Search Markers

Lockett Community, TX

Named for the Lockett families who settled here in 1888, this Wilbarger County farming community grew from a scattering of pioneer homesteads into a network of schools, churches, cotton gins, blacksmith shops, and general stores. Farming that began behind a yoke of oxen gave way over the decades to modern tractor equipment, and the Lockett Seed Company grew into a hub later acquired by Pioneer Hi-Bred as a cotton-breeding headquarters. Consolidating school districts and a Texas A&M agricultural research center capped the community's evolution across nearly a century.

Cuero, TX

These three acres are the oldest known African American burial ground in DeWitt County, tied to the once-thriving farming community of Lockhart whose earliest settlers included sharecroppers and former slaves. Formally purchased in 1910 by the Lockhart Colored Cemetery Association, the grounds hold 263 known graves—among them many veterans and Paul Wimbish, a former slave who became a successful county businessman. Handmade concrete headstones with decorative tilework and hand-etched inscriptions exemplify a Southern folk tradition of memorializing family and faith.

Galveston, TX

This Queen Anne residence began before 1889 as a modest one-story cottage and was transformed around 1894 by raising the original section to a second floor over a new ground level. Its owner, William B. Lockhart, was a son-in-law of Walter Gresham — builder of Galveston's famed Bishop's Palace — and rose to prominence as a county and federal judge, as did his son John after him. The house stands as a survivor of Galveston's Gilded Age prosperity.

Chappell Hill, TX

Dr. John W. Lockhart, a Chappell Hill physician and frequent host to Sam Houston, built this home in 1850 from cedar and black walnut hand-cut on the property. The house anchored a self-sufficient 1,000-acre place complete with its own blacksmith shop, cotton gin, and store. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark of the antebellum plantation era.

Lockhart, TX

Built in 1923 for Lockhart's African American students—reportedly with materials salvaged from a former white school—this two-story brick and stucco schoolhouse was designed and partly funded through the Rosenwald Foundation, with the district and Black citizens raising the rest. Before it opened, Black children had studied in scattered churches, lodges, and even a funeral parlor. Accredited in 1926 and renamed G.W. Carver High School in 1946, it closed with integration in 1964 and later housed a Head Start program.

San Antonio, TX

One of the oldest public schools in Texas, Lockhill has taught children continuously since 1868, when classes were first held in a former supply depot. It took its name from William J. Locke, who donated the land, and for a time was called 'Shavano.' The present building went up in 1923, and in 1985 the school's marker, gates, and archway were moved from the original site a mile away to keep the history close.

Shelby County, OH

After the catastrophic Great Miami River flood of March 1913 drowned Dayton and killed hundreds, Ohio pioneered one of the nation's first comprehensive flood-control efforts: the Miami Conservancy District. Completed in 1921, Lockington Dam is one of five earthen 'dry dams' the District built across the valley's tributaries — structures that stand empty most of the year and only pool water behind them during dangerous high water, releasing it slowly downstream. Among the largest earthworks of its kind when it was finished, its great length and height reflect the ambitious scale of engineer Arthur E. Morgan's regional plan.

Robert Lee, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1849, Locklin Bartholomew Murray came to Texas as a boy and, by about 1888, settled to ranch in the Yellow Wolf Valley near Sanco. In 1894 the citizens of Coke County elected him sheriff and tax collector, and he held the office through four straight terms until 1902, building a reputation as an honest and effective lawman. He and his wife Susan raised seven children to adulthood on the frontier.

San Gabriel, TX

This burying ground grew from the earliest days of Anglo settlement in Milam County, on land tied to a Mexican grant Abigale McLennan Fokes acquired in 1835. The first recorded burial, in 1844, was blacksmith Peter M. Mercer, and Fokes later set the site aside as a cemetery. Named for the family of pioneer William Lawson Locklin, it holds some 400 graves, including veterans of the Texas Revolution and the Republic of Texas Army.

