Search Markers

Cumby, TX

In the late 1830s, Texas Rangers camped in a grove of blackjack oaks west of present-day Cumby, and settlers gathered nearby for protection at a place called Black Jack Grove. To the south, James M. and Mary Long settled along Turkey Creek in the 1850s, reportedly setting aside land around 1860 to bury a girl who died as her family passed through. The oldest marked grave belongs to John M. Webb (d. 1869), and among later burials rest Civil War veterans and Woodmen of the World members.

Lometa, TX

Founded in 1876 as Sims Creek Baptist Church by the noted early Texas minister Noah T. Byars, this congregation of eight charter members grew under a succession of itinerant preachers. For decades it worshipped in the Long Cove schoolhouse, which doubled as the community's social hub until fire claimed it in 1925. A wooden sanctuary followed, but by 1981 the dwindling flock voted to disband, leaving a cemetery holding Civil War and World War II veterans among the rural pioneers.

Granbury, TX

Also called Temple Hall Cemetery, this burial ground is the last trace of two vanished pioneer settlements—Temple Hall and Center Mill—that grew up along Long Creek in the mid-1800s. Its earliest known graves are the Haley children, who died in 1864 and 1865, and it holds judges, county officials, mill builder Thomas Parkinson, and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. A cemetery association has tended the grounds since about 1909.

Sunnyvale, TX

Long Creek Cemetery grew out of the mid-19th-century Mercer Colony settlement, where Black Hawk War veteran Capt. A. Webb established a homestead and was joined by his father-in-law, War of 1812 veteran Benjamin Crownover. The first burial came in 1855, when Crownover's daughter Leona Caldwell was laid to rest beneath a pecan tree; Webb later deeded land for a school, church, and public burial ground that became the heart of the Long Creek community. Generations of area families, ministers, teachers, and members of fraternal orders lie here, and an association formed in 1910 still tends the grounds.

Miami-Dade County, FL

Long Hammock Archaeological Preserve protects a site used by Native peoples more than a thousand years before Europeans reached South Florida. Camped near the headwaters of Snake Creek, they hunted, fished, and navigated the wetlands by canoe, living off the rich subtropical environment of the region long before Miami existed. The preserve safeguards the traces of that deep Indigenous presence.

Marquez, TX

Named for the pioneer Long family, this Leon County settlement of farm families centered on a school built in the 1880s that doubled as church and community hall. When it burned in 1918 neighbors rebuilt it larger together, and a store so small that customers were served through a window kept the community supplied — until the school consolidated with Marquez in 1929 and the little store closed with it.

Catawba County, NC

This boulder marks the site of Long Island Village and its cotton mill, built by Avery M. Powell and John J. Shufford around 1852 on the Catawba River. For more than a century the mill anchored a working textile community, part of the industry that reshaped the Carolina Piedmont. In 1959 the village emptied as the waters of Lake Norman, created by damming the Catawba, rose to cover the land where dozens of families had lived and worked.

Lampasas, TX

Pleasant C. Cox first saw this land in the 1830s and returned by wagon train from Missouri in 1851, settling here and helping petition for the creation of Lampasas County in 1856. Most of the dozens of graves on his patented land are unmarked, the earliest belonging to a Cox child; his widow, Martha Jane, was the last laid to rest here in 1912. Limestone markers, fieldstones, and interior fencing still record a founding pioneer family.

Kerens, TX

In 1870 Lawrence S. Taylor sold five acres for school and church use, and the site soon served the Long Prairie community as schoolhouse, Methodist church, and graveyard together. The first burial, in 1872, was a child, Sallie K. Burt. Fraternal emblems and veterans' graves—reaching back to the Civil War—still mark the ground, also known as Alligator Cemetery.

Boston, MA

The Longfellow Bridge, opened in 1906 and named for the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, carries road, rail, and pedestrians across the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. Its distinctive stone towers — nicknamed the "salt-and-pepper shakers" — make it one of the region's most recognizable crossings. This marker commemorates the bridge's major 2017–2018 rehabilitation, which restored the century-old structure while pairing engineering with public art.

