Search Markers

Azle, TX

By local tradition, schooling in the Azle area began in the 1850s in log cabins and a Baptist church, persisting despite the disruptions of frontier raids and the Civil War. Over the decades the school grew by absorbing a string of tiny neighboring districts with names like Promised Land, Liberty, and Bluff Springs. That steady consolidation turned scattered pioneer schools into a single modern district.

Bastrop, TX

In the boom years after the Civil War, cotton wealth and commerce reshaped small Texas towns like Bastrop into places of Victorian ambition. In 1888 banker, attorney, and civic leader Benjamin Darby Orgain built this double-galleried residence, its fishscale shingling and interior woodwork of pine, cherry, mahogany, and walnut announcing the prosperity of a rising professional class. Orgain's wife, Drucilla, taught at the local Colorado Institute, and the family held the home for nearly sixty years.

Alamance County, NC

B. Everett Jordan (1896–1974) was a North Carolina textile executive who served in the United States Senate from 1958 to 1973. In 1973 the newly created Jordan Lake was named in his honor.

Joaquin, TX

Alabama-born Benjamin Franklin Morris came to Texas in 1838 and settled the pioneer village of Sarat, becoming a prosperous farmer and rancher. In 1884 he gave the Houston, East & West Texas Railroad a right of way through 500 acres and provided a 100-acre townsite—named for his grandson Joaquin—on the condition that a depot be built and passenger trains stop daily. A Confederate veteran, Morris also donated land for the town's First Baptist Church.

Victoria, TX

Victoria businessman, mayor, and state legislator Benjamin F. Williams built this Classical Revival home for his family in 1909, designed by local architect Jules Leffland. Its two-story Ionic columns, matching one-story side portico, balustraded balcony, and rooftop "widow's walk" overlooking the Guadalupe River mark it as a distinguished example of early-20th-century Texas architecture. The house reflects the standing of a prominent civic leader of its day.

Orange, TX

Alabama native B. H. Norsworthy came to Texas in 1860 and, during the Civil War, organized a Confederate unit known as the Lone Star Rifles. He was wounded at the Battle of Thompson's Station in Tennessee and the Battle of Jonesboro in Georgia, rising to lieutenant colonel. After the war he settled in Orange as a merchant and rice farmer and was elected to three terms as the city's mayor.

Sherman, TX

Bruno H. Zauk crossed from Germany alone at sixteen and, by 1876, had founded Sherman's first cigar factory; he became a naturalized citizen in 1880. He parlayed his success into extensive landholdings in West Texas and Oklahoma and served as vice president of banks in Sherman and Bennington, Oklahoma.

Austin, TX

School proprietor B. J. Smith bought this Austin property at a state auction in 1853, and the home that stands here was likely built during that decade. Its handmade hardware, doors, and structural details reveal the fine craftsmanship of one of early Austin's better residences. It survives as a rare example of the young capital's antebellum domestic architecture.

Breckenridge, TX

Benjamin Tarver Brown, a former Confederate captain, came to Stephens County in 1866 and, in 1876—the year Breckenridge was founded as the county seat—raised this limestone ranch house. Its 18-inch walls were cut from stone quarried nearby, while other materials were hauled by wagon all the way from Fort Worth. One of the oldest buildings in town, it was later restored by owners who bought it in 1941.

Boston, MA

Since 1897, the Boston Marathon has drawn runners to the roads west of the city each spring, making it the world's oldest annual marathon. This monument marks the race's storied finish, its inscription borrowed from Tennyson's "Ulysses" — a vow "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" that has come to speak for the endurance the course demands. Organized by the Boston Athletic Association, the marathon has become one of the great rituals of American sport.

Alpharetta, GA

Built around 1910 by Benjamin Franklin Shirley from a Sears, Roebuck house pattern, this nine-room Queen Anne home features a veranda and exterior stairs to the second floor. The Alpharetta Woman's Club bought the house in 1962 and paid off the loan through community fundraising, preserving it largely as built.