Lockport, NY · est. 1976

To lift canal boats 60 feet over the Niagara Escarpment, engineers built five paired locks — boats going up on one side while others descended. The project drew workers from across Europe and gave the city of Lockport its name.

Henderson, TX

Henry T. Lockridge settled in Rusk County in the 1850s and, after serving in the Confederate Army, bought the land in 1863 where he and his wife Jane spent the rest of their lives. The family cemetery on that property holds its oldest marked grave from 1881, though earlier burials are believed to lie there. Long inactive after the 1940s, it saw new burials again beginning in 2004, and much of the surrounding land is still owned by Lockridge descendants.

Manor, TX

This cemetery lies on land settled in 1833 by Gordon C. Jennings and his family, who came from Missouri as part of Stephen F. Austin's "Little Colony." Gordon became the oldest defender to die at the Alamo in 1836, while his young daughter Catherine earned lasting local fame for riding to warn neighbors as the Mexican army advanced during the Runaway Scrape. Catherine later married Sylvester Lockwood, and their descendants still tend the graves of these Texas pioneers.

Livingston, TX

Built in 1911 by Philadelphia's Baldwin Locomotive Works, this engine first hauled timber in Florida before being bought in the 1920s for the Carter-Kelley Lumber Company's East Texas operations. Running on the Houston, East and West Texas Railway between mill towns in Angelina and Polk counties, it carried logs and finished lumber—much of it first dragged from the woods by oxen. It stayed in service until 1952, a workhorse of the region's booming timber industry.

Elmo, TX

Founded in the 1800s, Locust Grove grew into a typical East Texas farming community with a sawmill, stores, a doctor, three churches, and a two-story building that doubled as schoolhouse and Baptist church. A post office opened in 1893 under postmaster James Hiram Hughes, and the community was later renamed Hiram in his honor. Today the Locust Grove Baptist Church, whose 1919 church house still stands, and its cemetery are the community's remaining landmarks.

Shippensburg, PA · est. 2007

Since the early 19th century, Locust Grove Cemetery has been the resting place of enslaved and free Black residents of the Shippensburg area, and the site of the town's first African American church, founded in the 1830s. In 1842 Edward Shippen Burd granted the land to the local Black community, and for well over a century it remained the only public cemetery in the area open to African Americans. Among its graves are twenty-six Civil War soldiers, alongside veterans of every American conflict through Vietnam.

Albemarle County, VA

Locust Hill, a plantation in the Virginia Piedmont near Charlottesville, was the 1774 birthplace of Meriwether Lewis. Raised in Albemarle County not far from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Lewis became a soldier and later Jefferson's private secretary before the president tapped him to lead the Corps of Discovery. Together with his friend William Clark, he set out in 1804 on an epic transcontinental journey to the Pacific and back, returning in 1806.

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

In the years after World War I, American communities received captured German artillery as war trophies and lasting memorials. This cannon reached Locust Valley through Henry P. Davison, a prominent banker who chaired the American Red Cross War Council and helped organize the nation's wartime relief effort; the French government presented the gun in recognition of American support. Set beside the library, it was dedicated to the local men and women who sacrificed and served during the Great War.

Fredericksburg, TX

The log room and loft at the heart of this house were raised by German emigrant Gerhard Rörig during Fredericksburg's very first winter of 1846–47, when the settlement was only weeks old. The cabinetmaker Johann Martin Loeffler later added the rock-and-half-timber rooms and cooking fireplace typical of the German Hill Country, and the Loeffler-Weber family kept it as a home or weekend "Sunday House" for ninety years. It is a living record of German building traditions transplanted to Texas.

Pend Oreille County, WA

The Grandview mine near Metaline Falls opened in 1924, when J. McGinn shipped roughly 217 tons of lead ore to the Bunker Hill & Sullivan smelter across the line in Idaho. It was part of the lead-and-zinc mining that drew prospectors and workers into the rugged mountains of northeastern Washington. A surviving log cabin marks the site of the mine and mill.