Boston, MA

This spot honors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the 19th-century poet whose verses were once memorized in classrooms across America. His poem "The Bridge," published in the 1845 collection "The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems," imagines a figure pausing at midnight on a river crossing, watching the tide and turning private sorrow into quiet reflection. Longfellow lived nearby in Cambridge, and the Charles River he crossed still runs beneath the bridge that now carries his name.

Karnack, TX

When the United States braced for World War II, the Army turned to Monsanto to run a new East Texas plant that poured out more than 400 million pounds of TNT between 1941 and 1945. The site never truly stood down: it made propellant during the Korean War, and from 1956 Thiokol built solid-fuel rocket motors here, employing nearly 3,000 workers by the Vietnam era. Fittingly, in 1988 it became the first place on American soil where U.S. Pershing missiles were destroyed under an arms-reduction treaty with the Soviet Union.

Burnet, TX

When Longhorn Cavern became a state park in 1932, the young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps arrived to develop it. Between 1934 and 1942, CCC Company 854 explored the cave and, using hand labor and native stone, raised this rustic pavilion in the style the National Park Service made famous. It served as park offices for decades.

Burnet, TX

Long before it became a tourist attraction, this Hill Country cavern sheltered a remarkable cast of characters. Native peoples knew it well, Texas Rangers reportedly rescued a captive here, and Confederates manufactured gunpowder in its chambers during the Civil War. Later, outlaws said to include the Sam Bass gang hid in its depths, and it even housed a nightclub before opening to the public in 1932.

Santa Maria, TX

The Longoria family were among the first Spanish colonists to settle the lower Rio Grande in the mid-1700s, helping found communities such as Reynosa and bringing the cattle-ranching techniques of southern Spain to the region. In 1831 Irineo Longoria expanded the family's holdings north of the river, and generations of Longorias ranched, farmed, and built early irrigation works around Santa Maria. This cemetery, holding an estimated 371 graves, was restored by descendants to preserve their heritage.

New Orleans, LA · est. 1985

Longue Vue House is a grand country estate on the edge of New Orleans, built in the early 1940s for the Stern family and celebrated for its formal gardens and refined Classical-inspired architecture. In 1985 the city's Historic District Landmarks Commission formally recognized it, protecting the house and grounds as a treasured local landmark.

New Orleans, LA

Longue Vue House and Gardens, the Stern family's early-1940s estate, is among the last American country houses built in the grand tradition and set within meticulously designed gardens. Its designation as a National Historic Landmark places it in the small circle of sites judged to hold significance for the whole nation's story.

New Orleans, LA · est. 1991

In 1991 Longue Vue House and Gardens was added to the National Register of Historic Places under the 1966 preservation act, a legal recognition of its architectural and cultural value. The listing reflects a wider mid-century American movement to protect distinctive homes and landscapes before they were lost.

Longview, TX

When surveyors laid out this East Texas townsite in 1870, they named it for the long view from Rock Hill, and the settlement incorporated the following year as the seat of Gregg County. Railroads, lumber, and cotton built the early town, which saw the notorious Dalton Gang stage its final raid on a local bank in 1894 and raised two future Texas governors. The 1931 Lathrop well nearby pushed the East Texas oil field into the largest in the world, transforming Longview into a petroleum and financial hub.

Longview, TX

Soon after Longview's federation of Women's Clubs organized in 1934, its members began raising money for a community center, ultimately supplying matching funds that persuaded the Gregg County commissioners to help build the structure in 1940. The building offered an auditorium, foyer, kitchen, dining rooms, and a drawing room for civic life. A fine example of the Moderne style, it features vertically banded windows with circular accents and a streamlined cornice.

Longview, TX

Longview Junction sprang up in the 1870s where the Texas & Pacific and International & Great Northern railroad lines met, drawing churches, hotels, boardinghouses, and businesses to serve workers and travelers. A mule-powered street railway ran from 1883 to 1912, linking the junction to downtown Longview. Annexed by the city in 1904, the community kept its own identity until automobiles gave people the mobility to move beyond it.