Langtry, TX

Established around 1898 in the rugged country near Langtry in Val Verde County, Babb Cemetery holds the graves of families who settled this remote stretch of the lower Pecos during West Texas's ranching and railroad era. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes the burial ground as a lasting record of a small frontier community.

Chico, TX

This cemetery dates to September 1866 and the killing of Mrs. John S. Babb by Comanches, an attack that also carried off two of her children, Dot and Bianca, into a captivity that lasted two years before their father recovered them. It marks the violent frontier that North Texas remained in the years just after the Civil War, when raids and captivities were a constant fear for settling families.

Whitfield County, GA

On the antebellum lands of Joel Babb, at the foot of Rocky Face Ridge near Dug Gap, cavalry probed and skirmished on May 8, 1864, as Sherman opened his drive toward Atlanta. Confederate horsemen under Col. W. C. P. Breckinridge patrolled out from Dug Gap and found Dogwood Valley swarming with Federals, then fell back before advancing Union brigades. By mid-afternoon Geary's division had reached this vicinity and deployed to storm the gap.

Llano, TX

Local tradition holds that Baby Head Mountain took its grim name in the 1850s, after a child killed in an Indian raid was left on its slopes. A pioneer community grew up nearby in the 1870s, taking the same name, with homes, farms, and businesses. Today the cemetery — whose oldest documented grave is that of a child who died on New Year's Day 1884 — is the community's last physical trace.

Frisco, TX

Henry Cook, a War of 1812 veteran, arrived here in 1845 as a member of the Peters Colony, building a log house that became a landmark on the Shawnee Trail cattle route. He opened this family cemetery in 1847 to bury his young son Daniel, and his daughter Rachel Cook Baccus later deeded the ground to his heirs and gave land for the Baccus Christian Church. Named in her honor around 1915, the cemetery remains in use today.

Rusk, TX

In 1902 fifteen young single women pooled fewer than fifty books to form the Bachelor Girl's Library Club in downtown Rusk—believed to be the first public library in Cherokee County. Renamed as members married ("Maids and Matrons," then "Library Study Club"), the club grew its collection for decades, eventually needing a paid librarian, and in 1966 donated its holdings to the City of Rusk. Those books anchored the town's permanent library.

Naples, FL

Settled in 1915, this "Back Bay" district gave the young town of Naples its first sheltered mooring, making it the natural gathering place for the community's pioneers. From here workers helped push through the Tamiami Trail linking Tampa and Miami across the Everglades, while the local fishing industry, the first pharmacy, and the first newspaper all took root nearby. It was, in effect, the working heart of frontier Naples in the decades before the city became a resort destination.

Alma, GA

Bacon County was carved out by the Georgia legislature in 1914 and named for Augustus O. Bacon, a four-term U.S. senator who had died in office earlier that year. A Georgian who served as adjutant of the 9th Georgia Regiment in the Civil War, Bacon rose to national prominence as an authority on Mexican affairs, and his death came at a tense moment in U.S.-Mexico relations. The marker also records the county's first slate of local officers.

Lubbock, TX

Built in 1916 for business and civic leader Warren A. Bacon and his wife Myrta, this two-story brick house rose in the Overton Addition, the first residential expansion beyond Lubbock's original townsite. Designed from plans by Amarillo architect W. M. Rice, it reflected the ambitions of a South Plains town coming into its own. The Bacon family kept it for more than sixty-five years.

Galveston, TX

Designed by noted Galveston architect Nicholas J. Clayton, this Queen Anne house was built in 1899 by Ida B. Baden, an unusually wealthy woman who owned considerable stock in the Galveston Wharf Company. After her sudden death in 1906, the home passed through her family and was sold in 1913 to ocean-freight broker Benno Sproule, whose family lived there into the 1950s. Its wraparound veranda, bow windows, and fishscale shingles make it a showcase of the style.