Dallas, TX

At the "Three Forks" of the Trinity River, colonists of the Peters Colony began arriving after 1841, drawn by land grants that required them to farm a few acres and raise "a good and comfortable cabin." The surrounding forests of oak, cedar, walnut, and bois d'arc supplied the timber, and John Neely Bryan's 1842 cabin marked the beginnings of Dallas. Within a decade milled lumber and brick were replacing logs, and an 1860 fire swept away most of the town's original cabins.

Temple, TX

Dr. Arthur Carroll Scott, co-founder of the renowned Scott and White Hospital, used this cabin from the 1920s until his death in 1940 as a private study and retreat. Assembled from two old log corn cribs and warmed by a fireplace of stones brought by rock-collecting friends, it stood in an oak grove where a farm bell, not a telephone, summoned him for emergencies. Trained at Bellevue and once chief surgeon for the Santa Fe Railway, Scott helped grow a small 1904 sanitarium into one of the nation's foremost medical centers.

Warminster Township, PA · est. 2008

Around 1735, the Reverend William Tennent built a humble log schoolhouse here and began training Presbyterian ministers — the first academy of its kind in America and the first college in Pennsylvania. Detractors mocked the rustic building as a "Log College," but it became a seedbed of the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. When Tennent died in 1746 the school closed, but its graduates soon helped found what became Princeton University.

Jennerstown, PA · est. 1947

In 1805 a miller named Cronin raised a log grist mill at Roxbury, part of the network of small water-powered mills that ground the grain of frontier Pennsylvania into flour and meal. The mill turned for well over a century, staying in operation until 1918 before its working days ended. Later reconstructed, the sturdy log building found new life as the Mountain Playhouse, preserving a fine example of early American milling.

Russellville, KY

Financed by a property tax passed in 1869, this Russellville jail replaced an earlier lockup that had burned and opened by December 1874. For more than a century it served as the county's symbol of law and order before closing in 1977. Restored in 1979–80, it now safeguards county records tended by the local genealogical society.

Altoona, PA · est. 1947

In September 1862, with the Civil War at a grim turning point, the governors of the loyal Northern states gathered at the Logan House, a famous railroad hotel that once stood on this site. Pennsylvania's Governor Andrew Curtin called the conference, and the assembled governors pledged their states' support to President Lincoln at a moment when he was preparing the Emancipation Proclamation. Their united stand helped steady the Union war effort.

Burnet, TX

Logan Vandeveer came from Kentucky in 1833 and was badly wounded fighting for Texas independence at San Jacinto in 1836. Settling in Burnet County to sell beef to nearby Fort Croghan in 1849, he helped organize the county and served as the town's first postmaster. In the early 1850s he built this house near Hamilton Creek for a daughter; the Burnet County Historical Society moved it here in 1973, flooring its porch with stones from an early county courthouse.

Harmony Township, PA · est. 1946

Logstown was one of the great Native towns of the upper Ohio, home between 1727 and 1758 to a mix of Iroquois, Delaware, Shawnee, and other peoples. Its council fires drew British and French agents alike, each competing for Indian alliances as the two empires maneuvered for control of the Ohio Country. The conferences held here helped set the stage for the French and Indian War.

Lakeway, TX

John Henry Lohmans left Hanover, Germany, for the Republic of Texas in 1842, first running a dairy farm near Austin before pushing west in 1867 to carve a homestead from the timbered hills above the Colorado River. A road-builder as well as a farmer, he personally financed Lohmans Ford Road, one strand in the web of early crossings that let settlers and goods move through this rugged country. Today's Lohmans Crossing Road still traces the general path of that pioneer route.

Lohn, TX

German immigrant Boi Albert Cornils arrived in this area in 1884 and married Bertha Lembke, another young immigrant, settling on ranchland east of Lohn. In 1896 the couple deeded five acres for a free public school beside an existing community burial ground on their property. Now holding several hundred graves, many of them veterans', the cemetery keeps the memory of Lohn and its people.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2019

Lois Weber was born on this Pittsburgh site and grew up to become the first American woman to direct films—and one of the most prolific and daring directors of the silent era. Between 1908 and 1934 she wrote, directed, and acted in more than two hundred pictures, tackling controversial subjects like drug addiction, abortion, and poverty that most filmmakers avoided. She also helped pioneer cinematic techniques, including the split screen.