Longview, TX

Longview incorporated in 1871 and had volunteer firefighters by 1887, but nothing prepared it for the 1930s, when the East Texas oil boom flooded the town with people and money. The 1905 city hall quickly proved too small, so voters approved bonds for a new seat of government, completed in 1936 with a red tile roof and fossilized-limestone veneer blending Neoclassical and Mediterranean styling. The building housed both city offices and the central fire station.

Longview, TX

Longview owes its existence to the railroad: in 1870 O. H. Methvin deeded 150 acres to the Southern Pacific, and by 1871 the town had become the line's western terminus, soon a junction where the International & Great Northern crossed. The Texas and Pacific replaced an 1874 station with the Colonial Revival depot completed in 1940, whose passengers reached the platform through a tunnel and whose walls bore stylized quoins, keystones, and grey stone trim. Once boasting three depots, Longview retains only this one — the last survivor of the railway network that created the town.

Longview, TX

Opened in 1930 on Gum Street as the Longview Negro High School, this campus gave African American students a secondary education in the era of legal segregation. Rebuilt after a 1946 fire and later renamed for beloved teacher Mary C. Womack, it produced graduates guided by principals honored in the East Texas Black Educators Hall of Fame. A federal desegregation order finally closed and razed the school.

Macomb, IL

Part of Illinois's 'Looking for Lincoln' heritage trail, this marker ties Macomb to Abraham Lincoln through a photograph and his appearances at the McDonough County Courthouse. As a circuit-riding lawyer and rising politician in the 1850s, Lincoln crossed western Illinois arguing cases and building the reputation that carried him to the presidency.

Gastonia, NC

In 1929 workers at the Loray Mill in Gastonia walked off the job in one of the most violent labor confrontations of the era, a strike that left two people dead and hardened public opposition to unions across the state. The conflict became a defining moment in the history of Southern textile labor.

Westhoff, TX

Established in 1879, this DeWitt County burial ground served the rural families who had settled the surrounding ranch country in the decades after the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, it preserves a quiet record of the community that took root here in the late nineteenth century.

Lorena, TX

Lorena Cemetery was set aside in 1881 by pioneer Daniel Aerl just as railroad financier Gen. Grenville M. Dodge bought sixty acres and platted a town along his Missouri, Kansas and Texas line. Dodge named the village for Lorena Westbrook Robertson, a local landowner's daughter who is buried here, and the ground fills with the graves of pioneer families, community founders, and veterans, its earliest burials the infant Lemuel Crook and young Jacky Pool.

Lorena, TX

Organized in 1881, the Lorena United Methodist congregation first shared the local Baptist building before erecting its own sanctuary in 1886. The design owed its distinctive look to plans brought from the English home church of trustee Herbert J. Hudson, a devout Methodist layman from Cambridge who had come to Lorena in 1877 to run a store and private bank. Dedicated by Bishop A.W. Wilson, the church grew over the decades with classroom annexes that kept faith with the 1886 style, all while remaining woven into the town's civic life.

Lorenzo, TX

Lorenzo sprang to life on April 10, 1911, the day the Crosbyton-South Plains Railway ran its first train to the spot. It took its name from Lorenzo Dow, an employee of the livestock company that promoted the townsite and, in 1914, urged local farmers to plant cotton. Incorporated in 1924, the little High Plains town grew into a cotton-farming center with its own churches, school, and businesses.

Lorenzo, TX

After the Texas Legislature carved out the Crosby Land District in 1876, ranchers spread across the Panhandle, and in 1890 a group of Chicago and New York investors formed the C.B. Livestock Company. Planning a rail line from Crosbyton to Lubbock in 1910, the company platted towns along the route and named this one for its attorney, Lorenzo Dow. It deeded land here for a community cemetery in 1916, where a child lost to whooping cough was reportedly the first laid to rest.

