Search Markers

Manor, TX

The town of Littig was platted in 1883 on land donated by Jackson Morrow, a formerly enslaved man, along the Houston & Texas Central Railway. Its cemetery, established in 1891, became the resting place for many of the community's freedpeople, including Morrow and his family, with the earliest marked grave dating to 1895. Though the town shrank in the mid-20th century, the cemetery remains active as a witness to one of Travis County's freedmen's towns.

Rusk, TX

In the winter of 1819–1820, Chief John Bowles led about sixty Cherokee families from Arkansas into East Texas, and near this site a leader named Little Bean founded a small settlement. The community lived here for two decades until 1839, when the Republic of Texas forced the Cherokee to remove to Indian Territory in present Oklahoma; Little Bean, who died that year, is believed to be buried nearby, and the land was later opened to Anglo settlers.

Ladonia, TX

In 1912, the African American families of the Stall Cup community near Ladonia had no nearby house of worship of their own, so they founded Little Bethel Baptist Church in the heart of the Jim Crow era. Around 1932 Deacon John Marshall relocated the congregation into Ladonia when bad roads began thinning its membership, and in 1938 members bought the present property and rebuilt after fire destroyed the earlier structure. For a full century the church anchored its community with charity, leadership, and spiritual life.

Duncanville, TX

This burial ground opened in 1856 with the graves of two small children and grew on land a pioneer donated in 1860 beside a small church later moved to Cedar Hill. Among those interred are relatives of John Neely Bryan, the first settler of Dallas, tying the cemetery to the earliest days of the region's Anglo settlement. It became a perpetual-care memorial park in 1966.

San Antonio, TX

In 1846 the Rev. J.W. De Vilbiss bought a nearby lot and hung a bell to mark a Methodist worship site, but a flawed title kept him from building. German Methodists finally raised this Gothic Revival church in 1879, where a Norwegian sailor known only as "Olaf" carved the pegs and hinged its lancet windows. The Episcopal diocese bought it in 1895, and the City of San Antonio took title in 1945.

Dallas, TX

Little Egypt took root in 1883 when Jeff Hill, a formerly enslaved man, bought about thirty acres and began a settlement that grew to include the Egypt Chapel Baptist Church and a one-room school. Its distance from Dallas let it keep its rural character for more than seventy years, even as the city crept closer. In 1962 the community collectively sold its land to developers, and the church relocated to south Dallas, where it still stands.

Jewett, TX

Little Flock Baptist Church took root in this corner of Leon County in 1854, and by 1860 its churchyard had become a burial ground for the pioneer families—Baldwin, Lamb, Shipp, Thomas and others—who farmed the surrounding land. When the Bear Grass Coal Company opened two mines here between 1907 and the early 1920s, new families arrived, including African American and Hispanic miners now resting in unmarked graves. Veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, preachers, landowners, and even a beloved fiddler named Tom Foley lie together in this ground.

San Augustine vicinity, TX

By 1880 families named Erwin, Crocker, Zeagler, Woods, and Harvey were farming this part of San Augustine County, worshipping first under a brush arbor before raising a one-room log church they called "Little Flock." The cemetery began in 1883 with the burial of six-year-old Carrie Bell Hawkins, who died while visiting the Erwin home, and the Erwins formally donated land for church, school, and cemetery in 1914. More than 400 graves now rest here, including charter church members and veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Temple, TX

In the frontier decades before and after the Civil War, families like the Moores anchored rural Bell County with a gristmill, a cotton gin, and a burial ground open to strangers and neighbors alike. The first grave, dug about 1860 for an unknown traveler who died on the road between West Texas and Arkansas, captures how perilous overland movement was in early Texas. Named for a verse in Luke, Little Flock became a camp-meeting ground where seven congregations gathered each May for worship and the old rite of foot washing.

Canton, TX

Organized in 1893, the Little Hope Baptist Church first gathered in the Farmers Alliance Hall before raising its own sanctuary in 1894 on land deeded by Louis Manuel Parsons. Successive buildings in 1916, 1954, and 1981 marked the congregation's steady growth in rural Van Zandt County. Through it all the church kept up a long tradition of aiding neighbors in need and supporting missionary work.