Athens, TX

The first recorded burial at Lollar Cemetery was the 1867 interment of John S. Partin, infant son of Samuel and Elizabeth Partin, on land then owned by Asa Dalton. The cemetery is thought to be named for neighbor John Lollar, whose farm lay just across the Van Zandt County line, though whether he rests here is unknown. Serving families such as the Fanchers, Brannans, Drivers, and Lewises for more than seventy-five years, it received its last burial—Eli Lollar Fancher—in 1944.

Tilden, TX

Settlers began moving into this stretch of McMullen County ranch country in the early 1880s, naming the place Loma Alta for its high hills. A school opened in 1896 and moved several times before consolidation in 1943, while a post office operated only from 1910 to 1921. Together the two institutions anchored a large, sparsely settled ranching area.

Three Rivers, TX

Beginning in 1973, highway-department archeologists excavating here uncovered a Native American burial ground used across many centuries, with graves in two soil layers dating to roughly 850 B.C. and 250 B.C. The people were hunter-gatherers who took deer and bison with dart-tipped spears; some two hundred graves held sewing and cooking tools, shell ornaments, and red and yellow pigment. A few men were buried with white-tailed deer antler racks, a sign of high status, and trade goods reveal exchange with distant coastal and interior groups.

Boston, MA

This Lombard Lamp was presented to the people of Boston in 1980 to mark the city's 350th anniversary, a gift from the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Germany. Modeled on the ornate lamps that once lit Hamburg's streets, it was offered as a gesture of international friendship and a salute to Boston's long heritage of freedom. It stands as a token of the enduring ties between the two historic port cities.

Chicago, IL

This ornamental lamp is a copy of the gaslights that have graced Hamburg's famous Lombard Bridge since 1869, given to Chicago in 1979 by the free and Hanseatic city of Hamburg as a token of friendship. The gift reflects the deep and enduring ties between Chicago and Germany, whose immigrants formed one of the city's largest communities and shaped its commerce, culture, and civic life.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

On August 1, 1842, Philadelphia's Black community gathered to celebrate the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies—a hopeful marker of freedom in a nation where slavery still reigned. A white mob descended on the peaceful parade, and over three days of violence African Americans were beaten, their homes ransacked, and a church and abolitionist meeting hall burned to the ground. The Lombard Street Riot was one of a wave of anti-Black assaults that convulsed the antebellum city.

Rio Frio, TX

In 1868, just after the Civil War, the Lombardy Irrigation Company dug a two-mile ditch by pick and shovel to bring water to more than 800 acres of the Frio River valley. Beyond irrigation, the ditch powered a cotton gin and grist, flour, and shingle mills, and the settlement that grew around it was simply called "The Ditch" until a post office gave it the name Rio Frio in 1875. For a century afterward the same channel watered lands held by descendants of its founders.

Lometa, TX

Lometa owes its existence to the railroad: in 1885 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe pushed northwest from Temple and planted a depot in open ranch country. Platted in 1886 and renamed Lometa, from the Spanish for 'little mountain,' the town drew residents away from nearby Senterfitt and became a thriving trade center for cotton, cattle, wool, and mohair. Rail branches and, later, state and federal highways kept goods and travelers flowing through the town for generations.

Santa Barbara County, CA

This memorial gathers the Lompoc Valley's remembrance of the men and women who served in the Vietnam War, a conflict that drew hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas from the mid-1950s into 1975. Its words dwell not on politics but on honor kept and sacrifice "never forgotten," the language of a community determined to welcome home those the wider nation was often slow to thank. It stands among the many local Vietnam memorials raised across the country in the decades after the war.