Sunbury, PA · est. 1994

Lorenzo Da Ponte had already lived an extraordinary life as Mozart's librettist — writing the words for The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte — before he emigrated to America in 1805. From 1811 to 1818 he made his home in Sunbury, his wife's family's town, working as a teacher, distiller, and merchant, and declaring himself so taken with the place that he resolved to settle there.

Houston, TX

Lorenzo de Zavala was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the first vice president of the Republic of Texas. His plank-covered log house near Harrisburg, built in 1829, sheltered the wounded as a hospital after the decisive 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, and it was there that de Zavala died that November.

Houston, TX

Born in Mexico in 1789, Lorenzo de Zavala was a statesman of two nations — a liberal reformer who served in the Spanish Cortes, as Mexico's treasury minister, and as ambassador to France before Santa Anna's tyranny drove him to Texas in 1835. There he threw himself into the cause of independence, signed the Texas Declaration, and became the Republic's first vice-president; his home near the San Jacinto battleground served as a hospital for both sides after the fighting.

Victoria, TX

Lorenzo Dow Heaton came to Texas from New York as a boy, clerked in his brother's Port Lavaca drug store, and by 1870 had opened a Heaton Bros. pharmacy of his own in Victoria. He built this house facing the old Market Square in the late 1870s from hand-hewn lumber and square nails, expanding it with porches and fireplaces over two decades. Its Southern Colonial pillars and Georgian entrance make it one of the very few Victoria homes surviving from that era.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2010

Born on this spot, Lorenzo L. Langstroth transformed beekeeping with his 1852 patented movable-frame hive, whose precise "bee space" let keepers inspect and harvest without destroying the colony. His widely read manual, The Hive and the Honey-Bee, spread the method around the globe. Both the hive design and the book remain in use, earning him the title "father of modern beekeeping."

Cresson Township, PA · est. 1947

The village of Loretto, a few miles from this marker, was founded in 1799 by Prince Demetrius Gallitzin as a Catholic colony on the Allegheny frontier. The priest-missioner who gave his life to the settlement is buried there, and generations later the steel magnate Charles Schwab made his home in Loretto and was laid to rest in the same ground. The place links the earliest days of frontier faith to the towering ambitions of the industrial age.

Allegheny Township, PA · est. 1948

Loretto owes its founding in 1799 to Demetrius Gallitzin, a Russian-born prince who gave up nobility to become a Catholic missionary priest on the Pennsylvania frontier. He opened a school here at the dawn of the new century, planting a seed that grew into Saint Francis College and made this remote settlement an enduring Catholic cultural center. Generations later the steel magnate Charles M. Schwab kept a grand home in the same hills.

Marion County, KY

In 1812, on the Kentucky frontier, Belgian-born missionary priest Charles Nerinckx founded the Sisters of Loretto, one of the first religious congregations of women established in the United States without ties to a European order. The community made education of children its calling, and its motherhouse rose on ground once home to Stephen T. Badin, the first Catholic priest ordained in the new nation. From this rural Marion County site, Loretto sisters would go on to teach across the American West.

Olyphant, PA · est. 1995

On March 21, 1917, just sixteen days before the United States formally entered World War I, Loretto Perfectus Walsh became the first woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy, serving as a Chief Yeoman (F) in Philadelphia. Born in Olyphant in 1896, she was part of a wave of women who stepped into naval clerical and support roles so that men could be sent to the front. Discharged in 1919, she died young in 1925, but her enlistment marked a genuine milestone.

Golden Valley, MN

This 1917 gift to Minneapolis honors Charles M. Loring, the first president of the city's Board of Park Commissioners and the man remembered as the 'Father of the Minneapolis Park System.' In the City Beautiful era, civic leaders like Loring believed parks, parkways, and cascades could ennoble a growing industrial city. The Loring name endures across the parkland he helped create.