Jasper, TX

This graveyard began in sorrow on land granted to pioneer settler Samuel Goode in 1838, when his wife Frances was buried here in 1844. Samuel joined her two decades later, and their unmarked graves lie among the earliest burials in what grew into a community cemetery. The oldest marked stones date to 1884, and the grounds also hold victims of the influenza and diphtheria epidemics that swept East Texas in the early 1900s. Little Hope Cemetery remains a quiet witness to the settlers who built Jasper County.

Winnsboro, TX

Five charter members gathered under a brush arbor in 1881 to organize this Wood County congregation, which by legend earned its name from doubts it would last even a year. Early converts were baptized in a neighbor's mill pond, land was donated by local settlers, and the fellowship not only survived but helped found a nearby sister congregation, serving the area for well over a century.

Jasper, TX

As Anglo settlers pushed into the East Texas Piney Woods in the late 1830s, traveling Methodist and Baptist preachers held services in a rough building that doubled as church and schoolhouse. A new structure went up in 1890, and the Little Hope Primitive Baptist Church was formally organized in 1893 under Elder Durham Richardson. Locals affectionately nicknamed the whole settlement "Seed Tick."

Lampasas, TX

When the nearby Gracy Hotel was finished in 1870, its builders used the leftover stone to raise this smaller companion, the "Little Hotel." It gave J. L. N. Gracy and his bride a private apartment upstairs while offering rooms to travelers below. Its mason, Charles Green, also worked on the larger hotel and on the Coleman County courthouse and jail, leaving his craftsmanship across the region.

Savoy, TX

Sid and Suzan Brown Pierce donated this ground as a burial place beside the Little Jordan Baptist Church, which served the community from 1850 until 1893. When former members formed the Ector Baptist Church, the cemetery eventually passed to the Savoy Baptist Church in 1953, and descendants of the original pioneers fenced the grounds in 1966. The little churchyard outlived the congregation that created it.

City of Niagara Falls, NY

This is one of the roughly two hundred small replicas of the Statue of Liberty that the Boy Scouts of America erected across the country between 1949 and 1952 under the 'Strengthen the Arm of Liberty' campaign. Dedicated in 1951 and presented to the Niagara Frontier Council by the Loyal Order of Moose, it pledges 'everlasting fidelity and loyalty' in the language of the early Cold War. These copper statues were mass-produced patriotic gifts meant to plant a symbol of liberty in ordinary towns and city parks.

Shenandoah, PA · est. 2013

Since the late 1800s, the coal fields around Shenandoah drew Lithuanian immigrants in such numbers that Schuylkill County holds the greatest concentration of Lithuanian ancestry in the United States. Lured by work in the anthracite mines, they built churches, societies, and one of the nation's oldest Knights of Lithuania chapters to preserve their language and faith. The Rev. Andrius Stupinskas, who led one of the first Lithuanian American Catholic congregations in 1872, rests in the local St. George cemetery.

Junction, TX

Separated from the rest of Junction by the Llano River, the neighborhood long known as Little Mexico grew from land Mexican American families bought in the 1920s along the route of the Old Spanish Trail. For decades the community went without city amenities and school buses, its children walking miles across the river bridge to class, while two churches and a cemetery of its own anchored its life. Though the building of Interstate 10 displaced many residents, the community endured and kept its culture alive.

Hamilton Township, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, freedom seekers escaping slavery in Kentucky and the South pushed north through Ohio, and southwestern Ohio's rivers were both obstacles and guideposts. At this spot along the Little Miami, people fleeing bondage waded across the water on their way to Butterworth Station, one of the Quaker-linked safe havens that laced Warren County into the wider Underground Railroad network. The 2022 marker, placed by Friends of the Twenty Mile House, fixes that dangerous night crossing to a real place on the map.