Harlingen, TX

Lon C. Hill built the first home in Harlingen in 1904—and, in a sense, built the town itself. A tireless promoter of railroads and irrigation, he helped transform the lower Rio Grande Valley from arid brushland into productive farm country. His climate-adapted Victorian house became a gathering place where valley pioneers met to plan the developments that would shape the region.

Jacksonville, TX

Founded in Kilgore in 1875 by pioneer educator Dr. Isaac Alexander, this Methodist school became the oldest junior college in Texas. It moved to Jacksonville in 1894, operated as a junior college from 1912, and was renamed to honor Pittsburg banker R. A. "Lon" Morris in 1924. It was the first Texas junior college with a Phi Theta Kappa scholarship chapter and among the longest-standing members of the Southern Association of Colleges.

New London, TX

Founded in 1856 in the piney woods of East Texas, London Baptist Church took root in a frontier era when congregations often shared quarters — here with an Odd Fellows Lodge in a building along the Henderson-to-Waco stagecoach road. Fire claimed the structure in 1877, but the congregation rebuilt in 1897 and thrived when the great East Texas oil strike of 1930 turned sleepy London into a boom town. Through fire, rebuilding, and sudden petroleum prosperity, the church remained a fixture of community worship and outreach.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Opened in 1754, the London Coffee House was a hub of colonial Philadelphia's political and mercantile life, where traders, officials, and townsfolk gathered to talk business and news. But its bustling floor carried a darker function: enslaved Africans, newly arrived by ship, were inspected and sold here at public auction. The site captures the uncomfortable truth that even in the cradle of American liberty, commerce and human bondage stood side by side.

London, TX

In the early days of Kimble County a ranching couple turned their hotel and wagon yard into a trade center, where the wife gathered the neighborhood's mail. In 1882 she formalized the arrangement and became the first postmaster of the new London post office. Its central location made the settlement the direct road between Mason and Junction, and postmasters served it for well over a century.

London, TX

Laid out around 1878 as the hoped-for courthouse square of a proposed county, this town took the name London after the postmaster's first choice honoring his wife was rejected by postal authorities. Sitting astride the Western Cattle Trail, London counted trail drivers among its residents and sold supplies to crews pushing longhorn herds north, supporting a blacksmith, stores, a cotton gin, churches, and a school. A future Texas governor spent part of his childhood here.

Llano, TX

Among Llano County's early rural schools, Lone Grove sat on a main road between Llano and Burnet and grew important enough to become district number two when the county was divided in 1884. The surviving schoolhouse dates to 1910 and, in 1937, was one of only two county rural schools to offer high-school courses before consolidating with Llano in 1947.

Lone Oak, TX

Organized in 1858, Lone Oak Baptist Church gathered a small circle of Hunt County pioneers around its first pastor, Thomas Hooker, on land donated by the McBride family. The original building later burned, and the congregation raised the present church in 1899. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1970.

Snook, TX

Traveling preachers served the Lone Oak community until residents organized a Baptist church in 1905. In 1911 they called the Rev. A.S. Broaddus, who led the congregation for an extraordinary 42 years — stepping away only to serve as a U.S. Army chaplain in both World Wars. Multi-day summer revivals, with family camping, brush-arbor services, and dinner on the grounds, marked the rhythm of church life.

Kemp, TX

In 1858, passing strangers lost a son to sudden death, and settler Weaver A. Cotton befriended them by providing a grave beside a tree near the log school-and-church building. He later gave the community a burial ground, deeded in 1883. Cotton, his family, and many other pioneers rest here.

Geronimo, TX

In January 1897, German immigrant families around Geronimo gathered at the Specht School and formed a 'friedhof gesellschaft,' or cemetery association, to establish a community burial ground. Within a week they bought five acres from Ernst Puls and named it Lone Oak Cemetery, where the first burial—the infant son of Ernst and Bertha Puls—took place the next year. More than 900 people now rest here, including reinterred graves from older sites.

