Search Markers

Lela, TX

Lela sprang up around 1902 along the proposed line of the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf railway, and residents quickly organized a school, first known as Story. When flooding forced the community uphill, the school moved with it, and the discovery of natural gas in the 1920s brought new prosperity and a brick schoolhouse. After nearly ninety years, the Lela district closed in 1992 and merged with nearby Shamrock.

Lemley, TX

The earliest grave here, dating to 1857, lies on land the Thomas B. Martin family settled in 1853 on the raw Texas frontier. After Martin sold the tract to the Lemley brothers, who had come from Illinois in the 1850s, the burial ground took their name and served family, friends, and neighboring settlers — including at least five Civil War veterans, with many graves marked only by native stones.

Cresson Township, PA · est. 1958

Samuel Lemon built this stone tavern in 1830 at the summit of the Allegheny Portage Railroad, beside the head of Inclined Plane No. 6. The Portage was an engineering marvel that hauled canal boats up and over the mountains by a series of cable-worked inclines, knitting Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. For years the Lemon House gave weary travelers, teamsters, and railroad crews a place to rest, eat, and water their horses at the roof of the crossing.

Corsicana, TX

Corsicana resident A. L. Lemon built this house in 1895 of Louisiana cypress, and in 1902 sold it to John Wesley Edens, a substantial landowner who farmed and ranched 2,400 acres and served locally as deputy sheriff, tax collector, and city councilman. The late Victorian home, dressed with Eastlake and Queen Anne detailing, stayed in the Edens family for more than forty years. It stands as a well-preserved example of the ornate domestic architecture that flourished in prospering Texas towns of the Gilded Age.

South Strabane Township, PA · est. 1953

In 1876 Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne, a physician and reformer, built the first crematory in the United States on this ground, convinced that cremation was more sanitary than traditional burial in crowded, disease-prone cemeteries. Between 1876 and 1900 the facility performed 42 cremations, a modest number that nonetheless launched a national conversation about death, public health, and reform. LeMoyne himself was cremated and lies buried at the site.

Washington, PA · est. 1953

Built in 1812 in the young town of Washington, this brick house became the home of Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne, a physician remembered as one of western Pennsylvania's most outspoken abolitionists in the decades before the Civil War. LeMoyne pushed his convictions in directions few contemporaries dared, later erecting the first crematory in the United States and championing public education and reform. The house survives as the home of the Washington County Historical Society, keeping that reform-minded legacy in place.

Hertford County, NC

A Baptist leader in the years just after emancipation, Lemuel W. Boone organized North Carolina's first Black Baptist association in 1866, giving newly freed congregations a shared institution of their own. He also served as a trustee of Shaw University, one of the South's early colleges for African Americans. His grave lies about two miles southeast.

La Grange, TX

Albert and Amelia Lenert, both of whom came to Fayette County from Germany as children, moved to La Grange in 1894 and built this fine Victorian Italianate home for their family. Its symmetrical façade, inset central porch, Moorish-arched side porch, and crisp milled detail reflect the prosperity of German Texans in the late nineteenth century. The Lenerts' descendants held the house until 1979.

Marlboro Township, NJ

Long before New Jersey took its name, the land around present-day Marlboro belonged to the Lenni Lenape — the "Original People" whose villages, trails, and planting grounds spread across the Delaware Valley and the Jersey shore country. A burial ground like this one marks a place the Lenape held sacred, where the dead were laid to rest according to customs carried through countless generations before European settlers arrived in the 1600s. The Lenape were farmers, fishers, and traders whose presence shaped the region's earliest paths and place-names, many of which endure today.

Galveston, TX

A Connecticut sea captain's son who went to sea at fourteen, Lent Munson Hitchcock left New England to join the fledgling Texas Navy around 1836. He came to Galveston in 1837 and became part of the port city's early leadership, serving as harbor master, alderman, and treasurer before volunteering for the Confederate army. Active as a Mason and Episcopalian, he left his name on the town of Hitchcock, christened for him in 1891.