Badin, NC

Badin owes its very name and existence to aluminum: the town was laid out in the 1910s around a smelter on the Yadkin River, and for generations the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) was the heart of community life here in the North Carolina Piedmont. This small park, dedicated in July 1991 by the civic group Better Badin, Inc. together with Alcoa, honors Josephine Nelson (1916–1988), a local figure remembered by the townspeople she served. It is a quiet expression of civic pride in a company town that outlasted the industrial era that built it.

Llano, TX

Built in 1891 during Llano's short-lived iron boom, this handsome building first housed the First National Bank before French-born mineralogist N.J. "Professor" Badu bought it in 1898 for his home. Designed by the Austin firm Larramour and Watson, it shows off renaissance revival detailing and a striking checkerboard band of native granite. Badu's descendants lived here for generations, and it became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1981.

Fredericksburg, TX

A German family immigrated to Texas in 1854 and, after moving about the central part of the state, settled roughly 120 acres in the Fredericksburg area in 1867. Their homestead centered on a house built of handmade clay-and-straw brick alongside a cluster of outbuildings. Their sons inherited the farm, and the family held it until 1937, when it passed to another German-Texan family.

Leander, TX

This burial ground opened in 1857 with the grave of three-year-old John Babcock, whose father later deeded the land to the community of Bagdad. Among its early graves lie a Civil War veteran and a colonel, marking a settlement that thrived until 1882, when the railroad ran instead through the new town of Leander and drew the living away. The two communities came to share the cemetery, which was enlarged in later decades.

Brownsville, TX

During the Civil War, Brownsville and the twin towns of Bagdad and Matamoros across the Rio Grande became a vital loophole in the Union blockade. Because Mexico was neutral, Confederate cotton hauled overland from as far as Arkansas could be ferried across the river and shipped to Europe, returning as guns, medicine, cloth, and shoes. This border trade was, as the marker says, the South's lifeblood when its own ports were sealed.

Bloomfield Hills, MI

Completed in 1833, this frame building was the second home of Bagley's Tavern, first opened in a log cabin by Amasa Bagley in the 1820s. Bagley arrived in 1819 with his family and a handful of other settlers, among the first to put down roots in what became Oakland County, and later served as an associate judge. His tavern was a gathering place on the frontier edge of the young Michigan Territory.

Elysian Field, TX

Bailey Anderson (1754–1840) fought as a young soldier through eleven years of the Revolutionary War across Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas, losing his father and two brothers to the conflict. A restless frontiersman, he pushed westward across a lifetime — from Virginia and South Carolina to Kentucky, where he sat in the state legislature, then Indiana, and finally East Texas around 1818, weathering Spanish attempts to expel American settlers. He is buried in the nearby family cemetery on land granted to his son, a soldier of the Texas Revolution.

Canutillo, TX

Bailey Cemetery near Canutillo dates to 1880, when the far western tip of Texas was still a sparsely settled frontier along the Rio Grande. Burial grounds like this one anchored the small farming and railroad communities that took root in the El Paso valley after the railroads arrived. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes it as a lasting record of those early settlers.

Muleshoe, TX

Bailey County carries the name of Peter James Bailey, a young Kentucky lawyer who died defending the Alamo in 1836. Carved from the vast Bexar Territory, the county was created on paper in 1876 but not formally organized until 1918, when enough settlers had arrived on the high plains to sustain a government, with Muleshoe as its seat.

Muleshoe vicinity, TX

When Mariah 'Aunt Rye' Long died in 1918, Emil and Anna Wellsandt gave a parcel of their land for a public burying ground—and it filled quickly, many of the first graves belonging to victims of that year's influenza epidemic. A cemetery association formed at once, and a 'Hill-Top' section was later set aside for the county's indigent dead. After decades of neglect and vandalism the association reorganized in 1996 to preserve the resting place of Bailey County's pioneers and veterans.