Mart, TX

This McLennan County burial ground began as land bought in 1880 by trustees of the Lone Oak School for a church and school. It was pressed into use as a cemetery by September 1881, when the infant son of the Goodman family was laid to rest here. Confederate veterans and a lone Union veteran of the Civil War also lie among the pioneer dead.

Palestine, TX

This congregation traces its beginnings to worshipers who gathered in the early 1890s in a schoolhouse at a spot known as Rocky Point. When the church bought land in 1903, a single pine tree standing on the property gave it the name Lone Pine Baptist Church, and the congregation was formally organized in 1908 with thirty-four charter members under the Rev. A. M. Thompson. From a dirt-floored "tabernacle" built in 1920 the church grew steadily, dedicating a new auditorium in 1957, and it has served the community for well over eight decades.

New Summerfield, TX

Founded before the Civil War with the earthy nickname "Skin Tight," this community took the name Lone Star when its post office opened in 1883 and blossomed into a center of trade, education, and culture. At its height it boasted businesses, a public school, four churches, two lodges, and the Lone Star Institute. A devastating 1893 fire, a railroad that passed it by, and disappointing oil prospects each drained away its future.

Anahuac, TX

In the early 1900s, east Chambers County was becoming rice country, but the crop needs a steady supply of fresh water. Beginning in 1902, Berriman Richard Garland and A. L. Williams dug this canal from the mouth of Turtle Bay to irrigate the fields, and by 1904 the Lone Star Canal Company was shipping rice out by sailing vessel. Salt water intruding during dry seasons repeatedly killed crops, prompting a dam, locks, and a river district to manage the water. Through hurricanes, closures, and changing owners the canal endured and still serves the region's farms and industry.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1851 Corpus Christi founder Henry L. Kinney launched the ambitious Lone Star Fair to boost his young town's economy and lure new settlers — while quietly recruiting men for General José M. J. Carbajal's revolt in northern Mexico. Kinney went deep into debt building racetracks and pavilions, enlisting former governors to promote it, and staged bullfights, circus acts, and stock shows when the fair opened in May 1852. He hoped for 30,000 visitors; barely 2,000 came, and the failure bankrupted him.

Denison, TX

Chartered on June 6, 1874, just a year after Denison itself was founded, Lone Star Masonic Lodge grew alongside the young railroad town. Its members met in several locations before raising this brick hall, built in two stages in 1900 and 1915 and topped by a distinctive bracketed eave. The completed hall was dedicated on New Year's Eve 1915, with ceremonies carrying into the first day of 1916.

Hermleigh, TX

Named for the Kiowa chief Lone Wolf, whose people ranged across this stretch of West Texas until the 1870s, this community took root when settler John Mahoney donated land for a cemetery and school. A one-room schoolhouse rose in 1901, doubling as a church, and a store, post office, and scattered farms soon followed. The little settlement gradually faded as its school consolidated, but its pioneer cemetery, with graves dating to 1892, still serves area families.

Loraine, TX

This mountain bears the name of Lone Wolf, a Kiowa chief held as a hostage by General Custer following the Washita campaign and later released. After his son was killed, Lone Wolf vowed revenge on white settlers, and a clash occurred along the El Paso Road north of Fort Concho near this landmark. The chief died in 1879.

Rising Star vicinity, TX

Long Branch Baptist Church was formally organized on July 16, 1885, holding its first services in an old schoolhouse on land given by R. B. Covington. Thirteen charter members were led by the church's first minister, W. B. Cobb, and missionary pastors kept up monthly services in the years that followed. The congregation built its first sanctuary on this site in 1905–06 and long served the surrounding Long Branch community.

Reagan, TX

Founded by former slaves in connection with a Methodist Episcopal church, this three-acre burial ground served the Black community of Long Branch for more than a century. Families who had come from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia by 1870 built a two-room school, chose teachers from their own ranks, farmed as tenants, and gradually became landowners. Their sons served in every American conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam—including Anthony Shaw of the 104th U.S. Colored Infantry—and among those buried here is Silvia King, who recorded her remarkable life story before her death in the 1930s.