Known as "Mr. Lee," he seldom drew a gun, earning respect through quiet persuasion, and his family lived in the county jail. He later became the county tax collector in 1916.

Fredericksburg, VA

During the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee took up a position on this elevated ground, which afforded a sweeping view of the battlefield along the Rappahannock River. From this vantage—soon nicknamed "Lee's Hill"—he watched Union General Ambrose Burnside hurl waves of troops against the entrenched Confederate lines below. The assaults, especially against the stone wall at Marye's Heights, ended in one of the most lopsided Union defeats of the war.

Asheville, NC

From 1844 to 1879, Colonel Stephen Lee ran a respected classical preparatory school for boys at Chunn's Cove, offering the Greek and Latin education that prepared young men for college and public life. The school stood half a mile north.

Leechburg, PA

In the prosperous years after World War I, the industrial river town of Leechburg invested in a grand new schoolhouse to match its growing ambitions. Designed by New Castle architect W.G. Eckels and raised between 1922 and 1924, the building wore the dignified columns and symmetry of the Classical Revival style then favored for civic landmarks across America. Opened with 23 classrooms and dedicated that September of 1924, it became the educational heart of the Leechburg Area School District.

Leechburg, PA

This blue-and-gold cast-iron sign is one of Pennsylvania's Keystone Markers, a statewide series from the early twentieth century that fixed the identity and origin of towns along the roadside. Leechburg took its name from David Leech, an enterprising figure of the early republic who developed the settlement on the Kiskiminetas River in the era when the Pennsylvania Canal threaded freight and passengers through the state's interior. A canal town by birth, it later grew into a busy iron and tin manufacturing community as industry followed the water and rail routes west.

Granbury, TX

This Eastlake-style house was built in 1890 for J.C. Lees, a Canadian-born Granbury merchant, and sold to S.L. Bowden in 1895. Bowden's daughter Maude lived here after marrying Hardy H. Bryan in 1903, and the home stayed in the Bryan family for nearly seventy years. Its corner tower with fish-scale shingles and pyramidal roof marks it as a fine example of late-Victorian architecture on the Texas frontier.

Leesburg, TX

The Leesburg Cemetery has served this small Camp County community since 1870, its graves quietly recording the lives of the families who settled and sustained East Texas in the decades after the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, the grounds mark the endurance of a rural settlement whose story is written in its headstones.

Leesburg, TX

Established around 1870 on land donated by Dwight Hays Townsend, this graveyard grew into the resting place of a whole rural East Texas community. Its earliest burials are believed to be two children reinterred from the old Leesburg schoolyard, and its oldest marked grave dates to 1870. Generations of pioneers, community leaders, and war veterans lie here, a stone record of the people who built and defended Leesburg.

Leesville, TX

Organized in 1875 in the small Gonzales County settlement of Leesville, this Baptist congregation lost its first meeting house to an 1886 storm, then rebuilt across O'Neal Creek on land bought from pioneer settler N. H. Guinn, raising this plain frame church in 1887-88. Its steeple came down in 1924, and after a devastating 1936 flood the town itself picked up and moved three-quarters of a mile west to the new state highway. The church stayed put, becoming one of the last markers of the original townsite.

Leesville, TX

Settled before the Civil War, the Gonzales County town of Leesburg — later Leesville — was a busy trade center when this one-room brick schoolhouse went up in 1868, with the site deeded to the Leesburg Male and Female Institute in 1873. Everything came from close by: red bricks fired in a nearby kiln, lumber from the Daniel Brown Sawmill on O'Neill Creek, and labor from local residents. Classes ran until 1918, after which the building served as community center, lunchroom, and even a private home before being restored.

Harmony Township, PA · est. 1946

Through the winter of 1792-93, General Anthony Wayne drilled the newly formed Legion of the United States at this camp on the Ohio, turning raw recruits into a disciplined fighting force. The training paid off in 1794 when Wayne's army defeated a Native confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, breaking Indigenous resistance in the Northwest Territory. Legionville is remembered as one of the first formal basic-training encampments in American military history.

Ector County, TX

In 1833, while Texas was still under Mexican rule, Alexander LeGrande carried out a sweeping survey for empresario John Beales, whose land dealings gave him claim to a staggering 70 million acres and the title of Texas's greatest land king. LeGrande's route ran some 2,000 miles across West Texas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and eastern New Mexico, an effort dogged by hardship and tragedy and ultimately abandoned. His work preceded the better-known exploration credited to Captain R. B. Marcy of the U.S. Army by years.