Santa Clara County, CA

This marker points to the nearby Bailey Fellows house, a historic structure at the south end of Calero Reservoir in Santa Clara County, California. The building survives from an earlier ranching and rural era in the hills south of San José, before reservoirs and parkland reshaped the landscape. Such farmhouses recall the agricultural roots of the Santa Clara Valley long before it became Silicon Valley.

Austin, TX

Bailey Hardeman, a Tennessee native, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836 and served as the first secretary of the treasury for the new Republic of Texas. He died later that same year on Caney Creek in Matagorda County. The State of Texas honored him with this marker during the 1936 independence centennial.

Bonham, TX

In 1837, Bailey Inglish moved his family from western Arkansas to this part of the young Republic of Texas, where he helped organize Fannin County and served on its land board and later as chief justice. To shield settlers from repeated Indian raids he built a fort on his land, and the settlement that grew up around it—first called Bois d'Arc—became Bonham. Through public service and gifts of land for town lots, a cemetery, and a female seminary, he shaped the community's early growth.

Gainesville, TX

Joseph Weldon Bailey was one of the most electric—and divisive—figures in Texas politics, rising through the U.S. House in the 1890s to the Senate in 1901 on the strength of a famous silver tongue and a famously short fuse. His career was clouded by the Waters-Pierce oil anti-trust scandal, yet he remained a force in Democratic politics into the 1920s, mounting a near-miss run for governor. He closed his life practicing law in Dallas.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1971

From 1773 to 1780, Francis Bailey ran a printing office on this Lancaster site, serving as official printer to both the Continental Congress and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In an age when the press was a weapon of revolution, his shop turned out patriot documents—including Thomas Paine's "Crisis No. 4," one of the essays meant to steel American resolve through the darkest stretch of the war. Bailey is also credited with being among the first to call George Washington "Father of His Country" in print.

Farmersville, TX

Widowed young, Anna Melissa Hicks Bain built this Farmersville house in 1865 and raised five daughters here while running a shrewd real-estate and boarding business. She subdivided her land into lots, put up commercial buildings, and sold a parcel to the Red River Railroad, all while housing teachers and students from nearby schools. Five generations of the Bain-Honaker family lived under this roof before descendants gave it to the local historical society in 1989.

Village of Bemus Point, NY

Bainbridge Colby (1869–1950) was an American statesman remembered here in the lakeside village of Bemus Point, where he kept a home on Chautauqua Lake. A founder of the Progressive "Bull Moose" Party, he later served as the last Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson from 1920 to 1921, helping guide American diplomacy in the difficult aftermath of World War I. This modest monument honors him with the simple epitaph "Faithful Public Servant."

Clayton County, GA

As the Atlanta Campaign reached its climax on August 30, 1864, Davis's 14th Corps moved from Red Oak toward the Fayetteville Road, splitting into columns for the approach. At this crossroads on the Flat Shoals Road, Baird's division swung northeast and then southward, its march briefly halting the passage of two divisions of the 4th Corps until it could complete the turn. The realignment set the stage for the fighting at Jonesboro that would finally sever Atlanta's supply lines.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

From its opening in 1887 until 1938, Baker Bowl was the home of the Philadelphia Phillies, and after a rebuilding in 1895 it was praised as the finest ballpark in the country. Its grandstands witnessed a remarkable run of firsts and lasts — the first World Series game attended by a U.S. president in 1915, the Negro League World Series of 1924–26, and Babe Ruth's final major league game in 1935. Razed in 1950, the park lives on only in memory and this marker.

Magnolia, TX

Baker Cemetery took root around 1855, in the years when Anglo settlers were spreading across the pineywoods and prairies of what became Montgomery County, Texas. A burying ground like this one usually marks the anchor of an early rural community, the first permanent claim a family made on the land. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2008 recognizes more than a century and a half of continuous local memory.