Fannett, TX

Leo Edward Craigen's life traced the arc of the post-Civil War South. Wounded at the bloody Battle of Shiloh in 1862, he lost a leg to surgery yet returned to serve with the Confederate cavalry until the war's end. He rebuilt an ordinary but rooted life in Jefferson County, Texas — teaching at the Taylor's Bayou School, marrying one of his own students, and finally carrying the rural mail through the Fannett area for the last fifteen years of his life.

Mission, TX

Leonardo Alaniz, remembered as "Leo Najo" after a playful twist on conejo (rabbit), grew up in Mission after arriving from Nuevo León in 1909 and became one of the first Mexican-Americans to reach professional baseball. Prized for his batting average and blazing speed on the bases, he climbed from South Texas teams to the minor leagues and briefly into the Chicago White Sox organization in 1925 before a leg injury closed the door on the majors. Back home, he managed the Mission 30-30s, raised a large family, and in 1973 became the first player formally inducted into the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.

Guthrie, TX

Born in 1813, Leo Roark came to Texas in 1824 as a boy during the earliest years of Anglo colonization under Mexican rule, and grew up to take part in the Texas War for Independence. He was present at the disturbances at Anahuac, one of the flashpoints that helped spark the Texas Revolution. He lived a long life on the Texas frontier, dying in 1892, and the State of Texas honored him with this marker in 1962.

Galveston, TX

Alsatian immigrant Leon Blum joined his brother in a Texas mercantile partnership around 1852, and by 1868 the family firm of Leon & H. Blum had become Galveston's leading wholesale dry-goods house. From offices reaching New York, Boston, and Paris, the company supplied the southwestern states, Indian Territory, and Mexico for more than two decades. This 1880 headquarters, later enlarged with input from noted architect Nicholas Clayton, outlived the firm's collapse in the 1890s depression and went on to house retailers and a newspaper.

Leona, TX

Leon County was carved from Robertson County in 1846, the very year Texas joined the Union, and organized within months. It honors Martín de León, the Mexican empresario who founded Victoria and brought settlers to the region before the Republic. The county seat began at Leona before moving to Centerville in 1850.

Centerville, TX

Built in 1887 of locally made slate brick, the Leon County Courthouse is one of the oldest Texas courthouses still standing in its original form. The county dates to 1846, and its seat moved from Leona to Centerville in 1850, where two earlier courthouses stood on this same ground before it. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Tallahassee, FL

This marker honors the Revolutionary War veterans who, by the 1830s, had settled in and around Tallahassee in Florida's frontier territory. In 1832 and 1833 these aging men — like Zachariah Gherkins, who had served as a private with North Carolina forces — came forward to apply for the federal pensions Congress granted for their service in the War for Independence. Their applications, filed a half-century after the war, quietly document how the Revolution's soldiers dispersed across a growing nation into its newest frontiers.

Commerce, GA

This Blue Star Memorial marker near Commerce honors Major Leon F. Ellis, Jr. of the U.S. Air Force, a Vietnam-era airman held as a prisoner of war. The Blue Star Memorial Highway program, launched by garden clubs in 1945 and named for the service flags of World War II, frequently recognized individual local servicemen. Here the Four Season Garden Club of Commerce joined the Garden Club of Georgia in the tribute.

Gatesville, TX

A crossing of the Leon River on the Old Georgetown Road, in use by 1854, this site began with R. G. Grant's ferry and Coryell County's first metal truss bridge, a bowstring span erected in 1882. After floods wrecked that bridge in 1899 and 1900, the George E. King Bridge Company of Iowa built the present 137-foot Pratt through-truss span in 1904, with pin-connected members, lattice railings, and stone abutments. It carried east–west traffic as part of State Highway 7 and later U.S. Highway 84, and was restored in 1994.

Leonard, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Fannin County in the 1840s and 50s, among them Solomon L. Leonard, a Confederate sympathizer who amassed 10,000 acres around Wildcat Thicket — a tangle of brush where fugitives and outlaws, and figures of the bloody Reconstruction-era Lee-Peacock feud, took cover. When the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad arrived in 1880, Leonard's heirs platted a townsite and auctioned lots at a picnic on this very square, an event still held every year. A saloon, hotel, post office, newspaper, and school followed, and Leonard became the market town of a rich farming district.