Allentown, PA

Carved from Northampton County in March 1812 and named for the river that powered its early industry, Lehigh County anchored the Pennsylvania German heartland around Allentown. Its ground had already earned a place in Revolutionary lore: when the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777-1778, patriots spirited the State House Bell — later called the Liberty Bell — to Allentown, hiding it beneath the floor of Zion Reformed Church. The county was also home to George Taylor, one of Pennsylvania's signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Dennison Township, PA · est. 2001

Long before roads crossed these mountains, a Native American footpath threaded through this rugged country, one strand in a network of trails linking villages of the Delaware and Susquehanna watersheds. The Lehigh Path ran from the Forks of the Delaware near present-day Easton northwestward to the Wyoming Valley on the Susquehanna near Wilkes-Barre. The Lenni-Lenape and Susquehannock traveled its steep grades until roughly 1800, when European settlement finally displaced the old ways of moving through the land.

Bethlehem, PA

Bethlehem grew up around steel — the mills and blast furnaces that built American bridges, skyscrapers, and warships also exacted a steady human toll in the men and women who worked them. Dedicated on April 28, 1991 — Workers Memorial Day, the date the modern labor movement set aside to honor those killed or hurt on the job — this memorial gathers that grief into a single place of remembrance. It speaks not for one industry but for every worker and the families left behind.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 2015

The rivalry between Lehigh and Lafayette began in 1884 at Lafayette College and became a defining fixture of the Lehigh Valley. Meeting more than 150 times, the two schools hold the NCAA's recognition for the most-played rivalry in college football. The annual clash has been chronicled in national outlets including Sports Illustrated and the New York Times and broadcast on ESPN.

Fredericksburg, TX

In 1882 German immigrant Henry Lehne raised this limestone house in the old-country farmhouse tradition brought to the Texas Hill Country by Fredericksburg's German settlers. He farmed and ranched, hauled goods to San Antonio as a teamster, and outlived two wives while raising nine children under its roof. A frame addition built by his daughter and son-in-law in 1933 extended a family occupancy that lasted 109 years.

Leidy Township, PA · est. 1995

In the winter of 1950, wildcatter Dorcie Calhoun ignored expert opinion and drilled deep into the hills of Leidy Township in search of natural gas. On January 8 his well struck gas at more than 5,600 feet, briefly gushing an estimated 15 million cubic feet a day. The strike made national news and set off a frenzy: within months more than thirty companies and independent operators were drilling across the township, chasing the boom before the field's production wound down.

Boston, MA

Around AD 1000, five centuries before Columbus, Norse seafarers sailing out of Iceland and Greenland reached the shores of North America — a landfall remembered in the Icelandic sagas as "Vinland." Leif Erikson, son of Erik the Red, became the figure most associated with that voyage of discovery. This bronze, raised on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall in the late 19th century, grew out of a New England enthusiasm for the idea that Vikings, not later explorers, first crossed the Atlantic to the continent.

Milwaukee, WI

This monument celebrates Leif Erikson, the Norse seafarer whom saga tradition credits with reaching the North American coast around A.D. 1000, roughly five centuries before Columbus. Statues like this one rose across the upper Midwest in the late 19th century as Scandinavian-American communities took pride in their heritage and pressed the claim that Norse voyagers touched the continent first. The figure of Leif became a rallying point for immigrant identity as much as a marker of early exploration.

Hondo, TX

Built in 1907 for prominent Hondo businessman Ernest Roland Leinweber, this three-story commercial block was raised by prolific South Texas contractor Gus Birkner, who had a hand in building the Texas State Capitol. Constructed of locally made brick, it blends touches of Classical and Romanesque styling and has long housed a rotating mix of professional and commercial offices. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1986.

Nether Providence Township, PA · est. 1955

Built in 1809-10 by Thomas Leiper and surveyed by John Thomson, the Leiper Railway ran about three-quarters of a mile to haul stone from quarries on Crum Creek down to a landing on Ridley Creek. It is remembered as the first railway in Pennsylvania and the first in America to be laid out by survey. Horses drew the loaded cars along its wooden rails decades before the steam locomotive age.