Kemp, TX

When the Baker family's infant son William was buried in 1848, this Illinois-emigrant family plot was born. Over the decades it grew into a three-acre community cemetery of more than 800 graves. Among the dead are veterans of the Republic of Texas Army, the Civil War, World War II, and the Korean War.

Weatherford, TX

Settlement of this part of Parker County took hold in the 1850s, and when Josiah and Kate Baker arrived with their extended family in 1854, the community that grew around their homestead took their name. The Bakers gave land for a school that opened in 1872 and for a Baptist church organized the same year by pioneer minister Noah T. Byars, while a family grave became the seed of the Baker Cemetery.

Fort Worth, TX

After working as a Pullman porter for the Santa Fe Railroad, James Nathan Baker, Sr. opened a funeral home for Cleburne's African American community in 1917 and became a licensed embalmer in 1922. Moving to Fort Worth in 1926, he built the Baker Undertaking Company into a regional enterprise that added a community ambulance service, a burial association, and a cemetery, serving Black families across the area. Passed down through four generations, the business remains a landmark tied to Fort Worth's historic Black churches, leaders, and neighborhoods.

Altoona, PA · est. 1947

Baker Mansion is a striking Greek Revival house built in 1846 for Elias Baker, one of the region's leading ironmasters in the era when Pennsylvania's charcoal-fired furnaces helped forge the nation's iron. Its columned dignity reflected both the wealth and the ambitions of the industrialists who ran the Juniata Valley iron trade. The house now serves as the museum and home of the Blair County Historical Society.

Altoona, PA · est. 1947

Erected between 1844 and 1847 to a design by Baltimore architect Robert Cary Long, Jr., this Greek Revival mansion was the home of ironmaster Elias Baker and his family from 1848 until 1914. The house captures the taste and standing of the men who dominated the Juniata Valley iron trade in the mid-19th century. Since 1922 it has served as the museum of the Blair County Historical Society.

Odessa, TX

With no public schools in rural Ector County, ranchers R.W. Smith and Teague Baker built an eight-by-ten-foot schoolhouse in Baker's pasture in 1906 and hired a teacher for $15 a month plus room and board, which they took turns providing. Such ranch schools taught not only ranchers' children but those of cowboys and 'nesters' — small farmers coming west to homestead cheap land. They served the isolated Permian Basin well until good roads and buses finally reached it.

Granbury, TX

Businessman, banker, and state legislator Jess Baker and his wife Alice built this home in 1905, and after their deaths in the early 1920s it passed to the prominent physician Dr. Arch Carmichael and his wife Dora. The house is a fine Queen Anne residence with Classical Revival touches, distinguished by a corner turret, a two-story portico, and a wraparound porch. It carries the names of two of Granbury's leading families.

Granbury, TX

Merchant and community leader John D. Baker built this native limestone building in 1882 for his dry goods store on the Granbury square. His partner James H. Doyle became sole owner in 1899, and over the years the building housed a national bank, grocers, dentists, and doctors. Its High Victorian Italianate style shows in the arched, fanlighted windows and simple stone cornice.

Houston, TX

Prominent Houston attorney and banker James Addison Baker bought this property in 1915 and hired noted architect Birdsall P. Briscoe to design a home as a gift for his daughter Alice and her husband, Murray Brashear Jones. Completed in 1917, the elegant residence shows off classical proportions, a pedimented entrance, and fluted Doric columns. Murray Jones served as a Harris County judge, while Alice became a well-known civic and charitable leader.

Cleburne, TX

Tradition holds that a little girl who fell ill and died while traveling by wagon train in the 1850s was the first person buried on this ground. Church records suggest J. L. Baker first deeded land for the cemetery near New Hope Baptist Church, founded nearby in 1860, with the Lain family later adding more; the earliest dated stone belongs to Hixy Moore, who died in 1870. Generations of pioneers, veterans and Johnson County families rest here, tended still by their descendants.