Gilmer, TX

Burials on this steep rise called "Little Mound" may reach back to the late 1860s, before residents of the pioneer village of Calloway organized Little Mount Baptist Church in 1878 in a former Union church and schoolhouse. Over the decades the congregation rebuilt three times, thriftily reusing the same lumber from one meetinghouse to the next. Among those buried here is Emma Sansom Johnson, remembered as a Confederate heroine who as a sixteen-year-old guided General Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops across a river in her native Alabama before later settling in Texas.

Newburgh, IN

This small brick building in Newburgh dates from the mid-to-late 19th century and has worn many hats over its long life — by local tradition serving as an ice house, a tack shop, and much later a mortuary museum. For years it vanished entirely, hidden inside a larger structure built around it, until a 1986 fire stripped away the outer walls and revealed the original 'Little Red Brick House' still standing within.

Maysfield, TX

Organized in 1849 with just eight members meeting in local homes and a small log cabin, Little River Baptist Church grew quickly as settlers poured into Milam County—seventy people joined after a single three-day revival in 1855. Like churches across rural Texas, it was the heart of community social life, with prominent members seated in the front "Amen Pews" and separate sides for men and women. The present building, finished in 1873 with the local Masonic lodge and enlarged in 1909, still stands beside its early cemetery.

Little River, TX

Seven Wilson brothers and the allied Huckabee and Thornton families came from Mississippi in 1867, fleeing the devastation the Civil War had left behind, and founded the Wilson Valley community. Family tradition holds that matriarch Easter Cobb Wilson wished to rest on a certain hillside, and after a three-year-old grandson was buried there in 1869 the plot became a family cemetery, formally deeded in 1893. Its graves — marked by high infant mortality and the deaths of the 1917–18 influenza epidemic — chronicle a community that faded as the railroad drew life toward nearby Little River.

Fredericksburg, TX

Raised on a town-lot grant from the German Emigration Company just after the Civil War, this small house passed in 1868 to Heinrich Ochs, one of the community's pioneer schoolteachers, whose family held it for sixty-one years. Serving over time as both home and store, its floor plan has stayed virtually unchanged since it was built. The little limestone house is a study in frontier continuity.

Olney, TX

On May 16, 1869, a cattle roundup crew was attacked at their work and forced into an all-day fight against some fifty-seven Comanches. The twelve cowboys—drawn from Palo Pinto, Jack, Young, and Tarrant counties—held the raiders at bay until nightfall, when the Comanches withdrew. Nine of the crew were wounded, and three of them died of their injuries.

Ganado, TX

The Little School of the 400 grew from a bold idea: teach Spanish-speaking children roughly 400 essential English words so they could succeed in first grade. In 1957, Ganado high schooler Isabel Verver read of LULAC president Felix Tijerina's wish for such a program, wrote to him, and taught the pilot class that summer, graduating sixty children before the fall term. Its success spread to towns across the region and helped inspire a state-funded preschool program that later foreshadowed Head Start.

Youngstown, OH

In the spring of 1937, the fledgling Steel Workers Organizing Committee — created by John L. Lewis and the CIO — pushed to organize the smaller 'Little Steel' companies after landmark contracts with U.S. Steel. When firms like Republic Steel refused to recognize the union, workers across the Ohio and Great Lakes steel towns walked out. Youngstown, one of the nation's great steel-producing cities, became a flashpoint of the bitter, sometimes violent confrontations between strikers, company guards, and police that summer.

Austin, TX

George Washington Littlefield came to Texas as a boy, rode with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War, and afterward built a fortune in ranching and cattle drives. Settling in Austin, he founded the American National Bank and in 1912 opened this Beaux Arts Classical building with a rooftop garden and Tiffany-cast bronze doors. A major benefactor of the University of Texas, he later gave those doors to the school.

Austin, TX

George W. Littlefield came to Texas as a boy in 1850, rode with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War, and emerged a major who turned to the cattle business, amassing great ranches across New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. Settling in Austin in 1883, he moved into banking and served as a regent of the University of Texas, funding buildings, scholarships, and library collections. He built this Victorian residence in 1894 and left it to the university on his death.