Hitchcock, TX

The education of Hitchcock's African American children began in 1903 in a private home and a Baptist church annex, and a permanent school opened in 1914 after residents raised money through fish fries and other fundraisers to buy the lot. Long known as the Hitchcock Colored School, it was renamed in 1949 for beloved teacher and principal Lorraine Crosby. Despite scarce funding, staff and families built up sports teams and a scout troop; the school graduated classes from 1960 until integration in the mid-1960s.

Los Ebanos, TX

This bend of the Rio Grande has been crossed for centuries, first recorded when José de Escandón's Spanish colonists forded here in the 1740s along a route that also carried a salt trail to El Sal del Rey. Over the generations it saw Mexican War troops in 1846, Texas Rangers chasing cattle rustlers in 1874, and smugglers during Prohibition. A licensed ferry and inspection station opened in 1950, and the hand-pulled crossing—named for the ebony trees on its banks—is said to be the only government-licensed, hand-operated ferry on any U.S. border.

La Joya, TX

In 1749 the Spanish colonizer José de Escandón founded Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Reynosa on the Rio Grande, and surveyors laid out more than 10,000 acres of Los Ejidos—town commons—alongside 80 riverfront porciones so every settler had water access. Beyond ranching and farming, the commons served as a hub of the regional salt trade, while its mission, San Joaquín del Monte, worked to Christianize local tribes and taught settlers' children. After flooding forced the villa to move in 1802, the old lands gave rise to communities like La Joya, Abram-Perezville, and Peñitas that endure today.

Seguin, TX

This one-room adobe house was built in 1849 for German immigrant Justus Gombert in the young town of Seguin, later stuccoed and enlarged over the years. After the Civil War it served as a campground for the Freedmen's Bureau, and Texas Ranger captain Ben McCulloch briefly owned it in 1870. Threatened with demolition, 'Los Nogales'—Spanish for walnuts—became the first preservation project of the Seguin Conservation Society in 1952.

Mirando City vicinity, TX

For thousands of years the springs of Los Ojuelos were a rare and precious source of water in arid South Texas. A Spanish land grant reached the site in 1810, but Comanche resistance blocked settlement until a Texas Ranger outpost under "Rip" Ford arrived in 1850, letting José María Guerra build the caliche chapel and ranch structures that survive as some of the region's finest Spanish-Mexican architecture. Over the decades the village thrived on the peyote trade—long central to Native American ritual—until oil drilling and the drying of the springs left it nearly abandoned by the 1930s.

Los Angeles, CA

This monument honors Los Pobladores, the settlers who founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles in 1781. Dispatched under Spanish authority from northern Mexico, the original founding families were a mixed group of Native, African, and Spanish heritage who established the small farming town that would grow into Los Angeles. Their arrival planted one of the enduring civic seeds of Spanish colonial California.

San Elizario, TX

Around 1855 the farmer and rancher Gregorio Nacenseno García built this territorial-style adobe as his family home, its distinctive inset gallery — the portal — giving it the name Los Portales. By the 1870s it had become a schoolhouse, and its first teacher, Octaviano Larrazolo, went on to serve as governor of New Mexico and a United States senator. The building ties the Hispanic ranching world of the Rio Grande to a nationally significant political career.

Alice, TX

In 1831, while Texas was still part of Mexico, Marcelino Lopez of Camargo secured a land grant from the state of Tamaulipas and founded Los Preseños on San Fernando Creek. The little settlement thrived on a trade route linking Corpus Christi with Laredo, San Diego, and Eagle Pass, and appeared on maps for nearly half a century. When N.G. Collins bought out the Lopez family in 1877 and platted the town of Collins, Los Preseños faded into memory.

Wichita Falls, TX

The men of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery—many of them Texans from the Wichita Falls area—were captured by Japanese forces on Java in March 1942, in the opening months of America's Pacific war. Held prisoner for three and a half brutal years, the survivors were not freed until Japan's surrender in September 1945. Their fate was so obscured during the war that they became known as the 'Lost Battalion.'