Orange, TX

Leonard Frederick Benckenstein made an early fortune in Detroit's insurance and securities trade and was a millionaire by his thirties, but a visit to Beaumont during the 1904 Lucas gusher drew him into the Texas oil boom. After early successes and heavy losses, a Louisiana drilling lease led him to co-found Vinton Petroleum Company with Orange businessmen W.H. Stark and Dr. E.W. Brown. He settled in Orange to manage the venture and helped organize the city's Red Cross chapter and its First National Bank.

San Francisco, CA · est. 2008

This plaque honors Leonard Matlovich (1943–1988), an Air Force technical sergeant and decorated Vietnam veteran who lived in this San Francisco building. In 1975 he deliberately challenged the military's ban on gay service members, landing on the cover of Time magazine and forcing the issue into national view. He later fought against AIDS and for LGBT equality until his death, and his epitaph — "A Gay Vietnam Veteran" — reads "Never Again / Never Forget."

Cuero, TX

Born in Cuero, Leonard Roy Harmon joined the Navy in 1939 and served as a mess attendant aboard the cruiser U.S.S. San Francisco. During the Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942, as enemy fire raked the ship, Harmon helped evacuate the wounded and was killed shielding an injured shipmate with his own body, earning the Navy Cross. In 1943 the destroyer escort U.S.S. Harmon—the first U.S. warship named for a Black man—was christened by his mother.

Brazos County, TX

The Leonard School opened in the late 1890s on land donated by Sam Luther, serving a farming community of Polish, German, and Czech immigrants drawn to the rich soil of the Brazos River bottoms. Its two rooms, divided by a movable partition, doubled as a community hall for dances, weddings, and elections, and the school year bent around the cotton harvest so children could help their families in the fields. Lacking running water or electricity until the 1930s, the humble schoolhouse served for half a century before consolidation sent its students to Bryan in the 1940s.

Polkton, NC

Born on this site in 1837, Leonidas L. Polk became one of the South's great champions of the farmer. He founded the influential newspaper The Progressive Farmer in 1886, led the national Farmers' Alliance, and helped establish the schools that grew into NC State University and Meredith College. His advocacy gave voice to rural people during the agrarian upheavals of the Gilded Age.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2021

Leopold Stokowski led the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1912 to 1941, transforming it into one of the world's most celebrated ensembles. Charismatic and inventive, he cultivated the lush, distinctive tone known as the "Philadelphia Sound" and worked tirelessly to bring classical music to ordinary audiences. His collaboration on Walt Disney's Fantasia and his many recordings carried symphonic music far beyond the concert hall.

Corydon, IN

Built in 1891 as the Corydon Colored School, this building educated African American children in southern Indiana at a time when schooling was rigidly segregated. It served as both an elementary and secondary school, holding its first graduation on May 14, 1897. In 1987 it was renamed for Leora Brown Farrow, who taught there from 1924 to 1950 and gave the school much of its enduring identity.

Limestone Township, PA · est. 1947

On October 16, 1755, John Jacob Leroy was killed by Indians near this site, one of the earliest victims of frontier warfare in the region. His death came just after the Penn's Creek Massacre and in the wake of General Braddock's disastrous defeat, events that shattered the fragile peace and opened years of bloody conflict during the French and Indian War. Central Pennsylvania's exposed settlements suddenly found themselves on the front line.

Mount Joy, TX

Born in Virginia in 1840, Leroy Nelson DeWitt came to this corner of North Texas with his parents in 1854 and put down deep roots as a merchant and farmer. He married Mary Collier in 1861 and, the next year, joined the Confederacy to serve on the frontier through the end of the Civil War. Afterward he became a recognized leader in the area's civic, church, and business affairs until his death in 1918.