Cooper, TX

An Illinois native and veteran of the Black Hawk War, Littleton Rattan came to Texas in 1839 and built a farm in what became Delta County. In the Republic era he rode as a Texas Ranger with three area militia companies, and during the Mexican War he served under the legendary Ranger Jack Hays. He was killed in battle with Native Americans on December 18, 1847, though the site of the fight and his grave remain unknown.

Manchaca, TX

The original four acres of this burial ground included land donated by pioneers James M. Turley and Andrew Jackson Hammett, its oldest grave that of Turley's daughter and her baby, who died in 1874. A community church built nearby that same year doubled as a school from 1877 to about 1886, and settlers gathered each summer for ten-day camp meetings under an adjacent brush arbor. Enlarged by an eleven-acre gift from Herman Heep in 1948, the cemetery now holds about 1,600 graves.

Killeen, TX

Live Oak Cemetery near Killeen traces its beginnings to about 1875, when the Young family, traveling west from Alabama, buried a daughter who died of sickness along the way — soon followed by her father, Michael Young. First formally deeded for burials in 1901, the ground grew to hundreds of graves and gave its story to the nearby community of Youngsport. It remains in use and cared for by a local cemetery association.

Lott, TX

Springing up just after the Civil War, the Falls County community first called Camden and then Rupee grew into Live Oak — a crossroads of stores, a cotton gin, a post office, a Masonic lodge, and a Baptist church whose log cabin doubled as a schoolhouse. The Hodges brothers donated land for the church, school, and cemetery, and the earliest marked graves date to 1877. When rail lines bypassed the settlement in the 1890s it withered away, until only the cemetery remained to mark where a farming community once stood.

George West, TX

Carved from San Patricio and Nueces Counties in 1856 and named for its live oaks, this South Texas county grew up around ranching along old roads that once carried Santa Anna's army toward the Alamo. Its first seat at Oakville gave way in 1919 to George West when the railroad reshaped the map. Ranching, farming, and petroleum have long defined its economy.

George West, TX

Live Oak County was created in 1852 with its seat at Oakville, but the railroad era reshuffled the map: cattleman George Washington West, master of a 200,000-acre ranch, platted a new town and lured the county seat to it in 1919. He promptly deeded a full block, and the 1920 courthouse rose in dignified classical revival brick and cast stone—among the last works of noted San Antonio architect Alfred Giles, who died before it was finished. For more than a century it has hosted not only trials but weddings, rallies, and county celebrations.

Oakville, TX

Oakville rose beside a Nueces River crossing and served as the seat of Live Oak County from 1856 to 1919, a supply hub for freight wagons and the cattle ranchers who thrived after the Civil War. Joseph Bartlett's 1857 stone courthouse and log jail marked the town as a center of frontier authority, and by 1887 a two-story sandstone Italianate jail—designed by the Diebold Lock and Safe Company of Ohio—held everyone from bar fighters to horse thieves. When the town lost its railroad bid in 1919, the county seat moved to George West, and the jail became one of the last landmarks of the old town.

Brenham, TX

Founded in 1853 by Presbyterian minister James W. Miller, Live Oak Female Seminary in Brenham offered schooling to female boarding students and day students of both sexes until 1888. Miller's sister-in-law Rebecca Stuart Red served as principal until 1875, when she left to open her own seminary in Austin. The campus centered on Miller's home, "Oak Lodge," whose upper floor held classes alongside dormitories, an auditorium, and a music conservatory.

Houston County, TX

South Carolina native Thomas Lively put down roots in Houston County in 1850, and the farming community that grew up around his land took the family name. In the late 1850s he set aside this ground as a burying place for his neighbors, and its oldest surviving headstones date to the 1880s. Though Lively himself died in Grayson County after the Civil War, his wife Jane later returned to be laid to rest here among the pioneers who had settled the area.

Fredericksburg, TX

This dogtrot log cabin — two rooms joined by an open breezeway — likely predates 1852, when surveyor J. L. Ankrin sold the land to John Peter Keller, one of Gillespie County's first commissioners. It passed to Keller's son-in-law and then, in 1886, to Anton and Anna Loth, who built a two-story stone house nearby and demoted the cabin to a barn and corn crib. Restored in 1973, it survives as a relic of the county's earliest German-settled years.