May, TX

The first burial ground here began in the 1870s as Hog Creek Cemetery, sited about a half-mile away until rocky soil prompted the community to move it after only two graves. The relocated plot took its first burial in 1874 and was formally deeded to Brown County in 1892 for cemetery and church use. A chapel followed by 1932, and when the local association reorganized in 1949 it renamed both itself and the cemetery Lost Creek.

Apache Junction, AZ

Erected in 1938 by the Dons Club of Phoenix, this monument commemorates the enduring legend of the Lost Dutchman Mine, a fabled cache of gold said to lie hidden in the Superstition Mountains. The tale drew countless prospectors into the rugged desert east of Phoenix in search of a fortune that was never found.

Bastrop, TX

The Lost Pines are an island of loblolly forest stranded some 80 miles west of the main Texas pine belt, likely a surviving remnant of vast prehistoric woodlands. Explorer Zebulon Pike noted the trees in 1807, and by the 19th century they had become the backbone of the local economy, their lumber floated out by riverboat and hauled by ox-wagon across Texas. Ideal soil and moisture have kept this ancient stand intact where the surrounding forests long ago retreated eastward.

Groesbeck, TX

Established by volunteers in 1846 and, by legend, named when a man lost in the woods stumbled onto the open prairie, this site holds the graves of many early settlers — among them Azariah G. Moore, a soldier of the Texas War for Independence. A Baptist church stood here from about 1850, and the present sanctuary is the fourth to serve the congregation. One early member, A. J. Rogers, was made a deacon after returning home from the Civil War.

Jacksboro vicinity, TX

Ringed by distant "Seven Blue Hills" and overlooked by a lookout point called Spy Knob, Lost Valley saw repeated violence on the Texas frontier. Settler families were killed here in 1857, teamsters of the Warren Wagon Train were slain in 1871 just after General W. T. Sherman had passed safely through, and in 1874 a Texas Ranger escort under Major John B. Jones was ambushed on this ground. In later years the same valley settled into quiet farm and ranch country.

Lott, TX

Lott sprang to life in 1889 as a planned stop on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad, laid out on a straight line between Cameron and Waco. The Texas Townsite Company bought pioneer land, gave the railroad its right-of-way, and named the new town for railroad president Uriah Lott. Businesses, a post office, a school, churches, and a volunteer fire department followed in quick succession, and the town was incorporated in 1890.

Beeville, TX

Black education in Bee County began in 1876 in Stephen Canada's store, then a small frame schoolhouse, chartered by the county as "Colored Community School Twelve." A larger frame school followed on North Burke Street, where principal J.R. Lockett matched the offerings of the town's white schools until fire destroyed it in 1929. With help from the Chicago-based Julius Rosenwald Fund, a brick school with four classrooms and an auditorium opened in 1931, named for carpenters Mose Lott and Allen Canada — serving until integration closed it in 1964.

Goliad, TX

Acquired in 1896 and soon renamed for a local African American family, Lott Cemetery holds the graves of trail drivers, cattle-industry workers, and everyday families whose modest wooden crosses and sculpted obelisks trace the ups and downs of the local economy. When the 1902 tornado destroyed a nearby Methodist church and neighborhood, several dozen victims were buried in a communal grave along its eastern edge. Among those resting here are more than thirty veterans, two centenarians, and a man known only as "Bingo," raised by a prominent cattleman's wife.

Mineola, TX

Angus and Lena Beaird began this house in 1918, completing it in the early 1920s, before selling it in 1928 to Howard and Vivian Lott, prominent figures in the growth of Mineola and Wood County. Its Prairie School influences show in the hipped roof with dormers and a central front porch framed by boxed columns and a pedimented entry, softened by classical detailing. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1996.

Kilgore, TX

Built in 1920 on the former site of the Hearne Hotel, this bungalow was home to Lou Della Crim, whose farm south at Laird Hill became the stage for history. On December 28, 1930, the Bateman-Crim Wildcat Well No. 1 blew in on her land — the discovery well for this part of the colossal East Texas oil field. As the boom convulsed Kilgore, this house even quartered the Texas Rangers, including the legendary Capt. M. T. "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas, sent to keep order.