Porter Township, PA · est. 2006

Born in the small coal-country town of Reinerton, Les Brown built a seven-decade career at the center of American popular music. His orchestra, the 'Band of Renown,' backed a young Doris Day on the chart-topping 'Sentimental Journey,' a song that became an anthem for a nation longing for loved ones to come home from war. Brown went on to serve for decades as bandleader for Bob Hope and Dean Martin, a fixture of American stage and television.

Seattle, WA

This memorial honors Bernie Whitebear and his sister Luana Reyes, members of the Sin-Aikst (Lakes) people who became prominent leaders in Seattle's Native American community. Whitebear is remembered as a founder of urban Indian activism in the Pacific Northwest, working to secure land, health care, and cultural institutions for Native people of many nations. Set in the Leschi neighborhood, the memorial keeps their names before a city they helped shape.

Georgetown, TX

In the 1880s Georgetown was a growing Central Texas county seat, and its limestone commercial blocks reflected a new prosperity. This Italianate storefront, raised in 1884, housed a drugstore that served townsfolk for three-quarters of a century, passing from Sanders & Lesesne to the long-running Stone's pharmacy. Its arched windows and pressed-metal cornice mark the era's confident Main Street architecture.

Smithville, TX

This Folk Victorian home was built in 1900 by premier local builder Virgil Sullivan Rabb Jr. Its longtime owner, Joseph Charles 'JC' Leshikar, was the son of Czech immigrants who bought his first Smithville saloon at 24, then expanded into land, oil and gas, and banking, raising his family here from 1903 to 1976.

Greensburg, IN

This veterans memorial carries Calvin Coolidge's warning that a nation forgetting its defenders will itself be forgotten, a sentiment drawn from the president's 1920s addresses honoring those who served. Placed in the heart of Decatur County, it speaks to the small-town American tradition of gathering to remember local sons and daughters who went to war. Such "Lest We Forget" markers anchor courthouse squares and town greens across the Midwest.

Spokane County, WA

Dedicated in 1925 by the Spokane chapter of the Service Star Legion, this memorial honors the veterans of the World War—the conflict we now call World War I. The Service Star Legion was an organization of mothers and relatives of servicemen, and its 'Lest We Forget' tribute reflects the raw national grief and pride still fresh only a few years after the 1918 armistice. Across America in these years, communities raised such monuments to fix the memory of their sons in stone.

Wysox Township, PA · est. 1967

Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913) spent his youth in this corner of Bradford County, working alongside his brother Cyrenus in a small hub factory before the Civil War, in which he served. He went on to become a pioneering geologist and paleobotanist and the founding figure of American sociology, arguing that human societies could be improved through reason and planning. So sweeping was his intellect that admirers dubbed him "the American Aristotle."

Dallas, TX

Clement LeTot, a Frenchman and Crimean War veteran, put down roots in northwest Dallas County in 1874 and by 1881 had founded the little rail-line town that bore his name. Following the frontier custom of the day, he set aside part of his land as a family burial ground, first for two young sons in the mid-1880s and eventually for himself in 1907. Long since absorbed into the sprawl of Dallas, the cemetery is one of the last tangible traces of an immigrant-founded community.

Galveston, TX

Levi Charles Myers Harby, born in South Carolina in 1793, served in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812 and spent two years as a prisoner of war in England after his prize ship was recaptured. By 1836 he had "gone to Texas," and he later settled in Galveston, where his wife Leonora founded the first Jewish Sunday school in Texas and the city's Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Society. When the Civil War came, Harby served the Confederacy as an artillery captain aboard the CSS Neptune in the Battle of Galveston and ended the war commanding the harbor.

Brazoria, TX

Between 1848 and 1851, enslaved workers built this plantation house for Levi Jordan, hauling materials shipped by sea from Florida to Velasco and up the San Bernard River. It stands in the heart of Texas's antebellum plantation belt, where cotton and sugar were worked by forced labor. The site later became one of Texas's most significant archaeological windows into enslaved and freed communities.

New York, NY

Levi Parsons Morton lived on this site in the years just before he became Vice President of the United States under Benjamin Harrison, serving from 1889 to 1893. A New York congressman, minister to France, and later governor of the state, Morton was one of the Gilded Age's most prominent bankers and public men.