Liverpool, TX

The community here began in 1837, in the days of the Republic of Texas, as a Chocolate Bayou shipping point renamed for the great English port of Liverpool. Burials in the cemetery began in 1875 on three acres donated by Thomas C. Nelson, part of which once held a building that served as both school and church. The grounds preserve the memory of one of Brazoria County's early settlements.

Liverpool, TX

Founded in 1837, the coastal town of Liverpool first received its mail by boat from Galveston or Velasco, and its earliest postmaster was Warren D. C. Hall, a leader of the Texas Revolution and former Republic secretary of war. Over the next century-and-a-half the post office migrated repeatedly among homes, stores, depots, and ferry offices, chasing the town's shifting center around the iron bridge over Chocolate Bayou and the new railroad townsite. Several women served as postmaster, including one who held the post through three successive marriages.

Grand Prairie, TX

Chartered in 1903 by the Prince Hall Masons of Texas, this African American Masonic lodge was first built near the Grand Prairie community known as "The Line." In 1944 the lodge moved its building to the Dalworth community, buying a $200 lot in one of the few areas where Black residents were then permitted to own property. Its members, leaders in the local Black community, kept the lodge as a center for gatherings, education, and public meetings.

Livingston, TX

Founded in 1846 as the seat of Polk County on a hundred acres donated by Moses L. Choate, Livingston grew into the trade, education, and social hub for the sawmill towns and Trinity River boat landings around it — Sam Houston himself is said to have danced at the nearby Old Andress Inn in the early 1850s. Texas's only Indian reservation, home to the Alabama-Coushatta tribe, lies close by. Long anchored in ranching and timber, the area saw major oil and gas development after 1930.

Salisbury, NC

Founded in 1879 as Zion Wesley Institute by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, this school became Livingstone College in 1885 and was named for the British missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Under the Rev. Joseph Charles Price, its president from 1882 to 1893, it grew into a leading center for educating African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. It stands five blocks west.

Amarillo, TX

Land for this Panhandle burial ground was donated in 1891, though the earliest known grave dates to 1888 — a child said by local legend to have been buried by her westward-traveling family. A cemetery association organized around 1901, and in 1929 the community rallied to build a mausoleum, the Llano Pancheon. It has long served as a regional resting place for Panhandle residents.

Llano, TX

Founded in 1856 as the seat of new Llano County, the town soon needed a burial ground, and by 1862 it held its first graves — a one-year-old child and a seventeen-year-old girl whose stones still stand. Trustees formalized the cemetery in the 1880s before deeding it to the city in 1907. Among those resting here is Frank Teich, the stonecutter remembered as the father of Texas's granite industry.

Llano, TX

The name Llano reaches back to 18th-century Spanish explorers, who applied it to the river running through this country—a name itself descended from a French term for the Lipan Apache. German colonists put down the first permanent settlements here around 1850, and in February 1856 the Texas legislature carved Llano County from Gillespie and Bexar, organizing it that August with Llano as county seat.

Llano, TX

By the 1890s Llano was a booming Hill Country town, and its fourth courthouse — designed by Austin architect A.O. Watson and built in 1892–93 — reflected that ambition in sandstone, marble, and locally prized granite. Fires scarred its interior in 1932 and 1952, and the iron fence that once ringed it is long gone, but the building endured as the civic heart of the county. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1980.

Llano, TX

In 1888 the hills of Llano County revealed their fortune in stone, when J. K. Finlay polished the first local granite and David Stewart opened a quarry just south of town. Within a dozen years the sculptor Frank Teich had leased ground from Stewart and founded Teich Monument Works, helping turn the county's thirteen varieties of granite into buildings and monuments across Texas. The county even yielded its own signature stone—"Llanite," a rare granite flecked with opalite that mineralogist N. J. Badu identified here. Hard to cut but prized for its quality, Llano granite gave this corner of the Hill Country a lasting industrial identity.