Granbury, TX

Built of cut limestone in 1895, this building housed the hardware business of D.O. Baker and J.D. Rylee on the Granbury square, growing into the Baker Hardware Company by the turn of the century. In 1929 the automobile age remade it literally: the Transcontinental Oil Company knocked out two walls so cars could pull in for gasoline. The transformation from hardware store to service station is written right into the structure.

Huntsville, TX

James Addison Baker came to Huntsville in 1852 as a widowed young lawyer and built a life as jurist, soldier, Mason, and civic booster of local education. In 1872 he joined the law partnership that would grow into Baker Botts — today one of the nation's premier firms, still guided by his descendants. His career links a frontier Texas courthouse to a legal dynasty of national reach.

Atlanta, GA

On July 22, 1864, during the Battle of Atlanta, Baker's Alabama brigade of Clayton's division was drawn northeast to form the far left of the Confederate attack against the Union 15th Corps. Facing Woods's Federal division across a swampy gap in the Clear Creek valley, the assault at first threatened the Union line and the DeGress battery near the Troup Hurt house. But a Federal counterattack retook the guns and forced Baker's Alabamians to withdraw.

Alvarado, TX

This burial ground was established in 1856 beside the Balch Cemetery to serve Alvarado's African American community, its first grave that of an enslaved girl killed by a black bear. Over the decades it received victims of smallpox, diphtheria, and other epidemics, many of them children, and in 1911 undertaker A. J. Senter donated land that gave the renamed Senterwood Cemetery its name. Those laid to rest here include business owners, church leaders, and veterans of the World Wars and Vietnam.

Austin, TX

The rugged Balcones Escarpment, curving through central Texas from Hill County to Uvalde County, shaped where people settled long before towns arose, its springs, wooded hills, and fertile prairies drawing Indian peoples and then Spanish colonists. Spanish explorer Bernardo de Miranda named the formation 'Los Balcones' in 1756, and part of El Camino Real, the King's Highway, followed the fault line past missions and presidios near San Antonio and Austin. Anglo-American settlers led by Stephen F. Austin arrived along the escarpment before 1830, and Austin—chosen capital of the Republic of Texas—grew up on its edge.

Milesburg, PA · est. 1947

Where Spring and Bald Eagle Creeks meet stood a Delaware Indian village named for the noted Munsee chief Woapalanne, whose name translates to "Bald Eagle." During the Revolutionary era this settlement was a staging point for raids against frontier settlements, part of the brutal borderland warfare that engulfed central Pennsylvania. The chief's name endures across the region today in creeks, mountains, and towns.

Bald Prairie, TX

When Tennessee-born Elijah Rains settled the Robertson County prairie in 1848, he set aside this ground so that his neighbors would have a place to bury their dead. The nearby Duck Creek and Prairie communities soon shared it, and its stones now trace the whole arc of a Texas farming settlement — from an uncertain early grave to the oldest surviving marker of 1872 and the veterans of the Civil War and later wars laid to rest here. A cemetery association formed in 1928 and an added acre in 1957 kept the ground in use, and roughly 600 marked graves are still honored each Memorial Day.

Bald Prairie, TX

Founded in 1847, this fellowship first worshiped alongside local Baptists before separating in 1849, meeting in a log building that doubled as a schoolhouse for its fifteen charter members. Elijah Rains gave land for both the church and the community cemetery, and the 1880s building served for decades as a school, funeral chapel, and social center. Descendants of the founders still gather here.

San Benito, TX

Baldemar Garza Huerta was born on this spot in San Benito in 1937 and grew up singing in South Texas talent shows before joining the Marines at sixteen. Recording first as El Bebop Kid, he blended country, rock, and Spanish-language rockabilly for Tejano audiences along the border, and in 1959 wrote his enduring hit "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights." After a prison stint and years working as a mechanic, he returned as Freddy Fender and topped the charts in 1974 with "Before the Next Teardrop Falls," launching a string of country hits. From honky-tonks to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he carried the sound of the Rio Grande Valley to a national audience while never forgetting his hometown.