Orange, TX

Irish immigrant brothers bought an existing Orange shipyard in 1859 and built wooden ships for decades, a trade their descendants carried into the steel age. Under Edward T. Malloy, who joined in 1939 and later bought control, Levingston Shipbuilding boomed during World War II, delivering 160 tugs, tankers, and rescue vessels to the Army and Navy between 1941 and 1945. After the war it reinvented itself as a world leader in offshore drilling rigs before closing in 1985.

Tullytown, PA · est. 1992

When the first family moved in on June 23, 1952, they joined a bold experiment in mass housing conceived by builder William J. Levitt. Following the assembly-line model he had pioneered at Levittown, New York, Levitt raised more than 17,000 homes on 5,750 acres of Bucks County farmland, a community planned for 70,000 residents and finished in 1957. Affordable and quickly built, its uniform streets became a symbol of postwar America's rush to the suburbs.

Louisville, KY

Louisville and the Falls of the Ohio were a launching point for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Here William Clark enlisted the first members of the Corps of Discovery, and here Lewis and Clark met on October 14, 1803, before leaving the area later that month; they returned to Louisville in November 1806. A brother of Revolutionary War general George Rogers Clark, William Clark had come to Kentucky as a boy, served in the militia and army, and after the expedition remained in government service, moving to St. Louis in 1808.

Hopkinsville, KY

As the Lewis and Clark Expedition made its way west and back, its leaders repeatedly passed through Kentucky's river country. William Clark—by 1807 a militia brigadier general and chief Indian agent for the Louisiana Territory—stopped with his family at Allsbury's Tavern in Hopkinsville in 1809. The tavern's keeper, Thomas Allsbury, was himself an early Hopkinsville figure who raised a company and served as a captain in the First Regiment of Kentucky Mounted Militia during the War of 1812.

Lexington, KY

Lexington, an early cultural hub of the trans-Appalachian West, hosted both leaders of the Corps of Discovery. In January 1808 Meriwether Lewis, newly appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory, was honored at a dinner at Wilson's Inn where locals raised twenty-two toasts. The following year William Clark and his family stayed at Traveler's Hall, and Clark visited expedition member George Shannon, then a student at Transylvania University.

Paducah, KY

In November 1803, as Lewis and Clark led the nucleus of the Corps of Discovery down the Ohio River toward their rendezvous with the West, they passed through what is now McCracken County. Camping near present-day Paducah and stopping at Fort Massac just across the river in Illinois, they recruited men for the journey, including the skilled interpreter George Drouillard. Years later, in 1827, William Clark returned to establish the town of Paducah itself.

Frankfort, KY

News of the Lewis and Clark Expedition reached the American public largely through newspapers, and Frankfort's papers played an outsized role. The Palladium and The Western World carried word of the explorers' long-awaited return, with The Palladium's October 1806 issues running the first printed accounts that the party had come back "in very good health." From these early notices the details of the journey were then circulated across the nation.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2008

On August 31, 1803, Meriwether Lewis eased a 50-foot keeled boat into the Ohio River near Fort Fayette, launching the journey that would become the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the newly acquired lands to the west, the three-year trek pushed all the way to the Pacific and back. Pittsburgh, at the head of the Ohio, was the practical starting line for that continental adventure.

Park City, MT

Near this spot on the Yellowstone River in July 1806, William Clark and part of the Corps of Discovery paused during the expedition's homeward journey to fell cottonwoods and build dugout canoes for the trip downriver. Clark's party had split from Meriwether Lewis to explore the Yellowstone, and their passage through this valley was among the first documented American ventures into what is now south-central Montana.

Leavenworth, KS

This marker along the Lewis and Clark Trail quotes from William Clark's journal describing the Corps of Discovery's passage near this spot on the Missouri River. In 1804 the expedition traveled up this stretch on its epic journey to the Pacific, mapping the land, recording its peoples and wildlife, and opening the West to American imagination. Clark's daily entries remain a vivid primary record of the young nation's reach across the continent.