Post, TX

The Cap Rock Escarpment marks the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado, or "Staked Plains," one of the world's flattest and most complete plains regions, sloping upward from Texas into New Mexico. Shaped by ancient erosion of tough caliche caprock, it was crossed in 1541 by Coronado, whose expedition marveled at an endless sea of grass. Long shunned for its scarcity of water, the Llano later supported a great ranching empire and became a leading cotton and grain region.

Post, TX

Established in 1880 and spanning 192 sections, the Llano Ranch was known as the "Curry Comb" for its cattle brand. Its first shelter was a half-dugout roofed with buffalo hides, replaced in 1883 by a two-story frame house that became the center of local social life. A baby girl born here in 1884 marked the first recorded birth in Garza County, and her nearby grave the first recorded death.

Llano, TX

In 1901 music teacher Jennie Clopton gathered sixteen women to found a literary society that grew into the Woman's Culture Club, a civic force in Llano for decades. The club opened the town's first public library, funded scholarships, beautified public spaces, and coordinated a Works Progress Administration project to build a permanent library in 1938–39. It embodied the Progressive-era conviction that organized women could shape the life of a community.

Teague, TX

Llewellyn Notley (1888-1970) was a Texas-born educator and scholar who took bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Texas and spent more than four decades, from 1912 to 1953, as a teacher and school administrator. In his later years he devoted himself to local history, chairing the Freestone County Historical Survey Committee and helping lead a railroad museum association. His civic and historical work earned him a string of awards.

San Marcos, TX

Local banker Lloyd G. Johnson and his wife Katherine built this San Marcos home in 1919–1920, hiring noted architect Atlee B. Ayres, who blended informal Mediterranean styling with classical detail and a formal, symmetrical plan. The Masonic Lodge No. 342 bought the house in 1937 and met here until 1990, when it returned to private hands as a family residence once more.

San Francisco, CA

Lloyd Lake in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park honors Reuben Headley Lloyd (1835–1909), a pioneer California lawyer and park commissioner who helped shape the city's public recreational spaces. His work reflects the Gilded Age drive to carve green retreats out of a fast-growing western metropolis.

Boston, MA

This plaque honors members of Local 34—a labor union chapter—who left their jobs to serve in the armed forces during World War II. Across the country, unions, workplaces, and neighborhoods raised such memorials to their own who answered the call. It stands as a small, local tribute within the vast American mobilization of the 1940s.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2025

Local 8 of the Industrial Workers of the World organized Philadelphia's waterfront dockworkers from 1913 to 1923, growing into one of the country's largest and most powerful unions. Under the leadership of Ben Fletcher, it stood out as a Black-led, multiracial local that deliberately united workers across ethnic and racial lines. It fought for better wages, safer conditions, and a solidarity that crossed the color line at a time when most unions did not.

Alburtis, PA · est. 2009

Built in 1868, the Lock Ridge Iron Furnace was one of scores of furnaces that made the Lehigh Valley the state's greatest producer of pig iron in the late 19th century. Distinctively, it burned only anthracite — the hard coal that fueled Pennsylvania's iron boom — and was the last furnace in the country to rely on it alone before closing in 1921. Today its partially restored stacks are among the few surviving monuments to that vanished industry.

San Antonio, TX

In 1934 the Works Progress Administration built this limestone auditorium on the old Locke Hill school grounds, its walls raised by federal workers from stone cut at a nearby quarry. Answering the county superintendent's push for better schools, the building became a gathering place for the whole community. When postwar growth outran the campus, the school was rebuilt nearby in 1976, but the New Deal auditorium remained as a reminder of a hard time when public work put people to build lasting things.

Jefferson, TX

Royal and Martha Lockett came to Texas from Georgia in the late 1850s with their eleven surviving children and the people they enslaved, and seven of their eight living sons went on to serve in the Confederate Army. The earliest marked grave is that of young Walter R. McGarity, a Lockett grandson who died in 1862. Family memory holds that a Union soldier who died on the Lockett Plantation was also buried here, and by 1999 the grounds held Confederate and World War II veterans among six generations of descendants.