Brookville, PA · est. 2009

In 1912, only a few years after the Wright brothers first flew, Lewis Sandt of Brookville climbed into a fragile early aircraft and flew from Erie into Canada — the first international flight by an American. The feat thrilled crowds and helped fire the public's imagination for aviation. Like so many pioneer aviators, Sandt paid the ultimate price, dying of crash injuries the following year at just twenty-five.

Buckholts, TX

This burial ground reaches back to the 1830s colonies of Sterling C. Robertson, when Thomas Curry—whose late wife Satsa Vann was a Cherokee leader's daughter—brought his family to a league of land along Little River. His descendants married into the Lewis family, prominent in building the communities of Corinth, Buckholts and Cameron; Squire William Michael Lewis, a justice of the peace and Confederate cavalryman, was buried beneath a ranch oak in 1867, founding the cemetery. A typhoid epidemic a decade later added more graves to a plot whose burials mostly predate 1900.

Navasota, TX

Connecticut-born Lewis J. Wilson came to Grimes County as a boy in 1851 and grew up in his father's Anderson merchandise store, leaving only to serve in the Civil War. Returning afterward, he opened a mercantile business with partners and in 1871 completed this brick building for a second establishment. Wilson became sole proprietor by 1881 and ran the store until his death in 1895.

Independence, TX

This marker honors a German-born immigrant who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence. Like many European newcomers, he cast his lot with the Texian cause and made his home in the new republic, dying near Independence in 1857.

Caldwell, TX

Virginia-born Lewis L. Chiles came of age in the era of Texas independence, taking his place among the volunteers who won the decisive victory at San Jacinto in 1836. He later founded the city of Caldwell, planting a town where a battlefield generation was busy building a new republic. He died in 1864, and this marker remembers him alongside his wife, Emily.

Ellwood City, PA · est. 2023

Lewis "Hack" Wilson grew up in the industrial town of Ellwood City before carrying its working-class grit into the major leagues, where he starred as a slugging outfielder across twelve seasons beginning in 1923. His 1930 campaign with the Chicago Cubs became the stuff of legend: 56 home runs, a National League mark that endured for 68 years, and 191 RBIs, a single-season record that still stands. He retired in 1934 and, decades later, took his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Longview, TX

Built in the 1880s or 1890s for merchant B. F. Lewis, this folk Victorian house passed in 1905 to James Knox Bivins, a Confederate veteran and lumberman who gave the deed to his wife Viola as a gift so the family could live near his sawmill. Viola Bivins restored the home in 1941 with an inheritance from her father. With its spindlework porch and Queen Anne accents, it stands as one of the last Victorian dwellings in Longview.

Frankfort, KY

Frankfort saw the Lewis and Clark story at both its triumph and its tragedy. In November 1806 Meriwether Lewis passed through the capital escorting the Mandan chief Sheheke and his family, along with a delegation of Osage Indians, on their way to meet President Thomas Jefferson in Washington. Three years later, in 1809, William Clark stopped in Frankfort while traveling east and there confirmed and mourned the death of his co-leader Lewis, discussing the loss with Kentucky leaders including Christopher Greenup and Charles Scott.

Lewisburg, PA · est. 1955

When Pennsylvania built its sprawling state canal system in the 1820s and 1830s to link its rivers and markets, short connecting cuts often did the crucial work of tying a town into the network. Completed in 1833, this five-eighths-mile cross-cut with three lift locks and a slackwater dam let canal boats cross the Susquehanna and reach Lewisburg, turning the town into a busy shipping point. In the canal era, such a modest ditch could mean the difference between a sleepy village and a thriving trade center.

Granville Township, PA · est. 1996

Built in 1848-49 as a freight warehouse, this is the oldest surviving structure known to have been raised by the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad — the company that would become one of the largest corporations on earth. Its opening was toasted at a banquet in September 1849 celebrating the rails' arrival in Lewistown, part of the great mid-century push to lace the state with iron. By 1868 the freight house had been remade into a passenger station, greeting travelers where goods once moved.